The year
was 1962, the place was Toronto. It was summer, and I was faced with the
necessity of earning the difference between my scholarship for the next year
and what it would cost me to live. The job was in the coffee shop of a small
hotel on Avenue Road. The booths were served by a waitressing pro who
lipsticked outside the lines, and who thought I was mutant. My job would be
serving things at the counter -- coffee I would pour, toast I would create from
bread, milkshakes I would whip up in the obstetrical stainless-steel device
provided. (“Easy as pie,” I was told.) I would also be running the customers’ money
through the cash register -- an opaque machine with buttons to be pushed,
little drawers that shot in and out, and a neurotic system of locks.
I said I had never worked a cashregister before. This delighted the manager, a plump, unctuous character out of
some TV show I hadn’t yet watched. He said the cash register, too, was easy as pie,
and I would catch on to it in no time, as I was a smart girl with an MA. He said
I should go and get myself a white dress.
I didn’t know what he meant by “white
dress.” I bought the first thing I could find on sale, a nylon afternoon number
with daisies appliquéd onto the bodice. The waitress told me this would not do:
I needed a dress like hers, a uniform.
(“How dense can you be?” I overheard her saying.) I got the uniform, but I had
to go through the first day in my nylon daisies.
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This
first humiliation set the tone. The coffee was easy enough -- I just had to
keep the Bunn filled -- and the milkshakes were possible; few people wanted
them anyway. The sandwiches and deep-fried shrimp were made at the back: all I
had to do was order them over the intercom and bin the leftovers.
But
the cash register was perverse. Its drawers would pop open for no reason, or it
would ring eerily when I swore I was nowhere near it; or it would lock itself
shut, and the queue of customers waiting to pay would lengthen and scowl as I
wrestled and sweated. I kept expecting to be fired for incompetence, but the
manager chortled more than ever.
An
ex-boyfriend discovered my place of employment, and would also come to stare
and shake his head, ordering a single coffee, taking an hour to drink it,
leaving me a sardonic nickel tip. The Greek short-order cook decided I would be
the perfect up-front woman for the restaurant he wanted to open: he would marry
me and do the cooking, I would speak English to the clientele and work -- was
he mad? -- the cash register. He divulged his bank balance, and demanded to
meet my father so the two of them could close the deal. When I declined, he
took to phoning me over the intercom to whisper blandishments, and to plying me
with deep-fried shrimp. A girl as scrawny as myself, he pointed out, was
unlikely to get such a good offer again.
Eventually,
I couldn’t handle the responsibility, the cash register had betrayed me once
too often, and the short-cook was beginning to sing Frank Sinatra songs to me.
I gave notice.
Only
when I’d quit did the manager reveal his true stratagem: they’d wanted someone
inept as me because they suspected their real cashier of skimming the accounts,
a procedure I was obviously too ignorant to ever figure out. “Too stunned,” as
the waitress put it. She was on the cashier’s side, and had me fingered as a
stoolie all along.
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Word Count: 612
