Okay, what kind of restaurateur held Red Lobster in such high esteem? Cheryl had to ask the question even though she feared the answer. He probably ran a Chuck E. Cheese or something.
“So, you said you’re a restaurateur?”
“That’s right. I like it okay, but getting up so early gets to be a drag, man.”
“Early?”
“Yeah, you got to make the bagels early.”
“Bagels?”
“Yeah. I make a mean cinnamon raisin. It’s a pretty good job, and I get off at noon, in time for my second job.”
Oh, it just keeps getting better. “Really? What do you do for your second job?”
“I . . . where are our biscuits? Excuse me, ma’am?” Louis asked a passing waitress who ignored him. “Miss?” he repeated. “Can you bring us some biscuits? And not just two or three, bring a whole mess of ’em, would ya?”
The waitress agreed, and Louis continued. “I’m sorry. I like to have a biscuit or two before the salad comes. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah, my other job. I’m a pharmacy technician.”
A cashier at the CVS? “Really, that must be challenging.” Cheryl replied for lack of anything else to say while Louis’s cuteness factor continued to fall like the stock market on Black Monday. “Two jobs must keep you busy.”
“Yeah, but I got them bills to pay. My parents keep telling me to get a job with benefits, but, you know, what do I really need health insurance for?”
In case you get sick, you moron. “I don’t know,” Cheryl said with a smile, resigning herself to just get through the date, hoping the food would arrive soon.
“I’ve actually been thinking about going to Japan and getting a job there.”
“Oh? You speak Japanese?” Cheryl asked.
“Nah, but I hear Americans can go there and make lots of money.”
“Really? Doing what?”
“I’m not sure. I haven’t investigated it thoroughly yet. It’s just something I heard. At least it would get my mother off my back. Last night me and Ma were watching That 70’s Show . . . have you seen it? It’s a riot . . . anyway, Ma keeps pestering me to look for another job, you know, just one job instead of two, but I like my jobs. Plus, I need jobs that are close to home, since my car got repossessed last year.”
“Well, I’m sure your mother wants the best for you. Do you see her often?”
“Every day. I live in her basement. She doesn’t even charge me any rent, and I have my own sofa and television and everything down there.”
Cuteness factor just dropped off the chart. “Sounds like a great setup,” Cheryl said, patronizing him.
“Yeah, it is. Sometimes it gets old ’cause Ma gets all caught up in my business and pesters me when I’m trying to play my computer games. But, for the most part, it works out okay for me and Juniper.”
Oh, God! What the hell is a Juniper? “Juniper?”
“That’s my cat. She’s sixteen.”
“Sixteen? That’s old for a cat, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but she’s in pretty good health. Although she had to have a kitty colonoscopy a few months ago. You know, she was having diarrhea all the time. It was gross. They took this camera and shoved it up her—”
“Oh, please! I don’t want to hear the rest, we’re about to eat,” Cheryl said as politely as she possibly could.
“Yummy!” Louis said as the waitress slapped down a big plate of fried seafood in front of him.
The two of them ate their meals as Louis rambled on about his collection of Disney snow globes and the intricacies of bagel-making while Cheryl spent the bulk of her meal nodding and forcing herself to pretend she was remotely interested in anything he said. When the check arrived, Louis asked if she wanted to split it. Cheryl agreed, and the two of them got up from the table and headed toward the lobby, dalump . . . dalump . . . dalump.
Before they got to the door, Louis stopped. “So what do you think? Do you like me?” he asked Cheryl point-blank.
No. “Oh, I think you’re lots of fun and very interesting,” Cheryl lied before adding, “but, honestly, I’m not sensing any real chemistry.”
Generally, Cheryl would just say yes and give the guy a wrong phone number or something, but she didn’t want this guy thinking she was even remotely interested in him.
His faced dropped a bit. “That’s okay. I wasn’t sensing any either,” he said, obviously disappointed.
“Well, maybe our paths will cross again,” Cheryl said, praying that they never would. She extended her hand and Louis gave it a polite shake.
“Yeah, come by the CVS on Broad Street sometime. If you want, you can come to my register, and I’ll forget to ring up some of your items. I do that for my friends,” he said with the same grin he held when he shot his order at the hostess.
