SKYLAR!! GET THE HELL OVER HERE!!
Scott sat alone at the periphery of tables and chairs fastened to the floor inside Wednesdays. He sipped the coffee he’d ordered and glanced periodically at his watch while outside on Highway 401 the other cars zipped past.
It was like a race, and they were getting ahead.
Twenty minutes passed. Her coffee was now nearly room temperature. “What was she DOING in there?” he wondered, incredulous. He looked towards the door with the icon of the woman stamped on the plastic square. She didn’t emerge. Sitting by himself and suddenly very conscious of this, he missed her, as if most of a large continent and a major ocean separated them. He knew that other guys at this point would begin to worry about their missing girlfriends, so he tried, thought maybe he too could be worried, but ultimately was distracted by the large cheek of a woman’s buttocks pressed firmly against the back of his skull. He looked up just as the woman, looking down in a studied, bored manner, noticed him. She glanced at his head then the back of the chair before returning her gaze impatiently to his head again in a way that was meant to communicate that she had thought his head was the chair goddammit and that both his head and the chair had been successful in their plot to make her look stupid and, please… could they just move on! Then, she apologized listlessly and moved an inch closer to the back of the line, practically spooning the small man in front of her. She wanted a cheeseburger and was going to get it! In 11 minutes she’d order a “cheeseburger” but there wouldn’t be any cheese on it – or rather, not anything a person seventy years ago would have recognized as cheese. He looked at the menu above the row of cashiers, her ass, then the picture of the hamburger illuminated from behind, and decided that the cheese looked like an orange bathroom tile.
Suddenly the woman jerked her body around (towards the video games placed against the far wall) and in doing so swiped him viciously in the ear with the faded ski pass fastened to the zipper on her ski-jacket. “Skylar!?” the woman screeched. He winced and checked his ear irrationally to see if it was still there, then his hand for blood.
“What?!!!” a child’s voice yelled in the distance from a simulated driving video game as if he were in his living room and the voice of the woman he was responding to was deep frying something energetically in their kitchen.
"SKYLAR!! GET THE HELL OVER HERE!!” she yelled and saw Scott holding his ear. Reflexively, she scowled in his direction. (She couldn’t believe she’d actually let his pretentious head touch her ass. Had he been snuggling it?)
The door to the women’s washroom opened and displayed the chaos within. He forgot about the pain, and his potentially missing ear. He saw Emily exiting the restroom, or thought he did. He stood up but realized, in fact, it wasn’t her. I am worried, he thought. “See?” he said pointedly to himself. He sat down and looked around Wendy’s feeling lost, not unlike a golden retriever tied outside a supermarket in a snowstorm.
Inside the restroom Emily caught a glimpse of him just before the door shut. She knew by the position of his eyebrows in the middle of his forehead that he missed her. Well, good, she said and decided at that moment that she would take her time. She washed her hands; she had a detailed conversation with a nice lady about the nice lady’s new teeth. The woman reminded her of her Aunt Ellen (but not Chinese), and she was learning stuff. On some level she knew she was annoyed with him as he sat there outside the washroom…
As she listened to the woman talk she continued to explore the thoughts unfolding in her head.
It hadn’t always been this way, she knew. This was one thing she was certain of. She hadn’t always had to put up with this. Really, he was a good guy, she said to herself, nodding at the woman’s teeth. A lot of people didn’t really understand him like she did. …Jesus. Had she just thought that? she wondered; because that sounded really super stupid. She showed the older lady her incisors and then her gums. The woman nodded and spoke sadly about both her nieces and their questionable dental hygiene and Emily expressed a muted horror. …Anyway, Emily decided, this rough patch between them would pass. Definitely! She was really very certain. In any case, she would never walk out on him. That was for sure. If she’d been telling you this she would have locked eyes with you and not blinked, until you looked away. She found herself hugging the older lady and watched her totter out. She would never walk out on him... She had not imagined her life without him. She couldn’t. Anyway. She smiled and promised herself she really would start flossing… She looked at the door the nice older lady had passed through then she washed her hands for the fourth time, starting to feel, perhaps, on some level, a little guilty. She gathered her strength.
Outside the women’s washroom, he happened to look up and really see her exit, business-like. He felt like he hadn’t seen her in, literally, weeks! He was happy and conscious of it; it seemed natural. He smiled and stood up, thinking they’d leave, but instead, (perhaps because he had stood up) she sat down. He began to lower himself back onto the plastic seat.
“It’s a madhouse in there!” she said, sounding invigorated and conspicuously self-reliant, and ignoring the slow descending of his bottom beneath the top of the table. She took the second coffee and spotted the teeth moving among the parked cars outside. “Good! My coffee’s still warm, sort of,” she said. She yawned and adjusted herself, not looking at him who, she decided, was struggling awfully hard to look incredulous.
“What’s going on? I thought you were kidnapped.”
“Oh. That’s sweet. You were thinking about me, Scott?”
There was something in her tone, he noted, something that he could not put his finger on, but he just let it slide. It didn’t matter, he told himself. Or, he was going to ignore it, sincerely wanted to, and decided, absolutely, that he would pretend that she wasn’t saying what he suspected, or rather, actually knew she was saying. …What the hell? What was this?!! he thought. He’d been sitting there for almost half a freakin’ hour being the model of patience in a goddamn Wendy’s on the side of Highway 401, when they both had clearly agreed that they would get this very long drive over with as quickly as possible (and avoid the gridlock that awaited them in the late afternoon along the Don Valley Parkway). They had said they would not make the drive any more painful than it had to be, and now, she was giving him this! To hell with that! He cleared his throat with gusto. “Um. What’s that mean?”
She locked eyes with him, “The traffic is picking up Scott. Maybe we should get going.”
Neither of them moved.
“Well, you were gone a seriously long time,” he said uneasily. “I was really worried.” She asked him how long but, yes, of course, she noted, he was stumped. He had absolutely no idea how long she’d been in the washroom. He pulled a number out of a hat. “Uh. About eleven minutes, maybe?”
She shrugged. It didn’t matter to her.
“I went twice,” he said. “I sincerely thought maybe I’d missed you. Like you’d come out when I’d gone in, and then I’d come out but you’d gone to the parking lot, and then you came back into the restaurant just as I’d gone back to the washroom, or something like that.”
She looked down at her coffee cup and wondered where it had been during the “twice” he was referring to. Behind her she knew that an angry line was beginning to snake out of the women’s washroom while men were skipping in and out of theirs in a casual, leisurely manner. “How do men get out so quick?” she said pointedly, more rhetorical than an actual question meant for anyone, then she took a long look at him, trying to measure his sincerity.
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