Dear Catastrophe Waitress Read online

  “Thanks!” Mark says. Everybody says Tim is gay, and Mark lit Brendan Halpin thinks it might be true, and that freaks out most of the male CITs, but Mark finds that he doesn’t really care because Tim is really nice and funny and has never once made Mark feel uncomfortable. He sees no contradiction between his affection for Tim, whom he believes (correctly, as it happens) to be gay, and his habit of saying things like “Shut up, fag!” to his friends.

  “So you wanna lock up the mess hall for me, just take a few minutes to soak it in, enjoy your success?”

  “Yeah, that would be great,” Mark says, thinking actually it would be great if he and Becky could make out in here tonight instead of in the storage shed.

  “Okay then. I’m sure I can trust you,” Tim says as he heads toward the doors, and Mark feels a twinge of guilt and wonders if he should really lock up the mess hall and meet Becky at the shed as usual. Tim smiles as he leaves, and Mark is sure that Tim is somehow reading his mind, and he turns purple with embarrassment.

  Mark slowly packs up his guitar, and about two minutes after Tim leaves Becky sticks her head into the mess hall. Becky has bright red hair and the freckles that usually accompany it. She is a fantastic soccer player and is five inches taller than Mark, whose soccer feat of the summer was scoring an own goal and bloodying his nose on the same play.

  “Hey,” Becky says, and Mark’s heart is pounding already.

  “Hey, Beckster. I’m a big rock star, huh?”

  “Yeah, I’m glad I got a backstage pass.”

  “Well, you know, only the prettiest girls in the audience get to come backstage,” and Mark begins to laugh, both at the idea of his Raffi-like success singing songs about vomit being anything like rock stardom, and at the ridiculousness of a dork like him having this pretend grown-up banter with Becky Randall. Two weeks after their first kiss he still can’t believe she likes him. She’s tall and beautiful (though insecure about her height, her red hair, and her athletic build) and makes him laugh and, somewhat incredibly, wants to kiss a short, athletically challenged kid who sings songs about poop to eight-year-olds.

  “So,” Becky says.

  “So,” Mark says.

  “Last night.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you gonna write to me?”

  “Of course. I promise. And I’ll call. It’s gonna … it’s gonna be weird not seeing you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m gonna miss you.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I …,” and Mark is starting to get choked up here, and he can hardly get the words out, “I just like you so much, and I …” His voice is cracking, which he assumes is a terrible goof that will make Becky hate him for being a wuss, and he doesn’t get that he is melting her heart.

  “Shh …” Becky says, and kisses him. And then they don’t talk.

  An hour later Mark is lying on a table in the darkened mess hall, feeling nothing but post-orgasmic contentment. He stands, and Becky leans down to give him a tender kiss.

  He’s only halfway back to his cabin when it all comes back: sadness about the end of summer, about missing Becky (for he knows in his heart that the letters and the phone calls won’t last, that this will end, and, further, that Becky will end it), about what he believes is the end of a spectacular music career. He enters the cabin and, as he always does when he enters late at night, he hears Jamie Sibthorp’s voice float down from the top bunk on the east wall.

  “So did you get any? Did she give it up? Inquiring minds want to know!”

  Mark smiles and thinks that he might actually miss this little ritual that he’s found so annoying. He delivers his line for the final time this summer: “Shut up and go to sleep, Jamie.”

  1990

  Mark turned eighteen three weeks ago. He’s sitting in his room at Hill House at the University of Pennsylvania. He doesn’t want to be here, but nor does he want to be home, where Mom and Dad are blaming each other and it’s cold and dark even when it’s sunny out.

  So he sits in this tiny room that he shares, or rather shared, with Hyung Park. In his first weeks here he joked that the room was so small, he and Hyung could lie in their beds on either side of the room and hold hands if they were so inclined. It’s an exaggeration, but if he and Hyung were much taller, it wouldn’t be.

