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THE SALAD LADY In memory of Eva Elias  RAWI HAGE I met Sarah at a restaurant. I was the waiter; she, the quiet customer with the soft voice and long gaze that passed through her puffed cigarette smoke, crossed the glass window and always landed on the same spot on the paved sidewalk. She came every Wednesday and ordered the same Greek salad. Whenever she came in, Stavros, the owner, would call me in his thick Crete accent, “Your lady-salad is here.” I would rush with a glass of water and greet her calmly with a soft nod, careful not to shatter her deep meditative mood. I never asked her if she wanted “the usual,” though I was tempted every time. To say it, I felt, might acknowledge her existence, expose her routine, and make her visible to the world. She was the kind of customer who wanted to be left alone. You know, the kind who erects barriers and turns tables into refuges of contemplation and solitude. I made sure her coffee cup was always filled and warm; the little glass bottles of olive oil and vinegar, which she poured slowly and always after the first bite of her salad, were also always filled. I would leave her the check, usually after the third coffee and right after her ashtray was filled with crushed cigarettes—a kind of subtle acknowledgment on my part of her routine, and my timing skills. She would walk to Stavros, pay him, walk back, give me the tip, and leave. Stavros, with his thick droopy mustache, would wish her a good day from behind his mechanical cash register that opened with a loud ancient voice. The machine was covered with Orthodox icons and Greek flags; on the wall behind him, a series of postcards from Crete 119 1KALDAS_pages:1KALDAS pages i-72.qxd 8/3/09 2:35 PM Page 119 showed a deep blue sea and white clay houses; and at his side were two signed photos of seventies Hollywood celebrities. Stavros was a pain in the ass. In the kitchen worked Ahmad, the Egyptian, whose conversation and obsession with cars bored the hell out of me; at the end of the kitchen, there was François, the Haitian dishwasher, whose overzealous Jehovah’s Witness preaching was a joke among all of us. Outside the kitchen there was Claire, the waitress, who served the left-side tables and the bar. Claire had worked in the restaurant for fifteen years. She never stopped reminding everyone about it. She talked about horoscopes, the weather, and her trip on the morning train to work. We all knew she lived in the Bronx and took the R-train every day. She had a very peculiar relationship with Stavros; and when she talked to him, she always reminded him of what a gorgeous broad she once was, and what a fat and stingy pig he turned out to be. She had met Stavros on a Greek island in the eighties, during a trip that she won on a radio show. There Stavros, young and handsome, seduced her that same night in a Greek bar that had no ceiling to keep the stars from shining on the bouzouki band that played loud and happy music, and no walls to keep the Mediterranean Sea breeze from mingling with the tourists’ sunburned thighs. Claire and Stavros spent two weeks together. He showed her the rough beaches outside the city, and they danced and drank every night. He took her to his birth village up in the hills and, in a cold flowing river, bathed her naked in his arms. He made her feel what no northern man was ever able to. And when she left the island, she wept and he kept her address. A few months later he showed up at her door with a suitcase. She took care of him. Then, slick Mediterranean that he was, he took care of himself , and in a few years had made enough money to open a small Greek diner with Claire as his manager. No one knew how Claire became the waitress and Stavros her boss, nor how he managed to hold her for such a long time under his command, nor why he, all these years, tolerated her contempt and verbal abuse. Her relationship with me was also a paradox. In private she often told me that I was doing the right thing by going to school; she told me...

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