The driver said a very bad word, and Tommy said, “All right, buddy. You’re done.” He picked the tray up off the door, too. “Get out of here.”
“You can’t do that!” the driver said. “That’s my order!”
“Out,”Tommy said, which was brave of him, and rather noble. Fortunately, that was when Mr. Sullivan came out of the restaurant.
I thought, after my perfume-counter experience, that I’d surely be fired on the spot. Instead, Mr. Sullivan told the men they weren’t to come back again. When they drove off with a squeal of tires, he told Tommy, “Good job, kid.” Andthenhe fired me.
“Not that I want to,” he said, “but I told you, pretty girls are too much trouble. Sorry, kid. Go get yourself another job. One where you’re not outside alone at night.”
At home, Joe said, “You’d have had to quit soon enough anyway. I told you the last time you got pinched that this wasn’t going to work.” I might have argued, but there was no point, for the job was gone. And Iwasvery tired of having my body touched, even for the sake of Joe’s education.
After that, there was a restaurant called Rick’s Swiss Chalet—an informal sort of name, but Americans were an informal sort of people—which served the kind of food I recognized in agemütlichatmosphere, all dark wood and red-checked tablecloths. It reminded me of the Biergarten in Fürth, but with better sausages, and the Swiss owner was less bothered than most about my origins. The work was more satisfactory, too, than at the car place—my bottom was pinched only once—but I was mostly scheduled to work in the evenings and on Saturdays, which Joe said was too much of a sacrifice for both of us. I agreed, but largely because he said it after the evening when I tripped over a trailing scarf on the back of a chair and fell, along with my laden tray, in a spectacular accident that disrupted the restaurant greatly and caused me any number of bruises.
I rather suspected the “sacrifice” idea to be a tactful way to extricate myself before I was fired for the third time, for even before my accident, the owner had a distinct tendency to roll his eyes and sigh at me. I was too small to carry the tray on one palm as the others did, and I wasn’t actually very good at remembering who had ordered which item, although the tips were agreeable and the men in particular very friendly. Oddly, this argument didn’t appear to weigh well with Joe, even when there was so little pinching.
Also, the cook couldn’t read my handwriting. It had been perfectly acceptable in Germany, but Americans wrote in a very different way. I was going to have to learn an entirely new style if I ever hoped to be a waitress. By this point, though, I mainly hoped never to have to be a waitress again, so I didn’t rush to correct this.
After that debacle, I tried the chief bookshop in town once more. The shop was large and always full of people, and the “Help Wanted” signs went up and came down with regularity.
“I’m sorry,” the manager, a strangely abrupt person for abookseller, told me. “But as I said before, the customers won’t like a German serving them. It was true last month, it’s true now, and it’ll be true next month, too. And how would you possibly know the stock?”
“But many customers are surely university students,” I said, “like my husband, and they are not so prejudiced, I think, as older people. And I’ve read a great many American and English books, you know. I think you’ll find me quite familiar.”
“Really,” he said. “Betty Smith.”
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,”I shot back. “Most enjoyable.”
“John Galsworthy.”
“The Forsyte Saga.Very engrossing, and he wrote women especially well, I believe, allowing them as much complexity as men.”
“Ernest Hemingway.”
“For Whom the Bell Tolls. A Farewell to Arms.Interesting stories, and well written—about men. I don’t think he believes women are quite human.”
“John Steinbeck.”
“The Grapes of Wrath.This was one of the first American books I read. I enjoyed it very much, for it’s about refugees, and I too was a refugee.” What harm could there be in saying this, when he didn’t want to hire me anyway? And I found his manner rather insulting.
“Carson McCullers.”
“The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.A bit overwrought to me, but then, IamGerman.”
“Walt Whitman.”
“The Leaves of Grass,I believe, or do I meanWalden?No, that was Thoreau. You see, I was marrying an American, and then marriedtoan American, so I wished to understand the country and its people, and this, poetry does well, do you notagree? My favorite is perhaps Emily Dickinson, who writes such deep things so simply, like Rilke.”
His eyelids flickered. “Agatha Christie.”
“Oh, too many to name. My husband likes her stories very much as a break from his studies, but I prefer Dorothy L. Sayers, although she can be rather pretentiously intellectual. This is the word, I believe? But Lord Peter Wimsey, you know, and Bunter … I believe readers enjoy feeling that theyknowa character, and this, as well as the puzzles, is to me her gift.”
“P.G. Wodehouse.” Triumph in his voice, for he thought he had me there.
“Jeeves, of course. Always Jeeves and the silly Bertie Wooster. So amusing, and I do think that his treatment by the British was rather harsh—one alwaysthinksone would have resisted if ordered to do something by the Nazis, but in fact, you know, it was very difficult to do so, particularly for a timid man. Writers of comic novels, I suspect, are often rather timid, for comedy is a sort of shield against the world, isn’t it? But Britain did suffer a great deal during the war, and fought very bravely, so this reaction is understandable.”
“Fyodor Dostoyevsky.” He rolled out the name in triumph, as if surely,surely,a mere woman—aGermanwoman—would never have read such an author.
“Crime and Punishment,”I said.“This book has many disturbing passages, but the struggle with guilt feels very true, and is perhaps a helpful way to understand how soldiers sometimes feel after war. I must confess that I haven’t read his other works, althoughThe Brothers Karamazovwas available to me. My soul was perhaps a bit scarred by the other? I prefer Tolstoy. One finds an entire world within the covers of his books, and it is important in these times to understand the Russian soul. I must add that I read these booksin German, for I am unable to read Russian.”
