NSA Dinner
whisper what it is you want
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Imagine you are in a disney movie.
Specifically, imagine that you are the title character in Aladdin. You have just found the magic lamp. You feel compelled to rub the magic lamp, so you do. The big, blue genie pops out of the lamp and he dances for you and sings and makes a big show of all the things you can wish for, and then he offers one wish (I am taking poetic license; go with me). You think for a minute and you blurt out “I wish to go to the Broadway Grill!” Within a second you are whisked through time and space and you find yourself sitting at a table in that Capitol Hill institution and almost immediately you are hit with fierce, rushing waves of regret and stupidity and ignorance. You want to go home. You wish this had never happened to you in the first place. You don’t even like lamps. You curse yourself for being such an idiot.
You have just imagined my Thursday night.
My date tonight let me choose the restaurant and I picked the Broadway Grill. For readers who don’t live on Capitol Hill (or readers who don’t ever go to restaurants), this is the equivalent of asking to go to T.G.I Friday’s, except the Broadway Grill charges four times as much and there are no pieces of flair.
The worst part is that none of this is a surprise. I know the Broadway Grill is terrible. They have nothing to hide; the Broadway Grill flaunts its sub-par food, its schizophrenic menu and its chefs who can’t make half of the items on it. Why? It can do this because the Broadway Grill is open really, really late. Every city, every neighborhood has a place like Broadway Grill. Shitty, expensive food, awful service, no ambiance, and uncomfortable chairs in exchange for being able to get nachos at two in the morning.
Why, then, did I pick Broadway Grill? I wasn’t drunk and it wasn’t two in the morning; it was 6:30 on a weeknight. There are thousands of restaurants in Seattle and I could have had a free meal at any one of them. Clearly I need to have my head examined.
I asked to be taken to Broadway Grill because you should know what the shitty food options in your neighborhood are. You need to know where you live. For my own edification, I needed to go to Broadway Grill. I needed to check it off my list. I imagine that going to Broadway Grill is a lot like going to Belgium on a backpacking trip across Europe; when you get home and you’re looking at a map with a friend, or they’re talking about going to Europe, you can swagger and declare “Oh, yeah, Belgium. Been there. Blah.” You need to go so you can speak firsthand about how much you didn’t care for Belgium, so you can sound well-informed and sexy when you tell your friends to never go there. That is why I am going to Broadway Grill.
Note: is it clear that I never fit in as a child and this whole venture is a pathetic attempt to be able to marginally participate in normal people discourse? Good.
So I am walking up Broadway, trying very hard to keep my dejected face at bay. I am miraculously exactly on time and my date is approaching from the other direction at the same time. I told her I would be wearing a big brown coat (my friends say it makes me look like a potato; i prefer to think of myself as a tootsie roll), and she is wearing an absurd green, furry number that she said she would. She has black hair and thick plastic glasses and that DIY riot grrrl aesthetic. Cute. Too bad I look like a starch. She does not seem pleased to see me. It is raining, so we keep the “are you who I think you are?” banter to a minimum and head inside.
We are waiting for the hostess to appear at the hostess stand with the “please wait to be seated sign” and no hostess appears to be in the building. The woman I am with does not think this is funny. I am thinking about how silly Seattle is and how funny this will look in my blog and this woman looks bored and mildly perturbed. Efforts to cajole her fall flat.
Eventually we realize no hostess is coming and we seat ourselves in a table by a window. There are a few families sitting around us with young children and babies; my date tells me that she hates it when people bring their children and babies into restaurants.
I am getting tired of this. This is NSA dinner number four or five, and I am getting very sick of making conversation with strangers, especially ones like my date, who sweat bad ju-ju. I need a free meal. I do not need your bad energy. I catch myself thinking this and I feel selfish. A waiter notices that we have sat down.
The waiter makes his way over to us with water and attempts to take our drink order, but we only want water. He is visibly confused by this request. As his confusion turns to aggravation, he then realizes that we do not have menus, ie we sat ourselves without the hostess. He lectures us for a solid minute about how in this restaurant you need to wait to be seated and he gives us an extra big huff before getting us a couple of menus.
