A Dish Best Served Cold...

“A Dish Best Served Cold”

By Beth Lane

John is trying to pat my face with one of those bright yellow napkins you get from the fast food places but I’m not helping much. I’m laughing so hard, my head is bobbling around and he keeps missing, which makes me laugh even more. Coffee runs down the side of my nose and I erupt again because he looks so funny shaking with “non-laughter.” When John laughs hard, he doesn’t make any noise. He just makes this goofy wheezing sound. The funnier it is, the less noise he makes.

“What’s that smell?”

“Defeat.”

“What?” He doesn’t get it of course.

“No seriously”, I point across the parking lot, “Its chicken wings. See?”

There is a Sal’s Birdland on the other side of the street.

“It smells like ass!” John laughs as I roll up my window. The smell of rancid grease and various unidentifiable chicken parts brings back my focus and suddenly, I’m anxious to get inside.

When we pulled into the parking lot of the Super Wal-mart, John didn’t realize it was a mine field. He never saw the pot hole, which explains why I have coffee dripping from my eyebrows. I take the napkin from him and finally wipe it off myself.

“Come on. Let’s go.”

Somehow, we manage to roll out of the Jeep and begin the long trek, still giggling and wheezing, across the devastated asphalt towards the store. We fall into our usual step, cheek to cheek, hip to hip and dodge the craters in unison. A warm autumn wind is twirling tired, dirty looking leaves along with the candy wrappers and garbage. There is a dirty diaper lying sodden near the cart return. It’s too heavy for the wind to twirl it much.

I stop and twirl myself, arms outstretched, like Mary Tyler-Moore.

“I told you it was a dump!” I declare proudly.

It’s not that John has never seen a Super Wal-mart before; he has. But he has never seen THIS Super Wal-mart. This one is mine, and it’s not particularly super but I have my reasons. He eyes me with suspicion and does “the eyebrow” at me. This thing he does where he raises first one and then the other eyebrow in rapid succession while wearing a comical quizzical look on his face. Grinning, I just shake my head. Not yet. He shrugs and we continue walking towards the store. He knows me well enough to know that I’ll tell him when I’m ready.

At the entrance, the electric doors almost seem to hesitate before laboriously sliding open. I pull out my list: cat food, Count Chocula, light bulbs. We grab a cart with the prerequisite broken wheel and dive into the swirling sea of shoppers. As I navigate the familiar aisles, I play tour guide and point out the more interesting sights.

On your right are filthy floors with the linoleum missing in great peeling chunks. To the left, you will see the clothes dripping off of hangers on every rack. They fall into colorful puddles to be marked later by muddy footprints. The thing that impresses me the most though, are the re-shop carts. Kept brimming by the inhabitants of the never-ending check out lines, they crowd every available open space with mountainous heaps of discarded and disorganized merchandise.

As we pass the produce section, I tell John about the time I came around the tomato display and narrowly missed running over an old man lying on the floor. His face was pressed painfully against the scarred floor and a thin trickle of blood had dribbled from his mouth. I didn’t panic or worry. The stores alert staff had already taken charge of the situation by placing four orange “Caution – Wet Floor” cones around his crumpled body. Someone had run a double length of bright yellow “Danger” tape around the cones for good measure before had they all, presumably, run outside to direct the ambulance.

We round a corner in search of light bulbs and are stopped by a family with at least twenty kids blocking the aisle. They are too distracted by the discount DVD’s to notice we need to get by them. John just smiles and shrugs at me so we start thumbing through the movies to kill time while we wait for them to move along. He’s great like that. He never loses his temper or his patience. He says he does, but I have never seen it happen.

John holds up a DVD for my inspection. It’s a copy of “Alice in Wonderland.”

“Do you recognize this girl?” I can tell he is teasing me about something.

“No. Who is it?” I play along.

“It’s you. Remember?” and suddenly I do.

***

His name was Tim and he lived down the street from me while I was growing up. He was a paper boy and I remember him watching me and following me around
on his bike. I knew that he liked me, thought I was pretty, but I thought he was ugly and obnoxious.

