category: short fiction
THE CHINESE RESTAURANT
(c)1986 by David Lefkowitz
The clear, open smile that radiated from her face assured Simon Wood that she had never lost any relatives in the Second World War. Her slivery darts of eyes and puffed yellow cheeks were too content, too free to be genetically inherited from a work camp detainee. Simon went so far as to reason that Hiroshima and Nagasaki meant more to him as key events in his fascination with historical tragedies than they ever had to her. He approached the fifty-year-old woman without guilt or trepidation and noted that her face looked like a tangerine behind wax paper; a puckering moon with muted wisps of clouds that were the gray tinges delicately aging her hair.
“Can I help you?” she said. Just like they talk in the movies.
Simon leaned against the counter and enjoyed the feeling of cold, smooth metal against his palms. “Do you have a special. Today. Of some sort?” Out of habit and politeness, Simon felt compelled to keep talking until the other person seemed ready to answer.
The finger she pointed at the homemade cardboard `n’ marker sign might have seemed rude had a patient smile not accompanied and, therefore, overwhelmed its dispassionate boldness. The handwriting was as neat, concise, and yet immature as the language:
SPARE RIB (2)
Egg Roll,
Shrimp Fry Rice…….$3.25
For all his previous thoughts and ruminations, it took this simple, frank little sign to jar Simon’s mind into making the distinction that a CHINESE restaurant would not have a JAPANESE waitress. His embarrassed subconscious replaced black-and-white stills of Iwo Jima with luminous, full-color slides of Chairman Mao.
“Um, what else do you have. Do you have anything else . . . uh, on the lunch menu?” Simon would show her that American Catholics could be humble, too.
With automated grace, the increasingly Chinese woman handed him a tiny list of inexpensive combinations, laminated in clear, flexible plastic. The Shrimp Lo Mein instantly caught his eye, though he went through the trouble of reading the entire list in order to avoid any guilty feelings about putting the woman through more trouble in requesting and obtaining the list than in his actual utilization of it. Simon even turned it over, though he instinctively knew it would be blank.
“Lemme have the, uh, shrimp lo mein . . . that’s letter D.”
“That comes with soup. Hot and sour or egg drop?”
“Egg drop.” Why would anyone want to order something that immediately came right out and told you it was hot and sour?
“Three seventy five,” she smiled and gently retrieved her prized menu. Her foreign accent was easily apparent, although somehow she pronounced her “l”s and “r”s with sufficient accuracy. “Will be ready in a few minute. Please have seat.”
After he had received his change, Simon sat down and discreetly checked his wallet. On paying the woman, he noticed uncomfortably that he was carrying less than he thought he was; less than he felt he needed in case minor emergencies or whims cropped up. He’d spent the better part of a twenty in the local drug store earlier that morning, and Simon’s mind flashed to the unopened bag he tossed onto the kitchen table before he went out again. “Eighteen bucks,” thought Simon. “The richest men in America and they can’t even write legibly.”
The Chinese woman was not looking at him. Natural instincts had trained her to stare at anything else in the room besides her customers. Simon observed this same courtesy towards her, though without a meal in front of him, there was nothing much to see, unless one counted oneself a chronicler of the obligatory: the stark white formica table, complete with gold-tinted cardboard ashtray, one gooey bottle of hot sauce, and one near-empty bottle of soy sauce, both made of glass and topped with a red plastic periscope-hole dispenser.
Simon made a mental note to grab three or four napkins from the front counter when he went to get his lunch. He also felt better about his decision to come here as opposed to Wong’s Wok across the street. If the difference between fast and cheap vs. moderate and moderate was an eyedrop of tea in a china cup and a pair of chopsticks, Simon could easily live with his economically based choice.
In their concentrated attempts not to look at one another, Simon and the Chinese woman exchanged glances at least twice, during which Simon smiled the weak smile that says, “Hi. Everything’s good. I’m not rushing you,” to which her broader smile answered in turn, “It will be ready in a minute. My looking at you was a mistake. Please don’t be self-conscious.”
