I wrote this 10 years ago. It’s about an encounter I had in Pendleton, while I was working for the Missoula Children’s Theatre in the summer of 1984. I wonder if this woman is still there.
War Bonds
She wanted to know what it was I wanted. I’d never been here before. It was a forgotten place on the main street of the little town I was traveling through. I had to stop here for a week, though, because that was my job. It’s what I did.
I never told this to anyone, but I’m afraid of old people. Especially old people who are obviously trying to look younger than they really are. I don’t get it. I hope, secretly, that I will never get old, when I see someone grasping at straws trying to stay young.
This woman had the most curiously colored hair I had ever seen. I think it was magenta with pink highlights. She was on the other side of the counter from where I sat. I was looking at the plastic-covered menu. The plastic was yellowish-brown with age, and read Club Cigar. This was apparently the name of the lunch counter where I had chosen to eat lunch. I thought it would be interesting.
The Club Cigar was a smoke shop on one side of the room and a lunch counter on the other. The woman was a fixture behind the lunch counter. She had curiously colored hair and was wearing a waitress uniform that appeared to be forty years old. Her black skirt tailored to be slimming, the white blouse top was starched so tight it looked like it would break if it was ironed one more time. The woman appeared to be eighty trying to look forty. Trying to look thirty? Twenty? I couldn’t tell.
I was looking at the menu and the counter beyond the menu. The counter was a different color yellow than the menu. It had been bright yellow linoleum when it was installed, but now it had faded to a pleasant shade. Faint outlines of boomerang shapes remained in the linoleum. It looked like a pattern of linoleum I had seen before—maybe on my mom’s kitchen table.
I always ordered the same thing in a place like this. I remembered my father telling me about traveling food. He had said, “When you are on the road and you are eating in a strange place, always order a grilled cheese sandwich.” His reasoning for this was that it was hard to mess up a grilled cheese sandwich. Without looking up from the menu, I told the ancient woman before me that I wanted a grilled cheese sandwich.
“And what to drink?” She asked.
I looked up, and for a moment my gaze caught hers. She was looking past me to the other side of the room. There was no one behind me. For a moment I thought she might be blind, but she wasn’t. She was looking out the door behind me. Out into the empty street. But then, a second later, she focused her attention on me. She looked at me.
Eye to eye.
“Well … ,” I began to tell her I wanted a Diet Coke, but I couldn’t. She was looking that deeply into my eyes that I couldn’t go on. I felt like a president sitting for a portrait. This ancient woman was looking so hard at me that she at once knew more about me than I wanted her to know. I didn’t flinch. I didn’t blink. I couldn’t say a word.
For a split second I was a teenager and she was on roller skates. I wanted a grilled cheese sandwich and a vanilla coke. I wanted a dime for the jukebox, so I could play my favorite tune. I wanted the courage to ask my girl to give me my class ring back that she had wrapped with yarn and wore around her neck on a shoestring.
A second later I was a soldier and she was a hot dame. I wanted a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of coffee. I wanted to look in the paper to see what Rommel was doing in Africa. I wanted to ask her if it was all right for me to stay until she closed up and maybe we could make a night of it. I could borrow a car and we could drive out past the stockyards and park.
I was a cowboy, just in town for the Roundup. I wanted her to wait for me to go to the rodeo and win enough money so that she could go away with me. We would travel all over the country bustin’ broncs. She could stay in the motel and make it homey while I went out and won big cash prizes. We’d hit all the big rodeos. Calgary, Dillon, Cheyenne, Billings, Laramie, Denver, Provo, Vegas, Santa Fe, Artesia, Amarillo, Muleshoe, Quanta, Dallas, San Antonio.
I’d be back, and I’d have a ring. I’d ask her to wait for me until I came back. “Don’t change a thing,” I’d tell her, gazing at her uniform and her swooping red hair. “You look just like Rita Heyworth,” I’d say. “I’ll be back,” I’d tell her. “Wait for me.”
“I’ll have a Diet Coke,” I said. She turned away from me and started making my lunch.