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This appears in a pre-2010 issue
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Out to Lunch
Pat Dixon
How the hell can they enforce that? wondered Dr. William (“Hopalong”) Boyd, as he washed his hands and read the large-print sign glued to the mirror in front of him. He smiled to himself and glanced theatrically around the upper walls of the large men’s room to see if it had any surveillance camera. Nope. If the employees don’t WISH to wash their hands after every time they have a whiz—or any time, for that matter—nobody will know—or nobody but the individual employee involved—unless the ladies’ room is different, which is very probable—or unless there’s a surveillance camera hidden in back of this mirror.
Dr. Boyd faced the mirror, scrutinized it with a slight frown, smiled toothily at the center of it, and blew a kiss to whatever camera might lie behind it.
He pushed the handle of a towel dispenser several times and tore off two brown paper towels.
“Ha—I like not that,” he said under his breath as he dried his hands. The handle of the towel dispenser was grimy looking. Then, as he reached for the handle on the lavatory door, he noticed more visible grime around it. Years of neglect, he thought. But even if they scoured and disinfected the handles every day, there’d be millions of unseen things on ‘em—and as the Little Prince rightly put it, ‘The really important things are invisible to the eye.’ Bet no restaurant cares to think about THAT. Well, once more into the breach.
His mother was sitting fifteen feet from the entry, looking absently at the sixty-eight lobsters crawling around the bottom of a large tank.
“I can see there’s an empty table in there, Billy,” she said. “Tell that colored girl that we’d like to be seated sometime today. Tell her that table would do just fine.”
“That’s in the smoking section, Mom. We asked for non-smoking. It’ll only be a few more minutes. Is there any chance you’ll need to use the little girls’ room while we’re here? If so, this w—”
“I went before we left the apartment, Billy. I can hold my water till we get back. I can see another table is clear in the other section there. Just tell that girl you want that one.”
“Mom, they gave me this electronic thing to page us when it’s our turn. Maybe that table is for somebody else who’s in the ladies’ room or men’s room or having a smoke outside. Maybe they’re being paged right now to come get their table.”
“Well, if they’re not here, then they gave up their turn. That’s my view, Billy. And when did you get that thing anyways? I never saw them hand it to you.”
“It was when the woman asked my name, and I told her ‘Boyd,’ and she wrote it down and handed this to me.”
“Well, I never saw any of that happening. Are you sure it’s working?”
As if on cue, the palm-sized black plastic octagon suddenly began to flash sixteen bright red lights and emit a series of soft ringing sounds.
“I’m Teesha,” said a contralto voice behind Dr. Boyd. “I’ll be your waitress, if you’ll just follow me, please.”
Mrs. Boyd raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips.
“Billy, grab hold of my walker while I get myself up from this bench—please.”
After they were seated at a small table meant for four and her walker had been stowed against the wall, Mrs. Boyd began paging through the menu.
“Well, I know what I want—if I can just find it. They’ve gone and changed the menu all around again on me. What are you going to have, Billy?”
Dr. Boyd pointed to his mouth, indicating he would answer her question after swallowing the piece of cheese bread he was chewing. They always give five pieces to a table no matter how many people are there, he thought. It’s as if they’re trying to start a fight between the customers. How many times do they have five people at any table? He swallowed and watched his mother take a bite of her own piece of cheese bread.
“I was thinking of having Captain Silver’s long-johns, Mom, but they don’t have them at this place.”
“Ha-ha. That joke was stupid even at the other restaurant last week. What are you going to have?”
“The usual—flounder stuffed with crab. How about you? What are you trying to find?”
“That—that pasta thingy.”
“Pasta thingy? The hollowed out bread with cheese sauce all over a few popcorn shrimp and a pea-sized piece of lobster? It’s halfway down page three here.”
“I don’t see it. Where?”
He turned a page of her menu and pointed.
“Are you sure that’s what you want, Mom? Your blood pressure was about 900 over 800 this morning, and your cholesterol levels were all through the stratosphere last checkup. And dairy doesn’t agree with you any more.”
“It may not agree with me, but I agree with it. I’m eighty-eight, and I’m going to enjoy my meals. There’s damn little else for me to enjoy, especially down south here.”
