The bartender at McHale’s was sleazy in an attractive way. This annoyed Lauren. She couldn’t make sense of it. She was disgusted with Preston, yet still happy whenever he threw a lime at her from behind the bar. “He’s gross,” she tried to explain to her friends. “He has dirty blond hair that he slicks back behind his ears with little curls at the end. It always looks greasy. His eyes are a filmy blue, like he’s thinking pervy things. And he has this big scar on his chin that I just always want to touch.”
“So he’s dirty sexy,” her friend Shannon said.
“Yes!” Lauren said. “But why?”
“Dirty sexy can’t really be explained,” Shannon said. “It’s kind of like ugly sexy. Only you feel worse about it because you think you should be above the sleaze.”
Lauren felt better for the explanation, but it still unsettled her to be around him. “I will not sleep with him,” she told herself. Two weeks after she started working there, she stayed with Preston to have a drink after work and found herself having sex with him in the walk-in fridge. One second she was drinking a vodka soda, and the next thing she knew there was a bin of lettuce shaking above her head. She couldn’t serve a salad for weeks without feeling trashy.
“So much for that,” she said to Shannon. Shannon just shrugged.
Lauren was sure that Preston was not the right guy for her. But still, she found herself in his bed. She lay behind him and sucked his blond curls when he was sleeping. She knew it couldn’t end well.
Lauren was almost out of money when she decided to be a waitress. She had been looking for PR jobs in New York for a month and hadn’t even gotten an interview. So she started applying at bars in SoHo and gastropubs in the West Village. (She figured if she was going to be a waitress, she would like to do it in a place where she might see famous people.) But none of those places wanted her. It turned out that being a waitress in New York was more competitive than being in PR. Aspiring models and actresses flooded every restaurant, elbowing one another with bony arms to win the right to serve food. Lauren didn’t have a chance.
A friend suggested that she apply at McHale’s, an old-fashioned restaurant in Midtown with a wood-paneled dining room and a meatloaf special on Wednesdays. McHale’s was the kind of place that made people nostalgic for a time when businessmen drank at lunch and people ate pot roast on Sundays. It had a bar with red leather stools and a mean vodka gimlet. They offered Lauren a job the day she walked in and she took it.
And just like that, Lauren was a waitress. It was only temporary, of course. It was just an in-between job, something to make money while she was looking for her next move. She could tell that it made the customers happy when she told them this. They were more comfortable once they knew that Lauren had plans. She was just too pretty, too charming to simply be a waitress.
Lauren figured she would work at the restaurant for three months, maybe six months max. But a year went by and she was still there. She stopped sending résumés out to PR firms. She couldn’t even remember what she thought she had wanted to be.
At the very least, Preston was a distraction from the detour her career had taken. He wasn’t a big talker, and Lauren found herself filling up the silence when they were together. That was how she came to tell him the story of the ham.
In her high school biology class, Lauren dissected a pig. Each pair of students got their very own formaldehyde-soaked piglet to cut up. As they sliced and dismembered the little porkers, the teacher told them different facts about the pig’s stomachs and reproductive organs. He walked over to Lauren’s pig and pointed to the rump. “This is where ham comes from,” he told her. Lauren looked up. “Ham comes from pigs?” she asked. “Doesn’t ham come from a ham?” Everyone laughed. As soon as the question was out of her mouth, she knew it wasn’t right. A ham wasn’t an animal, of course. She was only confused for a second or two. But the thing was, she knew what the ham would look like if there was such a thing. She could picture it perfectly, as though she had actually seen it before.
She told Preston this story when they were lying in bed together. She didn’t know why she told him. Lauren hated the story, hated explaining how she’d thought a ham was an oval-shaped hunk of an animal that slurped across the ground. “You know,” she said, “I thought it would be a ham.” As she said this, she moved her hands in an oval motion. “A ham,” she emphasized, as though this would explain it.
Preston laughed so hard that he cried. “Did you think it had just that one bone?” he asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I didn’t think about it.” He held his stomach and rocked back and forth. “Ow,” he said, wrapping his arms around himself. “Ow, it hurts! I can’t stop!”
