walk as it looked, because the emptiness of the landscape played tricks on the eyes. I was inside the Windy Run Diner within another ten minutes and letting the metal and glass-louvered door suck shut behind me on its tight spring.
Here I did excite a little bit of interest, for the row of heads at the counter turned and there were a couple of nods, a few vague little smiles. Probably they assumed my parents were getting the car filled up over at the Esso.
When the waitress slapped down her book of checks on the counter(a signal for me to order, I guessed), I said I’d have a Coke, really wishing like anything that I could order coffee instead with some authority, even though I didn’t much like coffee.
If I had any plan at all in mind, it was vague. I must have thought that if I sat amongst the townfolk, they’d all be jabbering away about the people who lived there and I’d surely overhear something about the Tidewaters. But they didn’t and I didn’t. Sitting to my right were two old men as silent as the grave; the only sound coming from there was the click of glass against china as they shook enormous amounts of sugar into their cups. The woman on my other side was chewing gum with short breaks to puff in on her cigarette and push her thick glasses up her short nose.
The waitress (who wore a little badge like Maud’s, only hers said “Louise Snell” and “Prop.”) was pleasant and asked me, “Where you from, sugar?” and I lied I was from over in Comus, another thirty or forty miles beyond. I figured Comus was big enough that she wouldn’t be surprised she’d never seen me. Besides the Tidewaters, I really wanted to know who that girl at the railroad station was, but had no idea how to set about finding out. It was fairly easy to introduce the Tidewaters into the talk, though, since I knew their name. So I said I had a friend who lived in Cold Flat and that her name was Toya Tidewater.
Now, given my mother’s fearsome look and compressed lips whenever she mentions the Tidewaters, I was prepared for wild eyes and sharp, intaken breaths all along the counter. Nothing like this happened. The old man at my right brought up some phlegm in a disgusting way, but just kept right on looking at his mirror reflection as if he found himself tantalizing.
Louise Snell called down the counter to a truck-driver type named Billy and asked where Toya lived, and was it that little gone-to-ruin place along Swansdown Road, and Billy answered back, nah, that was the Simpsons’ place, and the Tidewaters lived out Lonemeadow way. Well, this was immediately contradicted by the woman on my left, who said there wasn’t no Tidewater lived there, least not now, and Billy must be thinking about old Joe and he was dead. Billy got kind of surly, probably because this woman was telling him he was wrong, and yelled up the counter that maybe old Joe was dead, but that don’t mean none of his folks didn’t live at the end of Lonemeadow. At one of the chrome-and-Formica tables marching in a row down the lengthof the place a man and woman were sitting and they jumped right into this argument, telling both Billy and the woman they were wrong, that the Tidewaters moved last year over to Dubois—or at least some of them did (the man said to the woman, rather timidly). The argument over where the Tidewaters lived pretty soon expanded into guesses about all of the Tidewaters themselves, and who was whose kid, and which one went off to work in Comus, and which girl married someone named Mervin. Names broke and crested atop the waves of conversation (“Mattie Mae” . . . “Abraham” . . . “Joleen”) and on and on, so that the original question about Toya got completely forgotten and so did I. I just picked up my check and walked over to the cashier, a thin boy reading a comic book and muscling his nose around a bad cold, and obviously not a Tidewater fan, for he barely looked at the money, and at me not at all.
Outside on the
Here I did excite a little bit of interest, for the row of heads at the counter turned and there were a couple of nods, a few vague little smiles. Probably they assumed my parents were getting the car filled up over at the Esso.
When the waitress slapped down her book of checks on the counter(a signal for me to order, I guessed), I said I’d have a Coke, really wishing like anything that I could order coffee instead with some authority, even though I didn’t much like coffee.
If I had any plan at all in mind, it was vague. I must have thought that if I sat amongst the townfolk, they’d all be jabbering away about the people who lived there and I’d surely overhear something about the Tidewaters. But they didn’t and I didn’t. Sitting to my right were two old men as silent as the grave; the only sound coming from there was the click of glass against china as they shook enormous amounts of sugar into their cups. The woman on my other side was chewing gum with short breaks to puff in on her cigarette and push her thick glasses up her short nose.
The waitress (who wore a little badge like Maud’s, only hers said “Louise Snell” and “Prop.”) was pleasant and asked me, “Where you from, sugar?” and I lied I was from over in Comus, another thirty or forty miles beyond. I figured Comus was big enough that she wouldn’t be surprised she’d never seen me. Besides the Tidewaters, I really wanted to know who that girl at the railroad station was, but had no idea how to set about finding out. It was fairly easy to introduce the Tidewaters into the talk, though, since I knew their name. So I said I had a friend who lived in Cold Flat and that her name was Toya Tidewater.
Now, given my mother’s fearsome look and compressed lips whenever she mentions the Tidewaters, I was prepared for wild eyes and sharp, intaken breaths all along the counter. Nothing like this happened. The old man at my right brought up some phlegm in a disgusting way, but just kept right on looking at his mirror reflection as if he found himself tantalizing.
Louise Snell called down the counter to a truck-driver type named Billy and asked where Toya lived, and was it that little gone-to-ruin place along Swansdown Road, and Billy answered back, nah, that was the Simpsons’ place, and the Tidewaters lived out Lonemeadow way. Well, this was immediately contradicted by the woman on my left, who said there wasn’t no Tidewater lived there, least not now, and Billy must be thinking about old Joe and he was dead. Billy got kind of surly, probably because this woman was telling him he was wrong, and yelled up the counter that maybe old Joe was dead, but that don’t mean none of his folks didn’t live at the end of Lonemeadow. At one of the chrome-and-Formica tables marching in a row down the lengthof the place a man and woman were sitting and they jumped right into this argument, telling both Billy and the woman they were wrong, that the Tidewaters moved last year over to Dubois—or at least some of them did (the man said to the woman, rather timidly). The argument over where the Tidewaters lived pretty soon expanded into guesses about all of the Tidewaters themselves, and who was whose kid, and which one went off to work in Comus, and which girl married someone named Mervin. Names broke and crested atop the waves of conversation (“Mattie Mae” . . . “Abraham” . . . “Joleen”) and on and on, so that the original question about Toya got completely forgotten and so did I. I just picked up my check and walked over to the cashier, a thin boy reading a comic book and muscling his nose around a bad cold, and obviously not a Tidewater fan, for he barely looked at the money, and at me not at all.
Outside on the
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