Writers & Lovers(23)
‘Anyone got a gun with twelve bullets?’ she says to the line cooks before the door swings shut.
The Kroks sing ‘Mack the Knife’ and ‘In the Mood’ and ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight.’ For ‘Earth Angel’ they grab an older woman and put her on the floppy-haired boy’s knee while the rest encircle her with adoring looks. Then they fling her back where she came from in one motion on the last note of the song. They put their heads down as if in prayer and back away slowly from the smallest of them all, a curly-haired cherub who steps forward, opens his mouth, pauses, and begins singing.
‘By yon bonnie banks and by yon bonnie braes. Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomond’ slow and smooth, in a high quavering voice. I’m carrying a pot de crème to my deuce but am no longer moving. It feels like everyone in the dining room has stopped breathing. Even Dana behind the bar now stops stirring the whiskey she’s poured into her coffee.
The rest of the Kroks come in at the chorus: ‘You take the high road and I’ll take the low road’ but quietly, a mere rumble to the boy’s high bright reed. The boy sings three more verses and the last chorus himself.
For me and my true love will never meet again
By the bonnie bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.
When he stops the silence is long and complete. Then, a torrent of applause. The Kroks know this is their showstopper. They wave goodbye and jog out the door.
The dining room remains quiet. I carry my dessert the rest of the way, and my two ladies at 9 are patting their eyes. After I put down the plate and two spoons, I wipe mine, too. Five minutes later the diners have rebounded with more volume and demands than before.
I can’t seem to recover. The sound keeps playing in my head. I try to hide in the walk-in but the line cooks have begun their breakdown and keep coming in. I spend the rest of the shift, when I’m not serving, crouched on the floor beside the linen cabinet near the wait station, pretending to straighten the piles of tablecloths and napkins.
When it’s finally over and I get out of the building, I unlock my bike but don’t get on it. I don’t want to get home too soon. I don’t want to lie in bed churned up like this. I walk my bike to the river.
The students are returning. For the past two days the streets have been clogged with double-parked station wagons piled high with plastic milk crates and comforters. Now they walk in packs in the center of the road, yell to other packs at doorways of bars. Music spills from open dorm windows. The path along the river is busy, too, full of freshmen with nowhere to go yet. I move slowly, my bike wheels ticking.
I pass runners, walkers, and bikers. Two dudes with headbands throw a Frisbee low across the grass. A group of girls lies on the ground and looks up at the moon, which is nearly full. I used to have this path all to myself at this time of night. I’m already nostalgic for summer.
And I’ll be in Scotland before ye.
A woman runs by me, sweatshirt hood up, fists clenched. We catch eyes just before she passes. Help, we seem to be saying to each other.
After the footbridge, the people thin out. I look for the clusters of geese, but they’re gone. Have they started south already?
I find them just before the next bridge, a wide roiling mass of them, snorting and snuffling like pigs. They’re down the embankment in the weeds at the river’s edge. Some are half in the water, wings slapping the surface. Others are pecking the ground. I move closer and a few heads lift, hoping for food. I don’t have anything for them, but it’s the perfect place to sing loudly about bonnie banks and bonnie braes, whatever a brae is, and I do. More heads lift. My mother told me once that I had a beautiful voice. I was singing along with Olivia Newton-John in the car, and I had been trying to get her to say that. I wasn’t just absentmindedly singing. I’d been going for the compliment. My voice is nothing special, but when your mother tells you something about yourself, even if you’ve coaxed it out of her, it’s hard not to always believe it.
I sing to the geese. And I feel her. It’s different from remembering her or yearning for her. I feel her near me. I don’t know if she is the geese or the river or the sky or the moon. I don’t know if she is outside of me or inside of me, but she is here. I feel her love for me. I feel my love reach her. A brief, easy exchange.
I finish the song and push my bike back up the embankment. A few geese watch, their heads above the rest. Their necks look navy in the moonlight, their chinstraps pale blue.
A few mornings later I get hit by a car. I was giving myself a pep talk while walking the dog. I’d had a few bad days of writing, and I was tempted to go back a chapter to fix it, but I could not. I just needed to move forward, get to the end. Painters, I told myself, though I know nothing about painting, don’t start at one side of the canvas and work meticulously across to the other side. They create an underpainting, a base of shape, of light and dark. They find the composition slowly, layer after layer. This was only my first layer, I told myself as we turned the corner, the dog pulling toward something ahead, his nails loud on the sidewalk. It’s not supposed to be good or complete. It’s okay that it feels like a liquid not a solid, a vast and spreading goo I can’t manage, I told myself. It’s okay that I’m not sure what’s next, that it might be something unexpected. I need to trust—the leash snaps out of my hand and the dog bolts across the street after a squirrel and I bolt after him and slam into a silver sedan.