Chapter 20 Adventures in Employment
ADVENTURES IN EMPLOYMENT
The search wasn’t easy this time either, but I was hired at last as a carhop at a strange restaurant called a “Drive-In,” where the customers, yes, drove into the lot and parked outside the building, and the waiters, most of them men, took trays of food out to them to eat in their cars.
I couldn’t understand why one would wish to eat in a car, with nowhere to put one’s food and the hamburgers dripping everywhere, instead of comfortably at a table with proper linens, but it seemed Americans loved their cars so much, they never wanted to get out of them.
The owner, Mr. Sullivan, was reluctant to hire me, but that wasn’t anything new. His reason, however, was.
“You’re too pretty,” he told me. A red-faced man, he was rather stout, and brusque in his manner. “Some of those boys can get fresh.”
“But a pretty girl,” I said, “is surely better? Men enjoy having a pretty girl serve them, I think.”
“That’s the point, Toots,” Mr. Sullivan said. “They enjoy it too much.”
“I can look after myself very well,” I said. “And your sign has been there now for three days, which means you haven’t found anybody to work yet. Perhaps I could try it for a month, and we could see.”
“We’ll try it for a week,” Mr. Sullivan said. “And then we’ll see. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
He was correct, for I was pinched on the bottom several times during the weeks I worked there.
I found this not only objectionable, but also terribly bruising, and Joe was most upset by it.
I continued on, though, for I needed a job, and I’d done harder things.
Until the night when I served a very loud group of three college men, all of them looking much younger than Joe, possibly rather drunk, and definitely worse mannered.
I took their orders easily enough, though, and when the driver said, “How about a date later, sweetheart?” I answered coolly, “My husband wouldn’t like that.
He was in the Army, you see, and learned to fight perhaps too well.
He’s a student at Stanford also. Perhaps you know him?
Staff Sergeant Joe Stark.” This, I’d found, almost always worked.
Unfortunately, there was that drinking. That, I’m sure, is the reason for what happened next. I brought out their food—hamburgers and milkshakes and French fries, which was what almost everyone ordered—and as I was fastening the tray to the car window, the driver grabbed my breast and squeezed.
I didn’t drop the tray. I was rather proud of myself there. What I did do was snatch up a tall glass containing a chocolate milkshake and throw the contents in his face.
He yelped loudly, the man beside him yelled, “Hey!” and the man behind him said, “What’s happening?
” The milkshake, though, slid down the driver’s face in a most satisfying manner, though some of the whipped cream stuck to his nose.
As I watched, the maraschino cherry dropped onto his trousers with a plop.
I said, “That will be a dollar seventy-nine,” with my voice shaking only a little.
The driver said, groping for a handkerchief, “You threw a milkshake in my face!” He was spluttering a bit also. The chocolate had possibly got up his nose.
“Yes,” I said, “I did. You deserved it. A dollar seventy-nine.”
“I’m not going to—” he said.
I heard someone behind me and turned. It was Johnny, another carhop. He too was a Stanford student, but “a poor one,” he’d told me with a shy smile. “On scholarship. That’s why I’m working here.” Now, he said, “Is there a problem?”
“You bet there’s a problem,” the driver said. He hadn’t managed to wipe his face well at all. I suppose it was difficult to see through the milkshake. “She—”
“A dollar seventy-nine,” I said again, like a parrot. I’d begun to shake now.
The driver said a very bad word, and Tommy said, “All right, buddy. You’re done.” He picked the tray up off the door, too. “Get out of here.”
“You can’t do that!” the driver said. “That’s my order!”
“Out,” Tommy said, which was brave of him, and rather noble. Fortunately, that was when Mr. Sullivan came out of the restaurant.
I thought, after my perfume-counter experience, that I’d surely be fired on the spot. Instead, Mr. Sullivan told the men they weren’t to come back again. When they drove off with a squeal of tires, he told Tommy, “Good job, kid.” And then he fired me.
