by Matthue Roth
My mother, otherwise known as the most neurotic person on either side of the Atlantic, was already scrubbing soup stains off the laminated menu pages with her napkin. “Can you tell me, which specials are for tonight?” she asked, her not-used-to—English voice making static bumps out of the language I’d worked so hard to get smooth. I sank a little lower in my chair.
“They’re on tha firs page,” said our waitress, hovering rigidly in front of our table, pen and ordering pad poised in the air.
I wondered if she was just putting on the accent as a front—maybe she, too, had learned to blend in with the crowds. I wondered whether, if we found ourselves alone together, she would whisper in my ear like a late-night anchor on the TV news.
Totally on instinct, I looked over at her chest. She was wearing a bleached cardboard name tag, also laminated. Beside the Country Club Diner logo, it said, in all capital letters, MARGIE.
My mother folded the menu shut, as if to demonstrate a remarkable feat of instant memorization. “I will have the tuna salad grinder,” she announced to MARGIE, whose facial expression was growing more bored by the minute.
Without waiting for me or my father to order, MARGIE snapped her pad shut. “I’ll be raight out wit your warters,” she told us. “Youse can order then if ya want.”
For some reason, I really wanted a Coke. Someone at the next table over had ordered one, and the way the ice cracked in the glass, the way the bubbles fought each other sizzling to the top, looked really appetizing. But there was this unspoken rule in our family: We only drank water at a restaurant. Partly this was because they always charged as much for a glass in restaurants as stores did for a two-liter bottle, and we were offended by that. The other half of it—at least, for my part—was that my parents had just invested all their money into the factory, the block-long warehouse inside which we now lived. Going out to a restaurant like this—sitting at a table that didn’t used to be a conveyor belt, drinking out of glasses that weren’t stained with factory dust—was a luxury to us.
I watched my father sip his water, taking great care to avoid brushing the ice cubes with his mustache. My mother was spending an inordinate amount of time adjusting the napkin (cloth!) to drape perfectly on her lap. I picked up my own glass of water, ran the tips of my fingers over the raised bumps of the meniscus, and realized that MARGIE was staring at me, waiting.
“Sir?”
Her voice was absolutely flat. I couldn’t tell if she was making fun of me or not.
“Uh,” I fumbled. My menu was open to the page of steaks. The words swam over my eyes, each sounding more barbaric than the last: sirloin, pink, rib eye.
“Omelet,” I said, taking a sudden urge and running with it. “Spinach, tomatoes, and cheddar cheese, with hash browns, grilled hot and hard, extra paprika, and rye toast.”
Her pencil scribbled fast to keep up with my order. When at last she had finished, she glanced up from her pad and flashed me a single, lasting, cold stare, the kind that pretty girls with long blond hair are wont to direct at miscreant boys such as myself.
“An omelet?” said my mother. “With eggs? This is what you get for dinner at a restaurant? I could make you omelet at home, for nothing.”
“Is fine,” my father was already starting to defend me to her. He grabbed my wrist, shaking it like I’d just won an Olympic trophy. “Tonight is his honor dinner. Jupiter can make his own choice of anything he want.”
The waitress tapped her pen impatiently on the pad. She was smirking at me, as if to say, You’re fourteen years old and you still go out to dinner with your parents?
I looked around at the rest of the restaurant. Old people in khaki shorts and sandals. A family with several children gathered at a round table in the center of the room, the parents impossibly young. They were both huge—fat, yes, but also huge, squeezed into their skin. Their haircuts and clothes were hopelessly Yards, either out-of-date or stuck in a timeless Kmart vortex. The husband and wife looked almost the same, dressed in their sloppy T-shirts, with four or five kids that were identical, or almost identical, arranged neatly in their own seats around their mountainous parents. They didn’t look more than a few years older than me, that couple—that was the scary part. I wondered if that was going to be my future, a potbelly and a family of indistinct-looking kids straight out of high school.
