On the Wing (13 page)

“It's the Clam Capital of America. Are you sure that you haven't heard of it?”

“Yep. What're you going to have?”

“I don't know. Salisbury steak, I guess.”

“Baked potato or mashed?”

“My grandmother really likes Salisbury steak,” I said, speaking almost automatically, giving voice to my yearning for home. “She almost always orders it when we go out to dinner—I mean if my grandparents—I used to call them Gumma and Guppa when I was a kid—if they go out to dinner with my parents and me—which doesn't happen a lot, but does happen when we're driving to West Burke for our summer vacation and we stop for dinner on the way—”

“Baked or mashed?”

“Strictly speaking,” said my neighbor, “the so-called Salisbury steak is not steak at all. It's ground meat—and notice that I am careful not to say ‘ground beef'—formed into a patty in the shape of a cut of beefsteak and covered with a brown gravy, usually containing mushrooms.”

“I know,” I said.

He looked at me steadily for a long moment. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, though I refused to look at him directly.

“Gravy covers a lot of sins, son,” he said. He pulled the ashtray from his earlier location and stubbed his cigarette in it.

“You know,” I said to the waitress, “I think maybe I'll have meat loaf instead.”

“Now, meat loaf can be made of many things,” said my neighbor.

“Leave the boy alone,” said the waitress.

“My mom makes it out of hamburger,” said my automatic voice. “You know, ground meat—ground beef. And she puts bread crumbs and onions in it—chopped onions—and I think she puts some tomato sauce in it, too—the kind that comes in those little cans—and an egg—and then she mushes it all up and puts it in a glass pan—or I guess you'd say a glass dish—”

“Okay,” said the waitress. “Baked or mashed?”

“Baked—no—I—”

The man pointed a bony, slightly trembling finger at the entry for meat loaf on the menu and said, “Many things qualify as meat. During the Great Depression, many people ate horse meat, and they were glad to get it. Others ate horse meat and never knew they were getting it. Many a family around here was kept alive by a ready supply of squirrels. I can imagine a clever housewife discovering that she could grind squirrel meat and make an appetizing loaf out of it. She probably called it meat loaf.”

“I'm sorry,” I said to the waitress. “I'm going to have macaroni and cheese.”

She and I both looked at the man beside me to see if he had anything to say about that. He did.

“There are many kinds of cheese,” he said, shaking his head at the horrible prospect. “Some are better than others, some are worse than others, some smell like a pen full of goats, and some—such as the abomination called ‘pasteurized process cheese food'—are offered to us under the name of cheese though they are hardly cheese at all. What a weaselly nomenclature that is! It practically sneers at you, ‘I'm not cheese, you poor sap. I'm just cheesy.'”

With a sigh, the waitress asked, “Peas, carrots, or peas and carrots with that mac and cheese?”

“On second thought—” I said.

“Fourth thought,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Fourth thought. Your first was Salisbury steak, your second meat loaf, then macaroni and cheese, so whatever you're thinking of now is your fourth thought.”

“Oh, yeah. Fourth thought. Sorry. On fourth thought, I'm going to have fish cakes and spaghetti. Back at home, my mother makes that for Sunday-night supper. Not all the time, but pretty often.”

“This isn't Sunday,” the man pointed out.

“That's okay. I'm going to have fish cakes and spaghetti anyway.”

“Does your mother make her own fish cakes?” he asked.

“Um, no,” I said. “She gets them at the fish store. In Babbington.” As I said that, Mortimer's Fresh Fish seemed to reconstruct itself within Vern's diner. I could have been there. “Sometimes I get them for her,” I said. “If I'm going downtown on Sunday—to see my friend Raskol—or my grandparents—not the ones we go to West Burke with, but my other grandparents—my mother will ask me to get some fish cakes for dinner.” One of Mr. Mortimer's cats rubbed against my leg, the way it did when I stood in front of the refrigerated case and waited for the fish cakes. “Mr. Mortimer has six cats,” I said. “They're named for the days of the week. But there's no Monday. That's because he's closed on Monday.”

