by Anne Hays
The woman who works at Athena, the Greek restaurant two blocks from my apartment, forgets everything. She forgets the specials, so she reads them, stumbling over her words, from the notepad in her pocket. She forgets to bring us water, or silverware. She forgets my girlfriend’s bread, when she orders more, and she forgets to ask if we want desert once we finish. The woman apologizes. She’s older than us—maybe mid-forties. Her dark hair is streaked through with dusty silver (so is mine) and she wears it in a ponytail, waitress-style. She has pale skin, a sharply hooked nose, stringy-long arms. When the woman apologizes we say No! Of course! It’s not a bother! but we both think she’s a terrible waitress, that she won’t last long, and then we think maybe the restaurant itself won’t last long either. It’s new, after all—it’s only been here a few months—and the economy is wretched, after all, and anyway most restaurants fail: this we all know. So many other restaurants have failed, up and down our street, many of which were our favorite restaurants, and when this happens Jill and I think It wasn’t our fault! We were regulars! We tasted the baklava! Every day when we walk down the street we catalog the newly failed restaurants, strange dark holes in our once lit streets, and then murmur to each other about what went wrong. These restaurants—which stay, which fail—are a major source of daily anxiety.
And so when construction began on another new restaurant down the street from our apartment, we felt the excited stirrings of speculative anticipation. What would this empty space, so long a vacant corner store, become? Every time Jill and I passed by, en route to wherever lay beyond, we would muse over the construction and comment casually about the likely new occupant, the way people discuss the gender or name of a friend’s unborn baby. Will they name it Greg, or Allison? Will the baby be cheerful, cranky, spunky, shy, or impossibly stubborn like its mother? The sign they hung up along the brick was classy, almost contemporary, with its pale background, its bold red and black lettering. We were so entranced by the newness of it all that it took an extra moment to register their ludicrous name: The Park Slope Bistro Restaurant Bar & Grill. We wondered: what made them stop at bar, grill, restaurant and bistro and what force of self control held them back from adding the words diner, cafe, boulangerie, speakeasy, and chop house? The establishment’s identity crisis was the first indication of its inevitable doom to failure, but we didn’t want to think about that.
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