“Not that I want to,” he said, “but I told you, pretty girls are too much trouble. Sorry, kid. Go get yourself another job. One where you’re not outside alone at night.”
At home, Joe said, “You’d have had to quit soon enough anyway. I told you the last time you got pinched that this wasn’t going to work.” I might have argued, but there was no point, for the job was gone. And I was very tired of having my body touched, even for the sake of Joe’s education.
After that, there was a restaurant called Rick’s Swiss Chalet—an informal sort of name, but Americans were an informal sort of people—which served the kind of food I recognized in a gemütlich atmosphere, all dark wood and red-checked tablecloths.
It reminded me of the Biergarten in Fürth, but with better sausages, and the Swiss owner was less bothered than most about my origins.
The work was more satisfactory, too, than at the car place—my bottom was pinched only once—but I was mostly scheduled to work in the evenings and on Saturdays, which Joe said was too much of a sacrifice for both of us.
I agreed, but largely because he said it after the evening when I tripped over a trailing scarf on the back of a chair and fell, along with my laden tray, in a spectacular accident that disrupted the restaurant greatly and caused me any number of bruises.
I rather suspected the “sacrifice” idea to be a tactful way to extricate myself before I was fired for the third time, for even before my accident, the owner had a distinct tendency to roll his eyes and sigh at me.
I was too small to carry the tray on one palm as the others did, and I wasn’t actually very good at remembering who had ordered which item, although the tips were agreeable and the men in particular very friendly.
Oddly, this argument didn’t appear to weigh well with Joe, even when there was so little pinching.
Also, the cook couldn’t read my handwriting.
It had been perfectly acceptable in Germany, but Americans wrote in a very different way.
I was going to have to learn an entirely new style if I ever hoped to be a waitress.
By this point, though, I mainly hoped never to have to be a waitress again, so I didn’t rush to correct this.
After that debacle, I tried the chief bookshop in town once more. The shop was large and always full of people, and the “Help Wanted” signs went up and came down with regularity.
“I’m sorry,” the manager, a strangely abrupt person for a bookseller, told me. “But as I said before, the customers won’t like a German serving them. It was true last month, it’s true now, and it’ll be true next month, too. And how would you possibly know the stock?”
“But many customers are surely university students,” I said, “like my husband, and they are not so prejudiced, I think, as older people. And I’ve read a great many American and English books, you know. I think you’ll find me quite familiar.”
“Really,” he said. “Betty Smith.”
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” I shot back. “Most enjoyable.”
“John Galsworthy.”
“The Forsyte Saga. Very engrossing, and he wrote women especially well, I believe, allowing them as much complexity as men.”
“Ernest Hemingway.”
“For Whom the Bell Tolls. A Farewell to Arms. Interesting stories, and well written—about men. I don’t think he believes women are quite human.”
“John Steinbeck.”
“The Grapes of Wrath. This was one of the first American books I read. I enjoyed it very much, for it’s about refugees, and I too was a refugee.” What harm could there be in saying this, when he didn’t want to hire me anyway? And I found his manner rather insulting.
“Carson McCullers.”
“The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. A bit overwrought to me, but then, I am German.”
“Walt Whitman.”
“The Leaves of Grass, I believe, or do I mean Walden? No, that was Thoreau. You see, I was marrying an American, and then married to an American, so I wished to understand the country and its people, and this, poetry does well, do you not agree? My favorite is perhaps Emily Dickinson, who writes such deep things so simply, like Rilke.”
His eyelids flickered. “Agatha Christie.”
“Oh, too many to name. My husband likes her stories very much as a break from his studies, but I prefer Dorothy L. Sayers, although she can be rather pretentiously intellectual. This is the word, I believe? But Lord Peter Wimsey, you know, and Bunter … I believe readers enjoy feeling that they know a character, and this, as well as the puzzles, is to me her gift.”
“P.G. Wodehouse.” Triumph in his voice, for he thought he had me there.
