second writing asignment

Time Clock

I.

Punch the Clock In

On an eight-hour shift at Dave’s Dream I sling cafeteria trays loaded with thick ceramic oval platters freighted with food: roast turkey, applesauce, filling, mashed potatoes, and huge wedges of pie. Lima-bean green, Teflon-slippery trays that the plates slide freely around on. Heavy trays—it takes time to learn to balance them so that, while I’m dodging and weaving among other tray-bearing waitresses, the dishes do not go crashing to the floor. I’m working station 2 tonight, six blue-and-white striped vinyl booths running along the diner’s front wall, and the dinner rush has begun.

At the booth, I lay the tray out along my left forearm and unload plates one at a time with my right hand, each one so heavy it wobbles a little before I set it down. Stand for a few seconds to see if anything is missing or misplaced. Nod, do a little dip-almost-curtsy, turn, and walk three steps before breaking into a run back to the kitchen so I can serve the next booth.

In the kitchen Jake, working the scalding stream of water back and forth over an impossibly deep stack of plates and silver in the steel sink, turns his head and gives me a slow, exaggerated wink; he never lets me get in and out without at least one laugh. Sometimes it’s just a wisecrack issued from the side of his mouth: who the hell was Dave, he says, what was his dream? And ask me if I care. Sometimes he stages a quick, deft impersonation of the Boss, or better yet, of his wife, the diner’s beehive-haired, perfectly made-up hostess whose polyester pantsuit always is immaculate. Jake smiles at everyone, sings a lot, and never, ever complains. He moves as fast as I do, and still we sometimes run out of plates and cutlery for the next set up, a nervous gaggle of waitresses around the steam table waiting for the clean dishes and cringing when the boss barges in screaming for everyone to hurry up, customers are waiting. 

The boss is a god-fearing man who loves his beautiful, rigid wife and who never, in all the five years I work at his diner, so much as makes a suggestive remark to one of us waitresses. He gets rich running a restaurant whose most expensive entree is the $9.95 Fried Seafood Jubilee, served with paper ramekins of ketchup and tartar sauce in a little plastic basket lined with paper clear in spots where the grease has soaked through. Most customers come for the cheaper food, homemade vegetable soup, baked bean casserole, and the Sunday Special: homemade turkey with all the fixings. What makes money is volume, my boss says, and he and his wife pack the customers in like placid cattle, then move them on out with firm precision and fixed, wide smiles, the parking lot jammed with cars during its peak times, Friday and Saturday Nights and after Sunday Church. Those are the coveted shifts, and it takes two years of working after school and summers as a busgirl and one more summer as a “junior waitress” for me to get assigned to them.

Ten minutes after delivering the food to a booth, I check to see if my customers have finished. If the busgirls are behind, I clear the table, stacking empty platters one side of the tray, piling silverware along the other and shimming the plastic glasses, usually still half full of water, in a quick row, precise row down the middle. If you do it just right, the glasses are less likely to tip. Back into the kitchen, a hip nudging through the swinging door. I grab the rag tucked into my apron, swipe down my hands arms to clean up dribbles of ketchup, applesauce and gravy, then tally the check while banging back out through the swinging doors. I do the same things in the same order every time, pivoting on the ball of my foot like a dancer. There is a kind of grace in it, a strict efficiency and economy of movement.

Mid-shift

Through the doors and back into the restaurant with the check, I slow down. Measure each step back to the booth. Each shift has an archipelago of moments like this, quiet islands in a turbulent sea of fast, repetitive movements. I take deep breath. Smooth back stray strands of hair into the bun rubber banded and pinned at the nape of my neck. Compose my face into a smile. At the table I articulate each word from the script: “Thank you for coming to Dave’s Dream for your Sunday dinner, folks. How was church. I hope you will join us again, and soon.” Try not to let my eyes stray to the next table, where the customers are, I know, growing restless behind their emptied plates. Wait to see if they are going to hand me the tip or instead plan to leave it on the table. The standard tip is a quarter and a dime, but there are occasional stiffs, as well as occasional windfalls. Men out without their wives and girlfriends sometimes leave paper money, sometimes more than one bill, folded and tucked under the steel capped sugar canister.  Once a guy pisses me off by taking a whole booth for himself. Then he leaves me a twenty, and that night I take Jake up on his standing offer the walk me back to my car at the end of the shift.  “Lock the doors when you get in,“ he says. “I’ll stay till I see you make the turn onto Rte. 22.”

After the last customer leaves, each waitress wipes down her own station, the bleach smell  very strong and the rag burning my hands. I’m clumsy now, tired, and my pockets bulge with money like a stripper’s G-string. The very last thing we do before locking up is pool our tips and split with Jake and the busgirls. Some waitresses pocket half their tips before the split, but I’ve done my time as a busser and dishwasher, so I never hold back.

Punch the clock out

I can turn 15 tables in an hour when I have to, one about every 4 minutes. On good days, tips add up to almost $20, a wad of singles and loose change I unload onto my father’s dresser. I will need every cent come fall when I am back at college, for the shampoo and toothpaste and other luxuries not paid for by my scholarship and work-study plan.

