It was 1988. I had the “cool” reputation of
being “Mary from New York” before I had
even arrived in Nisswa, Minnesota to
work at Grand View Lodge, a resort my grandmother had gone to in the 1970’s and
which agreed to hire me, sight unseen, with no resume, as wait staff, for the
summer. How hard could it be for a high school graduate to carry out food trays
and take orders from a limited menu? I had always been great at bringing plates
to the dinner table at home, and asking my parents if they wanted Sanka, which
I prepared with the utmost of grace and flair. Plus, I’d be making money and
getting access to a mini beach, motor boats and an outdoor ping pong table.
No one working at Grand View Lodge had ever
been to New York and definitely not to Manhattan where I grew up, so there was
a great deal of excitement among the staff about my arrival. There
was another employee there also named Mary, who just happened to be my roommate
and who was an outspoken and bizarre born again Christian with enormous glasses
and what appeared to be a lazy eye. I
was very pleased to be “Mary from New York” instead of “Mary from Crazy Town” and my name
tag said as such. I was told that several of the staff had taken turns wearing
my name tag in the dining room before I arrived. I wasn’t exactly sure what
their intentions had been, but it seemed that merely being from New York granted
some kind of special status. I had
failed to achieve this in high school because everyone else there was also from New York.
One of my first assignments in the kitchen was
to make toast. In preparation, I
carefully observed the toast that I saw going out to the diners. It was cut in half and glistening with
butter. I went to work, as speedily as
possible. I was going to make my parents
proud, and impress the Grand View masses by being known not only as “Mary from
New York” but “Big Apple’s Toast-Maker Extraordinaire”. I opened up the bread bag and began slicing
pieces in half, just as I had seen, and tossing each one into its separate
compartment of the toaster. I felt like
a toast genius. I started piling the bread up and cutting three
or four slices in half at once as they waited in the toaster queue. We busy New Yorkers knew the value of a time
saving technique.
My boss, a freckled and frazzled fellow of 23, scooted
by, took one look at my toast project and then looked at me.
“Don’t cut the bread before you put it in the toaster, Mary”. His smile was one of pity
and disdain, not understanding and compassion. I half giggled and scratched my hair net. “Right. Sorry!” I muttered and molded my
eyebrows into a grand look of deep understanding as I nodded like a soldier at
attention. I made an attempt to mash the
½ pieces into a whole again, but it was useless. I was not the toast queen I had hoped to be
and the diners were forced into patience about the whereabouts of their morning
carbohydrate.
The next evening, I took drink orders for the
bartender, Jim, who had been winking and smiling at me since I had arrived.
Despite my skyscraper status, I couldn’t imagine that he was interested, but I
was somewhat titillated by his attentiveness.
Perhaps he hadn’t heard about the toast incident. And perhaps he hadn’t
noticed that although I was 18, my body was still in its infancy of pubescence,
and those mini mounds on my chest were mostly, if not all the result of a well-endowed
padded bra. To complete the even less
desirable package, the orthodox brown skirts and blue unisex polo shirt uniform
with the Grand View Lodge Emblem on the lapel made me look like a bean pole.
I went to take an order from a couple who had
just arrived.
“We’ll take a Manhattan and a Martini, please”,
“Sure” I said, jotting it down on my order pad
as if I drank both of these cocktails on a regular basis. “I’ll be back in a
moment with your drinks.”
I smiled at them, feeling very grown up and
sophisticated and returned to Jim, the bartender, trying to find a way to
swagger my reedy body in my military-with-a-hint-of-golfer outfit. I dropped off the slip and glanced coyly at
Jim. “Here’s an order for you.” I said,
and swaggered out
10 minutes after the drinks had been delivered
and I was now taking orders for “fresh” fish that we weren’t supposed to say
was actually frozen, there seemed to be some extra buzz around the staff. People smiled knowingly and nodded when they
passed me by. I smiled back, acting
like I was in on the game. Finally
someone said to me, “Nice spelling job, Mary from New York!” When I returned at some point to the
bartending station Jim said “Don’t even know how to spell where you come from,
eh?” and presented me with the order
slip. I had spelled Manhattan “Manhatten”.
My smile suddenly went crooked as I felt my “Mary from New York” status
melt away. First slicing bread before toasting it and then miss-spelling my own
borough. This was not how I wanted to represent my East coast compatriots. I would like to say that I didn’t have much
opportunity to see or write out the word “Manhattan”, but that would be a lie.
I went to an elementary school called “Manhattan Country School.”
“Oh, woops!”
I mumbled and walked out, my confident strut dissolving into an
embarrassed slink. No one working at Grand View Lodge had ever been to New York
but I believed they all knew how to spell Manhattan.
I returned to my employee bungalow, where my
roommate was sitting quietly on her bed reading the Bible, and stayed in for
the rest of the evening, deciding against attending the nightly “Dirty Dancin’ drinking
fest” that had been advertised earlier in the day, by Ricki, the head
chef. I needed to study waitressing 101 so I
wouldn’t pull an Amelia Bedelia when I was asked to “marry” the ketchups, as
well as check my spelling of all New York boroughs in case someone ordered a
“Long Aisle-land Iced Tea”.
After a fitful night, I awoke early the next
day for the breakfast shift, fumbled into my waitressing uniform in the dark while
Mary slept peacefully dreaming of Moses, and scurried to the dining area. I sheepishly fitted my name tag to my shirt
feeling somewhat undeserving of my title, and a tad concerned that it might be
taken away. The kitchen was already
bustling and the smell of waffles, maple syrup and “freshly squeezed” orange
juice that was actually one half Tropicana (Shhh! Don’t tell the guests!) permeated the air. I checked the board for my morning assignment:
Napkin Folding. Breathing a sigh of
relief, I stationed myself in the napkin vestibule and cautiously gripped the
edges of the cloths as I, one by one, pleated them into artful formations that
would have made the Statue of Liberty proud.
