Poached Egg on Toast

by Frances Itani

  He slipped into the diner by the bus depot and sat in a booth and asked for the breakfast menu, though it was afternoon. He ordered only coffee, but began to write on a shred of paper from his wallet.

  omelette, plain

  cheese and mushroom omelette

  Hawaiian omelette with pineapple

  He did not fancy what the Hawaiians mixed with their eggs in the morning.

  pancakes with syrup

  pancakes with blueberry sauce

  Without ceremony, the waitress appeared beside the booth and took the menu away from him. She lifted it right out of his hands.

  Ada was still away when Arthur returned. He started a new column and wrote out the breakfasts he’d borrowed from the diner. After that, he kept on writing.

  corn syrup with toast

  bacon (not cooked hard)—He had let Ada know that sometimes she left it too long in the pan.

  lasagna (leftovers)

  ravioli (leftovers)

  cheese chops

  He heard Ada coming, and he stashed the list.

  Arthur began to dream about plums served on doilied trays, about grapefruit slit with a delicate silver knife. He woke one morning and thought: Maybe Ada has forgotten the fight. And then: Maybe she’s told Elizabeth.

  He imagined the two women laughing over a fight that now seemed to have taken place a long time ago. A fight that was nobody’s business but his own. His and Ada’s, though it was never discussed. Breakfast had simply ceased.

  He sat in the chair in the living room while Ada pretended to sleep, and he pressed heavily with a pen into his black diary: I’m not a useless old fool. I come from a long line of men that were not required to do their own cooking. It’s the way things have always been, though once a year at Christmas my father made his four-meat pâté. Rabbit was the fourth meat because it was in the family tradition. I never saw him cook anything else.

  How would he give her the list, even if he did get it done? Somewhere in his mind, he knew he’d attached an unlikely outcome to the hundredth breakfast. Ada would rise early and come to the kitchen in her faded maroon robe and her soft slippers, and she would stir quietly about the room while he sat at the table and waited.

  There must have been something else, something besides him complaining about his poached egg on toast. Something deeper, darker, something further back. He couldn’t for the life of him think what it might be.

  Black pudding, he wrote.

  sausage regular

  sausage Oktoberfest

  bananas, flecked with brown

  Fifty.

  Thursday morning the following week, Arthur put the kettle on and boiled the water and made a large pot of tea, two teabags. He let it steep four minutes, and poured the tea into Ada’s cup and added a drop of milk. He carried it to their room and stood at the end of the bed.

  Ada did not stir; her breathing did not alter. He set the cup on her bedside table and, on his way out of the room, he thumped the end of the mattress with his foot.

  Before he went outside to work in the garden, he put on his cap and tied a bandanna around his neck. As he passed the mirror, he glanced back quickly, thinking he’d seen a bandit.

  All morning, he watered and weeded until his back ached from bending. He scanned the sky, looking for cloud formations, and he listened to the birds raise their young. The baby jays were learning to fly. Every once in a while, a blue ball of fluff drifted past, slow-landing on the earth.

  Everything had its life. He’d read in the paper that trees knew when someone was going to chop them down. Their terrible cries could be measured electronically as the axe hit. Arthur believed this. What was being discovered every day was wondrous.

  What he did not like was the way things were reported on radio and TV. Instant this and instant that, everything was instant. War inside your own house the same moment it was happening around the other side of the world. He could do without that. The whole business made him weary.

  When he went inside, he could not tell if Ada had drunk the tea he’d made. The cup was washed and dried and back on the kitchen shelf. Ada was nowhere to be seen. Though Arthur was tired, he pulled out the list.

  ham, fried

  side pork

  applesauce (cold)

  Spanish rice (warmed)

  peanut butter on toast

  liver and onions

  His favourite. He hadn’t eaten liver and onions for a long time. He began to think the list was foolish, but he had fifty-six; he was past any point, now, where he could do a back turn.

  toasted cheese sandwich

  hot scones with raisins

  bread pudding, crisped under grill

  cheese biscuits

  waffles with syrup

  bran muffins

  home fries

  fruit salad

  pigs-in-blankets

  He went to his room and hauled down the covers, and in the middle of the day, Arthur went back to bed.

  When he woke, he realized he’d eaten neither breakfast nor lunch. It was Ada’s night to go to the movies. Before all this had started, he used to mark the films she went to on the calendar. He never wanted to go himself but, every Thursday when Ada came home, he was used to hearing about the story and the movie stars. He especially liked to hear about the reruns, the old movies done up again, readied for the big screen, like old tarts. Bogart and Bacali. Cagney. Rosalind Russell, now there was someone who could act.

  He saw that his supper was in the oven. He’d slept a long time. When he looked out across the field, he realized it was the first time he’d missed standing at the door on a Thursday evening, watching Ada’s back as she crossed the field. She always called on Elizabeth first, before the two of them took the bus to town.

  He ate his supper in silence, listening to marauding bands of starlings as they roved from tree to tree across the field. He brought the list to the kitchen.

  Salmon patties, he wrote.

  dish of prunes

  He put down the pencil and picked it up again. He felt his face flush as he wrote and underlined:

  Eggs

  scrambled

  once over

  sunnyside

  He went outside and stood on the step. The sun was being pulled under the hills and there were streaks of charcoal above the horizon. Since last winter, he’d checked the sky frequently for signs of Jesus in his robe, but he’d never seen such a vision again. He remembered the date of it, December 24. His mother used to tell him when he was a small child that, at the stroke of midnight Christmas Eve, all the animals in the barn spoke to one another. Now, the seasons seemed to glide past; fall would be here and then winter would cover his roof, his garden, his shed.

  He returned to the kitchen table.

  boiled egg, 3 minutes sharp

  eggs Benedict—these, he’d only heard about. Ada had never made them.