We ignore each other for the requisite amount of time, heads hidden behind gigantic menu books. I don’t know what she’s thinking (probably something about her dislike of this typeface), and I am scanning the items for something vegetarian that won’t challenge the chef. The silence during this part of the meal, the reading of the menus, initially bothered me a lot and drove me crazy on the first couple of NSA dates– I would try to make conversation and make eye contact and read the menu at the same time. That era is behind me now. Silence rocks.
When I get shitty service in Seattle, my favorite joke to make/thing to think about is the irate server in particular going home at the end of their shift and ranting and raving to their innocent significant other about how hard it is to seem disaffected, aloof, and bitchy all night long to customers. I imagine my server feeling marginally depressed about having to go into work the next day and try so hard to be someone they’re not, someone who actually doesn’t give a fuck about anyone or anything, when really they are Seattle born and bred and they care a lot. About everything. And everyone. And you just can’t show that at the Broadway Grill.
My date, Miss Anthropic, does not think I am funny. She is already over it. She doesn’t want to make long, involved jokes about the service. She tells me that she hates Broadway Grill, that she only comes here once a year to remember how much she hates it, she prefers The Deluxe, blah blah blah. I have stopped comprehending. If you didn’t like this restaurant, why didn’t you say so? When I e-mailed her, I suggested Broadway Grill or Annapurna. Annapurna might have been a better choice (Nepalese food? They do not have this in upstate New York), or you could have e-mailed me back telling me I suggested the two worst restaurants on Broadway. Maybe she wanted to be nice and honor my request. Still, you would think after my disclosure that I had been to barely a handful of eateries in Seattle since moving here, that she would have taken my request as charming, but ultimately worthless.
I order the fish and chips and she orders some kind of grilled, glazed salmon. I have been fantasizing about french fries all week. When I was at Squid and Ink, I ordered the soup instead of the french fries as a side and regretted it throughout the whole meal. I know better now. Soup is for bitches. Bring on the patatas.
We make the same conversation I make with every date: jobs, liking/loathing seattle, travel, music, passions in life. I am beginning to realize how similar these conversations are to each other and how to draw people out by asking the right questions in the right way. I get her to talk about her job, working in a hospital doing some kind of medical data entry thing. She’s pretty reticent about it. It sounds boring. She mentions that she is a valuable commodity because she is trained to do something special in this field; she is worth money. Whatever. This is not interesting and we both know it. I’ve spent my fair share of time in hospitals, and they make me want to stick my head in an oven, so I ask her if it’s a depressing job. Bingo! She is off and running, talking animatedly about how awful it is to work in a hospital with sick people and sick children all the time and from there we talk about other things that make her feel sad: growing up poor, declaring bankruptcy, taking care of her ailing parent, her ex. I nod and say encouraging words until the food comes. I can be interested in other people’s misery so long as they’re interested in it, too.
For a half empty restaurant, the food comes late, but we’re not surprised. By now we’ve moved onto music she thinks sucks and why she hates Seattle. Our waiter plunks down our plates and disappears– he won’t return for nearly an hour, to drop off a check and grudgingly wrap my leftovers.
I am given a very large amount of food; a portion size fit for a very patriotic American. There are three long pieces of deep fried fish, enough french fries sprinkled over, under, and in between the fish to satisfy someone the size of Michael Strahan, and a large scoop of cheerful, brightly colored coleslaw laying out on the side on my absurdly oversized plate. My date’s salmon does not look nearly as exciting as my fried symphony, but she says she is on a diet, morosely digs in, and I pretend to understand.
The fish is fine. The fries are okay. The coleslaw is pretty good, though there are giant, inedible hunks of cabbage core in it. Fish and chips is the English equivalent of Thai yellow curry. Has anyone ever had bad fish and chips? Even the bowling alley I worked at when I was sixteen had decent fish and chips. Have you ever heard of gourmet fish and chips? Of course not. They don’t make gourmet things that are deep fried; it all tastes the same. People tell me I make fantastic potato latkes and squash fritter, but the secret is that everything deep fried tastes great. Yes, that’s the taste of the free radicals from the too-hot oil fucking up your internal organs irreparably. Everything is going to be okay. Keep eating.
Miss Anthropic makes yucky faces as she eats her salmon. It’s an oversized portion also (apparently quantity can cover up for quality in these parts), and it’s served on top of some rice with some vegetables. It is completely unexciting and she scrapes the best part, the glaze, off of the salmon. She mutters something about being on a diet. I offer a taste of my fish and chips; she declines.