“And have you seen how the fish cakes are made at the fish store?”

“No. They're in the case when I get there. I mean, they're already made.”

I had to struggle to keep myself from reaching down to scratch Sunday behind the ears.

“It's hard to know what kind of fish is in a fish cake,” the man was saying. “There are many fish in the sea, and many of those fish aren't very appetizing if you see them as they are, before they get chopped and mashed and mixed with crumbs and floor sweepings.”

“I don't think Mr. Mortimer puts floor sweepings in the fish cakes,” I said—or, to be truthful, snapped. “I don't think he
would
put floor sweepings in the fish cakes.”

“There are also many parts to a fish, many parts that you might not want to eat. Some of them fish got fangs, you know, like snakes, and spit venom powerful enough to kill a man. Who knows what's hidden inside that cake?”

“Can I have pork chops?” I said to the waitress.

“Sure. Mashed potatoes and peas?”

“Fine,” I said. I closed my menu.

“Now what exactly do you suppose she means when she says ‘peas'?” the man wondered aloud.

“Oh, good grief,” she said. She bent down and opened a door in a steel cabinet, reached in and wrestled out a huge can, which she lifted up, then dropped onto the counter with a thud. “This is what she means,” she said.

I reached out to it. I touched it. I turned it slowly, examining every side. The contents were, the back of the label declared, “Seeds of the variety of garden pea plant,
Pisum sativum,
known as Little Marvel, precooked, packed in water, and canned by Troubled Titan Foods.”

The lump in my throat was so large and thick that I could hardly speak.

“We have—we—at home—we have these at home,” I managed at last. I couldn't possibly have told them all the memories that the Troubled Titan had packed into that can, but I was willing to try, if only I could blink the water from my eyes and swallow that lump in my throat.

“You have to wonder about the quality of the water they pack these in,” said the man.

“Oh, Vern, shut up,” said the waitress.

I got up and in a blur I made my way to the door.

“What's got into him?” I heard Vern ask as I pushed my way outside.

“You gave him indigestion before he even ate,” said the waitress. “Why do you do that?”

“I don't know,” said Vern. “There's just something about strangers that makes me—”

*   *   *

WHAT IT WAS about strangers that made Vern treat them as he did, I cannot say, because I let the door close behind me, ran to
Spirit,
kick-started her, and drove a couple of miles down the road, where I found a garage whose owner was willing to let me spend the night on an old sofa in his office. I dined on candy bars. I don't know what was in them. I threw the wrappers away without looking at the ingredients. I fell asleep trying to figure Vern out and scanning my memory of the people who had been sitting in the booths while Vern was toying with me to see if I could spot a dark-haired girl. I did, in the last booth to the right of the entrance, far from where I had been sitting. She seemed to be having dinner with her parents. I couldn't tell what she was eating.

Chapter 12

Surprised and Delighted

Because a physical space in the world can always be returned to,… we feel irrationally, somehow certain, impossibly certain, that we should be able to return again to some often unfinished relationship … back in the imagined inexistent space of the past.

Julian Jaynes,
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

ALBERTINE ANGLED onto the off-ramp. We could have been anywhere in the country where an interstate highway intersects a road that may be important, even essential, to locals, but is to the speeding interstate voyager useful only for the short stretch in either direction that is cluttered and clotted with franchise outlets and motorist services; we might even have begun reliving the night when we stayed in an It'll Do and met the egoists.

“I'm getting a strange sense of eye-eye-dee-vee,” I said with a shiver.

“What's that?” she asked.

“Interstate intersection déjà vu.”

“I see what you mean, but this time there will be no eye-dee-dee-vee, I promise you.”

“What's that?”

“It'll Do déjà vu.”

“You mean this time you are going to drive past all of this and take us to some cozy spot?”

“Well now, that little word
cozy
can mean different things to different people,” she said, “and
spot
can cover a lot of sins.”

