1 – Appetizers and Drinks

“I would like it if you let go of the table, please.”

Do you know that feeling when you can sense that the entire restaurant has it eyes on you? Like, even though there’s still a lull buzz of conversation throughout the room, you can tell that in between bites of steak and cutlery scraping the plate, eyes flick up to you. Perhaps the conversation a table away has even shifted to be about you, as the group seated sneaks snippets of whatever train wreck is going down at your table, and giggles their judgement over dinner and a show. 

My mom is now gripping my forearm with one hand, her glass of wine still firmly secured in the other.

I have known this feeling my entire life.

“You don’t need to touch me,” I say, sitting back down and loosening my grip on the table’s edge. “You don’t have to make a scene.”

“Oh, yes, I’m the one making a scene,” she clucks into her wine glass. It is an aside for no one, though. It is not for me, nor for my aunt, seated at her right, who is struggling to cut apart her burrata appetizer in a neat manner. It is not for my sister, who is already drunk. And I mean, actually drunk, not angry-mom-drunk. She has her elbows on the table and her hands on her cheeks, trying to force her eyes open, so as to not pass out before the main course. My father went to the bathroom twenty minutes ago. 

I think about taking another piece of bread, but I already had two. I try to calculate how many calories that could possibly be in my head before I shake the thought aside. I am not my mother’s angsty, fat son anymore. I might not even order an entrée, show her just how skinny I can be.

“I’m sorry,” I say quickly, almost sarcastically. I push more genuineness out through my teeth. “I didn’t mean it – I don’t want to fight anymore. I just can’t talk about work right now.”

My mother had asked me how much I am currently making, which is not a conversation for dinner. You don’t discuss money, like you don’t discuss religion and politics. People know this.

My mother doesn’t. “I just want to know about your life right now,” she says.

My life right now? My life right now could stand to be better. I’m an Uber driver on my sixth year of obtaining a single bachelor’s degree. I live as my girlfriend’s ward, making dinner in exchange for rent, embarrassed by how little I can do for her and sensing a breakup. And, honestly, it is all entirely my mother’s fault, in a way that she could never possibly understand. She could never stretch her shallow brain to think more than three years in the past – it’s dwelling, she calls it. The past, to her, as to a fruit fly or a goldfish, never existed.

“My life is good,” my sister, Clarette, yawns. She has her necklace in her fingers, counting off on plastic pearls like rosary beads. “I’m good.”

“We know,” I say, simply. Right now, there’s no need to speak to her in a manner different than that you would to a child. Clarette has left the building.

My mother is sitting again, staring at my sister. Good. Perhaps it’s time we put some attention on the other prodigal sibling. Ask her how she’s doing.

Because a sober Clarette would tell you. She wouldn’t be able to hide it. Her doe eyes would fall unintentionally into the saddest gaze you’d ever seen, and at first, she’d be wistful and guarded with her response (“It’s okay, it’s just…you know,”), and then with little to no prodding, she would spill her sorry chronicle, just like she did last week on the phone with me. She told me about how Vincent, the new husband, is actually quite mean, which anyone could’ve gleaned since the wedding, and how he doesn’t seem to want to sleep with her anymore. He’s stressed with work, she told me, though she can never seem to explain to me what exactly it is that he does. She knows as much as she doesn’t: he works vaguely in the world of finance, and he gets promoted to things with inexplicable job titles, like “Head of Assistant Directing” and “Upper Management Team Supervisor.” She also told me, on the phone, that her stepdaughter, Julie, is having a terrible time in sixth grade, and I can’t help but think that this hardship isn’t aided in any way by the fact that Julie now has a 27-year-old stepmother with small feet and a yoga body. Clarette is always trying to take this poor child out to the park for free-move dance classes or to pottery-making at a craft fair. This poor, pimply kid would no doubt rather stay at home and cry. I would know. I think I’ve been this kid. I very well may still be her.

I check my watch for how long dad’s been in the bathroom. It’s now going on half an hour. I wonder if he’s slipped out the window.

