At the diner – the girl takes off her father’s old oversized hooded college sweatshirt
Illegally twice as long as the average Kyiv Commix should be
The cockpit announces they will be landing in Atlanta in about half an hour and have started their descent.
His ears are all stopped up, even unto sharp pain, and he’s annoyed – no amount of swallowing or opening and closing his jaws is helping to pop them open.
But the Kansas diner memories keep returning, seizing and gripping his chest, and he finds himself not wanting them to stop – he wants to suffer through the torture.
He blocks out distractions. He is able to complete the picture – sweetness, young innocence, desire, and the torment rolled into a fireball raging in his gut…
The father parks the SUV in the diner’s gravel lot, the end that abuts the road, as they find all the spots right in front of the diner are taken.
They find themselves walking through the midst of men of varying ages, though mostly young, and some women as well, dressed in military gear – not U.S. military, but that other military that has somehow sprung up out of nowhere and been spreading over the country like a cancer at incomprehensible speed – congregating noisily outside the diner, various weaponry thrown about them, but they do not bother the family; merely note their arrival and allow them to proceed as though none of their freedoms of old had ever been lopped or axed.
Although the diner is packed, there are some booths open and they squeeze into one – the mother and father together, on one side, like little children, and their 13-year-old son, Bobby, on the outside next to them. Across the table, the departing relative they are treating, next to the window and across from the mother, and Amelia, the 14-year-old daughter on the outside next to him and directly across from her brother.
A waitress brings the menus.
“Give us a minute, please.”
“Take your time – I’ve got my hands full.”
Several minutes pass and the waitress returns.
“What’ll you have, Bobby?”
“Bobby Kennedy,” says Amelia.
“There’ll be no mention of Irish Catholics at this table or in this family, young lady,” the father says.
“But why!” a pouting Meelee cries, fully knowing and purposefully provoking the response, particularly with regard to the Kennedys, thinking the whole thing very funny.
“Mick clan of guinea mafia proxies,” the father grunts.
“Dad, what’s a mick,” asks Bobby.
“You’re a mick,” shouts Meelee.
“Meelee, stop that this instant,” the slightly disconcerted mother says. “Bobby, will you please order – the waitress is… well, she’s waiting. What – are – you – going – to – haaaaave…?”
“Well, I guess since Meelee’s having the Dorkface Schnitzel, I’ll have the Wiener Schnitzel instead.”
“Moo-oom…”
“Bobby – you apologize to your sister right now!”
“I’m not apologizing. I’m just stating a fact. Waitress – that’ll be one Dorkface Schnitzel for the Dorkface.”
“And one Wiener Schnitzel for the Wiener.”
“Ha, ha, ha – looks like she got you there, young man.”
That’s the father, Bernard, last name, Gaywall, talking to his son, who turns to look out the window and watch the armed, war-geared people in the lot.
And what kind of name is that, anyway? Gaywall…
‘I’ll tell you what kind of name,’ the departing cousin sitting next to Meelee thinks. ‘It’s the name of the Chicago stockbroker, Harold Gaywall, who waltzed into my home in Belfast when I was just a tot and swept my father’s younger sister off her feet and across the Atlantic, never to be seen again. And now there he is, Bernard Gaywall, just one result of that union, younger than myself, with almost grown kids of his own, paying for my grand farewell meal.’
“Really, folks,” the exasperated waitress says, “If you can’t see that I’ve got all these –”
“Oh, no, no, no,” the mother says. “We’re all ordering right now. I’m really sorry about this, miss. I used to work as a waitress myself – long, long hours – and I know what it’s like taking orders from STUPID, ILL-MANNERED PEOPLE, WHO HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO RESPECT FOR THE HARD WORK THAT OTHER PEOPLE DO…”
Everyone wipes the grins from their faces, slumps their shoulders, and looks down. Somehow, the mother, whose name is Lizbet – and not Elizabeth, as the cousin had incorrectly assumed, but precisely and exactly Lizbet – intuits the lunches and drinks of everyone and rattles the entire order off for the waitress. Everyone at the table is struck dumb by the mother’s decisive display of power and authority.
Smiling her deep appreciation, the waitress finger-taps her own head twice and says, “Got it!”
The Belfast cousin orders for himself, and orders, of course, a steak.
The aura of respectful silence doesn’t last long.
“Dad – what’s a guinea?”
“Shut up, insect!”
“Dorkface!”
“Stop it, you two. Stop it – stop it!”
“Wiener!”
“STOP IT!!!”
Oblivious, composed, unaffected, Bobby asks: “Dad, what’s a proxy?!”
“Well, son, you see…”
But Bobby doesn’t wait for his father’s answer. Proxy? What does he care? Instead, he directs his newfound testosterone aggression out the big diner window to quietly watch the militants.
“Ooooohh, Goooood!”
“What’s the matter, Meelee?!”
“It’s so damn hot in here! I’m burning up!”
Before anyone can stop her, Meelee throws off her father’s old oversized hooded college sweatshirt. She’s wearing white long-john underwear and the Belfast guest’s heart jumps into his mouth.
“You don’t mind, do you,” she innocently asks the guest.
“Oh, ah, no, no Emily, not at all. I, I mean, you should make yourself comfortable, and, and” – he realizes he’s called her Emily by mistake instead of Amelia in an overproduced attempt to address her like a grownup, but in failing keeps jabbering on in yet another overproduced effort to cover up the mistake. But it doesn’t work. Amelia feigns hurt, although she knows she has merely flustered him beyond his self-possession.