“Okay, maybe I’ll do that,” Cheryl lied again, and pushed the door open to head to her car.
Restaurateur! How did he even know how to spell restaurateur? Cheryl thought to herself as she put the key in the car door and watched Louis walk across the highway, dalump . . . dalump . . . dalump.
Cheryl got in the car and closed the door. The day was taking its toll. She had really had high hopes for Louis. He looked like such a cutie in his picture, and his e-mails were so nice. She even turned down Peter’s invitation to come over the week before, thinking that maybe she would be able to get out of her dysfunctional relationship with him. She was already on edge from her encounter with Gina a couple of hours earlier, and the disastrous date with Louis was all she could take.
Thinking about the evening, she had such a strange feeling. One part of her wanted to laugh about her dinner with Louis, the first real-live moron she had ever met, and another part of her was so overwhelmed with sadness that she just wanted to cry. She looked in the rearview mirror at herself and let out a little smirk about how ridiculous the evening had been. Then she put her hand to her head and let the smirk fade into a steady stream of tears.
A Family That Eats Together . . .
Shirley had gotten held up at work and was running late as usual. She was currently working as a waitress at the T.G.I. Friday’s in D.C. She couldn’t remember the name of the play, but some musical about a French guy who got caught stealing bread was playing at the Warner Theater nearby. The matinee let out just before she was due to get off, and a bunch of foo-foo suburbanites who were too cheap to pay for the evening show crowded into the restaurant. The manager asked Shirley to stick around and help with the crowd. She needed the tips, so she agreed to stay for a few hours, but she made sure the manager knew she was doing him a favor.
She had planned to take the subway to meet Gina and her friends for dinner but decided to drive since she was already late and had to swing by her apartment to pick up some Ziploc bags. She usually kept her eyes straight ahead when she was driving to avoid the nasty snarls she often got from people in passing cars. Her car emitted a foul-smelling white smoke when she accelerated, much to the disgust of the motorists behind her.
As she crossed the bridge into Virginia, she caught a glimpse of a state cop in her rearview mirror. She decided to take the first available exit rather than risk getting stopped because of her expired tags—the ones she should have renewed six months earlier. She let the tags slide because she didn’t have enough money set aside to pay for the new registration. Besides, if she did go to get the license plates renewed, she wasn’t sure if the clerks at the Motor Vehicle Administration would want proof of insurance, which she hadn’t set aside money for either. Next month she’d ask Gina or her mother to help her meet these expenses, but Gina had just helped her make this month’s rent, and Gina’s grandmother was already footing the bill for all of Shirley’s medications—medications Shirley probably wouldn’t even need if she would just quit smoking.
Shirley had very slight asthma as a child. It was so mild that it wasn’t even diagnosed until she was an adult, and years of smoking had exacerbated it to a point where she would have frequent attacks.
It had been so bad lately that Shirley had to keep switching medications to head off the attacks and keep her asthma at bay. Doctor after doctor told her she absolutely had to quit smoking. Sometimes Shirley would be honest and say she just couldn’t. Other times, she’d just lie and say she had quit smoking or was going to right away. It was the way Shirley handled things—whatever way seemed easiest at the time, no matter what the long-term consequences were.
By the time Shirley got to the Kentucky Buffet and Salad Bar, Gina, Linda, and Peter were already seated and munching on some salads. Gina, as always, was trying not to watch Peter eat. She absolutely abhorred the way he ate. He insisted on eating only one item of food at a time. He had to finish all his mashed potatoes before he could eat his steak or scarf down an entire hamburger before he would even touch his french fries—and oh, God! The french fries! She couldn’t stand the way he consumed french fries, the way he kept biting them continually as he propelled them into his mouth. It was like watching a tree go through a wood chipper. And the sound was worse, CHOMP, CHOMP, CHOMP. Gina had to listen to CHOMP, CHOMP, CHOMP for every single fry. Damn McDonald’s and their stupid super sizes! If Peter hadn’t been the one to break it off with Gina years ago, she may have had to dump him. How could she continue to date someone who drove her crazy at every meal?