“It has been a while,” says Aunt Margaret. I guess I must’ve said that out loud. She’s popping burrata into her mouth with a fork and knife, glassy eyes scanning the restaurant.

“And how have you been, Aunt Margaret?” I ask, almost as a joke, but also to direct the conversation anywhere else. My mother is still brooding over her glass of wine. She’s twirling it, its burnt red contents churning like a stomach. I swallow.

“Oh, you know, a little of this, a little of that,” Aunt Margaret remarks. Her hand hovers above a dark wheat cracker, but she rejects it with a small sweep. The little thing slides past the edge of her plate and onto the tablecloth in a crumby mess. Aunt Margaret hasn’t noticed, though, as she chews happily like a little pet fish nibbling its dinner, staring blankly out into life outside of the bowl.

My aunt Margaret has always been like this, though people only consider it a problem now that she’s old. “She’s demented, Diane,” my father once barked at my mother after a particularly weird Christmas at Margaret’s house, with no tree, but presents strewn about everywhere, in various stages of being wrapped. This was only a couple years ago, but my father acted as though it was the first time he had ever noticed anything strange about Aunt Margaret. I had known since I was about three. Aunt Margaret moves through life differently than other people, especially in conversations, when she can never quite match what topic we should be staying on. She responds to every stimulant like it is a big surprise. Right now, from the look on her face, she can’t seem to believe we’re in a restaurant.

For a moment, Clarette looks about the same, and I’m about to tease her for it when I find where her eyes have landed. It’s dad, across the room, at the dimly lit bar. His hand is rested on a young woman’s shoulder, our server for the evening, Cathleen. She’s no doubt about nineteen. I turn the other way, shuffling myself deeper into blazer. The stupid thing is tree-bark-brown and scratchy. It smells like my girlfriend’s brother. I itch for the drink I never ordered.

I put out my two fingers and shake them the way I’ve seen people twice my age do before. “Cathleen,” I call. “I’d like another drink.”

2 – Entrée

“Is there anything else I can get you guys while I’m here?” 

I can sense the pointedness in her voice, she’s a little crabby. And I understand, I would be too; it’s a bit of dick move to call out to waitress like she’s a dog. But I had done her a favor, and a part of her has to know that.

My dad joined the table at the same time she came over. They were still wrapping up the end of some conversation they had had with little final pleasantries when he took his seat. My mother acted as though she somehow too had been part of the conversation, matching her smiles and small laughs to theirs.

Now, she shoots daggers into Cathleen’s impossibly young face. “I think we’re ready to order,” she says.

“Oh!” Our waitress stumbles, procuring her notepad out of her back pocket, where it had been tucked away. I feel the same – I also wasn’t expecting this. Aunt Margaret is still slurping her burrata.

Mom doesn’t wait for Cathleen to get settled. “I’ll take the braised duck with the bleu cheese crumble side salad. I’d also like an order of roasted pumpkin seed and asparagus.”

“…pumpkin seed asparagus,” Cathleen mutters the order to herself as she furiously writes. It’s shocking that she’s allowed to use a notepad at all, working at a place like this. Every other overpriced restaurant that my mother has taken me to forces their underage staff to rote memorization. 

Though mom took us all by surprise with her proclamation, I notice that I am the only person at the table still feverishly scanning the menu. I don’t know why this always happens to me. I am always the last person.

“I’ll have ravioli,” Clarette slurs. She means the butternut squash ravioli, twenty-three dollars and served in a white wine cream sauce. It may very well also come to the table with a little parmesan cheese grater. The richness makes a slight spell of nausea roll over me, as I imagine it hot and large and wet, sitting in the bottom of my own stomach.

I search down the menu, beneath the ravioli, and find the meat and poultry entrées. I skip it. I haven’t eaten meat since high school.

“I’ll have the salmon,” says my dad, peering up over his reading glasses.

“Is a house salad okay with that?”

“Uh, no…” he says, thinking aloud. He returns to the menu to address the salads and gives me the same idea.

