Girls in White Dresses

couldn’t tel which way they were going.

Lauren bought a book about weather and learned the names of the clouds. She would chant them under her breath as she looked up: “Cumulus, stratus, cirrus, pileus.” She learned everything she could about clouds to fil up her time. She learned that cirrus was a Latin root meaning curl of hair. “Cirrus,” she’d whisper, standing behind Preston, staring at his hair. “What?” he’d say. “Nothing,” she’d answer. Her favorite cloud was cumulonimbus. It sounded like a magic word. It sounded like something dirty.

Her friends were concerned that she was going crazy. “You should quit your job,” Shannon told her.

“Yeah,” Isabel a agreed. “Don’t make yourself sick over this guy. He’s just a dirty bartender.”

“A dirty sexy bartender,” Lauren said.

Shannon nodded sadly. “Yeah, he is. You should definitely quit.”

Preston walked in late for the lunch shift and slid behind the bar to start cutting fruit. Lauren raised her eyebrows at him from across the room, where she was rol ing silverware. “You’re late,” she said to him.

“Real y, my dear?” Preston asked. “I thought I was right on time.” Preston was a person who got away with saying things like “my dear” to girls he’d just dumped. Lauren hated him for this.

“Late night?” Lauren asked. “You look like shit.” Preston laughed because he knew he didn’t and tucked in his shirt.

Carly, the other waitress, burst in and threw her bag down before running to the bathroom. On Lauren’s first day of work, Carly had told her that she had a tattoo of a lawn mower on her pubic bone. “See, the lawn mower is right here,” she said, touching the space right above her crotch. “And then I shave the hair in front of it to make it look like it mowed a path. Upkeep’s a bitch, but guys love it. Want to see it?”

“No thanks,” Lauren said. “Maybe another time.”

Lauren was sure that she would die young. Maybe she would get a tumor or die in a freak subway accident. More likely, she would be murdered by a serial kil er. Dateline would do a special and interview everyone at the restaurant. “She was a pretty nice girl,” Carly would say. Maybe she would offer to show the cameraman her tattoo. Preston would pretend to be upset, but would real y be excited at the thought of being on TV. “We dated,” he would tel them. “She was a special girl,” he would say, and then look down for dramatic effect.

People who knew Lauren from col ege would watch this and wonder what the hel happened to her. They would ask each other why Lauren was hanging out with Ms. Lawn Mower Tattoo and Mr. STD Bartender. They would be sad for the way things turned out for her, and then they would turn off the television and forget about it.

Lauren tried to go out with her friends and have a normal social life. She would meet them after her shift ended and pretend that she wasn’t exhausted and didn’t smel like hamburger meat. She told herself that she needed to keep doing this.

“I have to find a real job,” she would tel her friends.

“So find one,” they would say. They didn’t understand. They talked about e-mail programs and corporate retreats. They compared health plans and 401(k)s and Lauren felt lonely.

Carly came out of the bathroom and asked Preston for a glass of cranberry juice. “I have a UTI,” she confided to Lauren. Lauren just nodded and continued to rol the silverware.

“It’s that new guy I’m seeing. I can’t get enough!” Carly bumped her hip against Lauren’s as though they were old friends, two gossiping gals trading sex stories.

Lauren excused herself from the UTI talk to go back to the manager’s office. She had requested next weekend off and wanted to make sure that Ray hadn’t put her on the schedule. Lauren had to go to her friend Annie’s wedding on the Cape. Annie and her fiance had bought a house in Boston and e-mailed pictures of the renovation of the rooms as it went along, with commentary like “Mitchel put in the tile in the upstairs bathroom al by himself. I knew there was a reason I’m marrying this one!”

Annie was the kind of friend who needed to do everything first. Lauren knew what she must have been like in third grade, fil ing out tests and raising her hand for the teacher, shouting, “Done! I’m done!”

When she’d gotten the save-the-date card last year, Lauren had been sure that she would have a job by the wedding. When she’d gotten the invitation two months ago, she’d stil thought there was hope. Now she knew that she would have to see al of these people and tel them that she was a waitress. A waitress who had sex in walk-in refrigerators.

Lauren’s first customers of the day were two women, a brunette and a blonde. They had a young boy with them who belonged to the blonde. Lauren could tel by the way he kept trying to impress the brunette that she wasn’t his mother. He wiggled in his seat and said things like “A horse says, Neigh!” Then he laughed and slid down the booth to the floor, pretending to be embarrassed when she noticed him.

Lauren didn’t dislike children, but she also couldn’t say that she liked them. She was sure this was going to be a problem. Shannon assured her that it was normal, but her friend Kristi told her it was not. “That makes me sad,” she’d said to Lauren, and Lauren felt ashamed.

The two women each ordered a chicken salad with fat-free raspberry vinaigrette, and the little boy ordered bacon and French fries. His mother laughed like he had done something clever. She looked at her brunette friend and shook her head and smiled as if to say, Isn’t he a riot? Isn’t he the most adorable thing you’ve ever seen? Lauren waited with her pen above her pad for the mother to make him order something else. The mother didn’t say anything.

“So, you want me to bring an order of fries and a separate order of bacon?” she final y asked. The mother looked at her like she was stupid and nodded.

Lauren walked to the computer to put the order in. She didn’t even know how to place an order of bacon. At McHale’s, bacon was something that went on a burger or a BLT. It was not something that people ordered a plate of.

“Preston?” she cal ed to him down the bar. “Do you know how to place an order of bacon?”

“Bacon? Where does bacon come from? A ham?” Preston asked, and then laughed.