We move on to music and we talk about the venues and shows she hates and why she hates Seattle but will never leave. I do not ask to see the dessert menu. I realize that I’ve been very lucky; our waiter did eventually return and I didn’t order any of the pseudo-fancy pasta dishes that my fish and chips would have put to shame. This woman offers to buy me another dinner sometime and I nod and smile and say something forgettable and stupid about that being nice. I have received enough charity for a lifetime. We part ways and head off into the night and I am thankful that I only have two of these dinners left; all this charity is starting to take its toll on me.
This is how my leftovers came back. Everyone else I saw in the restaurant carrying out food got little boxes. I think this was our waiter sharing his disgust with us, but maybe this is how they always do it. In the background is my elusive torso.
Tags: Broadway Grill, Capitol Hill, dinner, fish and chips, food, restaurants, seattle
justify my lunch
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My best friend from college has been traveling around Africa since August on a Watson fellowship. She is spending a year charming strangers and making music and noticing patterns and getting paid to not go to school. I find the idea of this project so overwhelmingly huge, it makes me pee my pants. Whenever I have a hard day in Seattle, I think about my friend and her project and how hard it must be to wander around a place you do not know and miss home and have to do good scholarship and have to feel grateful all the time for the opportunity and then everything that is going on in my life gets smaller and smoother and feels more manageable. This exercise makes feel a little sheepish, but the effect it has on my stress levels is noticeable, so I’m withholding self judgment. I wonder if there will ever be a day where I can deal with my own problems without stacking them up against someone else’s. I like to make lists and use hyperbole, though, so probably not.
The other day I spoke to my friend on the phone for the first time since July, and she told me about her life right now. She is in Dakar and she has been there for a while now, and she has noticed that whenever her host family sits down for a meal, other folks from the neighborhood always eat with them. They just seem to appear whenever a meal is being served. Nobody is turned away, because everyone needs to eat. People who need help ask and receive. This sounds nice to me, and when I hear this my thoughts turn to how I don’t know who any of my neighbors on my street are. …This makes me feel like I have underestimated the solution to the problem of hunger. Maybe I should get to know my neighbors and invite them over for potlucks (maybe they’ll bring something besides hummus or napkins) instead of going on dates with strange women. Maybe if strange women weren’t so eager to take me out I would actually consider doing this. But they are, so I don’t, so I just daydream about block parties I’ll never organize instead.
The woman who wants to buy me this particular dinner writes me a first contact e-mail that reads like a resume or a cover letter. In response to my craigslist ad she sends me something you might send a potential employer or a business you want to request a donation from. She is 32 and doesn’t want to be mistaken for a dirty old woman (DOM, which she shall be referred to as hereafter). DOM’s e-mail has a well-written introductory paragraph with blatant hooks so I can know why she is the perfect woman to buy me thai food. She says she is “amazed” by people who do service work programs like Teach For America or City Year and the “various motivations that move people to save the world” AND she tells me she has been involved with community services here in Seattle. In an on-going basis. I’m a liar if I say I’m not slightly intrigued in a more-than-NSA-dinner kind of way. Dirty old womanness aside, professional demeanor in personal e-mails turns me on.
DOM is blissfully unaware that this is not a competitive venture. I wish she could know that there is no question as to whether I will e-mail her back or not. This is not like waiting for someone to call you after a good first date, or waiting to see if someone will respond to the free flirt message you send to them on the Stranger Lovelab. I’m not a potential employer. I’m not a potential girlfriend. I’m more like community college: the application is just a formality.
DOM frames her offer uniquely. She wants– she “needs” to know about my relationship with service work. She is not taking me out because it’s a strange, exciting thing to do. She is not taking me out because she wants to meet someone new or eat in a restaurant. She is a phd candidate, she is hungry for first-person accounts of working in a non-traditional educational setting. She is doing research, bitch, and I am doing her a great big favor by agreeing to meet with her. She says she will only buy me dinner if I’m “willing” to talk about myself and the service work that I’m doing while we eat.
