Interstate

by Stephen Dixon

  INTERSTATE 3

  Guy in the next car’s looking at him. Why’s he staring like that, what’s he think’s so interesting to look at? Some people just like to bug you out, especially from cars and especially from ones going fast on the highway, and this guy, oh God what a mug, mean as hell, written all over it. Pay him no attention, next thing you know he’ll be gone. “Daddy, do you know that man?” Margo says behind him and he says “Why, which man, what’re you talking about?” and she says “Not the driver but the man over there in the next car sitting next to him and looking at us,” and he says “Sitting next to whom, what do you mean?” and she says “Next to the driver of the car beside us, you can see it if you look,” and he says “Pay no attention to him, don’t even look another second at their car, both of you. Maybe he thinks we’re someone he knows and he can’t exactly place us. But we’re not who he thinks we might be, that I’m almost sure of, and I don’t like his face,” and she says “What’s wrong, it’s ugly?” and he says “It’s not that. I’d never not like someone just because he or she was homely or had a physical disfigurement,” and she says “What’s—” and he says “Deformity, and I know you’re going to ask what’s that, so, uh, Jesus—I’m sorry—but gosh almighty sometimes the easiest words come the hardest. Malformation. No. Something wrong with the face, let’s say, if the deformity or disfigurement’s there—a scar here, but a bad one, or a couple of lumps there. A person’s lost an eye, for instance, and just has a socket in his face for one—an eye socket, that’s where the space for the eye is. Or a—” “Oooh,” she says and Julie says “What, Daddy said something disgusting?” and she says “The way he was describing,” and Julie says “What’s describing?” “Saying things. Eye spaces without the eyes. Lumps on faces like big pimples like I once had,” and he says “Describing’s more to make clear by saying what the thing is in a more detailed way, or something, and you never had a big pimple. Harriet—Doctor Harriet said, well, that you were too young for pimples and it had something to do with—and she’s a dermatologist, a skin doctor, besides being a pediatrician, but what’d she say it had something to do with? You often remember those things better than I do, Margo. But not pimples or acne, which you kept insisting your one pimplelike blemish was…blemish, in a way, that’s what disfigurement or deformity, et cetera, is to some extent. A flaw or mark, like a pimple or scar, but on a much grander scale—a big scale, a huge one. Instead of a mark it’s a scar, instead of a blemish or pimple or boil, it’s a huge lamp—lump—where’d I get lamp from? on your cheek or neck—goiters, for instance, which people used to have for ages and when I was younger and maybe some still do.” “It was a pimple I had and I got rid of it with Mommy’s skin cream.” “It wasn’t a pimple and you got rid of it by it just going away.” “What are they, goyas?” she says and he says “Goiters, in the gland, thyroid, the enlargement of that gland—a swelling caused by an iodine deficiency—you know, the lack of this iodine in that gland,” and she says “But iodine’s a poison, Mommy says,” and he says “But you need a small amount of it from natural means—you know, produced in the body, that thyroid gland. If you don’t have it then you get it from artificial—fake, Julie, fake—sources, prescribed by a doctor, or you can get it from using iodinized salt, I think’s the word. Or ionized. No, iondized—one of them, maybe not even that. Iodized, that’s it. I haven’t seen any people around lately with goiters but there was, when I was much younger, this goiter lady where I worked as a waiter. It was at a Schrafft’s—that’s like a, well, it’s not like any restaurant today. In New York. For tea and tiny lunches and mostly frequented by women, but that was during the day. At night, simple dinners—lamb chops with mint jelly, and creamed spinach and apple pie, and known for its ice cream.” “I want to go there next time we’re in New York,” Julie says. “I don’t think there are any more of them, but the ice cream’s still around. It was in my first year of college. Eight to midnight shift. And she came after the dinner crowd left, where we served mostly sodas and sandwiches and snacks. She and her husband, this tall, bald, skinny guy who always wore a suit and vest, came in every night, I’m saying every single night, and took the same four-table. If you’re a couple you’re supposed to take a two-table, one much smaller and for two people, but they always sat at one for four. And sometimes, if that table was taken and all the other fours were, they joined together two two-tables to make a four or added another two-table to the four-table they already had because they were expecting friends, who usually never came but when they did, ordered just as little and stayed as long and were as cheap as the goiter lady and her husband. You have to understand that the manager only assigned the waiter four to five tables for his station, and only one of those was usually a four.” “What’s a four?” Julie says. “Not for something?” “I didn’t tell you? It’s a table for four people, and with four equal sides usually, like a square.” “And what’s a station?” Margo says. “Not like a radio’s?” “Good question, as really what the ‘four’ was. For it’s an unusual word for it, ‘four’ for