“Is it always like this?” Sigrid asks Irv, flicking through the options.
“Choice is freedom,” says Irv, putting on his reading glasses and peering down at a sea of plenty.
“From what?”
“Huh?” he grunts.
“Freedom from what?”
“I don’t understand,” he says, glancing up from the menu.
“You can be free from something, or free of something. You can’t just be free. It’s a relational concept. So . . . choosing between the salad and the baby back ribs makes you free . . . from what?”
“Tyranny?” he tries.
“This isn’t a quiz,” Sigrid says. “I sincerely want to know the answer. It seems to have something to do with everything going on over here.”
The restaurant has a split-level floor plan with two steps leading up to a sitting area with a bar. Down below there are more than thirty tables. A quarter of them are filled with families. Children are absorbed in coloring, eating, using iPhones, and spilling things. The adults are either speaking to each other, focusing on the children, or staring—defeated—toward some imagined horizon, hoping that either a new lover or else death itself will come to take them away from this shiny place.
In this sense it is exactly like Norway.
“You should probably choose what to eat before the waiter comes,” Irv says. “Service is great in America.”
“No. Service has been trained to artificially increase table turnover rates to generate corporate revenue. You’ve been trained like dogs to think it’s good service, whereas it’s actually incredibly rude. I’m handed the bill while I’m still chewing.”
“You’re one of those low-blood-sugar women. I can tell. You’re not my first date.”
“Irv,” says Sigrid, leaning forward to keep her voice down. “Maybe you can’t see it because you’re inside it, but to the rest of us, America is weird. You have these immediate, ready-made answers to everything and most of them are meaningless and the others were designed by PR firms. Choice is not freedom. Sure, you can choose among what’s available, but what’s available was decided already by someone or something else. There are no hookers and cocaine on the menu, for example. You can’t choose those.”
“Not here,” he concedes.
“Really. What is this freedom thing that seems to end all conversations with you people? I’m watching the elections on TV and the Republicans are saying they want to give America freedom. Cut taxes for freedom. Abolish government for freedom. Defeat Obama for freedom. I sincerely don’t understand. Explain this to me.”
“OK,” says Irv, rising to the challenge. “I’m going to stick with the tyranny answer. We don’t want anything imposed on us. Don’t Tread on Me and all that. Being able to choose is proof that we aren’t living under tyranny. Choice may not be freedom itself, fine, but choice is proof of freedom because it proves there’s no tyrannical imposition. The more choice, the less tyranny.”
“But it’s an illusion, Irv. The way the goldfish is free to move to the right or the left. The fact is, he’s still stuck in a bowl. Laws and policies and doctrine and procedure, and the powerful strings of interests and money and greed—these are what put things on the table or take them off. We live in a world shaped by things above our heads. The freedom you fought for—that we all fought for, by the way—is the freedom to shape those big things together, not to be free from them. We didn’t fight to be free of community; we fought to have one. But you Americans chose between the . . .”—she glances at the menu—“Louisiana Chicken Pasta and a Glamburger and you think you’re a bunch of cowboys.”
Irv shakes his head. “That’s not a choice. The Glamburger, all the way.”
Melinda nods.
Sigrid ignores them both. “Americans have longer life spans and a lower infant mortality rate than they used to because of the directed hard work of invisible people who built complex systems that resulted in your better lives. It’s not because someone cut your taxes.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re a commie,” Irv says, putting on his red reading glasses again. “And you’re hungry. Girls are always like this when they’re hungry. You may think that’s sexist, but it’s a battle-hardened fact and I stand by it. You should get the burger. Angus beef,” he adds, glancing back down.
“I’m not sure if American culture is frighteningly simple,” she answers, “or overwhelmingly complex.”
Sigrid has nothing left to add. America is not making more sense to her, but its internal contradictions are coming into finer focus. Overwhelmed by the menu, she fixes her eyes on the television screen mounted above the most well-stocked bar she has ever seen in her life. There has to be fifty thousand dollars’ worth of booze back there. The massive LG TV is tuned to sports.
Two teams are playing baseball. She doesn’t know the uniforms and from this distance the labels are too small to read. She likes baseball to the extent she understands it. It seems a patient game that is skilled and inspired by an agricultural past. She also rented Field of Dreams a thousand years ago and liked it: Kevin Costner surrounded by corn. It was comforting for some reason. She wonders whether Marcus has become a fan of the game over the years. It isn’t played much in Norway.
“Come on. What are you having?” Irv asks, closing the menu.
“What’s chipotle?” she asks.
“No one knows,” he answers.
“I think I’ll have the fried calamari for an appetizer and then a burger.”
Melinda laughs. “That’s too much.”
“Let her,” Irv says. “It’s her colon.”
They order from a man who does not blink. His job complete, he is sucked back to the kitchen as if by a pneumatic tube.
Adjusting her eyes to the distance, Sigrid can better see the emblem on the baseball uniforms. It is the Cardinals against . . . someone else. She has seen
