In 1962, as Catch-22 began to gain a bit of commercial traction the year after publication, my parents began going out quite often together at night. The job of taking care of me and my brother (then aged 10 and 6) in the evenings shifted increasingly to my grandparents on Riverside Drive, but the job of feeding us fell largely to a glorious delicatessen on the corner of 77th Street and Broadway, a monument dedicated to fat, cholesterol, to sheer, profane gustatory delight, an Upper West Side shrine called Gitlitz. It was there that my brother and I first learned about the potentially magnificent effects of putting two very special words together: charge + account. Night after night we'd pick up the phone, call and order and then charge food. This was nothing short of miraculous. But we also went to Gitlitz as often as we didn't, with our parents when they were around. In fact, Gitlitz was our second kitchen.
Of course Gitlitz had pickles and pastrami sans pareil, but every corner deli had pickles and pastrami. Gitlitz had something no other restaurant in the world could boast: Gitlitz had Dee.
Dee the waitress was ageless, timeless, droll and somehow endearingly coarse. She was the tough-talking gun moll with the inevitable heart of mush. Her hair, crimped short and waved, was the garish yellow of a Woolworth's doll or a marionette. Her eyebrows were plucked almost completely clean. She darted quickly, effortlessly from the kitchen to the tables and back, never writing anything down yet somehow managing to always get every order right. She was immaculate in her black and white uniform, soundless in her white, crepe-soled nurse's shoes. Dee's face was powdered an almost spectral white, making Marcel Marceau look positively George Hamiltonesque by comparison, with the inevitable bright smudge of cherry-stained lipstick on one or more of her upper front teeth. And she always, always wore earrings that were replicas of fruit.
Sometimes they were cherries, sometimes baby apples, strawberries, plums or mandarin oranges, but whenever you saw her, bushels or clusters or bunches of one plastic polished fruit or another swayed from her lobes, lazily, like palm trees in a tropical breeze.
Dee was very dear to me and to my family. My mother told me that she was "brave" and had had a "very hard life," but never elucidated. Dee talked faster than anyone I'd ever met, swallowing every other word. Mom said she had a Boston accent but all I knew was that she was the most sarcastic person I'd ever met, including my father. Were mockery and rancor a local Boston custom, like beans or chowder, I wondered? Listening to Dee and my father having a conversation was like snaring front seats at the Sarcasm Olympics, with barbs and ripostes flying back and forth over the table, whizzing past your stuffed derma like torpedoes. Settling into a booth with us, my father, who called Dee "Blondie," might ask her, with an appreciative twinkle in his eye, how the pastrami was that day, to which Ma Barker might reply, "Ha! I can't swear it won't kill you." "Well, can you swear to me it can?" he'd ask, "No, genius," Dee would reply, knowing what his answer would be. "Okay then. You talked me into it."
Dee might have been 30 but she also could have been 90. Behind that floury visage there had never been a hint of a crease, a line or a wrinkle which gave her an almost ghostly, theatrical patina.
Dad sometimes brought handwritten pages or work-in-progress index cards from Catch-22 to Gitlitz to sit with and study. Never in all our years there, did Dee ever spill a single drop of mustard, Dr. Brown Cel-Ray or mushroom and barley soup on any of them. We ate there so often the odds were against her. The gods evidently, were not. She spilled plenty, and often, just never near any of those pages. The one time she almost did, a single, dime-sized spot of pea soup had energetically lurched from its bowl just as Dee was settling it in front of my father and his papers, just as he was puzzling out some linguistic problem that was driving him batty. The spot of soup, miraculously, landed clear in Dad's margins. The somber look that passed between them afterwards though, a mutual acknowledgement of terror averted, was not unlike the looks I imagine world leaders give each other when deciding whether or not to go to war.
When Gitlitz closed, sometime in the 80s, it was suddenly. One day the door was shut and the gate was down, never to be raised again. No one ever knew what had happened or where any of the owners or staff had gone.
Imagine my shock when Dee turned up about 15 years later, at a coffee shop near Lincoln Center. She looked eerily the same and still had fruit swinging from her ears as she served plate after plate and refilled coffee cups, still world-weary, with that merry splash of red lipstick on her teeth. I went in to see her whenever I was in the neighborhood.
Watching Dee was like watching a home movie of the past playing right before my eyes, without ingesting the cholesterol. By then I was already grown and working. She had by then slowed down somewhat, her movement and her speech, but her crimped hair had grown even more stubbornly, luridly yellow, and her white powdery face even whiter, as if it had been dipped into a huge flour bin each morning. Still, Dee was like a tree without rings.
At a table of hers at Lincoln Center, she would always ask immediately after my brother, then ask, "How's your Dad?" "Lord, he was a handsome bastard. And your mother, God bless her, she was a saint. Holy Christ, those two were crazy about each other. Boy oh boy, did she have his number!" Then suddenly, one day she was gone from Lincoln Center. I asked the coffee shop manager what had happened to her but he claimed not to know. This was, by now, in the mid-90s.
One morning in 1999, I walked out of the Apthorp and there in front of me, waiting for the 104 bus to take her down Broadway, was Dee. I called out to her, the familiar face, whiter than ever, turned around and we spoke briefly. I told her that I was getting married the following week to a lovely man I'd met, from Holland. "My condolences, hon," she said, but not mean-spiritedly. She looked genuinely sad for me. "I never had time for those shenanigans," she said. She confided to me then her secret for a long and happy life had always been: The Three Fs. Flirting, fruit juice and face lifts, which she said she saved up for and had once about every 10 years.
"Men are ridiculous little boys," she told me then. "But what do you expect?" she asked, rhetorically, "They think with that flap of meat between their legs!" she laughed, and I had a sudden vision of all the platters of meat she had hauled back and forth at Gitlitz for me and my family during all those years, so many years before. I looked up Broadway and a bus was making its way across 79th Street toward us.
I hugged her impulsively and she said to me, "Just remember, the minute you take a man serious, your life becomes a tragedy. I never had the stomach for tragedy," she said, suddenly doleful, most un-Dee-like, climbing up onto the bus in her white, soundless, crepe-soled nurse's shoes.
When the bus door shut I stood where I was for a few seconds, and felt a fretful tug at my heart, certain now that I'd surely never run into her again. The Gods of Coincidence had already showered me with a surfeit of riches.
As the bus moved off, I realized that something about Dee was different this time, I had just had difficulty pinpointing exactly what. And then it hit me. For the first time ever, Dee and her little white ears had been sadly fruitless.
My mother was gone, Gitlitz and Dee were gone, and soon, although I didn't know it yet, my father would be, too. Still, I'd always remember Dee and the fraction of a second's terror she and Dad had shared one afternoon over a slightly overflowing bowl of pea soup. As he sat, grappling with a particularly vexing dangling participle for Catch-22 and was saved, as luck would have it, by a waitress with peaches dangling in her ears.