four-table. And even ‘four-table’ is unusual for what it stands for. But a station’s the total number of tables you get to wait on, and they’re all usually close together so you can wait on one while bussing or cleaning another.” “Bussing?” Julie says. “To clear off the dirty dishes or get fresh water for it—you know, that job. But the point is you didn’t want, if you were a waiter, a single couple at your only four-table sitting there from eight-thirty till closing and only ordering a Sanka or Postum, I think it was called—a vegetable coffee made out of grain. Wait a minute, does that make sense? A grain coffee, for people who didn’t drink regular coffee or Sanka but wanted something like the taste and look of them, and also maybe sharing between them a slice of peach pie for the night, ‘two forks, please.’ That’s what they always asked for if you didn’t already have the silver on the table. I mean, I couldn’t believe those people.” “Grain coffee?” Margo says. “Like grain?” “Yuh. Like wheat, barley, rice, but barley I think it was made of—he, I remember, always had tea in a glass. They were Europeans, refugees from World War Two where they had fled Nazi Germany or even survived the war there. And where I suppose they drank tea in a glass and which was just another chore for the waiter, getting the hot water in the glass without breaking it. You first put in a spoon to conduct the heat—I don’t want to go into now explaining what that is—but you had to know that about the spoon. And then the glass, if you picked it up right away, like to put it on his table if you first didn’t put it on a saucer—well, what’s the difference? You burned your fingers either way—by first putting it on a saucer on your tray or no saucer and taking the glass off the tray and putting it on his table—but his fingers never burned. I don’t know what protection he had on them but he just picked it up and drank from it, so even his mouth and tongue should have been burned.” “What’s Nazi Germany?” Margo asks. “You mean with Hitler?” “Right. Adolf Hitler, she means, Julie. And these people were probably from Austria or Hungary or Poland and barely survived the war. And they were also Jewish, I’m sure, which I don’t know if you know but they were persecuted then over there. Persecuted: hunted down, killed because of their beliefs or just because they were born Jewish, so they probably also fled to America to escape all that, the goiter lady and her husband, which is what being a refugee is—fleeing—or just because they couldn’t ever go back to it for various reasons. For that time must’ve been something; beyond words; that old saw, a living hell.” “Hungary’s a country?” Julie says. “Hungary’s a country. Very good. How’d you know that, sweetheart, for it’s not the most known one?” “I just know.” “Though I was only saying Hungary was one of the countries they could’ve been from. Even Germany they could’ve been from, but I don’t think they drink tea in a glass there. I don’t know what they drink when it’s not wine or beer. Probably coffee. And I remember they spoke German and when their friends were there, a couple of other languages, which meant they could’ve
come from any number of countries. But she had her coffee every night, that’s for sure, and very often she asked for hot water when she was down to a quarter of a cup. We couldn’t charge for the extra water, you see, and it meant she could sit with her cup in front of her awhile longer. I suppose she had the grain one—they didn’t have then the kind of decaffeinated coffee we have now, I don’t think—because of her goiter condition. Doctor might’ve said no, but who knows? But then their leaving me a single quarter tip for the night. They’d leave around eleven-thirty when it was of course late and near closing time and nobody else was coming in. And if anyone was coming in, you didn’t want them because that’d mean they’d be sitting at your table till way past closing time, when what you really wanted was just to clean up your station and go home, got it? Okay.” “A quarter’s not so little money.” “Daddy’s talking about then, dummy, then,” Margo says. “Margo, don’t talk to her that way. And right,” he says to Julie. “It was worth a dollar by today’s quarter, meaning you could buy for a quarter then what you can for a dollar today. Do I have that right? I think so. But imagine one dollar tops in tips or so for one of your four-or five-tables for an entire night, and your biggest most productive table too, meaning the one you stand to make the most money from, and you can see what I mean. You were losing money as a waiter.” “You lost the dollar?” Julie says. “Every night from those people?” “No, I mean—oh gee, why’d I go into this? What started it? Good passing-the-highway-time talk, right? Right. But what I’m saying, and this isn’t your fault if you don’t understand it, sweetie, is that they were incredibly stingy and inconsiderate, sitting at my table or any waiter’s table for that long for so small an order and tip, and the manager shouldn’t have put up with it.” “What should he do?” Margo says. “‘Have done.’ Well, his policy was let them sit where they want, customer’s always right, blah blah—you’ve heard that one before—” “What?” Julie says. “It’s a saying, an expression. Honor thy customer and so on, because he’s got the money.” “And she‘s,” Margo says. “She’s got. True. Especially there. So long as there are other empty tables at the time. And since the restaurant was generally quiet between eight and nine, when they came in—lamb chop and jelly crowd having left, soda and snack crowd not in yet—they usually got the four-table they wanted. Besides, he couldn’t give a—he didn’t care how well we did. He was paid his salary, got no cut of our tips, so he didn’t rely on them the way we did, and that guy had been there forever, Mr. Feeny or Reilly or something—I forget his name. Art. That’s right, Art. We used to call him Art the—well, whatever we used to call him. Art the something—I forget. ‘Mister,’ though, that’s what he insisted we had to say before his name. But this customer, she had the most enormous goiter I ever saw and that’s why I and the other waiters—it wasn’t nice, I know that now and wouldn’t behave that way today. In fact, I didn’t like to say it then, but you know, they all did it and it was a rotten job, running around like mad for little dough and when you were really tired, for I had college and studying all day, so to make the job better you did little bad things for laughs. But we called her—that isn’t excusing it, you understand, for nothing really makes it right—but we called her the goiter lady, and the man, ‘the goiter lady’s husband.’ But her goiter was about the size of a football. Or maybe like a Softball, the kind you hit with a bat, but bigger than my big fist,” and he makes a fist and holds it up, “and was on the right side of her neck, or the left one, but anyway was a deformity. That’s why I brought it up, to explain the word,” and Julie says “The poor old lady. It must have been sad to walk around with that big thing on her. Why didn’t she have it taken off? Couldn’t she? Would it be too big a scar?” and he says “I don’t know about cutting it out, that’s a good question, and it is out, you know, not hanging on her to take off but pressed to her neck and chin and inside her skin. Today I’d have much more sympathy for her and, ironically, would ask—‘ironically’ meaning the reverse, or almost, to what I was saying; that it’s odd having that feeling now and you asking that question before, but—where was I? I’d ask the same question you did, Julie, and maybe even find out from a doctor why she couldn’t have it removed—I had two uncles who were ones—or what she could do if she could get it removed and then tell her while I was serving her, even. Or more likely—certainly more likely this—call her husband aside and tell him in private, for maybe they didn’t know. Maybe they thought ‘You have it, you live with it, you die with it, or if it happens to get smaller in time or disappear, even better,’ or were just not aware of what we can do in America with illnesses like that, deformities, et cetera. But if I was still a waiter today I’d still be a lot put off, even with my sympathy for her goiter, that they chose my four-table and that it’d be occupied by them for the next three hours. She was a nice lady, though, I’m not saying that. Nice smile, always okay to me. But sometimes the nicest customers, I found, were also the stingiest, and vice versa. Vice versa?” and Margo says “You mean the opposite, the other way around, vice for verse, verse for vice, I mean, versa,” and he says “That’s right, what it means, but that was more a question for me, that vice versa, for what I was about to say was that sometimes the worst customers—most demanding, gruffiest—were also the stingiest, which isn’t vice versa. And sometimes the worst and nicest were also the most generous—in fact in most cases the nicest gave the best tips—but anyway, enough of that,” and looks around and sees the car from before is beside him again, for a while it wasn’t or maybe it was for longer than he knew but he got so caught up in the conversation, talking, remembering—the goiter lady, where’d that memory come from after more than thirty years?—that he forgot about it or didn’t see it, and it stays even with his, drops back, then quickly comes even again and gets even a little closer, so close that he wonders if it’s crossing the lane line and he looks and it isn’t but he doesn’t feel comfortable with it so close and moves a couple of feet to the right. Guy with the same creepy look of before, smile, combo of both, staring at him, and he doesn’t like it and thinks when he’s looking at him “What’re you looking at, schmuck, you got a problem?” but gives the face of just the opposite, “Hey, how are you, nice day, see ya,” and looks front, and not to start anything with him, meaning give the idea he’s doing this out of some grievance or fear, he stays in the lane for about half a mile and then signals right, looks in the rearview and right side mirrors, giving more time to these than he usually does and just pushing up the directional signal the slow way he did, though no other cars are anywhere around his, and with what he thinks is a casual could-care-less look, so if the guy’s still looking at him he’ll think he’s in no great rush to get away from him, and then pulls into the next slower lane, depresses the directional manually before it clicks off by itself, and the guy’s car—the passenger; driver next to him looked a lot like him, almost like his older brother but his face doughier—goes into the lane he just left and stays alongside him. What the hell? he thinks, not looking at them. What’re they doing? They’re