A Pie Plate Pilgrimage

by William Loewen

  Chapter 16 - Chicken Wing Consolation

  The fourteenth was a normal day at the office. Lydia sent and received emails like any other day. She ran errands and worked on the book project with her regular enthusiasm. When five o’clock came and she still hadn’t started to pack her things up, Luke approached her desk.

  “Working late on Valentine’s Day, huh?” he asked. “Aren’t we a sorry lot?”

  Although he had spoken in first person plural, Lydia couldn’t help but see this as a one-way insult. She had been thinking of staying at the office longer. It wasn’t the first time she was using work as an excuse for not having plans later. Focussing on her job helped her almost forget that she was perpetually single and alone once again on Valentine’s Day. Generally she didn’t lose any sleep at night from not having a boyfriend, but today she couldn’t get away from all the commercialism of the holiday and all the other cutesy stuff that could make a woman question her self-worth. Still, Luke’s insinuation that she was at least as pathetic as him allowed her to choose to leave with some dignity intact.

  “I’m heading out in a few minutes,” she said. “There were just a few more things for my book project I wanted to finish.” She resisted the urge to emphasize ‘my’.

  “So do you have a date tonight?” he asked.

  “Are you going to make a habit of asking your staff this kind of personal question?” she responded. Her professional demeanour betrayed her inner disgust at the idea of talking to him about that part of her life.

  “Yeah, neither do I,” he said, ignoring her cues. “Well, I’ll let you get back to your work so you can go.”

  Luke walked back to his desk, and Lydia left the building soon afterwards. When the initial sting of the perceived insult had passed, she wondered if maybe Luke had actually been trying to demonstrate some kind of friendship, but she certainly wasn’t ready to accept full blame for having been offended.

  Lydia hadn’t been home very long when the phone rang. She was surprised to hear Oscar on the other end. She was even more surprised when she found out why he was calling.

  “Remember when you were waiting to hear about whether the book project was a go, and you said if you didn’t get it we’d have to go out to drink your sorrows away?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “Does that invitation still stand?”

  “You mean tonight?” she asked, but without waiting for an answer and without clarifying that she had no sorrows to drink away, she continued. “Sure, why not? God knows I have nothing else up tonight.” She used this self-deprecating humour as a way of avoiding all of the obvious questions, like what happened to his big plans with Evangeline for Valentine’s Day and why was he calling her, of all people, to talk about stuff that almost certainly had nothing to do with the book project?

  He asked Lydia to pick a bar that she knew, since he had no idea which ones were good. She also made sure to pick a bar that served food she wouldn’t actually feel ashamed to call her supper.

  Oscar was already downtown when he called, so he was waiting for Lydia when she arrived. Still, she had to get his attention in the relatively quiet bar before he noticed her come in. It wasn’t because he was talking to some of the other customers or watching one of the televised sports games; he was just staring off into space. She would have been more worried about him except that she saw he was only drinking a soft drink and not something harder.

  “Have you eaten yet?” she asked, trying to sound upbeat as she arrived at the table.

  “No,” he answered, snapping back to reality. “I haven’t had chicken wings for a long time, so I was going to get that, but I was waiting for you to get here before I ordered.”

  “Oh, I was thinking about maybe getting something a little healthier,” she said as she inspected the nearby daily specials chalkboard for a hearty salad or something light. “This is my supper after all.”

  “Yeah, it’s my supper too … and my lunch.”

  Lydia wondered if this was just a slip of the tongue or a cry for help.

  When the waitress came, Oscar ordered another cola with his wings, so Lydia decided not to get any alcohol either. When the waitress was gone, Lydia couldn’t hold off asking any more.

  “Are you alright, Oscar?” she asked. “Is there something you want to talk about?”

  “In a bit maybe. Can we just talk about the book or something for a while?”

  Lydia had no interest in talking about work outside of company time, especially since she’d already punched out for the day. Instead, she told him about the movie she’d seen on TV the night before. He’d seen it too, but in the theatre a few years earlier. They shared their opinions about it and talked about the lead actors.

  The small talk was boring Lydia but she played along, hoping that soon Oscar would feel comfortable to talk about what was really on his mind.

