My Life as a Girl

Book by Mosier Elizabeth

Chapter 3

"No way are you wearing a bunny getup and taking money from drunks," my best friend Rosa warned me when I circled the ad for COCKTAIL WAITRESS WANTED. I'd only tried the idea on as a dare --you had to be twenty-one, anyway, to serve -- but Rosa was serious. She snatched the newspaper away from me, rolled it up, and swatted me with it on the head. "You lose your clothes, girlfriend, you lose respect, too," she said. Rosa could afford to be uncompromising; she was guaranteed a summer job in her family's souvenir store downtown. The Gutierrez family took care of their own, while my dad took our savings to Vegas and left us to fend for ourselves.

It was the summer before Bryn Mawr, and my plan was to work two waitress jobs: one at The Phoenix, where a single night's tips would buy me Gray's Anatomy, and another at a greasy spoon. I'd take a day shift at the diner, a night shift at the pricey place, go back and forth between them. I thought I could pull it off.

I'd almost hooked the job at Ben Franklin's All-American Diner. I was smiling at the manager and leaning toward him, betting on his chubby face and straight, boyish bangs to make him behave, when he winked at me and said, "Under one condition."

I startled as if I'd been bit by a lapdog. It was early morning, and we were the only two people in the diner, alone in a vinyl booth, our knees nearly touching under the table. Though I hadn't wanted Mom to come with me to the interview, I was suddenly glad she was outside, waiting in her Pinto in the parking lot. I could see the car from where I was sitting, blue faded white from the Arizona sun. I hoped the manager could see it, too.

"What condition?" I asked, shifting my body toward the window.

"That you won't leave me in September," he said, setting my application aside. He had this dreamy smile on his face, and he was drawing voluptuous spirals on the steno pad he'd used to take notes. Glancing down, I saw him circle a word I hadn't noticed before: pretty.

Mom always told me I was lucky to be pretty, but Rosa had raised my consciousness. "Walk it like you talk it, if you want to go somewhere," she'd say.

"Listen, Mr. Thew," I said.

"Kenny," he corrected, tapping his nametag with his pen.

"Kenny," I said. I gripped the table's red-white-and-blue Formica rim to remind myself of the distance between us, space made for wideload truckers roaring in hungry off the Black Canyon Freeway. "What are you insinuating?" I asked, hoping the dirty-sounding word would make him back off.

But my accusation only dangled there between us, making me blush. Sure, I'd been flirting before, but couldn't he see I was just being polite?

Kenny leaned closer. "I know you college kids," he whispered as though we were conspirators.

"What do you know about us?" I asked, white-knuckling the table rim, ready to defend my morals.

He looked confused for a second and then said, "You're gone when summer's over, and I've got to hire all over again."

Oh, that," I said, relieved he wanted only loyalty, and not to fool around in the walk-in fridge. I let go of the table, let out my breath, and was surprised to find that behind my relief was a ready-made lie. "I'm deferring a year," I lied, looking down at my application, the line that said EDUCATION, where I'd proudly written Bryn Mawr. I was honest enough to be ashamed to meet his eyes, but corrupt enough to know he would take it as humility. "To work for tuition," I added. "My financial aid fell through."

"That's rough," he said, sounding really concerned.

"It's not the worst thing that could happen," I said, and right away I was superstitious for my scholarship, which paid tuition while I worked for room and board and book money. Losing it was the worst thing I could think of. I was counting on college to change my life. I tapped the table's underside, wincing as my fingers hit chewing gum instead of wood.

"Can't anybody help you?" Kenny asked. "Your parents?"

I shook my head. I didn't tell him Mom worked for minimum in the bakery at El Rancho, and Dad was indisposed in prison, awaiting his trial for embezzlement. What if Kenny had seen Dad's picture in the paper, the headline calling him CAPTURED CON?

For a second, Kenny's pen quit scratching on the page. "Boyfriend?" he asked, looking up from his steno pad and right at my collarbone.

I should have known.
I should have told him, Listen, Mister, I've got myself to rely on, and that's plenty. Whose grades, after all, got her into Bryn Mawr? That's what Rosa would have done. But if I'd learned one thing in eighteen years, it was how guys bow to the word boyfriend.

"He's saving up for an engagement ring," I said in an octave higher than my own, hardly believing what I heard myself say. There was no boyfriend, no promise of a ring. As Rosa would say, I wasn't going to college to get an M.R.S. It fooled Kenny, though. He coughed and said, "Okay. Gotcha. Loud and clear."

