Chapter 2: "Memories"
I was a prep cook in the restaurant that Tracy and I worked in, and I had to come in four hours before the doors opened for lunch. I usually left around two o'clock. Tracy was an after-school employee and came in usually around five. I had been working in the pizza parlour for several months without ever seeing her. I had heard stories, though.
Most of the stories centered around the question of the authenticity of her breasts. I had the image of Tracy as someone like the infamous Barbara of my junior high school days. Barbara had a fairly normal-looking figure except for her breasts. They were as big as footballs and stuck straight out. They looked like something out of the twilight zone. The first time I saw her in the seventh grade, she nearly knocked me over with them in an aisle in the school library. Barbara had a face like an iguana. I figured Tracy was Barbara with freckles.
I never saw Tracy until the summer of 1987 when she started coming in to work the lunch shift. I didn't recognize her when I saw her the first time and just assumed she was a new waitress until I saw her name tag. The tag was sitting on top of her left breast. This was the infamous Tracy? The blond with the enormous tits? She looked perfectly normal to me. She had the face of an angel. I was expecting an ugly girl with football-sized breasts. What a surprise!
"You're Tracy?" I stammered. "You sure aren't what I expected."
"You must be Lewis," Tracy answered without bothering to look at my nametag. "I've heard about you."
"Nothing horrible, I hope," I said. Tracy eyed me with obvious curiosity.
"Nope, nothing bad at all. You're one of two college grads working here as an hourly employee. I hope you escape from this place sometime soon. I'll probably be stuck working in places like this my whole life."
In spite of her sour comment, I soon saw Tracy as the live wire of the restaurant. Mischievous, carefree, and relentlessly cheerful in spite of her awareness of being trapped, Tracy was sort of like the restaurant's pet. Management loved her. She had more warnings in her personnel file than any of us, and the managers kept writing her up, but the unit manager refused to fire her even though she had triple the number of warnings that were supposed to trigger a termination.
I think the unit manager kept her around because she kept everybody amused. One day she was struggling with the lid of a canister of salad dressing and the lid suddenly popped free. Tracy was soaked in Italian salad dressing from head to foot. A waiter walked by and wryly observed that the salad dressing looked like semen and that Tracy just seemed to always have that effect on men.
Another day Tracy got drafted to crawl into the dishwasher and remove something that was clogging the drain. She was the only employee small enough to fit in the dishwasher. Tracy dutifully crawled in and removed the offending clog. She couldn't get out. The manager came back from his usual outpost in the dining room buried in paperwork. He wanted to know what the problem was.
"MY TITS ARE CAUGHT IN THE FUCKING RACK!"
It took awhile, but we did finally extract Tracy from the dishwasher. When she got loose, she pulled her uniform shirt down, and tucked the tail in. Suddenly the size of her breasts became obvious as she had pulled her uniform tight down over them. I made the mistake of staring.
Tracy looked at me with an amused expression on her face. "Well, well, Mr. Blind-As-A-Bat finally noticed. Yes, I do have big tits. However you certainly never had a chance to notice. You've had your eyes glued on my face since you first saw me." Tracy walked up to me very close and moved her face right in mine blocking my view of everything else.
"Am I that pretty?" Tracy asked.
"Yes, you are," I said. I didn't hesitate to reply.
"You're just about the only one who thinks so," said Tracy. "Everybody else just stares at my chest. You, however, are welcome to stare at my chest anytime you like." Tracy turned sideways a bit, threw her chest out, and winked at me.
When I think back to those days, I now see that Tracy liked me and was dropping hints left and right for a date. I never asked. She was 17. She was a minor. I was 28. I was an adult. She was carefree and mischievous. I was an intellectual worrywart. We were The Owl and the Pussycat. It was hopeless. I never asked Tracy for a date. I never dreamed that she would have accepted if I had asked. Now, looking backward, I am sure she would have. Tracy liked me. Maybe even loved me.
How could I have been so oblivious?
End of Chapter 2