A week after that, he woke up and said, “I don’t think this is going to work.” She was still in his bed in a T-shirt and underwear and didn’t know what to say. Immediately she felt sorry for the ham—it had been a mistake to tell him about it. That much she knew.
After Preston broke up with her, Lauren started going to the park during the day. All of her friends worked in offices and she couldn’t stand to be in her apartment alone. She would go to the park and lie on the grass, waiting for the day to be over so that she could start her shift at the restaurant. She liked watching the clouds. She liked the way they always kept moving, even if it was so slowly that you couldn’t tell 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 fill 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,” Isabella 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 rolling silverware. “You’re late,” she said to him.
“Really, 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 killer. 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 really be excited at the thought of being on TV. “We dated,” he would tell them. “She was a special girl,” he would say, and then look down for dramatic effect.
People who knew Lauren from college would watch this and wonder what the hell 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 smell like hamburger meat. She told herself that she needed to keep doing this.
“I have to find a real job,” she would tell 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 roll 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 fiancé had bought a house in Boston and e-mailed pictures of the renovation of the rooms as it went along, with commentary like “Mitchell put in the tile in the upstairs bathroom all 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, filling 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 still thought there was hope. Now she knew that she would have to see all of these people and tell 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 tell 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 finally 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 called 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.
“Don’t be such a shit,” Lauren said.
“What’s with the attitude, peaches?” Preston asked. “Just a little joke. You like jokes, don’t you?”
Lauren sighed and turned back to the computer. Finally she ordered a BLT with extra bacon, hold the bread, tomato, and lettuce. Then she walked back to the kitchen to explain to Alberto what the order meant before he came out yelling.
When Lauren got back, there was another customer in her section. “He just sat there,” Carly said. She sat on a bar stool and sipped cranberry juice, looking miserable. Lauren didn’t feel like fighting with Carly today, or hearing the details of her UTI, so she picked up her pad and went over to the table.
“Hi,” Lauren said.
“Hi,” the man said back. He was about thirty, but he was dressed like he was older; his hair was swirled in an old-fashioned part and his suit was impeccable. He wore heavy-looking cuff links of a bear on his right wrist and a bull on his left. Lauren hated him on the spot.
“Can I get you something to start?” she asked.
“Well, to start with, you could smile. Would that be too much to ask?”
Lauren looked up and locked eyes with him for a second. People were always telling her to smile. Construction workers on the street and random guys in bars would just call out to her, “Hey, beautiful, smile!” They said it like they were doing her a favor, like they could make her happy with this little tip.
“My mouth turns down,” Lauren said. “I’m not unhappy.”
“Whoa, okay. That’s more information than I asked for.”
Lauren sighed. “You told me to smile, implying that I was unhappy. But I’m not. My mouth turns down and sometimes it looks that way.”
“So what are you?” the guy asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you said you’re not unhappy and you clearly aren’t happy. So what are you today?”
“I guess I’m neutral.”
“Well, neutral, it’s lovely to meet you. Can you get me a Glenlivet on the rocks?”
Lauren nodded and turned away. She was used to creepy customers. And she knew from experience that this guy was a self-important creeper, which was the worst kind. He thought that Lauren should be thrilled to be his waitress. He thought he was different from every other customer.
Lauren placed the drink order at the bar and then went to deliver the food to her other table. The boy clapped his hands when she put down his plates of fries and bacon.
“And pickles!” he cried. “I want some pickles.”
Lauren wanted to tell him about the rise of childhood obesity, but she went back to the kitchen and pulled four pickles out of the pickle tub and put them on a plate. When she placed them in front of the boy he said, “You’re a pickle,” and pointed to the brunette. Then he clamped both hands over his mouth and laughed and bounced on his seat.
She picked up the Glenlivet from the bar and deposited it on the table. “Are you ready to order?” she asked. She looked down at her pad. She didn’t want to meet his eyes.
“I know you from somewhere,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” she answered. “People say that a lot. I’m a familiar-looking person.”
“No, I definitely know you from somewhere. What’s your name?”
Lauren looked up at him. She debated giving him a fake name. Maybe this would be the serial killer who would murder her. Carly could tell the cameras that she felt guilty for not waiting on him. “It could have been me,” she would cry through purple mascara.
