Secrets and Fries at the Starlight Diner

by Helen Cox

  Esther shrugged. ‘Parents can be funny about stuff like that. I was a teacher once upon a time and saw it a lot with the kids I taught.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were a teacher. But now you say it I can imagine it. You have that stony, unimpressed glare perfected,’ I said with a small smile.

  ‘Thank you for noticing,’ Esther said, with a flicker of her left eyebrow. ‘It takes precious time to perfect something like that.’ She took in a deep breath and straightened out her mouth, which just a second ago had been hitching up into a smirk. ‘Where’d you spend Christmas?’

  My chest clenched at that question. ‘In a church, mostly.’

  ‘Alone?’

  I nodded.

  Esther lifted her head up off the doorframe before sighing, walking over and sitting next to me on the bed.

  ‘I didn’t tell you before, but when you went back to your parents’ last Christmas, I spent it alone in Atlantic City,’ Esther said, looking at me, her eyes watery and gleaming; two topaz stones catching the light.

  ‘But you said you had friends you were spending it with in New York?’

  ‘I lied. I wanted to be alone and I didn’t want anyone to know why.’ Esther shook her head. ‘Unlike you, I can lie, and I did. For a long time, I lied about so much.’

  ‘Why?’ The question was out of my mouth before I could stop it.

  Esther sighed again. ‘It’s… painful to talk about. But Mum spent Christmas 1989 alone too, back in England, and I still feel awful about it. Who knows how many Christmases she’s got left. And there’s no harder time to be alone. This time of year is supposed to be all about togetherness, and when you spend it watching all the other families go into their cosy homes, standing on the outside of the circle, hearing them on the inside laughing and arguing and taking each other for granted, knowing they’re part of something you’re not, well, that’s hell.’ Esther was caught in a daydream, or something worse: the grip of a tragic memory.

  ‘Makes you feel like you got no family,’ I agreed.

  ‘I’m sorry I hesitated about taking you in, that was wrong,’ she said, looking me right in the eye as she spoke.

  ‘It’s no less than I deserved.’ Somehow, I don’t know how, I managed to shrug.

  ‘Don’t say that. Nobody deserves to be turned away when they’re desperate like that,’ Esther said. She moved a stray strand of blue hair out of my eyes. The temperature in the room seemed to be rising by the second. There were no mirrors in the sitting room but I could feel the redness in my face and a lone tear stole down my cheek.

  ‘Bonnie, hey, come on,’ said Esther, putting a hand on each of my shoulders. It wasn’t exactly an invitation for an embrace but I threw my arms around Esther anyway and, without hesitation, she pulled my head into her chest and stroked my hair. Did she know, by some magical instinct, that that’s what Mama used to do when I was a kid? Until one day, without a word as to why, she just stopped. Maybe because she thought I’d grown too old. Or maybe because it had finally sunk in that her first-born daughter wasn’t going to be the perfect little princess she’d hoped for. She was going to drink beer and stay up late and play music she didn’t approve of.

  I missed those hugs so much.

  For all that’d happened between me and Esther in Atlantic City, she was the closest thing I had to family right then. A woman I hadn’t seen for almost a year. A woman I’d tried to rip off in a moment of hopelessness. They were always so difficult to undo, the things you did in moments like that.

  ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry for what I did to you. I never should’ve done it,’ I said, my voice muffled by the fabric of the checked shirt she was wearing.

  ‘Shh. It’s alright. It’s alright,’ Esther soothed.

  ‘It’s not alright. It never is. You’re good to me when I don’t deserve it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know who I am or what to do. I’m not supposed to be here. I should have things figured out. I should have a real job and a family and a house and a cat or something dumb like that but I haven’t got any of those things. I just… I don’t fit. I don’t belong. I don’t know why.’ I took in a sharp breath, trying to fill my lungs again after my pathetic blathering, which had all the makings of a country song if only I could make it all rhyme.

