by Katie Edkins Milligan
From Fiction Number 65 (2021).
Katie Edkins Milligan - www.katieedkinsmilligan.com
★ Lucky's won the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction in 2021.
IN THAT VERGING summer between high school and college, I worked at a BYOB lobster restaurant on an inland creek in Kittery, half an hour down from Kennebunk by the Post Road, where the water was brown and shallow enough to get hot. I lived in the next county over, which is enemy territory in a football town like this, so I shouldn’t have gotten the job. But graduation had hooked me on the idea of stepping out into the world, and whenever I’d been to Lucky’s the people in the aprons had always seemed adult and sexy, so when I went to fill out an application I made myself wear a skimpy top, and I could hardly believe I did it, but it worked.
When I talk about Lucky’s with people in my life today—people who’ve never been to Maine—I think they imagine it like the postcards. Overlooking one of those stretches of rocky beach with cold, silver sand. Nubble Light on the horizon, untouched by time, always just as sweet and Nubbly as ever. But Lucky’s wasn’t one of those Maine places, and the hard part is explaining how being on a lovely coastline would have ruined the whole vibe. The restaurant was a long, clapboard pier that sagged over the creek bed, with painted picnic tables on top and a cabin by the road where customers placed their orders and a senior waitress plucked flapping bugs out of the tank. Some people came by car, but a lot of locals rowed up in canoes, tied their boats to the pilings, and baton-passed beer coolers up the ladder. I had a dream a few months back where I was, inexplicably, back home with a group of women from the office, and I took them to Lucky’s for lunch, and it made me so mad the way they said, “You worked here?”—the way they tried to convince me it must not have been the way I remembered it.
On the June day I drove to Lucky’s to fill out the application, I passed some of the nicer beach restaurants on my way. I checked myself in the rearview mirror at one point, and I worried I might look obvious and fake in my revealing top. A boy had bought it for me once on a weird mall date, and I’d always been too concerned about what that had meant, but picking it out from the back of my closet years later felt like selecting it for myself. I stood outside on the pier at Lucky’s, filling out the forms, and I felt the rest of the waitstaff glancing my way. They all looked old enough for college, and I wondered if—or hoped that—they thought the same thing when they looked at me. I alternated between dipping my shoulder to make the spaghetti strap slip and crossing a tentative arm across my chest to hold the strap in place.
When I got home, I found my younger sister in the kitchen, and I smiled when I told her, “I got the job.” She saw me in my outfit and looked surprised, and put a hand on the mesh collar of her own baggy pinnie. She sounded resentful, or jealous, when she said, “You look like a Lucky’s girl already.”
My manager was a guy named Mack. He was the owner’s son, in his late thirties, as short as my little brother, a jacked-up wheeler type with a cleft lip scar and a hairpin temper who yelled at customers and male waitstaff. His dad fired him every other week, but he was never actually fired. Whenever he got mad, or flirty, I’d look down at the top of his head and wonder whether he’d seem dangerous if he were full-sized.
I was the new girl in a crew of older kids who’d all gone to the same schools and worked at Lucky’s for summers in a row. A few roomed together at Orono and tacked pictures of themselves in their dorms to the walls by the cash. On my first day, Mack told Jay to show me the ropes, so I knew Jay must be an experienced Lucky’s server. He wore his waist apron slung low, like baggy jeans, and he held the swinging doors open for me. Mack trailed alongside us as Jay toured me through The Tent and the shucking station and the back lot, where they shoveled the debris of the place into built-in dumpsters. “You have cat eyes,” Mack said to me by the trash. “Meow. Meow.” Jay laughed, rolling his eyes while he walked away, but he glanced back a few steps later and almost ran into a customer. I thought, Was that because of me? And then, That was because of me. One of the veteran waitresses standing nearby took a step toward Jay and sneered.
