I just read a Frank Bruni column in the New York Times (I won’t link because the column itself is just awful) about how terrible it was for Hillary Rosen to say such and such about Ann Romney because his mother was a stay at home mother and she really worked hard with the kids, and those “career” women can just be so damned judgmental about making the sacrifice to say home with her children. Through all this I have been thinking about Sylvia. Sylvia was a woman who had a major impact on my life although she never knew it, and neither did I for a good many years.
I had just graduated college and was trying to make ends meet. I worked the lunch and dinner shift and Sylvia worked breakfast and lunch, so we overlapped. She wore bright red lipstick and there was never a spot on her white shirt. Sylvia was a single mother, late thirties with two kids and tired eyes. She wore sensible shoes and hustled her ass off in ways that would put Pete Rose to shame. I was too young to notice then, but I have a picture of her and me together and now that I’m older, she was pretty cute. But she had tired eyes - really tired friggin eyes. But she was a great lady, always holding court at the service station. She would sip her ice tea just before the lunch rush and say to me, “Kid, what the hell are you doing here? Waiting on tables sucks.” But she was there at six every morning to help open up.
Honestly I don’t know how she did it. She got her kids up at 5:30 and dropped them off at her mom’s where they had breakfast and then were taken to school. Her mom had the lunch dinner shift at some diner. Sylvia would pull the tip at her last table and would just keep going right out that door to pick up her kids at three. When the last table stayed late she would get antsy because Lenny, the manager, didn’t like the wait staff cashing out each other’s tables. You could see her sweat as the clock ticked and the ladies that lunch would ask for just one more refill. Somehow she always made it to the school on time. Man she could move fast in those sensible shoes.
One time one of the dinner waiters couldn’t make it and Lenny told Sylvia she needed to stay over. This was a tremendous difficulty to Sylvia because there would be nobody to pick up her children. Lenny wasn’t a bad guy, but he was living on the margins also. If he couldn’t count on Sylvia in a pinch she wasn’t worth that much. Sylvia was so upset she broke down and cried, she couldn’t afford to lose the job. It was a bad recession. But what about her kids? All members of the wait staff scrambled, lining up at the orders phone calling anybody we knew. I don’t remembered how everything got covered but it did. Sylvia and her family were safe for one more day.
One breakfast a guy left a fiver for Sylvia on a five dollar bill. You should have seen Sylvia wave that bill around like it was a recording contract or a college acceptance. She came up to me and said, “You see this fiver I got kid. From this really good guy, who I only refilled his coffee once.” Big tips made me happy of course, but I didn’t realize then that it wasn’t so much the money as the fact that the guy noticed her and was offering her a bit of recognition. In that moment Sylvia got the fiver she wasn’t invisible. Sometimes I forget how important small things can be, simple recognitions. I shouldn’t.
Sometimes during lunch wives of wealthy men would come in. They were the ladies who lunch. They had frosted hair and thousand dollar outfits and they would sit over their iced teas for a long time. Sylvia was a good waitress and served them well, but I could tell somehow it made her sad. Sometimes when the lunch rush ended early she would bum a cigarette off me – she was always bumming cigarettes saying “I got to quit, I got kids” and start off into the distance.
“I never get a fiver with a table like that,” she said an afternoon soon after that grand morning, cocking her head towards a table of ladies who lunch. “They don’t even know I exist.”
“Hey they know you exist Syl,” I said, speaking out of the wrong end of my body.
“No kid, I’m invisible to those gals. I serve them and they’re talking about their kids and sometimes I want to say, hey I got kids too, they’re really beautiful. But Lenny would have a cow. I’m just some shadow that passes around them, and somehow their food ends up in front of them and their glasses are always full. But they never even look up.” And then she snorted with the last of her puffs. “And they never, ever would leave me a fiver if you know what I mean.”
One time one of the ladies who lunch snapped her fingers for Sylvia to refill her drink. Sylvia stubbed out her cigarette and muttered under her breath, “Bitch.” And then went to refill the drink.
I think about Sylvia every now and then, but especially the last few days. What I get from this whole uproar more than anything else is that to Ann Romney and Frank Bruni the Sylvia’s of the world are invisible. Their struggles don’t exist. Every decision is seen from the vantage point of wealth and privilege. Things have gotten worse for the Sylvias of the world over my lifetime. We have somehow managed to make their lives more difficult, to make them even more invisible.
Tomorrow morning I think I’m going to go out to breakfast and I’m going to leave a fiver – maybe with inflation a ten spot. And I’ll think of the smile on Sylvia’s face and think, “sweetheart, you are not invisible. You make the friggin world go round.”