  ‘Bonnie, you’ve got to listen to me. Listen.’ Esther wrapped her arms tighter around me, holding me steady against the force of my tears and the exhaustion and all I was running from. ‘Nobody has the right to tell you who you should be or what you should do.’ I closed my eyes and tried to zone in on her voice. It had a steadiness and certainty to it I didn’t remember noticing before. ‘You’ve got to figure that out for yourself. I built a whole other life on “shoulds”. A woman should get married. A woman should keep a tidy, proper house. A woman should please her husband.’

  I pulled my head away from her chest and dried my eyes on the sleeve of my sweater dress.

  ‘You were married?’ Even though Jimmy had already let this slip last night in the diner, I thought it best to look surprised. If Esther found out Jimmy had been talking about her private life behind her back it’d only upset her and that’s the last thing I wanted.

  ‘To a bad guy,’ Esther said. ‘On the surface, he seemed to be everything a good husband should be. But when nobody was looking he did unspeakable things. To me and to himself.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I rubbed her right arm at the elbow.

  ‘It’s alright, I’m alright– or, at least, I’m on my way to alright. But what I’m saying is, I’ve lived a life of “shoulds”. In fact, in a weird way, that’s something Michael – my late husband – and I had in common. And it’s not a guaranteed route to happiness. In fact, often it’s quite the opposite.’

  I offered a limp smile. ‘Are you saying Jack isn’t the kinda fella who gets too hung up on what he should be doing?’

  Esther shook her head and after a minute smiled too. She always had a war with herself over raising a grin. I never did understand that about her.

  ‘Jack’s impulsive and unpredictable and has a complicated history, if we’re going to be polite about it, but he’s not alone on that score, and he makes me happy. Not everything about our life as a couple is certain, but it doesn’t matter because we’re together and to us that’s all that really matters,’ she explained.

  ‘So all I gotta do is find true love? That it?’ I smirked at the idea. True love was some far-off, mythical figment right then. She might as well have told me to go off and hunt for a unicorn.

  ‘No.’ Esther chuckled. ‘You have to decide what you want, that’s it. A relationship with someone else might play a part in that someday but your relationship with yourself is more important. In fact, it’s by far the most important thing.’

  ‘Difficult to have a relationship with someone you barely know,’ I said, scraping both hands through my hair.

  ‘Maybe this is your chance to find out who you are.’ Esther raised both eyebrows. ‘Maybe this is a chance to become who you want to be. Rather than some sexed-up persona on the casino stage in Atlantic City.’

  Esther had heard me talk so many times, after too many beers, of how I felt I was hiding behind the words and truths of other people. Put me on a stage, give me a song to sing, and I could be somebody. Not myself, but somebody. But take me out of my costume, let me come up with my own words, and I didn’t know who I was or what to say. Off stage, I wasn’t anybody at all. Other than a person nobody really wanted around.

  ‘Don’t remember you dishing out these philosophical nuggets when you were frying omelettes at the Crystal Cavern Buffet. When did you get so wise?’ I eyed Esther in mock suspicion.

  ‘Only about two months ago,’ she said. ‘Oh, and please, don’t remind me about that buffet job. People used to waste so much food, and dangle lengths of bacon into their mouths as if they were starving mongrels. Used to make me sick.’

  ‘People can be pretty disgusting. Especially in a place like Atlantic City,’
I said with a little shiver. Though ‘disgusting’ didn’t even come close to what I saw that night.

  ‘Hmm,’ Esther agreed, and then shifted her voice back into the business-like tone she’d used with Jack earlier when she was instructing him on what to buy at the store. ‘Right, Jack’s clearly gone shopping to Timbuktu. How anyone strings out a trip to a shop less than a block from the flat the way he does, I’ll never know. Why don’t you get a hot shower whilst you’re waiting? You can borrow my dressing gown and by the time you’ve got yourself sorted I’ll probably have a cup of hot chocolate ready for you. Assuming Faber hasn’t frozen outside in the blizzard.’

  ‘That all sounds incredible,’ I said, swooning at the very thought of feeling warm inside and out. ‘Except the part about Jack freezing to death, of course.’