Pomegranate seed and arugula, fresh spinach with a pepper vinaigrette, kale Greek. I know I won’t be full, but when have I ever been? Not at home, after a full box of stovetop mac and cheese (which is three times the serving size). At this point, I would be just as well closing my eyes and pointing at any random spot on the menu. Whatever I order, I will not be eating. Not after this.

Dad settles on something, and so does Margaret. And then, it’s me, because my family knows I always take the longest to decide. I feel three sets of eyes watch me closely as I do this (present my speech), while Margaret stares so far up at nothing that I can only see her nostrils.

Clarette’s eyes are still very dazed. I don’t want to speak, don’t love the feeling of the words in my mouth, but know it’s an essential part of the exchange. I tell you, you feed me, we can all feel at ease. It can give all of us something to do and let me cross another visit with my mother off the to-do list.

“I’ll have the spring mix and shaved beets.” Without a stutter.

“Croutons: whole wheat or gluten free?”

“No croutons.”

“Goat cheese all right with that?”

Jesus, so many questions. “Sure.”

“Alright,” she says, clicking her pen in finality. There’s a small smile of triumph on her face. “I’ll have that out for you shortly.”

She turns, a blonde ponytail in the breeze. My father watches her go. I don’t imagine what he’s thinking, or at least I try not to, and I unfold my napkin in my lap. Clarette is unnecessarily catching our dad up on what he missed while he was gone, which isn’t much besides my mother and I’s fight. She skips that part, though, either because she’s my ally or because it happened after her third martini. Either way, I’m grateful, and send her a smile.

She must take this as a cue to keep talking because she does. She talks about her life, particularly poor little stepdaughter, Julie. I can tell this is my mother’s first time hearing about all of Julie’s issues, because she is absolutely rapt, reacting to every retelling of sixth grade drama with exaggerated scoffs and guffaws. I take a sip of wine, wishing I had asked Cathleen to top me off before she left.

“…and then, they’re all calling her this name, which I don’t even understand…” Clarette has her elbows on the table with her hands up near her face, wrists rotating with every emphasis.

“What’s the name?” asks my mom.

“It’s some thing from some show, I don’t get it,” Clarette begins. “It’s…“Lippy.”

“Lippy?” my dad chimes in. “What, does she talk a lot?”

“No, no, my god, she’s so shy,” Clarette says. “It’s some character from some show who’s, like, not cute, ya know? She’s, like, the ugly best friend on some show, the one who’s there to be funny.”

My mother groans. “That is just terrible.”

“I know! And they all think it’s so funny, like, they’re so clever and she doesn’t get it. But she does. She gets it. She knows they’re all making fun of her. And then if the teacher asks what’s going on, they’re all like, we just think she looks like a character on a show.”

“Oh my god,” my mother breathes, clutching her chest.

“How do you know all this?” I interject. I feel my blood growing hot, but I don’t know why. “I thought you said you two weren’t very close.”

“We’re…I guess, we’re not…when did I tell you that?” Clarette tries.

“On the phone, two days ago.”

“Hm.” 

She’s left chewing on that, her eyes sad and puzzled. I wonder if she’s remembering any other parts of that conversation. I don’t know what I’m going to do anymore. He’s going to leave me; I know he’s going to.

“Well, I think it’s just awful. It cannot be easy being a little girl who looks like that,” my mother says, hands still holding her sweater like she’s trying to keep her heart from falling out of it.

“Looks like what?” I say. I’ve seen Julie on Clarette’s Instagram, but I’m acting like I haven’t. I’ve barely met her in person, so I’m banking on the fact that my family will assume I don’t remember what she looks like. I want to hear my mother try to describe her to me. I want to hear her struggle through that.

“Oh, you know…you’ve seen her,” my mother starts. I raise my eyebrows in faux confusion, as to say “no, keep going,” but my mother doesn’t need prompting. She’s already continued on. “She’s not…traditionally pretty.”

I snort. This is a classic line of my mother’s. 

“She’s bigger,” she says. “So tall, and ya know, her whole body…she’s just big. And her skin, of course –”

“Of course,” I say, as though this is some sort of intellectual debate. My mother seems to have finally caught on to the fact that I’m mocking her.

