Eating Out
Michelle Cacho-Negrete
Word Count 1536
On Saturdays, my mother took me out to eat at the Chinese restaurant near us. These weekly lunches, a chance to be out, were major events in my life, which was marked by poverty, danger from Brooklyn street gangs, and vanishing time. I eagerly counted down the days until Saturday the way others counted the days until the end of school. My mother was single then, a status that would bookend her short, second marriage to my stepfather and the birth of my brother. Back then, every penny came out of her pocket, but amid the drudgery of a low-wage job as a file clerk and endlessly trying to conquer roach infestations in our tiny slum apartment, she recognized the need for a treat for us, and this was it.
I don’t remember ever going with a friend of my mother’s, her friendships were few and irregular, but I remember meals there with her sister. They despised each other, and their rare times together often seemed like duels of who exhibited the most disdain for the other. My mother was secretive, and I never learned why. By the time I was in my teens, and had the curiosity to ask about it, she was long out of our lives.
They would meet on her sister’s front stoop, each acknowledging the other by a brief nod, then they’d proceed together. Nobody would have guessed their relationship because of the physical distance they kept, their obvious lack of intimacy, and no physical resemblance, with the exception of their mutually similar glances of dislike. My mother was very diminutive, four foot ten with a boyish cut and plain clothes. Her only bow to fashion were engraved gold hoop earrings brought by her mother when their family escaped Czarist Russia. Her sister, however, had inherited their father’s height and was about five foot six with flaming red hair worn in the Lucille Ball style so popular then. She wore the ubiquitous high heels almost compulsory for women of that generation.
The moment we arrived at the restaurant, even before coats were removed or purses placed onto the worn, faux-leather seats, my aunt would snap her fingers at the waiter who, familiar with her after countless meals, was already bringing the menu, unnecessary since they always ordered pork fried rice with chicken egg drop soup. She also demanded a pot of tea and the free fried noodles with both duck and hot mustard sauce, also unnecessary since that was immediately served after menus were deposited. The waiter, a man with a stoic face, slim body and observant eyes, would nod politely and vanish into the kitchen. I’d roll up my coat and sit on it so I could more easily reach the table. At five, I hadn’t grown to what I considered an acceptable height for a girl my age. As soon as the waiter was out of sight, my mother and aunt would drop the packets of salt, pepper, soy sauce, sugar, and saccharine into their purses. Even at five, I was embarrassed and stared out the window, now made visible by my coat. I don’t remember if these neatly packaged condiments were ever used, but this casual theft of property set the stage for me to steal things that were necessary, a winter coat, boots, and food from supermarkets, a practice I occasionally engaged in when my children and I were at our lowest financial ebb.
I liked looking around the restaurant, whose decorations were so foreign to our Russian background. Gaudy pennants of red and gold Chinese letters laced with ribbons, swaying Chinese paper globes with lights inside, photographs of their particular “old country,” a term always used by immigrants back then, and blue-patterned bowls and cups. Scents, like a child’s bubbles, traveled across the room on the steam that escaped from the kitchen whenever the door was opened, thrillingly different from the oniony-garlicky, heavy meat odors that permeated our house since my mother cooked the cheapest meat possible for hours to tenderize it.
We devoured the noodles which my mother and aunt dipped in hot mustard while I stuck to the sweet duck sauce. The bowl emptied almost immediately, my aunt then demanding another one. Perhaps that wasn’t allowed, but the waiter, familiar with her sharp tone and loud voice, surrendered without discussion. The soup, when it arrived, jiggled on the table because the restaurant was beneath an elevated subway line whose frequent, roaring trains made the whole restaurant shake as if hit by a series of mini-earthquakes. Because I had a tiny appetite, my mother split her plate with me. The waiter gave me my soup for free and ceremoniously placed a small plate in front of me with a wink. While my mother usually thanked him for his thoughtfulness, my aunt took it for granted. If there were leftovers, but not enough for a doggie bag, she splayed dirty napkins over the plates so ,“The chinks wouldn’t eat our food.” To her credit, my mother, no paragon of intolerance, didn’t participate. I wondered then about “the starving children of China” we were always told to consider. I thought our waiter, if he was a father, might have brought this food home to his starving children. I didn’t equate starving children with America. Americans seemed unaware it might exist. Even my mother, despite onion sandwiches on stale bread and weak tea, because there was nothing else in the house, never associated starving families with the U.S., how totally had the myths of bounty been accepted despite evidence to the contrary.
My mother and aunt would finally, for reasons I never learned, stop speaking to each other for good, just after my mother remarried. My stepfather was a cab driver who worked nights, but in the late afternoon, if he was around, he would take us all, including my infant brother, to Chinatown, where he had an agreement with one of the restaurants that he would bring them out-of-towners in exchange for free food. It evidently was a successful merger. My stepfather would park by the kitchen, run in, and emerge a few minutes later with a pungent smelling, grease-stained bag, drive to the waterfront beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, and we’d feast. I have a lingering, faint memory of gnawing on a spare rib, my face covered with sticky sauce.
My mother and stepfather were divorced within five years. By the age of fifteen, I got working papers and a job in a factory and brought home a small paycheck. We expanded our culinary repertoire, eating at the Ukraine Village on second avenue, Ratner’s and Katz, landmark Kosher restaurants on the lower east side, a German bratwurst place I don’t remember the name of in the 40s, and a little Russian luncheonette on second avenue. The Chinese restaurant became a monthly to every six weeks standby, and I liked to think that the waiter, who had watched me grow up, was pleased when I began ordering my own plates from the menu, experimenting with vegetarian food, which I soon preferred. One afternoon, when we came in, there was a strange waiter who told us when we inquired that our waiter had died. We expressed both shock and sorrow. My mother asked what the tradition was when a Chinese man died, perhaps thinking of sending a card or maybe even dropping off food, a Jewish ritual but probably not necessary to a family of restaurateurs. He shook his head and said the waiter had died a month earlier, and everything was over with. I realized then how long it had been, probably two months, since we’d eaten there. It occurred to me, for probably the first time, that the passage of time is dependent upon how you fill it, that it somehow speeds up or slows down without you noticing. It was the last time we went there; it had lost its charm without the waiter.
Many years later, visiting the Brooklyn ghetto I’d grown up in, now an affluent neighborhood, I passed the location of the restaurant, a high-end boutique transformed as so much of New York was from visit to visit. I stood there, remembering the jiggling soup, the cheap decorations, and my aunt’s rudeness to the waiter, who remained dignified, kind, and always calm. A train passed overhead, the ground shaking, every other sound drowned out by the roar. I was suddenly transported back in time, to the waiter’s smile, the smell of hot soup, my mother asking if I wanted more from her plate. Then the moment scurried back to the past from which it had briefly poked itself out, and I realized that the restaurant, except for her grave, had been my last worldly link to her, that in the end, links erode and vanish just as we ourselves do.
Michelle is a retired social worker and the author of Stealing; Life in America. She has 90+ publications in, among others, Able Muse, The Sun Magazine, North American Review, Under The Sun. Four of her essays have been among the most notable of the year, two have been Best of The Net, she has won the Hope Award and was runner-up in the Brooklyn Literary Arts contest. She lives in the currently iced over state of Maine.