  No one’s seen Hyung in three weeks. Mark had seen lots of pamphlets about salvation by aliens on Hyung’s side of the room (OUR LIGHTSPEED REDEEMERS and SALVATION HAS ENTERED OUR QUADRANT were Mark’s favorites), and one day he simply vanished. Mark joked to everybody on the hall that Hyung had been beamed aboard the mother ship. And then Hyung’s red-eyed crying mother had shown up looking for him, and Mark felt like a shit.

  Now he’s the one sitting in this room red-eyed. It’s Sunday night, and tomorrow he’ll have to go make the rounds to his professors, or, more accurately, grad student slaves of the professors, and give the dead-sister speech four times, explain his absence, ask about incompletes, ask about making up work that feels incredibly stupid and pointless.

  The thought of doing that is like a rock in his stomach.

  He opens the guitar case and brings his guitar out to try to calm himself down. He’s randomly strumming chords, and he realizes he’s playing “Pukin’ My Guts Out.” And suddenly he sees Janet’s face, smiling and happy and proud, listening to him play. And he remembers Janet’s little hands on this guitar when he was teaching her the basic chords last year. He sees her smiling again, playing him her original composition, “I Get My Brother’s Room,” on the day he left, on the last day he saw her alive, and the memory is so strong that it knocks the guitar out of his hands and onto his ratty-mattressed bed.

  He’s crying now—sobbing really, so loud he’s sure the whole hall can hear, and fuck them anyway, stupid hateful happy drunk motherfuckers, he hopes they do hear and that it stops their frantic booze-fueled humping for five seconds. He looks through blurry eyes at the guitar and realizes he hasn’t changed the strings since the last time Janet played it, and it suddenly strikes him as bizarre and absurd that right here on the strings of this guitar there are traces of Janet, just the oils from her fingers probably, but more than is left of her anywhere else except in the urn at home.

  He cries for thirty more minutes until his eyes are puffy and his throat hurts and he feels even more like he just got hit by a truck than he did before, and he realizes that he’s going to need a new simile for this feeling, because he’s probably going to feel it for a long time, and he doesn’t want to think about people being hit by trucks anymore, ever.

  He picks up the guitar and puts it back in its case. He will never take it out.

  1991

  Mark is nineteen. He’s sitting in the lounge in the Public Service College House, a tiny dorm for people interested in public service. He sits on a maroon upholstered couch that was new five years ago and can no longer hide the stains very well, and he’s slightly cold under the solarium glass. As usual, he has an exam on the last day of finals, so he is one of the very few students left here. Unlike most of the other people still here, he bears no resentment about this. He’s not looking forward to another first—last year’s misery fest was The First Christmas Since Janet Died, this one is The First Christmas Since The Divorce, and Mark doesn’t even know where he’s going to stay and whether he’ll be the latest thing his folks decide to fight about.

  And he doesn’t even really have hanging out with his friends to look forward to, either. He was still embarrassed about what happened on the day after Thanksgiving, when a few beers and twenty minutes of sobbing about Janet had convinced him that Christine was not, in fact, just a good friend, but might actually want to drunkenly make out. Unfortunately, Christine had not been convinced that making out was a great idea and had told him she didn’t want to ruin their friendship, which they’d had since preschool and which was incredibly important to her. But they’d had just a few awkward phone calls since then, so it looked like their friendship might
be tanking anyway, so they might as well have made out. And Josh was off doing some kind of Superjew thing—leading impressionable Reform Temple Youth Group kids on a tenday kibbutz stay or something. And everybody else—it was nice to see them, but their conversations were getting limited to “Remember when Ms. Kean said this or that?” or “Remember that time Jeremy filled a beaker with puke in chemistry class?” This was fine as far as it went, but Mark often felt like he was watching these conversations from far away. Yeah, I remember stuff that happened when I was in high school and I lived in my real house and my parents weren’t screaming at each other all the time and I had a little sister who was alive. So what?