  Then, after he’d finished his first order of wings and there was a bit of a lull in the conversation, Oscar finally spoke, almost blurting out, “It’s over. Evangeline and I, we’re officially done.”

  Before Lydia knew what to say, the waitress arrived with their orders. “You sure you don’t want a beer instead?” Lydia asked.

  “I’m okay,” he answered.

  “Do you mind if I have one?”

  Oscar shook his head and Lydia asked the waitress for a light beer with a lime in it. Then Oscar turned to the waitress too and asked, “In about five minutes can you bring me another batch of these wings? And can you make them a little hotter?”

  When the waitress left, Oscar just sat there staring blankly, giving no indication that he was going to be the next one to speak. Lydia waited a minute or so in silence before asking the question she thought was most appropriate. “Is there any chance you two can work this out and get back together?” She also felt it necessary to inject a sense of hope in her voice; as though this is what she thought was best for him.

  “I don’t know,” he said with both hope and despair in his voice. “I still want to marry the girl that I proposed to, but I don’t know if that girl exists; she probably never did.”

  “So what happened?”

  Oscar cleared his throat and showed some discomfort and uneasiness in his face.

  “I’m sorry,” Lydia continued, “you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  “No, no, I want to tell you. Everyone else I could have called knows me as Evangeline’s boyfriend or fiancé. You know me as me, that’s why I called you. I want to talk about it, I just don’t know how.”

  Since long before he and Evangeline began dating, Oscar was well aware that this was her city, and their friends were predominantly her friends. Not only was her father a well-known pastor, but so was her uncle, as well as her maternal grandfather. He literally knew nobody else in the city who he thought was capable of seeing his side of the story.

  “Don’t worry,” Lydia said. “With the relationships I’ve been in and the ones my friends have told me about, there’s nothing that’ll surprise me. I’ve heard it all.” It was a bit of an exaggeration, but she was just trying to make him feel more comfortable; and it seemed to be working.

  “Okay, so you know we had that disagreement a few weeks ago? I think I remember telling you that it was pretty serious.”

  “Right.”

  “As bad as that was though, I don’t think either of us thought we’d cancel the wedding because of it.”

  “So how did you resolve that one?”

  “I guess we somehow managed to convince each other that our relationship was stronger than that. I hadn’t intentionally set out to hurt her and I think I was finally able to help her see that. I said that I really did respect her father. She admitted that she had overreacted and that she was truly sorry. Despite all that supposed sincerity, I don’t think either of us learned any lessons.”

  “So things were good then?” Lydia asked.

  “Apparently, a little too good,” Oscar said. “After all that a
pologizing, we were in pretty good spirits, so we did some relatively intimate celebrating.”

  “I still don’t see what the problem is.”

  “Well, neither did I, but the next morning she started feeling guilty about maybe going too far and she thought maybe I should feel more guilty too.”

  Lydia had experienced a few of her own regretful mornings, so for a brief moment she found herself identifying with Evangeline. “Oscar, is there a chance that you put pressure on her to do things she wasn’t comfortable with?” she asked cautiously.

  “I never got the sense that she was withholding permission,” Oscar said frankly. “It seemed to me that she had at least as much fun as I did, if not more, but I guess none of that matters now.”

  After a few minutes of not knowing what to say and watching his cheeks turn red and his eyes water from the wings, she finally blurted out, “So you had sex. Big deal!”

  This actually brought a smile to Oscar’s face. He started shaking his head. “No, if we would have had sex, she’d probably marry me out of shame. I won’t go into details, but we were still a few steps away from that.”

  “So if you haven’t broken that precious little rule of yours, why is she so sure that what you did together was so wrong?”

  Oscar wiped the wing sauce from his face before saying, “She came to that conclusion in consultation with her father.”

  “You mean she told him about…?”

  “Yup,” Oscar said, answering the question that Lydia was too flustered to finish. She motioned to a nearby waitress to bring over another beer, and he continued on with his story. “The good Reverend told her that we shouldn’t get married unless I apologize. Then I said I didn’t want to marry into that family unless her father apologized to me for sticking his nose in our business. I also said that when she told him what we did, before telling me she felt guilty about it, she had chosen her loyalty.”

  “Did you really expect them to say sorry?”

  “No. I fully expected them to stick by their ultimatum, so I thought I’d present one to them that was equally ridiculous.”