“The name’s Amelia. You’ve been with us for two weeks and I can’t believe you still –”
“Oh, ah-ah, what did I say? Did I not say your name right, Mee, ah I mean Amelia, I mean I just wanted to say, that is, to tell you, aaahh… that, aaahh…”
But whatever the cousin is trying to say gets lost in sweet frustrated irrelevance and a new, slightly disorienting bliss for the girl, for she is somewhat inexplicably giddy; and in the wild swirl of attention now directed by everyone at her, especially her mother’s indignation.
The father is speechless, trying hard to ignore the situation or treat it as just another dopey family scene to be taken lightly and dismissed while it blows over. But there’s no blowing over what Amelia now, suddenly, has under that long white thermal underwear, through which you can kind of see.
Only the brother keeps his cool – in his own younger brotherly way; and that, only because he is her brother and not some strange boy gaping at her tits. Bobby reacts by stuffing bread rolls under his sweater and cat-calling:
“Oh, look at me, I’m Dorkface with my big tits…”
For Amelia’s tits had come up like bolts of lightning over the past week – although no one had been quite sure, as she’d immediately hid it, that is, the fact, them, under that very same oversized old hoodie she had just thrown off, secretly bouncing around the house with it on all week, no doubt getting used to and greatly enjoying the new sensation of their size and weight surging up and down with the every-which-way locomotion of her body without everyone prying into her personal business – and were looking to be about a C cup now, with every indication they were ready to keep going. You see, these sorts of things happen whether a new, evil, and horrifying terrorist people’s republic begins to inexplicably take shape over the old map of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, or not.
The mother lashes out, now also calling her daughter by her proper name, although she suddenly has other names lined up against her that would never have entered her mind to call her before:
“Where did you get… that, Amelia?!”
“Get what?”
But everyone knows Lizbet, whose breasts are quite small, is referring to the bra Amelia is using to hold, gather, and push the heavy mounds of beautiful flesh that have suddenly appeared on her chest up and out of her long white underwear. One can see that the bra is sultry, come-hither, and scintillating – burgundy trimmed in black lace. But the tits are clearly more than the device can handle or hold.
“You know very well what I’m talking about, Amelia. That bra! Where did you get it? My God, it’s too small!”
Yes, the mother thinks, venomously, indignation, hostility, pure unexpurgated anger rising and rising inside her, ‘too small for her, but too large for me – way too large,’ the hatred, the resentment so sui generis and extempore, she could not explain it to herself, nor did she want to, craving the waves of hot evil she was feeling against her daughter, her own flesh and blood. Any other woman with big breasts she’d more or less trained herself to ignore, or ascribe to them other faults that, she fooled herself into believing, detracted substantially from the beauty of their bosoms, but this was her daughter, her only daughter and firstborn, and from this moment on she knew, without throwing the thought from her, but, rather, relishing it, that she would never let Amelia be.
“I can’t help it mother. I ordered it from a catalog, but by the time it got here, I grew again.”
“Ooo, look at me, look at me, I’m Dorkface with these giant tits, ooo, ooo, ooo…”
The father looks down, but only to take secretive glances up from under his brow at his daughter’s chest.
“Dear God! You’re not to wear that anymore! Go to the bathroom and take it off and put that sweatshirt back on – right now!!!”
“No! I’m not going to take it off! I bought it and it cost me 75 dollars, and I’m going to get my satisfaction out of it even if it IS already too small!”
“Seventy-five dollars?! Where did you get that kind of money?! Who gave it to you?! This is outrageous – I’ll deal with you at home! Now! I said take it off!!!”
“And I said – NO!!!”
Tears fill Amelia’s eyes, but they are not genuine. They are crocodile tears. She’s really enjoying herself. Dear God, the control she suddenly has over all these people, her own family; the power, THE POWER!!!; and all because of her tits. And especially the white-haired but still very handsome relative from Belfast married in Kyiv, leaving today – the memories he’ll remember, and won’t be able to get out of his mind, driving him crazy… crazy!!! What’s his wife – a picture of whom he showed her in the Kyiv Poster, with her lost weight, skinny and shapeless in that stupid black evening dress with her hair pulled back trying to look like Audrey Hepburn, with no chest – compared to her?!
The Belfast cousin is completely flabbergasted. He keeps looking at Amelia’s chest, but trying to make it look like he’s only looking at her and not her chest. To impress her, he decides to act the gallant knight on her behalf – also as a way to disguise his prying eyes – but it’s all so boyish and clumsy, even for a distinguished-looking and still handsome man his age – though Amelia is tickled by the attention and effort of the older man, her father’s cousin, whom she has come to admire and finds attractive. He shouts at the mother:
“Lizbet! Leave Amelia alone!”
Suddenly, no one knows who he is. He has shocked everyone, including himself. Now everyone, except Amelia, can’t wait to see him go.
The waitress arrives with a large tray piled up with the first parts of their meals. She nods and smiles admiringly at Amelia, who smiles timidly back, as she uses a paper napkin to modestly daub the salty wetness from her cheeks. Otherwise, no one speaks and eyes avoid eyes.
Somehow Bobby has gotten away and when the mother looks out the window, she sees him speaking enthusiastically with a crowd of New Nation militants, as they let him touch their weapons. One militant even looks like he is about to let Bobby try out one of his guns, pointing him to a big pile of compost, frozen earth, and dung.
The mother shrieks in horror and dismay: “Oh, no! They’re not going to take my child – not my baby, not this young!!!”
She barrels past her husband’s knees, on her lunge out the booth elbowing him painfully in the temple, and like a bat out of hell flies down the aisle past all the booths and crashes through the door. Bernard sits in his place, unmoving, looking down, paralyzed by fear… His hands remain folded between his knees; he doesn’t even lift the right one to rub the side of his head.
The plane touches the runway. The passenger has landed in Atlanta.
Filed January 15, 2015