There was another family in the restaurant that was clearly Russian. You could tell. The parents didn’t look American at all, and the kids looked way too American. Cheap button-down shirts and single-sheet pattern dresses for the adults, backward caps, sports-team jackets, and skanky skirts for the girls. Lots of visible electronics. Cell phones clipped to their belts, pagers in abundance, and, for some reason, sunglasses that they’d borrowed straight from the Junior Mafia.
All these families were clustered in a restaurant named after an American institution that none of us would ever have a shot at getting into.
The soccer-team girls were probably all out on dates with their boyfriends tonight. Even Bates was probably out with Anarchia or some other heavy-metal girl, doing God knows what in a dark basement somewhere. And I was going out with my parents after the first day of school.
I needed to get out.
“I’ll be right back.” Without really knowing where I was going, I stood up and shot off.
Going to the bathroom in a new place was one of my favorite things. I know it sounds gross, but bathrooms, when you’re fourteen years old, are the only bona fide place where you can hide out from your parents. Everywhere I went with my parents, sooner or later, I needed to escape from them. And each place I hid out, each bathroom, was different. Some were sleazy, with cigarette butts all over the floor, leftover pee bubbling in the urinals. Others were clean, almost eerily hygienic. The best thing about bathrooms, really, was the graffiti. Everything from the trite-but-classic “Here I sit/brokenhearted/come to shit/but only farted” to ruminations on the universe, to those almost-possibly-real girls’ names and phone numbers written on the walls, either by vengeful ex-boyfriends or (please, God, please) by the girls themselves, curious to see what kind of teenage boys were reading them.
I followed a hunch, and slipped into the hallway next to the kitchen. MARGIE was standing there, right in the doorway, staring at her nails. She looked utterly fascinated and utterly bored.
“Hey,” I said.
She looked up from her nails. “Yeah?”
I took one hand out of my pocket, gave her a little wave.
“Whaddyawant?”
I counted the words in my head. What. Do. You. Want. Four words, and she’d managed to condense it into a single syllable. There had to be a Nobel Prize category for that.
“Uh, I was actually just looking for—” I said slowly, halfway into my sentence before I realized I was going to ask for the bathroom. Bathroom. There had to be a better word for it. Or, at the very least, a word you didn’t have to use with girls. Facilities? Lavatory? In a flash, simplicity seemed like the coolest response, and before I could check myself I’d finished my sentence. “—the boys’ room?”
Shit.
She didn’t even blink. “Right over there,” she said, nodding behind me.
I looked over my shoulder. There, on bright red plastic signs, were two silhouettes, the international symbols for I need to go NOW.
I blinked at her, briefly, coolly, as if to thank her without further sacrificing my dignity, and turned to follow her nod.
“Hey, wait.” She tugged on my sleeve. I wasn’t out of this yet.
“Yeah?” I spun around carefully, making sure she didn’t let go of my shoulder.
“You look sorta farmiliar,” she said. “Do ya go ta Yardley?”
Nathan Yardley High was just down the street. There were about three thousand kids there, bussed in from all over the Yards. Everyone from my old class went to Yardley—everyone, that is, except for the hydroponic nerds like me who placed into an accelerated high school on the other side of the city. I co
uldn’t say yes, and I really, really didn’t want to say no.
“No,” I said, throwing all my cards into one basket. “I’m at North Shore. It’s this special-admissions high school near town—”
“Wow,” she said—still in that android monotone, but her eyes open in newfound appreciation. “Yeah, I heard of it. You must be pretty smart or somethin’, huh?”
I shrugged. If I was now playing the part of a North Shore kid, I might as well do away with the false modesty. I was already feeling like roadkill, and I could use any brownie points I could get.
“Hey—I got to take my cigarette break now, or I don’t get another one for another hour. You wanna come?” She nodded toward the door marked EXIT, which was right next to the door marked GENTLEMEN.
