My burrito was cold, but I no longer felt hungry. I no longer felt like eating. I looked up at the TV. A reporter was describing a mass killing in Milwaukee.
Most people were probably watching the news right now.
The average American was watching news with his dinner.
I got up, switched the channel to
I brought the beer back with me into the living room and sat there watching TV, trying to concentrate on the
I realized that the lines punctuated by the laugh track were the ones I found funniest.
I switched off the TV.
Jane came home around nine. I’d already downed a six-pack and was feeling, if not better, at least far enough out of it that I no longer cared about my problems. She looked at me, frowned, then walked past me and put her notebooks down on the kitchen table. She picked up the certificate from where I’d left it. “What’s this?” she asked.
I’d forgotten about winning the dinner. I looked at her, hoisted my current beer. “Congratulate me,” I said. “I won a drawing at work.”
She read the name on the certificate. “Elise?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“This is great!”
“Yeah. Great.”
She frowned at me again. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.” I finished my beer, put it next to its empty brothers on the table, and headed to the bathroom where I promptly threw up.
We went to dinner at Elise three weeks later.
A child of the suburbs, I could not remember ever eating at a restaurant that was not part of a chain. From McDonald’s to Love’s to The Black Angus to Don Jose’s, the restaurants I patronized were not unique, individually owned businesses but corporate cookie-cutter eateries, comfortable in the reliability of their conformity. As we walked into the entryway and I saw the elegant decor, the classy clientele, I realized that I did not know how to act here, did not know what to do. Despite the fact that both Jane and I had dressed up — she in her prom gown, me in my interview suit — and outwardly fit in with the restaurant’s patrons, I felt jarringly out of place among the other diners. We seemed to be decades younger than everyone else. And instead of actually paying for our meal, we’d be using that stupid gift certificate. I put my hand in my pocket, felt the ruffled edge of the certificate, and I wondered if I’d brought enough money for a tip. I suddenly wished we hadn’t come.
We’d made reservations ahead of time, two weeks ahead of time, and we were promptly seated and provided with a calligraphically hand-printed description of the day’s dishes. From what I could tell, we had no choice to make; there was only one meal available, a multi-course dinner de jour, and I nodded my approval to the waiter, handing back the description. Jane did the same.
“What would you care to drink, sir?” the waiter asked me.
For the first time, I saw a wine list on the table in front of me, and not wanting to appear as ignorant as I was, I studied the list for a moment. I looked to Jane for help, but she only shrugged, looking away, and I pointed to one of the wines in the middle of the list.
“Very good, sir.”
The wine and our first course, some sort of smoked salmon appetizer, arrived minutes later. A dash of wine was poured into my glass, and I sipped it, the way I’d seen it done in movies, then nodded to the waiter. The wine was poured into our glasses. Then we were left alone.
I glanced across the table at Jane. This was the first time we’d had a meal together in over a week. There were legitimate reasons — she’d had to see her mother; I’d had to take the car into Sears to have the brakes checked; she’d had to study at the library — but the real truth was that we’d been avoiding each other. Looking at her now, I realized I didn’t know what to say to her. Any conversation starter would be just that, a forced and awkward effort to initiate talk. Whatever rapport we had once had, whatever naturalness had previously existed in our relationship, seemed to have fled. What would have once come easily was now stiffly self-conscious. I realized that I was becoming as estranged from her as I was from everyone else.
Jane looked around the dining room. “This is really a nice place,” she said.
“Yes, it is,” I agreed. “It really is.” I had nothing to follow this with, nothing more to say, so I repeated it again. “It really is.”
The service was amazing. There was a virtual platoon of waiters assigned to our table, but they did not hover, did not make us feel uncomfortable. When one dish was done, a waiter silently and efficiently took it away, replacing it with the next course.
Jane finished her wine soon after the salad. I poured her another glass. “Did I tell you about Bobby Tetherton’s mom?” she said. I shook my head and she started describing a run-in with an overprotective parent she’d had at the day care center that afternoon.
I listened to her. Maybe nothing was wrong, I thought. Maybe it was all in my head. Jane was acting as though everything was normal, everything was okay. Maybe I’d imagined the rift between us.
No.
Something had happened. Something had come between us. We had always shared our problems, had always discussed with each other our difficulties at school or work. I had never met her coworkers at the day care center, but she’d brought them alive for me, I knew their names, and I cared about their office politics.
But now I found my mind wandering while she recited the litany of today’s injustices.
I didn’t care about her day.
I tuned her out, not listening to her. We had always had a balanced relationship, a modern relationship, and I’d always considered her work, her career, her activities, as important as my own. It was not rhetoric, not something I forced myself to do out of obligation, but something I truly felt. Her life was as important as mine. We were equals.
But I didn’t feel that way anymore.
Her problems seemed so fucking petty compared to my own.
She chattered on about kids I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. I was annoyed with her and my annoyance soon graduated to anger. I had not told her about being ignored, about discovering I was some sort of quintessentially average… freak, but, damn it, she should have noticed something was wrong and she should have asked me about it. She should have tried to talk to me, to find out what was bothering me and cheer me up. She shouldn’t have just pretended that everything was okay.
“…these parents entrust their children to our center,” she was saying, “then they try to tell us how to — ”
“I don’t care,” I said.
She blinked. “What?”
“I don’t care about your damn day care center.”
Her mouth closed, flattened into a grim line. She nodded, as if this was something she’d been expecting. “Now it comes out,” she said. “Now the truth finally comes out.”
“Come on, let’s just enjoy our meal.”
“After that?”
“After what? Can’t we just try to have a nice meal together and enjoy our evening?”
“Enjoy it in silence? Is that what you mean?”
“Look — ”
“No, you look. I don’t know what’s wrong with you. I don’t know what’s been bothering you lately — ”
“Why don’t you try asking?”
“I would if I thought it would do any good. But you’ve been living in your own world the past month or so. You just sit there brooding all the time, not talking, not doing anything, shutting me out — ”
“Shutting