Then I worried the ploy had worked too well, that if I was already taken, Kenny would take back the job. I'm like my dad that way, can't walk away from the table when I'm winning. "In the meantime..." I said, rattling the ice cubes in my tea, "I'm staying in Phoenix."

That lie came as easily as a habit. It was the first line of a rap called "Worst Case Scenario," which Rosa and I used to say. I'm staying in Phoenix, one of us would start, and together we'd make up a miserable life: hitched to some loser guy right out of high school, cramped into a trailer in Happy Tepee RV Park, selling fry bread with beans at the mall, drinking beer at desert parties. The game kept us from griping about busting our brains to get into good colleges, and geared us up to face the thin rejection letters we were sure we'd find in our mailboxes. Until that afternoon in April, when the fat packages containing letters starting "We are pleased..." came to us from Stanford, Rosa's first choice, and from Bryn Mawr.

"Isn't Bryn Mawr near Philadelphia?" Kenny asked, and I nodded almost imperceptibly, watching for some sign that I'd gotten the job. He patted my arm, as though in a second I'd gone from conquest to old flame. Then, slowly, he folded my application into quarters and tucked it into his breast pocket.

I waited, afraid to breathe, like a gambler watching the dice roll.

"I'm from back east myself," he said finally, and then went on about how people are friendlier in Phoenix, the usual stuff back-Easters say to flatter you, for what seemed like an hour. I listened and smiled and told myself the job was just my safety; I'd make bigger bucks at The Phoenix. But the more Kenny made me wait for the job, the more I felt I had to have it. I was almost as anxious as I'd been at my Bryn Mawr interview.

By the time Kenny had finally finished hyping about the laid-back Western attitude, I'd blown the whole thing out of proportion. Suddenly, that job at Franklin's meant the difference between college or staying in Phoenix. Between my future as a doctor or being dependent on a man, like my mom. Between the M.D. degree I wanted and the M.R.S. that seemed a consolation prize.

"Can you start tomorrow morning?" Kenny asked.

"Yes!" I gushed, but then it was weird to have it decided. I felt more resigned to it than happy, the way my dad looked the time he won a pile at the greyhound races.  That night he told me soberly, "You have to know your limit," as if winning were scientific and not just luck that could change in a minute, the way ours did.

Remembering Dad's words, I told myself I'd drawn the line, gone as far as I'd have to for a damn diner job.

Then Kenny said, "I'll go get your uniform."

"Army, navy, or marines?" I joked.

"I just love a girl in a uniform," he joked right back.

"Ha, ha," I said, tripping over the reprimand woman, which cowered at the tip of my tongue. That's what Bryn Mawr called its students, but in Arizona the line between one thing and another isn't so clear. I left it alone, but I was thinking: This summer's the end of my life as a girl.

"Size small?" he asked, trying not to look at my body.

"Medium," I said, straightening up in my seat.

"Read up on the rules while I'm gone."

Kenny left me alone then with a heavy notebook called "Franklin's Almanac." On the cover was the same cartoon that glared out from the floodlit highway sign: long-haired Ben with his square spectacles flying an electrified kite, and beneath it a corruption of Poor Richard's famous words: "Live to Eat." I flipped through the plastic pages, skipping company policy to look at greenish photos of Franklin's seafood specials, revived and deep-fried versions of what people got fresh in Philadelphia. I'd seen pictures of a place called the Italian Market, where iridescent fish were laid out on ice, and live crabs scrambled in buckets. But everything at Franklin's was hidden under greasy brown covers of breading, so you could hardly tell what it was.

I shut the rule book and looked around the diner, trying to picture myself hurrying out of the kitchen with a Kite 'n' Key Krab Kake Platter, trying to picture ninety hot summer days of the same. Someone had tried to make Franklin's look like Philly, with faux-brick floor tiles and lampshades shaped like Liberty Bells. On the walls were sun-faded posters of Independence Hall and the Delaware River, both much cleaner than seemed possible, and an outdated picture of downtown, missing the newer, mirrored buildings I'd seen in Bryn Mawr's viewbook. This inside information made me feel smug for a minute. But then, imagining how I'd describe the diner to Rosa, I felt embarrassed by how it was done up as if it wanted to be somewhere else.

We'd always planned to go to Stanford together, right up until last fall. Maybe I chose Bryn Mawr instead because an Eastern women's college was as far from familiar as I could get. Or because, for the first time in my life, I wanted to go somewhere without Rosa.

