Chapter from This Purgatory

Her mother noticed the vague intensity Sally expressed in the diner. As a mother leaning slightly toward the east in those days, it was quite difficult to manage a smile for her own daughter. A fight erupted over the tardiness of the waiter and she said, "He is such a loser." This caused Sally to launch into one of her popular digressions about being thankful for being in a diner and awaiting a bit of food.

"Oh for crying out loud Sally," was all her mother could say. For crying out loud. How does one explain to a Sally what is going on in the late night of a diner except in a story and so she did. She began:

"You know, I used to work in one of these, they're awful..." as if the children hadn't heard it ten times before or a hundred. "Your father would be feeding you as I left and my heart would just sink. In fact, I paid for your sister's homebirth by collecting just the coins in a coffee can. I saved all my coin tips and paid for the midwife myself because really, he wanted nothing to do with it all...before you were born that is," Ruth added in a conscientious way.

Sally just pursed her lips tighter and kept looking around, not realizing that she was even worse off than her mother who knew what it was all about now. Kids always think they know so much.

"But you know, it was also one of the best times in my life. I met people in the diner. All those old guys at the counter and Ultra, who thought he was Jesus. He didn't say so but it was pretty obvious that he looked like him and anyways, he didn't talk alot."

Still, Sally didn't budge. She felt sorry for the waiter. Her mother kept an uneasy eye on the food window and felt certain that their order was just sitting there and getting cold. Oddly enough, she didn't usually care this much about a slow order but for some reason, this time, she did. She didn't want her children to suffer so much. She'd been watching too much news and for crying out loud, had even ordered a collection of Carol Burnett shows from an early morning advertisement there. She just wanted a little "pick me up" as in the way her own mother used to "put on her face" to go out back in the old days when her mother was actually alive.

Ruth was born weighing only five pounds and was put directly into an icubator. This fact somehow made her feel very special throughout her life but she didn't think about it often, just once or twice in twenty years but when she thought of it, Ruth's special nature just seemed to crystalize completely in her own mind. I was in an incubator! Like an egg, like a very precious egg. The reason she was such a lightweight however was because her mom was such a heavy smoker and the fact was in one of her most coveted photographs in which her mother sat slouched and very pregnant on the tattered couch with a menthol held delicately between the tips of her fingers. She'd tried to abort Ruth with a certain drug that gave Ruth cervical problems when she was only fifteen but always held that she had taken it to prevent another stillbirth. Her mother had had two of them and would talk about those once in a while. The only one Ruth really remembered though was the one that fell out at the breakfast table, a little boy. She had lost two brothers! And one of them literally fell out at the breakfast table and for whatever reason, Ruth believed it happened in a diner. It provided so much evidence to Ruth that, yes, she was supposed to be born and yes, she was very, very special.

When the food finally arrived, Josh the waiter begged the pardon of his “clients” as Ruth liked to think of herself when in any service situation, obviously worried about his tip in light of the fact that he’d read Ruth’s look as well as Ruth had read Sally’s and Sally had read her mother’s. Sally’s brother Joseph hadn’t really said a thing about it all because he was just trapped, entirely trapped by two females whom he knew only too well, or so he thought. His mother contemplated the irony of their relationships as all mothers do and often told him, “You were in my uterus you know, I know everything about you.”

Sally still looked distressed. She said, “This place is so scary.”

“There you go again! What do you want me to do about it Sally?” Ruth couldn’t explain what she knew, it was entirely too frightening to let on what it was she knew very well. Sally got even more agitated and pursed her lips even tighter and barely touched the food which looked quite delicious to Ruth who had ordered her usual eggs and biscuits instead of what she really wanted.

“Do you want some mom?” Sally couldn’t resist making a point of offering it to her mom.

“Oh no sweetie, you eat it. If there’s any left I’ll take a bite later.” Ruth’s eggs drooped in front of her on her plate and she slid them around in a puddle of fat, they were half done and the hashed browns were a sorry sight. The biscuit was pretty good and she used it to sop up the luke warm watery eggs. Joseph shoved his food down as fast as usual and Ruth couldn’t help but notice he didn’t know how to cut his baked potato so that he could eat it without messing around with the peel.

“You do it like this son,” she said in a matter of fact tone. He rolled his eyes and just looked helpless. “Your fingers are too long you know, it isn’t really your fault,” and she tried to make him laugh but it wasn’t really very funny. He’d heard it so many times before and pretty much, resented it.

“Oh well, what can I say?” was the only thing she could think of to make it all better, this situation in a cruddy diner in a city that existed mainly to serve the needs of the US military. Everyone in the diner looked the same and outside, just about every car had a bumper sticker on it with the American Flag.

Ruth thought once again how hard it is to live in purgatory without being able to tell anyone about it. It was her secret although she knew that there were others who knew it too. People like Ultra who instead of talking, just imitated and tried to look real.