Twenty-first of September, the first day of fall, and light and shadows were in a frenzy, competing with fickle breezes, and the sky, not to be outdone, cleared itself of every cloud. “The sky is blue and clear … clear as a clean piece of paper.” How could she have remembered that line … a line she had said from a play she had performed in over forty years ago! How like the day she had been way back then, all bellied over with hopes, boundless and new, light reflecting from every part of her body.
Her pace quickened until she caught a reflection of herself in a glass window. Jesus! She was even bigger than when she started this stupid diet four days ago. Long Beach diet she kept calling it, instead of South Beach, as if she had become one of those lost suburbanites in Long Beach, looking for what’s missing in their lives and sure to find it
with a thin body. Another week and a half to go … she struggled so and today was only the fourth day. She was determined to continue to lose the weight, the weight of boredom, disappointment, letting go of a profession in which she had been successful but no longer interested her, the loss of a dream of making a difference in life for more then a moment, the weight of all that, the ice cream, the wine, the fig newtons and the mountains of sushi and pasta.
He was starving. “Dammit! This place is taking forever,” he thought. ”Out of place here with my work clothes and everything. But they’re probably not being snooty, just busy … never used to be this fancy when I worked on that job up the street.” A tall sliver of a waiter appeared, almost out of nowhere as if he had been blown in by the playful wind
and landed just on that spot. “What’ll ya have,” fell from his mouth in one word. Startled by the suddenness of the waiter he quickly decided on the pasta of the day. “Gotsya” said the waiter. “Oh shit, that wasn’t what I really wanted!” he thought to himself. “Probably shouldn’t have come all the way down here from the job in Midtown. But the food is good and it don’t cost a lung to eat here. Most of all had to get away from those guys I work with…a bunch of gorillas…driving me crazy. Whew, fuckin’ lonely is what I am and they make me feel lonelier, especially today, so pretty out. Something new like this day is what I need.”
The corner café where she hoped to find the chef’s salad required for the diet’s fourth day lunch was crowded. All her favorite seats by the window had been taken. The only available place was a communal table across from a man sitting alone. She sat down at the empty seat facing him and immediately wished she hadn’t. He started shaking his
leg nervously, nonstop, the way bad boys had done in school, boys way in the back of class, and always she had associated it with something sexual. “I better take out my notebook or something and start writing so this guy doesn’t think I’m coming on to him,” she thought. A distracted waitress appeared. She faithfully ordered what was on the South Beach diet for Thursday. She sensed he was watching her.
“What’s this,” he thought. “Probably a school teacher, nice voice, soft … could use a little softness in my life. That screeching tattooed girl at home is driving me nuts … should never have let her move in with me.” His pasta arrived. He unscrewed the top of the cheese shaker and smothered his pasta with cheese. “Look at that sweet mouth she has, this one…looks like you could have a conversation with her too, without hammering the ideas out.”
She pretended to be writing in her notebook, but all the while she was thinking about how out of place the man was. In spite of the jiggling , he had a craggy, quiet demeanor. “Handsome, Eastern European,” she thought, “probably lost, just wandered into this cafe, oozing with NYU professors, smooth rosy students, studied creative souls. Twirling their tresses while deep in thought. His hair is bluntly cut. Is he wearing a uniform?” His cellphone rang. As he quickly answered and shut off his phone, she noticed a New York accent form one of those small-lawned boroughs . A pen was clipped to his breast pocket, crowed to the side by cigarettes and an eye glass case. “Oh God,” she sighed to herself, “just like all those men from the small hometown I fled from, with their stuffed breast pockets … the kind with all that abortive longing, abusive men who stored their reason in dusty banks of platitudes and spent only force, using power to beat away any vulnerability in others and in themselves. Oh fuck! Why am I so judgmental? Probably because I’m starving to death on this damned diet!” She looked around for the waitress.The sun fell into a cloud and a wave of quiet paused the noisy cafe. She stole another glance at her table companion. “Odd, “ she thought. “When he eats, he appears so differently from how I first imagined him.” There was an appealing pensive quality, a sensuousness in the way he ate, so slowly…as if he were really present, tasting, kissing, almost making love to his food, taking small bites to make the pleasure last. Why were his lips so moist, so deep in color like the lips of a young boy, resting slightly open. “Oh Lord, careful,” she thought. ”This kind of man is dangerous for me, I know this man, how he believes sappy love songs, defends ignorance, and how he has the power to make me disbelieve there is a world of the mind.” Her salad arrived.
“Look at that, she eats like a screwy little chipmunk,” he smiled to himself. “No makeup either. Bet she thinks she’s too fat, nice to look at woman with a little flesh for a change, without a face on her like a Barbie doll.” Just then, she dropped her pen. It rolled under the table. He picked it up and smiled. His eyes were so blue that she thought she
was looking through his head to the sky. “Thank you,” she said, as he handed her the pen. She accepted it so gently that it fell from her hand into his pasta. They laughed and then they talked and then they laughed some more. Like the day outside, they made light and shadows. All was new. When she got up to leave she knew for the next three or four Thursdays she would come back to this cafe hoping to see him again.
Kathleen Widdoes has been an actress for many years in the theatre, television and film. She received a Tony nomination for Beatrice in ‘“Much Ado About Nothing,” three Obie awards for Off-Broadway performances, in plays by Dumas, Chekhov and Brecht. She was Edith Wharton in PBS’s “Looking Back” and received four Emmy nominations as Emma Snyder in Daytime Soap, “As The World Turns.” She was Joe Papp’s first Juliet and all the dark ladies of Shakespeare at The New York Shakespeare Festival. Some films include, The Group, Masha in The Seagull, and Courage Under Fire. Kathleen’s writing has appeared in 12th Street journal and is now an honors student in the Riggio Writing & Democracy Program working towards a B.A. at The New School.
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