And then she threw me instead into the broom closet, shut the door behind her, inserted a single, long-nailed finger into the collar of her dress shirt, and yanked it down so that the shirt ripped in half, buttons flying everywhere, her lacy-bra’d breasts popping out like a cuckoo clock, like a pair of grenades, with me at ground zero. Her hair got in her face. Her hair got in my face. Our tongues dived into each other like crazed monkeys battling, fingers grabbing each other, pulling into our flesh, trying to force our bodies even closer together. Her skin was white and smooth, like new, just-out-of-the-package soap. Her lips were thin and crisp. I tried to pull myself away, then relented, pressing my torso against hers, hoping against everything that she noticed, that she could smell how incredibly much I wanted her.
Oh my God. I am a teenage boy. I am loquaciously, disgustingly horny. I am horny for anything that moves. I have fantasies about the girls on the nine o’clock sitcoms, girls on the ten o’clock dramas, and the girls in the deodorant and car commercials in between. My head is in the gutter, and the rest of my body is squeezed right underneath it.
We stood right outside the exit door, a few steps away from the kitchen, and she pulled on the hoodie she’d brought out with her. It was tight. It pulled in her stomach and silhouetted her breasts a lot more clearly than the loose shirt and vest of her uniform. She drew a lighter and a pack of cigarettes out of the pocket and lit one up, barely looking at me as she drew the flame into her cigarette with a deep breath. Her hair bristled. It looked nice.
“So,” she said. She looked at me expectantly, like my being here was a privilege, and now I had to earn it.
“So,” I echoed, not sure what to say. I folded my hands in front of my belt, realized I was standing with the posture of a fifty-year-old college professor, and quickly slid them into my back pockets. “You live around here?”
“Yeah,” she grunted. When she talked, the smoke curled out like a dragon’s breath. “My parents got an apartment a few blocks away. I’m saving up so I can move out of that shithole and get my own place, probably another shithole. But at least it’ll be my own shithole. You?”
“Yeah, kinda. Down where Yardley Ave stops being a hill and flattens out, over near the docks.”
“Oh yeah?” she asked, taking a deep, impressed toke. “Rough neighborhood.”
“Parts of it are. You learn to lay low.”
“My boyfriend used to run DVD players for these guys, he was down there all the time. They kept them in one of those old warehouses, not even locked. You could just walk right in and help yourself. There ain’t too many houses around there, right?”
I shrugged noncommittally, trying to cover up for the fact that I’d winced when she mentioned having a boyfriend. “There’s a few. It seems rough, but it’s mostly quiet.”
“Man, that’s not too bad. I bet I could rent a whole house around there for what an apartment would cost. That would be pretty tight. I could even have friends move in—of course, I wouldn’t, that would kill the whole purpose of it. Hey, are there any houses around there up for rent now, do you know?”
“I dunno. I’m kind of, you know, taken care of.”
“Still doing the parental thing, huh?”
She said “the parental thing” as if it was an extreme improbability that any child above the age of teething would ever live with his parents. Not sure how to reply to that, I played it cool. “They’re not so bad,” I said, offering up yet another indifferent shrug. “Mostly, we live in two different worlds. I think in English, and they think in Russian.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t sound like you think in English.”
I could feel my face heating up. Now I was blushing furiously. I didn’t say anything, not sure whether I should be offended or not. Other things about me that I was insecure about, I could hide. My accent stuck out like a bad hair day without a hat, like a zit that never went away. My hair was fuzzy and big, curls sprinting out in a Sideshow Bob ‘do that required refreshingly little effort. She ruffled the top of it now, as if petting a puppy.
“Don’t knock it,” she said. “You’re cute. And then you open your mouth and that voice comes out, that voice of yours, and it doesn’t sound anything like you expect it to. I bet you’re good at throwing people for a loop, yeah?”
“I’m alright,” I said noncommittally.
“Nice. So, what’s with the accent anyway?”
“What’s with it? I’m with it, I guess.”
“Heh,” she laughed. She laughed in a way that sounded like she’d contemplated what she was laughing at, thought about it for a while, and she still didn’t think it was funny. “If you were really swift, you’d say, ‘What accent?’”
