November 20 - The booth in the corner

When Rose was little, her family would eat dinner at the diner downtown every Sunday. They always sat in the same booth in the corner, the father against the wall, the mother next to him, and the two little girls facing opposite, away from the diner’s door. The seats were upholstered in a cherry-red, and a small glass vase with one, sad looking, downturned flower slumping to one side adorned the tabletop. Rose and her sister would perch with their bums on the edge of the booth because otherwise they couldn’t reach the plastic top of the table. They loved the yellow and red squeeze bottles for the ketchup and mustard, and the placemats that the waitress brought over – often a different woman, but always with the same ponytail and same perpetual wad of snapping gum in her mouth, it seemed – along with crayons for them to color. Rose and her sister would ignore the dinner of hot dogs and French fries that their mother ordered for them, preferring instead to dig their spoons into the tins of jelly in the condiment stand. “Girls!” their parents would scold, as Rose and her sister stared with strawberry smeared smiles of delight at one another, and plunged the tips of their silver spoons back in for another taste of the flavored corn syrup.

When Rose got a little older, the diner was the place to go with friends after school. They felt big and daring for going out alone, even though in the backs of their minds they must have known their parents knew exactly where they were, and that the diner was a safe destination within one block of their homes. They would order milkshakes – or, on a double-dare, one of the gigantic sundaes – and sit in the corner booth and eat until their stomachs ached, from too much ice cream or too much laughter either one. They were rude to the servers because fifth graders always have an inflated sense of their own importance, and they laughed uproariously at their own cleverness when they tipped the waitress one penny, leaving Abe smirking up from the receipt on the tabletop. “It’s worse than not tipping at all!” they crowed with delight, scampering away in vindictive childishness, and the waitress – whoever she was – would pick it up and shake her head at the children’s behavior, her ponytail wagging back and forth like a tsking finger.

When Rose reached high school, she brought her boyfriend to the diner on their first date. Most of the girls were content to let the boys decide where to take them, but Rose insisted she was in charge, grabbing the boy – we forget his name – by his hand after school and marching him to the corner booth. They sat staring at one another awkwardly across the plastic table top. Rose tried to act as she imagined her older sister might, and demurely ordered an iced tea, but she also got a plate of mozzarella sticks. “You have quite the appetite,” her date said. He had never seen a girl order more than a salad on a date. They shared one of the chewy, bread-crumb coated sticks, the string cheese joining their mouths in a Lady-and-the-Tramp across the table, so that they held one another first through mozzarella, not through their flesh or their lips. “You’re not like the other girls,” he said in a strange, accusatory way, and Rose wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not. She stared down at her hands on the tabletop. They looked suddenly strange; new, adolescent hands that had sprouted little hairs on the knuckles. Did other women grow hair this way when they reached their teens, she wondered, curling her fingers under and placing them in her lap. She hoped he thought it was just to rearrange her napkin.

When Rose was a senior, her cluster of girlfriends liked to go to the diner on Sunday mornings to cure a hangover from the night before. They ordered chocolate chip pancakes and heaps of hash browns, and sipped at coffee that was as black as mud and roughly the same consistency. They talked about how they wanted to keep having weekends like this and keep eating these chocolate chip pancakes like this right up until the end of their lives. “You mean you’re not moving out after graduation?” Rose asked, suddenly surprised to find she was the only one dreaming of such a thing. They stared at her a moment in silence before picking up where they had left off in midsentence, about who had kissed who the night before, and which boy had the biggest, well…. Rose would sip at her coffee black, and politely shake her head no when offered a bite of French toast/scrambled eggs/sausage/whatever. She mashed around the oatmeal in her bowl, stirring until it thinned and stretched out, and left without eating a spoonful. If any of the other girls ever noticed this, they didn’t say. As she tripped back out into the fresh air outside the diner, Rose would think fervently: of course there is more to life than this.

After graduation, Rose wasn’t really quite sure what to do with herself. She would go to the diner and scribble her writings in a notebook while sipping at cups of hot tea, her head bent down and her fingers aching until she was inevitably startled by the waitress who came over and put an apologetic hand on her shoulder and murmured that it was closing time. How long did she sit with her head bent like that? Long enough that she looked up and realized everyone else had moved away. Strange, she wondered. She hadn’t seen them go. She thought about leaving, but every time she tried, something stayed her. She would drive to the edge of town in her car, and then her stomach might rumble, and she’d turn back and park at the diner, and walk in and trudge to the corner, where the waitress would say, “Tea?” without prompting, and Rose would nod and find herself back where’d she begun.

The town changed slowly, but it did change, and Rose found comfort in the fact that the diner still stood on the corner with the bubbled letters of its sign out front and its metal-rimmed spinning stools at the counter; the same fat chef still called out the plates from behind his window, although now his hair was gray instead of black. The same chipped, thick white coffee mugs still were slammed down on the table by surly waitresses with ponytails. There was still the same menu boasting chocolate chip pancakes, and still the tins of artificial jelly.

“You new in town, hon?” asked a new waitress when Rose came in for dinner one night. The waitress was young, twenties probably, with a ponytail. She snapped her gum. Rose laughed. “I’m old in town, honey,” she replied. “I’ll be sitting in that booth over there.”

She started coming to the diner every night for dinner when arthritis wormed into her hands and she had a hard time cooking for herself anymore. She had long since stopped writing, long since stopped scribbling in her notebooks, but she would come and sit in the corner booth and read a book and smile up at whoever the waitress was to lay the plate down on the tabletop before her. She always ordered the same thing – a bowl of minestrone soup and a grilled cheese sandwich, of which she ate exactly half and asked the waitress to wrap up the rest for later. She never ate it later, and often wondered why she bothered making the girl go the extra step, so she tipped a little bit generously every time, which earned her smiles and good service when she came in the next day.

One day, one of the waitresses walked in and saw the corner booth empty around dinner time, and couldn’t exactly remember the last time she had seen somebody sitting there. She snapped her gum. “What happened to that old woman who used to eat in the corner booth every night?”

“Hasn’t been in for a couple weeks,” one of the girls offered.

“Must have kicked the bucket,” one of the other girls said crassly. Someone kicked her ankle.

“Have some respect.” The first waitress watched a family come in – a mom and a dad, and two little girls, and watched the girls squirm up onto the booth in the corner, the seat too large for them, their little chins barely reaching the plastic edge. One of the girls started to fuss, until the mother peeled back the foil from a tin of jelly and spooned some into her mouth, and soon the girls were all wide-eyed happiness. The waitress went over. “What will it be tonight?” she asked.