“Jeeves, of course. Always Jeeves and the silly Bertie Wooster. So amusing, and I do think that his treatment by the British was rather harsh—one always thinks one would have resisted if ordered to do something by the Nazis, but in fact, you know, it was very difficult to do so, particularly for a timid man. Writers of comic novels, I suspect, are often rather timid, for comedy is a sort of shield against the world, isn’t it?
But Britain did suffer a great deal during the war, and fought very bravely, so this reaction is understandable. ”
“Fyodor Dostoyevsky.” He rolled out the name in triumph, as if surely, surely, a mere woman—a German woman—would never have read such an author.
“Crime and Punishment,” I said. “This book has many disturbing passages, but the struggle with guilt feels very true, and is perhaps a helpful way to understand how soldiers sometimes feel after war. I must confess that I haven’t read his other works, although The Brothers Karamazov was available to me.
My soul was perhaps a bit scarred by the other?
I prefer Tolstoy. One finds an entire world within the covers of his books, and it is important in these times to understand the Russian soul.
I must add that I read these books in German, for I am unable to read Russian. ”
“You surely can’t read any other languages,” he said. “You look eighteen.”
“Well, there’s Latin, of course,” I said, not addressing my age, for that would be lying again, “which could still be useful, perhaps? There must be Latin scholars at the university, and Latin is taught even in America, is it not? The speeches of Cicero, the poems of Catullus; such items as these, I think, you may have. I read some Greek as well, although I’m a poor Greek scholar.
And French, naturally. Most recently, I’ve read La Peste, by Camus, to which I reacted much as I do to the works of Kafka, for I don’t believe people are so powerless as these men would like to believe, and I find allegory rather tiresome.
And á La Recherche du Temps Perdu, by Proust, but this, too, I struggled with. ”
“The French too difficult?”
“No. The books too long. However, I was alone, waiting to be allowed to join my husband, and it was very cold. So I read for many hours each evening. I don’t have as much time to read now, but I’m much happier.
C’est la vie. And you haven’t asked me about Shakespeare.
Surely you wish to know about Shakespeare. ”
“You could be French, I suppose,” he said slowly, “if anybody asks.”
“I would greatly prefer not to lie.”
“And if I said you had to lie about that in order to work here?”
“Then I’m afraid,” I said, “that I would have to most regretfully decline. But how can relations between countries improve if one never meets one’s former enemies, so they remain monsters in one’s mind?
I understand very well the hatred—I have a great hatred for Hitler myself, and for many who followed him, and feel much shame for my country—but if we are to live in the world together and avoid more war, should we not try to understand one another? ”
“So you’re saying you’re some kind of cultural ambassador? Is that it?”
“But of course I would be this,” I said, “if a customer wished to discuss Thomas Mann, perhaps, or Goethe, for that’s one reason a person reads, isn’t it, to understand life in other places, in other times?
My husband, who was an infantryman and an interpreter in the war, and afterward at Nuremberg for the trials, is a Jew, but also German by ancestry.
He has a deep love for the poems of Rilke, and also Goethe, for Goethe was a great genius, you know, but also most human.
Life is not so simple, I think. One can hate an idea, and one can hate cruelty and oppression.
One should have hatred for such things. Hating an entire people, though, seems a great waste. ”
“All right,” he said. “We’ll give it a try. Twenty hours a week maximum, though. Maybe, because I suppose now you’ll tell me all the hours you can’t work. Married women!”
“I am most flexible,” I said. “This is the correct word, I believe.” Easy enough to say, as the bookshop was open only until five, and closed entirely on Sundays.
“Well, you’re unusual, then,” he said. “My wife’s hardly able to take care of the house and kids, let alone going out to work. Suppose you tell me your secret.”
“I believe,” I said sweetly, “it’s because my husband helps me with the cleaning of our apartment and doesn’t criticize my cooking even when it isn’t very good. That, I find most inspirational.”