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.

          Gary's tea came in a folded transparent paper sachet that was like a miniature tool wrap.
          And then our eggs: their whites dyed saffron yellow by a brushing of mustard oil, each salmon-colored pureed yolk capped with a tiny, cone-shaped pickled pimiento. The delicate flavor was like no other eggs I'd ever had—all four arranged onto a feather bed of individual spinach and arugula leaves.
          We ate in solipsistic bliss.

* * *

          The counter with the cash register was the old-fashioned type of display cabinet, with hidden colored lights and a length of soft, gathered fabric, rather than sliding panels, at the back, so that the day-old scones and cupcakes seemed to be on stage—a Theater of the Absurd, from the slightly depressing look of it.
          Beyond was the kitchen. And as my sandwich lost its cheesy appeal, quite suddenly I noticed the cook, blocked occasionally by the soft-spoken young waitress, gracious enough, who refused to be drawn into conversation—the only staff, as far as I could tell.
          The cook was very tall and solidly built. She wore a Macintosh-patterned flannel apron over snug-fitting jeans and T-shirt, and there was a blue bandanna rolled and tied around her head just above her ears. She had very short hair, curly from steam and the stove's heat.
          But none of these details matter. They do not live separately in my memory, nor are they interesting in themselves.
          Every movement she made came from a single place, like a score of music that rests, out of view, on a conductor's stand—she never reached with just her arm, and it was never her thigh alone that shut the refrigerator door. All of her stirring, the sudden jerking of a frying pan back and forth, the grasping of a hanging ladle, seemed to be governed or balanced by the soles of her feet or the muscles of her buttocks, their precise shifting like the minute, barely perceptible touches on a trackball.
          She was cooking from her belly—from her third eye, from a remembered dance warm-up—from joy. The kinetics were not unpleasant or tiring to watch, because there was no wasted effort, though she appeared like a Shiva in front of the big grill ... all legs and arms, effortlessly rocking.
          And when she said "We're up," the tone was as bland and conversational as a therapist's.
          Her fingers pinched the next order from the clip.

* * *

          The Bangor Daily News article said that 28-year-old Wesley Osterhout had bought the dilapidated building during a search for a massage studio with her boss at the pub where she worked. Cooking had paid her massage school tuition, and she'd been ready to abandon it. Something about the little building itself changed her mind. She and her father restored the interior and took a huge chance in a small town. Half a year later, she has been rewarded beyond her expectations.

I think I've really figured out what exactly it is that I love about this place, and it's the fact that I think we're recapturing that feeling of when you go home for the holidays, and everything is warm, and it smells like food, and everybody's talking [...] that's just what I want people to feel like, when they come here.

          Such catastrophic, sudden choices seem to be the stuff of history itself—Arthur Conan Doyle trying his hand at short stories while in medical school, Eleanor Roosevelt beginning to make appearances on Franklin's behalf—and the dubiety that is at their source is comforting, encouraging.
          It would seem that no one is a loser who listens very carefully.