Read Online About My Sisters by Debra Ginsberg - Free Book Online Page B

published my first book, Waiting , Maya went on the road with me to every interview, book signing, and radio show up and down California. One glance at her expression during these events told me how well I was doing. If I faltered, I looked for her face, a fixed star, and found my way back to center. If I’d needed any reassurance that the fabric of my life was inextricably connected with Maya’s, I found it during one of those radio interviews in Los Angeles.
    The show’s host greeted us warmly when we got to the studio and told us, “We’ll be live today. And we’ll open up the lines for callers. Are you up for that?”
    â€œOh yes,” I told him. “Sounds great.”
    â€œOkay,” he said, “get yourself comfortable with the microphone. Your sister can sit in there,” he gestured to a small glassed off area, “and she can hear the whole show.”
    Maya situated herself with a pair of headphones. She was behind glass but directly in my line of vision. The host warmed up and introduced the show. The on-air lights went on and within minutes the plastic squares representing callers started blinking madly. We were off and running. I could see Maya smiling, enjoying a call from a disgruntled waiter who claimed that customers were always asking for items off the menu and expecting servers to provide them. The host asked me if I thought customers generally had unrealistic expectations of their servers or if servers just complained too much. I told him it might be a bit of both, but yes, there were certainly times when customers made demands that couldn’t possibly be filled. The host asked if I could give him an example.
    It was then that I started to drift a little, my train of thought unraveling slightly and I felt I was on the verge of missing what I was looking for. For a split second I thought I was going to have to switch gears and move to a different topic. I looked up at Maya who was gesturing to me in her booth. She was mouthing a word but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. I shrugged slightly and she scribbled something down on a piece of paper. I just kept talking, although I wasn’t exactly sure what I was saying any longer. Maya held the paper up against the glass and I saw that it said wasabi in giant letters.
    And suddenly it was all clear.
    â€œWell, here’s one example,” I told the host. “I was working in an Italian trattoria at one time, waiting on a large party of Japanese businessmen and the host asked me for wasabi. I told him I was very sorry, but we didn’t carry wasabi, it being an Italian restaurant and all, but he got angrier and angrier, demanding that I find him some and absolutely fuming that we didn’t carry it. ‘You should always have wasabi!’ he screamed at me. ‘Peoplewant wasabi. It’s outrageous that a place like this doesn’t have it.’ And then he asked me if there was somewhere nearby I could go and purchase some. And obviously I couldn’t. So that would probably constitute a good example of when a customer has unrealistic expectations of his server.”
    The host loved this and the entire board lit up. Maya smiled and nodded, pointing in approval at all the flashing lines.
    â€œPlease be patient,” the host announced, “the lines are full, but we’re going to try our best to get to all your calls.”
    The rest of the show seemed to run by at hyper speed and we ran out of time before we could get to all the callers. Afterward, the host asked me if I’d come back and do it again and I told him I’d love to.
    As we walked back to the car Maya said, “I can’t believe you forgot that story.”
    â€œBut you remembered,” I told her.
    Maya was working beside me in that Italian restaurant on the night of the wasabi fiasco, although that day was the first time either one of us had mentioned it since. I couldn’t have said how