pat willard

The Feast of Lost Souls
Here is bread, which strengthens man’s heart, and therefore called the staff of life.
Matthew Henry, Psalm 60, 1708-1710


It was not the first aroma that greeted visitors to Manayunk. Depending on the days of the week and which businesses were operating, there could rise from the river the oily fullness of softening wood from the paper factory or the acidic sharpness of dyeing wool in the yarn mills. From Tuesday to Thursday, there was the high pungency of fish from Mrs. Paul’s Kitchen which lured neighborhood cats down to the canal to risk their many lives in the perilous high-wire crossing over the top of the locke-gate near the factory’s garbage bins. But if one was to walk a little way up to Umbria Street, the air would slowly become burnished by the clean bitter sweetness of brewing yeast. A little further, pass the public school where only heathens or the unsalvageable children thrown from one of the parish schools went, the scent gathered into a trumpeting perfume, so powerful in the morning with cinnamon and in the afternoon with tomatoes that people often hung on the spiked iron fence around the large yard as if they were drunk. They carried their money in the palms of their hands, quarters and balled-up dollar bills, ready for when the inner door was propped open and the ample black figure of a small woman appeared like a watermark on the outdoor screen. This meant the batch of sweet breakfast cakes or the lunch squares of thick yeasty tomato pies and long loaves of dinner bread were ready to be sold at Consola’s Bakery.
After Dominic Consola arrived in Manayunk from Calabrasie, Italy he worked as a baker down in a shop on Main Street but, in 1924 and married to Mary who he had known back home and with 3 sons to raise, he purchased a house with a large yard in back of the public school on Hermitage Street. This is where he built a brick oven housed in a narrow, low building which was attached to the family’s home by an open veranda. The bake room had three windows along the front facing the gravel patch where the bakery truck was always parked and one window on the opposite side which looked directly out over the school yard. But inside the bake room it was always twilight, the panes of glass coated over the years in a pearly mist of flour. The oven filled one entire wall in the plain, whitewashed room. There were several arched openings high up for the baking, and a larger square with a heavy black iron door at the bottom where the fire was built. The oven’s heat danced through the windows, across the gravel drive to the sidewalk, where it rubbed against the passer-bys with an almost corporeal presence.
The family rarely spoke as they worked. Dominic–and his boys, James, Francis and Anthony, as they grew and took their places around him–pounded and shaped the dough then shoveled it into the tile-lined ovens with long wooden paddles in an almost silent communication between the bread and the fire. Mrs. Consola, sitting on a stool beside the door, collected money from the customers. Sometimes she greeted women she knew from church or the neighborhood, but mostly she sat on her stool and silently handed out change.
When Dominic died young, Mary kept the business going with the help of her three sons. She saw that they graduated from high school but, as soon as they took off their caps and gowns, the boys slipped on spotless white aprons and took their places before the oven. Every day, Mary made the sauce for the tomato pies–a thick gravy, lightly spiced, allowing the simple complexity of the fresh tomatoes to flourish. She also devised the recipe for the sweet rolls they began to make. Again, it was simple, just yeast and flour and cinnamon, some sugar and a little water. Nothing more. But they were light, not so much sweet as creamy, and as the customers began to walk home, it was hard not to begin pinching bites along their plumb edges. The bread, too, was nibbled, starting first along the soft side seams, fingers digging into the loaf’s belly in search of the still warm fluff inside. Not far from home, and finding themselves with a suddenly empty bag, the customers realized the only thing to do was turn right around and go back down the hill to stand in line again.
II
