How I felt when I was happy (minus working as a waitress)
She had come back to California this time slimmer than that state had ever allowed her to become before. Her jeans hung satisfyingly slack on her hips, and her arms did not jiggle. There was nothing unnecessary on her; she felt capable and contained. She had only as much money as she needed and no desire to spend more. She had no boyfriend. She ate small meals. Everything she owned fit in the back of her truck.
She had come back because she had no better plan, and for the first time in her adult life that felt okay. All the times before, she had been returning out of desperation or debt or a broken heart. But now she had nothing important or specific to do, and she didn't feel pressured, guilty, or inferior about it. She was twenty-three. She did not have a college degree. Her work in the world, she had decided, was of the invisible kind. Was not of this world, in fact. Not many people understood that when she dared to say it, and those who did usually only did so when they were drunk.
She found a job as a cocktail waitress. At certain peaks in the course of an evening, she felt actual grace, she thought. Immense comprehension might be passed in a glance from a cute boy; a man might tell her, "Keep smiling, it makes the world a better place," and it would seem not generic but wholly, honestly, uniquely directed at her. For one second, something would be generated. Would rise and mingle in the air, then travel into the night with the dispersing people and would thereby, yes, be making the world a better place, even if only in tiny increments. After a few drinks her belief in the theory solidified, and she walked through the crowd believing she could glean essential characteristics about people in a glance. She felt lucid and critical and sexy. The room was hers. Handing drinks off precarious full trays to sympathetic, flirtatious, or oblivious customers, she experienced a feeling of satisfaction at being the one at work in the midst of others' leisure. The satisfaction was aided by the fact that she was also privy to some exclusives--free drinks, favorable attention from the musicians who played there, privileged passage through the crowd, the right to push. It was a position that made her feel known (people either avoided a waitress's gaze or sought it out) but exempt from social expectations. At the end of the night the overheads were switched on, and in that new stark glare she would gather and stack pint glasses with a kind of lowdown pride.
In this manner--she felt--she was reinventing herself.