8.

Don’t look at the tray. I lifted and walked, lifted and walked. After awhile I began to be pretty good at it. I began to enjoy myself. The wait staff and housekeepers and cooks all lived together in three old houses across the road from the hotel; I had a room to myself on the top floor with an iron bedstead, a chair and a window that looked out over the valley towards the mountains. I came to love the perpetual sense of crisis in the kitchen, the cooks sweating in their undershirts, the smoke and flames shooting up from the grill, people reaching over each other’s heads to grab a plate; and the serenity of the dining room, where the hotel guests, showered and dressed for dinner after an afternoon of golf, sat in the fading sunlight examining the wine list. I had never been in a restaurant kitchen before. I suspected that most of the people in the dining room hadn’t either. It was thrilling to be able to inhabit both worlds so thoroughly, to be able to pass from one to the other just by pushing open the heavy swinging door with my foot, my tray held steady a couple of inches above my right shoulder.

I was surprised by how demanding the guests could be—how demanding and how rude. One family had already made themselves unpopular before I got there. I was told that they came to this hotel every year for a weeklong family golf vacation, a ruddy-faced father, his wife, their five grown sons, and the sons’ wives and children. I was assigned to their table nearly every night. They looked like the families I’d seen every summer at Dartmouth reunions—pink well-shaved jowls, straight teeth and nicely pressed shirts for the men, well-cut sleeveless dresses for the women, modest jewelry, and a smoldering sense of irritation in everything they did. Night after night they came in from the bar jingling the ice cubes in their gin and tonics and looking around for their waitress. The children threw food on the floor, the father narrowed his eyes and spoke down the table to the sons, wives left the table abruptly in tears. They sent things back, they ordered things that weren’t on the menu, and they always complained. Four of the sons were there; they were waiting for the youngest unmarried son to arrive. He did at last, a younger version of his father and his brothers, with the same Oxford cloth shirt and cheeks like well-marbled beef. I recognized him from the living room at Northrop House. “Excuse me,” I said as I leaned from behind him to pour some water. “Didn’t you go out with Pat Thatcher last year?” He turned and looked at me. “Northrop House,” I said.

It was like observing a group of birdwatchers adjust their binoculars towards some disturbance in the trees. I could see their perceptions shift; after waiting on them for three nights I had suddenly become visible. They weren’t any friendlier after that, but they were better behaved, at least while I was around.

At night the big hotel sat lit and silent like the Titanic. Up the hill on the other side of the road we ran from house to house playing sardines or tag in the dark, or lay on the grass and looked up at the stars. The staff was divided between high school and college students like me, and a group of older men and women who worked the hotel circuit year round, Florida in the winter, New England or upstate New York in the summer. They would go down the hill in the evening to sit on the porch of one of the other houses while we danced in the living room in one of the ramshackle boarding houses, packed close together moving to Big Brother and The Holding Company or Three Dog Night. I turned twenty-one at the end of June and went to the town’s one little general store and bought Jimmy a six-pack.

It was turning out to be more difficult to get to Montreal than I had anticipated, although the city was less than four hours away. I didn’t have a car and the bus ride was a long complicated business of transfers and layovers. My only options were to persuade someone to drive up with me, or to hitchhike. Jimmy and a friend had tried hitchhiking to Montreal one weekend and were stopped at the border—it turned out that the man who had picked them up was driving a stolen car. “I gave them your boyfriend’s name and phone number, I said that we were visiting him,” Jimmy said, “but they still wouldn’t let us in.”

I sat in my little room looking out the window at the mountains. Early in July I asked if I could speak to the dining room manager, an anxious little man named Mr. Quick. “I have to leave,” I said, looking down at my hands in my lap. “I’m turning in my resignation.” He was kind but didn’t try to change my mind.   “I’m sorry to lose you,” he said, pulling out my paperwork. “If you had stayed you could have made a very good waitress.”

The call to my parents was more difficult. I sat in the lighted phone booth behind the kitchen listening to the night sounds from the woods nearby. Finally I put the quarters in the slot and made the call.
“

Well hello lover!” my father said. “We were just lying here in bed talking about you.” I could picture them in the big mahogany bed in their high-ceiling bedroom, with the bedside lamps lit. “How go the wars?”

“Actually,” I said. “I just handed in my resignation. I’m going to Montreal to spend the rest of the summer with Edward.” There was a silence.

“What is it?” I could hear my mother saying in the background.

“It’s Liz,” my father said. “She’s going to Montreal for the summer.”

My mother took the phone. “Are you sure about this?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “I just told them I was quitting.”

“Is anything wrong?” No, I told her. I just wanted to be with Edward.

“Are you going back to school in the fall?”

“Of course!” The thought of anything different hadn’t even occurred to me.

“When do you leave?” Tomorrow, I told her. One of the other waiters had offered me a ride. I was packing my few belongings tonight.

“What’s Edward doing?” she asked.

“Nothing right now. He just got there, like, a month ago.”

“Two months,” my mother said. “It’s been more than two months. Is he looking for a job? Is he planning to go to school?”

“Mom, I don’t know.”

The line was filled with a heavy silence.  A moth blundered into the lighted wall of the phone both with an audible thump.  “Well,” my mother said at last, “you’ve thrown your cap over the windmill now.”