Her nametag insisted she was Cydonia, which was several orders of magnitude too exotic for this little upstate town, something he could say with great confidence having grown up in the town with the name Oscar. Somehow, this attracted abuse from boys named John and Steve, possibly an instinctive revulsion toward polysyllables they couldn’t even explain.
Cydonia, then, was probably a transplant. Except there was no reason for a twenty-something to move to this place. There was no college nearby, or heavy industry. There was factory work two towns over, on the river, and a winery in the valley a half an hour’s drive north. But no, this wasn’t the place people moved to, it was where people got up and moved away from once they were old enough to hire a cab.
“Are you ready to order?” Cydonia asked. The question was addressed to the middle of the table, and to the notepad in her hands. The notepad was the only indicator of her station, other than the nametag. She could pocket the tiny spiral-bound pad and remove the nametag and she would be left with a loose short-sleeved shirt, her jeans, and well-worn sneakers. Hypothetically, at that point she’d be indistinguishable from the general public.
He didn’t think that would be really possible for her, though. She had a wariness that was combined with a sort of hyperactive exhaustion that branded her as a service employee. That was without considering the aromatic bouquet of failing deodorant and aerosolized fryer grease that would mark her as the waitress in a wide range of circumstances.
He wondered if she could even go to other restaurants without people asking her for things, mistakenly assuming she worked there.
“Toast, please,” mother said, without looking up. She had mastered the art of speaking around people with a casual dismissiveness that was easy to interpret as spite and, sometimes, outright antagonism, especially to strangers and her children. “Could you burn it? I like it burnt.”
“Right. How burnt?”
His mother looked Cydonia in the eyes, as if nobody on the planet had ever, in her seventy-seven years of existence, asked this question. As if ‘burnt’ was a toaster setting with which everyone was familiar.
“Darker than brown and lighter than charcoal,” Oscar said, as clarification, before the elderly widow Donovan found the most witheringly insulting way to answer the question as possible. Cydonia deserved better.
“Got it,” she said. “And you? Want some more tea?”
His choice of tea appeared to be a source of amusement to the kitchen. It perhaps identified him as a person who didn’t live around here. He suspected his clothing did much the same. It was also possible he was being overly sensitive, and seeing people from a provincial region with the foggy lens of a cosmopolitan. Perhaps they were possessed of some manner of down-to-Earth-ish homespun wisdom that he, in his urban liberal enclave, would only grudgingly learn to respect after a number of hard-won lessons about the value of hard labor and an honest day’s work.
This was what the movies had told him to expect. But since he grew up in this town and fled at the earliest opportunity, he was not about to misapprehend isolationist xenophobia with good ol’ American aw-shucks wisdom. He escaped this place for a reason.
“More hot water would be great,” he said, trying on a smile. “Do you do egg white omelets?”
“Oh, Oscar, please,” mother said.
She always found his peculiarities a symptom of his being difficult, but would then turn around and offer a lengthy dissertation on the importance of getting her toast exactly right. For her, being difficult was an exertion of common sense; in other people it was little babies who wanted to have everything just so.
“I’m sure we can do that,” Cydonia said cheerily in a tone that indicated this was hardly the first request of its kind. “Two eggs?”
“That’d be super, thanks.”
Cydonia flashed a little smile and took her small-town-attractive self to the other side of the room to place their high-maintenance order with the cook, who looked like he recently arrived in the twenty-first century directly from 1955.
Oscar very much wished that the conversation he was in the middle of was with Cydonia, instead of with mother. This was probably true when it came to everybody else in the diner as well, but that didn’t mean he found Cydonia any less interesting.
“So you can stay there if you wish.”
“Where?” he asked.
“In your room.”
“Oh.”
To his knowledge, the bedroom he called his own in the house in which he came of age, remained exactly as he left it when he stopped calling it his home. He was told—by Karen, some months prior, as a preamble to the unfortunate fact of her imminent demise—that mother held it aside from the rest of the house in the same way a woman who’d lost her child to an unfortunate sledding accident might: as a ghostly memorial. When Karen told him this he thought back to all the things that must still be there, collecting dust: odd collections of Matchbox cars and comic books, posters of bands now famous mostly for having once been famous, a shelf of those books everyone was assigned to read in high school, and so on.
He wondered how thorough she’d been, in her effort at verisimilitude. Did she pick up the laundry or leave it on the floor? He had a wooden box under his bed that contained a small water bong and a plastic bag that was about half weed and half oregano. Did she find this? Would she leave it there if she did? Would she even know what it was?
These were entertaining questions once. Now, he was about go to back to that room and he didn’t want to, because now he recognized it for what it was: the phantom of his own childhood, back to reclaim his soul. It was as if he’d slain a dragon to escape this place—that was the approximate difficulty level, in his mind—and now, thanks to an awkward contractual detail, he was back, and not only did the dragon live, it didn’t appear to have been inconvenienced in the slightest.