  Western sandwich

  egg-in-the-hole

  He went to the gun rack and took down his rifle. As he passed the mirror, he saw that he was still wearing the bandanna. He loaded the rifle in the kitchen.

  poached egg on toast

  He left the house and walked to the clump of trees in the middle of the field. He sat on the earth, sheltered by trees. He thought he might catch the first star, but three blinked together as if they’d been visible all along and he hadn’t been alert enough to notice. He closed his eyes and thought about the list. It had been easy enough at first, but he was beginning to run down. He did not know why he’d loaded the rifle, why he’d brought it here, to the rise in the field. He sat holding it, pointing the barrel towards the sky. In an hour or so, Ada would be returning. She and Elizabeth would step down from the bus in the dark and Elizabeth would arrive home first and wait while Ada crossed the field. Ada sometimes called back when she reached the step, to let her friend know that she was safe. Not that there was anyone around. They just did that; they were in the habit of calling back and forth through the dark.


  He began to feel the coolness of the night as he waited. Birds were settling around him, a soft shudder of wings. Far off, he heard the bus pause to drop its passengers, and it threw out cones of light as it turned to go back to town. Arthur sat upright, his fingers swollen against the rifle.

  A few minutes later, the voices of the two women rose and fell through the dark. There was a murmur as they stopped at Elizabeth’s doorstep and then, silence, when Ada set out alone across the field. She had to pass in front of him; the path was below the clump of trees where he sat stiffly, on the ground. It was too late to go back to the house; she would hear him, if he moved.

  The argument was of no importance, he saw that, now. He and Ada had drifted to this place together. They’d been living their lives, and anger had erupted and settled in a still, dark pool. He could scarcely imagine why he’d been so stubborn. But she, she was as stubborn a woman as he’d ever known.

  She was passing now, below the trees. The curve of her shoulder, her silhouette, was as familiar to him as his own unspoken voice. He cocked the rifle, and was startled to hear the snick. He aimed at the sky and pulled the trigger, and the roar nearly knocked him onto his back. The throb and flutter in the trees fell silent.

  Ada’s pace did not alter one bit; she did not even look his way. She reached the house and went in, and again he saw the curve of her in the light as she removed her jacket and walked through the living room to close the curtains. He tried to get up, but his knees would not hold him. He had to rub his legs and feet to get them to move.

  From where he stood in the field, he might have been underwater. The lighted house seemed to recede as he waded above the path, his thighs thickening with the chill.

  If there was a way of surfacing, he’d never learned it. The list was three-quarters done; Ada would probably never see it. She might not even speak to him when he went inside. He felt foolish holding the rifle, firing it into the air. He did not know how other men and women faced their differences, whether it was all a matter of blunder and chance. He knew only that he’d had to let Ada know he was serious about wanting his breakfast. He only wanted her to understand.

  Acknowledgements

  These stories, with occasional variations, have been published and/or broadcast, as follows:

  “Clayton” in Canadian Fiction Magazine; Moving Off The Map: from story to fiction; Coming Attractions 3; Pack Ice and broadcast by CBC Anthology. “An August Wind” in The Fiddlehead; Contexts: Anthology Two; The Ottawa Citizen and Man Without Face. “Megan” in Queen’s Quarterly and Pack Ice. “Marx & Co.” in Pack Ice and The Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women. “Pack Ice” in Pack Ice. “P’tit Village,” my first published story, was published in Queen’s Quarterly, in A Land, A People and in Man Without Face. “Truth or Lies” in Room of One’s Own; Truth or Lies and in Common Ground. “Separation” in The University of Windsor Review and Pack Ice. “An Evening in the Café” in The University of Windsor Review; The Journey Prize Anthology; in Truth or Lies; and an excerpt was broadcast by CBC State of the Arts. “Scenes from a Pension” in Queen’s Quarterly; Coming Attractions 3; Truth or Lies and broadcast by CBC Anthology. “Messages” in Room of One’s Own. “Accident” in Quarry and Symbiosis in Prose. “Touches” in Grain and Man Without Face. “Foolery” in Truth or Lies. “Earthman Pointing” in Canadian Fiction Magazine and Man Without Face. “Man Without Face” in Prairie Schooner and Man Without Face. “Sarajevo” in Man Without Face. “In the Name of Love” in Toronto Life. A two-page excerpt, notes for “The Thickness of One Sheet of Paper” was published in Rikka under the title “Black Eyes, Almond Skin.” “What We Are Capable Of” was published in The Walrus Magazine. “Poached Egg On Toast” won the 1996 Tilden/CBC/Saturday Night Literary Award and was published in Saturday Night and Emergent Voices: CBC Canadian Literary Awards Stories 1979–1999) and was broadcast by CBC Between the Covers. Blaine Harden’s article on designer coffins in the Washington Post supplied background detail used in “Earthman Pointing.”

  Thanks again to my husband, Ted. I thank my friend and former editor Dilshad Engineer, my agent, Jackie Kaiser, at Westwood Creative Artists, and Nicole Winstanley, also at WCA. Once more, a special thanks to Phyllis Bruce, my Canadian editor and publisher, for her perceptive comments, her concrete suggestions and, against all odds, her unflagging enthusiasm for the short story.

  Copyright

  Poached Egg On Toast

  © 2004 by Itani Writes Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40232-3

  A Phyllis Bruce Book, published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  FIRST EDITION

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  Library and Archives of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Itani, Frances, 1942–

  Poached egg on toast: stories / Frances Itani.–

  1st ed.

  “A Phyllis Bruce book”.

  ISBN 0-00-200584-0

  I. Title.

  PS8567.T35P62 2004 c813′.54 C2004-903318-2

  HC 987654321

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