Gina didn’t particularly care for the Kentucky Buffet, one of those all-you-can-eat buffets filled with vats of lukewarm foods like mayonnaise salads, fish sticks, canned soup, and macaroni and cheese. It wasn’t really the food that bothered her so much as the customers. Her stomach turned as grossly overweight people in polyester slacks and tight frocks slopped mounds of sloppy joe and fried fish on their plates—still chewing the food from their last round as they returned to the buffet to go at it again. It was like feeding time at the hog house. The only reason she agreed to come was that she felt a little guilty about snapping at her mother at the bank a few days earlier. Linda and Peter were happy to join in. They actually enjoyed Shirley’s company. Truth was, Gina enjoyed her company too, when she could get over the fact that it was her own mother sitting with her friends, talking about the guy with the severely curved dick she went home with the night before, or the time she spent the better part of a Sunday sitting in a tub of vinegar because someone told her it would make her vagina tight again.
“Hi, gang,” Shirley said with a smile before sliding into the booth next to Gina. “How are ya, sweetie? You seemed to be in a bit of a huff the last time I saw you.”
“I’m okay. I had just had a rough day at work. They don’t feel I’m performing up to speed, so now I have to come up with a written plan with goals for improving and things like that. It’s due on Monday. Guess I’d better get started, huh?”
“Guess you’d better. If you lose your job, who’s going to help me pay my bills?” Shirley said, only half joking. “So what’s new in the world of young people? Young people with buff bodies, I might add,” Shirley said, smiling and giving Peter a good once-over. Even on Shirley’s worst days she was still sexy. A little cheap-looking, but always sexy. She even made Peter turn on the charm sometimes if she wasn’t making him blush.
“Pretty good,” Peter said. “Although my throat is a little scratchy today for some reason. Hope I’m not getting sick.”
“We just did a little shopping,” Gina added. “Our high school reunion is coming up, you know. Linda and I were trying to find something to wear.”
“Did you find anything?”
“Just a cheap whore in the bookstore,” Gina said, smirking at Peter.
“And who might that be?”
“Cheryl Sonntag, Gina’s nemesis,” Linda said, answering Shirley’s question.
“I don’t remember her.”
“She’s the girl I went to American University with. She was one of my roommates in college. She was around the house a lot the first summer after we graduated. I think you were living with Stan at the time, or maybe it was when you moved out for the umpteenth time to live with that guy whose mother was younger than you,” Gina said, slightly slamming Shirley for her history of repeatedly moving in and out of the house she had occasionally shared with Gina and her mother, not to mention Shirley’s taste for younger men.
“The black girl your grandmother didn’t like you hanging around with?”
“Yes, Shirley, the black girl.”
Gina’s grandmother was a nice woman, but she did have one major flaw. She was a bit on the racist side. She didn’t spend her evenings in white sheets burning crosses or anything, but she certainly didn’t approve of Gina rooming with an African American. Gina’s grandmother had old-fashioned ideas about how an upper-middle-class girl should behave, and it didn’t include mixing with people of other races. But compared to Shirley’s antics, Gina being friends with a minority seemed like small potatoes.
Growing up in such a strict household, Shirley learned to abhor rules and discipline. As a child she felt like she wasn’t allowed to have any fun. Her mother would tell her it wasn’t proper to play in the dirt with the boys or run through the sprinkler on a hot summer day. She constantly pestered Shirley as a child to sit up straight, cross her legs, and conduct herself as a lady. She also forbade Shirley to wear pants outside the house, loaded her up with books on etiquette and proper presentation, and would not allow her to date until she was eighteen.
Looking back on her childhood, Shirley felt like she had been forced to stand on the sidelines, trying not to get dirty, while the other children played and were allowed to be kids. As she progressed into her teenage years and developed a mind of her own, she protested her mother’s strict rules more and more, almost as often as she disregarded them—rolling her pants up under her skirt until she was on the school bus, passing on the etiquette books in favor of trashy novels and television, and sneaking around with boys long before her eighteenth birthday.