“Oh, what?” she says. “Have I hurt you?”

“What?”

My mother lifts her hands in surrender and speaks matter-of-factly. “Ya know, this and the money; you’re very sensitive.”

The money. I shouldn’t have ordered an entrée. I can’t afford it and I won’t eat it.

“I just think this is an invasion of her privacy,” I say. “Julie’s privacy. It feels very personal. I wouldn’t want to know that people were talking about me like this.”

Something in my mother clicks. Her face looks as though this whole conversation were spoken in code, and she just solved it. There is even a whisper of a victorious smile on her face. “This…” she says. “Does not have to be about that.”

I know what “that” is. Everyone at the table does. (Except for Aunt Margaret, of course, who wouldn’t be able to tell you what we were talking about if you put a gun to her head.) But I act like I don’t. I need to do that.

“What – what do you mean? What does that mean?” I say.

“My god,” Clarette moans because she knows exactly where this is heading. My dad feels the same. “Diane, don’t start.”

However, only she and I, my mother and I, are really here now. Everyone else might as well be wall dressing. 

“This doesn’t have to be about you,” my mother says.

I have a million planned responses to that, all of which require me to play dumb. I can keep stuttering incredulously, or I can take the bite out of my mother that I have wanted to for years. I chose to try to take the wind out of her sails.

“Well, ya know, I’ve been a fat, ugly person before, so I just thought I’d stick up for the one who isn’t here to defend themselves.” It comes out quicker and breathier than I had hoped. I also realize, very quickly, that the only person that this sentence really hurt was myself. I feel a lump gather in my throat. My mother opens her mouth, ready to respond, but I can’t hear it, so I drill deeper, to knock her into silence. I just want her to stop talking.

“Because you know how to hurt people like that, mom, you know how to be a bully and how much more bullying does this little girl have to put up with? You did it to me, I won’t let you do it to her.”

“Could anyone use any more drinks?” Cathleen appears out of thin air. “Your entrée will be out shortly.” 

3 – Interlude (Palate Cleanser)

I don’t know how much I weighed in ninth grade. I could never bring myself to look at the number on the scale, even when it was right at eye-level at the doctor’s office. I would always close my eyes.

I do, however, know that my dad lost his job that year for fooling around with one of his undergrads. No one wanted me to know that, but I did. I had even seen her once. She was not much taller than me, but was very, very skinny, and was pressed against the garage door entrance, engaged in an elongated goodbye with my dad. She had kissed him, a short peck, and my stomach scrambled, and I moved away from the screen door and skittered up the stairs. I’m not if sure my dad had heard me rush, but if he did, he never said anything. He did, however, tell her I love you.

I love you, I love you, I love you.

In the end, it wasn’t that big of a scandal; my dad got a job at another university, and my mom stayed with him. But she changed. She had always been stern, straightforward, but now she was angry. She was more prone to blowing up. When I was younger, she would immediately apologize after every fight because she couldn’t take the guilt. She didn’t do that after this. I guess she was done being a person who was sorry. I was just beginning.

I felt bad about everything then. Sometimes, I’m certain it’s because of what I saw my dad do, but other times, I’m not so sure. Maybe it was just me. Maybe it had been building in me for a long time, this persona of sheepishness, of teetering on the edge of an absolute breakdown all the time.

Maybe I was just a teenager, though. Clarette was eighteen at the time, but had the maturity of an adult, and was on her way out of the house. She seemed completely unbothered by it all. She was barely ever home to soak up the strangeness that had become of our house, and she seemed all the better for it. She missed the night I think of the most when I feel the familiar drag in my stomach before visiting my mother. She had been out with her friends.

I had been washing the dishes after dinner. More specifically, I was scraping the wet food scraps into the garbage disposal: a job I hated. I felt like I had this sixth sense where I could taste everything on the plate just by looking at it, I could feel the texture in my mouth. It made me gag.