  “So it’s over then?”

  “You know, during our last break I had almost started to understand that we were very different people. I almost got to the point where I could imagine that she was better off with a different kind of guy and I was better off with a different kind of girl. The thing that I couldn’t understand was that I really thought that she was an answer to my prayers. When I asked God to put someone special in my life, that’s when I met her. When I prayed about whether or not we should get engaged, I was pretty sure God was saying that we should. Isn’t that pathetic? All the other mysteries of God don’t shake me, but now, when I can’t work things out with my girlfriend, my trust in God is shaken.”

  Lydia sat quietly for a while and then said, “Boy Oscar, I hardly know what to say.”

  “That’s the thing,” he said, “most of my Christian friends would know exactly what to say. Even before I was finished talking they would have their advice and a scripture passage ready. I appreciate the way you are just hearing me out.”

  Lydia took a sip from her beer and added, “Well, I hope she comes to her senses.”

  Oscar nodded. Then suddenly he stopped and asked, “Do you really?”

  Lydia let out a nervous giggle, a little louder than it would have been had she been drinking colas. “Would it be awkward if I said I think you are better off without her?” After adding that, however, she slowly realized the potential misinterpretation of what she’d just said, so she quickly added, “Only because I think she…”

  Oscar laughed. “Don’t worry, I get what you’re saying, and thanks, but that might take a little while to sink in.”

  “But if you two get back together, you can forget everything I just said.” Then, wanting to avoid putting her foot in her mouth anymore, she asked, “So this must be the worst Valentine’s Day ever for you?”

  “Easily,” he said. “What’s your worst Valentine’s Day?”

  “I guess I had a few good ones with this guy I dated in university,” she said thinking back, “but I haven’t done much ever since.” The more she thought about it, the more she saw that every February 14th since then had been a little more depressing than the last. Then, partly so that Oscar wasn’t the only one talking about heartbreak and partly for her own cathartic release, she went on to explain her own failed relationships over the past ten years. The stories kept coming and somewhere along the line Lydia stopped keeping track of how many drinks their waitress had brought her.

  After a while Oscar tried to shift the conversation to spare Lydia any more pain. At first when he asked about her thoughts on the book project, she just said she didn’t want to talk about work outside the office. She gave a polite answer about how good the team was and that there was still a lot of work to do. But with a little prodding from Oscar, she started to open up a little more. It was the first time he heard her complain about anyone, but he listened so well and Lydia was full of liquid courage. She felt comfortable telling him exactly what she thought about some of her co-workers and other members of the development team. What he’d only assumed before, from observing her raised eyebrows and listening to her carefully constructed responses, was now being put into words.

  Lydia switched to talking about her tasks for the next day, and only then did she think about what time it was. When she looked at her watch, it was the first time Oscar thought about how late it was too.

  “Maybe it’s about time we get going,” Oscar said, spotting a clock over the bar. “Let me give you a ride home.”

  Lydia knew, of course, that he had only taken the bus to the bar.

  “I’m the one with the car, silly,” she said with a laugh.

  Oscar knew roughly how many glasses the waitress had carried away, and given Lydia’s slender frame, it wasn’t hard to do the math.

  “Yes,” he said, looking her in the eyes, “but I’m the one that’s sober.”

  Lydia looked down at the drink she had just finished and remembered that it wasn’t her first or even her second. She looked up to tell Oscar that she was fine but when she met his sceptical glare she let out another giggle, which was enough to convince her that she did in fact need a ride.

  Oscar covered their tab at the till and Lydia surrendered her keys to him in the parking lot.

  It was a quiet ride home. Lydia was increasingly aware of how the alcohol was affecting her and she did her best to hide her drunkenness and maintain some dignity in front of Oscar. He, on the other hand, had begun in the silence of the car to contemplate again the reality of no longer having Evangeline in his life.

  Upon arriving at Lydia’s apartment, Oscar got out of the car too, and offered to walk her to her door. She said it wasn’t necessary but he insisted. Deep down she didn’t mind. If anyone saw her, it might look a little more respectable to be with someone rather than stumbling in on her own. And even though it was her place, it felt better in her condition to be with someone that she trusted.

  “Well, here we are,” Lydia said as they arrived at her door.

