XI

The next day Thomas skipped the presentation on effective speaking and met Clarissa for lunch. After about forty-five minutes of fairly aimless walking they eventually decided on a little Chinese place with no name that was very effectively hidden down an alley just off a rather dubious side street. Actually it had a name, but Thomas could not read Chinese. That the owners’ did not feel the need to put up a name in English, or even a close approximation, was considered by many to be a hint.

Inside it was clear that the decorator was making a very strong statement about having other, more important, things to do. The tables were an assortment of the folding, banquet tables seen at hotel functions everywhere, except these had obviously been retired by the hotel that had originally owned them, and perhaps even a subsequent owner. Thomas had never realized that the height of banquet tables varied so much. Off to one side, for more intimate, or perhaps unsocial parties, were a couple of rickety card tables. The chairs were an even odder collection. They ranged from old café chairs to wooden kitchen chairs to folding chairs of unknown strength. Out of the several dozen furniture legs on display in the room, Thomas was willing to wager that no two were of an equal length. This gave the room a festive, what the hell, we’re all going to end up on the floor anyway atmosphere that made complaining that the duct tape holding your seat cushion together was now more firmly attached to your designer silk and wool blend slacks seem a bit petty.

The walls had been painted a garish yellow that screamed “Close Out Sale At the Paint Store,” and along the wall opposite the card tables was a small counter with a couple napkin dispensers, some plastic forks and spoons, chopsticks, and several bottles of various condiments, some of which seemed menacing.

At the back of the room was a counter. A piece of notebook paper with the crudely lettered words “order Here” had been pinned to a post at the end of the counter, and a kitchen could be seen in the darkness beyond. Above the counter was a large sign with many lines of Chinese characters, under some of which were the English names of Chinese dishes of varying degrees of familiarity. All in all, the atmosphere at first glance seemed to sum up the attitude of the management fairly succinctly. They had heard of ambiance, and it irritated them.

Thomas looked at Clarissa with an expression that didn’t so much plead with her to leave, but groveled pathetically in the most embarrassing way. Clarissa, on the other hand, thought things were working out nicely. She had done a quick head count, and the Asian to round-eye ratio was nearly perfect. There were about twenty people scattered around the various tables, hunched over their bowls, showing a single minded determination to think only about the food they were eating. Only one person was not of Asian ancestry, and he had the look of someone who had spent several of the last years roaming about the parts of China, Viet Nam, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia that don’t usually get put on the guided tours. What that look was exactly is up to you.

“Looks alright to me. Let’s give it a try.”

When they got up to the counter they could see that an elderly woman sat behind it. She was old. Very old. Workers taking a break from building the Great Wall had probably given her their orders. After a second or two she gave a start and then carefully stood up. Once she was standing she made all the chairs and tables seem stable and solid. It wasn’t that she teetered or wobbled. You just felt that at any moment she could or would collapse into a pile of dust and threadbare woolens. “You ready order?”

Clarissa eyed the menu board again, and said, “Is the fried tofu made with hot chili paste or sweet?”

“It come either way. You like spicy?”

“Yes. And some tea, please.”

“You got it. And for you?”

Thomas got the distinct feeling that some how, on some frequency only females could receive, he was being mocked. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Clarissa grin and pointedly look somewhere else. He didn’t know what the joke was, but assumed he was the punch line. “Um, is the Mongolian beef very spicy?”

“Don’t worry. I tell cook to make it special extra bland for you.”

This was a level of abuse he was accustomed to. “Ah, that’s very kind of you. And I would like lemonade to drink.”

“What this look like? Trader Vic’s? We got tea, water and soda.” With the word ‘soda’ she gestured vaguely in the direction of the drink dispenser next to the condiment counter. I would have mentioned it when describing the room, but I just noticed it myself.

“Just a regular soda, please.”

“They all regular. All same except some orange, some clear and some brown. I not sure I trust orange one.”

Thomas paid for the food, and the old woman started screaming something in what he took to be Chinese at the darkness behind her. From amid the crashes of what sounded like a particularly violent talempong orchestra someone screamed back. For the next five minutes the two voices, or more—it was hard to tell—screamed at each other with a vehemence rivaled only by a large scale battle between approximately twenty-three cats. This, of course, is how it sounds to Occidental ears. In reality, if not actuality, they were making rather pointed, and possibly obscene, remarks about Thomas’s taste buds, and worrying about the lateness of their daughter.

Thomas and Clarissa took seats, but then they didn't know what to do with them so they put them back and sat down at one of the card tables. As he sat down the table wobbled violently and spilled half his soda. After a couple trips across the room to get napkins, the table was dry again and Thomas sat down. Clarissa seemed to be laughing at some private joke again. “What?”

“Didn’t that seem strange to you?”