For those first few weeks, especially when it was busy, when he knew I was stressed, Mack would purr at me as I hustled past him. It was the kind of thing that would have unnerved me at school. I might have called friends to talk about it, or gone home afterwards and said to my sister, this is what’s happening, and she might have said, Don’t tell Mom. But on the hot Lucky’s pier, as a new Lucky’s waitress, I felt the purring less like an advance and more like a reaction to some kind of influence. I tried testing it, playing with it like a game—I started flicking my lashes at Mack on purpose, to confirm that I could make him do the purr.
It’s easy for those people who weren’t there to say, today, That doesn’t sound like a good work environment. I can talk myself into thinking the same thing. But that seems like a false way I’m supposed to remember it now, not the way I actually felt about it then. From the beginning, I saw things at Lucky’s clearly. I was aware of myself while I was doing the job, so aware that I was aware of my awareness in real time. Like moving in front of a mirror and appreciating the reflection. I’d think, I’m unfurling the rain curtains, and then, I’m thinking about unfurling the rain curtains while I unfurl the rain curtains. I’m thinking about flicking my lashes at this guy while I flick them. I like feeling this new way about myself, and I’m liking it right now.
After K-12 years with all the same people, I wonder if one big part of it was the novelty of newness. How it buoyed me up. When the other waitresses hazed me early on in girly ways—telling me fake shift times so I’d almost show up late, or talking in front of me about afterwork crew parties I wasn’t invited to—I realized I could choose to be someone who was unintimidated. They’d make me clean the bathrooms, and I’d scrub the stalls hard and quick, and walk right back up to the head hostess, mop propped tall, hip cocked, like, Anything else? When Jay and the rest of the guys eyed me obviously, like boys who knew me when I was eight never would, I eyed them back. I let them look.
The Lucky’s uniform was a logo T-shirt and shorts of our own choosing. The shorter the better. Even now, when I’m back home, I’ll find one of my Lucky’s tops in a dresser drawer and it will still smell like those months at the restaurant. Butter and steamers, broth and sweat. I’ll remember coming home from a full-day shift in the first few weeks and slogging upstairs and taking a few extra seconds on my feet to study myself in my work outfit while the shower warmed up. It was a roller derby kind of look, tight and mostly limbs, and I’d suck in my kneecaps and watch in the mirror as the sweet meat of my thighs clenched.
My Lucky’s summer was when I first started going to the gym. Before that, in my middling high school athlete days, weak attempts at exercise had only ever been about skinnying down. I’d spent years jogging around sports courts, sort of sweating, and then pinching at my skin in front of locker room mirrors with girl friends, defeating myself like teenagers shouldn’t, like most do. But in the kitchen at work, I watched the other waitresses bragging about their fitness routines and comparing the curves of their hard muscles when they hoisted bags of clams. The confidence with which they showed themselves off—it was revolutionary. I began going to the Y in the mornings before my shifts, using the leg machines and then oiling myself in tanner for my day on the pier. When I spent a day’s wages on bigger shorts because my ass had shaped up, I was proud. By late July, I’d catch myself rolling the hems and bending the long way over a table at work when I wiped it down, like a carwash girl. I started leaning my weight to one foot while I took orders, enjoying the feeling of one strong muscle shelf sliding over another.
One night in early August, I cleared the plates away from a big party at the back of the pier. It was a twelve-top, with three coolers of Harpoon arrayed down the middle and trays piled high with shells. I was distracted, because an old high school boyfriend had showed up at Lucky’s earlier that day with some kids from his track team. I’d watched him and his buddies walk in and place an order with Morgan, a popular waitress with a tongue ring who was just starting to warm up to me, and it amazed me, the way she made them all look small and out of place by comparison. She’d held a pair of chicks up toward them and they’d jumped back. When the group had turned to leave the order line, this guy saw me, and waved, and I’d watched Morgan look from him to me and raise her eyebrows when she understood we knew each other. I’d gone to fold napkins with Jay, and I’d been able to see the old boyfriend watching, frowning when Jay towel-whipped a flirty napkin against the skin on my waist. The boyfriend called me over to talk, and after a few minutes he’d pointed at the cartoon logo on my uniform shirt. He’d said, “Those claws are—strategically placed,” and he and his buddies had laughed. It was disorienting, being embarrassed for someone I used to pray would call my phone. I’d told him, “I should be getting back.”