  Oscar still had her keys and he took them out to unlock the door for her. “Is it alright if I wait here for a cab?” he asked, hanging up her keys on the hook beside the door.

  “Sure,” she said, “but you know, you could just spend the night here. I can bring you home on the way to work. That way you can save the cab fare and get to bed sooner.” Then, sitting down on the sofa and gesturing around the apartment, she added in a voice that was becoming increasingly slurred, “You can sleep wherever you want.”

  “Thanks for the offer, but you’ll want to drive straight to work, and I’ll want to sleep in.”

  His reasoning didn’t convince her, but she wasn’t going to try any harder to convince him. “Okay,” she said, stretching it out into three syllables, trying to communicate that the offer still stood

  “Do you have a phonebook?” he asked.

 
; As Lydia got up to show him where the phonebook was, she suddenly felt queasy. She slowly sat back down, but before she could stand back up again she started throwing up all over herself. Oscar ran over to guide her to the bathroom. While she emptied the contents of her stomach into the toilet, he went to the kitchen to bring some paper towel to clean up the smelly trail of vomit from the couch to the bathroom.

  When Lydia was convinced that she was finished throwing up, she took off the jeans and blouse she had dirtied to soak them in the sink. Then she took a face cloth and started dabbing her face and chest to wipe off any extra vomit.

  Oscar finished wiping up the various spots on the floor and headed over to the bathroom to discard the dirty paper towels and to see how Lydia was doing. He wasn’t at all expecting, when he walked in the open bathroom door, to see her standing at the mirror in her underwear.

  “Oops, sorry,” he said, trying to avert his eyes, and he immediately backed out of the room.

  “Oops,” she said semi-apologetically. “How much did you see?”

  “Nothing,” he answered quickly, “just enough to know I should back out.” But Oscar was lying. He had in fact seen almost everything. It was a picture he had not yet allowed himself to imagine.

  Lydia quickly wrapped a bath towel around herself and emerged giggling from the bathroom.

  “I think I’ll go call for that cab from the lobby,” he said, gathering his things together.

  “It’s even later now, Oscar,” Lydia said. “You may as well spend the night now, after all of that.”

  Oscar didn’t respond, but he was still resolved that he had to leave. ‘All of that’ was precisely why he couldn’t stay.

  His cab arrived fairly quickly and the light late night traffic meant that he arrived home in good time. He climbed into bed right away and eventually fell asleep, a little easier than he had the past few nights. Back at her place, Lydia fell asleep quickly too, feeling much better than she would the next morning.

  From: Lydia Phillips

  To: Development Team

  Subject: New chapter submission from Zack

  Thanks in advance for reviewing this. Following my format, please add any comments or suggestions that you wish to make, attaching it to the relevant section and including your initials. You can also add your initials to a suggestion someone else has made that you agree with. (LP – Lydia Phillips, ML – Mevlin Bamford, ST – Sylvia Thompson, LR – Larry Roberston, GL – Gus Leighton, OB – Oscar Brandt)

  --- Attachment: CulturalThing.docx ---

  Draft: It’s a cultural thing

  “Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.” – Colossians 3: 11 (NIV)1

  If you’ve ever tried making a home in another culture, you’ve probably noticed that a funny thing happens; people start offending you. It might not happen every day, but often, and usually when you don’t expect it.2

  I grew up as a missionary kid and my dad grew up as a missionary kid. We thought we were immune to making unhealthy cultural assumptions, since in many ways we really had no culture of our own. We even celebrated the richness of all the cultures we had lived in. But every now and then we realized that we lacked the stability of being from one clearly defined culture. It was also clear at times that we had accumulated baggage from the many cultures we had experienced. Getting offended was a regular occurrence for us. I’m not talking about remote tribes where the men and women walked around naked3 or other blatant cultural practices that would offend our sensitive western eyes; I’m talking about much more subtle ways of being offended. 4

  My mother had an average body shape by North American standards5, and like most women, some parts of her body were a little bigger than she wanted them to be. In a few of the African communities we stayed in, my mother would be praised publicly for the slightly larger than average size of her bottom6. In some of the Asian countries we visited, store owners would meet her at the door and tell her that because she was so fat, they had nothing in her size. No matter where we were, women, especially older women, would feel free to tell her what she was doing wrong in terms of housekeeping, raising her children, or how she interacted with either her husband, or any man7 for that matter8. Sometimes when I would see this happening or hear her retelling a story, I would ask her why she didn’t say something, but she would always reply that this was merely a cultural difference. It was much more important and much more likely that she adjust than the entire local cultural rubric9 be changed for her sake. I always admired my mother for the grace with which she dealt with these situations.

