The Waitress

Bex O’Brian

Word Count 881

I was “The Waitress.” My soon-to-be ex-husband and I laughed at this. But the woman he now loved, whom he was thinking of marrying, the one who had given me this moniker was not joking. How, she wanted to know, had he ever sunk to such depths as to marry a waitress? And, why hadn’t he divorced me? When he told me this, we laughed even harder. We always had the same sense of humour: we saw the absurd in most things. Nevertheless, the marriage had not worked. We both had the same trigger temper, exploding at petty cops or cab drivers who refused to drive us into Brooklyn, which was considered the wilds of New York in those days. Still, the marriage failed.

A year or so after we had wed, one of my waitress friends convinced me to see her swami. He made me breathe in such a peculiar way that I thought I would faint. While he violently pushed my stomach, he told me I was married to my brother. Maybe that’s why the marriage hadn’t worked.

Once we separated, it never occurred to us to divorce. Years passed. Now, however, there was a pressing need. God forbid, we joked, this Harvard swan, this French-born, half-Japanese goddess decked out in Agnès B and Givenchy, should find out before he had a chance to propose that I was a high school dropout who wore cotton underpants that came in a pack of six and ripped t-shirts. Bad enough I had been a waitress but that I had not worn Aubade lingerie might queer the whole deal.

The first time I saw my then-future husband walking towards me in the back room of the Dublin House bar on the Upper Westside of Manhattan, I knew I needed to know him for the rest of my life. He had an utterly endearing puckish grin while I wore a ribbon in my hair, something I had never done before and would never do again. We started talking about Graham Greene. My brain had never been happier. We should marry, I thought, this is fun.

Heading to meet him outside a grey Brooklyn Office building for our appointment with a divorce lawyer, it felt a little like play-acting. But then the marriage between two people far too young to understand any of the gravity of wedlock had felt like play-acting until it didn’t. Until, what we weren’t capable of, began to hurt.   

We hurt each other, but never enough to kill the love. After all, he was my brother. His future wives and girlfriends realized this instantly. We have all been close friends. It was the way it was supposed to be. But the woman he was divorcing me for didn’t know me. I was merely “The Waitress”.

Getting a divorce seemed like a rite of passage. My parents had certainly done it enough. I was excited, and we were in high spirits as we took a creaky elevator up seventeen flights to a dingy office. We whispered it was very Philip Marlowe with its wooden filing cabinets and swivel chairs. Shown into the back office, we noted that the windows were filthy. Our lawyer had a comb-over and a perpetual cigarette in his mouth. My near-ex and I held hands, squeezing hard, trying not to laugh.

My husband spoke, giving our names while handing over the marriage certificate. It wasn’t how things normally were between us. In fact, before we went in, I had slipped him all the necessary documents. The lawyer wanted to know if there was any mutual property, children, pets, stocks, bonds. The more he drew a picture of a life we had never lived, the more we laughed and kidded about.

Finally, the lawyer looked up.

“And, where is your wife now?”

“What do you mean?”

“The woman you want to divorce, I will have to meet her.”

For some reason, both my soon-to-be ex-husband and I blushed. We must have looked ridiculous to this lawyer, two idiots, giggling, holding hands, no better than kids playing a prank. Then across my husband’s face came that grin, the one I first saw, head slightly bowed, eyes not quite focused, the joke, the wild joke of life written all over his face.

He slowly raised his hand and pointed at me. “She’s the wife.”

“What!?”

“Yes,” I said. “He wants to divorce me.”

“Why?!!!”

I thought then of all the couples looking for a cheap divorce who had sat in those creaky swivel chairs, whatever vestige of love in ashes, each demanding a share of their past lives.  I thought of all the rage, hurt, misunderstandings that flowed across this lawyer’s desk, him having to absorb it all, before offering an end, freedom neatly tied up. 

He must have been having the same thought. Confusion animated his face, his ears flamed red. This was not the natural order. He looked around his office, barely reassured by the musty filing cabinets and stacks of paper on his desk.

Finally, he threw up his arms. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Half an hour later, my now ex-husband kissed me goodbye and hopped on the subway to go tell his girlfriend he was free of The Waitress. But not of me, never of me

Bex lives mostly in Brooklyn with her husband and their dog. She’s been scribbling around on various projects for the better part of thirty years and made very little money as a result. Thus conditioned, she is thrilled with the advent of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. She is the author of the novels (Under Bex Brian) Promiscuous Unbound and Radius, also available here. At present she’s working on a new novel entitled, My Memoir Of An Impossible Mother. Read an excerpt from Radius on our DPA+ page, here.