The customers at the twelve-top table were in their twenties, friends, playing some kind of casual drinking game. At the head of the table was a blond guy with a mischievous surfer face. While I cleared his tray, I tried to look confident in the wake of my disorienting afternoon. I bent across him and smiled, and I asked him how everything had been. “Food’s great. Service, great,” he said. Drunkenly, he added, “And look at you.”
Then, with his friends watching, he pulled a folded pack of bills from his pocket and lifted it up to my bare leg. He grinned, and tickled the paper slow across my thigh, and slotted it up under the rolled hem of my short shorts. The denim was tight, so the money held there, against my new muscles, like a scale on a fish. “A tip,” the guy said, giggling and bouncing his eyebrows. His friends were all, Jesus, Ollie, and, Leave the poor girl alone. Ollie! I just smiled and left with his tray, the money still in my shorts, its folded corners poking my skin while I walked.
The radio sang loudly in the kitchen. Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long.” Jay stood at the roll station with Morgan, and Mack sat behind them on a stool at the cash, picking at his nails. I walked over to them, set the customer’s tray on the counter, and tugged the wad of bills out from underneath the fabric on my leg. A hundred dollars. “Cute little friends of yours earlier,” Morgan said, teasingly. I held the money up and said, loud enough for Jay and Mack and Morgan all to hear, “This guy just stuck a tip up my shorts. Like at a strip club.” My voice wasn’t mad. It was incredulous, tentative, as in, Can you believe this is a thing that happens? As in, How is it supposed to make me feel?
Mack waggled his eyebrows like Ollie had done, and he purred. Morgan looked surprised. Jay frowned and started to ask me to explain, but Morgan interrupted him and said, “They do that sometimes.” Her voice mimicked her usual confidence, but the casualness to it was forced, fake, like she was overworking to imply that this had also happened to her. Something had shifted. I replayed the way she’d said it in my head. She turned away and then glanced at me, and I raised my eyebrows at her, the way she’d done when my old boyfriend waved. Jay made a joke of rolling up his T-shirt sleeves, and said, “Well, don’t you ladies worry.” Morgan laughed, and I fingered the bills in my hand.
It was a muggy night, and I spent the closing half hour of my shift wiping down the steamed-up kitchen windows. I did it without being told to, and the owner said, Nice job, but I was really standing there so I could look out at the pier, at Ollie at the twelve-top table. I caught myself wondering if he’d even remember that he’d done it. When his group got up to leave, I hurried out of the kitchen from the door by the road entrance and bumped into Ollie’s back, in a way that could have been an accident. He turned around, and I pulled the hundred dollars out of my pocket, holding the money up to him between two fingers. I tilted it toward his face, like I was about to return it, and then I took it back for myself. I said, smiling, “Thanks.” One of his lady friends said he was bothering that girl again, and I told her no. I said, “It was me.”
Summer holidays were our biggest nights, and on Labor Day, for one of our busiest hours, Mack let me man the cabin where customers picked out their lobsters. It was the sitting down, face-of-the-restaurant station that everyone wanted because it meant—for that shift at least—you were more important than everyone else bussing tables and clearing shells out on the pier. “My parting gift,” Mack said, smirking. “Don’t fuck it up.”
I sat on a stool, behind a booth with an order pad and a wet scale, and the winding queue of customers stepped up one by one, making their requests. They’d say, “Pound and a half, please,” or, “Pound and a quah-tuh,” parodying the accent. I’d go over to the corresponding tank and plunge my hand into the water, grabbing one of the chicks by its round back. When I pulled it out into the open air, it would buck in my hand, flailing its banded claws. I’d hold it up to make the silly girls in line squeal, like Morgan did. I’d place it on the bed of the scale and watch it scratch against the metal.