  I decided that perhaps I too could adopt this mindset, not just in particular situations where I felt offended, but as a whole, whenever I dealt with anyone whose cultural10 assumptions were different than my own. When I did that, I slowly began to realize that I was no longer being offended. More than that, though, I was getting along with more people than I had before. I would often realize that the source of my discomfort was a personality issue, either someone else’s insensitivity or my own over-sensitivity. When I would write it off as a cultural difference, the interaction was allowed to progress peacefully and constructively11.

  Taking this attitude into my interactions with people of the same culture proved equally beneficial. Even with people of the same nationality and the same worldview12, writing off annoying behaviour by saying “It’s a cultural thing,” makes13 relationships much easier to manage. Certainly there is a time and a place to voice your displeasure so that the relationship can grow14, but often these “cultural” differences are unchangeable15 and you need to learn to deal with them in the same way that other people are continually adjusting to your “cultural”16 distinctive behaviours17.

  Inevitably the dominant culture will wear off on smaller ones and those whose cultural traits are more desirable will positively influence the others. The Kingdom of God has a distinctive culture, but the dominant cultures around us, no matter what country we live in, oppose Kingdom living18. Our task as Christians is not only to live out Kingdom culture, but we also need to resist absorbing other dominant cultures and we need to make Kingdom culture19 appealing to other people.20

  21, 22

  1 – I’m not sure if you’re trying to be consistent or if you just like the original NIV better, but the wording of older translations, like the NIV, seem to suggest that these differing cultures no longer exist, while the newer translations include the phrase “no longer” which seems more in line with the point you seem to try to make with your article, that they still exist but they don’t matter. (OB)

  2 – This sentence is awkward to read. (GL)

  3 – That’s what I’m talking about! (ML)

  4 – This whole paragraph is awkward to read. This is a disturbing trend. (GL)

  5 – It would be nice if you could include a statement about how the standards by which women’s bodies are judged are unhealthy. (LP, ST)

  6 – This may be more awkward because she’s your mother, but it would be less awkward for the reader if you just said, “for her generous curves” or “for her big butt.” (LR, ML)

  7 – I appreciate the cultural anecdotes, so some more examples here would be good. (ST)

  8 – “For that matter” is of a different tone than the rest of this chapter and your writing level, try replacing it or simply delete it. (GL)

  9 – Good use of the word ‘rubric’. (LR)

  10 – I know you switch from talking about actual culture to perceived culture, but this might also be a good place to put culture in quotes. (LP)

  11 – You should speak more assertively and make it clear that it was their error and you made the effort to overcome it. (GL)

  12 – It’s unclear here if the people you’re talking about are the same nationality and the same worldview or is it one or the other and maybe both? (LR)

  13 – You need to reword this sentence so that the verb tense is consistent. (GL)
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  14 – Voicing your displeasure is sometimes necessary, even if you don’t want to improve the relationship. (ML)

  15 – Is it unchangeable or can it still be influenced? You contradict yourself. (GL, ML)

  16 – Drop the quotes and use the adverb form. (GL)

  17 – Nice inclusion of self-critique, but would it be better to end this sentence “the distinctive behaviours of your ‘culture.’”? (OB, LP)

  18 – Is the idea of the Kingdom of God, and its affiliated culture and lifestyle universally understood in Christian circles? (LP)

  19 – Too many uses of the word ‘culture’ in one paragraph. (GL, ML, LR, LP)

  20 – I think it would be more accurate to talk about Kingdom culture more abstractly. I don’t think it’s healthy to assume that every Christian in the world has a perfect grasp on Kingdom culture. (OB, ST)

  21 – While I think the point you’re trying to make is clear enough, I think it would be helpful if your advice included a bit more hands on, accessible advice. (LP)

  22 – It’s nice to include your mother as the hero of this story. Maybe another mention of her at the end of the article would be good. (ST)