When we were ten years old, he wanted to kiss me. I said “No way!”, so he just knocked me down in the snow and kissed me anyway. When we were thirteen he would come to my door every day and “ask me out.” I would say no and he would go do something awful, like smash out all the windows in his garage. His dad would come to my door and yell at my mom to keep ME away from his son. As if somehow it was my fault that his kid was a spoiled brat and a bully. When we were fourteen, I grew tired of arguing. He finally wore me down and I agreed to go out with him. I think I started to feel almost guilty. Here was someone who just wouldn’t give up, someone willing to do the crazy things he did, because he loved me. How could I say no? Didn’t everyone want someone to love them like that? Who was I to reject someone willing to love me? Wasn’t that what I had always wanted?

The first time he hit me was three days later and I broke up with him. He came to my window in the middle of the night and refused to leave until I explained once more WHY I wouldn’t go back out with him. He begged and promised and threatened until I was exhausted. Finally, I would break,

“Fine! I’ll be your girlfriend again! Can I go back to sleep now?”

This became the pattern of my teenage years. I couldn’t seem to get away from him. He was everywhere I went. We hung around with the same group of losers and no other group would have me. The “druggies” and the “Heads.” This was my place and always had been. They were stupid and mean but they were all that I had, unless I wanted to be alone. Sometimes I would try to date someone else. Someone from a better clique, but whenever I tried to escape, Tim would inevitably show up, pledge his undying love for me and start a fist fight. I would quickly find myself alone again and alone was much worse to me than Tim. Defeated, I would always come back.

Until I met John.

We met at a party in March of senior year. He was everything that my friends were not. John was smart and funny, honest and decent. He came from a two parent family for Christ sake! How could he possibly like me? Me. The girl in the work boots, with the big hair and all the thick, black eyeliner. He played ice hockey and wrote for the school paper. What the hell did I think I was doing? I must have been crazy to think that I could combine our worlds. That I could spend time with him and his friends discussing literature and he could spend time with me and my friends smoking pot. Still, for a while it worked. John saw through my circumstances. He saw the real me. The girl that was underneath all the big hair and the mind that was at work behind the cigarette smoke screen. He knew I was smart and he told me so often. He tried to fit in with my friends and I tried to fit with his. We were madly in love and seventeen. We thought we could do anything. Even go to prom.

I never dreamed I would ever go to a prom. I made a really big deal of it all and I’m sure I drove John crazy with the details. He just smiled and indulged my girliness. He was always a good sport like that.

A couple of days before the big night, I had him drive me over to K-Mart so I could look for shoes. We pulled into the parking lot with “Pink Floydd” blaring, climbed out of the wagon and started towards the store. We had been in a silly mood all day and for some reason John decided to come up behind me and ducked down to scoop me up so I was sitting on his shoulders. I screamed and laughed and demanded he put me down but we were having fun so he started running instead. I don’t remember now if he tripped on something or just stumbled from my weight but I do remember falling and hitting that pavement hard.

When prom night came, I stood before him in my ball gown. My long blond hair tied back and one elbow length white glove on my left arm. It matched the white, elbow length cast that covered the right. I remember John reaching out and trailing his fingers down the cast to clutch at my fingers. His eyes were shiny with tears as he whispered,

“I am so sorry.”

“Why? I’m not. I am going to the prom with the best friend I have ever had. What more could I want? See? The glove matches perfectly. It’s barely noticeable.”

“But I broke your arm!” He looked so distraught!

“No! It was an accident. We were having fun. John, I have never had as much fun with another person as I have had with you.”

He stood back from me, looked me up and down and finally he smiled.

“You look beautiful. You remind me of Alice in Wonderland.”

“Alice in Wonderland? Geez, I think I would rather look like Cindy Crawford.”

“Naw. Alice was beautiful and so are you.”

“Who are you then if I am Alice?”

He grinned, “The Cheshire cat I think. Thank you for forgiving me. You are my best friend.” And he kissed me.

Parked by the creek after prom, we were busy steaming up the windows of the old Malibu Wagon when the beginning of the end came.

That huge brown Lincoln was moving so fast when it passed us the first time, it rocked the wagon on its axles like it was a toy. His brakes squealed as he came around for another pass. The headlights were blinding and I could smell the rubber of his tires. This time, he actually took the side mirror off and pushed the wagon a few feet to the left. I was terrified he would kill us both. Over the blare of the horn and the sickening sound of grinding metal I heard him loud and clear.

“You WHOOOOORE!”

It was Tim of course.