This is ridiculous for a lot of reasons, the main one being that everyone loves to talk to themselves. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t. Anyone who says they don’t love to talk about themselves is lying, and if they aren’t lying, then they probably also shit little nuggets of pure gold. I think most people’s idea of a great first date is talking solely about oneself while chowing down on a free meal. Maybe I have found the holy grail. This offer feels a lot like the e-mail you would send someone really dorky and uncool if you wanted to go out with them but you wanted it to seem like you’d be doing them a favor. Maybe that’s not that right analogy at all, but something about this feels cheap and overdone. There is definitely some wheedling going on here (I love that word).
That is why I am thinking about justification as I walk briskly towards Rom Mai Thai on Wednesday night. As I head up John Street (which turns into Thomas and then back into John for reasons I will never understand) I think a little bit about how I will never hear the word ‘justify’ or ‘justified’ or ‘justification’ in my head again without thinking of Justin Timberlake (this makes me giggle), but mostly I am thinking about this date that I am going on and the woman who is taking me on it and how it seems like we are constantly engaged in the process of justifying our actions to ourselves and to the rest of the world.
To be blunt, I know that I’m not a hungry hungry hippo. Things could be a lot worse than they are in my life right now. Anyone who has lain eyes upon me knows that I’m not wasting away (on the contrary: I am expanding ever outward). My food stamps will roll over very, very soon (I am counting the hours now). I have housemates and friends who seem to have renewed their concern and commitment to subsidize my feeding while I wait to have government money back in my wallet again. My parents tell me they love me when the right moment comes along. I think about all of these things in a never-ending cycle, it’s like there’s one of those little red plastic camera/binoculars with twelve slides of ocean scenes that you can scan through over and over again, except it’s in my head and it’s reasons why I’m not poor poor (whatever that means) and I think plastic toys are abhorrent.
No matter how much positive feedback I get about the NSA dinner date idea, I cannot stop thinking if I deserve it. I spend just as much time convincing myself to quit worrying as I do guilt tripping myself. I need this, I tell myself as I am looking in my cupboards for something breakfasty, finding nothing but an almost empty bag of brown rice and some kasha. I deserve this. I’ve volunteered at a shelter, at a food bank, at a warehouse for foster kids, among other places in addition to spending all day every day building relationships and growing plants with street youth. I pay it forward, and I would do the same thing for another stranger if they asked. I would be the kind of person who answers the craigslist ad I posted. My mind races through these facts over and over again, turning them over, looking at them every which way, because maybe if I look hard enough I can unearth some speck of some forgotten detail, some statistic or truth that makes what I’m doing 100% completely acceptable and good. I’ll let you know when that happens and/or when I develop my first ulcer.
I am thinking about all of this when I arrive at Rom Mai Thai and I can navel gaze some more because I am early, as usual. This time I am early because I overestimated the amount of time it would take to walk to the very north end of Broadway. I overestimate the time it takes to walk anywhere in Seattle. It’s not that big at all. However, DOM has done the same thing, and we are both there almost fifteen minutes ahead of time. There’s no point in waiting for it to be 6pm outside with her, so we go in.
All of my dates to this point have looked a lot alike; this one isn’t any different. Granted, I have a sample size of four, so there’s not a lot of statistical power to any of these words, but the resemblance is striking. I don’t think it means anything important so I won’t post photos or ruminate at length about their appearances here, but to anyone who has asked me what these women look like: no, they do not in any way resemble angelina jolie or shane from the L word. I am, regretfully, not interested in going out on romantic dates with this lady.
DOM is sassier than the other women I’ve gone out with, which I notice immediately. Whenever I meet someone who is as stereotypically east coast as I am, I exploit their sarcasm for all its worth and wrap myself in it like a blanket. I love it, and I miss it a lot. I inquire about this, and my hunch is correct: DOM lived in Boston for six years. There’s a reason why people invented the phrase ‘Massholes’ and it has a lot to do with Boston.
She gets right down to it too, firing questions at me about service work before our menus arrive and she doesn’t let up until almost the very end of the evening, which, thankfully, is not that long. After an hour of eagerly talking about myself I usually realize what an asshole I am and I become horribly self-conscious and I self destruct into a little, sticky puddle of goo. Like Alex Mack, only with more shame.