The first time I saw them, the Consola sons were middle-aged men and I was a seven year old school girl in a blue worsted uniform with a scratchy white blouse buttoned tightly to my throat. My school perched on a steep hill high above the bakery. To get to the school and the Romanesque church where I was baptized and where my family attended Mass on Sunday, you walked up 23 steep stone steps which were divided by 5 long landings to make the sharp escalation more bearable. In winter, when it snowed or icy rain made the steps treacherous, parishioners trooped through the school, which was build in ascending levels, to a stone portico that led out to the garden surrounding the church. Even on the hottest days, the hill on which the church sat would be cool and breezy. In the summer, families picnicked on the rolling lawn and lovers met, not at all respectfully, among the flowers and shrubs in what was the closest thing to a park the town had.
My family lived five blocks away and, except for the few Italian families who attended St. Lucy’s (where the priests spoke Italian; Holy Family was the Irish church) and the lone Protestant family (poor lost souls, my mother called them), all my friends entered the first grade with me. In the morning, we walked to school together, big brothers and sisters shepherding us through the narrow streets, the flock increasing in size with each house we passed. In the afternoon, the reverse happened, the flock decreasing until we all arrived safe at our doors.
At lunch, however, even the youngest were on their own. Most of us hurried home, running swiftly up and down the hill, taking a short cut through an alley and a rubble-paved vacant lot, to back doors where our mothers waited. The kitchen door slammed shut and there on the table would be a sandwich made of spiced ham or tuna fish between two pieces of white bread, along with a glass of milk and a piece of fruit to munch as we hurried back to classes. On rainy days and through the winter months, most of us stayed at school. Our mothers packed us lunches in little metal boxes or paper bags and we ate in a large and mayhem-filled basement room, overseen by nuns with pinching fingers and steel-edged rulers. The lucky few–the ones I thought of as rich and privileged–brought a quarter each day, no matter what the weather, to slip and slide to the bottom of the hill into Consolo’s Bakery.
It was a hot autumn day when I followed behind a friend who jiggled a quarter in her uniform pocket. I don’t remember why I didn’t go home for lunch; I do remember being annoyed with my baloney sandwich and squashed triangle of pound cake. And I can still feel the swift slap of jealousy toward my friend when she asked me to go to the bakery with her. She was going to buy a tomato pie, a thick square of dough over which a rich tomato sauce had been spread.
“You wait here,” she said to me authoritatively. She was two months older than me and had been to Consolo’s before. She left me beside the iron fence while she joined the line of children at the bakery door. When the church clock struck twelve, Mrs. Consolo opened the door and, one by one, the children filed into the bakery, reappearing a moment later with a large red square of pie. Most of them stopped just outside the door to take a big bite from their slice. I watched them eat it, the boys shoveling the slice into their mouths so fast that lush globs of sauce ran down their chins to stain the fronts of their rumpled white shirts. The girls ate their pieces only slightly more delicately, walking back in pairs, giggling over the mess between their fingers.
Pulled by the scene before me, I disobeyed my friend and walked across the yard, slipping quickly into the open door and maneuvering unnoticed between sacks of flours. In the dusky steaminess of the small bake-room, the men wore sleeveless white undershirts and long white aprons that covered most of their white pants. The black down that covered their arms was powdered white with flour. I think they wore small, diamond-shaped hats on their heads, or maybe they were round cloth caps; something covered their black hair and soaked the sweat from their brows. A young woman, who I often heard later being referred to as the Irish wife, was counting loaves cooling on racks near the front windows while Mrs. Consolo sat on her stool beside the door, still dressed in widow’s black and half hidden behind the old cash register.