Two attractive Oriental girls, obviously college students, rose from the next table, wiped their mouths, and deposited their respective trays in the nearby wastepaper—no, garbage can—not garbage can—“what do you call those things?” thought Simon, “with plastic tops and the lids that flap back and forth. It’s not garbage cans; those are metal. Receptacles? No, a place like this doesn’t have `receptacles.’”
The girls passed him on their way out, and one had really pretty long black hair. Shiny, as if she had just washed it. Before Simon could engage in any harmless daydream fantasies, they were out of the restaurant and gone. He followed their figures in the mirror that reflected the street and watched them walk a few steps before they disappeared magically into the mirror’s edge.
They had left their table remarkably clean, and it only took the Chinese woman two wipes with her wet rag to finish the job. Simon watched her as she threw the rag on a stool behind the counter and receded into the dark, shabbily curtained hallway which led to (he imagined . . . and hoped) the kitchen. Had he been a dog, Simon figured, this would have been the moment for him to begin his conditioned salivation. The time on the wall clock corroborated to the minute the time on Simon’s wristwatch, yet he check both repeatedly and would check them again throughout the meal.
Upon seeing the Chinese woman return with a lightly steaming tray of colorful food, Simon uncontrollably flashed back to the menu and suffered the mild panic of wondering whether he had really chosen the right dish after all. The possibility of substituting beef for shrimp had not occurred to him then and, happily, passed quickly and left no disappointing impression on him now. Neither did the tempting spare ribs, which, he reasoned, were probably greasy and devoid of more than one mouthful of meat if scraped together collectively.
Simon delicately lifted the tray from her small rough hands and nodded the way he nodded to all bearers of service, especially Oriental ones. “Enjoy your meal,” she said, making the phrase sound only vaguely like a cliche. As nice as the woman was, it didn’t stop the unspoken response that usually popped into Simon’s head upon hearing that phrase from reintroducing itself: “Well, you prepared it. If it’s any good, I’ll enjoy it. Don’t make your preparation my responsibility.”
“Thanks,” was the only word that actually left Simon’s lips.
It was exactly 2:47.33 when Simon began his meal. He had forgotten the napkins, and his instant correction of that error added 25 seconds to his starting time. Not that he was really in a rush; rather that to Simon, fast food restaurants were for eating fast as well as being quickly served. Any other combination of speed and pace would be jarring and unsettling the type of food that needs all the settling it can get.
Simon dipped a plastic spoon into the soup, expecting it to melt into a curvaceously Dali-esque creation. Not to be second-guessed, however, the spoon obstinately maintained its shape and filled itself with the runny yellow consommé. He blew twice onto the soup and gingerly let it slide into his mouth, vowing thereafter to blow three times. After the sting had left his tongue, Simon decided that the soup was excellent. He would have called it “authentic” had he been able to distinguish authentic originals from their American copies.
As he waded through the murky soup, Simon fixed on authenticity as a time-passing topic of contemplation. He tried to invent distinguishable boundaries: loneliness being authentic, as is lust; boredom and passion being only carbon copies of real emotion. Despair is wholly authentic, ennui not at all, and angst is the misbegotten son of their marriage. Occupied with these pointless intellectual pursuits, Simon Wood finished his egg drop soup quickly, sipping the last quarter cup the way people eating alone always do.
The first thing Simon noticed about his shrimp lo men was the surprising number of shrimp in it. They were small—assuming that anything called a shrimp could be large—like the shriveled pinkies of emaciated old men. Simon glanced at the mirror to view a street that seemed somewhat darker, colder looking, than when he had first entered the tiny establishment. A stocky Hispanic whizzed by on a bright red Schwinn, the kind Simon had had when he was a child, only blue. A couple in their mid-twenties strolled by, never taking their eyes off each other. The woman wasn’t terribly attractive, but when she moved to kiss her lover, Simon snapped his head back to his plate and forced himself to think about something else
Picking off a severed bit of noodle that tenaciously clung to his lower lip, Simon devoted a few seconds to answering honestly how he felt about American foreign policy. Dismissing the problem as too complex to fathom over lunch, and the solution too simple to bother with on this particular afternoon, Simon dropped the subject, forked a shrimp, and turned his head to the waitress. She had piled before her several dozen fresh stringbeans and was deftly removing her tips and tops. She never looked at the particular green she was cutting—she obviously didn’t have to—and she didn’t look at Simon, either. He was therefore able to stare at her for a few seconds before restoring his gaze to his half-finished plate.
