It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [59]
I was frozen; I didn’t know what to do.
“Get the hell out of here!” the man yelled in return. “I’m calling the cops now!”
“Go back to Mexico, asshole,” one of the other guys added, and then, cued by the tallest one, they all turned and walked back out of the diner.
“I’m not done with you!” the tallest one called over his shoulder as the bells chimed again.
It was silent for a while in the restaurant. The four of us stood there; no one moved. Then the man reached for the credit card my husband had put on the counter when we walked up. He slid it across the Formica and swiped it through the terminal.
“I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head but not looking at us. “I’m sorry that happened.”
In moments like this in the movies, writers have had time to figure out what the right thing to say is, what the best way to handle it would be, how to offer some clarity to the situation or even a nugget of wisdom to wrap it all up.
But the truth is that in real time none of that happened. I didn’t know what to say. Nothing came out of my mouth. I couldn’t think; all I knew was that I had Nicholas with me and what had happened could have ended pretty badly. I was frightened. I was just glad the thugs were gone, and I was shaking, even though the incident didn’t take more than a minute or two. I didn’t know this town, I didn’t know these people, but I was terrified of them, and I’d never wanted to leave someplace so badly.
“That was terrible,” my husband said to the man. “You should call the police.”
He nodded, and we left the restaurant and headed directly across the street. I walked quickly, herding Nick in front of me to hurry up and get to the safety of the car. I couldn’t believe that those assholes put that in front of my nephew, just a little kid. Put that there and let him see that, let him hear it, a kid who, up until three minutes ago, thought tiny spiders on the ceiling were the biggest things to be afraid of. For what seemed like a very long time in that diner, I had the feeling that we might well end up as Flannery O’Connor characters on vacation. I didn’t know what these guys were capable of or if they had anything tucked into their waistbands or not. I had no idea how far their anger would take them. All I knew was if you could bust into a restaurant and start shouting blatant threats and racial epithets—not to mention doing it in front of a child—your range probably knew very little bounds and nothing was off the map.
“You okay, Nick?” I asked.
He looked at me, took a deep breath, and nodded.
“I thought I was going to poop my pants,” he said as he reached for the car’s rear door, and the honesty of my eleven-year-old nephew allowed the three of us to burst into nervous laughter as we got into the car.
––
My sister, her husband, and my younger nephew, David, flew into town a day after we returned home. I knew that Nick couldn’t wait for them to come, and I couldn’t blame him. I mean, here we had promised him this awesome vacation, and, instead, in the last three days I antagonized him into touching fake scrotum, he stood up to a huge wave because he believed he was already a dead man and the sea might as well take him, we ruined his shoes, made him go to the bowels of the Earth to see a giant sea lion hurl, and gave him a front-row seat to his first hate crime. Great vacation.
The first thing I said to my sister when she got off the plane was, “Nick started a tab,” and when I explained to her that she neglected to pack him more clothing than was required for a day, she looked at me like I was insane.
“Look,” I said, as I pointed to Nick in his Bigfoot shirt and new shoes. “Recognize any of that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “He had so many clothes in that bag I almost couldn’t get it closed. Most of his clothes were in the big pocket. Didn’t you check?”
And, as it turned out, that was true. There were shirts, pajamas, and pants underneath several pairs of socks and underwear, which, alarmingly, he never used enough of to see what was underneath.