  So he is actually dreading the Christmas break and is happy to have an excuse to stay in Philadelphia for a while. Besides, there is always a strange but kind of exciting after-hours feeling all over campus when most of the students are gone. When Mark stayed here for spring break last year (no way he was going home right after Mom filed for divorce), he had this sense of possibility the whole time, like anything could happen, even though nothing did, beyond going to Chili’s with one Mike and three Jennifers, and, after dinner, having Jennifer number two give him the “like you as a friend” speech he had heard so many times from so many girls that he could have said it himself and saved her the trouble.

  So he’s happy to sit here in the lounge and do pretty much nothing for as long as he can. Right now it’s ten P.M. on December 19, and some chubby kid from the third floor has rented a bunch of Christmas movies and is showing them on the big-screen TV in the lounge. So Mark watches Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer feeling blank and numb.

  This feeling is abruptly replaced when Rudolph, sporting his fake nose, leaps into the air and yells, “I’b cuuuuute!” He had completely forgotten until just this minute how much he and Janet used to like that particular part, and as soon as Rudoph says it, he can hear Janet saying it like she’s in the room, and it is physically painful.

  And just like that, he’s crying. At a cartoon. Or whatever one might call a filmed entertainment starring slightly disturbing puppets. He gets out of the chair he staked out at seven and staggers from the lounge into the hallway, where he sits on the floor, back against the cinder-block wall, and cries.

  He’s not sure how long he’s there. But then he hears Raquel’s voice. “Hey, Mark. You wanna watch It’s a Wonderful Life?”

  Mark looks up, embarrassed, and wipes his eyes. “Uh, nah, Rock, I don’t think I can handle Zuzu tonight.”

  Raquel sits next to him. She’s tall and thin with very short black hair. Everybody pretty much assumes she’s a lesbian, but nobody’s ever asked her, and there’s been no evidence either way. This is at least in part because though she is in the lounge all the time, she is often silent and brooding, and while she’s not big, she is tall and looks like she could probably take out pretty much any resident of the public service dorm, all of whom are just about as strong and athletic as you might expect people interested in devoting their lives to public service to be.

  Mark likes to be around other people, too, so he usually sits in the lounge even when he feels like brooding, and so he’s always felt like Raquel is some kind of kindred spirit. She’s clearly pissed off about something.

  But tonight, she’s not pissed off, and their lounge rat comradeship seems to have been magnified by the fact that 60 percent of the residents of the dorm are home already.

  “You wanna talk about it?”

  Mark thinks for a minute. “I don’t think so. Thanks, though. I don’t even feel like thinking about it.”

  “I hear you. You wanna kiss me?”

  This causes Mark to lift his head. He’s never even considered this as a possibility, so he hasn’t built up any excitement about the idea, but Raquel is sexy—long and lean and troubled and unpredictable. And kissing Raquel right now would feel good, and he certainly hasn’t felt good in a long time.

  “Yeah. Yes I do.” And just like that, he does.

  PHILIPPA

  Philippa is in the dressing room at Harrods. It’s been one week since Aunt Betsy called about Mom. Mom is out of the hospital, apparently fitted with something called a “flipper,” which is a retainer with two false teeth attached, while she waits for the permanent false teeth to be done. When Philippa called her, Mom cried, insisting that this was a real wake-up call, that she was really going to stop drinking, no, this time she meant it, she was incredibly lucky not to be dead, and she had too much to live for to end it right now wrapped around a tree on Clough Pike, for Chrissakes.

  Philippa had been at this long enough to know that while Mom believed what she was saying, addicts lied to themselves even more than they lied to everybody else, so she didn’t have a lot of confidence in Mom’s pledge to take the pledge.

  Philippa’s own pledge to stop drinking after she puked in the street lasted exactly two days, but the gnawing fear and discontent that surfaced on that day remain. So when Dad gave her a perfunctory invitation to the party he was hosting for his banking colleagues and assorted financial services people, she surprised him and herself by saying she’d love to. She wasn’t sure she would actually love to, and going to a party wasn’t much of a personal transformation, but it just felt like something she would never do, which is why she wanted to do it.