Thomas looked around the room. The tables’ tops made a surprisingly accurate topographical depiction of northern Arizona except with the seismic stability of Japan. At the back a feline war of untold dimensions continued. And across the room he was sure smoke was coming out of one of the condiment bottles. “You’re going to have to narrow it down a little.”

“The lady’s accent. It didn’t make any sense. She was mispronouncing both her ‘L’s and her ‘R’s. It was like she was trying to be Chinese and Japanese at the same time.”

“Maybe she’s just an over-achiever.”

Do not be alarmed.

Like Thomas, you didn’t notice that the old woman was mixing her ‘L’s and ‘R’s with reckless abandon because it wasn’t written that way. In a perfect, or at least different, world a much better or much worse writer would have written something like “Don’ wolly. I teww cook make it specioh extla bran’ foh you.” Then again, that writer would probably have been hunted down by the ghost of Joel Chandler Harris and forced to read the dialect passages of Dorothy L Sayers until he, or she, repented fully and completely his, or her, transgressions.

Just then a middle-aged man in a t-shirt, dark blue work pants, and an apron brought out their food. He had the smile of someone who enjoys what he does, and is content with life in general. “Spicy fried tofu,” and he sat a large bowl down in front of Clarissa. As he set Thomas's dish down he said, “Mongolian beef—American style.”

Thomas had to admit the food looked far better than the Chinese food he was accustomed to, and the aroma was wonderful. The smell was savory and spicy without being heavy—and just a bit different than any Chinese food Thomas had had before.

The man set a bowl of rice down between them, said, “Enjoy,” and beamed with pride as he looked at his creations.

Just then a girl came in the door. She was about junior high school age, and wore the plaid skirt and white shirt of many private, parochial schools, not to mention the more hopeless and private, parochial fantasies of many older men. The cook/server beamed even more and said something to her, which she answered by rolling her eyes in exasperation, and sighing heavily. As she walked passed them to the back she seemed to carry the weight of the entire universe’s woes on her sensitive, martyred shoulders. The man beamed even more, which Thomas thought was impossible, and said, “That’s our daughter, Kimberly. She thinks everything boring, and should be beige.” With that he beamed himself back to the kitchen, and the old woman and Kimberly started a conversation that would have made the rangiest alley cat back off in fear.

As they had been talking to the cook/server another man started wiping down some of the tables near the back counter. Even given the mish-mash of castoffs they had for furniture the one thing you could say about the place was that it was clean. Squeaky clean. Very wobbly, but very clean. The man bussing the tables looked almost, but not quite exactly like the cook/server, and when Thomas looked very hard he could see another almost identical but completely different man cleaning vegetables.

For a few minutes Thomas and Clarissa concentrated on their meals. There was a reason everyone was hunched over their bowls at this little restaurant. The food demanded your full attention, and you instinctively tried to contain the aroma with your entire body. With each mouthful you discovered some new, subtle layer of flavor and aroma that made you want to savor that bite as long as possible, and at the same time eager to take the next. Eventually Thomas looked up, surprised that the surroundings were indeed as shabby as he remembered. For a second or two a lingering aftertaste that hinted of soy, garlic and something undefined—red skies and dark orange forests perhaps—floated around his mouth.

“That,” he said with religious conviction, “was good.”

“Amazing.” Clarissa had the look of a woman in love. Thomas decided he really liked that look, but was surprised to find he was suddenly a bit jealous of some bean curd. “Try a bite,” she said.

Now Thomas had been raised in the Midwest in a very small farm town far from those culinary hotbeds of the suburbs. His mother was the product of generations of Midwestern farm wives’ cooking traditions. This meant that all food except vegetables were either brown, tan or white. Vegetables were greenish gray. During the week meat was breaded and fried, and on Sunday it was roasted until it formed a quarter inch crust that was impervious to knives and small arms fire. He was in his twenties before he tasted anything spicier than catsup.

“Um, I don’t know…”

“Oh, come on. It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever tasted.”

“Ah, well, you’ve obviously never been to Orem, Utah.”

“What?” People who knew Thomas tended to say “What?” a lot. In fact they said it with such regularity that he often waited until he had heard a somewhat baffled “What?” before continuing the discussion. Clarissa, however, was not going to distracted by logical discontinuity. “Here, just a little taste.”

For a brief, frightening second Thomas remembered how his highchair used to wobble unsteadily, and he opened his mouth. The taste was unlike anything he had ever known. There was a smokiness that barbecue pit bosses across the nation would kill to achieve. There was a savory sweetness that seemed to slide around and across the fringes of his soul like two luminescent snakes dancing in the air, and would haunt
his memories for years to come.

And there was fire.

A lot of fire.

Sweat beaded on his forehead. His nose ran. His eyes teared. His nose teared, his forehead ran and his eyes beaded. It was the most intense sensation he had ever had that did not involve a dentist’s drill. And somewhere beyond the heat shimmer of his vision the old woman was laughing.