S.K.
Plastic Menus
I can’t move.
My limbs feel too heavy, my head feels too light. My stomach feels like someone carved a hole in it, right below the belly button, letting everything inside spill out onto the floor. I blink, slowly, and dip my head to look at the golden statue clenched in my right hand.
Everyone is right, I think, as I peer into the sunken eyes of the theater mask inscribed on the surface. They are heavier than they look.
My head finds its way back up, and I look out over a sea of glittering faces. Pretty people with even prettier pockets, swathed in their finest Gucci and Prada and Oscar de la Whatever.
I open my mouth to speak, the words I’ve rehearsed for years tripping over themselves in excitement on their way up my throat.
“Oh wow. Okay, okay. Thank you so much, I don’t even know where to begin…”
Practiced disbelief. I do know where to begin, but they don’t know that.
“I’d like to thank the Academy for this honor, I’m so –”
My speech is interrupted when I open my eyes and look at the ground to my right. A large white dinner plate lies in three jagged pieces on the stained linoleum floor.
My surroundings come rushing at me, like I’m waking up from a long, unplanned nap. The water is scalding, and steam rises from the basin where my arms are submerged to the elbows, the skin red and raw from the unforgiving heat. The syrupy chemical scent of dish soap floats like cheap perfume through the air, mixing with the aroma of chicken korma and sticking to my clothes, my hair, my skin.
A large stack of clean plates gleams to my right, next to the open kitchen door where Amma now stands, eyes narrowed, arms laden with half-full dishes. Her slight frame cuts an imposing figure in the doorway, and behind her I can see the dinner crowd seated in the dining room.
If it can even be called a crowd.
A month ago, before al Qaeda shattered innocent lives on the American soil, we would have upwards of 75 patrons in one night. Sitting on the worn red plastic chairs at sticky linoleum tables, they would talk, laugh, eat, and drink long into the evening, most of the time well past closing.
Now, the dining room sits still, frozen in time. We’re lucky if even 15 people come through the door in a day.
I told Amma that the neon sign and laminated plastic menus written in Sinhala and Hindi plastered to the glass windows overlooking the parking lot probably aren’t helping.
But she refuses to change the sign or take the menus down.
“They are scared, for what? Once they come in, once they meet us, and eat our food they will see that we are with them. We cannot face fear with more fear, duwa,” she says in her firm, unyielding voice.
The same voice that is now rising in volume as it tries and fails to get my attention.
“Hello? Duwa, are you listening? I asked you three times now to go out to Table 11 and see what they want. My hands are full, I cannot go over there now,” she snaps, pushing past me to drop the dishes into the sink. She moves with efficiency through the kitchen, heading towards the stove when suddenly, she stops.
Sees the broken plate lying on the floor.
Pinching the bridge of her nose, she lets out a deep sigh.
“Hama daama uda balaagana inne,” she mutters under her breath.
Always looking up, head in the clouds.
I automatically reach for the broom and dustpan tucked behind the refrigerator, but she stops me with a click of her tongue.
“Go. Table 11,” she says, not looking me in the eye. “And when you get back, I want to see your biology exam from yesterday.”
I go.
As soon as I leave the warmth and safety of the kitchen, I immediately sense that something is wrong.
Table 11 is on the far side of the dining room without any windows. At night, the muted yellow light of the wall lamps just barely reaches the table, ensconcing it in shadows. It’s my favorite place to work on writing my plays after school – papers, pencils, and books strewn all over the surface. From Amma’s place behind the buffet counter it looks like I’m perpetually working on a particularly difficult homework assignment. She loves glancing over and seeing me hunched over my physics textbook, which is just a large print copy of Shakespeare’s King Lear from the library.
The only thing on the tabletop I can see now though is a single dish, two plates, and a glass. My feet seem to sink into the threadbare maroon carpet as I move towards the table, new details coming into view with each step.
A middle-aged man and woman, sitting across from each other.
Step.
White.
Step.
A couple, judging by the matching rings winking out at me through the shadows. Married, by the way they are sharing one drink.
Step.
The woman’s blond hair falls in a wavy curtain over her face. She’s pretty.
Step.
Her eyebrows are furrowed, her mouth pulled into a painful-looking pinch.
Step.
I reach the table. I put on my best customer service smile and force as much cheer into my voice as possible on a Thursday night.
“Hi! How are you guys doing tonight?”
The woman scoffs and I feel it in my teeth. I slide a glance towards her husband, who seems to be attempting to shrink himself and his mousy brown combover down small enough so he can fit in the shiny black briefcase resting at his feet.
