Chili 4-Way
MICHIGAN PIKE
When you were in college, at Butler, you would drive out Michigan Pike to eat at the Steak 'n Shake there. It looked like a Steak 'n Shake, but it wasn't quite right. It looked the same as other Steak 'n Shakes — black-and-white with the chromium fixtures and the enameled tiled walls and ceramic tile floor. The staff wore the paper hats and the check pants, the white aprons, and the red bow ties. But often you were the only customer. You sat at a table, not the counter, and scanned the menu as as many as a dozen waiters and waitresses waited for you to order. This was a training restaurant for the restaurant chain, self-conscious of its self-consciousness, a hamburger university. There were waiters and waitresses in training watching how your waiter would take your order, and there were waiter and waitress trainers who were being followed by other waiters and waitresses in training watching the waiter and the waiters and waitresses watching the waiter taking your order after bringing several glasses of welcoming water. They crowded around the table in their spotless uniforms like hospital interns around your bed, waiting, taking notes on their checkered clipboards. There were television cameras everywhere and television monitors everywhere displaying what the television cameras where recording. There, the grill cook and the dozen or so trainee grill cooks pressed with the fork and spatula the meat pucks into perfect steak burgers. There, one after the other flipped each patty once, crossed the instruments at right angles and pressed down again forming the perfect circles of meat, the evidence of this broadcast on snowy monitors next to those displaying the scoops of ice cream falling perfectly and endlessly into a parade of mixing shake mixing cans. There was even a monitor that showed the bank of monitors and one that showed the monitor showing that monitor, and in it the endless regression of televisions within televisions, the black-and-white clad waiters and waitresses and the grill cooks and prep chefs moving like a chorus line, constructing your two doubles that you had ordered an acceptable duration of time ago. And the caterpillar of service snaked with your plates of perfectly plated food held by the waiter at the head-end trailed by a conga line of identical servers back to your perfect table where the television cameras panned to focus on you eating your two doubles and showing you eating your two doubles in the monitor that showed the monitor of the double you eating. And everyone in the place made sure you had everything you needed and said they'd be back to check and then came back to check and asked you if you wouldn't mind filling out the survey about the service and food and a survey about the survey and the survey about the survey's survey. The sandwiches were perfect. And the milk shake. The French fries were all exactly the same length and arranged in a pleasing random jumble. The real stainless steel cutlery gleamed, and the real dishes and the glass glasses gleamed. As you left, at every empty table, an employee wiped and polished the Formica tabletop, watched over by two or three others, nodding unconsciously in what you took to be approval.
96TH STREET
She would meet him when he was in town, when he was going through town, at the Steak 'n Shake right off I-69 on 96th Street. They both remembered when this part of the city had not been part of the city, had been nothing but farmland, nothing but woods. She grew up in the city. He grew up in another part of the state. They met later after both their lives were settled. Now 96th Street was all strip malls and box stores and freestanding drive-ins. Sometimes, after they would meet at the Steak 'n Shake, they would decide to drive separately to one of the motels nearby and spend a few hours there before she would go back to work, her family, her home and he would get back on the road to drive back to his home, his family. Or he would stay the night, call his wife to say he was too tired to keep driving, would get an early start the next day. On the nights he stayed over, he drove back to the Steak 'n Shake and had dinner, trying to get the table they had shared hours before. In the parking lots outside, as the parking lots' lights came on, teenagers gathered in crowds of cars. Everyone out there milled about, switching rides, changing places, slamming the doors, flashing the car lights. Some of the kids would come inside to order shakes and fries, take the order back out between the pools of light to pass around the drinks and the bags of fries to their friends in the shadows. He watched through the plate glass with its camouflage of advertisement the purposeful loitering in the lots outside. Earlier that day at the same table, they had talked about how things had changed and how they wanted them to stay the same. She always ordered a Coke but Steak 'n Shake had its own brand of pop. King Cola. It tasted the same, she always said, but it was different. He always ordered chili, and as they talked he crushed each oyster cracker separately in the plastic bag, one at a time, turning the crackers into finer and finer crumbs, a dust of crumbs, before he would tear open the bag and pour the cracker crumbs into the bowl of chili. That day when she ordered the King Cola she was told that Steak 'n Shake now served regular Coca-Cola. The waitress waited while she considered. There was a Diet Coke now too, and that's what she ordered after she thought about it. When the waitress came back with the drink, she dropped off the bags of crackers, and without thinking, he began to pinch and pop the crackers inside the bag. He asked her how the new cola tasted. She used a straw. The same, she said, and different.