Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (8 page)

Several months earlier, I’d filled out an application for sum
mer employment at Yellowstone National Park. Although this was the first I’d heard of it, many of the national parks advertised for employees through colleges and universities around the coun
try. The draw was that in addition to getting paid to work in one of the most beautiful places in the country, room and board was thrown in and there was ample opportunity to explore the sur
roundings. In truth, the only reason I’d applied at all was because Ray, my boyfriend at the time, thought it would be a great idea for the two of us to work side by side in the great outdoors away from the pressures and rigors of school. A year ahead of me, he
was getting ready to write his senior thesis and graduate in the spring of 1983. It was a last hurrah for him, a chance to revel in youth before entering the “real” world. Besides all of this, he con
sidered himself something of an outdoorsman, an expert when it came to backpacking, rock climbing, or any activity that required some sort of convergence with nature. I couldn’t have been more opposite in my thinking, but I wanted to get away as much as he did and, at the time, I wanted to be with him as well.

Ray prepped me for disappointment as we filled out our applications together. It was entirely possible, he claimed, that he would be accepted and I would be rejected. He had much bet
ter experience, he said, and the national parks probably had quo
tas on how many students they could hire from individual schools. There were spots on the application that allowed us to state our preferences as to where we would work. Ray listed the ranger station as his first pick. As I filled in the spot marked “Waitress, Dining Room,” I realized he was probably right. I wouldn’t get hired and he’d be off on a big adventure for the summer. I began to plan an alternative course of action.

By the time we heard back from Yellowstone, the spring term was almost over. Ray and I had gone through the sort of rapid relationship change inherent in youthful romances. In fact, we were in the process of an ugly, drawn-out breakup. His letter arrived first, a thin missive thanking him for applying but stating that they were unable to hire him. His keen disappointment deepened a few days later when I received a thick packet from Yellowstone welcoming me to the summer team and listing my assignment. “Kitchen Prep,” it said.

“Well, maybe I won’t go,” I told Ray. “I don’t really want to work in a kitchen.”

“You have to go,” he said bitterly. “Why would you pass up such a great opportunity? And it’s not like you want to be with
me
.”

He wasn’t entirely incorrect. Truth be told, part of the reason (well, actually most of the reason) that Ray and I were breaking up was because I had fallen hard for one of his best friends ear
lier in the year. In turn, the friend had rejected
me
in a most painful fashion while still allowing for just enough possibility that something might happen between the two of us in the future to drive me mad with longing. Ray and I had gone through rather an intense few months hashing all of this out, our confused feelings for each other further complicated by stringent academic demands. By the end of the semester, I found that despite having deep feelings for Ray, I was still in love with his friend. It was an impossible situation. I needed desperately to get away and sort out my muddled emotions. I wanted to be in a place where nobody knew me and where I would have to rely entirely on myself. Kitchen or no, Yellowstone seemed like the perfect place to do this.

I decided to take the job.

In the weeks before I left, as we divided up our pots, pans, and pathetic collection of furniture, all I heard from Ray was how he couldn’t believe they hired me instead of him. He wasn’t convinced our relationship was over and he believed he knew what was best for me. “You’ll never make it there,” he warned me. “You don’t like hiking and you hate snow!”

“This job has nothing to do with snow” was my response.

My parents thought that working in Yellowstone was a great idea. They felt I’d grown entirely too dependent on Ray (they’d never gotten over the fact that I’d moved in with him against their express commands) and too immersed in the cloistered environment of school. I had been the first child to leave the house and go away to school (although school was only a half hour away, I didn’t live at home and visited only on holidays), and the growing pains as I attempted to separate from my family had been particularly intense for my mother and father.

With all this psychological baggage packed securely along with several sticks of incense, a thick notepad, and some warm socks, I boarded a bus to Wyoming. The bus took a convoluted route to Yellowstone, driving first to Tacoma, through Montana, and down into “Big Sky” country. It took two days to get there. In Tacoma, I was befriended by a trucker on his way to Bozeman.

“Why don’t I take you out for a sandwich when we get to Spokane?” he asked. “I know the city really well.”

“OK,” I agreed, although I sensed I probably shouldn’t. But after all, I wondered, what could really happen? We were both captive on the bus, and he would be getting off before me. He didn’t seem like the type to kidnap me and force me into slavery. This was to be the first of several leaps of faith I made on my journey.

At first it seemed as if overriding my instincts was the right thing to do. My trucker was personable and acted like a benevo
lent uncle. He bought me a grilled cheese sandwich in Spokane (we ate very near the bus station at my request—I wasn’t a total idiot, after all) and told me about his life on the road, an ex-wife in Idaho, and a ten-year-old son he adored but didn’t get to see very often. I drank coffee and he ordered beers for himself. By the time we reboarded the bus, I felt he was an old pal and something of a protector.

Deep into Montana, in the dark of night, my trucker decided to become more than a friend. I sat next to the window and he sat in the seat next to me. Gradually he edged closer and closer, until I was wedged against the glass. Since I was obviously not taking any of his hints to get cozy, he finally began pawing at me in earnest, sliding his hands along my legs first and then pro
gressing up. When he made a move for my breast, I slapped his hand off and said, “Please don’t do that.”

“Aw, come on, honey,” he said. “It’s real dark. Nobody will see.”