“Did you forget?” he asked.
“What?”
“Did you forget your name? It’s taking you a long time to answer.”
“Lauren,” she said. She figured if he was going to murder her, he was going to do it whether or not he knew her real name.
“Lauren,” he said. “I don’t know any Laurens.” He looked at her carefully.
“I told you, I’m a familiar-looking person,” she said. His stare was upsetting. She wanted him to stop looking at her. He ordered a steak sandwich and another drink. Lauren looked down, surprised. She hadn’t realized he had finished the first drink while they were talking. She took the empty glass and walked away.
“Lauren, who’s the hottie over there?” Carly was looking much perkier after her third glass of cranberry juice.
“Just some guy. He’s kind of a creep,” Lauren said, and waited for Preston to look her way so that she could order the drink.
“So you’re taking next weekend off?” Carly asked. “Ray asked if I could cover your shift.”
“Yeah, I have to go to a wedding,” Lauren said.
“Oh, fun! I love weddings,” Carly said, and then she sighed. “I want to get married.”
“Is that a proposal?” Preston asked.
“Yeah, right, Preston. Like you could handle all this!” Carly did a shimmy to make her boobs swing back and forth and Preston laughed.
“Preston, can you get me this drink?” Lauren pushed the slip across the bar.
“What’s with you, sourpuss?” Preston asked.
“Why is everyone saying that to me? I’m fine,” Lauren said.
“Clearly,” Preston said.
“It’s just these customers are bugging me today,” Lauren said. “See that table over there? The mom let her son order bacon for lunch.”
“Grody!” Carly said.
“Yeah, grody!” Preston mocked her. “Plus, do you know how many little bacons had to die for that lunch? It’s really a shame.”
“Shut it, Preston.”
“Here’s your drink, sunshine!”
The man smiled at Lauren as she carried his drink over. “Is that man your lover?” he asked.
“Lover?” Lauren asked. “No, that man is not my lover. Where are you from? Who talks like that?”
“I do,” he said, and sniffed.
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” Lauren said.
“You did mean to, and you didn’t, so don’t worry.”
“I’m a very successful man,” he said.
“That’s great.”
“It is. A lot of people are jealous of me. I make a lot of money.”
“Great.”
“A lot. More than you could probably guess.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes,” he said. “I thought of where I knew you from, by the way.”
Lauren’s heart started pounding. “Really?” she asked.
“Yes,” he answered. “I used to see you in the park.”
“The park?”
“Yes, Madison Square Park. You used to lie there and talk to yourself.”
“What?” Lauren felt dizzy.
“I used to work right there, and we’d see you on our lunch break. One of my buddies thought you were retarded.”
“I didn’t—that wasn’t me. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, come on, Lauren, give it up! I saw you. I saw you every day. Don’t be upset about my buddy calling you a retard, he was just playing around. Anyway, when he said that, I told him, ‘I’d still sleep with her. She’s still hot, even if she is a retard.’ ”
“I didn’t” was all Lauren could say.
“So, what were you doing there anyway? You were there every day and then one day you weren’t there. I always wondered what happened to you. I always wondered what you were doing, lying there and talking to yourself.”
“I wasn’t doing anything,” Lauren said.
“Well, Lauren, you must have been doing something.”
Lauren wished she hadn’t told him her real name. She didn’t like the way it sounded coming out of his mouth.
Lauren never told her friends how much she went to the park after Preston dumped her. They wouldn’t have understood that it was the only place she wanted to be. She figured she’d just keep going there forever, lie on the grass and look at the clouds, happy in her own world. But then one day she went to the park and it rained. It rained big, thick drops that made noise when they hit the ground. Lauren watched as the white light clouds soiled themselves, turning an army brown and finally a slimy black. She lay there, feeling the people around her gathering their things and leaving. But she stayed, watching the clouds quiver and finally release. She kept her eyes open the whole time. She didn’t even blink.
One drop hit her chest and stayed intact, a tiny puddle of rain wobbling on top of her skin. Others fell on her face, sliding off the grooves of her nose and mouth. Some hit her eyeballs, and she thought they ran right inside her head, through her eyes and all the way to her brain. She let them all fall on top of her, let them soak her one at a time.