  Just then, Esther held out her hand. It was such a small gesture. She couldn’t have known what it meant to me. Looking at her hand, I noticed a scar I’d never seen before, just on the inside of the palm where the thumb and the forefinger meet. A dull, red line that marked out some past pain I didn’t know about. Tact may not have been my most obvious quality but I knew better than to ask about it. Instead, I put my hand in hers and she gave it a squeeze. The lower half of my face wobbled but I managed to keep it together this time. I’d cried a lifetime’s worth of tears in the last few days. Enough was enough.

  ‘Alright.’ Esther jumped up off the mattress, scuttled into the bedroom and returned with a cotton bathrobe in cornflower blue and the softest-looking towels I’d ever seen in my life. ‘Go and relax in the shower, and in the meantime I’ll hunt out some spare bedding for this thing,’ she said, tutting at the way Jack had arranged the cushions and reorganising them into what would, I had to admit, be a far more comfortable formation.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, a little smile creeping across my face at how much Esther was enjoying the mothering aspect of this scenario. She smiled in return and rubbed my right arm.

  Scooping up the yellow towels and the robe, I headed off to the shower, locked the door behind me and started when I caught my reflection in the mirror.

  ‘God damn it,’ I said, putting a hand on my heart as if to push it back into the correct position. Would I ever stop seeing a stranger with a blue bob in the mirror? It’s not that it didn’t suit me – it actually looked kinda cute, even if I did say so myself – but I’d had almost twenty-eight years of looking into a mirror and seeing a face framed with flowing brown locks. Before all this I was almost sensible-looking, when I wasn’t on stage. But since – what had Jimmy called it? – my makeover from the Cyndi Lauper school of beauty, I looked a lot more like the wacky idiot I probably was deep down.

  I rested my hands either side of the sink and looked my reflection dead in the eye, trying to see past my weird disguise down to the person I really was. A pair of wary green eyes stared back at me. They had an emptiness to them, a despair.

  I turned to the shower for a moment, switched on the faucet and sighed at the soft pattering sound the water made. A sound that meant refreshment and relief. That gentle burbling banished the awkward silence that’d been growing between me and my reflection.

  I kicked off my shoes and was about to pull my sweater dress over my head when I paused and sighed again. This time, not out of relief. Lowering my arms, I turned, leaned on the sink and looked into the glass.

  ‘I’m real sorry for gettin’ you into this,’ I said to the woman in the mirror. ‘I’m sorry for so much that I’ve done to you. I haven’t exactly treated you right the last twenty-seven years. Fact is, all I’ve done is hurt you. By being ashamed of you.’ The woman’s eyes came over all watery. ‘But I’m going to change that,’ I said to her, quick as I could, before she turned on the waterworks. ‘It is going to change, Bonnie.’ The woman in the mirror flinched at the sound of me speaking her name out loud. ‘Something has to. You deserve better than what you’ve had.’

  I put my hand over my mouth to smother a weak chuckle and I shook my head.

  Neat. Talking to yourself in the mirror. That’s always a sign of spectacular mental health.

  I looked down into the endless blackness of the plughole and then back up at my reflection, searching for something, any clue to who I really was and what my next step should be.

  But the woman in the mirror was giving away nothing.

  Maybe Esther was right. That somehow this was an opportunity disguised as a disaster, a wake-up call. Oh boy, it’d been that alright.

  I could never go back to my old life in Atlantic City, and I wasn’t wanted back in Detroit. What I was meant to do now, I had no idea.

  Chapter Six

  The next day at sundown I headed straight to the Starlight Diner as per Esther’s military instructions. She’d made it clear that straggling around Manhattan on your own after dark wasn’t a safe thing to be doing. Said she’d even been mugged once in broad daylight not three streets away from the diner. She’d no idea that I had bigger problems than being ambushed by some two-bit crook after the change in my pocket, but she meant well and, in spite of everything, it was sort of comforting to know she was looking out for me as best she could with the information I’d given her.

