“What the fuck am I doing?” she says to herself, aloud, inside the Barracuda.
She jumps out of the car, starts to walk to the diner, then turns back, pulls open the door, and grabs the keys from the ignition slot.
A gust of steamy air hits her as she pulls open the metal door and steps inside the diner. Lon almost drops his rubber tub of dirty dishes trying to say hi to her. She slides into the first booth and nods hello. The table is littered with the debris from the last customers. There are two breakfast plates coated with the hardened yellow remains of fried eggs, large glasses with grainy traces of tomato juice, side bowls dusted with the last brown crumbs of Harry’s secret-seasoning home fries, toast crusts, orange rinds, coffee mugs. She guesses that both customers were men, probably truckers, possibly in their mid to late forties. Then she stops herself, annoyed that she can’t even take a seat in a lunchcar without reflexively analyzing the landscape like a crime scene. She can’t turn off being a detective, looking for the tiniest evidence that might reveal something more. But what? What is ever revealed that’s truly of use? It’s the process, the breaking apart of the immediate environment, sifting it fragment by fragment and looking at each particle from all perspectives, dusting it, photographing it, putting it down and picking it up again — this is what has become important to her. The method. The technique. The system. The idea that she can no longer sit in Rollie’s Grill without her mind taking over, shifting into an inspect-and-analyze mode, reconstructing a common diner-booth’s previous occupants — she finds this pathetic beyond words.
Behind the counter, Harry raises a full coffeepot toward her and she nods again. Lately, she’s noticed that inside the diner, communication is often assisted by the gesture and the hand signal accompanying normal, audible words. She assumes this is because of the number of different primary languages that all the inhabitants speak. As far as she knows, only Isabelle is terribly fluent in a second language.
Isabelle manages to get her instructions across to everyone. She snaps Spanish at her own extended brood, handles a beautiful, rhythmic English with the customers, and cuts what, by her own admission, is a broken, sometimes humorous Khmer dialect. She is the translator through whom all interracial communication must pass. She referees the fights between her Uncle Jorge and Harry’s cousin Lon.She relays Harry’s words about clean grill to her sister Luisa. She’s able to barter with both of the odd, lanky “sales reps” from both the Mekong Market and the New Ponce Bodega. And she’s able to keep Karl, the redneck milkman who calls the diner “the town’s own goddamn United Nations,” harmless and under control.
Lenore watches Isabelle now as she comes out of the storeroom wiping her hands on her apron. She’s a large woman, but she moves like someone half her weight and age. Though Lenore has to admit, she has no idea how old Isabelle actually is. Lenore envies her grace behind the counter, not just in the way she moves, the ease and agility of her body — Lenore thinks she could match that — but her easy manner of dealing with people. Lenore has never seen her blow up and yell. In any language. She’s never seen her grab the front of someone’s shirt or throw a water glass or serving spoon across the room. Even in those moments when the diner is packed to capacity during a dinner rush and boothfuls of college kids are screaming rude insults about their wait and cousin Lon has burned a second omelette and the dishwasher has started to leak again, Isabelle just dances through each crisis, attending to one thing at a time, cajoling the college boys with refills of coffee and her smooth voice, patting Lon on the back with a soft word to relax, even taking a monkey wrench to the bottom of the old Cleansomatic.
Lenore feels that put in the same position, she, too, could handle all the problems. But it’s the method that differs and how things are left in the wake of the job’s completion. It’s not a comfortable thought, because her method for dealing with all problems arises out of the core of her personality. Her schematic is simple — confront the problem and take the shortest, most direct route toward its solution. Every other consideration is superfluous. She’s never doubted this before. It’s been the first holy truth. The truth of truths. But in looking at Isabelle, she sees a woman — and it’s an important fact that she’s a woman — capable in an all-pervasive, almost primal way. And yet there’s no blood left in her wake, no jumpy casualties, no pockmarked landscape.
The disparity of their jobs is no answer. Lenore can actually see the diner as a microcosm of Quinsigamond. It’s not that much of a stretch. A bunch of unassimilated people side by side, droning and bitching from time to time in a native tongue, serving drunks and head cases and average hungry schmucks, passing time. The fact is that even behind the counter, in a much more insulated and controlled world, Lenore would be bullying her way toward the last clean plate and the end of the day.
Lon appears with a dish bin and an embarrassed smile. He clears the table of all the dirty dishes, wipes it down with a damp rag, and heads back behind the counter with this endearing, scampering run. Isabelle walks up in front of her and slides a black coffee onto the table.
“Don’t you ever get tired of this place?” she asks.
Lenore shakes her head. “This is my free zone, Isabelle. This is where I relax.”
“Free zone,” Isabelle repeats, smiling. “I like the words.”
“Got a free minute?” Lenore asks, and Isabelle rolls her eyes like some old-time Hispanic soap opera star. Then she slides in on the other side of the booth.
“Busy day?” Lenore asks.
“Average. They’re all average.”
“You ever get away from this place? You ever take a vacation?”
“I don’t think that word goes into Cambodian.”
The both laugh and Harry eyes them suspiciously from the chopping table at the other end of the counter. Then he can’t help himself and breaks into an approving smile.
“Does he understand what you say?” asks Lenore.
Isabelle shrugs. “When it’s convenient.”
Harry calls something down to her, a series of short high-pitched syllables. Isabelle laughs and makes a long kissing sound back toward him.
“It must be strange sometimes,” Lenore says. “Two different cultures and all.”
Isabelle smiles. “My grandmother used to say it’s good to mix the blood. Keeps things bubbling. No dead water.”
“Dead water?”
“What’s your word? Stagnant?”
“Yeah. That’s it. I think I see what you mean.”
There’s a pause. Lenore sips coffee and Isabelle watches her, then says, “Everything okay today?”
“Isabelle, I hope, I don’t mean to …” She stops and starts again. “Is it possible to love someone you don’t really understand?”