“Mom, Virginia is hardly the south anymore. The south starts with South Carolina now that so many Yankees like you have moved down here.”
“Well, I don’t have any of my friends down here—not my real friends, anyhow.”
“That’s what comes of all your virtue and clean living, Mom—you’ve just lived longer than most of your friends and kept going and kept all your marbles. Half the ones that are still alive are—bed-ridden or don’t have a clue who anybody is. And nobody ever comes to visit them, either, I’ll bet.”
“Maybe they’re better off that way. I’ve got plenty of aches, and not all of them are physical. And I can’t even get my TV programs down here. You’ve been here almost two weeks—doesn’t it bother you that so many coloreds are on all the TV programs here?”
“Uh—no, no it doesn’t, Mom.” Dr. Boyd felt himself tense up,
and he hoped that her voice was not carrying to other people.
“Well, it bothers me! Anyways, Billy, what looks good on the menu to you?”
“I was thinking of having some flounder stuffed with crab meat. It was pretty good the last time we were here.”
“Do they still have it? Did you see it listed still? They’ve been changing the menu each time I come here.”
“Yup. It’s still there. And your fave is still there, too. Would you like another piece of this cheese bread?”
“No. One is more than I should have. Dairy doesn’t agree with me. You finish all the rest.”
“Well, maybe I’ll have just one more myself, Mom.”
“Jesus H. Christ, Billy—will you get a look at that.”
“Where? Where, Mom?”
“That little girl over there, just sitting down.”
“In the orange camisole? What about her?”
“Whore clothes—on a little eight-year-old. Her parents probably’ve had her going to baton classes and beauty pageants since she was six months old. How else can you explain that? Pimps. That’s what they are. They have no successes in their own lives, so they’re trying to foist their sick dreams off onto their daughter. That kind of thing doesn’t happen up north.”
Dr. Boyd thought for half a minute, weighing what to say.
“I think she may be ten or eleven, Mom. She’s starting to show signs of puberty.”
“That’s what happens to eight-year-olds when their folks push them like that. I read it in two of my magazines,” she answered.
“Are you guys ready to order yet?”
Dr. Boyd looked up into Teesha’s smiling dark face and nodded.
“My mother would like your famous linguini with shrimp and lobster, a cup of hot tea, and a small bowl of your wonderful apple sauce.”
He watched Teesha write this down and waited for her to stop and look at him.
“What are you going to have, Billy?” said Mrs. Boyd.
“I’m having one of their famous flounder stuffed with crab meat, Mom. And a couple other things.”
“So just speak up and tell the girl, Billy. I’m sure she’d like to hear it.”
Teesha was looking at him with a faint smile on her lips.
“So—besides your flounder stuffed with savory, spiced crab meat, I would like a caesar salad and a cup of regular coffee, no cream—please.”
“I’ll be right back with your hot drinks and starters. Do you want any more of the cheese bread?” said Teesha with a broader smile.
“No. I think we’re happy with what we have, thanks.”
“Jesus!” said Mrs. Boyd. “Look what she’s doing now.”
“Who?”
“The little girl in the whore clothes, of course.”
Dr. Boyd turned his head again.
“What was it?” he asked.
“You didn’t see? She’s been pulling her bra straps down off her shoulders. They’re both hanging down all loose and public. Is that her father there with her?”
Sitting opposite the little girl was a man who seemed to be in his mid-thirties. He was dressed in tan corduroy trousers and a maroon wool sweater, which looked like Christmas presents he was wearing for the first time. His longish dark hair was styled, Dr. Boyd thought, to resemble that of Tom Cruise.
The girl had short, curly brown hair and wore tight brown jeans with her tight orange camisole. A pale-blue bra strap hung loosely over each of her skinny biceps, and she seemed to be tugging on one of them to make it even looser.
“Her mom probably had her for Christmas, and today she’s day-aftering with her dad,” said Dr. Boyd. “That’s my best guess. Otherwise, it is a puzzlement.”
Either that, he thought, or Lolita’s running away with Pervert Pervert.
“What’s she even wearing a bra for?” said Mrs. Boyd. “All she’s got is a couple o’ grapes.”
