In summertime, I enter The Office Beer Bar & Grill from the rear, in order to avoid customers at sidewalk tables out in front of the restaurant. I’ve learned that they will inevitably wave down anyone wearing the referee-like dress shirt that a server, like me, is required to wear.
I enter the kitchen through the back door and hear someone behind the pickup line immediately shout out my name to get table 21.
“It’s a party of five. They just sat,” he says.
It’s 3:00 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon. Lunch for the ritzy Ridgewood, N.J., shopping crowd sometimes runs a bit late.
Before I can tie my apron on, the restaurant manager, Huey, rushes past me and without looking at me wants to know if I’m punched in yet. He disappears behind the food line to yell at one of the cooks. The cook yells back.
I hurry into the dining room and lounge. Despite the heat and brightness on the street, summer afternoons in The Office are always dark and cool. The restaurant’s interior consists mostly of two things: mirrors and lacquered wood.
Through the front door, I watch a string of cranky, sunburned kids come in, followed closely by their distracted parents. They blink their eyes, adjusting to the dimness.
I head to table 21—which probably has been waiting five times more than the one-minute maximum allotted by management for newly arrived customers.
After taking their order I notice table 31 has been set. When I turn down their aisle, my head smacks into the chest of an enormous teenager, who’s looking for the restroom. I look up, automatically apologizing, but he’s gone.
When I get to table 31, I take their drink and appetizer orders, and then rush to the computer. There is a line there already to input orders. I push my back up against the high chairs and watch the front door fill with more people.
By 6:00 p.m. the dinner rush is on. I have four tables full, and the hostess, Jamie, finds me at the bottom of the ice cream freezer, scooping out rainbow sherbet for a little girl at table 21.
She warns me that a family of six has just been seated at table 23.
I drop off the sherbet at 21 and continue down the aisle to table 23. As good-server etiquette suggests, I try to establish eye contact with one of the parents. But both their heads are down.
“Hello, folks, my name is Steven, and I’ll be your server tonight.” I say into the air above their heads.
Without any kind of immediate acknowledgement, I take a breath and speak louder.
“How we all doing tonight, guys?”
Two of the four kids at the end of the table look up.
“Can I get you all something to drink?”
Out of the corner of my eye I see table 22, behind me, waving to get my attention.
I also observe one of the ladies at table 31 flashing me her credit card.
“I want mozzarella sticks,” a boy’s voice comes from the end of the table.
I’m entering the “weeds,” a term used by servers to describe a mentally impaired state that diminishes their performance. In the “weeds,” customers cease to exist, because all a server can see is a blur of incoherent requests racing through his mind.
My mind reels back. The tops of the parents’ heads face me.
“Folks,” I say, “let me give you all a few more minutes to think, okay?”
The father looks up at me, as if I had just got to the table. He goes back to reading the menu, possibly trying to tell me that I should wait for them to decide without making them feel hurried.
He sees out of the corner of his eye that I’m still there.
“Something to drink for you, sir?”
Annoyed, he slowly asks his kids what they want to drink and then tells me, along with his order.
When his head goes back down, I interpret this to mean that he won’t be taking his wife’s order and that the baton has been officially passed to her. I look at the top of her head and wonder if she will notice me. “Ma’am?” I say over her.
She flips the pages a few times on the menu. Her husband tells her the waiter needs her order sometime today.
She ignores him. I try to find something other than the top of her head to look at. At the edge of the table I see her husband’s watch and try to read it.
When she decides on a drink—water with lemon—I turn around and face table 22. They already have drinks but have been staring at the back of my head, waiting to place their dinner order.
I offer a harried smile and ask if they can wait one moment. But the mother impatiently refuses. She announces they’ll order—now, her tone implying that she finds my increased workload rude.
It’s a true phenomenon—one widely regarded by the serving staff at The Office Beer Bar & Grill—that a general perception exists among Ridgewood residents, after they have completed their two- to three-hour trek back from the Jersey shore at the end of a long weekend, that the world should reassume its orbit around them.
