Part 3 (1/2)

When I told June the example of how I was supposed to admit to mistakes even if I didn't make them, June said, ”You mean you don't say, 'Eat your peas, a.s.shole?' ”

”No, you're supposed to say, 'Eat your G.o.dd.a.m.n peas.' ”

Of course we were high, so we laughed for half an hour about that. Yet for as stupid as I acted with June about all the Dreisbach's knowledge I was getting, I did want to be a good waitress, and I took my job seriously. I made plenty of mistakes in the beginning. Sometimes I forgot to bring silverware to a table, or I added wrong on the guest check. If I took too long getting someone's meal out to them, Earl, the cook, stood in the kitchen doorway and hollered, ”Food's ready!” He b.i.t.c.hed at me every night in Pennsylvania Dutch, and I was glad I couldn't understand him. I felt like I was working in a maze those first two weeks, but then I got a handle on the job. I learned to make all my actions as useful as possible, and I ended up liking the way the job forced me to think all the time. Once I knew, I knew, and even Earl had to stop b.i.t.c.hing so much.

After I got accustomed to the job, though, I had time to notice more, and I became aware of how people treated me. I didn't mind the men who teased me or the women who gossiped with me-at least I was a person to them-but other customers treated me like I was some sort of lower life form. Even when they weren't outright rude, I could feel something ugly in their comments. I thought it might be all in my head, but one night I knew it wasn't. A man stood up and went to leave a dollar tip on the table for his and his wife's meal. He dropped the dollar on the floor, and when he went to pick it up, the woman said, ”She'll pick it up. She'll take her money wherever she can get it.”

What she said was true-I would take my money where I could get it-but I didn't know how that made me different from anyone else. I went to the ladies room and checked the mirror to see if I looked any different, but all I saw was my face. I worked in a cheap, rough place, so that was how some people saw me.

Neil Roy came in every day after he got off s.h.i.+ft to sit at my tables. He worked in the Ringer mine in Trego, and sometimes he came in for dinner still covered with coal dust. Wherever he sat, he left that fine dirt, and I had to wipe down both the table and chair after him.

After I served him dinner for a few days, Roy asked, ”Why don't you come home with me and watch me sleep?”

He had chicken gravy and chocolate milkshake in his beard, and the stink of working all day was still on him. I couldn't think of anything worse than being near him, and I didn't think what he said was funny. Roy wasn't good looking or nice, but he had big arms and a big chest from the work he did, and I guess he thought his muscles made up for his stink and his dirt. The following night, after I took his order, I got myself ready for the watch-me-sleep line, but it didn't come.

”How much for skin and how much for head?” he said instead.

I walked away. I thought he was a pig and wanted to tell him to his face, but he scared me. I believed I knew what kind of man he was. My dad had friends like that-men who were rough and didn't even know it, who used words like c.u.n.t and b.i.t.c.h when they talked about any girl or woman. I served Roy's food as fast as I could, but still I heard him say, ”Do you give good head?” when I put his plate in front of him.

I knew I had to change if I was going to keep working. I had to learn to take people's s.h.i.+t and not let it bother me. So I started looking at every person who came in the door as money in my pocket, and I forced myself to make conversation. I'd lie and pretend to care how people's kids were, or I'd talk about the weather, or I'd just say, ”What do you think of this crowd, now?” I said anything, just so it looked like I was friendly. I did it even with the rude sons of b.i.t.c.hes. I did it all without meaning it, but no one seemed to care if I was just pretending. They wanted to be served by a pleasant person who brought the food while it was hot, and I don't think they cared if my friendliness was real or not.

”You see, honey?” Lorraine said after watching me operate for a while and seeing our tips go up. ”It pays to be nice to people.”

I knew Del and I would need a chunk of money to move in together, so I started doing everything I could to squeeze a dollar out of people. One night I sat down and hemmed all my skirts up short. I figured if men like Roy were going to say stuff to me, I'd give them something to say. After that, when I had to lean into the ice cream chest to scoop out desserts, my skirts just barely covered my a.s.s. I took to wearing underpants over my pantyhose so that if anything showed, it was only cotton with little flowers, or nylon with a little lace. I made a couple of short, ruffly ap.r.o.ns, too, and I thought they added to my look. The ruffle was just enough to cover the swell of my belly, and the ap.r.o.ns made me look like a c.o.c.ktail waitress, or so I thought. Some nights, at the end of the evening, I took my hair down out of its ponytail and let it lie long on my shoulders. I'd started dyeing it with Lady Clairol, and it was a deep golden color close to my scalp and whitish gold toward the ends. Women complimented me on the color, and men just looked. One of my regulars, an older man named Bill Mahlon, told me I looked like Veronica Lake. I didn't know who Veronica Lake was, but I could see Bill Mahlon thought I was pretty.

”She was the Peekaboo Girl,” he told me. ”You ask your dad.”

”I don't see my dad too much.”

”Oh,” he said, and I knew I was getting to him: a young woman without a father. Boo hoo.

”Well, you look just like her,” he said. ”She wore her hair long, and it kind of hung down over one eye.”

He left me a dollar tip that night and every time after, even if all he had was a twenty-five-cent cup of coffee. It was all right. If men wanted to see my long hair or my legs or the flowers on my underpants, I'd let them.

Once I convinced myself nothing mattered but getting tips, the job got better. I became a different, harder person at Dreisbach's, and I knew that hard person stayed with me at other times, but I told myself it was good for me. Whenever I found myself thinking of certain things that I did not want to think of, I pushed them away and concentrated on the task at hand. It was not a bad skill to have, and it was the price I had to pay if I wanted to go on working. Since I did not have a choice, I decided to pay.

7.

