Your Coffee Shop
A woman asks if the seat across from you is free. You’re sitting at the end of a long community table and note (to yourself) there are at least six free seats. She won’t affect the angle of your laptop screen; it’s a huge table; but you find it interesting none-the-less. She sets herself in the seat slowly, with extreme care, behind sunglasses. You smile, wondering if she’s recovering from an injury or suffering from a chronic condition.
You return to your work. How did you rack up $56 dollars at McSorley’s on a Tuesday afternoon? You log the receipt and notice the woman is unpacking a manilla folder. It’s full of yellow pages, torn from a legal pad, black ink packing each line, red frantic notes in the margin. She creates a six-by-three grid of pages. She doesn’t encroach your side, but she’s close. She begins to write with a green pen, adding a third color, a fourth if you count the paper, and for a moment you see the arrangement as it’s own art.
Her order arrives, a pumpernickel bagel with potato salad on it. She seems annoyed having to move her pages to accommodate the plate and you find the aggravation strange, since she obviously should have anticipated the event. The barista sets the plate down and her attitude gives you the feeling this isn’t the first time they’ve interacted.
The woman says, I didn’t realize this comes with a salad. The barista says Yup and walks away. The woman mutters something about having unique magical powers but you can’t quite make it out.
The woman contemplates her meal behind her sunglasses. She takes a bite of the bagel but her displeasure grows. You note a stain of balsamic vinaigrette at the edge of the bagel facing you. She gets up; the process is labored, and a grimace hints along her cheekbones, and you consider asking whether she needs help, but she’s capable enough that you worry the question would insult her. She returns with a stack of napkins, unfolds one, lays it across her hands and grabs the entire salad and you note there’s no sound of crunching, likely an effect of over-poured balsamic. She puts the salad into one hand; with the other, she flattens a second napkin, soaking the remaining balsamic; then she sets the napkin-wrapped salad back onto her plate. Three drops of balsamic dripped onto her papers. She didn’t notice.
You have work to finish. You need to meet your sister in Fort Greene in an hour. You close your expense spreadsheet and start to clear your inbox but note the woman is now holding her bagel above the plate, inspecting it super-closely. She pinches away that section of bagel stained with balsamic and sets it on the salad wrapped in napkin. Then: She drops the bagel back on her plate in anguish. She’s discovered the three drips on her pages. She lifts one the way a doctor examines an x-ray. She shakes her head and says God damn it but at this moment the barista passes your table. Excuse me, you blurt, could we get a clean plate? Both the barista and the woman across the table peer at you for a long moment.
[Caleb Garling is a writer in San Francisco and the author of The St George’s Angling Club, a novel about the outdoors.]
