Betty the Waitress

The map was spread across the table, wrinkled edges fighting for space against coffee cups and greasy dishes, as we plotted the distance from New Jersey to California. It was 2 a.m., and we were 22, four old friends squashed in a diner booth. Eileen was moving to California in two days, and the rest of us were going along for the drive. We were all one week sprung from college, and I was desperate for anything new, just needing to go, to move.

“More coffee?” asked the waitress, standing over us with a fresh pot in one hand and the other perched on her thin hip. Her name badge called her Betty, and she looked like one, with frizzled yellow hair and chipped magenta fingernails. She had the leathery glow of a lifetime sprawled on a beach blanket down the shore, a cigarette in one hand as the other flicked through a gossip magazine.

“Hey now. Where you guys going?” she asked, spotting our map.

“We’re driving to California,” said Eileen, blond curls shining. “We’re leaving on Saturday.”

“Ooh, California,” Betty said. “Push in,” she demanded and we obliged, wide-eyed, sliding further into our booth so she could sit, half her ass perched over the edge.

I pushed the map towards her and explained our routing.  We’d leave New Jersey and head first to Tennessee, where we’d walk on Beale Street in Memphis, big plastic cups of warm beer in hand as the blues spilled out of the clubs into the steamy twilight. We’d plow on through Oklahoma, where we didn’t know it yet, but we’d sleep in a bug-ridden roadside motel and wake up at sunrise to stand over the empty swimming pool out back, wondering about the rotting mattress resting in the deep end. We’d push on through endless Texas, where we’d eat enormous steaks and take goofy pictures with cowboys. And our final night would see us streaking through the desert of New Mexico, Eileen and I singing Counting Crows songs under a midnight bowl of stars as our friends slept in the back.

Betty listened with calculation, following my eager pencil scratches across the highway lines. Other booths tried to catch her eye but she pretended not to see. She was probably pretty, in a flashy way, when she was younger. I pictured her twenties full of hot pink bikinis and platform sandals, parades of boyfriends with motorcycles and tattoos. Tonight she looked washed out under the florescent lights. I noticed the start of liver spots on the back of her hands.

“You kids seem nice. I always wanted to go to Cali. Got any extra room for me?” she said. She grabbed a french fry off my plate and popped it into her mouth.  

I intuited the game. “Sure thing, Betty,” I said. “Everyone needs to drive to California once, right?”

“You know it,” she said. “I’ll find a babysitter for my kids. We’ll all be best friends by the time we get there. I bet the beaches in California are nicer than the ones here.”

We told her she could squeeze in. We’d leave noon Saturday, from the diner parking lot. Pack light.  

An angry guy at another table shouted out for his check, and the game was suddenly over. “Well, it’s been nice, kids,” she said, hauling herself up. “Enjoy your drive.”

She walked away, old and tired to my young eyes, and I felt a flash of fear. I saw in the set of her shoulders how easy it might be to become someone you had no intention of becoming, to be 47 and dreaming of driving away with a car full of strangers towards a bluer sea. I was full of the terror you feel at 22 when you have no idea who you are or what to be, and the future is catching up with you. When I closed my eyes all I could ever see was a road, a snaking asphalt of exit signs blasting by, radio up and windows down. I didn’t know where I wanted to go but I knew I couldn’t sit still.

I thought of Betty from time to time over the next nine years, as I built my life brick by brick. Of course I thought of her on that cross-country drive, the last time my friends and I would be together and free, with every door still wide open for us. I thought of her again when I flew to England a few months later on a working visa, armed with nothing but one brave friend, a hostel reservation for the first two nights and a hazy plan to get a job, find an apartment, and make a life on the opposite side of a big ocean. I remembered her when I came home six months and 12 countries later, with strong shoulders from backpacking, $44 in my bank account and a heart bursting with a level of confidence I’d never known before.  

But one blink of a year later I was miserable, commuting for three hours a day on crowded, dirty trains towards a desk job in Manhattan that sounded cool on paper, like something I should want to be doing, but I didn’t.

So on my 25^th birthday I reminded myself of Betty and left that job for a new one in the travel industry. And that beautiful little job brought me everywhere – to the Galapagos Islands, where I snorkeled with sharks and laid flat on my drunken back at midnight on the deck of a small wooden ship, dazzled to realize that even the stars were different in this opposite hemisphere, gazing at the Southern Cross instead of the North Star. To a colorful marketplace in Lima, Peru, where I held on tight through my very first earthquake. To the sun-bleached Atacama Desert in Chile, and to the Nazca Lines, where I flew in a tiny red four passenger airplane and tried not to vomit on the pilot. Just this winter I counted my blessings and set foot on the rocky shores of Antarctica for the first time, penguins flocking around my heavy boots and the briny sea smell in my nose. If it’s possible that there is a portal on this planet to another one, then that secret doorway is in the rough waters of the Drake Passage, and on the other side is a miracle of blue ice and bright light. I've stood at the bottom of the earth and felt true wonder, and have been deeply thankful. 

For unknown reasons, I was born with a restless heart. At 22, in that diner booth, I didn’t know how far I could go on this earth, in this life. All I knew was that the world was big, and that I was small, and that I was afraid. I was scared to wake up and be 30, 42, 55, and wonder where it all went, all that limitless space and air.

I watched Betty closely that night, the way she small-talked with the truck drivers and drunk teenagers like a pro, how she sighed as she leaned along the bakery display counter to rest. She kept checking her watch. She felt restless, too.  

It’s my opinion that there are a lot of Betty's out there, actually. People who are dimly aware of the enormous scope of this planet and that have a real itch to feel the miles collect under tired feet, but who get caught up in their lives and somehow just never get there. This is human and normal, and I get it. Life feels long when you’re at the starting gate, and it’s easy to think to yourself, later, later. Someday. I’ll go on that trip/write that book/go back to school eventually, when the time is right. When the money is there. When I meet someone new, when the kids are grown. All of these future days feel like a guarantee when you are young and hopeful and full of plans.

Although I have tried, I don’t believe in later. When I thought of the future, even back then, all I could ever see was loss, the way our moments all slip towards an eventual decline. No one is promised a glowing tomorrow and plenty of good people don’t get one at all, and there is no discernible reason to the way it’s doled out.  Maybe this belief system makes me morbid, or melancholy, I’m not sure. I choose to think of it as a blessing and let it anchor me deep into the earth. My bible is imprinted with one simple thought: you can spend your time dreaming about the future, or you can put your feet on the ground and walk.

Last summer, I went to Africa. One morning, I sat with friends under the equatorial light in a safari vehicle that smelled like sweat and sunshine, and watched as one lone giraffe galloped across the Serengeti’s dusty horizon line. A few days later we stood together on a rooftop in Zanzibar, and I held my hand over my heart as the first notes of a muezzin’s call to prayer rang out across a city made of stone. I looked out over rusted tin roofs to a flawless blue sea and felt a happiness so deep it almost twisted into pain. Every decision I’d ever made that walked me towards that moment had been the right one. And for the rest of my life, I have the gift of remembering that moment of full-bodied joy, that sureness of heart and step.

A few months ago, I mentioned Betty to a friend. In telling the story, I realized I hadn’t thought about her, or what she represents to me, in years. I suppose I don’t need to hold that memory close anymore, like a talisman against time and loss. I’m too busy living a life that fits.

That night in the diner it felt good to be with friends, planning an adventure. It was time to start walking. I watched Betty, ducked my head, and said a fleeting prayer for all of my future selves. Then I fell back into the lines of the map.