scaring him and scaring him can make his driving shaky and that guy’s creepy look can also scare his kids too. Doesn’t he know that and doesn’t the driver know it too if he’s encouraging the creep? Just driving that close to him and sort of stalking him so many miles, makes the driver just as bad. God, the stupid things guys can do when they got nothing better going, or what? Listen, he’s nervous at the wheel to begin with sometimes, especially when his kids are with him without his wife and they’re going at a fast clip on a long drive, so it’s never a good idea to act like this, it shouldn’t be done—scaring and grinning or just looking plain peculiar at other cars is something an overgrown kid does and not a smart one. Or maybe there’s something wrong with his car they’re trying to tell him about. If that was so the guy would’ve pointed right away or made some kind of signal and not given him the spooky look and ugly grin. But they’re beside him and the guy still grinning and staring and the driver with this hey-what-a-how
l look, and when he slows, they slow, and when he picks up speed, they do, so nothing to do but find a cop if he can find one or signal to pull off at the next exit and if they do beside or behind him then to stick on this one for he doesn’t want to get on any smaller even more deserted road with them, or just slow down all the way on this road and stop, but if they stop on the shoulder with him he doesn’t want to have anything to do with them, it could be a robbery, that’s what he now thinks they might be after, maybe not just his wallet but his car too and even his oldest girl, so he’d just zip away and maybe the whole thing would start again, slow, fast, shifting lanes, same stupid smirks and grins, looking for the next exit or a cop or some other car or truck on the road to somehow signal to that these guys are menacing him, or maybe he should just face up to the guys straight off. Maybe that’s all he needs to stop it. A look that he’s not taking their shit or just that he’s hip to it, and then they’d fly off. The wrong thing to do?—maybe not. But no angry or put-down look, just one that says, well what should it say? With his voice and face, something like “Hey, what gives already, fella, what the hell gives?” So he looks at the guy but no casual could-care-less look, a look with his face serious and eyebrows raised saying “So, what’s up?” and with his index finger making a whole bunch of little quick circles to the guy, he doesn’t know why or what it means, probably just nerves, and the guy raises his eyebrows same way but grins and then with his lips mimics almost a stripteaser’s or showbiz kiss and with his hand closed makes several circles in the air for him to roll his window down. He shakes his head “Sorry, I don’t understand, what’s that you’re saying and what was all that with the kiss?” because he’s at a loss now what to do and feels he made a big mistake looking at the guy like that and doing whatever he did with his finger, for who knows what the guy took it as, and is suddenly afraid of them again, doesn’t want to rile the guy more than he thinks he has, make him think he’s a wiseass, he for sure doesn’t want to say what he really thinks and that’s that the guy’s acting, well, not “say” or also “say” but to gesture and look at the guy to give the impression, well, not “impression” either for that sounds too much like “suggestion” but to sink definitely into the guy that he’s acting like a complete asshole, driver too, that in fact their actions are wicked or something, no, wicked, when you consider the kids, wrong, totally wrong in every way and that they’re imbeciles, if they want to know, imbeciles and pigs and probably always have been for as long as anyone can remember, that he’s a punk, this guy, a tried and proven punk and no doubt the one responsible of the two for what’s going on, and the driver’s his stupid stooge but almost no less to blame, that’s how he sees it and what he’d like to get across and with his finger this time pointing right at him as if he’d like to stick it through his chest and then to wave for the guy to have the car pull over to the shoulder and if the guy says “What?” not to back off but to point and wave and say “Come on, come on, you know what I mean, pull over to the damn side,” and after they both stop there for him to get out and go over to their car and when the guy opens the door to grab him out and slap his head against the car and punch his face a couple of times and pick him up and throw or roll him over the hood and then grab the driver out and if he locked his door, to go through the passenger’s side and if he’s locked that too to just smash a window with a rock nearby and open the door and grab the driver and say “You want some of the same too? Then leave us alone. Leave everybody on the road alone. You got problems, go work them out for yourself some other way but terrorizing, or trying to, people on the road. It’s the stupidest thing to do and also one of the rottenest, don’t you know that? Couldn’t you see it in my face?” Haven’t you any idea how you made my kids feel? Don’t you have any concern for anyone but your goddamn selves?” and then to throw the driver back into his seat and go back to his car and get in and even if the kids are screaming for an explanation or just hysterical, even hysterical, to just start the car up and go.