At first she violated her mother’s rules only behind her back, but as Shirley got older, she became bolder and sometimes blatantly ignored her mother’s wishes. If her mother wouldn’t let her go to a school dance or get her hair permed, Shirley would do it anyway and be perfectly willing to face whatever punishment was doled out when her mother learned of her actions. It almost became a routine—Shirley would go to a party she wasn’t supposed to or get home past her ridiculous ten o’clock curfew and then be grounded for a week. The following week she’d get caught with a cigarette or chatting on the phone after nine o’clock and be grounded for another week. The cycle continued for years until Shirley just plain wore her mother out. Gina didn’t know if her grandmother’s strict nature was really what made Shirley end up as such a wild woman though. Anyway, it couldn’t have been totally to blame. Shirley’s nature seemed so fully ingrained, it was probably just who she was.
Luckily for Gina, her grandmother mellowed with age and had been thoroughly exhausted by Shirley. And, after witnessing Shirley’s tremendous rebellion against her efforts, Gina’s grandmother did her part in raising Gina with a more relaxed attitude—and, for the most part, she, not Shirley, raised Gina. Although her grandmother wasn’t thrilled about Gina’s friendship with Cheryl, she couldn’t have been nicer to Cheryl when she came over to the house. She just occasionally raised her concerns to Gina and asked her not to spend so much time with that “nice colored girl.”
It amused Gina that racism was usually handed down from one generation to the next, but not in her family. Her grandmother’s feelings certainly didn’t get passed on to Shirley, who Gina sometimes referred to as an equal opportunity slut. Shirley slept with guys of every race, color, and creed, although there was always the notion that she did it just to get under her mother’s skin. Simply to amuse herself, Shirley would occasionally buy her mother ethnic gifts for her birthday and holidays. Last year she gave her a black animated Santa Claus figure. She was also sure to send her mother Hanukkah and Martin Luther King Day cards every year just to aggravate her.
“Oh, yes, Cheryl. I met her once or t
wice. Seemed nice enough to me,” Shirley said.
“Yeah, well, she’s nice all right,” Gina added sarcastically.
“What? What did she do?”
“It’s a long story. I can’t believe you haven’t heard it already.”
“I’ve got all day, sweetie.”
“Some other time, Shirley.”
“Just tell her, Gina. What’s the big deal?” Linda interjected.
“I think it can wait,” Peter said, agreeing with Gina.
“Now you’ve really got me curious. Do share, Linda.”
Realizing that Gina and Peter would be only slightly angry if she spilled the beans, Linda decided to go for it.
“Gee, I don’t know where to begin. I guess it was the first Christmas after Gina and Cheryl graduated from American. Gina, Cheryl, Peter, and I had just spent Christmas Day with Peter’s parents out in the boonies, somewhere in Calvert County, Maryland. After dinner with Peter’s parents we went to a local bar to have some drinks and shoot pool. Well, obviously, with it being Christmas Day, the bar was pretty empty. To liven things up, the bartenders started giving away free drinks and tequila shots. We certainly weren’t going to give up free drinks.”
“Certainly not,” Shirley said as if it would be a tragedy to pass up free tequila.
“Needless to say, the four of us got schlossed. Oh, oh . . . I forgot one important detail. This was just a few weeks after Peter dumped Gina. Well, he did dump you, Gina,” Linda said, looking at Gina, sort of apologizing for putting it so harshly.
“Whatever, Linda.”
“Anyway, the four of us were three sheets to the wind by midnight. None of us were in any condition to drive, so I had the brilliant idea of catching a cab to Denny’s. We were going to go there and have coffee and something to eat. After we sobered up we were going to grab a cab back to the car and drive back to Peter’s house. So, anyway, we got into the cab. Peter sat up front, and us girls climbed into the back. I was sitting in between Gina and Cheryl, and not five minutes passed before I heard Gina make some quiet grunting noise like she was choking or something. Then I heard something splatter on her shirt like she had just spilled a drink. It was dark, and she was so quiet about it, I really wasn’t sure what had happened. I was like ‘Did you puke?’ and she nodded her head. Then our lovely cabdriver asked if she threw up. He sounded rather annoyed. I told him that she did, but she mostly got it on herself and not on the cab. . . .”
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