I pressed against the wall, entranced by the men, how the muscles in their backs expanded and contracted as they danced before the oven, each holding a long wooden paddle with which they slid the loaves of bread and long flat sheets of tomato pies through the arches. The black iron door to the hearth was kept open and when the men weren’t twirling around with their paddles, they fed the red and blue flames, throwing in chunks of wood that sputtered and popped as they caught fire. I grew up to be taller than each of these men but they appeared powerfully big at the time, as graceful and frightening to me as ghosts. Only the women spoke as the men continued to waltz around each other.
“Four loaves and a dozen rolls for Mrs. Wallace,” the Irish wife hollered and one of the men nodded to signal he had added the order in his head to the others to calculate the day’s loaves. Mrs. Consolo barked at her young customers.
“Don’t push. Wipe your mouth before the nuns see you. Take your change.”
“What do you want?” she threw across the room when she caught sight of me against the flour sacks.
I shook my head. I didn’t have any money and, even if I did, I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell her what it was exactly that pinned me to the wall; the sight of her sons’ elegant hips, the fire’s warmth upon their bare shoulders; the breath of yeast, rich and human, surrounding them. The Irish wife came over and flicked me away from the wall toward the door.
“Go on with you, now. Back to school.”
All the way up the hill, my friend laughed at me and would not give me a taste of her pie, a mean-spirited, greedy girl. I would not let her see my anger nor the real lust I felt for what she so roughly swallowed. But I went home that afternoon and told my mother I needed a quarter for the next day.
“For a tomato pie from Consolo’s,” I told her. My mother was a good cook and, without giving voice to it, she understood how food could haunt you. But she dismissed my entreaties; a quarter was too much to pay for a lunch she could make herself.
I didn’t give up, though. I bothered her through the night and over the next week, even waiting for my father to get home and ask him. They were, at first, amused, admitting to the goodness of Consolo’s but not fathoming the singular depths of a child’s mania. And as the week went on, they grew impatient. I could not bear the thought of not being able to go back to the bakery, of never taking my place in line and pressing my quarter into Mrs. Consolo’s palm, to never receive, as mine and mine alone, the product of those men’s labor. I needed my mouth to be filled with that dough, with the keen fresh tomatoes, roughly cut and unadorned. But my mother was stubborn; my father could not understand. Thursday night I wept myself to asleep.
I came to school on Friday, hot with desire. I sat at my desk in the second row, not paying much attention to the lessons. My friend in the seat beside me taunted me with her quarter, placing it in the pencil groove at the top of her desk. I felt myself ready to burst and so, when it was my turn at the blackboard to write the alphabet, I placed myself before the card holding quarters for a Pagan Baby the class was sponsoring. These little infants, born to heathens in jungles and the slums of less fortunate countries, could only be saved if we gave money to the missionaries for their care. A card full of quarters was enough for one tiny soul to reach heaven. I certainly didn’t think of my soul–didn’t much care at all, for that matter–when I nimbly slipped one of the quarters out of it’s slot and into my uniform pocket. I finished my letter and took my seat again, blissfully happy.
The theft was discovered shortly before noon. We were, one by one, my classmates and I, called up to the teacher’s desk and privately interrogated. When it came my turn, I looked the nun straight in the eyes and lied. Oh, no, I said, it wasn’t me. No, I said, I don’t know who it could be.
When the thief wasn’t found, we were kept inside for lunch; those who hadn’t brought anything to eat were given stale pretzels from the lunch room. By the end of the day, with no one confessing, we were all given extra homework for the weekend and told to bring in a quarter–enough to fill up the card and another one, besides.
I ran from school and down the hill smack into Consolo’s Bakery, gave the quarter to Mrs. Consolo and received my slice from the Irish wife. The brothers were taking a break, lined up outside in the courtyard, smoking cigarettes. They did not pay me any attention and, outside the bake room, I did not even glance at them. Unrepentant of my sin, I walked slowly home, holding each bite in my mouth to make the bread sweetly dissolve, the tomato to tingle, upon my savage tongue.

