Roses at 5 by Amanda Montell

There’s a secret reason why I love going on flower runs. The restaurant assigns someone, usually a runner or a busser, to run out to this market on 9th Street and 2nd Ave to pick up a dozen red roses with which to garnish the VIP tables at the beginning of each dinner shift. But I always volunteer to make the trip. It’s kind of a hassle of a job, and I sometimes wonder whether they speculate as to why I always so enthusiastically offer to go. But I doubt they could figure the real reason why. Well, I suppose there are actually two.

One of the reasons is that getting to leave my motionless position behind the host stand to go out and run an errand provides the same sort of bleak and joyous liberation that a prisoner feels when he is permitted to surface from the dungeon for twenty minutes to drag a ball and chain around an outdoor patch of cement. See, the restaurant is owned by a mass of self-promoting trendy New York testosterone, which values what it believes to be “atmosphere” over an ability to see; so the lights in the place are kept so low and the temperature so frigid that it might as well be a dungeon disguised as a the dining hall of a devastatingly hip castle. So, having an excuse to leave it for a while gives my eyes a break from the darkness and my aching back a break from the hours of standing still for the only purpose of saying “Hi, Welcome to DeZee’s,” every half hour or so.

But there exists a far more secret and wonderful reason why I love to go on flower runs. See, once I pick out the most exquisite twelve roses I can find and pay for them with the restaurant’s money, once they’re wrapped in pristine cellophane and gently placed in my arms for the taking like a baby in the arms of a new mother, I get to carry a dozen red roses six blocks through the streets of New York, back to the restaurant.

And that’s a crowded area, the East Village at 5— huffy young professionals jay-walking back from work, NYU students powering up for a night out on St. Marks, unidentified angry but beautiful modelly-type women in stilettos, and hipsters with their Camel Lights and True Religion jeans.

But I am the only one with a dozen red roses.

All I have to do is put a hint of a smile in my eyes and a spring in step, and lucky me; according to all the passersby, I have just been the recipient of the most iconic symbol of true romance. I have no man by my side like the other couples parading down 2nd Ave; I have something better. I have a gentleman who has just professed his profound affection by surprising me with a dozen red roses and sending me on my way. It is the most fabulous accessory in sight. And the passersby take notice.

The modelly women’s brows soften at the sight of my roses and the hipsters stop their cigarette-laced conversations, mid-puff, and stare. The NYU chicks, hand in hand with their skinny boyfriends, go wide-eyed and whisper “Aw, look!” to their uneasy and flowerless partners.

I just smile bashfully and trot right along, basking in the recognition my adoring man has allowed me.

Of course this man does not exist, at least not to me. He might to the NYU girl, swooning over such displays of affection and hoping her lackluster boyfriend will take a hint. And he might to the banker returning home to his wife of six years, who sees my roses and is inspired to take her for a spontaneous night out to dinner.

But he doesn’t exist to me. I know the roses aren’t mine and that in a matter of minutes I’ll be forking them romancelessly over to my sniveling manager Chad DeZee. However, for those ten minutes during which I’m flaunting my roses back to DeZee’s, those looks of longing and envy and inspiration and joy at the sight of something I have, make me feel almost as special as my admirer is imaginary.

I put in my two weeks’ notice at the restaurant the other day. I’m moving back to Maine. My father set up a job for me at a florist shop there. I wonder if they’ll let me take roses home for free.

Amanda Montell, a Baltimore, MD native, is now a Linguistics student at New York University, where you may often find her brooding on a park bench eating chocolate chip cookies. A lover of memoirs and childhood stories, Amanda bases much of her prose on the biographical stories of her Dad, and poetry on the stories of people she meets on her adventures in New York. She has poetry published in The Stone Hobo, and a collection of her short fiction can be found at www.americanwordplay.blogspot.com.