"I thought you were going to tell us how wise you are now."
"I'm not wise, but at least I've tried to keep my mind open."
Nelson, walking a little ahead of them but hearing too much anyway, points to the great Sunflower Beer clock on Weiser Square, which they can see across slate rooftops and a block of rubble on its way to being yet another parking lot. "It's twenty after six," he says. He adds, not certain his point was made, "At Burger Bliss they serve you right away, it's neat, they keep them warm in a big oven that glows purple."
"No Burger Bliss for you, baby," Harry says. "Try Pizza Paradise."
"Don't be ignorant," Janice says, "pizza is purely Italian." To Nelson she says, "We have plenty of time, there won't be anybody there this early."
"Where is it?" he asks.
"Right here," she says; she has led them without error.
The place is a brick row house, its red bricks painted ox-blood red in the Brewer manner. A small un-neon sign advertises it, The Tavema. They walk up sandstone steps to the doorway, and a motherly mustached woman greets them, shows them into what once was a front parlor, now broken through to the room beyond, the kitchen behind swinging doors beyond that. A few center tables. Booths along the two walls. White walls bare but for some picture of an oval-faced yellow woman and baby with a candle flickering in front of it. Janice slides into one side of a booth and Nelson into the other and Harry, forced to choose, slides in beside Nelson, to help him with the menu, to find something on it enough like a hamburger. The tablecloth is a red checked cloth and the daisies in a blue glass vase are real flowers, soft, Harry notices, touching them. Janice was right. The place is nice. The only music is a radio playing in the kitchen; the only other customers are a couple talking so earnestly they now and then touch hands, immersed in some element where they cannot trust their eyes, the man red in the face as if choking, the woman stricken pale. They are Penn Park types, cool in their clothes, beige and pencilgray, the right clothes insofar as any clothes can be right in this muggy river-bottom in the middle of July. Their faces have an edgy money look: their brows have that ftontal clarity the shambling blurred poor can never duplicate. Though he can never now be one of them Harry likes their being here, in this restaurant so chaste it is chic. Maybe Brewer isn't as dead on its feet as it seems.
The menus are in hectographed handwriting. Nelson's face tightens, studying it. "They don't have any sandwiches," he says.
"Nelson," Janice says, "if you make a fuss out of this I'll never take you out anywhere again. Be a big boy."
"It's all in gobbledy-gook."
She explains, "Everything is more or less lamb. Kebab is when it's on a skewer. Moussaka, it's mixed with eggplant."
"I hate eggplant."
Rabbit asks her, "How do you know all this?"
"Everybody knows that much; Harry, you are so provincial. The two of you, sitting there side by side, determined to be miserable. Ugly Americans."
"You don't look all that Chinese yourself," Harry says, "even in your little Lord Fauntleroy blouse." He glances down at his fingertips and sees there an ochre smudge of pollen, from having touched the daisies.
Nelson asks, "What's kalamaria?"
"I don't know," Janice says.
"I want that."
"You don't know what you want. Have the souvlakia, it's the simplest. It's pieces of meat on a skewer, very well done, with peppers and onions between."
"I hate pepper."
Rabbit tells him, "Not the stuff that makes you sneeze, the green things like hollow tomatoes."
"I know," Nelson says. "I hate them. I know what a pepper is, Daddy; my God."
"Don't swear like that. When did you ever have them?"
"In a Pepperburger."
"Maybe you should take him to Burger Bliss and leave me here," Janice says.
Rabbit asks, "What are you going to have, if you're so fucking smart?"
"Daddy swore."
"Ssh," Janice says, "both of you. There's a nice kind of chicken pie, but I forget what it's called."
"You've been here before," Rabbit tells her.
"I want melopeta," Nelson says.
Rabbit sees where the kid's stubby finger (Mom always used to point out, he has those little Springer hands) is stalled on the menu and tells him, "Dope, that's a dessert."
Shouts of greeting announce in the doorway a large family all black hair and smiles, initiates; the waiter greets them as a son and rams a table against a booth to make space for them all. They cackle their language, they giggle, they coo, they swell with the joy of arrival. Their chairs scrape, their children stare demure and big-eyed from under the umbrella of adult noise. Rabbit feels naked in his own threadbare little family. The Penn Park couple very slowly turn around, underwater, at the commotion, and then resume, she now blushing, he pale – contact, touching hands on the tablecloth, groping through the stems of wineglasses. The Greek flock settles to roost but there is one man left over, who must have entered with them but hesitates in the doorway. Rabbit knows him. Janice refuses to turn her head; she keeps her eyes on the menu, frozen so they don't seem to read. Rabbit murmurs to her, "There's Charlie Stavros."
"Oh, really?" she says, yet she still is reluctant to turn her head. But Nelson turns his and loudly calls out, "Hi, Charlie!" Summers, the kid spends a lot of time over at the lot.
Stavros, who has such bad and sensitive eyes his glasses are tinted lilac, focuses. His face breaks into the smile he must use at the close of a sale, a sly tuck in one corner of his lips making a dimple. He is a squarely marked-off man, Stavros, some inches shorter than Harry, some years younger, but with a natural reserve of potent gravity that gives him the presence and poise of an older person. His hairline is receding. His eyebrows go straight across. He moves deliberately, as if carrying something fragile within him; in his Madras checks and his rectangular thick hornrims and his deep squared sideburns he moves through the world with an air of having chosen it. His not having married, though he is in his thirties, adds to his quality of deliberation. Rabbit, when he sees him, always likes him more than he had intended to. He reminds him of the guys, close-set, slow, and never rattled, who were play-makers on the team. When Stavros, taking thought, moves around the obstacle of momentary indecision toward their booth, it is Harry who says, "Join us," though Janice, face downcast, has already slid over.
Charlie speaks to Janice. "The whole caboodle. Beautiful."
She says, "These two are being horrible."
Rabbit says, "We can't read the menu."
Nelson says, "Charlie, what's kalamaria? I want some."
"No you don't. It's little like octopuses cooked in their own ink."
"Ick," Nelson says.
. "Nelson," Janice says sharply.
Rabbit says, "Sit yourself down, Charlie."
"I don't want to butt in."
"It'd be a favor. Hell."
"Dad's being grumpy," Nelson confides.
Janice impatiently pats the place beside her; Charlie sits down and asks her, "What does the kid like?"
"Hamburgers," Janice moans, theatrically. She's become an actress suddenly, every gesture and intonation charged to carry across an implied distance.
Charlie's squarish intent head is bowed above the menu.
"Let's get him some keftedes. O.K., Nelson? Meatballs."
"Not with tomatoey goo on them."
"No goo, just the meat. A little mint. Mint's what's in Life Savers. O.K.?"
"O.K."
"You'll love 'em."
But Rabbit feels the boy has been sold a slushy car. And he feels, with Stavros's broad shoulders next to Janice's, and the man's hands each sporting a chunky gold ring, that the table has taken a turn down a road Rabbit didn't choose. He and Nelson are in the back seat.
Janice says to Stavros, "Charlie, why don't you order for all of us? We don't know what we're doing."