THE FIRST EVENING that the Tropicale Grill at the Sunrise Cove Resort Motel was open for paying customers was the kind of evening that Ariane had imagined weeks before, when she had stood in the skeleton of the dining room and pictured it as it might be. The crowd seemed to enter in a rush and scatter to their tables as if there were a competition underway.
With each arrival bringing new impressions and duties, it was all just too much to absorb. She went about her work, did as she had been taught, but she was dazzled and befuddled and performed in a daze, wearing a goofy smile. The conversation buzzed and the crowd spun like the bright bits of glass in a child’s kaleidoscope. When the room was finally full, her mind caught up with her senses, and she could catch her breath and look around, select the things she wanted to see and hear, pull them from the buzz and dazzle, and get some sense of what was going on.
Some of the people in the room were strangers, some were people she recognized from around town, and a few were people she actually knew. The local people were impressed. She saw it on their faces, and she heard it in their remarks. She was surprised at the way they spoke about the room, the staff, and the food without any concern about her hearing them, as if she weren’t right there beside them to hear them, or as if they didn’t recognize that she was associated with the establishment. This surprised her, because she had seen, when she finished dressing, that in the uniform of the waitresses at the Tropicale Grill, the skintight black toreador pants and snug sleeveless white stretch top, with an artificial hibiscus in her hair, she had the look of a woman from another town. As she walked around the room, she listened.
“They don’t seem to go out of their way to make you comfortable, know what I mean?”
“They make you feel uncomfortable.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“It’s a lot more than I thought it would be.”
“It gleams.”
“People are more dressed up than I expected. I mean, it’s a motel.”
“I never thought that there would be so many strangers.”
“I didn’t know Jack Tuttle owned a suit.”
“Did you think that people would come from out of town for this?”
“I never thought I’d be driving to Babbington to have dinner.”
“It makes you look at the town in a new light.”
“Well, it’s something new, something to talk about.”
Now and then, here and there, as she roamed the room, s he might have heard something like the tail end of a remark or a question that she couldn’t quite be sure she had heard, something like “woodsy,” or “could she cough,” or “cheek off,” maybe just a sneeze, but she might have been mistaken and so she shook it off.
Mr. Murray liked to keep a low profile, to observe the operation from a quiet spot. (After she’d been working in the Bayview Saltaire Lounge for a while, Betty Dorati described him to her parents as “a creepy little guy who’s always lurking in a corner, spying on you.”) He had his eye on Ariane. He noticed the way she watched Renée greet people as they came in. He noticed the way Ariane would mimic Renée’s smile and her posture, in miniature, in a restrained way, just practicing, something that most people wouldn’t have noticed. He even noticed that Ariane was beginning to speak in Renée’s voice, using her tone and phrasing. When she arrived at a table, she would say, “Good evening. It’s nice to see you here tonight.” This proprietary attitude confused many of the customers, who didn’t take her for a waitress. They chatted with her for a bit and complimented her on the room but said nothing about ordering, because they expected someone else to come along to take their orders. Mr. Murray couldn’t help smiling. He saw such innocence there. What she thought she knew was so small a part of what there was to know. Apparently, Ariane had also observed and absorbed a bit of Renée’s style that Mr. Murray found extremely annoying. This was the way that Renée seemed to flirt with the male customers. It was an ambiguous set of looks, a playfulness, a little familiarity, and a habit of touching them, so lightly that they could be mistaken in thinking that this was flirtation, but were flattered by it all the same. Mr. Murray thought it was vulgar and—worse—ineffective.
[to be continued]
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