It was then that I knew I couldn’t keep him. John was the “anti-Tim” in my life. He positively radiated goodness. I didn’t belong with him and I knew it. I had the whole, “Abused Teenage Girl Abandoned by Father” thing that I was sure I was destined to live out to the bitter end. I would poison him somehow. Drag him down with me if I tried to hang on to him. Fear for myself. Fear for him. I had to give him up.

It was awful. I didn’t even give him a reason. He begged to know why and I just shook my head, unable to look him in the eye as he stood on my porch steps confused and hurt. I was mean. I deserved what I ended up with, and what I ended up with was Tim. John left town for college and I married a man I didn’t even like.

Tim loved to tell me how stupid or ugly I was depending on his mood at the moment and how much beer he had consumed that particular evening. Once, after he had “slipped on some ice” and broken his leg, I refused to go pick up his beloved chicken wings for him at midnight. I figured he was harmless in his cast and crutches. I was wrong. He chased me up the stairs and used his crutch to break a hole in the locked bedroom door so he could get to me.

The only good thing about my marriage was how little he was home. He spent every night drinking at a bar down the street and I tried to be asleep before he came home. I would find him in the mornings, passed out on the couch, balancing his styrofoam container of chicken wings on his bloated beer belly. His shirts were typically covered with sauce stains and he always bought enough to have leftovers for the next day. I would try to throw them away before he woke up but he would catch me and fish them out of the trash. It made me nauseous to see him chewing on the stale, greasy bones. He said they were better when they were cold.

When I discovered I was pregnant for my first child, I was horrified. I realized that this self imposed abuse had to stop. It was one thing to live out melodramatic teen angst and my “I don’t deserve anything better,” delusions for myself, but quite another thing to condemn a helpless child to suffer along with me.

The night I made my escape, I waited until he passed out, carefully removed the box of wings from his belly and brought it to the kitchen. I pulled a bottle of bleach from under the sink, doused the greasy morsels and put them back on his lap.

I stayed in hiding for a few months and when I felt safe, I looked for John, but it was too late. He had left town for college, a new life and presumably, a wife. He says he looked for me as well, but the computer, as we know it, hadn’t been invented yet. It took twenty years, a divorce under each of our belts, and the aide of internet technology to make this day, shopping in this crappy Wal-mart, possible. I am deliriously thankful.

***

“I’m going to buy this.” John tosses the DVD in the cart.

“My niece’s loved it but whenever it was on, I always had to leave the room. It reminded me of someone I missed very much.” He smiles his sweet smile at me, “I think I would like to watch it now.”

We finish our shopping and wheel into the shortest of the endless check out lines. This is my favorite part. Someone has put something that looks and smells utterly vile down in the bottom of the biggest pile of re-shops. There is an evil looking puddle spreading under the cart. How wonderful!

“Sweetheart, I don’t understand why you don’t just shop at the store across town? I think it’s even a little closer. Seriously, why are we really here?”

I shrug and go back to watching a bald, stoop shouldered clerk dig hopelessly through the pile of sticky, contaminated re-shops in the overflowing cart. The front of his shirt is covered with the faint traces of what looks like some kind of sauce and I smile.

I have my reasons.

Prof. Smith,

As I said before, fiction was something I thought was impossible for me. In this particular story, I attempted to write fiction that reads almost like memoir. In preparing for the revision, I went over your comments and did several exercises from the book. I included a sentence from page 225 in the “opening up your story” section. While I couldn’t make it fit as the first sentence, it is at the beginning.

The exercise that was the most helpful to me was actually on page 230. In the section, “A Little Gardening, A Little surgery,” I printed out a copy of the unfinished story and cut it up. It was great! I rearranged the pieces a bit and I could really see what was missing and where it needed to be.

The exercise, “Dynamic Scening” helped me with the ending as it made plane how I would establish the change of power in the characters. The “revenge” aspect of the plot needed to have the narrator clearly coming out on top.

To be honest, this story still doesn’t seem finished to me. The length limit was six pages and I have already exceeded that limit. I feel as if it still needs a little more in order to feel complete but I didn’t want it to run any longer. This is something I will take out and play with until I think its really done.

Finally, the mechanics are not usually my strong point and I know this. I did try to go over it and fix the errors and hopefully it isn’t too bad. I have trouble seeing the errors myself.

Thank you and I hope you enjoyed the story.

Beth Lane