As one of the experiences of a new server, I have had the chance to come in at 5:30 in the morning to open up the restaurant and get to know the customers, many of whom order the same thing every day. Lately I have also been reading Nabokov. Speak, Memory.
I know there doesn't seem to be a direct correlation between working at a restaurant and reading the autobiography of a Lolita-writing Russian author, but because I am sleep deprived and waking up at 4:00 these days, it occurs to me that it might be fun to observe the "characters" I have met so far through the eyes of Nabokov- or at least give a sort of Nabokovian description as I interpret his aesthetic from his memoir.
Character #1: Older man, regular.
A man walks over to the counter upon which sit the coffee mugs, water glasses, utensils and various other necessities of the initial ritual of fetching a beverage for the customer. This man does not wait for the coffee to come to him, but walks right up and helps himself to a mug turning on the spigot of the regular coffeepot and grinning at me as I struggle to work the cash register and ring up another guest's meal, a particularly difficult moment for me and so he has me at a disadvantage. I greet the man, a man wearing jeans about ten years out of date, an old gray sweatshirt, and a man who, despite the beaked nose, gray hair (complete with morning cowlick) and skin tired of fighting the war on gravity, was probably once somewhat handsome.
I ask the man how he is.
"Do you really want to know?"
Of course, what I want is of little regard to this man who is intent, as evident by the gleam in his eye, of delivering a joke he clearly finds amusing. He proceeds, despite my protests that no, it's ok, I don't need to know and says:
"I'm ornery and horny."
And with that he laughs at his own joke (non-Nabokovian me laughs too) and walks over to his usual table, a round table in the back of the restaurant where he hangs out with his cronies each morning sipping coffee and complaining about the state of things in general, and in particular, the service at this restaurant.
Character #2: Woman at counter, ordering large turtle latte.
A woman with faded brown hair that falls lower than her shoulders and bangs that look like they have been pushed hastily aside in a rush to get out of bed and on with the daily routine approaches the counter, bug-eyed or bleary-eyed, it is hard to say.
I greet her, as bound by my new position as server, and ask how she is today.
"It's too early to tell," she retorts, clearly annoyed that anyone has the gall to pose such a ridiculous question at the god-awful hour of 7:30. She is such a woman who delights in crushing the enthusiasm in front of her, like she delights in squishing an ant when she sees one walking along the sidewalk slowly in front of her and she happens to be wearing some thick-soled pair of shoes, or perhaps her "outdoor" crocs- the pair that will not come inside, thereby trailing ant remains behind them.
I know she is this particular kind of sadist because her response to her own retort about it being too early goes something like this:
"I suppose you have to be here even earlier, huh?" (she grudgingly concedes that she is not the only one who has to face morning before it is light and I tell her we arrive at 5:30.) "Well, I saw on my calendar that I think it's this Sunday that we shift over to daylight savings. I guess you'll be getting here at 4:30, huh?" She walks away after smugly tilting her head toward the plastic lid on her drink and taking a big sip.
She didn't leave a tip.
Character #3: Delivery man, Ghiradelli chocolate-sauce delivery man
I greet the man walking confidently behind our counter wheeling four cardboard boxes on a dolly. I say "How are you?"
He says, "Better each time I see you. You know that's why I come here, right? To see your pretty face each time. You know that too, right? I know you got a man who tells you every day how pretty you are, or you better."
The man continues on despite the fact that I am looking away and working on the cash register again and other servers are rolling their eyes. Of particular note is the fact that this is only day three of my time at this restaurant; I have not seen this man, with his glasses and Ghiradelli jacket and black-and-gray curly short hair. He has never seen me either, so it is impossible to take anything he says seriously. Thus I turn my attention in my mind to the Mnemosyne butterfly, the species that I remembered not so much for the moment in which I caught it, but for the moment my Nanny, Mademoiselle O, sat on it and crushed its wings into six lop-sided and broken pieces. I don't pretend to assume their was any connection between the Mnemosyne butterfly and the Ghiradelli delivery man, but the thought serves merely to illustrate how disconnected I was from the conversation he was having with himself in my direction.
The End--of Nabokovian interpretation...
And now- the why of it all. Why did I choose to have a Nabokovian flight of fancy in thinking about the customers I have met? How is Nabokov different from me?
Well, there is the obvious--He was a Russian writer born in the 19th century before the crumbling of Tsars and Lenin's reign on the world who wrote well and hunted butterflies and grew up in a household full of dozens of dozens of servants all taking care of the personal business of his family. I am an American woman born after Vietnam and before Desert Storm part one who took karate and dance and was held accountable for washing dishes at a very early age. But beyond that-- how do we interpret the world differently? What have I learned from his autobiography? From my own life?
Aesthetically, Nabokov holds his reader at arm's length. His visual description of people and places emerges out of a bounty of details that appear on a page like an image beneath an artist's charcoal pencil. He lets us revel in imagery but resists approaching emotion in anything more than a detached and bemused sort of way, such as when he says of his time in college at Cambridge, "Emotionally, I was in the position of a man who, having just lost a fond kinswoman, realized-too late- that through some laziness of the routine-drugged human soul, he had neither troubled to know her as fully as she deserved, nor had shown her in full the marks of his not quite conscious then, but now unrelieved, affection" (261). It is a lovely passage, thoughtful and intelligent, but certainly not emotionally engaging. The emotion has been put in an aquarium and Nabokov is instructing his readers of its nature much like a tour guide would do in a natural history museum.
I like that about Nabokov, or at least I like it right now. My own writing has been much more the variety of bleeding onto a page as late, and my emotions are too raw to continue. I want a break. I am tired of describing the gut-wrenching pain of heartache and self-exploration.
Aesthetics aside, Nabokov as a server amuses me to no end. Me as a server depresses me a bit. I'm starting to think becoming a server for me, a woman with codependent tendencies and habits, is a little like sending a drug addict to work in a crack factory. How many times a day do I get to ignore my own boundaries in efforts to please the customer? How many times do I get to smile at a derogatory comment all in an effort to keep things running smoothly and also make a tip? Not that I don't understand the playfulness of the customers or the delivery men, but I feel myself slipping into pleasing-mode and away from the self-containment that Nabokov has in such abundance. Nabokov would make no apologies or accommodations for the customers, but of course, I do.
Perhaps that is why I choose to look at the customers from Nabokov's point of view. Even if in the moment I am wrapped up in being charming and smiling and laughing and putting others at ease, I can always come home and rewrite the scene.
No comments:
Post a Comment