Restaurant Observation 1

They were sitting there at the Pho restaurant, middle table not corner booth, awkward not comfortable, tense not relaxed, staring into their bowls of noodles. His was saturated with sriracha, he wasn’t really eating, he had forgotten how spicy that shit was, he had forgotten what it was like to eat dinner with his mom.

            He was nine, maybe ten, blonde and blue-eyed, her beautiful boy, her perfect Aryan boy (his dad was Jewish, never you mind the details). She watched him. The waiter would come and ask if she needed a refill on her water, and it would take her a moment to process his question, she was so carefully inspecting her son’s face, so carefully looking for the changes she must have missed. She felt as though she had not really looked at her son in years, and she probably hadn’t. She resolved to look harder.  

            “How is school, Jack?” she asked. He shrugged. “Do you like your new teacher?” He shrugged again. “Well what’s wrong with her?” He shrugged.

            This wasn’t really going anywhere fast.

            “She’s okay,” he finally said. He had a lisp, his two front teeth missing. He was smaller than the other boys his age. You could see that he was afraid. He was afraid. He was afraid of her, afraid of how far away she seemed on the other side of the very small table, and so he did not look at her, though he could not explain this, his vocabulary didn’t allow for it, he had trouble with reading comprehension and after all he was only a fourth grader.

            His mother paused, beginning to pick at her noodles the way he picked at his, swirling her chopsticks in small and decidedly counter-clockwise circles, slowly, slowly, wondering when she was ever going to get her appetite back.

            Her left hand felt too light. About two carats too light.

            “You haven’t come to this restaurant in a while, huh, Jack?” she asked. He shook his head. She paused her stirring, her face revealing nothing but a porcelain-perfect guise of unfeeling. “Does your dad still go to the burrito place much?” Jack shook his head.

            “He doesn’t go anywhere we used to go together,” he finally said.

            His mom nodded. “What about temple? Do you still go to temple?”

            Jack nodded a little.

            “He says we need Yahweh more right now than we did before.”

            Her heart felt too light, about a family of four too light.

            “How’s your sister?” she asked through a little choke.

            Shrugged.

            “I don’t know,” he said. “She says she doesn’t believe in Yahweh anymore.”

            They both started to quietly cry.

            The waiter didn’t offer her any more water.