The Cook at the Bantam Cafe

Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's
weather to all who can read it. 
—Martha Graham

          

          The day before, I started thinking "They won't have the deviled eggs." They had felt like something capricious on the menu—somebody had simply bought too many eggs that first week of October. 
          My life has prepared me for disappointment, and I snuggle my face into it like a suffocating old sweater. I hypothesize that this gives me character.
          We dropped the dogs off and cantered two doors up to the tiny building, separated from a row of old, three-story brick storefronts and a third their height—like a one-car garage with a gabled roof.
          They have them. 
          Gary said this to me as he might have said, just as gravely, The surgery went well.
          This time, I found myself in a seat facing the kitchen rather than Main Street. 
          We had crossed the frozen, yellow-white Penobscot on the new bridge and followed the marshes up through Frankfort—its Congregational church, post office, and general store huddled together in the bright noontime cold—into Winterport, and the views out the car window not even Andy Wyeth's burnt umber and ultramarine could beautify. It was nothing but desolate, frozen mud along the banks, the dead grasses combed through by the retreating water like the hair of a corpse.

Any Dinnertime

          The music that came in under my bedroom door as a child was Dinah Washington.        
          Drinking again
          And think-ing of when you loved me ...
          My mother would have been sitting out there alone, in coffee-colored knit slacks and a crisp sweater, her loafers under her chair.
          If you listen to Dinah long enough, deeply—intentionally—you hear certain things that are perfect; perfect in a way that we hardly encounter in our lives at all.
          One memorizes the phrases and transitions, and repeats them on the lips, like little religious texts, until they can be sung out—with depressing results but, still, in competent mimicry.
          But here I come back for more,
          Open the door,
          Please—please—please
          Mis-ter Blues.
          Dinah—and my mother—belong to that world of 33-and-a-third revolutions per minute, of hypnotic, slow circles ... a rippled indigo-black lake that reflected the low lights of the living room at night.
          Which found their way under the crack of my door. My bedroom was dark, and I was awake, too, but not in the way my mother was awake, at that moment.

Neighbor Moving

          They had a big black dog and a baby. 
          One morning last summer, when I turned onto Pine Street suddenly they were there, ahead of me, the four of them walking. After that, I never saw them out on the block again, and I never saw them all together again.
          They never spoke to me or nodded Hi, but Gary says they spoke to him a couple of times. 
          On Saturday night, someone told me they sold their house. They had to really drop the price. Sunday morning, as I skipped church again, from my bedroom window I saw their dresser and swivel chairs and coffee table on the tiny front lawn.
          At first I thought it was a yard sale. Then I saw the modest-sized U-Haul backed up the short, steep dirt driveway.
          So, of course, I was suddenly sad.
          I have a heart that breaks inappropriately—an old dishwasher of a heart that jostles the ceramic mugs and glass inside, noisy and inefficient, barking through its cycles and blowing steam.
          I think: Why is the truck so small?
          At Christmas, she hung huge plastic colored balls on the frozen boughs of their lilac. They were there until April. When spring finally came, on Sundays they brought the baby out front, dipping her in and out of the plastic pool like a laughing pink egg roll. The big black lab leaped around the tiny yard, running nowhere, crazy with the freedom, an uncontrollable foal. As they held on to his leash he dragged them up and down the driveway.
          The baby started to scream.
          They were genuine homeowners and they did everything right, but I never got to have small talk with them. 
          I know everyone else on this block.
          What did she want to say with the big Christmas balls on the tree, and the lights in her windows? That she was just happy Christmas was here, or did she wish her neighbors a Merry Christmas? Was she (secretly) expecting someone to drop by with cookies? Did she make too much fudge herself, hoping to give some away? Now I'll never know. She had a wooden daisy, missing half its petals, hanging on the clapboard. It's down, now. Did she love flowers? 
          There's a little bed of chrysanthemums at the foot of the driveway, but it feels like a period at the end of a sentence.  
          The truck is gone but some final things are being loaded into cars. Already the windows have their curtainless stare out toward the street. Boxes appear and are carried away, and a bald man is holding a tiny pet carrier lopsided, like Gary holds pizza boxes. I hear her giving instructions to the men—too loudly, like certain types of girls in high school always spoke.
          From where I sit I hear a motor start, and tires crackle on the gravel, and I have a terrible lump in my throat.
          Why is that truck so small?

First Maine Winter

One must have a mind of winter/To regard the frost and the boughs of the pine-trees crusted with snow;/And have been cold a long time/To behold the junipers shagged with ice/The spruces rough in the distant glitter/Of the January sun;/and not to think/Of any misery in the sound of the wind. 
—Wallace Stevens

          

          You didn't smell the percolating coffee until you reached the little landing with the colored glass window, two-thirds of the way up the stairs.
          But that was in spring, when the house was still empty. It felt like camping, nothing but my air mattress on one of the shiny bedroom floors. The rooms echoed as I walked through them; the old-fashioned coffee pot was cheap, and the coffee was terrible.
          I was so happy.
          Now the cats are curled like brown fists on the bed, and the window on the landing is solid ice. The sun is blinding, yet no match for the cold.
          It takes 15 minutes to get ready to go outside.
          The snow piles up like books, never reducing, but the crunch of our feet on dog walks is musical—slightly vaudevillian. The plow is king, and the rogue pick-ups hurl themselves into the driveways for which they have been hired, sometimes in the morning, sometimes late at night.
          The big plows know just when during the storm to come, and the roads are always tidy and easy to drive. 
          Your face is scalded by the cold air—ironically, as if by hot coffee.