It wasn’t a contractual detail. It only felt that way. Father had died from a fatal case of congenital bitterness ten years past, Karen only a week ago—from cancer, not bitterness, unless that was a kind of cancer—and now he was all that was left to care for mother, and the house she refused to part with.
He could already tell she expected him to take Karen’s place. Like dropping everything and relocating to this highway rest stop of a town was something he could do. He couldn’t, though. He had a job and a life and friends and an existence that would only ever see this place as the answer to a personal question, provided to unlock an online login, alongside the last four digits of his social security number.
She couldn’t care for herself, and her daughter, his sister, was selfish enough to die first, and he wasn’t going to be stepping up. He was going to be putting mother into a home, and paying for it by selling the house. That was what was going to happen.
He thought this probably made him a bad person. He could no longer tell. Maybe she knew this was going to be happening eventually, that the son you drive away—intentionally or not—is not the man you should be putting your future care into the hands of. She was going to be upset and he was going to be angry and they were going to have a terrible time of it, and that was before he got around to bringing up the subject of a nursing home.
He knew it was going to play out this way, just as he knew she was going to be asking too much of Cydonia on the subject of how to best burn her toast. It must be edible, she might say, but not enjoyable. I’m working out a lifetime of Catholic guilt through my diet. It has to taste like sin. If you can’t do that for me, I have some communion wafers you can sauté.
Oscar and his mother were stuck in a Sophoclean tragedy. That they knew this wasn’t going to change the outcome. All he could say for sure was that this very moment, in this diner, on the day they put Karen into her hole, was the wrong moment to discuss the future. Today was a day owned by the past.
“The Eatery,” Wilson said. “Okay.”
“That’s all you have to say?” Oliver asked.
“I have a lot more.”
&nbs
p; “I hated it,” Minerva said.
It was only Wilson and Minerva, because this was not any more a formal meeting of TAWU than the dinner in Four Horse had been.
Oliver felt like he’d been punched.
“You didn’t like it?” he asked her.
“I liked the other stuff better. I mean I’m sorry, I know I don’t get a vote since I’m not in the group, but I read all the stuff too.”
“She does,” Wilson said. “I keep telling her to get involved but—”
“But I’m not a writer.”
Wilson took her hand, which was the first time Oliver ever saw a gesture of affection pass between them. He felt oddly uncomfortable, like he’d walked in on them in the bedroom.
“She says she’s too busy being a character,” he said with a laugh. “Kills me every time.”
They were sitting outside, at one of the tables in the vertical park a few blocks from Wilson’s condo, and around the corner from Oliver’s work. It was a cold, wrought-iron setup, the kind of thing that makes sense on a patio or some other place where wind is the enemy. Heavy, with the table chained to the ground and the chairs chained to the table, it was designed to go nowhere, year-round. It made for a pretty uncomfortable place to sit for an extended period. This was likely just a byproduct of choosing iron furniture, but it was probably an outcome the city preferred, since nobody was likely to occupy one of the seats for all that long.
Wilson squeezed Minerva’s hand for another second, let go and leaned forward.
“I thought it was excellent,” he said. “I thought you made great progress. Even if the story doesn’t show promise, I think you grew as a writer. You really focused your attention on the smaller details and teased out some interesting things.”
“Thanks,” Oliver said. “That means a lot to me.”
This was something he thought he should say because he thought it was probably supposed to be true. Surprisingly, despite being the exact kind of accolades he had been hoping to get one day, it didn’t feel true. He turned to Minnie.
“Tell me more about why you didn’t like it.”
“Oh, I’m not the expert here,” she said.
“Go ahead,” Wilson said.
“Well, okay. I don’t think you should listen to him.”
Wilson laughed, but didn’t add anything else.
“No,” she said, “I mean, it’s… okay, The Eatery is pretty good, notwithstanding the title.”
“What’s wrong with the title?”
“I just don’t know what an eatery is, I mean it’s a diner. You call it a diner the whole time except for the first time.”
The truth was, Oliver started writing the story without bothering with the letter-prompt. He completely forgot about it, until just before he handed it in. After combing the document for a good noun that would do for a title, he went back in and changed one of the diner references to ‘eatery’, slapped the title on, and sent it through. If he had more time he would have given the mother a name beginning with an E instead. Or the waitress.
“It doesn’t tell me much about the story,” Minnie added.
“All right, sure,” Oliver said.
“And the writing’s okay. But nothing happened. I’d rather see you go back and tell me what happens when Osraic gets to the kingdom, or Orrin figures out what’s going on with the ghost, or Opie sees his alien.”
Wilson laughed again. “I just realized you gave them all O-names,” he said, which was not the first time it had been observed, but the first time he’d been the one remarking on it. “What’s that about?”
“I don’t know,” Oliver said. “Just feels right.”
“Someone’s gonna accuse you of writing Mary Sues. Or, what are they for men? Gary Stu?”
“I don’t know what that is,” Oliver said.
“It’s when the author puts idealized versions of themselves into their stories, basically.”
