Searching for X - excerpt

Recently, I remembered that I have never led a careful life. I will not begin now.

It was time to do the things he’d always wanted to see, do, be: the little things that made life. A sunset, a sunrise, a piece of pie and a cup of coffee. Watching people. If he could find enough of those little things that summed up life on the way, maybe he would also have found the right answer. If not, maybe it was what you did before you got there that counted.
The first day he didn’t drive far. He picked up some speed along the straight ways, dallied along the curves, pulled over a few time to sit watching traffic, deliberately thinking of nothing until he saw a set of tiny headlights, like hope coming toward him, become larger and brighter, and carry past him on a whish of sound. He’d blink, and go back to thinking of nothing. After a few hours on the road, always moving south, he stopped at one of the small Mississippi river towns. It wasn’t famous for the river; it was famous for the home made farm country pies. One of the things he had always wished he had done was to sit in a restaurant for hours, watching people come and go, a cup of smoking hot coffee and a piece of pie in front of him. There was never time, or the right restaurant handy. It was time to change the equation.
Farm country he would have called it, with local patrons were at their brown laminate tables, bent over the newspaper (most of them trucked in from the Twin Cities, he noted with quiet pride) or staring bleared ahead of them, forearms along the table. Their eyes were concentrating on yesterday’s news or today’s hopes. There were plenty of empty chairs and almost as many open tables. He asked politely for one at the wall, where he could see the view from across the restaurant.
“There isn’t much to see, just the street where people leave their cars,” the blonde and young waitress told him solemnly. It’s just a small town.”
She could have been one of his students, home for the day, picking up a little extra money by working her summer job, even though now it was fall.
“That’s okay. I like to lean against the wall while I sip my coffee. Just coffee, please.” And he had gotten what he wanted: a table for two, with nothing behind him except fake paneling and everything in front of him: tables, waitresses moving briskly among them, the smell of pancakes and sugar, sunrise turning the fog in the air translucent and the dust on the cars outside to pollen yellow. Time.
He came back to himself from a formless reverie about time and fog. The coffee, newspaper, breakfast group had left. The waitresses were mopping clean tables, setting out new paper mats, shifting the pies in their lighted cases. That was one reason he had turned the car here. If he was going to waste time over a piece of pie and a cup of coffee, it might as well be somewhere where they were known for their pies. Apple, apple with streusel crumb topping, banana cream, blueberry, cherry, chocolate cream, cranberry apple, currant, lemon meringue, peach, pecan, raspberry, rhubarb, strawberry. ‘Streusel crumb’ was a cheating name, for the tourists. Anyone from a German or Polish background knew that streusel was crumbs. But it was the pies, pies from generous farm kitchens, that were important. He looked up from consideration of the pie list, out the window. More cars, the early scouts for today’s stream of tourists, were moving into open spaces on the main street. Take one farm town where people knew how to cook, subtract three failed businesses factored into the reduced price of bulk milk, add the byproduct of traveler runoff from a highway, compound multiply by word of mouth. What did you have? A list of thirty-five kinds of pie (most of them indigenous) and enough rebuilt economy to keep the town’s women employed while their men either drank the coffee the women poured into restaurant cups or went back to the fields and barns, hoping for an upturn in the price of corn, wheat, milk, and beef. Pie. He studied the list, and tipped a smile toward one of the waitresses.
“And which will it be?” she asked, as she poured a coffee refill.
“Rhubarb, please.” His grandma used to make rhubarb pie in early spring, pink and green stalks bound in a yellow egg custard. Sticky, sour, and full of promise.
By the time he laid his fork across the smeared plate, the tables had refilled. The restaurant was sloshing in coffee, sugar, and noise. “Got to make Sioux Falls today.” And, “Remember Sasie, we want to see the Effinghams when we’re in Detroit.” Or, “Did you pack the camera? Do you think you could get a photo of us – maybe outside? Do you think they would let us take our plates out in front? Mehitabel would love to see this place.” “Mehitabel would love the pies. That woman never missed a meal in her life.” He sipped his coffee and watched people who didn’t know when they would run out of distance or time.
The restaurant traffic never slowed down after that. At one in the afternoon, hemmed in by the people who had been shifting their weight in the vestibule, watching for an empty table, he ordered a piece of lemon pie. “Not the meringue.”
The waitress frowned, her skirts still riding the air currents from her movements between the tables. “Not the meringue? That’s the only lemon we have.”
“Okay. How about banana cream?”
“That we can do.”
About half were round tables and the rest were square. The restaurant contains twenty-five round tables and sixteen square. If a round table seats four comfortably, as does the square, but if customers leave the square tables on the average of 2.3 minutes sooner than the round, and if the traffic flow can be assumed as constant for twelve hours of operation, with an increased 40% for the two-hour periods of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, how much of a financial advantage is it to replace the round tables with the square, assuming a 30% depreciation each year, with the initial cost of the round tables exceeding the square by 5%. Or was that .05? He frowned in concentration. Someone at a nearby table muttered about going to use the john.
There were five stalls and the requisite two urinals. On the women’s side it would be six stalls and a Kotex dispenser. Assuming a usage of 5 gallons per flush, and usage increase of 35% on the female side of the restrooms versus the male, at what point was it environmentally less costly to install porta potties, to be periodically emptied at the nearest large city, which was…Chicago? Rochester?
About three-thirty in the afternoon, when some of the tables had opened and the restaurant was quieter, he ordered a slice of apple pie (no streusel, just the regular crust, please) and a cup of tea. His stomach was wrinkled from coffee. His mind felt quieter, though. He ate the piece in tidy bites, saving its triangular point until last: the wish bite. Years ago when he had been a child, swinging his legs from a too-tall chair at the table, “I wish for another piece of pie,” was his grandfather’s line. What did he wish for? He pushed back his chair, left a generous tip for the waitress (his third, he smiled sadly: he had managed to hang on to his table through three shifts, two-thirds of a day’s traffic, and five trips to the restroom). Soon it would be the dinner group: round steak with mashed potatoes and field green beans; chicken smothered in cream gravy with baked potatoes and pickled beets. Supper meant people coming home, lights coming on in the houses, quiet before sleep. Supper meant: when are you heading home? He was close enough to the house in the Twin Cities that he could be back before midnight, far enough away it could not reach out and pull him in. He had made one decision this morning. But one decision was just the first in this chain, or the end link in the chain before. He could get out on the road and drive north for a few hours, his body jazzed with caffeine and his mind lulled by pie and memories. Or he could head south and west toward. Or he could make the decision tomorrow.