Serving Breakfast
There’s a rendezvous of strangers around the coffee-urn tonight.
Tom Waits, “Eggs and Sausage” from Nighthawks at the Diner.

Breakfast is not what you would call the most convivial meal to share with others. This is the hour when the most articulate person is often reduce to mere grunts, while the liveliest of spirit will cringe away from a cheerful chat and long, instead, to simply linger over a peaceful cup of coffee. We are all too raw, our temperament suspended too precariously between a private and a public domain, to be anything more at this hour than just polite company.

Yet, even knowing so well how harsh the dawn rubs against our human frailties, breakfast socials and business meetings are regularly scheduled events in our lives. Local Rotary and Lions Clubs, the Elk Lodge and Knights of Columbus set up breakfast buffets for the civic minded. Well-meaning friends send out invitations for weekend omelets, crepes, lobster Newburg. Houses of worship loop their parishioners after routine and special ceremonies for krugel and muffins accompanied by endless cups of coffee dispensed from tabernacle-like urns. And even I can attest to times when one boss or another considered it an admirable idea to rouse his employees at the crack of dawn for scrambled eggs while progress reports and media plans were aired.

Surely, all these functions have resulted in more indigestion than anything else. Brunch is marginally better but then the sort of things you get (those hybrid dishes that are too heavy for breakfast, too light for lunch) almost always lead directly to thoughts of afternoon naps which is a scandalously underappreciated activity in this country. Certainly, partnerships are cemented and deals are finalized; events commemorated and friendships sustained over many a poached egg nestled in soggy toast points, but what truly occurs when people come together for breakfast is a recognition of our collective vulnerability. The suit of armor we tug on each day is still unbuttoned, even a little askew, and we are all–even the most guarded among us–slightly more susceptible to the vagrancies of life. Samuel Duff McCoy, who won a Pultizer Prize for news reporting in 1923 but was destitute enough in 1936 to be hired by the WPA, observed in Rhodes Island that, “The annual Pancake Breakfast, hosted since time began by the Board of Elders in Washington County every third Sunday in May, eight a.m. sharp, is the one time anyone who has an interest in knowing the truth about anything in this corner of the world has a chance to find it out since a politician’s brain doesn’t start functioning well enough to prevaricate until the cocktail hour. Added to this, as well, the purity and simpleness of the fare–the pancake–and even the most harden public servant reverts back to the innocent he must have been when his mother knew him.”

What develops at many breakfast gatherings, then, is a comradery born from a fusion of morning’s white-lightening reality with the cloudy vestige of night’s persistent dreams. At any public place in America where people sit hunkered over plates of eggs and bowls of cereal, if you quietly stand and cock your head a little to the side, this is the persistent chorus you’ll hear running beneath the room’s murmur: “We will get through this early hour together, then go our separate ways a little more fortified, a bit more assured.”

At no time is this refrain more audible than when you are at a diner during the breakfast rush. Diners are among America’s most cherished public meeting rooms. In many towns, they are the best place to learn the local news and gossip, to find a willing ear, to feel most at home away from home. Across our restless nation, diners have helped immigrants to pick up the language and strangers to settle into new territory. In their very nature and context, diners are a perfect representation of our country’s character–an innovative, crafty, and practical invention born from the demands of an increasingly fast-pace working life. From their inception, diners synthesized our love of commerce and convenience, our desire for speed and the pioneering urge to move forever onward, with the urge to belong and to form–for however brief a time–a vital community.

“At night, the neon sign above Nellie’s Diner pares away the unforgiving starkness of the desert’s highway,” the poet Vincent McHugh wrote when he was briefly transferred from the WPA’s New York office to help out the project in New Mexico. “Diners are a traveler’s lighthouse, a stranger’s guardian angel, piloting all to safe harbor.”

I discovered for myself what McHugh described during the course of my first real waitressing job. For reasons I can’t even begin to phantom, Bob, the man who owned Bob’s Diner, decided to hire me to work the weekend breakfast shift. I’m not even sure it was Bob–or if Bob was even alive at the time since the diner was already fifty years old and the man I met couldn’t have been more than middle aged. Whoever he was, the man unquestionably commanded the small stainless steel diner, the attention of the short-order cook behind the counter, and the lone waitress hustling down the aisle. This Bob, a wiry, short man in a clean white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, anchored the back corner booth with a brooding presence. I nervously sat across from him and looked out the curved window behind his pomaded head toward the panoramic vista of the town’s old cemetery–a flat field filled with worn, tilting gravestones and, on a gentle rise at its center, the white marble obelisk commemorating the eighteen Virginian boys who were massacred one December night in a nearby barn by Hessian troops during the Revolutionary War. (At the diner today you may purchase a classic thick white coffee mug silk-screened with a drawing of the diner, the breaking sun peeking behind the Virginians’ memorial and silhouetting the surrounding tombs, emblazoned with the declaration, “Bob’s Diner, A Monumental Eating Experience.”) At seventeen, I knew I was as woefully unskilled and unprepared for the task at hand as those boys had been for theirs. In fact, I was nearly unemployable. The only reason I can think of that would explain why Bob would even consider me for the job was that he might have recognized before him a morning person, someone who was (and continues to be) up and already in gear by dawn–and very often a full hour or two before the first light drifts across the window sill. In short, he might have detected the perfect morning waitress: The hour wouldn’t make me grumpy and, with a perverse reason all its own, my body would be in motion and functioning better than it did at any other time of the day.

