The Girl With the Axial Twist

I enjoy working as a hostess at a fine dining establishment. They always schedule too many of us, and we all stand together in a flock, dressed in all black, behind the host stand. We mill around, a host of hosts, and when a patron enters we all look at them and reach towards them in a way that probably induces anxiety, like a funeral where every attendee turns to face you and greets you in unison. 

On the full moon people come strangely. On the full moon, or on a night when you thought the moon was full but the weather app tells you it’s just waxed to a robust 98 percent, people come to the restaurant even more strangely than usual. Manners and decorum, tenuous to begin with, have now gone out the window. People are agitated and quick-tempered, boisterous, frightened, stunned, or in a fugue state. Their coats are all non-euclidian and I’m dropping everyone’s shit on the floor of coat check as I fumble for the openings to hang them. The air in the coat room is thick and sweet because yesterday’s trapped mouse has finished bloating and begun releasing its ghost into the enclosed space. I hold my breath and grapple with the closure on a 2,000 dollar Moncler quilted hooded down cape until I see stars.

Back out on the floor I watch my coworker write—in a stylized, circular, girlish hand—how many covers for the night: 3 hundred and 33, 15 cancellations, and 32 VIP’s. We exchange a meaningful look. Surely the guest we are waiting for will soon arrive. 

And when the door swings in permitting another blast of cold air, there she is, the girl with the axial twist. Her patient boyfriend grasps her upper arm tender but firm. She cannot see where she is going, so he guides her. At the host stand we greet her with as little awkwardness as possible. She cannot make eye contact or see our lips moving, so we must speak loudly and clearly over the noise of the dining room to be understood. She cocks her head to indicate she is listening and her lover watches her, sometimes repeating what was said close to her ear and stroking her back.

In the notes on her profile she has special accommodations. For one, she needs a booth that she can situate herself in side-saddle. A bit of privacy is preferred, for she is one of the rare guests who come to our restaurant, not with a burning desire to be seen, but with a healthy burrowing instinct. As for the rest of our clientele, it is all we can do to keep them from perching on top of the tables to lord over the sea of well-appointed heads. Friendly, we guide the odd couple to table 76, an intimate corner where they can sit side by side on a couch in warm light. She laughs as her handsome companion helps her into the booth, and her eyes, fixed on the cherry wood wall, twinkle with pleasure. She is understood and anticipated here, an experience we are proud to offer our loyal customers. She strokes his hair with her hands and then turns all the way around to face him as he lifts the menu so she can see. 

There is a theory that might explain why people tend to kiss with the left side of the face, and hug with the right side of the body, why the right brain is intuitive, the left logical, why the organs lack bilateral symmetry, and why when it really comes down to it, every one of our hearts is at least slightly left of center. This is the Axial Twist Theory, which suggests that the head and body of vertebrates twist left-handedly during the early stages of embryonic development. You know how we all begin our amphibious existence with undifferentiated gonads? They’re also saying we begin with our faces on the back of our heads, until at some point while our heart beats in the dark, we twist. The body—and funnily enough, the ears—travel one way and the face goes the other, like a wrung cloth. Like an Indian burn. The back of your head was once, and in a way still is, your true front. So if you want to, close your eyes for a moment and try to feel that in your body. 

And so, a more accurate nickname for the woman sitting, or rather kneeling, in the booth at table 76 would be The Girl Without the Axial Twist, but because most people don’t know that we are all born twisted, and because it has a much better ring to it, we leave out the out. And it’s accurate enough because she does have an axial twist in relation to the rest of us. She is beautiful, very sexy even, in spite of her affliction. A backless dress gives the impression of full frontal nudity, as she sits with her knees to the wall. Your gaze finally meets her catlike eyes and travels southward, between her shoulder blades, following the long indent of her spine. There’s her ass and then the legs that seem to bend backward at the knee causing mental confusion, like a hallucination. She’s an exotic chimeric beast and it’s difficult not to stare.

I know she experiences psychological repercussions as well. I’ve seen her sparkling mood suddenly dampened by unexpected outcomes and unanticipated events; no table yet, a menu change, a guest running late. She tends to order the same thing and likes to know what’s coming. To walk comfortably she must lead with her blind side and often requires guidance, which surely puts a chip on her shoulder: a sensitivity to feeling blindsided. Though she can easily watch her own back, her heart and belly are exposed. She has a long memory, a tendency to fixate on the past, and her reaction time is delayed because in order to approach something, she must first turn away from it. Working in the service industry gives me a lot of time to mythologize people’s quirks, but I’m pretty sure I’m mostly right.

Back at the host stand I sigh romantically. I turn and whisper to my co-worker, “how painful it must be! At every moment, her affliction forces her to choose between really seeing and really holding her boyfriend.” My co-worker, examining her new press-on nails pensively, says “yeah… but I bet the full eye-contact backshots go absolutely crazy.”