How Things Go

Last night after work, I sat on the veranda of the sushi restaurant alone eating a late dinner.  The restaurant was full, or at least the outside portion was, and I felt good to be in a place that was alive.  The hostess and the servers, all Asian, made their usual queries after my being and my life and brought me drink and appetizers where I sat.  And after I had started on the sake, a woman in a light blue dress walked to the table in front of me.  I could only see her from behind, but I was already intrigued.  I am like most men about gorgeous women, struck by the image of that, but the woman in the blue dress was not gorgeous.  She did not have outrageous proportions.  Rather, there was something in her outline that spoke to me.  We are not allowed to say such things any more in the era of identity politics, but I will say it anyway.  Her figure spoke to me.  I waited for her to turn around.  She had dark hair and faded eyes and lips and breasts that were formed from an excess of estrogen, not proportionally large, but full.  As I spied her, she looked behind me and said, "Over here, honey."  Oh, I thought.  But she had changed her mind on sitting, first having chosen to give me her back, but now choosing to sit facing me.  When honey arrived, he was a five year old boy.  This will be fun, I thought, watching this mother and son at the dinner table alone on a Friday night.

My dinner arrived.  It was not what I had wanted but what the hostess had thought I wanted.  I had ordered it before, and it was O.K. so I took it.  I was more interested in the partial family before me.

I made an effort to look.  Her fingers were bare, empty as God in his infinite wisdom had made them.  She was definitely Italian, and when she spoke to the little towheaded boy, her voice was high and feminine.  She was as full of estrogen as the university studies on women with high voices had indicated.

Out of her big blonde leather bag, she pulled out papers and began to read to the little boy.  Homework.

"Point to the big red square.  Point to the small yellow circle.  Point to the orange triangle.  Point to the purple rectangle."  And each time, the boy would reach his finger to the paper and mother would nod.  The kid was a genius.

And so my dinner passed, me watching and laughing, the mother and son calling relatives and talking on the phone, speaking to grandmama, etc.  Once, she called home and had the boy leave a message so he could hear himself when they got back.  You can't imagine how much I wanted to help.  It was a scene out of a movie, and I figured every movie needed me.

But out of nowhere on a perfect southern summer night, without a hint of warning, everything went suddenly bad.  Perhaps I wasn't paying attention to what they were doing.  The boy had chopsticks bound at the top so that they wouldn't separate, but it was not helping, and he was dropping his food all over the place again and again.  His mother tried to help him.  "You're squeezing too tight," she said as she reached for the utensil, but he was having none of it.  "No!  No!  You're breaking it!  You're breaking it!"  The rice from the sushi roll was crumbling into pieces.

"You're squeezing it too tight, honey," she said to him in that sweetest of motherly voices that any woman has ever used.  But suddenly he was rabid.  "No!  No!" he screamed.  "You're ruining it!  I don't like you!"  I could see her look at me out of the corner of her eye.  Now I wanted to step in.  I could handle this, I knew.  But she kept on in her sweet way, telling him he could try once more.  But I hated that he had said that to her, even if she was not married to the father.

Suddenly in the parking lot next to us, a big woman fell down with a splat.  I looked over and saw her lying on the pavement.  We were all waiting for her to get up, but she stayed on the ground as her friends looked on. Maybe she couldn't get up, I thought.  How old is she?  Just then she began to roll around, back and forth, her friends making a wide swath around her until she bounced to her feet.  I looked back across the table to the mother and son who were still looking on.

It was  then that I heard some shouting, and straight ahead from where I sat looking north, over the mother and son's shoulders, a fight broke out.  It was a pair of teenagers, a black fellow and a white.  They had squared off and were swinging, the black kid connecting with a powerful roundhouse to the jaw that definitely rocked the white kid but didn't send him to the ground.  The black kid should have pressed in, but he didn't, dancing around instead as if he had won a title.  And that was it.  Suddenly, they were done.

I looked at the woman at the table in front of me and twisted my face up into something.  I don't know what.  But as I did, the sake I had just poured spilled into my lap, spreading through my crotch like pee.  Perfect.  All of this had happened in the span of a minute.

And so I was done, finished, ready to go.  A few minutes wrangling with the bill and I was up, gone, heading to the parking lot for my car.  I had no plans.  Nothing, really, was waiting for me at home.  Friday night.  This is just how things seem to go.