Less trot, more glide

Less trot, more glide is the private motto of the unnamed waitress who narrates portions of the novel from her post at the New Orleans Diner. The phrase is her shorthand for the physical mastery of her trade, but it extends far beyond the buckling linoleum floors of the restaurant to become a governing philosophy of survival, self-discipline, and hard-won respectability. It is the distilled wisdom of a woman who has escaped a chaotic childhood and a failed marriage through sheer efficiency and willpower, and who now moves through the world with the deliberate grace of someone who has learned, at great cost, exactly how to cover the maximum ground with the minimum steps.

The Motto of a Master Waitress

The expression first emerges as a description of professional technique. The waitress, who has been waiting tables since she was thirteen, explains that the New Orleans Diner, which she calls the NOD, is long and skinny and has defeated many a waitress. She has watched young women come and go because they were not efficient, and she diagnoses their failure with the phrase: too much trot, not enough glide. Her own method is the opposite. She moves across the buckling linoleum floors of the diner like a skater, the best at what she does, all glide, no trot. The motto is thus a standard of professional excellence, a way of distinguishing her own seasoned competence from the flailing of newcomers who have not yet learned to conserve their energy and move with economy.

A Philosophy of Self-Discipline

Beyond the diner, less trot, more glide becomes a principle of personal conduct. The waitress applies the same logic to the care of her own body, revealing that she goes home every day and spends an hour with her feet up on the ottoman, a glass of Pepsi at her side. Because she does this, she notes with satisfaction, her legs are still worth a whistle, with not a trace of a varicose vein. She pairs the motto with a second secret, elevate, and offers both as the wisdom she would share with the younger girls if they ever asked. But they never ask, she observes, because they think they have all the answers. The phrase thus carries a note of hard-earned authority, the knowledge of a woman who has learned through experience that survival requires not frantic effort but measured, deliberate action.

The Wisdom of a Hard Life

The motto is inseparable from the waitress's own history, which she recounts as a cautionary tale of near-misses and narrow escapes. Her parents brought the family to Baltimore during the war for the Glenn Martin money, but nothing worked out for them; they drank, they divorced, they got back together, which was worse than the drinking or the divorce. She had to find a way to escape even at thirteen, so she got a job at a place called Stacey's, then moved to Werner's, and finally to the New Orleans Diner. She admits that having cash money at the end of the day was not the best thing for a teenage girl on her own, and that there were a couple of dark years where she almost became her mom. She woke up pregnant, the guy married her, but it was the only correct thing he ever did, and pretty soon she was nineteen, with a baby, all alone. The motto represents the disciplined alternative to that fate: where her mother was a ghost in a bathrobe with a gin bottle who sneaked into her room and stole her tip money, the waitress is a woman who does not drink and keeps a house neat as a pin. Less trot, more glide is the hard-won principle that separates her from the chaos she escaped.

The Motto as a Way of Seeing Others

The phrase also shapes how the waitress reads the people around her. She applies her philosophy of efficiency and restraint to judge the customers who pass through the diner, particularly the woman who comes to lunch with Mr. B, a regular who likes his job and does not want to go home. The waitress observes the woman with the body language of a dog stalking a squirrel, all a-quiver, and concludes that whatever that woman wants from Mr. B cannot be as important as she thinks. Nothing is, she reflects, a lesson she has learned over and over again. The motto thus becomes a lens of skepticism, a way of measuring the world's frantic pursuits against her own hard-won calm. When she reads in the Star that Cleo Sherwood, a woman who once told her she was going to be famous, has already disappeared from the paper, she reflects that Cleo is famous in a way, or was, for a day. The waitress's own fame is of a quieter kind: the renown of the best at what she does, all glide, no trot, a woman whose name the reader never learns but whose philosophy of measured, efficient survival gives shape to the novel's meditation on the lives of women who work and endure.