Up on the street the heat pools just above the hoods of the parked cars, making the brick buildings squiggly. The sidewalks are packed now, packed with out-of-towners creeping along with their crêpes and iced lattes, their children sucking down milkshakes and Mountain Dews. I walk in the street to avoid them and cross over to Dunster and back up to Iris.
I go up the stairs, past the presidents, directly to the bathroom even though I’m already wearing my uniform. It’s empty. I catch myself in the mirror over the sink. It’s tilted away from the wall for people in wheelchairs so that I’m at a slightly unfamiliar angle to myself. I look beat up, like someone who has gotten ill and aged a decade in a few months. I look into my eyes, but they aren’t really mine, not the eyes I used to have. They’re the eyes of someone very tired and very sad, and once I see them I feel even sadder and then I see that sadness, that compassion, for the sadness in my eyes, and I see the water rising in them. I’m both the sad person and the person wanting to comfort the sad person. And then I feel sad for that person who has so much compassion because she’s clearly been through the same thing, too. And the cycle keeps repeating. It’s like when you go into a dressing room with a three-paneled mirror and you line them up just right to see the long narrowing hallway of yourselves diminishing into infinity. It feels like that, like I’m sad for an infinite number of my selves.
I splash my face and pat it down with paper towels from the dispenser in case someone comes in, but as soon as I get it dry my face crumples up again. I put my hair back into the tight bun and leave the bathroom.
I’m late by the time I enter the dining room. The Twisted Sister is back in action.
Dana glares at me. ‘Deck. Candles.’
The deck, past the bar and through the French doors, is humid and smells of roses and lilies and the peppery nasturtiums the chefs use to garnish the plates. All the flower-pots are dripping dirty water and the floorboards around the edges are soaked. It smells like my mother’s garden on a rainy summer morning. Helene, the pastry chef, must have just watered. This rooftop oasis is her creation.
Mary Hand is in the far corner with a tray of tea lights, a water pitcher, and a trash can, knifing out the old wax from the night before.
‘The three and fourpence,’ Mary Hand says. She has her own vernacular. She’s been waiting tables at Iris longer than anyone else.
I sit down beside her. I pick up the rag on the tray and wipe out the insides of the glass holders she has voided, pour a few drops of water in each, and drop in a fresh tea light.
It’s hard to know how old Mary Hand is. She’s older than I am but by three years or twenty? She has straight brown hair without a fleck of gray, which she pulls back with a beige elastic, a long face, and a spindly neck. All of her is long and lean, more colt than workhorse. She’s the best waitress I’ve ever worked with, flat calm but fast and efficient. She knows your tables as well as she knows her own. She saves you when you forget to fire the entrées for the six-top or you leave your wine opener at home. At the height of the night, when everyone’s losing their shit, when your plates have been left so long under the heat lamp they’ve gotten too hot to carry even with a cloth and the sous chefs are slandering you and the customers are waiting for their apps, their checks, their water refills, their extra jus, Mary Hand will be speaking in a slow drawl. ‘Simple as toast and jam,’ she might say, loading up every one of your entrées along her long arms without flinching.
‘C’mon, little homunculus,’ Mary Hand coos at a burned-down tea light. No one ever calls her just Mary. She twists the knife and it comes out with a satisfying pop and a spray of wax water that hits us both, and we laugh.
The deck is pleasant like this, empty of customers, the sun behind the tall maples dappling the tables with light but not much heat, raised up high above the hot, loud chaos of Mass. Ave., Helene’s plants, hundreds of them, in boxes along the short stone walls and in planters on the ground and hanging from trellises, all flowering, the leaves dark green and healthy. The plants all seem satisfied, thriving, and it makes you feel that way, too, or at least that thriving is a possibility.
My mother had a green thumb. I want to tell Mary Hand this, but I haven’t mentioned my mother at the restaurant yet. I don’t want to be the girl whose mother just died. It’s bad enough that I’m the girl who’s just been dumped on her ass. I made the mistake of telling Dana about Luke during my first training shift.
‘Is it like this every year, so fecund?’
‘Mmmm hmmm,’ Mary Hand says. I can tell she likes the word ‘fecund.’ I knew she would. ‘She has a gift.’ She pronounces it gyift, very slowly. She means Helene. ‘A gyift for flora.’
‘How many years have you been here?’
‘Since about the Truman administration.’
She’s squirrely about the details of her life. No one knows where she lives or with whom. It’s just a question of how many cats, Harry says. But I’m not sure. The story is that she used to go out with David Byrne. Some say it was in high school in Baltimore; some said it was at RISD. Everyone says he broke her heart, that she never recovered. If the Talking Heads ever come on when the music is cranked before or after service, whoever’s closest to the stereo at the bar will switch stations fast.
‘How’d you get this job?’ she says. ‘You’re not one of Marcus’s usual hires.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re more like us, the old guard.’ She means people hired by the previous house manager. ‘Cerebral.’
‘I’m not sure about that.’
‘Well, you know what cerebral means, so case in point.’
Tony comes out on the deck to give us the breakdown. Only one large table out here, a party of ten for an anniversary. Mary Hand and I push two tables together, cover it in several cloths, lining up the points of the corners of the top layer with the straight hem of the bottom. We do the same to the rest of the smaller tables, then set them, shining the silver and polishing the glasses with small cloths as we go. We put a candle on each table and get the flowers I arranged for lunch out of the walk-in. The chef calls us all to the wait station where he tells us the specials, explaining each preparation and ingredient. The chefs I’ve worked with before were high strung and volatile, but Thomas is calm and kind. He never lets things in his kitchen get out of hand. He doesn’t have a temper or a vile mouth. He doesn’t hate women, not even waitresses. If I make a mistake, even on a busy night, he just nods and takes the plate and slides back what I need. He’s good, too. We’re always trying to get our hands on an extra carpaccio or seared scallops or Bolognese. The high shelves in the wait station are full of finagled food, pushed to the back where Marcus can’t see and eaten surreptitiously throughout the night. I have to eat at the restaurant—I can’t afford more than cereal or noodles at the grocery store—but even if I weren’t broke I would sneak that food.
Thirty minutes later every seat in my section is filled. Mary Hand and I fall into a groove. The French doors to the deck have to be kept closed because the AC is on in the dining room, and when our meals are up and loaded we hold the door for each other. She brings my drinks to one of my fours, and I deliver salmons to her deuce when she’s opening bottles of champagne for the rowdy ten.