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.

November 19 - Being lost along the way

Sally was sitting at the kitchen counter when Chris got home. It was Thanksgiving, and he had told his wife he was the only one who could work that day. Sally had whispered two weeks before that she wished they could ‘skip it’ this year. She couldn’t handle it, she said, her eyes begging please don’t make me go, so Chris had dutifully lied. “That works out great!” he said, feigning enthusiasm. “My boss will love it if I work on Thanksgiving, since no one else is around,” and Sally had smiled in relief. In fact, he wasn’t needed at the office, which was closed, so he drove around most of the day, sat in three different coffee shops over three, very long drawn out lattes, and came home when he approximated it might seem legitimate. The street outside was already dark; the sun extinguished itself early this time of the year. “The darkest day is over,” Sally would breathe like it was a prayer, after the winter equinox had passed. “From now on, every day until June is a little bit brighter than the last.” As if it were a mantra, words that propelled her onward when solar power ceased to provide warmth and energy. Tonight, she was slumped on her stool, a back that Chris remembered being stick-straight in the seminar classes of college where he had first met her reduced now to an arc, like the curve of a wishbone. Her lips were clamped together until they were white and her eyes were tight with concentration as she counted out almonds from the clear package at her side.

“Three, four, five…” he heard her hissing under her breath like a radiator leaking out gas. The almonds landed with precise clinks into the small glass bowl on the counter in front of her, and Chris froze in the doorway, watching the wrinkles deepen at the corners of his wife’s eyes with each successive almond, the whites growing larger all around like a spooked horse, as though she was afraid of the end she knew was coming.

“…Twelve, thirteen, fourteen,” she finished in a rush. She dipped her slender fingers – no; he remembered them as slender, now they were more properly bone with just a trace of flesh on top to add humanity to it – watched as those bony fingers descend greedily into the bowl and she lifted almond to mouth quickly, as though afraid someone might take it from her otherwise. He watched until this horror show was over, all fourteen almonds gulped down, her eyes closed, her mouth macerating the food, her lips working like she was praying. He knew better than to interrupt Sally when she ate. Such interruptions most often resulted in having things thrown at him, or Sally crying hysterically, or, more rightly, both.

“Hi,” he said when the last almond was swallowed with obvious pain down her throat, the esophagus bulging against the sinews of her neck. Her eyes snapped open and she glared at him accusingly.

“How long have you been standing there?” she demanded.

“Since I got home from work.” Only a small lie. Her eyes weighed his answer.

“You were watching me eat,” she accused.

“No,” he lied. She jumped off the stool faster than it seemed her frail body should have been capable, lunged at him and pushed – tried to push – him backwards against the garage door. “You were watching me eat! No one watches me eat. No one!” Small fists pummeled against his chest, a flurry of angry white snowflakes that melted on his lapels.

He grabbed a wrist in each hand; his fingers could easily have circled around the bone twice. “Sally. My love,” he said as gently as he could. “I wasn’t watching. I just now walked in the door.” She glared at him defiantly a moment more before her arms went limp in his grasp and she sank back from where she had been poised on tiptoe. He released her and she walked back to the counter, laying her forearms atop it and hunching over them. He remembered when his wife’s ass had been round and firm when she stood like that, sticking out and inviting him to caress the curve, but now there was no seat to her pants.

“God, Sally,” he said then without thinking. “What happened to you?”

He instantly wished he could take the words back when his wife’s head swung towards him and he found himself frozen under the dead, vacant look in her eyes. He remembered in that moment every hope she had had as a young revolutionary in their college days. The desire to enter politics, to go to law school, to become an investigative journalist – the ‘goal’ had a tendency to change daily, but it wasn’t what it was that mattered so much as that there was always something to be achieved, done, conquered. Then the years of their early marriage, watching her bang her head against disappointment after disappointment, stumble up against turned-down job offers, watching her uterus reject the idea of childbirth. (“Is your wife getting her period?” more than a few fertility specialists had asked, and Chris hadn’t known enough back then to ask about amenorrhea.) The next few years only brought more career disappointments, book manuscripts that never sold to agents, classes in graduate school that she dropped out of after a semester, wanderings around the house with a zombie’s gait and eyes that stared vacantly ahead at all hours of the day. Going to bed at night only to wake and realize his wife had never occupied the sheets next to him, her side still tucked up and unwrinkled, and finding the empty wine bottles in the recycling can (buried under plastic Evian bottles and soup tins so he wouldn’t find them, but he learned to dig). He couldn’t remember how long ago she had stopped cooking dinner or going out to restaurants with him, only that he would come home and see these strange rituals, this pagan worship of the fourteen almonds or the half a cup of oatmeal (unflavored) or the sucking on water crackers until they were pap in her mouth. The way she said, “I like eating them better that way. It gives me something to do,” and then instantly clapped a hand over her mouth, betrayed by her own words. And now, this crazed look in her eye, this wild rolling of the iris. Her hair was thinner, he realized. He had ignored the clumps that would collect by the drain in the shower, but there was no denying it anymore.

He couldn’t help it. “What happened to you,” he repeated.

A touch of the feral look drained from her eyes, and Sally slumped further forward onto her forearms, as if the little weight left on her bones couldn’t stand upright anymore. “I got lost somewhere along the way,” she said slowly, shaking her head, and began reciting, “I got lost somewhere along the way. I got lost. I got lost. I got. I got…”

* * * * *

Jackie opened the front door and found her daughter and her new boyfriend laughing hysterically, holding one another up on the doorstep as if their convulsions of mirth would knock them over otherwise. “What on earth is going on out here?” she demanded, wiping her hands on her apron.

Sally wiped her eyes. “Mom!” she crowed, throwing her arms forcefully around Jackie’s neck so the older woman took a step or two backwards. “We’re so glad we’re here.”

“So glad you’re here? So glad you’re here?” She looked from one to the other. “That’s nice and all, but I’m not sure I can ever remember you so enthusiastic for a Thanksgiving.” She ushered them inside. The scent of roasting turkey and candied yams, of cranberry relish and Brussels sprouts, of corn muffins made from a pre-packaged mix – all of it was thick in the air. The kitchen was at least ten degrees warmer than the rest of the house. Sally frisked her hands along her upper arms as they came inside, and her boyfriend – this one’s name was Chris, if Jackie remembered correctly – was smiling awkwardly and wrinkling his nose; Jackie wasn’t sure if that meant he enjoyed the smells coming from her holiday kitchen or not.

“Now, what’s all the mirth about?” she asked, planting her hands on her hips. Sally and the boy – Chris? Chris, she decided – Sally and Chris looked at one another and broke into fresh gales of giggling.

“Oh, Mom!” Sally said, hoisting herself onto one stool and sitting, her back straight. She began thumbing some of the cheese spread onto a cracker without even bothering to use the decorative knife provided. “We took a wrong turn!” she said around a giant mouthful. “We had just gotten off the highway but we must have missed a fork in the road and we got lost along the way! We were circling forever!” ‘Ever’ said as though it was a wonderful place to be. She and Chris howled with laughter as if this was the funniest thing. Jackie dug her fists into her hips until her flesh ached. She hated being lost. What joke, exactly, was she missing here?

“And?” she prodded.

Sally screwed her eyes up towards the ceiling and Chris took over. “We had the best time exploring the new roads that we discovered. You wouldn’t believe it, the excitement of only vaguely knowing where we were, but not really. The adventure involved…” He shrugged as if it all made sense. “Getting lost is the fun part. We knew we’d get here eventually.” And he popped one of Jackie’s bacon tarts into his mouth.