“Wait a minute—” I muttered, inspired by her performance.

“What is it?”

“Well, it's odd, but—”

“What?”

“Your imitation of my imitation of Vern has me thinking how odd it is that we feel something like nostalgia for even our bad experiences.”

“Do we?” she asked, in a manner that made it clear that she, for one, did not.

“Apparently
I
do,” I said, “because all of a sudden I yearn to return to Vern's.”

“You do?”

“I think so. Maybe.”

I scanned the road ahead of us, looking for a place where we could conveniently stop so that I could consult a map in search of some congruity between the past and present that would show me where Vern's ought to be. I could have asked her to pull into any of the fast-food joints or any gas station, or even into the parking lot of one of the motels. There was no reason not to pick the first one that she could have pulled into without causing a multi-car pileup, but my keen eyes saw, some distance down the road, toward the edge of the clutter, a Kap'n Klam. (As I suppose you know if you have not isolated yourself from the culture entirely, the Kap'n Klam Family Restaurants, America's only all-bivalve dining choice, rival some of the hamburger and pizza franchises in their ubiquity. “We're your korner klam shack,” is one of their slogans. Reading those words now, you can probably hear the catchy Kap'n Klam jingle, I'll bet.)

“Why don't you pull into that Kap'n Klam?” I suggested. “That will give me a chance to study the map for a bit—”

“If you will turn your attention to our printed itinerary, item 12B, you will see that our dinner destination should be just a couple of miles along this road. Relax and enjoy the scenery. You don't really want to go back to Vern's.”

I felt a sudden sense of relief. “Okay,” I said gratefully. “You're probably right.”

“I think you're going to enjoy the place we're headed for. According to their Web site, it's run by a young couple with a passion for food, life, and each other who found a tumbledown millhouse and converted it into exactly the kind of charming little restaurant that they would like to stumble upon if they were driving along the winding roads of vanishing small-town America.”

“They said all of that?”

“They did.”

“Including ‘tumbledown'?”

“Keep your eyes peeled.”

“How about the place up ahead? It's got that former-tumbledown-millhouse look.”

“What's the name of it?”

“Jack and Jennifer's.”

“That's the place.”

“And Jack and Jennifer must be the young couple with a passion for food, life, and each other.”

“I'd be willing to bet on it.”

*   *   *

OKAY, IT WAS CHARMING. That is, it was charming if you are charmed by old mills converted into restaurants. Al and I are suckers for them. There must be something about the smell of old wood or the babbling of the old mill stream. We go into a state of receptivity that other restaurants in other styles and settings do not induce in us. Put us in a restaurant in an old mill and we are immediately predisposed to be pleased, even charmed.

A charming young woman greeted us when we entered. “I'm Jennifer,” she said. Who else could she possibly have been? “And Jack is in the kitchen. We are delighted that you have chosen to join the narrative of our life together.”

Uh-oh. I detected a whiff of something rotten in the enchanting aroma of the old wood.

“This is a charming place,” said Albertine. She didn't seem to smell that hint of putrefaction.

“Oh, thank you,” said Jennifer, seizing Al's hand and squeezing it. “Come this way—I have the perfect spot for you.”

As we followed her, I whispered to Al, “Did you get a whiff of something—ah—malodorous—a little fusty?”

“Hush,” she said.

“It's just that—something has made me wonder how long it's going to be before they turn this into a franchise—with Styrofoam wood and prerecorded babbling.”

“Behave yourself. Follow Jennifer.”

The large dining room was more than half full, but Jennifer led us to one of the most desirable tables, beside a window, overlooking the mill pond. The charm began to return, and—if such a transsensual alteration is possible—that slightly off odor was sweetened by the babble of the brook below us and the play of evening light on the surface of the pond.

Another charming young woman came to the table and began pouring water for us. “This is Stephanie,” said Jennifer. “She'll be your guide and interpreter this evening.”