“That comes with a Happy Ending Sundae,” the woman told me.
“Sounds fine,” I said and thanked her. When she’d gone, Paul promptly resumed his laments. I couldn’t blame him for being disappointed, but it seemed ridiculous for a grown man to sit whimpering at the table, blowing his nose into napkins and stuffing them in the pockets of his cargo shorts. I couldn’t look at him at all. His face became so apish and gross when he was upset. The sight of him, I felt, would ruin my appetite.
“They sell hats at Hooters,” he sniffed. He stared at me and moaned.
It was clear that my succulent wasn’t a good enough gift for Paul. He was materialistic, like my wife. How many blouses and bracelets does a woman need? How many terrible framed watercolors, throw pillows, little silver things shaped like birds or cats, or ceramic hearts filled with potpourri, or crystal ashtrays does a human being require? My wife had filled the house with that kind of nonsense. And she was a snob, on top of it. She would have rolled her eyes if she’d seen me eating at a Friendly’s with a couple of retards. She would never have understood why I was there. She had no idea what it meant to expand one’s horizons.
I put my arm around Claude, hoping we could change the subject. “Excited for ice cream?” I asked. Our waitress stopped off to deliver sodas and small packets of colored crayons for Paul and Claude. Claude tore into them immediately, scribbling on the back of his paper place mat. Paul opened the packet and snapped each crayon in half, let the broken pieces roll across the table toward me. Claude collected them, herding the pieces into a pile, then continued to draw.
“You can have my sundae, Paul, if it makes you feel any better,” I told him.
“I don’t want your stupid sundae,” he said. “Ice cream melts, Larry. You eat it and it’s gone. You can’t take it with you.” He took another napkin, rubbed his eyes, blew his nose.
“You can take your crayons with you,” I said. “I could ask for a new pack. Should I?”
He grunted, wiping the tears off his face with the hairy backs of his hands. Then he turned to the window and began to peel the paper off his straw very slowly, like someone plucking a flower, lost in thought. “I hate life,” Paul said and quickly sucked down his glass of Coke.
“Guys. Ice cream,” said Claude, watching his silver dish float through the air, high on the huge tray our waitress carried. She set the tray down on a little stand next to our table, then distributed our plates, smiling. She seemed undeterred by the awkward tension in our group, which I took as a testament to her strong character. She was very professional. Nothing like the girls at Hooters. I caught her attention by staring into her eyes, which were big and black and set deeply under the fat, shining ridge of her brow bone.
“Okay?” she asked.
“It’s his birthday,” I said, pointing at Paul.
“You wanna cake?” she asked, addressing Paul directly. “You wanna candle?” Paul said yes, licking his fingers morosely, his face already covered in BBQ sauce. He was not ashamed.
Those strange painted eyebrows crimped and settled. When she brought the plate of cake, her grubby hand cupped around the lit candle, Paul pushed himself up and scooted out from the booth and stood next to her, staring down at the flame, and she sang to him in Spanish, softly, beautifully, glancing bashfully up into his small, swollen eyes.
? ? ?
At home that night, I sank deep into a bath, played a cassette tape of golden oldies, watched the water turn milky and still between my knees. I got wistful remembering how my wife would stand at the vanity in a pink satin robe, fixing her hair as though I’d care what she looked like when we got into bed. She wasn’t a beautiful woman, but she dressed well and had small, sparkling eyes. Emerald eyes, I called them when we first started dating. “Honey” was what she called me. When she first started calling me that, I felt it was dismissive, that she was using the pet name as a way to blanket over everything that was good and distinctive about me, that by calling me “honey” she might as well have been addressing a servant or a dog. But after a while I began to hear the love in it, to yearn for it, and eventually it felt so good, so soothing, that when she used my name, Lawrence, it sounded dry and cruel, and my heart would flinch as though it were being pinched and gouged by her long, cherry-colored fingernails. I slept on the couch that night, the TV flickering like a flame over my shoulder, the succulents creeping in cups and saucers across the mantle, the coffee table, all the window sills, the whole house full of them, my perfect little children.
SLUMMING
You could tell just by looking—grape-soda stains on their kids’ Tshirts, cheap dye jobs, bad teeth—the people of Alna were poor. Some of them liked to huddle on turnouts or thumb rides up and down Route 4, sunburned and tattooed, but I never thought to stop and pick one up. I was a woman alone, after all. And I didn’t want to have to talk to them, get to know them, or hear their stories. I preferred to keep the residents of Alna as part of its scenery. Wild teens, limping men, young mothers, kids scattered on the hot concrete like the town’s lazy rats or pigeons. From a distance I watched the way they congregated, then dispersed, heads hung at midlevel, neither noble nor disconsolate. The trashiness of the town was comforting, like an old black-and-white movie. Picture an empty street with a broken-down car, a child’s rusty tricycle abandoned on the curb, a wrinkled old lady scratching herself while watering her dun-colored lawn, the hose twisting perversely in her tight fist. Crumbling sidewalks. I played along when I went up there, slipping pennies in and out of the dish on the counter of the Gas Plus on State Street as though a few cents could make or break me.