Tuesday, May 13, 2008
An excerpt from Anne Lamott's recently re-released novel about a rundown riverfront cafe and the funny, broken people who congregate there.
Sep 12, 2003 | The winter rains are over. In new green meadows orange poppies bloom. Purple and white lupine grows everywhere. Sails filling with sea breeze, boats slice through the bay. An egret leaps off a lonely black piling. Sea lions bark, gulls cry, the herring are back. Mud hens and mallards paddle around, and old Japanese people fish from the shore with ice chests beside them on the sand.
A woman sings softly as she walks along the water, chanteys and old cowboy songs. She is wearing a necklace whose gold letters spell APRIL, although that is not her name, and is dressed in what she will tell her customers is a tribute to spring: green culottes, blue T-shirt, pink sneakers, white socks.
She ambles along, sexy and sweet, near forty, somewhere on the cusp between curvaceous and fat. Her lips are full and thin out into dimples. Her skin is finely crinkled around peaceful brown eyes. She bleaches her short hair pale blonde, but other than this she resembles the torch singer Helen Morgan. A wreath of plastic grapes would not look out of place on her head.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Jessie's Cafe is a restaurant from another era, the sort of broken-down waterfront dive one might expect to find in Steinbeck or Saroyan. The main room is empty when Louise steps inside, but she hears water running and the clatter of dishes coming from the back room.
"Willie?"
She walks to the back room, where a fair, slight man in his early twenties stands over an aluminum sink full of soapsuds and dishes.
"Hey, Lou."
"Kisses?" She closes her eyes and puckers up. He kisses her. She opens her eyes and surveys the mess. Dishes are stacked on every available surface, and both garbage cans are full. She exhales noisily. "Looks like Pompeii after the big event."
"Coffee's made."
"Good."
"Grill's on."
"Great."
She leans in the doorway, watching him work. He scowls.
"Don't stare at me."
"Cut your hair again, didn't you." It is not a question.
He shrugs. "Maybe."
"Maybe? You're starting to look like a molting deer."
He turns and gives her the finger.
"No kidding, ducks."
He whisks a dirty potato masher through the soapsuds, pretending to ignore her.
"Willie, no lie -- you look like some old deer that the others in the herd are trying to nudge gently out towards the highway."
"Oh, go away."
"You burnt, baby, huh?"
"Get out of here."
"Up all night?"
"No."
"Willie, my love, you'd lie if the truth would work."
"Lou?" plaintively.
"Willie?" she whines. "Why do you do that shit?"
"What shit?"
"Dexedrine. Hearts."
"It's none of your business what I do after work."
"Yes, it is. I'm your best friend."
"So why don't you get off my case."
"Because my love for you is not blind and sloppy. It is harsh, and strong."
He rolls his eyes. He has heard this line so many times before. It was from one of Virginia Woolf's journals.
"Let me get my work done."
She laughs at him. "It's not like you're doing brain surgery."
He smiles through a scowl.
"I'm not saying it's my business that you hang out with a bunch of possibly AIDS-riddled screaming nellie faggots."
"You're homophobic."
"No, I am not homophobic. Maybe I have certain aesthetic problems with the, how you say, graphics of what you guys do."
"Why don't you just try not to think about it."
A Handi Wipe falls from the shelf above the sink, off to his left, and he startles, as if a guillotine blade has just dropped. "See?"
"Well, don't be a hypocrite, man. You used to do it."
"I used to do a lot of shit I don't do anymore."
"So ..."
"I used to cry when different foods on my plate touched each other. But I don't anymore. It's kid's stuff, man."
"What."
"Speed."
"Well, it's cheaper than coke."
"Yeah, so's Drano."
"Lou--"
"Willie? Read my lips. In about two hours, you're gonna hit the wall. Won't be nothin' left of you but buttons and hair. Who's gonna serve the food I cook? Who's going to help me clean up?"
"I, I--"
"You're gonna woofle around all day, mewling and puking. And then you're going to go into your algae browser mode."
"Lou--"
"I want you to straighten up and fly right."
"Get out of here."
"I couldn't take it if something happened to you."
"Luuuuuu ... Get out of here."
"You drive me out of my mind, Louise."
"Kisses."
He laughs at her quietly, bends forward to kiss her.
"Thank you. How we doing on mayo?"
"Check it out, man."
She walks behind him to the far end of the narrow room, to the burlap bags of potatoes and onions, the bins of beans and flour and sugar, the plastic gallon containers of mayonnaise and mustard and relish. There is plenty of everything.
The main room is in reasonably good shape. Louise wipes down the bar, arranges place settings at the counter and tables, pushes in chairs, grooms the vases of blue daisies. She goes behind the bar to put on Willie's favorite tape, Frank Sinatra's Greatest Hits, and turns the volume on loud. She can almost smell Willie smiling in the back room. She salts the grill behind the counter, checks the stove's oil well, studies the two packed refrigerators as if looking for something to wear, reaches for parsley, scallions, and celery. She takes them to the cutting board, where she begins mincing, threshing, dicing. She puts the heat on under pots of beans and soup on the burners, and turns the grill up a tad. She stirs leftover hotcake batter, adjusts the temperature of the deep-fat fryer, and is doing this all at once, like lateral juggling.
Cutting, stirring, tasting soups, tamale pie from yesterday, through it all she's chanting silently, over and under Sinatra, the power of God is in me, the grace of God surrounds me, the power of God is in me. She can wrap herself in this protection the way a parrot fish spins a transparent sleeping bag around itself at night on the ocean's cold floor. Chanting quiets her crazy mind, and now, shelling peas, she does it to keep from hag-riding her breakup with Joe, three months before.
Left to its own devices, her mind is a fat hummingbird flitting through leafy trees of anxiety, apology, sorrow, excuses, and dreams of grandeur, dreams of humiliation. Sometimes she watches it run off, and it makes her laugh and shake her head. It's like a video game. Bright fast blips of worry and anger come at her, and, after fending them off, she's attacked by the huge lumbering Czechoslovakian blobs of tiredness and broken-spiritedness which break into small, faster missiles of regret when she fires at them. What a half-baked species we are, she thinks, and does what she can to make her insides more habitable.
"Willie?" she calls.
"Yeah?"
"Come here."
"No, I'm busy. I'll be there in a minute."
"Now, right now, right this second. Immédiatement. Ee-mmmeee-ja-mah."
"Lou," he whines from the back room, "I'm going to come out there, and you're just gonna make me give you kisses...."
She continues the lateral juggling. Willie shuffles in.
"I'm not givin' you kisses."
"Come here!"
He walks over to her at the grill.
"Dolly, will you see if there's an opened can of tomato paste in the fridge? I've got my hands full."
"Just open a new one, Lou."
"Come on."
"No, Lou, what if it's been there a coupla days? It's gonna look like something cultured in a petri dish."
"Please, darling?" Willie walks wistfully to one of the refrigerators, opens it, looks inside, shakes his head. "Algae browser," he says, abstractedly. "What a lovely, soupy existence."
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