After taking their dinner orders, I rush to place 23’s drink orders with Jimmy at the bar; then I manage to close out table 31 and input 22’s dinner orders.
I’m at the computer, typing in 22’s orders, when I can sense someone to my right—out of the corner of my eye—looking at me. I continue inputting my order. The figure is now leaning over the high chairs. She obviously needs me.
Finally, I look.
“Oh, you’re not our waiter,” the woman tells me.
Later, after the dinner rush, while I’m organizing the ketchup and steak sauce bottles to end my shift, I silently wonder if there is something about my age, appearance or personality that causes customers to treat me like I don’t exist—like I’m nobody, like I’m just something at the other end, bringing them what they want.
This question is answered a few weeks later.
In the middle of another evening dinner rush, a party of one, a tall, middle-aged black woman, is seated at table 32 in my section.
I am extremely busy, with all six of my tables now full and a line of customers stretching out the door.
From a few tables away, I mouth to her, “I’ll be right with you.” I’m happy to see her wave her hand at me, indicating not to rush.
A half hour passes. The pace picks up. The kitchen is having major problems, enough for my customer at table 21 to bitterly ask for a manager. His family’s food is more than 45 minutes late.
After I see that a manager has visited him, I go to the man and apologize again for the delay. He’s still fuming. Apologizing is making it worse. He refuses to make eye contact and demands a round of waters.
But before I do this, I suddenly remember table 32, quietly eating at her booth. I forget the waters for the moment and head toward her. How curious that she has not stopped me, I say to myself, nor asked for anything, since placing her dinner order a half hour ago.
“Is everything okay?” I ask her quickly.
Her mouth is tightly closed as she chews. Softly shaking and then nodding her head, she tries to communicate that she is okay and doesn’t need anything.
I glance at her plate before hurrying off and am shocked to see no BBQ sauce on it, which she had asked for when she first ordered her meal. With one chicken finger left on her plate I know I’m too late now to do anything. Oh well, I tell myself.
But before I can turn away again, my eye catches on her glass of diet Coke, where there’s nothing in it but ice.
I somehow feel embarrassed by the complete lack of demand she has put on me.
Her big black eyes seem void of demand. I forget about my other customers for the moment.
“Are you having a difficult night?” she asks quietly.
Other customers stare at me, annoyed at my being with a table of one for more than a minute. So I leave her to tend to them.
When I make it back to her, I offer a smile. I thank her for the only thing that comes to my mind—her peacefulness.
“Really?” she smiles. Peacefulness seems to have been the wrong word. She looks down at her plate, chewing on the word, I assume.
When she looks back up, she says slowly, “Would you believe that today was one of the hardest days of my life?”
Standing there, my shoulders sink, and my breath eases completely out. All of my blind, mental hurrying stops. Her voice obviously wants to break. I’m staring at her. I tell her how sorry I am.
A moment more passes, and I leave her for the next table, her words repeating in my mind. The hardest day of her life, I tell myself, as if trying not to forget.
Later on, Lilly, a girl from El Salvador, comes to me with a note in her hand. “Es de su mesa,” she says.It’s a note that she found while bussing table 32.
I thank her and open the note.
Steven,
Thank you for making my dinner tonight so pleasant, before I head back out into the wilderness.
Your sister in Christ.
I think of the woman with no name for days. What made that day of her life so hard? I consider many scenarios: the death of someone dear to her, a tragic discovery, the unfaithfulness of a lover. And why did she tell me? Why not instead take at least a portion of that turmoil out on me, a server, and a total stranger who deserved it?
I begin to understand something else about that night. I see how she proved for me she wasn’t just a customer. And considering the many others I had served, neither were they. If there is to be more to me than being just a server, then there should also be more to them. I am someone at the other end of their evening, not something, and so are they.
Everyone, rushing each day through lives that no one else really knows, all of us, we rustle through the weeds together.
P. Steven Ghiringhelli, is a 2005 graduate of Rutgers-Newark and a writer at Kairos Magazine. He has published articles in the Star-Ledger of Newark, the New Jersey Herald of Newton, and the Times-Herald Record of Middletown, N.Y. Posted August 2005.