“Oh.”
Oliver did sort of think of all the main characters as a version of him. He thought he was supposed to be doing that.
“It’s not really a thing,” Wilson said. “I mean, it can be, but usually if you’re getting accused of stuff like that it’s because you’re writing something that isn’t very good anyway. I mean, basically every thriller with a super-competent protagonist is trafficking in the same idealization. Nobody throws that charge around until they’re reading someone who can’t pull it off.”
Somehow, whenever Wilson named specific genres, it sparked an idea in Oliver. In this case, he was suddenly working on a spy thriller in his head.
“That someone is usually a woman,” Minerva said. “Even if they’re doing a fine job of pulling it off.”
“Oh, hey, I don’t think that’s fair,” Wilson said.
“Sure it is. You know it is. You guys write James Bond versions of yourselves and sketch the outline of the women characters and get movie deals out of it. Flip the genders and everyone starts throwing Mary Sue around.”
Minnie clapped a hand over her mouth.
“Sorry!” she said. “I’m not supposed to know that much about writing.”
“I don’t understand,” Oliver said.
“I mean I shouldn’t say things like that. I’m not the expert.”
“Why not? Who’s stopping you?”
She laughed one of her cuter laughs.
“Never mind!” she said. “Go on, you guys talk about the thing some more, don’t mind me.”
What Oliver wondered was whether Minnie was drunk. It was a little early in the day for it.
“So Mary Sues are okay,” Oliver said.
“Yeah, yeah they aren’t really Mary Sues, I don’t think. I mean if these guys are idealizations, you’ve got some issues. They’re well-rounded characters, mostly. Probably. I’m not sure about the last one.”
“Oscar.”
“Right,” Wilson said. “Another O. He’s mostly present in the story as a reflection of the world he’s judging. Nothing wrong with that at all, and the writing’s really interesting. I’d love to see you explore that some more. Did you enjoy it?”
Oliver hated it. With the other pieces he felt like the only reason he stopped was that it was going to take two months to finish and he only had a week. With this, he could see it taking two years, he would hate the two years, and when he was done he would have an end product he would also hate.
“I guess,” he said.
“Oh, come on,” Minnie said.
“Minerva…” Wilson looked like he was jumping back into the middle of an argument they’d already had.
“Wilson, look at his face, he doesn’t want to write more.” She reached out and put her hand on Oliver’s wrist. “Ollie, look, it’s okay to admit you don’t like writing the things Wilson thinks you should write.”
“I don’t know. I mean, if I’m good at it…”
“Yeah, but you didn’t have any fun.”
“Maybe you should try outlining,” Wilson said.
“What would that do?” Minnie asked. It was starting to feel like Oliver was a child stuck between his parents disagreeing on how to punish him. His actual parents didn’t ever do this, as far as he could recall, but it felt that way just the same.
Wilson ignored her question, and kept his attention on Oliver.
“It’s the one thing we can consistently report about your efforts to date. You come up with things too large to finish. Even when I told you to just take something small, you focused in on a level of detail that made it impossible to write a whole story. I’m wondering if the problem is that you’re just sitting down and typing, without any kind of plan.”
“I’ve never tried an outline before.”
“It’ll be fun! You can work out the whole plot first, and then just fill in the gaps.”
“But what do I write?” Oliver was worried he’d be forced to do something boring—an outline—in order to write something also boring, like the prestige pieces that got Wilson going.
; “Whatever you want, I guess.”
“Write a romance!” Minerva said.
“A romance?” Oliver thought he was probably blushing.
“With a female main character! You haven’t done that yet, have you?”
“Um… okay.”
“For me?”
Minerva gave him probably her best smile. It was really hard for Ollie to believe she didn’t know what that smile did to him.
“Sure, all right.”
Oliver didn’t want to write a romance and he didn’t want to work on an outline for a romance he didn’t want to write. He would rather work on the spy story in his head.
It would start with a helicopter crash, he thought. That would be a less effective beginning for a romance. Or, he assumed that to be so.
Wilson, meanwhile, looked like he was developing a bad headache, and looked ready to go on a rant about the romance genre as a whole.
“Do you need a letter?” he asked, instead of ranting.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Let’s go with U. The letter U.”
“Sure. Romance, letter U.”
“Start with an outline, see how far you get.”
“Right.”
“Oh, look at the time, Ollie,” Minerva said. “You need to get back to work.”
“Do I?”
He looked at his watch and saw that it was nearly two P.M. This was possibly bad, but he couldn’t remember.
“When did I go on break?” he asked. He honestly didn’t know.
“Like an hour ago,” she said. “We don’t want you to lose your job.”
“Yeah. Yeah, no, we don’t.”
“Go on, then,” Wilson said.
Oliver jumped to his feet and headed to the intersecting road that connected Tenth and Market. He noted that he was wearing his work shirt, the black slacks he usually had on accompanying the shirt, and the right footwear. There were coffee grounds under his nails and in a couple of spots on his shirt.
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