He was a professional, however, and asked the usual question about any previous experience. I responded with an enthusiastic rendition about my time serving at the Crystal Tea Room atop Wanamaker’s Department Store, withholding the information that I had been fired after only two days for dumping a plate of cookies in the tiny lap of a very old Gloria Swanson. Bob mulled over his decision for about five minutes while I looked over his head at a couple of kids cutting across the cemetery on bikes, their wheels creating dusty streamers as they veered around the circular drive. Finally, Bob put out his hand and welcomed me into the Bob’s Diner family.

I left with instructions to return on Saturday morning at a quarter to seven, and headed straight for the nearby Salvation Army where I unearthed two old waitress uniforms–one in blue gingham with white collar and cuffs; the other a snappy red, short and tight, probably used before to serve cocktails. When I told my parents that night that I was hired to work the weekend breakfast shift at the local diner, I imagined from the slight grimace that slipped across my father’s lips and my mom’s sigh as she picked up her evening drink that this news struck them with a horror that was based on my mother’s strange sense of our high social standing in town and my dad’s equally bizarre need to keep me under lock and key, away from the local boys.

Now that I understand them both better–and have endured my own share of uncharitably judgements from disgruntle offsprings–I realize the news probably brought them more pertinent concerns if only because they knew, certainly better than I did that day, just what I was in for. Anyone, in fact, who has ever spent a small amount of time patronizing diners would have known at least this: no matter what time it is, breakfast is always–always–the busiest meal. This is because diners were born to serve an incessant work force. On the night in 1872 when Walter Scott, a former night pressman for a Providence, Rhodes Island newspaper, first headed out with a box full of provisions to sell to others toiling on the graveyard shift, restaurants closed at eight p.m. and bars (which, in any case, generally did not sell food in the evening) a few hours later. Along the river banks and in the deserted precincts on the outskirts of town where new factories and mills were rapidly being built in many New England towns, there wasn’t a grocery store–not even a fruit cart–to be found. Think, then, what it must have been like for a hungry worker who had forgotten to bring his dinner pail to stumble from his post at the meal break and find Walter



Coffee Shops and Diners
Beyond their stark architectural differences, the essential distinction between a coffee shop and a diner is one of location and demeanor. If you grew up below the Mason-Dixon line or west of the Mississippi, you’re probably more sentimental about a local coffee shop; if you live up in the northeast states, in the steel belt of the Midwest, or along the highways of the pacific coast, you set your hat on diners. The reason for this is based purely on the country’s economical development during the 19th century.
Diners grew up around factories and mills. Because of their location in unpopulated, isolated sections of towns, and because they stayed open late into the night to serve the ceaseless shift of workers, diners always enjoyed a somewhat raffish reputation even when they were embraced by ministers in the temperance movement who tried to promote them as a healthy alternative to the scores of bars that lured in patrons with the offer of free food. Diners remote industrial surroundings naturally kept many women and children away, which tended to foster in the owners and customers alike the freedom to speak and conduct themselves pretty much as they pleased.

Coffee shops, on the other hand, were almost always situated closer to a town’s business center which allowed them to be woven more tightly into the fabric of everyday life. For that reason, they could adhere to more orderly business hours and, because people from all walks of life–and especially women–mingled at the counter and tables, a sense of decorum and social civility were more strictly maintained.
**

Scott standing outside the factory door with his brimming box of food–ham sandwiches, boiled eggs, buttered bread, slices of pie (apple, mince, squash, huckleberry, or cranberry), and warm coffee in a tin urn, all homemade and costing just a nickel. Eager customers quickly ringed about him, pressing into Scott’s hands grateful coins. Each night he made more food until the box could no longer hold it all. That’s when Scott hitched a horse to an old trolley car that he had fixed up by cutting a window out on the side from which he served his customers. When he stopped his funny-looking rig in front of a factory that night and threw open the window to the line of customers waiting for him at the curb, the diner was born.

