WRY BREAD: A Slice of My Life in Pursuit of Dough

Clear the Table and Pull Out the Calculator—Women Are Splitting the Restaurant Bill!

By Gail Harlow

t was girls’ night out: The three of us had gotten together for a leisurely meal at a local bar and grill, enjoying not having to cook for a change, as well as the pleasure of catching up with one another’s complicated lives. Laura and I both ordered the house specialty—succulent, lightly breaded crab cakes, accompanied by the house salad. Mary Ellen chose the grilled tuna. Laura had white wine, I drank my usual Campari and soda, and Mary Ellen ordered a glass of Pernod. After all, what would girls’ night out be without “girlish” drinks?

      Lively conversation passed among us over flickering candles and the slightly wilted white carnation centerpiece. We talked about the challenges of starting up a magazine, about the unpredictable nature of antiques sales (“everything sells eventually”), of the motivation for artists to create, about the difficulty of making money doing what you love, about sons and daughters, about our mothers’ amazing stiletto heels and the unbelievably rude salesclerk at our local T.J. Maxx. 

      When we ‘d finished our main course, our size 4 waitress, Tiffany, came over and did her utmost to tempt us with objets de le chef’s art from the dessert cart. “The triple chocolate mousse cake was just made today and has hardly any calories,” she cooed, seductively.  We exchanged amused glances and, in an act of female dieters’ solidarity, jointly decided that “hardly any” were too many calories for our hips and waistlines. Even Laura, who could eat twice her weight in chocolate and not gain a pound, declined dessert. To end the meal, we ordered cappuccino, instead. As we lingered over our coffee, Tiffany approached to ask if we wanted anything else. We said no, and, clearly disappointed that she’d been stuck with a table of low-spenders, she returned with the check, presenting it in one of those faux leather portfolios with a convenient slot for your credit card. 

      There comes an awkward moment at the end of every meal out with friends when everyone looks at the bill and no one reaches for it. If it’s a group of guys, they’re all thinking, “Who’s going to pick up the tab this time?” The pause stretches into what seems like minutes, until one of them does the macho thing and, in one seamless motion, simultaneously picks up the bill with one hand and pulls his wallet out with the other, slipping a credit card into the portfolio and sliding it to the edge of the table for the waiter to pick up, all the while forcefully fending off the other hands that have reached out just a second too late to take the check away from him. 

       I wouldn’t be surprised if arm-wrestling for the check becomes an after-dinner sport in certain circles sometime soon. It’s a macho thing with guys—call it muscle dining. One of them always has to pay the whole tab. In mixed company, when couples go out together, jostling for the bill can become a performance art, with wives nudging their husbands to beat the competition to the draw. And the winner ends up griping all the way home that “this is the second time we’ve paid and the Joneses invited us this time, didn’t they?”

      When women go out together, there’s a whole different dynamic going on.  We don’t try to beat each other to the punch when paying the bill. Instead, we obsess about splitting the check evenly. We seem to have an almost anal need to carve the total up into equal parts, to the penny, like moms, bending over backwards to make sure that each of our kids gets an equal piece of the leftover pie. We argue about who’s better at numbers, and the one who is determined to be the math whiz–in our case, this evening, it was Laura, the antiques dealer—is handed the bill. The person who gets the honors does figures in the air, or whips out her pocket calculator and a handy-dandy wallet-sized chart to determine how much to leave for the tip. Then she announces what everyone owes and asks, “That’s right, isn’t it?”,  prompting a five-minute debate about the accuracy of her figures.

      When we’re finally all in agreement on the bottom line, calculated to the penny, the next challenge begins—because, wouldn’t you know it, there’s always someone in the group who doesn’t have the right change. This necessitates a complicated switching of twenties for tens and ones, as bills are moved from one pile of money to another, with all of us trying to follow the logic of the magician doing the shuffling. Any passer-by would be convinced that a complicated shell game was going on. Eventually, satisfied that we’ve each put in our equal share, we stuff the dollars (thankfully, we can’t charge the bill to three different credit cards) into the portfolio and present it, with a sigh of relief, to the waitperson. Then,  we gather our coats and purses and off we go to handle our assorted corporate crises, family feuds and other mind-boggling challenges with aplomb.

         Whose way is better? The guys might argue that we make too much of a production out of paying the bill. But I say this female financial ritual proves our sex to be the smarter sex. After all, none of us get stuck with the whole tab.

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Gail Harlow is the Founding Editor of MAKING BREAD Magazine.

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