I start writing their imaginary play in my head almost immediately: Harper, a cutthroat New York attorney, and Joe, a mild-mannered organic soap salesman, go to an Indian restaurant on their 9th anniversary. They’ve been unhappy ever since Harper’s mother-in-law moved in with them, but meek little Joe has always been too afraid to tell powerhouse Harper how he truly feels, and—
“Are you just going to stare at us like an idiot all night, or are you going to ask us what’s wrong?”
My cheerily false smile wavers, but I quickly recover. Customers are rude all the time.
“So sorry ma’am, what seems to—”
“This chicken is cold, under-seasoned, and under-done,” she states matter-of-factly, like she’s reciting from a written list of grievances on her napkin.
I know for a fact that the chicken korma is none of those things, having tasted it seconds before Amma snatched it from my hands to start carefully portioning it out into bowls.
“The customer is always right,” Amma’s voice echoes in my mind.
“Of course,” I say sweetly. “So sorry about that. We’ll have a new dish out and ready for you in just about five minutes.” I reach for the bowl resting on the table, my hands grasping at the white ceramic handles.
The porcelain nearly scalds my palms.
I know I should turn around and begin marching back to the kitchen.
I know I should grab another dish and ladle it full of steaming korma.
I know I should bring it right back out with a new false smile on my face.
I know I should, but I don’t. I can’t help myself.
“Ma’am, I think this chicken is still hot,” I say, trying my best to keep my voice level even as it fights to rise in volume.
Harper turns her head slowly to look at me, her blue eyes like ice-chips in a blizzard.
“I don’t particularly care what you think,” she says. “I want another dish. Now. And while you’re at it, clear these dishes out too.”
I stare at her.
Of course. The customer is always right.
“Great, be right out,” I say tightly, and start to gather the rest of the appetizer dishes and used cutlery. I should have known she was going to respond like that.
Harper doesn’t wait until I leave to start talking to Joe.
“I told you we shouldn’t have come here. These people are illiterate, can’t even take an order,probably working with those lunatics to plan another attack or God knows what—”
The knife I’m holding clatters to the ground.
This time I don’t bother trying to put on the customer service voice.
“What did you say?” I say, my voice shaky.
Harper hurls another ice-chip glare at me, this one cutting deep. “I said, you and your little Arab friends are probably on the phone with more hijackers right now, plotting the next thing that’ll take thousands of innocent lives,” she says, slowly rising in her seat.
Joe now looks like he wishes a hole would open up in the ground and swallow him whole.
My mouth opens and my throat is working but no words come out.
I’m back in my daydream.
I can’t move.
Then, a hand comes down on my left shoulder.
Amma’s voice floats into my ear. Firm, unyielding.
“Is there an issue here?” The syllables sound slightly strange and unpracticed, making the words sharper, more neutral. She always says she doesn’t have time to waste trying to get customers to understand her.
Harper snaps her frigid gaze to her.
“No,” she says, getting up from the table and tossing her napkin on the ground. “We were just leaving.” Joe gets up from his chair too, with his briefcase in tow, following suit like a lapdog.
I’m tempted for a second to knock the briefcase out of his hands, see if it really is filled with organic soap. To see if this is just some strange dream, that my reality is just as benign and whimsical as my imagination.
I don’t. In my bones, down to the marrow, I know this is real.
Harper brushes past Amma, knocking into her shoulder. She whispers something under her breath to her, but I hear it.
“F***ing terrorists.”
I blink and Harper and Joe are gone, the front door swinging shut in the late October evening air behind them.
Amma and I stand, frozen.
The dining room is silent. I realize now that it is nearly empty, with the exception of a young woman in the other corner, sitting quietly with a basket of garlic naan.
“Amma,” I start in a voice I can’t recognize as my own. “We have to call the police, they didn’t pay. They just left without paying.”
“No,” she says. Her tone is softer now. Defeated. “No police. They cannot help us.”
She finally looks at me, and I see unshed tears resting on her lower lash line. Squeezing my shoulder twice, she lets her hand fall. “Help me clean this, we have to close soon.” She turns to head back to the kitchen, then stops.
“I saw your biology exam in your backpack. Only 96%? What about the other 4%?”
She’s teasing. Or trying to, at least.
I smile at her.
“Next time,” I say. I don’t have the heart to tell her that I’m meeting with my advisor tomorrow morning to change my major to playwriting. Not yet anyway.
Not now.
Slowly, we start to pick up the pieces of the mess Harper and Joe made. The young woman finishes her garlic naan, pays for her meal with a crumpled $15 bill and bids us goodnight.
I’m just about finished wiping down the tables when I hear an odd tearing noise. I look up, and there Amma is at the front of the store.
She’s peeling the clear tape off the backs of the laminated menus in the window.
She removes all of the menus until the window is bare and smudged with adhesive.
She reaches down and clicks off the switch to the neon sign light.
In the new velvet-blue darkness, she sighs.
“Come. Let us go home.”