  Though it was still cold, the snow had stopped falling long enough for me to busk under Washington Square Arch for the best part of the day. There, families had gathered to build snowmen and throw snowballs at each other. I’ll admit, given my own family circumstances, watching loving fathers roll around in the snow with their fresh-faced, moon-eyed daughters was about the last thing I needed. Still, it had been quite a lucrative session in terms of dollars in my guitar case, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. There are certain songs you can play in cities like New York that are bona fide crowd-pleasers, guaranteed to make people stump up a few more bucks for you. ‘Downtown’ by Petula Clark was one of them and ‘Tom’s Diner’ by Suzanne Vega was another. Anything that glorified the urban ant farm they had going on here was sure to boost donations to the Bonnie Brooks Reinvention Fund. I sang my heart out, on and off, for eight hours and made just shy of seventy bucks. Not too shabby for a day’s work.

  By the time I reached the diner, it was nearing half past five. Esther’s shift didn’t finish till seven and Jack was in rehearsals for his next movie, some bubblegum action flick called Nowhere Left to Hide. The shoot was mostly happening in a studio lot, somewhere on the Upper East Side, instead of a studio in LA like I would’ve expected, but according to Jack rehearsals often overran and he couldn’t promise what time he’d get home. Thanks to a key shortage, I’d been directed to wait for Esther to finish her shift and walk back to the apartment with her.

  The dinnertime rush was in full flow when I walked in. Man, was it ever noisy in there at busy times. I could barely hear the tinny wail of ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ playing out over the jukebox for all the chattering and cackling of customers having a jolly old time. Esther was buzzing around the joint with arms full of plates while Jean, a waitress with a halo of black curls and a nose speckled with pale freckles, was permitted to carry only one item at a time. This, Bernie had discovered, was the only way of making sure Jean didn’t drop whatever she was carrying before it reached the table. According to Esther, Jean had been on ‘probation’ longer than any server in the history of the Starlight Diner but Bernie didn’t have the heart to fire her.

  Despite the rush, Bernie was sitting at the end of the counter near another older gentleman who was engrossed in a copy of the New York Times. To my surprise, the diner owner waved me over. I traipsed across the lino to see what he wanted, lugging my guitar behind me.

  ‘Bonnie, right?’ said Bernie, his eyes staring just to my left rather than straight at me. They were brown eyes, the colour of hazel, but they didn’t catch the light the way some people’s eyes did. Quite the reverse. There was a dullness about them that was too depressing to look at head on.

  ‘Right.’ I smiled at Bernie but he didn’t smile back.

  ‘Esther tells me you�
��re trying to get a few bucks together and that you know how to play good music.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I like to think so,’ I put my hands in my jeans pockets and swung my hips round from side to side, not sure why – coyness I guess. Esther liked me to sing to her but she’d always had a glass of gin or two before asking so I’d never been sure if she really took pleasure in what she heard or if it was just a fun distraction after a couple of drinks. Truth be told, she wasn’t that hot at handling liquor.

  ‘Esther said you play sixties tunes?’ Bernie squinted at me.

  ‘Well I can play a lotta things. But yeah, I played sixties tunes back in Atlantic City.’

  ‘Swell. What’re you doing New Year’s Eve?’

  ‘Uh, probably being evicted from Esther’s apartment for outstaying my welcome, why d’you ask?’ I smiled again, hoping this was funny enough to make a crack in Bernie’s face of stone, but his lips remained level and showed no signs of budging. Was smiling against this guy’s religion or something?

  ‘Well, we have a little get together at New Year, for staff and regulars only, you understand. Beats going up to Times Square and getting caught up in the crowds. And I… Well, it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.’

  I looked at him and nodded, hinting that I understood what he was getting at there. New York, it seemed, was a city built to house the lonely. I’d visited the city a few times during my studies at Princeton, but the place had a different feel to it when you were busy partying with college buddies, blowing the savings your Dad had squirreled away for books and equipment on cocktails and clothes. Beyond the parties and the nightlife there was a different side to this place. For reasons I couldn’t figure out, it was like a magnet for lost souls. And I was one of them.

  ‘Anyhow,’ Bernie continued, recognising I didn’t really know how to respond to his last comment. ‘I thought it might be a nice touch to have some live music at the party, if you fancy playing a couple of sets. Sixties music would be a change of pace for us all. The staff get sick of hearing the same songs coming out of the jukebox, they make a point of telling me that every chance they get. Do you think you could play for us?’