Although his stomach began to feel the mellowing sensation of fullness, Simon obliged his habit of eating as much as he could, within reason, when he paid to dine in a restaurant or on those rare occasion when he played the guest to a friendly host. The portion wasn’t huge to begin with, and Simon began to see the white of the plate beneath the greasy cellophane strings of lo mein. “Adequate, if dry and somewhat bland,” thought Simon. All things are, to an extent.
Because he had forgotten to ask for duck sauce early on, Simon felt foolish about asking the Chinese lady for some now, as he was so near the completion of his meal. He shook a little soy sauce onto the neuron-like tangle of noodles that remained, and it helped a bit. The clock read one minute after three o’clock as Simon eased the final ounce into his mouth. It had been a satisfying meal, and Simon congratulated himself on spending his precious time and money so wisely.
For some reason, the Chinese woman seemed more like a stranger to Simon now than when had first walked in. And when she called to him from behind the curtain, asking him with her eyes if the meal was good, and with her voice if he wanted any dessert, he reacted as if some unknown force had inexplicably intruded into the private world of his thoughts and planned actions.
“Thanks,” Simon raised his palm and timidly cast his eyes to the floor. “It was very good.”
The woman smiled the same broad smile with which she had greeted her customer thirty minutes before and then vanished into the black hallway, assumedly to collect another pile of stringbeans.
Simon rose and pulled the heavy down jacket off the back of his chair. The zipper caught several times before he could close it properly, and Simon cleared his throat authoritatively when he had accomplished the task. Bussing his tray, Simon decided on “garbage” as the operative word for the special lid-capped waste bin and gripped the plate tightly so as not to let it fall irretrievably beyond his reach.
It wasn’t as if he was waiting for the Chinese woman to return—she didn’t—when he stopped at the door and took one last quick look around. What was there to see that he hadn’t already observed in his short tenure at the restaurant? The stack of take-out menus, the simple, framed-ink drawings discreetly placed on the walls, the absence of table cloths, the profusion of metal surfaces, smooth and cold, the bright light, the sudden quiet. Simon gripped the door handle and pushed.
Not more than two seconds later, the Chinese woman returned, carrying not stringbeans but refills for the napkin holder. Without so much as a glance at the slowly closing door, she put the bending pile down and snatched the washrag. Silently, she moved to his table and wiped it until nothing remained to hint that anyone had ever been there.
Simon walked quickly back to his apartment, making good time despite a troublesome light on the corner of the Chinese restaurant’s block.
He needed only one glass of water to swallow the pills, though he gagged a little in the beginning. Simon lay down on the couch and tried not to think about anything. This failing him, he closed his eyes and tried to picture the woman in the Chinese restaurant. Already her features had become vague, her movements indistinct. It was twenty minutes to four when Simon Wood finally fell asleep.
When his heart stopped beating an hour later, it was almost as an afterthought.
*
NOTES & BACKSTORY:
The first draft of the story was completed Feb. 5, 1984, with revisions done two years later and the final draft completed Jan. 24, 1986. Despite a preponderance of unnecessary adjectives, there is much about this story I still like, 30-plus years later. I can read through it and find felicitous phrases I actually remember writing—always a good sign. And I like how the minutiae always have an undercurrent of both comedy and dread. Whether it’s New Yorker-worthy… ehhhhmmmm… I wouldn’t say no if they asked.
The Collected Writings of... David Lefkowitz 