Waiting on seven to nine tables, each with two to six customers, Rosie devised memory strategies so that she could remember who ordered what. A waitress acquires knowledge and intuition about the ways and the rhythms of the restaurant business. I’ve since studied the working habits of blue-collar workers and have come to understand how much my mother’s kind of work demands of both body and brain. I couldn’t have put it in words when I was growing up, but what I observed in my mother’s restaurant defined the world of adults, a place where competence was synonymous with physical work. Gripping the outer edge of the table with one hand, she’d watch the room and note, in the flow of our conversation, who needed a refill, whose order was taking longer to prepare than it should, who was finishing up. I’m all in, she’d say, and whisper something about a customer. She’d take a minute to flop down in the booth next to my father. She would haggle with the cook about a returned order and rush by us, saying, He gave me lip, but I got him. She stood at a table or booth and removed a plate for this person, another for that person, then another, remembering who had the hamburger, who had the fried shrimp, almost always getting it right.
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She walked full tilt through the room with plates stretching up her left arm and two cups of coffee somehow cradled in her right hand. Rosie took customers’ orders, pencil poised over pad, while fielding questions about the food. Lingo conferred authority and signaled know-how. The racetrack, for instance, was the fast-turnover front section. Her tables were deuces, four-tops, or six-tops according to their size seating areas also were nicknamed. Fry four on two, my mother would say as she clipped a check onto the metal wheel. Standing at the service window facing the kitchen, they called out abbreviated orders. Weaving in and out around the room, waitresses warned behind you in impassive but urgent voices. At mealtimes, the pace of the kitchen staff and the din from customers picked up.
There wasn’t much for a child to do at the restaurants, and so as the hours stretched out, I watched the cooks and waitresses and listened to what they said. Sometimes she worked the register and the counter, and we sat there when she waited booths and tables, we found a booth in the back where the waitresses took their breaks. When I was growing up in Los Angeles during the 1950s, my father and I would occasionally hang out at the restaurant until her shift ended, and then we’d ride the bus home with her. My mother, Rose Meraglio Rose (Rosie), shaped her adult identity as a waitress in coffee shops and family restaurants. Diner in Pawtucket, Rhode Island (Photo by Carol Highsmith/Library of Congress)
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