Soon the streets were full of competitors who distinguished themselves not so much by the food they served, but by the design of their rigs. Some became quiet fancy in a giddy one-upmanship sort of way, but all heeded Scott’s central tenet and served factory employees manning industrial machines around the clock. In time, they were joined by nighthawks–late-night revelers and roamers, the kid out on a lark, the couple reluctant to part, the bar patron needing stability before heading home, the unattached, displaced, footloose, insomniac wanderer looking for a temporary rest stop, a place to collect thoughts, a breath, some sense of being before heading out again.

All of which meant that whoever was behind the counter, tending the stove, needed to be prepared to scramble up a couple of eggs not only before the early morning whistle blew, but all through the day as a rolling procession of people stumbled from their beds and fell into the nearest diner booth. Many diners, which could be purchased from manufacturers and set up for as little as $5 thousand, were owned and operated by Greeks, the newest immigrants to arrive in New England, who saw diners as a viable way to begin making their way in America. ( The Silk City Diner Company from 1950, boast that with a modest investment, a diner “provides an opportunity to start earning an attractive income in your own town. You will be a respected member of the community. And your family will be assured of ample security in the future.”) But instead of cooking Greek dishes, these freshly-minted cooks served up what they thought their customers wanted most–the plain fare of the diner’s New England English heritage, composed of eggs, toast, some sort of meat on the side, and potatoes. Waffles were a foreign entity but flapjacks and griddle cakes were pure American; all were doused in the region’s favorite maple syrup. Donuts and muffins, baked on premise or brought in from a local bakery, were a staple. In the early years of the twentieth century just as diners began to hit their stride, newfangled cold cereals that were suppose to be good for you became all the rage; although they were not as comforting on winter days as oatmeal, they proved to be fast and convenient, perfect diner food.

My dad grew up in the marshy grasslands on the outskirts of Philadelphia, the son of a railroad lineman. My mom’s Irish family, from my grandmother through a long line of revered aunts, uncles, and cousins, served for years as domestics in the homes of wealthy families. Diners were where my parents, especially my dad, felt most comfortable eating out, especially for breakfast because that was where you would get a good cheap, filling breakfast that would set you up for the day ahead. That afternoon when I told them where I would be spending my weekends, they knew what working at Bob’s Diner would be like: The look on their faces that I took to be aversion was probably much closer to expressions of concern for all who would soon become enmeshed in their daughter’s education.

I presented myself at the diner’s door just before dawn the following Saturday. The cemetery separates Bob’s from a stretch of shops and the library on Ridge Avenue. Perpendicular to the diner is Lyceum Avenue–a wide thoroughfare of stately homes which turns into the twisting sharp drop of Levering Street and the neighborhood of Manayunk. When I tied on an apron that first morning the shops along Ridge Avenue were still prosperous and Manayunk was a working class community whose many factory buildings stood silent, some in ruins, the shuttered shops along Main Street inconceivable as the fashionable boutiques and expensive restaurants they would be transformed into five years later. At a quarter to seven, the counter was already packed with men and a few women. Some of the customers had just come off their shift at one of the few factories still in operation and what they wanted most, the waitress who was handing them off to me instructed, was coffee and more coffee. She told me their names, along with a brief biography and a description of their likes and dislikes. One customer wanted his coffee mug filled half with coffee, half with milk; another demanded that the small milk pitcher be removed from his table even before he sat down. A woman requested that her three minute egg be done in four, while the man in the third booth from the register liked his eggs runny: “Still kickin’,” was the term the waitress used.

“And a little more than two bits worth of potatoes,” he grumbled. “What the hell you call this puny thing here, because you can’t call it a decent piece of bacon.”

“You should be having oatmeal anyway,” the waitress snapped back and took the man’s plate from under his raised fork. “You want another heart attack?”

“You’re the one giving me heart attacks.”

“What’s the new one’s name?” A younger man nestled among his friends at a nearby booth called out. He and his companions all smiled over at me in my little red uniform that barely covered my thighs.

“Never mind that,” the waitress said and pulled me through the swinging doors into the kitchen to show me where the milk, butter, syrup, ketchup, and bread was kept as she flung herself into her coat and gathered up her bag.

