At Sofia’s
by Megan Peck Shub
Everybody at the restaurant discussed Tiffany’s relationship with Bob, the elderly man who rode his reclining tricycle to the restaurant for lunch every day. Always alone, he sat by the front window, at table four, and ordered a bowl of the minestrone.
We all got our chance with Bob, but it was only Tiffany whom he loved.
⦿
The restaurant was called Sofia’s, although “Sofia” never existed. The face beaming out of “Sofia’s” black-and-white portrait hanging on the wall was an anonymous dead grandmother scooped up by an interior designer at some flea market.
This being Orlando, the city where everyone comes to pretend they’re somewhere else, Sofia’s was ersatz mom-and-pop, a simulated version of itself, a new chain prototype concocted in a corporate office. Picture the bullet points of any red-sauce joint and you’ve got the idea: pizza, pasta, and sticky, red-checked tablecloths. But ours remained the only location, a vestigial pinky toe in the company’s portfolio of more lucrative brands.
I worked there the summer after graduating high school. Most of my friends had moved away to their new schools, but I hadn’t applied to college, despite my intelligence. People typically cited me as one of the smartest people they knew, expressing a sort of horror at my not going to a “good” university, as if my brain were wasted like a dozen eggs cracked and oozing through their carton. It wouldn’t be for many years, after I turned out alright, that I’d understand this period of my life, my “coming of age” to put it in narrative terms, as nothing condensable, which is why here I’ll focus on Tiffany.
⦿
Tiffany. “Tiff,” as everybody called her but I, who believed strongly she was a “Tiffany,” and—though most of my “beliefs'' were primordial electric surges, synaptic fires and misfires coalescing into ideas—I held to them as they came.
The line cooks juggled pans of broccoli rabe and mozzarella cheese as they leered at her ass. The dishwasher, Sal, who spoke of almost nothing beyond the night he saw Frank Sinatra live, expounded her beauty. Edgar, the General Manager, tended to look at her feet when he spoke to her, as if she were a white-hot star threatening to explode his retinas. The servers, all women, loathed her, and then we loathed ourselves for loathing her. She comprised every physical attribute we grudgingly desired, all poured into one composite. She was in her mid-twenties, the bronze-and-blonde Swedish type, easy to imagine sporting a dirndl and milking a cow in the grasses of some European field. Her face was mathematically symmetrical aside from the dimple, planted on the right side and, I thought, endearingly imperfect, as was—important note—her near complete lack of tits.
⦿
“Tiff’s got backup,” Jenny, another server, told me early on. We were making iced tea, Jenny standing on a chair as I passed up cup after cup of sugar for her to dump into the three-gallon silo. The tea was sweet enough to kill something. Over at table four, Tiffany lingered around Bob like a butterfly.
I asked Jenny what she meant.
“Her mother works here, too, a few nights a week. She’s running offense. Edgar wants to schedule Tiff for dinner shifts, but her mom keeps talking him out of it, because the old man is at home in his bed by then. You know what they’re doing, right? Tiff and her mom?”
I swallowed, realizing I didn’t like admitting ignorance of anything.
“They’re swindling Bob. Tiff has spun a yarn about needing money for college, so he keeps writing her checks. Big checks. She’s our very own Anna Nicole Smith.”
I, who barely afforded a mildewed duplex apartment stocked with a vicious Craigslist roommate and her poorly trained dog, could not help but think that Tiffany’s scheme sounded smart, but I didn’t say so.
“It’s wrong,” Jenny said. “He’s old and alone, and she’s lying to him. She’s not saving his money for college, she’s saving it for breast implants. She’s getting tits. We all know it. She told Sal.”
Sal! Who knew what other secrets he contained. Sometimes I pictured him young and spry and shiny-eyed in the front row of that Sinatra concert in the 60s. Strange to think we were all hurtling in his direction, we’d all one day be regurgitating one story repeatedly, whistling to ourselves.
I looked over at Tiffany, who was topping off Bob’s diet soda with a pitcher, nodding her lovely skull along with whatever he said. Nothing sinister churning. Bob enjoyed giving Tiffany his money, and Tiffany had every right to take it.
⦿
One night after closing, the staff stayed late drinking vinegared table wine and things went haywire. I lost my virginity to a cook in the backseat of his Civic. The next day he winked as he passed me an order of mussels. Mia Farrow, I recalled, gazing into the opened shells hissing steam into the lights of the expo counter, lost her virginity to Sinatra.
The rest of the summer I felt myself observing myself in a new way, not as purely individual but as part of a taxonomy of women, each category accessing different avenues for experiencing the world. I wasn’t yet sure of my place, but I did know that no matter how much kindness or attention I paid Bob, no matter how much I patted his bony shoulder or smiled with my teeth like Miss America, he never slipped me anything beyond one five-dollar bill before pedaling off on his tricycle, its orange safety flag limp in the humidity.
I asked Tiffany what they talked about, since Bob was dull and bland as a stalk of the celery floating in his soup. A woman of few words, she just laughed and said, “Nothing, really.”
So, they talked about nothing. It made sense. In the scroll of my mind I marked it down: I had learned one more thing about the world.
“I’d be using that money for a down payment on something important,” Jenny once told me, to which I said, “Tits are important.”
Until my last day, when I left Sofia’s for a job at a restaurant closer to the community college where I’d enrolled, I monitored Tiffany’s dutiful service to Bob, all her discreet tucking of his money into her apron. I thought of it piling up in a drawer, stacks upon stacks of five-dollar bills. I thought of laying my body down on a steel table, my vision flooded with the ethereal light of a surgical lamp, a masked anesthesiologist taking my hand and counting down with me: ten, nine, eight…
⦿
Years later, after I’d moved away from Florida, I took my parents back to Sofia’s, almost as a joke, though I didn’t know if it would be funny or sad, or something in between, or both. Or neither. Or some feeling which I’d yet to name.
The restaurant remained the same. The red-checkered tablecloths. The glass case of pizza by the slice. Grandma Sofia on the wall—though now she looked much younger to me, less like an ancient matriarch and more like a woman who happened to suffer the crime of a few wrinkles around her eyes.
A hostess sat us at table four and I thought of Bob, thought of myself settling into his molecular dust. I remembered him sitting in my chair, gazing out the window, as if the view was not a suburban parking lot but paradise itself. I thought, maybe in a future decade I’ll do this again; I’ll look out there and see it, too.
Beside me, I noticed my father straighten up. My mother, as well. The light flickered in the stained-glass lamp hanging above.
I turned to see a beautiful blond approaching us from the server’s station, her hands tucked into her apron pockets, her posture pushing a set of laboratory-grade double-Ds to the forefront. They were truly impeccable.
“Must be a short in this lamp,” my father said to the woman, confident with his explanation, exuding the satisfaction of men who declare that x causes y, and so forth, with such infallible certainty.
“We’ll have to check on that,” Tiffany said, smiling, the one dimple right there in its place. “What can I get you to eat?”
“I’ll take the minestrone,” I said, my voice in my own ears suddenly like a stranger’s.
She didn’t recognize me at all.
Megan Peck Shub is a producer at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in the Missouri Review, Salamander, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Maudlin House, Peach Mag, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and X-R-A-Y. She is a contributing editor at Story magazine.
