Behind the Silver Window
Faith Gardner
I meddle with dishes prepared for those I’ve loved. Nobody knows. My sous chef and my prep cook, too busy to come into focus, white blurs in the back room, flashing knives, don’t know. Waiters who bring the meddled food to my loved ones’ tabletops are oblivious accessories. My loved ones, most of all, don’t know I meddle with their dishes, nor do they know they are loved.
At the Franklin Bistro we don’t play music from speakers, but we offer our patrons the gentle tinkling zzz of several small plug-in waterfalls. The gold-painted framed photographs of naked Davids and Venuses add to what The Franklin Times called our “European ambience.” I have never been to Europe, nor has anyone I know except Heidi Fulton, who studied art history in Paris. I went to online culinary school.
Nowadays, on occasion, if Heidi Fulton happens to visit the Bistro, I spy her through the long silver window. She visits with her mother, who still carries a candy-pink Bible with her everywhere. They flip through their menus and sip their chardonnays the same way. They order artichoke dip in unison.
When I have a moment alone with the artichoke dip I stare down into the O of it, a green scream. Cream cheese, mashed hearts, spices. When Heidi and I were sophomores I used to guard the restroom stall at school for her when she puked, schoolbooks pressed to my chest while I listened to her gag, heave, spit, flush. And when she reemerged, smacking gum and wiping the sweat from her forehead, her round cheeks glowed. I never said a word. She moved away, came back, moved away. She didn’t answer my messages. Years later, in this silver kitchen, in my stiff white blouse and my floppy white hat, I roll a ball of phlegm inside my cheeks for her and my tongue propels it out of me and into her dish. I mix the dip with my finger and taste it. It tastes the way regret should: fatty, salty, and mouthwatering. Spit, the secret cement of souls. The waiter takes the dip for delivery. As Heidi eats it, I watch from the silver kitchen window, and my insides might as well be music.
There’s a married man who comes into the Bistro on weekends with his wife; they wear complementary earth tones and seventy-dollar sandals and hold hands over the tablecloth. Even from the silver window, I can see their rings are tattoos and not gold. When I knew him, when I loved him, he had no wife. He had not enough hair for a ponytail and he didn’t believe in Pilates or Priuses or condominiums. Back then all he did was smoke and read and sleep. Our weekends were foggy and bed-spent. He never paid rent, complained of restlessness and eventually left. I miss the smell of his pillow. For him, I stick my fingers in my orifices each and poke them in his Asian chicken salad. Finger in lips, lettuce; finger in nose, sesame dressing; finger in ear, shredded carrot; belly button to minced onion; vagina to meat. I send it away without a word. I blink from the silver window at their moving shadows and the flickering dance of fake candelabra. He savors and sips me while laughing with his wife. Nobody knows. That salad he forks is flavored with my juices. He chews a mouthful of me and smiles, not knowing I smile too, back here, where things sizzle and simmer and burn.
Once a year or so a celebrity-man seats himself at a corner table with a thin book of poems. He dines alone and orders a single scoop of gelato. He has a haphazard beard I want to rub. In teenagedom I had a poster of him. I admit to my fantasies. Example: him slipping the camisole off my shoulder. Him cupping my face with his hand and sucking my lips. His fingers tracing my skin’s shapes and pricking my hairs on end. But we all know the truth about this celebrity-man. He’s notoriously grumpy; if he takes off his sunglasses the insomniac bags become obvious; and he is dating another celebrity with bleached pigtails and a tit job. Still, I loved his carefree teenaged persona, his sarcastic sneer and scorching gaze, the negative sting I felt when witnessing his makeout scenes. And though my love is obscured by screens and years, it’s love all the same, like love through a barbed wire fence. This is why I shred my fingernails with the coconut and sprinkle it atop his raspberry gelato. He doesn’t know me, but I am inside of him. Smile, shiver from my silver window. I dream in iced cream.
If I could feed and watch them from my silver window until time grew tired of itself and curled up and ate its tail, I would. But they leave. They must. Go home. Their tables are cleared, disheveled plates swept up, dry crystal glasses stacked into a bus tray and taken to the kitchen. If it’s the dirtied dish of a person I love, I keep it, put it beneath my tableclothed dumbwaiter on a secret shelf for later. When I close at night, say goodbye to the waiters and the dishwashers and the hostesses, I will sit alone in the dark restaurant, beneath the pale twittering song of fluorescent lights, there behind the silver window, and I will eat their remnants off the plate; I will delight in each crumb, lick every sticky spot, remembering what it was I made them, what it was of me I gave them, and how I loved them so.
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Faith Gardner lives in Oakland and has stories in or forthcoming in PANK, Word Riot and Corium Magazine. Find her at faithgardner.com.