Plates clink in an unorganised rhythm and the background chatter of the radio informs me of more meaningless trials or tribulations of our broken world. Worn linoleum floors bear the scars and scuffs of countless years of serving and spilling. Specials that ended four months ago are pasted onto the walls. Waitresses bustle about, with tired smiles and weary familiarity.
Face to face in a dimly lit diner, I feel my skin burn. Back straight and fingers interlaced on the table, I’m keenly aware that he can sense the dishonesty of my composed exterior. He leans back with his usual nonchalant demeanour: an arm draped casually over the back of the chair and an untrained, infuriating expression of apathy smeared across his face.
The entree is the easiest part. We wade through the surface of conversation topics – exchanging light-hearted questions about work and that new deadline and my mother’s bitter phone calls and Martha down the road’s latest affair. He asks how my day was and I recount the tale from today’s writing class. A girl stood up to shout at a boy across the room, spit flying and hair untamed. Fury and grace intertwined. He’d given his two cents on women’s reproductive rights where nobody had asked it. The naive part of me expects him to agree with me about the incident yet I’m not surprised when he calls her volatile. Nor am I surprised when he brands her with the name he always calls outspoken women: ‘those kinds of girls’. I can’t help but notice the sneer behind his words as he brands them with the title with a hot iron rod.
By the time the main meal comes out, the conversation makes a natural diversion to last week and last month and last year. We unravel the seasons of our past while he winds his spaghetti around his fork. The veins bursting out of his neck remind me of my father. As he leans further and further across the table and I slouch further and further down the cold leather seats, I forget I am no longer a little girl. I am aged now. But it’s hard to remember who you are when the only reflection you have of yourself is the man looking at you.
Dessert arrives and the future beckons with a toothy, leering grin. A thick slice of chocolate cake on a hot, silver platter with ‘Welcome to Womanhood!’ written in chocolate sauce around the edges. He tells me what our future will look like and I nod like the good girl I am. I feel my life branch out before me but it’s not the gentle embrace wrapped around my shoulders. I catch a glimpse at all the past and future versions of myself and watch as love unravels me onto the carpet. Endure as muddy men keep their dirty shoes on.
The diner is a sanctuary of sorts, yet it’s seen a lot over the years.
It’s no stranger to couples quarrelling over a plate of pasta. Or divorced parents reuniting for the sake of their children, whose cut-throat remarks stain the tablecloth before it’s time to pay the bill. Or a single mother taking her children out to eat, scanning the menu for the cheapest option and landing on a side of onion rings.
There’s a girl squeezed next to her mother in one of the run-down booths observing the look in her father’s eyes and she accepts this as her fate. She’ll come to resent her mother and blame her for her father’s anger but that won’t shift the atoms and save her. The diner clock behind her head keeps ticking, the hands rotate continuously around that face of impartiality. Time doesn’t stop for small girls in old diners. Why should it stop for you? The cycle is already set in motion.
She won’t be able to prevent the moment at twenty-five when she cuts her hair short for the first time. When she gazes into the mirror and doesn’t see herself. She won’t be able to stop herself from seeing her mother. And when she sits in a diner and stares into the unforgiving eyes of a man she thinks she loves – she will realise she cannot escape the familial timepiece of her fate that never quite chimes happiness. When her mother watches her walk down the aisle, do you think she will feel sad? Do you think she will feel hopeless because she couldn’t protect her daughter from the same things she fell victim to?
So many things buried between the bricks of these diner walls but no one to dig them out.
“Are you even listening?”
I nod placidly because that’s what I am supposed to do. I’ve known since I was 8 and my mother started sleeping on the couch because “dad snores” that agreeing is all you can do.
I’ve observed many women filter in and out of the creaky swinging door of this diner over the years. Each one is a reflection of the next, echoing a collective sigh that reverberates off peeling wallpaper and checkered tiles. Their stories differ in the specifics but are all the same in essence: sacrifices made, dreams deferred, silence over noise.
My eyes wander between them, idly listening to their partners endlessly blather mundane observations about capitalism and the stock market. I never fail to note the glaze over their eyes. Diner death is losing your mind listening to men conjure idealistic fantasies of economic growth and personal triumph.
But that’s the role of the everyman's woman: listen, nod, respond with a humble ‘I don’t know’ when she asks if she thinks we have free will. Wonder if this is all that life is. Follow him to parties, and be introduced as his missus. Never her name – that’s her job to announce if she wants it to be known. Held hostage to the life of Mrs.Whatshisface. Is it free will then?
Diner death is the way we lose ourselves in favour of the man in front of us. We’d asphyxiate on his apologies before leaving. Suffocate beneath layers of compromise and quiet resentment.
Diner death is the way we endure the slow, excruciating demise of ourselves over a basket of garlic bread. You’d defend his name to God if it was his mistreatment of you that denied him into heaven.
I stare at the shell of a once bright young girl and I feel sad for her. A young girl who dreamed of love. A young girl who conjured fairytales of what love is supposed to be from a cauldron of whispers on the playground and secrets spoken under bedsheets.
I stare at a girl who smiles at strangers on her morning walk and makes funny faces at babies.
I stare at a girl who prayed for a peaceful death for the roadkill she passes on her way to work.
I stare at a girl who cannot see she is the love that she is searching for. I stare at a girl nodding absentmindedly at a man telling her she isn’t doing enough. She diminishes herself into the narrow confines of his perception, like a puzzle piece trying to squeeze itself into a too-tight space.
My eyes flick over to a young couple. A tall, tattooed boy and his girlfriend. Knees touching beneath the table and a glint of naive hope in her eyes. He tells her about his political beliefs but when she asks if he’s read any Marx, he asks her who ‘Marks’ is. She doesn’t laugh for fear of wounding him. What more is she to do? On some days, she becomes the shape of a girl who knows every lyric to every song on The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead album. On others, she is a stripped mannequin in his bed. She stays to convince herself that she’ll be another thing he can never get out of his head. To love a man like him is to perform the most sacred ritual. The sacrificial girl always drowns in the linen sheets. The prophetic boy becomes a god. Yet, we can’t see the grief under the bed if we’re on someone else’s mattress.
You lay your thoughts out on the table and pray the wrong person won’t pick them up. Yet when he picks them up and shakes them upside down until you're blue in the face and you cannot remember what the thought ever was – you’ll say you’re grateful to have a man who holds you accountable. For what more are you than a grateful woman? A good, forgiving woman.
A hand slamming in front of me and cutlery jumping from their place on the table lurches me out of my spiralling thoughts.
“Listen”, he seethes.
Would you believe me if I said I couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t make a single fucking sound?
When we exhaust each other and let our grief spill out onto the table, somebody has to clean it up. And maybe that person should be me. But my limbs have long grown tired of cleaning up after a man’s mess. Amidst the clatter of dishes and music, I observe a room of women destined for something greater.
They say God is important because people won’t be kind unless they fear it will affect the fate of their death. People won’t be true unless they have the spectre of divine judgement looming and a fear of someone watching them.
My God is the woman I want to be and she is always watching.
I grab my bag and walk away from the man who doesn’t know my middle name. I swing open the creaky door and step into a night that beckons me with its fruits of freedom and the love awaiting me.
I won’t die in a diner.