“A couple o’ raisins,” said Dr. Boyd. To himself he thought, Cute kid. Like to see her again in about eight years in a couple of my freshman classes. Aloud he added, “I don’t think it was her mother that dresses her like that, Mom. I think she must be living with a latter-day Miss Haversham who hates men and is planning to use this girl to get revenge or something.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Billy.”
“Dickens, Mom. A great book about expectations—and disillusionment—but with all the answers and a happy ending, unlike most of real life.”
“Tell me something I can understand—please.”
“Okay. During the first term I had a funny student named Kyle, who told the class and me about being a waiter in a place like this. One day, he said, some—”
“Why was he wasting your class time on that? You let kids just jump in like that? I never did, back when I was teaching in Hartford.”
Dr. Boyd paused and considered her remark. Teesha arrived and set his mother’s applesauce and tea down, asked if everything was all right, and set his coffee and salad down. When she left, he replied to his mother.
“Mom, as part of an assignment I was discussing, I invited the students to each give a few examples—”
“Billy! You know better. I know you know better.”
Again he paused to consider.
“Mom, it’s my class, I’m fifty-seven years old, I’ve been teaching college for thirty-one years, and students now are not at all the way they used to be, and —”
“What are you talking about? You said, and I quote, ‘to each give.’ That was called splitting an infinitive when I went to school and when you did, too.”
Yet once more Dr. Boyd paused.
“Oh. My bad. Anyway, I invited each student to give a specific, concrete example of something that was seriously—or humorously—interesting to them about a job they had had or work they had done back before coming to college. I was trying to ‘engage’ the students in the ‘learning process’—that’s what we have to do nowadays. Nobody lectures any more even in college, Mom. Two generations of computer games and four generations of TV programs have given about 95 percent of incoming kids Attention Deficit Disorder—or something. Okay?”
“I’d blame Jimmy Carter and the Clintons, sooner than I’d blame TV or computers. People very often learn valuable things from their TV and computers.”
“Anyway—it’s different now, and I start my students out writing about a personal experience they’ve each had—like a job—and tell them to alternate between a kind of general matrix and an array of hopefully vivid and concrete details and—”
“Hopefully?”
“What?”
“‘Hopefully vivid details’? Can details be ‘hopeful’? And you have a Ph.D. in English? Lucky for you, your father isn’t alive to hear you talk like this.”
“Examples—and details—which, one hopes, will be vivid—and interesting. All right?”
“I’m waiting for you to get to your point, Billy. You always seem to spin out these long-winded prologues. As the Bard would tell you, ‘More matter, Billy, more matter—and less art. Much less art.’”
Dr. Boyd smiled with his lips but not his dead eyes.
“Anyway, Mom, Kyle—my student—told how a customer handed him back a teaspoon and complained about it being dirty—soap residue spots on—”
“That happens to me a lot when I go out to restaurants. People nowadays just don’t care to get the silverware clean.”
“No doubt that’s Carter’s and the Clintons’ fault.”
“Don’t you be a smartass with your mother, Billy. Just try and finish your little story before the food arrives.”
“Anyway, this kid, Kyle—he—he brought the customer a clean spoon.”
“What was so vivid about that, Billy?”
“I guess not much, Mom. Anyway, Kyle flunked out the end of his first trimester—he flunked everything but English.”
“And it sounds to me as if he should have flunked that, too. Do you inflate their grades, Billy?”
“Of course I do, Mom. I’m too old and flabby in both mind and body to whore myself in other ways any more.”
“William! Be nice.”
“I’m sorry, Mom. I just get in moods some times.”
“Just because that happens, Billy, doesn’t mean you have to take it out on others.”
“You’re right, Mom.” And he began thinking about the discrepancy between his career plans—writing greatly admired books at an Ivy League university—and the reality—teaching large sections of bonehead composition at a tenth-rate midwestern state college. If I could just have half a sabbatical, he thought, I could discuss the inconsistencies, the discrepancies in Faulkner’s fiction from story to story and posit new “solutions” and weigh their merits in new ways: each story is a self-contained “alternative universe”; or the narrators are deceptive and/or semi-incompetent; or Faulkner himself (as he got older and drank more) was the same; or Faulkner—like Robbe-Grillet—deliberately was constructing an inconsistent narrative; or . . . .