“No,” I said and contemplated bursting into tears. I felt he’d let me down, somehow, and now I was going to have to hate him for the rest of the trip. Mostly, though, I just felt incredibly stu
pid for not anticipating this scenario. Because I felt totally responsible for getting myself, literally, into such a tight spot and because I was more than a little scared, I didn’t move. I opted instead to continue fighting the trucker off in silence, moving his hands constantly and occasionally slapping him. He drifted off, finally, and fell across me. It took all the strength I had to shove him back to his side of the seat.

We pulled into Butte at dawn and the trucker woke up, yawned, and smiled over at me as if we’d shared a particularly pleasant and intimate night together.

“Buy you a cup of coffee?” he asked.

“No thanks,” I said crisply and disembarked, losing myself in the diner where we stopped. When the bus pulled out forty min
utes later, I changed my seat, opting to sit next to a very large woman who ate from a seemingly bottomless box of pastries. I watched the trucker get back on the bus, scan around for me, shrug, and sit down in his old seat. When he finally left the bus in Bozeman, I felt I was exhaling for the first time in hours.

There were a series of tour buses waiting at the Wyoming Greyhound station to take tourists into Yellowstone. In contrast to the bleak misery of the Greyhound, the driver of the next bus was relentlessly perky, pointing out areas of interest in a coun
tryside that seemed so foreign to me it might as well have been on the moon. I paid little attention to the spiel until we passed an area that was carpeted with animal bones.

“Winter kill,” explained the bus driver. “This is where they come to die.”

Somehow, I couldn’t help feeling that this was a bad omen.

By the time I arrived in the village of Lakeshore, I was tired, ratty, and overcome by the high altitude, which was making me
light-headed. I checked into the main office and was processed like a piece of salmon caught in a net. The dormitories assigned to employees were small, gray, and depressing. When I hauled my belongings into my new room and laid them down on the creaking bed, I finally allowed myself a few tears of self-pity. I had the sinking feeling that Yellowstone was not going to be the haven I’d anticipated. I felt I’d started what was supposed to be an enriching experience on a sour note (I was having a little trouble banishing the trucker from my thoughts) and I wasn’t sure I could bounce back in such forbidding territory. Moreover, instead of feeling wildly independent, I just felt unbearable lonely.

But again it occurred to me that my situation was a direct result of my own actions. Nobody had forced me to come to this land of summer snow and bleached bones. If it seemed grim, I had nobody to blame but myself. And of course, I had only just gotten there. I still didn’t know what was behind Door Number Three. And so I donned a sweater and headed down to the hotel bar.

Employee dorms were single sex by floor, two to a room. My roommate, Susie, was a year older than me and from a very wealthy family in Virginia. Her parents, she said, were totally opposed to her coming to Wyoming. They considered it slum
ming of the highest order. She was engaged to a politician whom she claimed not to like very much but whose diamond engage
ment ring she displayed proudly on her left fourth finger. She needed to get away from him for a while, she said, and from the suffocating atmosphere of her home. She had been hired as a clerk at the front desk, a coveted position. I wondered who, exactly, determined the placement for all these summer employ
ees and what kind of bizarre system was used to determine room
mates. Not that it mattered, because my roommate and I got along pretty well, but the whole thing did seem fairly arbitrary.

There were a couple of days of orientation before we took our positions, and we were provided with a sheaf of rules and warnings to absorb. Hiking through the park was encouraged, but we were to watch for fresh bear droppings (it was bear sea
son, after all), never keep food in our tents, and follow estab
lished and maintained trails. We were not to fraternize with tourists. Lights out at 11
P
.
M
. We were forbidden to become physically involved with each other (I later discovered that this was one rule employees took particular pleasure in flaunting). Should we decide to leave the park before our allotted time was up, there were several forms to fill out and a lengthy exit interview. In short, it was a little like being in a work release program.

The pervasive sense of uneasiness I felt turned to despair on my first day at work. The kitchen was enormous, a cold master
work of white tile and steel. My section, the pantry, was larger than most entire restaurant kitchens. Sound echoed off the walls and bounced off the floors. All the utensils, bowls, and pots were oversized jumbo appliances that dwarfed the humans using them. My first look around the kitchen convinced me that I was in some sort of surrealist nightmare. What struck me more than the physical surroundings of the kitchen, however, were the hierarchy and delicate balance of power within it. Before coming to Yellowstone, I’d worked in small family-owned restaurants of a decidedly casual nature. This was an entirely different story. There were literally dozens of employees in the kitchen and din
ing room, and each had a specific role to fulfill in these mini-societies. The kitchen was to be a very different kind of learning environment than the one I’d just left, but no less important in the long run. Although I was too busy contemplating my own fate at the time, observing and understanding the complicated structures of the kitchen and dining room would later prove to be valuable lessons indeed.

My introduction to the actual work involved being lined up with the other hapless pantry hires in front of our supervisor, an ageless giantess wielding a huge whisk. Smiling, she pulled a shrimp from a vast trough in front of her and stripped its back vein.

“Y’all gotta clean out this black stuff in the back,” she said, “and y’all gotta do it right.” She demonstrated the process on a few more shrimp. “Now we do a lot of shrimp down here, so y’all gotta be fast, too.” Several of my coworkers were starting to look a little green around the gills. “Now I know I say ‘y’all’ a lot, but I’m tellin’ y’all, I’m from Mississippi, and I’m gonna have y’all sayin’ ‘y’all’ before I’m done with y’all.”

Shrimp wasn’t the only fleshy item we were responsible for in the pantry. We had to slice and prepare the vast storehouse of meat needed for all three meals. The meat slicer looked like a marginally updated version of the guillotine. No matter how hard I tried, I could not picture myself using it.