Mom appeared at the alcove between the dining room and the kitchen. We had had Aunt Margaret over for dinner that night, and mom had just finished walking her to her car, which was really shooing her out the door. Mom was shrugging her jacket off, but she was still cold. She was rubbing her hands together.

“Weird night,” she said as she walked closer to me. I thought this was odd already. Mom hadn’t been in the conversational mood for months, not since dad told her about the college girl. She hadn’t wanted to have a simple, little chat with anyone, let alone me, her moody 14-year-old, who I had once heard her describe to Aunt Margaret over the phone as “just impossible to get to know.”

I shrugged out a small “yeah,” just as a particularly slimy chuck of pasta fazool touched my finger. I pulled myself a bit away from the sink.

I had tried not to make my disgust noticeable, but my mother rolled her eyes. “Here, let me do it.”

“No, it’s fine.”

“No, you’re so dramatic.”

She edged me away from the sink, taking the plate from my hand. I was secluded to the corner of the kitchen where the counter met the stove.

“You won’t eat the thing, you won’t touch it…I don’t know what’s up with you.”

I wasn’t very talkative then. I’ve had to build the skill of conversation my whole life. It was very easy for me to fold in on myself.

My mother looked at me, stopped scrubbing the dish. Her eyes were apathetic over her bifocal glasses, studying me for any sign of life. I didn’t give it to her.

“You’re not fat, you know,” she said. “We don’t have those genes. You could just go on walks or something. You don’t need to hunger strike.”

That hadn’t been what I was doing – that hadn’t been what it was about. It was about…decision-making. It was about the power that came with choosing what did and did not go in my mouth. But her words shifted something. They bloomed new thoughts.

“You think I should go on walks?”

“I get that it’s not easy being your age,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me. “Having a new body, looking a new way. It’s crazy that one day you’re a little kid, and the next day, you’re huge. Just…take care of yourself. It’ll all be fine that way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, maybe next time I’ll make you a salad, if that’s what you’re worried about. You don’t have to eat the pasta.”

“That’s not what…I don’t…”

I hadn’t been doing this for my body. But in that moment, I thought that maybe I could. Maybe it was worth the experiment, to watch myself change. Apparently, mom had thought that was something worth fixing. I already learned that I could starve. I was now learning that I could starve with a purpose.

“Don’t get all worked up!” She said. I had been starting to get a bit louder, but it was only because I thought she was right. I was angry that she was right. She was forcing my hand into doing something I always thought I had to do but didn’t want to. 

“I…I’m not mad,” I said. “Thanks, mom.”

4 – Entrée Continued

“What night in the kitchen!? What are you talking about!?”

My mother had followed me out of the restaurant, to the back parking lot near the dumpsters. That had been where I had parked earlier in the night, having skillfully picked a spot closest to the exit, with the full intention of leaving as early and as quickly as possible. When pulling into my destination at the start of the night, I found myself fantasizing about the way it would feel to leave, with every conversation and every meal ordered behind me. I pictured the entire weight of the evening flying off me like dust out my open car window, into the chilly night.

I wasn’t intending to leave just then, though. I had wandered into the parking lot to feel like a lost kid for little bit; one who couldn’t find their parents and got to soak up the big, lonely world through their own eyes for a moment. I had always loved that feeling. It had never been true, though – I had never actually been separated from my parents in a public place. I had only pretended.

She caught me as I was leaning up against the back brick wall, at the start of my cigarette. I put it out as soon as I saw her. It was my least favorite habit; I didn’t need anyone else seeing it.

She had asked me what I thought I was doing. I didn’t know what I was doing, so I asked her about that night in the kitchen when I was fourteen. And this is where she left me: a bit dumbstruck that she didn’t remember.

I suppose it was a small moment, looking back, but I hated the way she spit out her words. As if small moments didn’t matter. As if they were only small.

“Nothing, mom,” I say, angry, exasperated. “Never mind.”

“My god, I don’t understand you. I’ve never known how to talk to you without…blowing you up.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I want to know you!” She’s standing in front of me now, taller than my slumped frame. Her eyes are desperate, and I try to feel something, but I can’t. I can only look at her.