I didn’t reply. Now I was listening to her voice, how much softer and less abrasive it had gotten while we’d been out here. “How about you, then?” I said. “Now you barely sound like you’re from the Yards at all.”
“Yeah, I dunno,” she said. The gravel crept back in, but only slightly. Maybe because she was thinking about it now. “It’s a defense mechanism, you know? You got to communicate with people on their level. You got to make sure they don’t give you shit.”
I waited.
For a moment, it seemed like she was in another world. Like there was something in her voice that she wasn’t saying. Then she snapped out of it, and snapped back to looking at me. She laid a hand on my chest. I felt like I should leap back, like she’d just bumped into me—it was so direct and so forward and even, if only inside my brain, so sexual. Her nail was right over my nipple. Her palm was hot, and I wondered if she was going to pull me in to her and start kissing.
Instead, she let go. She stepped back like nothing had just happened.
“But, come on,” she said, putting one hand on a hip, cocking a posture like she was examining me from afar again. “What’s the deal with your accent? Are you an android, or is your larynx just on steroids?”
I gulped. “It’s Russian. My parents are from Russia. We got airlifted out of the country when I was seven.”
“Oh yeah? How was that for you?”
“I don’t remember that much. My parents made me stuff all the clothes in my room inside a duffel bag in, like, ten minutes. They said to just bring the important clothes—they were too busy, they couldn’t even help me—and when they unpacked they discovered I had only brought my holiday dress suit and a shitload of underwear. Oh, and Where the Wild Things Are, which was my favorite book at the time. Anyway, they hustled me out the door, to a plane, telling me we were going to a party. I stayed up the whole flight, gazing out the window, and fell asleep as soon as we landed. I woke up a few hours later, we were in this rusty recycled car, headed for the Yards, and then I turned into an American.”
She barked out a bitter, dry laugh. “Damn, dude,” she said. “I think that’s the first time I ever heard the Yards being a happy ending.”
“Well, damn yourself,” I said, trying to project some sauciness into my voice. “I didn’t think I was up to the ending, yet.”
She smiled.
For the first time, it seemed like I’d found something soft about her. Her voice, her chin, her eyes, even her breasts were so perfect, ample, and fleshed-out, plentiful in the way of Ital
ian mothers and collagen patients, but perfect in the other sense of that word, too, stiff as a Renaissance picture. From her body, and from her attitude as well, she was the total opposite of me: totally composed, totally on top of her own social scene, and totally in control.
But, man, when she cracked her mouth open and let her smile poke through—awash in all her thin-lipped glory, crooked teeth swimming inside, gums the pale pink of someone who runs their toothbrush under the water instead of scrubbing their teeth at night—it was so imperfect and asymmetrical, so flawed and honest, that it actually made her look beautiful. I wanted to take that smile in my pocket and fall asleep with it under my pillow, to have it keep me warm through the cold of the warehouse night.
“And it isn’t so happy, either,” I said.
She opened her mouth and looked at me—what do you mean?—in the way that perfect people always do, those girls who say whatever they want and expect everyone else to love them for it. But then she closed her mouth, as if to take back that sentiment, and instead she reached over with those intense fingernails and pulled my collar down.
I winced again as she saw my battle scars. My knee throbbed, and its soreness wasn’t visible but I imagined she could see my limp, too, even as I was standing still. She looked grossed out, as any normal person would be, but not revolted.
By which I mean, she didn’t flinch. And she didn’t look like she was going anywhere.
“Yeah, well, you know what?” she said. “It’s gonna be.”
I took a hard, long breath.
“After what we go through to get where we are,” she said, “it better be happy. It fucking better be.”
She brushed aside one permed curl from her forehead. I could see purple skin of her own beneath it, a nasty contusion that ran along most of her scalp.
And, at that moment, I was about to offer her a room in our warehouse. I was about to tell her, forget about my hormones, forget about getting an apartment of your own, I’ll take you away from all this.
She reached down, ground the cigarette out with the heel of her shoe, and tossed the butt in the half-cranked-up window of someone’s car.