As it turned out, June moved in with Ray before I got my second paycheck from Dreisbach's. The two of them moved in with Ray's older brother. The brother, Luke, was renting a house on the road to Church's Mountain, and he invited Ray and June to go in on it with him so they could all save money on bills.

I couldn't believe it. I asked her, ”Don't you and Ray want to be alone?”

”It was Ray's idea. He needs a new car.”

When I told Del about it, he said, ”Their bedroom has a door on it, doesn't it? Then it'll be all right.”

He was right. No one was handing June or Ray a truck, even if it did have 87,000 miles on it, and they were at least going to be together instead of just talking about it, the way Del and I did. I was probably just thinking of how I behaved with Del's brother anyway, and that had nothing at all to do with June.

In truth, I envied June living in that house. Church's Mountain was her backyard, and south of the house, private property turned to state game lands where tall pine let no sun to the forest floor. Almost every time I drove out there, I saw a hawk flying above the road or wheeling far out. And of course she was living with Ray. She got to sleep beside him all night and push back against him when she half woke from a dream or just wanted to feel his skin. As much as I loved to f.u.c.k Del in a car or on the sly at his mom and dad's house, what I really wanted was for the two of us to live together.

But June needed something to go her way. After we graduated, she went around town putting in her applications for a secretarial or typing job. Even though she'd taken the business curriculum the whole four years we were in school, and I knew from being in Miss Leader's typing cla.s.s with her that she could type sixty words per minute, she didn't get one call for an interview.

”You're going to get a job sooner or later just because you have that bun on your head,” I said to make her feel better, because she was even doing that: pulling all her hair, which covered her shoulder blades, into a brown donut on the top of her head.

”It's called a s.h.i.+n-yon,” she said, and I later found out she was saying the word chignon, which I never heard p.r.o.nounced before. From the donut/chignon she let a few pieces sneak out so they strayed prettily around her face and the nape of her neck. I could have told her I knew those pieces were called tendrils, but I didn't want her to think I was teasing her about the way she talked. Even if we were country girls who f.u.c.ked in cornfields, we knew how to read, and we knew words like chignon and tendril.

Even though June looked for almost a month, she could not get a job at any of the businesses in Mahanaqua. They all told her the same thing: that she should go on for more schooling, over to the business inst.i.tute in Mingo County.-”Well, you could do that,” I said. ”You always did get good grades.”

”Like I have money for it, Vangie.”

She ended up doing what a lot of girls from our school did: sewing piecework in the factory: It was the one job I told myself I'd never take. I knew I'd rather listen to Neil Roy talk about me sucking his d.i.c.k than sit hunched over a sewing machine every day. My mom had done it for thirteen years, and she told me it was a killing thing. So if June did have to sit sewing s.h.i.+rt collars all day, I was glad she at least got to go home to Ray, even if there was another person in the house with them.

I never said this to June, but I thought that if she hadn't been a Keel, if her father and brothers hadn't made the name so bad, she might have had a better chance of getting hired. But I think people in Mahanaqua heard the name Keel and figured she was one and the same with Dean and Kevin, and no fancy hairdo was going to change their minds.

I didn't know the older of June's brothers at all, but I often saw the younger one in Dreisbach's. Kevin. He was the one who served time for vehicular manslaughter after striking down an old man on a county road. He came into Dreisbach's a few times a week for dinner. He did not let on that he knew I was June's friend, and I was sure he didn't know. He had no reason to know anything about his sister's life, judging from the distance June kept from him now. Yet that one time she talked about him, when she told me it was one of his friends that screwed her, I got the feeling things hadn't always been like that between them, and I wondered what it all meant to Kevin. Did he miss her at all? Was he sorry about letting one of his friends f.u.c.k her when she was ten? Was it why June didn't want to talk about him now?

Kevin Keel acted toward me like many of the men who came into Dreisbach's acted: he flirted with me, but he never crossed over the line. In turn, for my tip, I flirted back, but I never crossed over the line either. With all those men, what I mostly did was make a big show of taking care of their needs. When I brought their dessert or coffee, I'd set it down with a flourish and sometimes touch them-on the hand or arm, nothing more. When one of them ordered a Yuengling with his meal, I'd pour the beer for him from the long-necked brown bottle, careful to tilt the gla.s.s. It was a thing men seemed to like: someone pouring their beer for them.

”I can do that,” Kevin said the first time I did it for him. ”I know you're busy.”

”I don't mind,” I said. I tried to smile a real smile, not one of the fake kind like I gave everyone else, but it was hard because of what I knew about him.

”Working hard?”

”Hardly working,” I said.

”Now that I don't believe. I seen you in here enough to know that.”

I felt uncomfortable around him not only because of June, but also because I'd heard so much about the manslaughter conviction. The stories about that were rife. I heard Kevin was so drunk the night it happened, he thought the old man he ran down was a pole on the side of the road. I heard that a piece of jawbone from the old man had somehow worked its way onto the dashboard of Kevin's car. I heard that Kevin's skinny girlfriend, Sherry, was happy when he got locked up, because she could finally leave him without getting a black eye for trying. I heard that other inmates at the prison had feared him because he was always lifting weights and working out.

Still, something in me wanted to talk to Kevin Keel, and one night when I got up the courage, I sat down at his table and introduced myself.

”Your sister and I went to school together,” I said. ”I'm Vangie Raybuck and June's my best friend.”

”Is that right? Good friends are hard to come by.”

I thought I could tell by the way he held himself and looked at me that he did not want me to go on talking. So I stood up and was about to leave his table when he put out his hand to shake mine. He said, Pleased to meet you, Vangie Raybuck. When I was looking at him, I could see June in his face, in the eyebrows and the shape of his mouth. He knew I was looking at him, and he let me. I imagine I wasn't the first person to study him.