Working With the Working Woman

by Cornelia Stratton Parker

The subject changed to summer hotels. One woman had worked last summer as a waitress at one of the beaches. That was the swellest job ever—just like a vacation! All summer she had two tables only to wait on, two persons at a table. Each table had tipped her five dollars a week. Next summer we all must try it.

The minutes flew by too fast that supper. Before I knew it, 5.30 had come around, and by the time I was downstairs again it was five minutes past my appointed half hour. Poor, poor Schmitz! And yet lucky Schmitz. It must have caused his soul much inner satisfaction to have a real honest-to-goodness grievance to complain about. (You see, he could not go up for his supper until I came down from mine.) Schmitz upbraided me, patiently, with explanations. Every single night from then on, when at five he would tell me I could go upstairs, he always added, “And be sure you're back at half past five!” In natural depravity of spirit, it was my delight one night to be able to sneak down at about 5.25 without being seen by Schmitz. Then I shrank into a corner of my compartment, out of his line of vision, and worked busily on my evening chores. At 5.30, Schmitz began his anxious scanning of our large clock. By 5.40 he was a wreck and the clock had nearly been glared off its hinges. Then it was a waiter called out to me the first evening order. With the crucified steps of a martyr, a ten-minute-hungry martyr at that, Schmitz made his way over to fill that order. And there I was, busily filling it myself! Of course, I hope I have made it clear that Schmitz was the kind who would say, “I knew she was there all along.”

The rush of this particular Thursday night! More lettuce had to be sent for in the middle of the evening, more tomatoes, more blackberries, more cantaloupes, more bread for toast. There was no stopping for breath. In the midst of the final scrubbings and cleanings came an order of “One combination salad, Sweetheart!” That done and removed and there sounded down the way, “One cantaloupe, Honey!” Back the waiter came in a moment. “The old party says it's too ripe.” There were only two left to choose from. “Knock his slats in if he don't like that, the old fossil.” In another moment the waiter was back again with the second half. “He says he don't want no cantaloupe, anyhow. Says he meant an order of Philadelphia cream cheese.”

But nine o'clock came round and somehow the chores were all done and Schmitz nodded his regal head ever so little—his sign for, “Madam, you may take your departure,” and up I flew through the almost deserted main kitchen, up the three flights to the service floor, down four flights to the time-clock floor (elevators weren't always handy), to be greeted by my friend the time-clock man with his broad grin and his, “Well, if here ain't my little bunch o' love!”

If he and Schmitz could only have gotten mixed a bit in the original kneading....

By Saturday of that week I began my diary: “Goodness! I couldn't stand this pace long—waiters are too affectionate.” I mention such a matter and go into some detail over their affection here and there, because it was in no sense personal. I mean that any girl working at my job, provided she was not too ancient and too toothless and too ignorant of the English language, would have been treated with equal enthusiasm. True, a good-looking Irishman did say to me one evening, “I keep thinkin' to myself durin' the day, what is there about you that's different. I shure like it a lot what it is, but I just can't put my finger on it.” I used as bad grammar as the next; I appeared, I hoped, as ignorant as the next. Yet another Irishman remarked, “I don't know who you are or where you came from or where you got your education, but you shure have got us all on the run!” But any girl with the least wits about her would have had them on the run. She was the only girl these men got a chance to talk to the greater part of the day.

But what if a girl had a couple of years of that sort of thing? Or does she get this attention only the first couple of weeks of the couple of years, anyhow? Does a waiter grow tired of expressing his affection before or after the girl grows tired of hearing it? I could not help but feel that most of it was due to the fact that perhaps among those waiters and such girls as they knew a purely friendly relationship was practically unknown. Sex seemed to enter in the first ten minutes. Girls are not for friends—they're to flirt with. It was for the girl to set the limits; the man had none.

But eight and one-half hours a day of parrying the advances of affectionate waiters—a law should be passed limiting the cause for such exertion to two hours a day, no overtime. Nor have I taken the gentle reader into my confidence regarding the Spanish chef in the main kitchen. He did the roasting. I had to pass his stove on my way to the elevators. At which he dropped everything, wiped his hands on his apron, and beamed from ear to ear until I got by. One day he dashed along beside me and directed an outburst of Spanish into my ear. When I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders and got it into his head that I was not a countrywoman, his dismay was purely temporary. He spoke rather flowery English. Would I walk up the stairs with him? No, I preferred the elevator. He, did too. I made the most of it by asking him questions too fast for him to ask me any. He was a tailor by trade, but business had been dull for months. In despair he had taken to roasting. Some six months he had been at our hotel. He much preferred tailoring, and in two months he would be back at his trade in a little shop of his own, making about fifty to seventy-five dollars a week. And then he got in his first question.

“Are you married?”

“No.”