What Now? (5 page)

to want to know where you’re going to do your residency or if you’ve made law review or what you plan on doing upon leaving that vil-lage in Uganda. As quickly as you think that everything is set, it all becomes unglued again. A huge part of this is simply luck, the element of life both good and bad that is beyond our control. Sickness comes into the picture of perfect health, true loves catches your eye just as you were setting your foot on the train that would have taken you away forever. Babies are born, jobs are lost, fortunes are made. Wars and suffering pull us back-wards while science gives us a second chance we never thought possible. Even if you have it all together you can’t know where you’re going to end up. There are too many forces, as deep and invisible as tides, that keep us 5 7

bouncing into places where we never thought we’d wind up. Sometimes the best we can hope for is to be graceful and brave in the face of all of the changes that will surely come. It also helps to have a sense of humor about your own fate, to not think that you alone are blessed when good fortune comes your way, or cursed when it passes you by. It helps if you can realize that this part of life when you don’t know what’s coming next is often the part that people look back on with the greatest affection. In truth, the moment at which life really does become locked down, most of us are overcome by the desire to break it all apart again so that we can reexperience the variables of youth. As for me, I managed to land a job teaching fiction for one year at a little college in Pennsylvania, and when that was over I wound up back in Nashville 5 8

working as a waitress at a T.G.I. Friday’s. I moved into the guest room in my mother’s house. It was exactly the place I had pictured myself going had I never gotten into college at all. Soon after I started working, the dis-trict manager came from Memphis to present me with a tiny gold-toned pin in front of the entire assembled waitstaff. WOW, it said.

I was the first waitress to score a perfect 100

on her waitressing exam. My six years of higher education had finally paid off. I served fajitas and rolled silverware into napkins and married bottles of ketchup, a delicate proce-dure in which bottle A must be held on top of bottle B until bottle B is full again. It wasn’t a good sign that I demonstrated such adept-ness at the transference of ketchup that my superiors thought to praise me for it. The whole time I dreamed of the novels I would 5 9

write while I heard the Greek chorus singing in my head, What now?

Then one day, while serving straw-berry daiquiris to businessmen at four in the afternoon, I had my answer: now you are a waitress with a graduate degree.

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Receiving an education is a little bit like a garden snake swallowing a chicken egg: it’s in you but it takes awhile to digest. I had come to college from twelve years of Catholic girls’ school. At the time I thought that mine was the most ridiculous, antiquated second-ary education in history. We marched in lines and met the meticulous regulations of the uniform code with cheerful submission. We 6 0

bowed and kneeled and prayed. I held open doors and learned how to write a sincere thank-you note and when I was asked to go and fetch a cup of coffee from the kitchen for one of the nuns I fairly blushed at the honor of being chosen. I learned modesty, humility, and how to make a decent white sauce. The white sauce I probably could have done without, but it turns out that modesty and humility mean a lot when you’re down on your luck.

They went a long way in helping me be a waitress when what I wanted to be was a writer. It turns out those early years of my education which had seemed to me such a waste of time had given me a nearly magical ability to dis-appear into a crowd. This was not the kind of thing one learned at Sarah Lawrence or the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, places that told 6 2

everyone who came through the door just how special they are. I’m not knocking being special, it was nice to hear, but when it was clear that I was just like everybody else, I was glad to have had some experience with anonymity to fall back on. The nuns were not much on extolling the virtues of leadership.

In fact, we were taught to follow. When told to line up at the door, the person who got there first was inevitably pulled from her spot and sent to the back and the person from the back was sent up front to take her place. The idea was that we should not accidentally wind up with too grand an opinion of ourselves, and frankly I regard this as sound counsel. In a world that is flooded with children’s leadership camps and grown-up leadership semi-nars and bestselling books on leadership, I 6 3

count myself as fortunate to have been taught a thing or two about following. Like leading, it is a skill, and unlike leading, it’s one that you’ll actually get to use on a daily basis. It is senseless to think that at every moment of our lives we should all be the team captain, the class president, the general, the CEO, and yet so often this is what we’re being prepared for. No matter how many great ideas you might have about salad preparation or the reorganization of time cards, waitressing is not a leadership position. You’re busy and so you ask somebody else to bring the water to table four. Someone else is busy and so you clear the dirty plates from table twelve. You learn to be helpful and you learn to ask for help. It turns out that most positions in life, even the big ones, aren’t really so much about leadership. Being successful, and certainly 6 6

being happy, comes from honing your skills in working with other people. For the most part we travel in groups—you’re ahead of somebody for a while, then somebody’s ahead of you, a lot of people are beside you all the way. It’s what the nuns had always taught us: sing together, eat together, pray together.

It wasn’t until I found myself relying on my fellow waitress Regina to heat up my fudge sauce for me that I knew enough to be grateful not only for the help she was giving me but for the education that had prepared me to accept it.

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Is it possible that at the moment in my life when I should have been processing what I had learned in graduate school, I was just 6 7

beginning to untangle the lessons of seventh grade? I had studied at the Iowa Writers’

Workshop, after all. I had studied writing at Sarah Lawrence with the likes of Allan Gurganus and Grace Paley and Russell Banks.

But with all the important books I’d read and all the essential things I had learned about how to write, I didn’t become a writer until I worked at Friday’s. More specifically, I didn’t learn what I really needed to know until the police came late one afternoon and took away the guy who worked the dishwash station. It turns out that I was the only waitress who was willing to wash dishes, and it was while I washed that I finally learned to stare. Oh, maybe I’d played around with staring in school. Maybe I looked out the window every now and then when I was stuck trying to fin-ish a paper, but I had never stared deeply.

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Catholic school and college and graduate school had prepared me both for how to be part of a group and how to be the group’s leader, but none of them had taught me the most important thing: how to be alone. I had never stared as a way of solving a problem or really seeing the details that make up a story, which is to say I had never just stayed still, been quiet, and thought things through. In the end it was the staring that got me the novelist job I wanted.

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As I scrubbed the soup pots and mar-garita pitchers, I figured out that What now is always going to be a work in progress. What now was never what you think it’s going to be, and that’s what every writer has to learn. I 7 1