“Wear something else tomorrow,” she counseled, then glanced at my feet in their fashionable platform sandals. “And you’ll be wanting to wear sneakers, too. This ain’t a party you’re at.”

Her parting advice before she ran out the door was to have the long L-shaped booth in the back set up for six by eight o’clock.

I can’t remember how I got through the morning: it continues to be a blur of domino-ing calamities. There were two other waitresses working with me–one behind the counter, the other tending the opposite end of the diner–but it didn’t matter. Simple math tells the situation’s harrowing human dimensions:

If I had seven booths and each booth could sit at least four customers, how many people at any one sitting were subjected to my ineptitude during anytime on that day?

7 x 4 = 28

When six enormous men came lumbering in at eight o’clock, not only did they not find the long L-shape booth in the back set up for them, but it was already being shared by a family for five and two teenage girls squeezed in at the end. The men stood still in the aisle staring incredulously at the unspeakable anarchy of others in their accustomed booth. With so many other exasperated, famished souls under my care, I didn’t even notice their distress. Orders were mixed up. Shirts and pants became splattered with what I dropped on them. Checks didn’t add up right. A few customers were simply abandoned with a measly cup of coffee.

And what did they all do? In fine diner fashion, they made me the brunt of their jokes, their morning gripes, their thermometer reading for the probable course to the rest of their day. The people in my booths asked the folks at the counter for the condiments I had forgotten; the counter people swirled around on their stools and became part of the conversation that started with the sorry state of waitress affairs and went clear on through to current town events. I was lucky it was Saturday: No one was in any real hurry. A few got up in a huff and moved to another section. One lady called me an uncharitable name that made me blush and tear up; the six men standing in the aisle conferred with one another for a minute, then did the unthinkable and left to seek breakfast somewhere else.

“You sure gave them a lot to talk about,” Bob said to me as the breakfast crowd finally began to thin out. That he didn’t fire me then and there is a small miracle for he could not have seen any diamond-in-the-rough before him. But I got through the lunch hour in a little better shape, if only because there were fewer customers, and when my shift finally ended Bob said without much of a smile that he’d see me again in the morning.

The next day I wore the more modest blue gingham uniform, along with my sneakers. All through my shift–from seven until three in the afternoon–there was a line at the door with men in suits, women in church hats, and children constrained in hot woolen suits and scratchy crinoline dresses. Every religious denomination, every social class, every racial and ethnic group, patiently waited their turn for a space inside. Out the window, I could see people making their way through the headstones to leave mementos on graves. When they were finished, they came in, as well, calling out to people they knew as they took a seat. No one seemed to stay put; the population of one booth migrated toward another, sometimes exchanging a few members so that, when their plates were ready, I had to go hunting for their owners. I overheard wedding plans and divorce proceedings; about doctor visits and sick relatives. A very old woman asked me so many questions about the menu that I began to uncharitably tapped my foot. Bob drew me aside and told me about the woman’s husband dying the previous October and her children moving away because there wasn’t work for them in town.

“The only time she gets to talk to someone is probably when she comes in here on Sunday,” he said, before leaving me alone with my shame.

At another booth, a couple were locked in a heated discussion that broke off every time I stopped by, with the husband falling back against the booth and the wife turning her face toward the window. After I removed their empty plates and poured new cups of coffee for them, the husband suddenly asked me what I thought he should do with his life–go to trucking school or take a job offer from his wife’s father who was a plumber? I can still see the piercing annoyance on his wife’s face as her husband asked which direction his life should take it. There couldn’t have been more than a few years difference between our ages. We were, the three of us, children–me, especially I know, but the two of them, as well. The wife turned her face back to the window and, in her annoyance, drummed a spoon against the table. Her disdain was understandable, of course, and more than deserving. But in the narrow confines of a diner the traditional barrier between strangers is nearly as low as it can be and I felt required to answered him. I stuttered for a second, then was saved by the arrival of the couple’s friends who breezed passed me to squeeze in beside them. When I came back with fresh cups and silverware, the conversation had turned away from the disquieting future and was, instead, merrily pondering the afternoon ahead.

