The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [48]
Early afternoon and she saw no one out in the white-hot sun. The men were at work on road crews or at the canneries. The women, she figured, were cleaning house or cooking or tending to the children. She was starving. She’d borrowed a few dollars—well, ten—from the jar where Whaley kept the cash she saved. On a corner stood a grill, filling the neighborhood with the smoke of fried meat.
Inside a line of men sat at the counter drinking sweaty cans of beer, not their first, judging from slump of the shoulders. Most of them swiveled slightly on their creaky stools as if they needed to feel the sway of water beneath them even on land. She hesitated in the doorway, her arm about out of her shoulder socket from lugging her suitcase through the streets, the huge floor fan pushing her hair, dress, smell of sweat and salt right back outside.
The men studied her with hard red faces until, because she failed to blink, they turned away. Maggie wasn’t used to not knowing soul one. She remembered the last time she’d been off island for any significant length of time—years ago, she was in her late twenties, already ancient to be unmarried, a spinster. She’d traveled with a girl she’d grown up with, Cleo Austin, to Elizabeth City to visit Cleo’s cousins, who lived in a three-storied seemed like to Maggie mansion overlooking an arm of the Pasquotank River. They stayed a week. Days they’d wander in and out of the stores, looking at dresses and toys and cookware and even farm implements and tools in the mercantile and feed stores, and every night they attended dances in a bandstand by the river or went to church or strolled up and down the esplanade. She’d met a boy who wanted to marry her—he’d claimed so the third time she’d danced with him—but he was red-haired and scrawny and his last name was Sheep and his first name was Myron and he was her age and lived right on with his mama and unmarried sister and even though she could not claim any more independence, she knew from looking at the way he hitched his pants well up over his hips and the fat tortured knot of his tie that she’d be marrying his mother and sister and that they would find her (and she them) intolerably lazy and dull.
A buck-toothed boy wearing a dirty apron and a pencil stub behind his big ear was in front of her with his little pad. It had been years since she’d been in a restaurant. She had nearly forgotten how it worked.
She nodded at the man on the stool next to her.
“What he’s having, I guess,” she said.
The boy blinked and slid his nervous eyes to her neighbor’s plate, then looked at her with his open, pimply face.
“Looks good enough to eat,” she added.
“Cheeseburger steak,” he nearly yelled, printing it out slowly in big blocks across his pad. He was gone, the swinging kitchen doors batting up a breeze as she forgot to tell him, Bring me some sweet tea.
Five minutes later a replica of the plate next door arrived in the boy’s shaky hands. She made him nervous, plainly. He’d gone away and bent down beneath the counter but was back with a sweat-beading bottle of beer.
“I didn’t order that,” she said.
The boy shrugged a bony shoulder at the man next to her.
“What he’s having. That’s what you said.”
“I meant food.”
He stared, dejected, at the beer. “But it’s done been opened.”
Maggie sighed. “I reckon between the two of us we can find someone to drink it.”
“Yeah, but he’ll make me pay for it out of my wages and—”
“I’ll pay for it, shug. Bring me some sweet tea.”
He shot off without a word. The steak was so tough and tasteless she smothered her plate in ketchup. Chewing, Maggie felt her eyes watering, her throat closing. What in the world was she doing across over here, eating a hamburger steak like she had a clue? The horror she felt then was crippling, a seizing so much worse than nausea or backache, for such things passed but this futility stretched itself thinly out across time continuous, it remained in her blood like something handed her by God, a part