A few times, if the customer seemed interested enough, I said, “If you want, I can tell you if it’s male or female,” and then I flipped the lobster on its back and pried its tail open, holding it still in my hand and petting its first row of feelers. If they were feathery, girl. Bony and opaque, a boy. Between groups, I’d wipe the salt water off my hands onto the butt of my shorts. After an hour, Morgan tapped me out and said, Good job. I was ten feet tall.
The next day, a Tuesday, was a hot calm after the storm. I was headed off to college in five days, but the future felt as far away as high school felt finished. The sunlight flashed off the squeaky clean tables. The water below the pier streamed past the pilings, canoe-less. A few customers popped in for crab rolls around noon, but then, for hours between lunch and dinner, the restaurant stood completely, resoundingly empty. The others told me this happened occasionally, once or twice a year after big nights, but for me, it was the first time.
The owner had left for the day and put Mack in charge. Mack passed out Styrofoam cups of wine-slap Franzia, and all seven of us—a small shift—untied our waist aprons and lined ourselves along the fence of the pier, holding our drinks over the belly of the moving creek, baking in the sun. The overgrown, undeveloped bank across from Lucky’s had only tall lady ferns and sand, so it was just us, and empty tables, and lobsters walking in their tanks.
I stood next to Morgan by the edge of the pier. She wiped her sweaty forehead, and we looked out at the water and I said, right when it occurred to me, because it was hot, “What if we went swimming?” She stared into her wine for a moment, and I briefly thought she might tell me to refill her cup. But then she smiled a slow, impressed smile. I understood. “Hey,” I said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Let’s go swimming.”
Mack smirked and said, “Don’t let me stop you.”
The boys stripped down to their boxers. We girls scavenged sports bras from the gym bags in our cars, and we changed behind the plastic room divider that wrapped around the outside bathroom door, peeking between the slats to confirm the guys were watching. We cannonballed off the boards like kids, but we landed on the squeegee creek bottom and emerged laughing, grabbing for our wine back on shore. The tide came up to my nipples and ombréed the fabric on my chest.
Mack picked up a decorative buoy and threw it as hard as he could across the water. “Swim! I’m paying you to swim!” Morgan and the rest of them raced off after it, but Jay and I hung back by the dock.
Above the surface, Jay was naked. He looked at me, bobbing in the tug of the water, and I was aware of the expanse of my own wet skin. Despite the experience of a few fumbling afternoons with old high school guys, a few months earlier I might have believed the sexy thing was to pretend I didn’t know what I wanted. I might have made myself wait for him to come to me. But Mack whistled at us from the shore. “Swim!” he yelled. “It was your idea to swim!”
A half hour or so later we pulled ourselves out of the creek, and toweled with clean aprons, and put our uniforms back on, and topped off the Franzia in our cups, and I showed a couple other girls how to French braid their wet sidebangs back to keep them from drying curly in their face. By the time the first dinner customers showed up we were pretty drunk, and mostly dry, and a few days later I was gone. But while we were still swimming in the water, I kicked back over to Jay with my new gym legs and hooked his boxers with my pointer finger. I kissed him, hard. On the shore, Mack catcalled, saying, Meow! Meow!, and I pulled Jay even closer, and I felt him go hard against the muscle of my hip. I wrapped my fingers around him under the water. I felt like I could make him do anything at all. Since then, there have been these crushing days when I’ve tried to summon that powerful feeling. Hold it like that first dick in my hand.
Katie Edkins Milligan is a fiction writer from Maine, currently living and working in Texas. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Tahoma Literary Review and North Dakota Quarterly, and she is the 2021 recipient of the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction. She is the fiction editor at Gulf Coast and an MFA candidate at the University of Houston, where she is an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow. She has received support from the GrubStreet Short Story Incubator program, the Aspen Summer Words Workshop and the Southampton Writers Conference. Find her at www.katieedkinsmilligan.com.