Night Waitress

NIGHT WAITRESS / Lynda Hull Reflected in the plate glass, the pies look like clouds drifting off my shoulder. Tm telling myself my face has character, not beauty. It's my mother's Slavic face. She washed the floor on hands and knees below the Black Madonna, praying to her god of sorrows and visions who's not here tonight when I lay out the plates, small planets, the cups and moons of saucers. At this hour the men all look as if they'd never had mothers. They do not see me. I bring the cups. I bring the silver. There's the man who leans over the jukebox nightly pressing the combinations of numbers. I would not stop him if he touched me, but it's only songs of risky love he leans into. The cook sings into the grill. On his forehead a tatooed cross furrows, diminished when he frowns. He sings words dragged up from the bottom of his lungs. I want a song that rolls through the night like a big Cadillac past factories to the refineries squatting on the bay, round and shiny as the coffee urn warming my palm. Sometimes when coffee cruises my mind visiting the most remote waystations, I think of my room as a calm arrival— each book and lamp in its place. The calendar on my wall predicts no disaster only another white square waiting to be filled like the desire that fills jail cells, the old arrest that makes me stare out the window or want to try every bar down the street. When I walk out of here in the morning, 290 · The Missouri Review my mouth is bitter with sleeplessness. Men surge to the factories and Tm too tired to look. Fingers grip lunchbox handles, beltbuckles gleam, wind riffles my uniform and it's not romantic when the sun unlids the end of the avenue. Tm fading in the morning's insinuations collecting in the crevices of buildings, in wrinkles, in every fault of this frail machinery. Lynda Hall THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 292 ...