The town never seemed so small to me. At the end of my shift, I was exhausted by all the people I had talked to, all the conversations I had been pulled into, all the glimpses I had had into others people’s lives. And yet I was buoyant, knowing I was a part of something outside myself. What makes diners so terrifically American and unlike other countries’ pubs, bistros, and cafes, is the vitality with which the people inside take to exchanging their opinions and stories with their neighbors. The narrow spaces of a diner’s design certainly promotes such participation. Perhaps, too, it is due to the traditional lack of liquor in diners to dampen down spirits. But whatever the tangling roots of such commingling is, I felt it that weekend: I knew that by being at Bob’s, I was a part of the wider world.

A couple of months later, though, Bob asked me to quit. I had worked every shift and had turned into a pretty good snappy waitress but he explained to me that he had a cousin whose daughter had a year-old baby. We stood in the kitchen during a lull and he put his hand on my shoulder as he told me about his cousin’s daughter and how she needed the job more than I did. One way or another, he said, I would eventually be getting the hell out of town, whereas the other waitresses had been with him for a long time and probably would continue to be. He said he felt bad about letting me go and I believed him but it didn’t make the news any easier to take. There were the good tips, of course, but there was something pricking at me that I didn’t quite understand until the following weekend when I woke up early enough to make the breakfast shift and realized I had no where to go.

That night, after being with friends, I walked down Ridge Avenue and spied the red neon clock glowing above Bob’s doors. As I stood uncertain in front of the cashier stand, the grill man looked up and recognized me.

“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Mickie bellowed. There were maybe ten customers in the place–kids whiling away the hours until they could sneak home; men and a woman or two going to or from their work shift. We nodded to one another as I took a stool at the counter. Maybe the waitress was Bob’s relative because I had never seen her before but Mickie quickly filled her in on a couple of my more spectacular failings.

She rolled her eyes and smiled at me. “Whadda’la have.”

“Corned beef hash and some poached eggs,” I answered and felt my loneliness begin to slip away.

**
Diner Language
Until my family moved a few years ago, I used to spend a lot of time in a diner that was up the street from our house in Brooklyn. The food was decent and inexpensive, and at any time of the day or night, you could pretty much find a booth as back as a Cadillac’s backseat to lounge in. A friend of mine made it her unofficial office when she started to work at home and it was the favorite haunt of off-duty police and firemen from the nearby station houses, which made it a safe hide-out for my oldest son during his wild teenage nights.

The people who owned and worked in the diner neatly represented the surrounding neighborhood which was changing rapidly from the old Irish (depicted by several of the senior waitresses), to Hispanic (the busboy, a junior waiter, and cook), to Asian (the kitchen help). The family who owned it was Greek and had grown up in the neighborhood–in our house, in fact–but the diner’s success had allowed the entire clan to move to more affluent sections of the city.

What I loved most about this diner was how it became filled with so many different languages–brogues, Spanglish, Cantonese, and Greek, all slathered in Brooklyn-ese. The common language everyone spoke, however, was diner–the highly visual, melodic slang that has developed over generations between cooks and waiters. Sometimes, if I was lucky and got the booth by the order window, I would sit and write down every leaping poetic holler of this quirky tongue. I always thought then–as I still do–that it was a good way to spend my time, just listening to all those tongues, conversing in the most vibrant of dialects.

A jack –a grilled cheese sandwich.
Wreck a pair –scramble two eggs.
Abbott and Costello –frank and beans.
Adam and Eve on a raft –two poached eggs on toast.
Belch Water –seltzer.
Black and white -a milkshake made with chocolate syrup and vanilla ice cream.
Bowl of red –chili.
Burn it–cook until well done.
Cremate a blue –toasted blueberry muffin.
Eve with a lid on–apple pie.
High and dry –sandwich with nothing on it.
Murphy carrying a wreath–ham and potatoes with cabbage.
Nervous pudding –Jell-O.
Put out the lights and cry –liver with onions.
Red lead –ketchup.
Sissy spread– with cream cheese.
Takes a flower –put an onion on.
**