|
Some Waitresses I Have Known
i.
She was a steamed pudding,
a dumpling,
a moist soft pastry with a shining face and
greasy fingers
ladling huge ladles of noodle soup,
of cabbage and potatoes,
of boiled pork and
the dark spikes of dark dark hair
escaped from her white cotton cap,
plastered to her skin by sweat and by steam,
followed the lines of her face, of her cheeks and
if there was ever such a thing possible
as a communist Madonna
in a white cotton apron and
presented to us all in clouds of steam
from the communal soup kettle,
she would be one.
ii.
I'd sit at the dark end of the cantina
for the last hour of the evening
waiting for her to get off work
so I could drive us to her house and
watched her steal from the drunks and
the flirts when they weren't looking by
slipping their money off the table and
by adding my drinks to their tabs and
by altering their credit card receipts to reflect
a surprising generosity, an acute appreciation
of her skills as a cocktail temptress.
On more than many more than one occasion
as we sat in my car in the parking lot and
waited for the engine to warm up,
for the heater to kick in,
she would fan her cash
in front of my face
and was usually a lot and
she would ask me "What did you make today?"and
she knew I hadn'tt made anything.
I once watched her chase a bad tipper
into the parking lot and
fling the silver he'd left her
like it was dirt to bounce off his car windows,
his mouth a frightened circle and moist,
some quarters and a dime on an $80 tab
scattered in the dust and pea-sized gravel,
dull gray in mercury-vapor lamplight.
iii.
She was a giantess among Japanese
and she was therefore obliged to buy kimono
at the special gaijin kimono
store and pay those special gaijin pricesv
but she was a natural blond.
At the bottle club in the Roppongi district
where she worked,
near the Hard Rock Tokyo where she never went,
somewhere east of the enormous television screen
on the side of the an
enormous building that showed the endless loop
of dolphins swimming and leaping
between an emerald tropical sea
and a turquoise tropical sky,
somewhere down there on a side street
above a restaurant where it always
rained or at least dripped
from the innumerable gray clouds in the city's gray sky
and the innumerable drips and leaks and overflows
from all the surrounding buildings,
somewhere where the streets were still
too narrow for automobiles,
she would pause in the tidal ebb
of an unending crowd of very small people
with a limitless number of umbrellas
and she would try to remember how to count.
iv.
The sound of the interstate is like a river,
white noise constant with its own rise and fall,
waves or rapids or the surge from a sudden downpour
of diesel washing a steady flow of trucks ahead
and forward and past this
empty crossroads with the 200-ft. sign
and from the backdoor facing south
with the sun setting like it always does
on the right and the first stars of another night
like always on the left,
she'll smoke another More down to its filter,
the clatter of thick dishes being washed and
a jukebox version of another hit song behind her and
she'll look south across an unimpeded plain
of soybeans and cotton, of oil
pumps and feedlots full of stumbling cattle,
a perfectly flat plain spreading out and away
from all highway diners and all
the way to Mexico,
just another place she's never been.
Addendum:
Born a slave, she always served,
was so highly trained, so closely educated
as to preclude even the capacity to conceive of any life
other than service and
she was bred to beauty, to a certain proportion and
scale as to bring pleasure to her master's eyes and
sometimes to their beds though
for the longest and the most number of days
in the short years of her
chattel-life she was ignored as a machine
or an animal is ignored,
as a device or as one among identical many
is taken for granted.
But what her masters never saw or felt
was the small clear burning of her hatred
nor did they know that
what she brought them when she served them
at their table and at their bath,
whether on her belly or on her knees,
what she gave them was poison, always poison.
A Chinese Feast
A Chinese feast begins with candy and Spam,
processed, potted meat food and
carved into elaborate fishes or a tableaux of
Kwan Yin, the elaborate goddess of mercy.
No one can remember how a Chinese feast ends,
which of the endless series of dishes was the last.
Up in the mountains near where I grew up,
the first time a boy went to prison they would have
a funeral and bury a casket in a grave until
the boy came home again released or paroled, tattooed
and maybe a man and maybe a punk,
and his family would dig the casket back up and burn it
at a big party with a bonfire and plenty of Coors beer.
Out on the mesa beyond that line of cliffs,
the horses still graze free almost the whole year
until we ride other horses
out there to bring them all back closer to home
and on those autumn mornings
when we have twenty-five or thirty horses running
along the now-dry river
through the gray and yellow and brown of whatever grows
there along whatever water
flows there and they steam, the horses, all of them, their breath,
their hides rising steam and smoke in the air at the end
of the season, at the end of our year.
Robert C. Mastersonlives in Yonkers, New York.
Close this screen and the menu will appear. If frames-incompatible, Click Lunarosity