My father supports our family of seven on his insurance salesman’s salary, which at the time I was filling out the college financial aid firms peaked at $28,000 a year. Dad loves the feel of an abundance of money, the sheer pile of it, and once a week he sits at the kitchen table to stack the bills and sort the coins into piles while he searches out the wheat pennies, buffalo head nickels and liberty dimes, which he will keep for himself. The rest goes into paper cylinders and, along with the bills, to the local bank where he’s opened an account in my name but on which I will not, for the life of the account, ever have check writing privileges. 

While I am away at school, Dad doles the money out to me by mail—$20 a month—and though I don’t know it at the time, uses his own money to replenish the meager account when it runs out.

After each shift I go to the bathroom and strip off my stained uniform, the same style and make as the white polyester tunic and pants my sister wears for her graveyard shifts at the Mercy Hospital. The fabric is stiff and does not breathe, not even enough to make dark circles under my arms, and sweat has dried into a salty crust on my skin.  I stand under the hot stream of the shower for a long time.  What I don’t take off is the Phi Beta Kappa key I wear on its chain under my uniform. No one but me knows it’s there, but when the men leer or hold my hand too long while they are pressing money into it, when their wives complain when the food portions are too little, too cold, or too slow, I think about the key, and sometimes I touch it through the fabric. It is my talisman, my literal key, my way out into another life that, at the time, I cannot see the exact shape of, just that it is less filled with lightning fast calculations of how many tables times thirty five cents adds up to how many dollars per shift times the number of shifts worked from June through August until I can get on the train back to college. It will be less heavy, I hope, less sweat-stained. Less smelling of turkey gravy and bleach.

II. 

Punch the clock in

It’s been more than twenty years since Dave’s Dream burned down, an event I learn about when—I think it was my sister—sends along the clipping from the Altoona Mirror. She says what got rebuilt is a busy as ever, but it lacks the old diner’s fifties authenticity and awkward charm: naugahide instead of vinyl booths, plastic instead of Formica table tops, a cheesy country themed décor, matching waitress uniforms, thin plates of some lightweight material. I leaned from a previous clipping that Clara, whose coconut meringue pies once stood nine inches tall, is dead.  No surprise, since she was in her sixties when I clocked in Sunday mornings at five to find her already standing at the big ovens, unloading roasted turkeys the size of small bear cubs. My sister says the food’s gone downhill, that now they truck in frozen stuff that gets reheated in the big, new microwaves.

I’m living in San Francisco, working as an associate in a large law firm, logging billable hours long and frenzied with the orchestrated economy of a million small tasks that remind me in some ways of my shifts at Dave’s Dream. I am earning more money than my father ever saw in his life. My boss is called my “Partner”—not because we are peers or allies in any sense of those words but because he, miles above me in the hierarchy, is a partner in the firm and the one assigned to supervise my training. Mostly I draft complaints and motions and on court days carry my Partner’s briefcases, sitting silently at counsel table while he stands, paces the dock, and pontificates to the judge and jury.

“You look like a strawberry,” he said the day I wore the red dress that I took off that night and never wore to work again. “Meet Rebecca, he tells a client. “A member of my stable, as it were.” I usually work straight through lunch, but sometimes get invited along to treat a client to a two-hour meal at Tadich Grill or some other old-line fancy restaurant in the financial district. You’d think those lunches would be respites in days made frantic by too much work and not enough hours to do it in.  But, fraught with the need to charm, to smile, to appear as if my whole life were just such one leisurely lunch, and to keep my thigh under the table well away from my Partner's thigh, they are not.

Three times a day I go down the elevator to sneak cigarettes in the stall of the Ladies Room of the hotel next to my office building. I lock the stall door with a sense of great relief, light up, and take quick hard pulls on butts snagged from the sand-filled containers next to the elevator bank; these are the islands of quiet in working days that last, sometimes, twice as long as the ones I worked at Dave’s Dream.

Mid-shift

I read about Jake in The Chronicle—was it really him? How many Jake Smyzyiaks my age (I think that was the spelling of his name) could there be in the world? How could I have not known that he made it all the way out here from Pennsylvania? Or (as I later find out) that he was gay? Jake worked behind the counter of a record store in the Castro. He opened the doors after hours—sometime after 11 pm—for a late customer. Who emptied his handgun into the back of Jake’s head and left him, splayed among the smashed racks and album covers strewn all over the floor.

I am sitting in the Partner’s capacious office overlooking a bay painted in primary colors: blue sea and sky, white sails and clouds, and the soaring red arc of the Golden Gate Bridge. I wonder if I’ll ever get an office with a view of the Bay. He is giving me grief for my pro bono hours, which are taking away from the billable hour quota our group must make for the firm.  Or, we are deep into a discussion of some fine point of discovery, whether to serve interrogatories on opposing counsel whom we know is about leave on his honeymoon, something like that. I feel queasy even before my Partner gets up from his desk and walks towards me.

