Bottom Dwelling

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By the time my daughter, Nina, arrived from work, all long-haired and looking like a picture, I was sure we would be receiving some first-class attention. The waitress took the orders from a couple of well-dressed men sitting across the aisle from us. I thought I detected some kind of foreign accent in their whispers. Behind my daughter, an Italian couple laughed and ordered a couple of things from the menu. My ears were sharp enough to hear: the spaghetti with shrimps and artichokes, because I was thinking of that one, too, and was anxious to see how the waitress, who answered them in a jovial responsive Italian, would comment; then pizzas, and some appetizer or another. It took a while for her to begrudgingly come over to us. Nina never seemed to mind these kind of experiences, whereas I insisted there was something horribly off, and they were about to intentionally screw up our meal or put our tickets on the bottom of the pile of orders.

We could never agree on the same thing or else we would have gotten out easy, with a $20 check, cutting our losses, and some pleasant conversation, but the longer we sat, waiting to be attended to, the more complicated things became, and I began to feel it was like a conspiracy without the liquor, like I was caught in the sleepy miasma of a rainy day, with nowhere in particular to go and nowhere I wanted to go. Nina ordered a sausage pizza, which I wouldn’t touch, and I, not wanting cheese, ordered an unappetizing marinara pizza with anchovies, oregano, and garlic. The waitress didn’t so much as comment before slapping up the menus and disappearing. When she finally poured me some water, it didn’t even have any ice in it, though I noticed the glasses on the other tables were brimming with cubes.

I loved going places with Nina, sitting across from her, looking into her smiling face, waiting for some news of youth and life. Being that I was such a recluse, I had less and less of real substance to talk about and felt something of a vulture when it came to hearing all about Nina’s life: who she was arguing with after hours, what kind of fights she was getting into with old and new boyfriends, how she couldn’t sleep, etc. It was all so unhealthy, and we would talk about that, too, until someone, usually Nina, ended up crying. In a place like this, no one even lifted an eyebrow.

Nina had ordered a bean salad, and though the adjoining tables, I noticed through our conversation, were picking at platters of antipasto and tossed salads, my pizza finally appeared out of the blue, just dropped on our table —as if we, or I, was being punished— by a disinterested busboy. We couldn’t even find our waitress, until I noticed some sort of Middle-Eastern man and a heavily scented Arab-dressed woman sitting in the back — I had inhaled her walking past us, praying all the while she wouldn’t be seated near us — and that was where our waitress seemed to be circling all the while. Perhaps he was the real owner, and that would explain something of the odd, inauthentic feel of this place. 

The pizza itself, well, for all the rating razzamatazz, it was like the bread from the basket; it might as well have been cut up into rolls and served free of charge. But here were people like us, chomping it up for $16 and $32 a pie, making this dough business the biggest racket since… but that’s the way life is, and my husband, when he finally joined us, only prolonged the damage. Just in sitting there, tired of chewing on bread without cheese, I kept trying to decide whether I should order a plate of stringy-looking spa-gett like the kind they were eating on the table next door — standing up and sitting down countless times to get a better look. I have tried so many times to get Nina to like shrimp, but she insists she’s allergic, so I would be on my own, no one to share the plate. 

Just then my husband called to give an update.

“I’m running late. They just brought my car down from the garage,” and then fifteen minutes later, en route, he called again. I could hear the agitation in his voice. “Why don’t you just order me something,” he said.

So I ordered him the Campagnola, which combined the tomato sauce, parmigiana, mozzarella, and basil, making his the best, the simplest combination of all, and now, just from sitting there, knowing we’d never come back, I was saying to Nina, “So, what the hell, do we, do I, order the pasta or not? What the hell, right?” But inside I knew ordering pasta, and shrimp, no less, in a pizza place was like taking your life in your hands, or at least was taking a crap shoot, as far as my stomach was concerned, but we were caught in the web, with Lazzo’s spinning out and pizzas walking by, and I could see the man in the back twirling the dough, though not once did it occur to me, as it had in every earlier day, to get up and take a walk over to check it out for real.

That night, lying in bed, tossing and queasy, I replayed it all like a dazzling dream, as if I was both duped and drugged. I was alone and together both, the meal, chewy and OK, yet horribly unworthy, unsatisfying, untasty, leaving me craving for more. And there I was, curled up in bed like the perennial shrimp I was telling you about, forever curling up into itself, going nowhere, solving nothing, aimless and internal.

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