Kenny returned from the back with a frilly white Betsy Ross blouse draped over his arm. "Is that your mother out there in the car?" he asked.

"She didn't want to come in," I said, glancing out the window to make sure. I thought she was afraid she'd make the wrong impression, spoil my chance to land this prestigious job. She must have been feeling optimistic, though, because the car windows were closed and the air was on, an extravagance at seven A.M. The old Pinto was shaking like a piggy bank coughing out coins.

A string of tiny Liberty Bells hanging from the doorframe jangled a warning as Kenny leaned outside and waved her in. "Come in and have some iced tea," he called, and I was surprised when she did.

As Mom came into the diner, I stood by the booth like a guard dog, ridiculous because Franklin's --believe it -- was nothing you'd want to defend.

"Please excuse my uniform," she said, more to me than to Kenny, as she ran a hand across her hairnet like a spotlight calling attention to it. Her fingers were rainbow-stained with food color, and she had on her wedding band. Later in the day she'd remove it, complaining her fingers swelled from forcing cake icing through pastry tubes. The plastic badge on her chest bore her maiden name, Johnna Wynn, which she'd recently taken to using.

At home, Mom dressed like all the women in our old neighborhood, wrap-around skirts mail-ordered from Talbots, back east -- so she still looked strange to me in her uniform. But Kenny took in the bakery apron, the hairnet, and the stained fingers as though this was all there was to her. He'd fixed a smile on his face, like nothing she could say or do would surprise him. I thought how I'd give anything to keep a man from sizing me up that way.

But Mom just stood there in her uniform, a pretty-enough woman looking pleased to meet him. "I'll excuse your uniform," Kenny laughed, tugging on the sleeve of his short-sleeved dress shirt, a style people probably laughed at back east, "if you'll excuse mine."

Mom, of course, was charmed by this. "Nice place," she said as Kenny hustled away to pour her some tea, but she really meant nice man. I almost told her about the wet dreams this nice man had doodled on his steno pad, but by then I was doubting what I'd seen. I slumped back into my booth seat, which the air conditioning had turned clammy cold. Mom slid in beside me. "I bet you'll meet all kinds of neat people here," she said.
I scooted away a few inches. "You mean like truckers and drug runners?" I said, hating her persistent cheerfulness, the pioneer spirit I had always admired. No matter how bad things got, Mom still insisted we were lucky. And here I'd made up bad luck, the bit about the lost scholarship, to get a diner job. In Mom's book, a person couldn't go any lower than to trade pride for pity, and knowing that made me nasty. "Maybe we can start a book group," I said.

Mom said, "Remember you're lucky to get that fancy education."

She meant Bryn Mawr. I earned it, I wanted to shout at her, but my life was still mixed up with hers; I wasn't sure what was mine to claim. I only knew what had been taken from me, and what I wanted to leave behind.

We'd been rich, and then one day, after Dad's boss called him in to question receipts from a "business" trip to Vegas, we weren't. I kept thinking we'd get back on our feet again, even while Mom sent our family room furniture back "for repair," "lost" our better car, and moved us from our house to an apartment "for the time being." After Dad was arrested, she stopped the newspaper. All that time, I believed she was keeping us safe, putting some distance between us and disaster. Now I thought she'd been protecting herself.

"It will be good for Jaime to work with real people," Mom told Kenny as he set down a sweating glass of tea and took a seat across from us. "Before she heads off to the ivory tower."

"Ivory tower?" Kenny asked.

"Bryn Mawr," Mom said proudly.

Hearing that word, I snapped to attention; I'd almost forgotten the lie that got me the job. By then I was so far in that admitting to Kenny that I was going to Bryn Mawr seemed as awful as Mom catching me in a lie about it. I was scared Kenny would blow my cover. I felt like laughing out loud.
Kenny looked first at Mom, then at me. He opened his mouth and closed it, blinked at me once, and considered. "Who knows?" he said finally, clasping his hands behind his head and spreading his arms back, so his grinning face looked like a peacock's backed by its fan. "If Jaime's as good as she says she is, she might be my boss by the end of the summer."

"Who knows?" Mom laughed along, though she looked alarmed for a moment, picturing my career at the All-American Diner. Then Kenny winked at me so slightly it was almost a twitch, and it hit me that he thought he was protecting Mom from my bad news, the "lost" scholarship. When he handed me the Betsy Ross blouse and unfurled the skirt that lay beneath it, I knew he'd decided not to tell.

The skirt was the same faux-brick red as the floor and printed with white stars. It was cut as ...