I order the yellow curry again because I’m boring and my life needs more repetition and structure, and the last time I ordered something that wasn’t yellow curry at a thai restaurant I regretted it for two weeks afterwards (this is what happens when I buy myself food in a restaurant, which is why I make strangers do it for me now). DOM tells me she picked this restaurant because this is the best thai food for this price she’s ever had in Seattle. I’m skeptical; most thai food is alright to pretty good and there are eight billion thai restaurants in Seattle and half of them are the best one someone’s ever eaten at. I’ve never had awful thai food, but I’ve also never had thai food that left me shaking with pleasure and unable to remember my own name. People who feel fanatic about certain thai places also usually happen to really enjoy spicy food; their word for this is “flavorful”. As I am Mrs. Cracker McWhiteypants from upstate New York, I hate spicy food and I enjoy extremely boring, bland flavors like potato or, well, potato.
The service at Rom Mai is incredible, and it is so friendly and attentive that I am frightened and I think I am in the beginning scenes of an episode of the Twilight Zone. This is typical Seattle here; every time I take more than one sip of water from my cup, a smiling waiter comes and refills it. When we get halfway through the rice, someone takes it away and brings more fresh, steamy jasmine rice. No fewer than four people try to take our order before we’re ready (I can’t converse and read at the same time, so I always ignore one in the name of the other), and once the food comes they stand less than ten feet from our table, smiling blandly in our direction, waiting for any indication that we have a need that is not being met. I love Rom Mai Thai.
My curry is very good, probably the best curry I’ve had in Seattle, but not by much. If we’re talking statistics, there is not a significant difference between this curry and most of the other curries I’ve had. The tofu is fresh and flavorful and there is a lot of it, and it is just spicy enough for it to not be boring or too impossible for me to eat, and the rice flows like wine coolers in a sorority house. DOM orders something she think I will like, and she orders it with tofu, and she orders a level of spice mild enough for me to eat; she tells me the leftovers are for me. If someone I went on a real date with did this for me, I would probably agree to sleep with them right then. Like on the floor, under the table, under my two sets of leftovers. I have just discovered the quickest way to my own heart.
sigh.
The conversation we have at dinner is a conversation I’ve had many times in Seattle, nothing special. People are really curious about service work, mostly because they cannot imagine trying to subsist on that kind of a budget, but also because they perceive this work to be exceptionally emotionally draining and they would need oodles of money to offset the emotional toll. Also, I come from the land of suburbanites, none of whom have ever even seen a farm, much less thought about having a garden or becoming a farmer. This perplexes everyone, not least of all my family members. I tell DOM I didn’t take this job because I wanted to do service work– I wanted this job, and it happened to be through a service program, so I signed up. We talked about being qualified to do everything and nothing. I waxed poetic about working with youth (so challenging! so engaging! so rewarding! blech.) and attempted to speak thoughtfully about the concept of national service (I think it would be cool if everyone did it, but I also think there are aspects to this program that are wholly fucked up). This wasn’t anything I hadn’t said before, and I left thinking about why DOM needed to justify to me why she’ll buy me dinner.
How come we couldn’t just make plans, go out, and have a good time? Why does she need to have any excuse at all? Why do I need to have multiple layers of excuses to ask for help in the first place? Why does this program not pay me a living wage? How do I expect to survive in the ghetto that is the non-profit world? What is the alternative? There are so many things that are fucked up about this situation. I spend so much time swimming in these issues that are not going to go away when my foodstamps roll over tomorrow. It’s a relief when they next day in the office I can take a half hour break and ignore the need to qualify my life to myself over DOM’s leftovers. It is pumpkin curry with tofu, something I never, ever would have ordered, and it is amazing and it is without a doubt the best thai food I have ever eaten.
I want to swim in a bowl of noodles
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I do not love bagels. You wouldn’t know it because I spend most of my time here in Seattle complaining about how you can’t get a good bagel, but at home in upstate New York I usually feel relatively neutral about bagels. I would rather have eggs. I got off bagels when I got braces at twelve and they became verboten item #2 (after chewing gum) and I couldn’t eat bagels for three years; I never really went back in the same way. Most mornings I have yogurt. Sometimes I put fruit or granola in the yogurt.