  This is how she finds herself in a dressing room in Harrods trying on dresses with Ella on the other side of the door. Ella volunteered to help with this because she was not going to have Simon embarrassed by Philippa’s inability or unwillingness to dress properly, and also because she hoped that a day alone together would give her the opportunity to tell Philippa that she needed to stop being a sponge, that she was taking advantage of a wonderful man, or, anyway, a good man, that it was time to start acting like an adult instead of a spoiled child.

  Philippa looks at herself in the mirror. She’s not quite sure who this person in the dress is. If it weren’t for the hair and makeup, she’d look pretty at home in this dress, and she has to admit it shows off Trevor’s favorite features well—it’s obviously expensive, and her breasts look fantastic—but it still feels more than a little off.

  She peels it off and puts her jeans and T-shirt back on. She throws the dress over her arm and exits the dressing room. Ella smiles and says, “Well?”

  “I like it. If I can get my hair to calm down a little bit, I think it’ll look great.”

  Ella smiles a genuine smile, surprised that Philippa is giving more than her usual series of grunts and hopeful that she’ll manage not to be an embarrassment at the party.

  Philippa pays for the dress with Simon’s money, and Ella suggests they have lunch. “Do you know any good places?” Ella asks. “I’m always on the lookout for something new.”

  Philippa wonders if Ella is fucking with her. Her experience with London cuisine is limited to what Trevor refers to as the three c’s: chippie, curry, chinkie. “Uh, I really don’t know anyplace good.”

  “Shall I pick a good spot then?” Ella says, and she hails a taxi, which she directs to a small restaurant where every item on the menu costs more than anything at Café Bombay, which is Phillppa’s usual big splurge. On days when I get my allowance, she thinks.

  They eat soup, and as the bowls are cleared away Ella makes her move: “So you’ve had a good summer, then?” She knows perfectly well that it’s October 8, and that summer is long gone, and she hopes her question will be a subtle reminder that just as it’s not really appropriate to be talking about summer in October, it’s not appropriate for Philippa to continue living her carefree summer life this late in the year.

  “I guess. No, the summer was great. The fall has been less great. And I don’t know what the hell’s going to happen in the winter.”

  “No plans, then?” Ella says. She believes she has just slid the knife between Philippa’s ribs, and so she’s completely unprepared for Philippa to respond sincerely.

  “I don’t know, I mean … look, I appreciate you being nice to me and ta
king me out and everything, especially because I’m usually such a bitch at home, which is usually just because I’m hungover.”

  “Well, you … your father thinks the world of you, and I think the world of him, so I feel like it’s my—”

  “Look, I know I’m a mess. You’re nice to pretend I’m not a mess, but I know I’m a mess. It’s … like I thought I was all superior to everybody at school who had the next ten years all planned out, but now I’m just … I’m not having fun. And I feel useless. I mean, I always figured Dad owed me for leaving me alone with Mom and Jack Daniel’s all those years, but I’m getting … I drink too much, I’m not good at anything, and I don’t really understand why I’m alive.” Philippa pauses, not sure where all this came from or why she just unloaded it on Ella.

  Ella is surprised to find herself feeling affection for this lost girl she wanted to berate. She is aware that Philippa may have pulled a stunning act of emotional jujitsu on her, shifting her weight and turning Ella’s offense into a liability, but she just doesn’t believe Philippa to be that guileful.

  She’s also aware of being terribly out of her depth. She’s thirty-six, childless, and dating a man fifteen years her senior. She neither loves nor hates her job at the bank, and frankly doesn’t know what she’s good at or why she’s alive, either. She sits silently for ten seconds, and Philippa rushes in to fill the silence.

  “I’m sorry, Ella, I mean, I shouldn’t drop all this on you, I mean, I guess it’s kind of weird, we don’t really know each other, but I never get to—”

  “Hush. I was just—I mean, those are the questions, aren’t they? What am I good at? Why am I alive? I’m sure many of your schoolmates are at university precisely so they don’t have to think about those questions for a few more years. So maybe you’re less of a mess than you think.” Or perhaps I’m more of a mess than I think, she adds to herself.