“How’s your fish, Billy? My shrimp are good, but I can’t find any lobster.”
“Oh—it’s good, Mum—great actually. Glad I chose it. Want a taste?” He knew she would not, and he smiled at the harmless lie he had just told: both his salmon filet and his broccoli were luke warm and quite soggy.
In the kitchen, a skinny white busgirl tapped a heavy-set black waiter on the arm. “Tommy, you remember Kyle Bascomb?”
“Kyle? Yeah—ol’ Kyle that got his dumb ass fired for lickin’ the silverware.”
“Yeah. Well, I saw his older sister at mass this morning. She says he was accidentally shot a couple days before Christmas—in the head. He’s in a coma down in Texas.”
“How was that?”
“Shit, Tommy, I don’t know. During basic training, she said. Somebody brought some bullets back from the rifle range—an’ they somehow got into Kyle’s gun.”
“Probably was no accident. Ol’ Kyle was a wise guy.”
“His sister said they—his company commander—said Kyle was the one brought the bullets back.”
“Makes sense to me. Like I say, he’s a wise guy, Kelly, an’ him enlistin’ ain’t gonna change that.”
“Beth, his sister, said it was a—a accident, but maybe Kyle decided the army really wasn’t for him—or vice verse.”
“Nah—that asshole wouldn’t ‘a’ had the guts.”
“I guess maybe we’ll never know.”
Teesha led Dr. Boyd and his mother to a booth near the young man with the maroon sweater and the girl with the orange camisole. Mrs. Boyd pointed with her clear lucite cane and leaned over to whisper to her son.
“What’s with the flag-flying over there? Is this a fourth-grade fad to have their straps hanging down now?”
“Looks like that, Ma. Does it bother you? Me, I hate the hair of the guy she’s with.”
“Both of ‘em look pretty stupid, Billy. Him with those corduroys, and her with that underwear showing. Well, there’s a pair the squirrels aren’t likely to ever get back. But you was telling me about something funny you’d heard about this place. Lay the rest of it on me—please.”
“Ho yeah—funny story from one of my patients about a kid she used to work with in this restaurant. Seems a bunch of Jewish types came in one day and got all bossy about how they wanted things done their way. She—my patient, that is—called it an ‘eight-top,’ meaning there was eight people all sitting at one big pushed-together table. So it seems a fat ol’ Jewish lady starts going ape-shit about there being a dirty knife that maybe had some little soap scum streaks or spots on it—almost sterile for most practical purposes, you know, and certainly no freakin’ danger to anybody with the sense of a goose—and hardly even an eyesore.”
“Except to people of her tribe.”
“Right. Anyways, Ma, the kid pretends to be polite to ‘em, ‘cause he wants a big tip probably.”
“Which he was never gonna get, o’ course.”
“Right. Hadn’t thought o’ that, Ma. You’re so right. Anyways, he says, ‘Oh, bless my soul, Ma’am, let me run that back to the kitchen an’ personally select a clean one for you.’
An’ he just goes around a corner just out o’ their sight an’—get this now for brass balls—an’ he licks the freakin’ spoon or knife—on both sides an’ then wipes it on the seat of his jeans—an’ laughs with my patient about this—an’ then he takes it back to the—the tribal matriarch with a big shit-eatin’ grin an’ says, ‘Here you go, Madam! I just licked it clean myself!’ An’ she gave him a big smile an’ a big jovial thank-you. How ‘bout that?”
“You think that’s funny, Billy? If he’d do that to the Hebes, he’d prob’ly do it to reg’lar people, too.”
“Aw, Ma, lighten up. It’s a funny story. You could send it in to Reader’s Digest an’ get a hundred bucks for it maybe. There was no harm. You’ll get sicker from touchin’ the door handle to the ladies’ room.”
“I never do.”
“What?”
“I never touch the handles. I always carry these little packs o’ tissues an’ always push or pull the doors with ‘em.”
Dr. Boyd regarded her with new respect. “I never noticed, Ma.”
“Unless, o’ course, someone’s getting the doors for me, which at my age they often do, including even you, Billy. But, I wanna know, was this waiter one of—you know—one o’ them?” She cast a quick glance over at Tommy James, who had just come out of the kitchen.
