Famous Authors as Café Customers

by Rachel Kincaid

It was noon on a Saturday. It was ninety-five degrees, and there was a line out the door, and the previous customer had been a tiny elderly Armenian woman who had been impossible to understand, and so obviously the person next in line was my former undergraduate thesis advisor.

“I had no idea you worked here!”

“Oh, hi, [redacted]! So nice to see you again!”

“You too! This is such a lovely little place, you must love working here.”

My advisor was a fairly famous and lauded novelist who had successfully moved out of the realm of “ethnic” literature into what is regarded as generally good American literature. Her books dealt with this, with being American, but also with being “ethnic.” She was very short and very imposing, and although I was always aware that she had a family, it was difficult to picture that while she talked about speaking on panels with Salman Rushdie. But now they were here, two girls who looked like American Girl dolls and a husband with a beard and affectionate eyes.

“What can I get for you?” My advisor and her family did not respond. They were looking at the menu.

“I’d like one of those,” the husband said, pointing towards a tomato-and-goat-cheese tart. The food where I work is Middle Eastern-ish; people are willing to pay $4 for tarts because they’re “ethnic.”

“Okay,” I said. “Would you like this for here or to go?” He didn’t answer.

“I’d like a tomato and goat cheese tart,” my advisor said.

“I just ordered one of those,” her husband told her. She considered this.

“Well, I want one too,” she said.

“It has bacon in it, too. Just so you know.” We had never talked about food while she was my advisor, but I felt vaguely like she might be a vegetarian. A lot of people are.

“That’s fine,” she told me.

“Would you like this for here or to go?”

“For here.” I put two tarts on two separate plates.

“So is this your summer job?” my advisor asked as I handed them to her over the register.

“No,” I said. I wanted to explain further, but everything I could say to clarify sounded pathetic. “This is my real job,” or “this is all I do now.” I had gone to a very expensive private school. My advisor had left her teaching position at that school in the middle of my thesis because the university didn’t want to give her a year off to start a new book.

“Oh,” she said.

I had never gotten along particularly well with my advisor, and assumed that this was because I wasn’t smart enough. When I told her I wasn’t sure how to structure a work of this length, she told me that with fiction there was a center that was an iron ring in the sea, and that you had to always watch that iron ring or else the work would fall apart. “Oh,” I said.

“Is there anything else I can get for you?” My advisor and her family ordered three items from the kitchen, and paid with a card. I printed out their receipt, and told them “Your order number is 37.” My advisor walked away from the counter, and her husband said “Thank you.” Neither of them left a tip.

My thesis had won an award that came with a $100 check; everyone else who wrote a fiction thesis also won an award, as there were four departmental awards and four thesis writers. The section I had read aloud at my defense had to do with child sexual abuse. I had given my mother a copy of the full work, and she had read parts of it.

After twenty minutes, I found a coworker and told them I needed someone else to take over on register. I leaned up against the table behind the counter and hoped I looked sick so that someone would ask me if I needed a break.

“My thesis advisor from college just came in,” I said.

“Oh really?” my coworker asked. He was from California, and had been a champion cyclist before he started smoking too much weed.

“She asked if this was my summer job.”

“Ha,” he said.

“And she didn’t tip.”

“Wow,” he said. “That’s cold.”

“Yeah,” I said. After I got off work that day I was so depressed with the state of my life I had to go to a thrift store and buy a gray sweater for ten dollars. I checked on Amazon later, and her new novel comes out this month. I will not buy it, because I liked her short stories better anyways.

Rachel Kincaid spends most of her time writing about Katy Perry and Lady Gaga covers, which is weird when you think about how expensive her degree was. She also has a blog and twitter, duh.

Photo by Axel Kuhlmann from Flickr.