“I never liked my body either,” she says. This stirs some emotion in me. I’ve never liked when people swapped bodily insecurities with me. What they describe never feels the same way that I’ve felt, and I only end up feeling more isolated. It’s like two people trying to speak in two different languages to each other – all you learn is that you will never know the language of anyone else’s body as well as they do. 

“Oh?” I say, as she moves to stand beside me. We’re not looking at each other anymore, but I can feel her stiffen in her body language. She didn’t like this response of mine; probably thought I was being dismissive or rude.

“It’s not really about that,” I try again. “It’s not about how I feel about my body.”

“I wasn’t talking about your body –”

“I guess,” I jump over her words. “I guess I’ve always felt guilty about what I saw dad do.”

“What?” She turns to me, face partially obscured by her scarf. I have no idea why I said this, but there is not a hint of malice in my mother’s face, but rather, a genuine curiosity. I know she knows what I’m talking about, but she’s pretending, which endears me to her. She’s pretending like a little kid. So, I explain my father to her as though she has never met him, and as though she wasn’t there all those years ago.

“I watched him be with other women…my entire childhood.”

“Oh, yes, well.” She shakes her head. “That’s a bit of an exaggeration. There was really only the one he slept with. Everyone else…” She shrugs, a somber, defeated smile. “Everyone else was just everyone else. That’s what your father does. He…flits from one thing to the next. Always has.”

“Does it ever make you feel lonely?” 

She looks at me, shocked. “Lonely? Why would I be lonely?” We pause. “I had my kids,” she says. 

I’ve felt lonely for years. I have become very empty, full of stovetop mac and cheese and bile and steaming shower water and hot air. I always accredited this to my mother. But, in this moment, that argument didn’t feel worth making, and I took my mother’s calloused hand and rubbed my thumb on top of it. I didn’t say one other word.

5 – Dessert and Coffee 

Somehow, we make our way back to the table. It is a quiet, hazy trip, with neither of us knowing exactly how long we had been gone. We had stood in silence for quite some time, though, and the minutes seemed to have racked up. By the time we reach the rest of our party, my mother and I’s dinners have been stowed away in hot Styrofoam, and Cathleen is there taking dessert orders.

My father is ordering a black coffee and a lemon tart, a combination from hell, I think. The thought of washing down sour lemon tart with dark, bitter, piping coffee makes my tongue sweat and recoil in my own mouth. 

“Diane,” he says in the middle of ordering. “You’re back.”

My mom takes her seat and nods at my father. “I’ll take the berries and crème fraiche.”

Cathleen scribbles down her order dutifully, her head bowed. She doesn’t make eye contact with my mother, but turns to me and asks, “Would you like anything for dessert, sir?”

“No.” Of course. I haven’t ordered dessert since childhood. Don’t even know what I’d get, even if I had had the time to scrupulously study the menu. With that, she turns away, a swinging ponytail, with my father’s eyes glued to her backside.

My mother inspects the inside of her carry-away container in the same pinched way that one might lift a toilet seat. She screws up her face in distaste. “I knew they would overcook the duck here. This wouldn’t be a problem if we had gone to Chère Oie the way I had wanted to.”

“I cannot drive to Chère Oie,” says Aunt Margaret. “There are too many deer on the road that it’s on.”

“Aunt Margaret,” Clarette giggles, now sober, into her glass of bubbly water. Her cheeks are still flushed, but her eyes are much brighter, in their shade of charcoal brown.

“Take it,” my mother turns to me, pushing her takeaway box in my direction. 

“What?”

“I don’t like the duck,” she says earnestly, eyebrows raised.

I study her, from her prodding fingers to crinkled forehead, and I feel something inside of me begin to shake. I am done reading my mother, at least for the night. I pull the container a bit closer to me.

Conversation continues around me, mostly about deer and car rides. I don’t hear very much of it, but feel Aunt Margaret’s fishbowl eyes land on me as I crack the lid of my mother’s abandoned dinner. It is still hot. A bubble of condensation of the inner top lid slides onto my finger as my hand fishes for the perfect bite.