However, if you happen to be one of the new friends or acquaintances or, really, anyone I’ve ever spoken to for more than ten minutes on this coast, you might think my undergraduate major had been “kvetching about bagels”. I find myself talking about the awful state of Seattle bagels ALL THE TIME. Seattle bagels are terrible. They are so, so , so very awful. God does not smile upon them. Sometimes I think it would be better if people in Seattle had never heard about the invention of the bagel so they would never have felt tempted to recreate its bagelly holiness here.
But there are only fake bagel imposters here, just like there is no cheap diner food, no decent italian or mexican food, and no pizza worth shaking a stick at (such a weird turn of phrase, but so useful). There is only Vietnamese. Or Thai. Or Indian. or Teriyaki. This is why, even though I don’t like noodles at all, I am walking in the direction of In The Bowl on a Tuesday night.
I’d walked by the Olive and Denny intersection a handful of times before noticing In The Bowl, and I only saw it because I was walking with a friend who mumbled something about “good noodles”. Noodles are the only really affordable food here, which I don’t understand, because you think people would want more cheap options that don’t closely resemble Top Ramen. I had never heard of pho or bun before I came out here, but it didn’t take me very long to figure out that these two options made up the bulk of restaurant menu items I could afford. People in Seattle were shocked when they found out pho isn’t widely available in my hometown, so I present for you folks that have no idea what I’m talking about, a description of what these two dishes are by an unnamed born-and-bred seattlite:
pho: “pho is rice noodles and broth and i think cilantro and sometimes chicken and yeah, i mean, mostly it’s huge, and that’s kind of the point, and some people put bean sprouts and lime on top, and there’s always plum sauce, and that’s usually when i find out people can’t use chopsticks”.
bun: “bun is like pho because its rice noodley but there’s lettuce and different kinds of meat and, um, i think it has carrot shavings and it’s sort of the color, i don’t know, it’s sweet and soury and i have no idea what it is but you mix it up and it becomes this big bowl of stuff and it’s very delicious”.
I am going to In The Bowl because the woman who is buying me dinner does not appear to have money coming out the wazoo. This is the first date that I’m slightly anxious about. I felt great about the first two dates (see: history of shamelessness) but I got stood up the night before sort of accidentally (one of us went to Kaosamai Thai, the other to Kwanjai Thai) and now I cannot stop thinking about all of the things that could go wrong in this situation. She might not show up tonight. She might show up and make me pay or leave before the check comes. She might be a massmurdering fuckhead. “She” might be a group of teenagers who will steal my empty wallet and run away. She might hold me hostage until all the kitties in the world are free. This could be ugly. I hadn’t thought about that. Fuck.
The woman who is taking me out is also an intimidating. She described herself in her e-mail as “43, a social worker, out for 24 years”. She originally offered to take me to the Ballet restaurant. She sent me a photo that almost made me cancel the date outright. In my original craigslist ad, I had been adamant about my being willing to go out with anyone. I am definitely desperate enough. I am clearly being tested.
I am there barely five minutes before our date begins and I can see her inside, sitting down at a table. I cannot believe I am doing this. I shake her hand, and we are immediately handed menus and talking to this stranger is going to have to wait until I decide between the yellow curry and swimming rama. Not coincidentally, neither of these dishes involves noodles. Yellow Curry. Fresh tofu, not fried. White rice. Just Water. Thanks.
The best part of the evening is that we are sitting less than an arm’s length from two old dykes on a date and they overhear every word of our conversation and they are making yucky faces at me and the intimidating woman to indicate their disgust and horror because they assume we are on a first date. The intimidating woman doesn’t notice or doesn’t let on, and like most things that are terrible, I think this is hilarious, and I begin to ask questions like I’m actually on a date that isn’t about my freeloading on strangers.
“So what are your greatest passions?” I ask her, sipping my ice water. I don’t order drinks with these women. Something about that seems unfair. I need nutrition, yes, but I don’t need a thai iced tea, and we both know that.