She watched a cloud turn into a shape that she recognized. It was a ham—but not the ham she had seen in her head. No, this was an ugly ham, a deformed ham. She watched it float along the sky and she was repulsed. It had bumpy skin and big nostrils. It was so fat that it looked like it was going to burst. She stayed there and watched as it floated away and got eaten by the other clouds. And then she left.
Lauren didn’t go back to the park after that. She hadn’t wanted to. She wasn’t totally over Preston, but something in her shifted. Wanting him back was like wanting to cut off your arm or have your toes poked with needles. It didn’t make sense. Her friends never knew exactly what had happened, but they were just happy she was getting back to normal.
“Breakups are tough,” Isabella said. “But you got through it!”
“I’m glad you’re over him,” Shannon said. “Now you need to go find another asshole to fuck with your head.”
But none of them knew that it was the ham that had done it. How could something that Lauren made up in her own head turn so ugly? How could her creation get so out of hand? It was that ugly ham that made her move on.
Lauren was still standing at the man’s table. She couldn’t seem to make herself walk away.
“Would you like to have dinner with me sometime?” He smiled and sat back, like he was sure she would be flattered at this invitation.
“No,” she said. “I really wouldn’t.”
“I’m very successful,” he said. He slurred a little.
“Why are you here alone?” Lauren asked.
“I’m celebrating. I’m celebrating a big deal.”
“Alone?”
“I’m very successful,” he said, sounding impatient. “I told you that already.”
“Well, you’re not the type of guy I want to go to dinner with.”
“Oh no? Who is, then? That bartender over there?” He said the word “bartender” like he was saying “pimp” or “homeless person.”
“No,” Lauren said. “He’s not my type either.”
“Oh, well, look at you, Miss High and Mighty! Are you going to meet someone in the park?”
“You’re a jackass,” Lauren said.
“And you are a rude waitress,” the man said. “A rude waitress who just lost herself a tip.”
“Good,” Lauren said. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“Why don’t you just sit down for a minute?” the man asked. “I feel like we got off to a bad start.”
Lauren rested her hands on the back of the chair across from him. Her knees felt wiggly. “I’m okay,” she said.
“I didn’t ask if you were okay,” the man said. “I asked if you would like to sit down. I would buy you a drink if you did. I just closed a huge deal.”
“I know,” Lauren said. “You told me. Why do you keep telling me that?”
“It’s the kind of thing people like to know,” he said. “It’s the kind of thing you want to tell someone about yourself.”
Lauren straightened herself up and looked him in the eye. She smiled widely, showing him all of her teeth. “Thank you, then,” she said. “Thanks for sharing.” She walked away from the table. The man sat there holding his drink.
“Carly, I need you to finish up that table for me,” Lauren said. “I can’t wait on that guy anymore.”
Carly nodded. “Sure. Is he rich?”
“He might be,” Lauren said. “You should ask him.”
“Hey, Lauren,” Preston said. “This guy at the bar just ordered a grilled ham and cheese. You want to go tell him that he shouldn’t eat the precious ham animal?”
“You are a moron,” Lauren said. “You know that?”
“I’m just saying, there are a lot of hams getting slaughtered around here today,” Preston said and smiled.
Carly looked back and forth between them, like she was waiting for a fight to break out. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Lauren said.
At the other table, the little boy was standing on the seat of the booth wiggling his hips and singing, “Ooh, baby, baby. Ooh, baby!” His mother clapped and laughed until his knee knocked over the water, and then she told him to sit and motioned to Lauren that they needed help cleaning up.
This was not what Lauren went to college for. This was not where she was supposed to be. These were not the kind of people she was supposed to be around. She took a deep breath and whispered, “Cumulonimbus.” She closed her eyes and saw the Ham—the real Ham—basking in all of its glory. It looked nothing like the monster she’d seen at the park. This was a handsome Ham. It had whiskers that blew in the wind, and Lauren thought it was smiling at her. She opened her eyes, feeling better. “Did you say something?” Preston asked her, and she shook her head. She picked up a towel from the bar and went to go clean up her table. She had the Ham back. Tomorrow, she told herself. Tomorrow she would quit.