But he walks past where I am sitting and continues to debate, loudly and with great compression, the need to show the other side our willingness to “go to the mat,” do whatever it takes to win. And while he is talking I hear something else: what sounds like a belt being slowly unbuckled, a zipper being unzipped. Am I imagining it? Being paranoid? No, there is the sound again. I steal a glance sideways and see hands tucking in the tales of a dress shirt, re-zipping the fly, re-buckling the belt. Oh, I think, just tucking in his shirt. But then he does it a third time, and a fourth, pacing and talking the whole time like nothing is happening while I sit, frozen, staring in front of me at the bay, the sky, the boats, the bridge.

Punch the clock out

My partner is fucking one of the paralegals; everyone knows it, and everyone despises D__, who gets special privileges like shorter hours and flying first class on business trips bivouacked at swank hotels like The Plaza in New York. When my Partner, in front of everybody, calls her “Slim,” she dimples and blushes. She is at least thirty years his junior. When I hear her telling another paralegal about lying beneath my partner’s grand piano with a glass of chardonnay while he plays Mozart. It grosses me out. But I am secretly grateful to her when, for a time the odd shirt-tucking in sessions go on hiatus.

Then they start up again. I go to the head of the firm who makes it clear that my Partner has been at the firm a lot longer than I have, and that it is my job to figure out how to deal with him, as others have done. This is when I find out that other associates, including even some men, have sat in the same chair staring at the same bay while my Partner goes through his routine. So it’s a power thing, I decide. Meet the old boss, same as the new boss. I think I can deal with that.

But then one night when I am working late my Partner comes into my office and sits down to give me some long winded and scotch-smelling fatherly advice about my career. I smile and nod, itching to get back to my work so that I can get home before midnight. When he’s done, he passes closer than he needs to and darts in suddenly to kiss me on the cheek, wetly and very close to my mouth.

That’s when I decide to quit.

It is suddenly so simple. I can just—leave—and he will be out of my life.

I quit, I quit, I quit. I am giddy with freedom.

He comes to my office again after hours when I am on the floor packing up my boxes of files. “I have power in this town,” he says. “Do you think you can just go work somewhere else? I know the partners at the firm you’re interviewing with (creeping me out by saying its name—how did he know that?) Yes, Bill and Richard and me, we go way back.”

This time, though, he is not behind me making me wonder if he is really doing what he is doing, or am I imagining it, or am I reading a malevolent motive into a perfectly innocent activity. No, I see him straight on and this time I really see him: a small-boned man not much taller than I.  Balding, past his prime and deep in the bottle, walking on snowshoes across a reputation laid down when he was vital and young in world that is melting away, and fast. I don’t have the guts to say a word, and I keep my head down. But I keep packing.

III.

Punch the clock in

The second job at the second law firm, where I’ve traded a good chunk of wages for the promise of regular hours with weekends off and an atmosphere that is collegial and rather than hierarchical, turns out to be a lot like the first job only without the creepy lecherous boss. There are no bosses here, my supervisor tells me—everyone is on a first-name basis. Everyone is equal, and everyone equally works nights and on weekends—it is a collective. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Mid-shift

When I leave weekdays at five, there are mutterings. Evenings at home, my inbox goes black with the text of messages marked “Urgent.” A motion that has to be filed on a Monday gets assigned to me on the preceding Friday. The workload mounts; I start coming in earlier and working through lunch so I can still leave at five. At a firm meeting, I tell the apocryphal tale about the New York Law firm where associates pulling all-nighters get a new Brooks Brothers shirt; no one laughs, and the managing partner jots a quick note on his “To-Do List” notepad. I begin staying past five and working on weekends. The projects I started on those first free weekends—a new quilt, a short story, a collection of poems—never get finished. I fall into bed at midnight to have, over and over again, the same dream: I get hit by a bus and am taken to a hospital where I stay in bed for a very long time, resting, eating regular meals, watching a little TV.

Punch the Clock Out

At some point I understand I have swallowed the time clock. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The surgery is clandestine and difficult, requiring a C-section, but the thing comes out whole and undamaged. Too bad for you, the doctor says. It’s still ticking. When he gives it a slap, I hear a loud, angry ding-ding-ding! Quick swaddle in flannel, a pink cap, and into the wheeled bassinet next to the bed.

I’m tired, very tired. But later that night, after everyone has left, I sneak over to the bassinet and take out the clock. It’s in sleep mode, and quiet. I pick it up, along with the tote bag of tools I’ve tucked into the overnight bag brought with me to the hospital and, skirting the nurse’s station where I hear the low murmur of words and slap-slap of cards, I slip out the door.

In doesn't take much walking to find a hill in San Francisco, what will do in lieu of a stone-cropped mountaintop. I unwrap the flannel, expose the clock to the night fog and the wind. Take the long foundation nail from my tool kit and use the hammer drive it through the clock’s base, pinning its moving parts. I turn, facing into the wind so that I will not hear anything behind me. And leave.