She responds: “birding”. Not long ago someone told me they asked all of their dates and acquaintances this question instead of “what do you do?” because this question makes people squirm, and this is a fun thing to watch. The intimidating woman embarks on a long narrative about heron migrations and going to see birds with her estranged brother who has cancer and her aging mother and I can’t stop thinking about the fact that her greatest passion is birding, much less process any of the words that are currently spilling out of her mouth at frightening speed. I become acutely aware of the fact that I don’t know anyone who loves birding and I don’t know anything about birds except for what Tom Robbins had to say about whooping cranes in ‘Even Cowgirls Get the Blues’ and this fact occurs to me while she is talking and I feel ashamed for thinking about Tom Robbins. For someone who writes e-mails professing her interest in other people, this woman is sure talking a lot. I am here to listen, I remind myself. Listen to this woman. Nod your head. Smile. Nod again.
The food arrives and we fall silent, shoveling food into our mouths. I love how in this country we cease all conversation upon the arrival of the food. We’re not here for each other, for the ambiance, for the quiet time being spent on starting to know another individual and feel a little less alone in the world. We’re here to stuff our faces as quickly as possible and complain about the food or service if necessary. My sister went to college in Montreal and the only thing I remember from the meals I ate there was the intentional slowness of the service. Dining out felt entirely different, like an event or an experience, not an appetizer for a movie or awkward, drunken, regrettable sex.
I am making an effort to eat slowly, to show that I am making an effort to be interested in this woman’s life story, but fuck, this curry is good. Yellow curry is pretty good everywhere which is why I order it. It is plain, boring, and full of saturated fat. It is on the menu at almost any Asian-cuisine restaurant and it is generally always the same. I discovered yellow curry in college at about the same time I stopped having any real faith in Judaism. Yellow curry is my rock now.
The curry, dependable as ever, comes with something that looks like chips of crispy fried naan and a sweet sauce with little bits of cucumber and shaved carrot in it. I have no idea what these things are and I didn’t ask if they had names, but they weren’t on the menu as things that came with my meal and I am, by extension, delighted. I love crispy friend things. I would probably eat fried crickets or fried tongue or fried dirt if it were offered. I like to think I have a spirit of adventure.
This woman seems lonely. It seems like she doesn’t get to talk to a whole lot of people. Why would anyone buy me dinner, people ask me if I tell them about this whole operation. Why would anyone buy a stranger a meal and not ask for anything in return? Like the other two women so far, this woman is the corporeality of niceness. She seems adventurous, which is the nice way of saying she seems a little crazy and a little spontaneous. And I think she is lonely. I wonder if she has a lot of days where all she says is ‘thank you’ to the cashier at the grocery store. I have days like that, I want to tell her. She works in social services. I want to tell her that I know what it’s like to spend all day building relationships with people who are struggling, developing allyships and listening and helping and then go home alone and stand quietly over the stove and watch the water boil for your macaroni and cheese and have no one to talk to about your day. I know what this is like too. I know what it feels like to talk and talk and talk at the first person who seems vaguely interested in your day, which is what it feels like this woman is doing right now.
Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe this woman’s life is filled with people who care about her and want to hear about her passions and her deadbeat stepfather. I have no idea. I might, though, because this woman wants to buy me more dinners. She says she will buy me breakfasts because I told her that breakfast is my favorite meal of the day. I’m probably not wrong about her being lonely.
Dessert is black sticky rice pudding with coconut milk; it comes with the meal. If it hadn’t come with the meal, I wouldn’t have ordered it. This pudding is everything that is bad about sticky rice, caviar, jello, and fish eyes rolled into one. I take two bites; the texture makes me want to throw up all of the curry that I have so happily just polished off. I feel bad about not finishing it.
After my brief encounter with the pudding, I am back to navel gazing about this woman. Part of me feels like I’m trying to determine who has the upper hand in this situation; who is more pathetic? The woman with no money and no food, or the woman with no one to talk to? It’s only recently that I’ve acquired housemates who occasionally ask me about my day and a smattering of friends who might pick me up in the middle of the night if I called them. She probably has enough money to not every worry again about these noodles. We’re both pathetic, which means that for once I can stop feeling pathetic. It’s like coming home to a gay bar or a room full of people your own race or weight or whatever. I can stop thinking about being broke and revel in me at the same time. This is good.
This woman offers to buy me more meals, possibly set up a longer term arrangement. Dinner or weekend breakfasts (I told her that breakfast is my favorite meal of the day) in exchange for my company. I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again or if we’ll ever set up this arrangement, but as I walk home in the dark, full of curry and someone else’s stories, I enjoy the sensation of feeling poor and very not poor at the same time.