“Was he black? Nah—no. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t—pretty sure. My patient’s white at least, so I assumed. But o’ course she does live in a trailer park and has four tattoos, never mind where two of ‘em are, an’ five body piercings, never mind where four o’ those are—even if I’m the one that did ‘em for her. Ha—just kidding. Maybe.”
“You better be, Billy.”
Dr. Boyd and his father, Lieutenant Colonel William (“Crazy Pippin”) Boyd, USMC, Retired, gave Tommy James their orders for the Surf-n-Turf Special and continued their conversation.
“So, if you teach econ, why’n hell’s a cadet tellin’ you about his cousin doin’ a thing like that? It sounds disrespectful, like if he thinks you’re his best buddy or something.”
“We were talking about how hard it is to get good help and keep their loyalty in the present economy, Dad. So he said he knew of a case where one manager let waiters have a lot of slack provided the customers didn’t complain too much and how another manager came in and acted like a tough-nuts little Hitler about everything. Licking the knife was pretty funny, I thought, and anyway the kid got fired by the second guy.”
“Well, I just hope you didn’t laugh so’s your students saw you. You’re not their buddy and don’t ever forget that. Friend—sometimes, maybe. Enemy—that’s the best: keeps them on their toes—and respectful. But never be their buddy, Junior.”
“You’re right, Dad. That’s for dang sure.”
“I know I am. And—how’s your mom doing, Billy?”
“She’s good. I spent all day yesterday with her, you know, sir. She’s good.”
“You—you talk at all ‘bout me, Billy? You know, like I asked you?”
“Tried to, Dad, but she told me not to spoil the day for her.”
“Sully.”
“What?”
“She said ‘sully,’ didn’t she?”
“Well—yes.”
“That’s the word she’d use—it’s worse somehow than just ‘spoil.’ Anyone can say ‘spoil,’ but only your mother ever says ‘sully’ anymore. It’s like a dying-out word.”
“I s’pose you’re right, Dad.”
“Course I am—always am about the crappy minor things. She said, ‘Billy—don’t sully Christmas by mentioning your father’s name here in my house.’ I thought she would. Expected it.”
“It rankled her when you signed that letter ‘Faithfully yours.’”
“I’ll thank you, Junior, to never remind me of that old faux pas again.”
“Yes, sir.”
The son shook a large gout of “secret” sauce onto his quarter of fried chicken.
“Billy, why’d we have t’ have this damn’ buck for our waiter, anyways? I’d druther’ve had that big gal over there a-waiting on us. Ha. If she an’ I was playin’ poker, Junior, I’d have the advantage, ‘cause I can see she’s got a full blouse! An’ her name’s Tease-Ya. Nice name. Like that name. Nice roun’ ass, too—real nice.”
“Pop, you’re maybe speakin’ a tad too loud—ag’in.”
Teesha handed a third glass of Merlot to the man in the maroon sweater and brought a third plate of cheese bread for him and the girl, who was drinking her second cola. They told her they were almost ready to order but needed a little more time.
“Uncle Billy, isn’t this the place where we saw those waiter men licking the forks last summer?”
“Yes, Terry.”
“If you were so upset about it, why’d we come back here?”
“I’m pretty sure nobody does that kind of thing here any more, Terry. But we don’t know about any of the other restaurants here in Lexington, do we?”
“Can I have the spaghetti an’ lobster an’ shrimp inside a loaf of bread again?”
“It’s called linguini, dear. Yes—if that’s what you’d like.”
“An’ some pecan pah, too?”
“If you have room for it. But you have to eat all the shrimp and lobster pieces.”
“I can do that.”
“And will you remember to please fix your—fix those straps back before we leave the restaurant? Please?”
“Oh—I can do that in the car—before we pull into Mom’s drive. Can I have a taste of your wine this time?”
“Can we make a deal? You can have a small taste, but you do what I asked you, please. I think we should both be able to compromise on stuff and get along. Okay, Terry? Please?”
“Hey, Billy! Billy Boyd! Hey, you creepy, crazy mother!”
Eleven heads whipped around to see who had spoken to them.
