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."
Rabbit says, "I know what I'm doing. I'll order for myself. I want the" – he picks something off the menu at random – "the paidakia."
"Paidakia," Stavros says. "I don't think so. It's marinated lamb, you need to order it the day before, for at least six."
Nelson says, "Dad, the movie starts in forty minutes."
Janice explains, "We're trying to get to see this silly space movie."
Stavros nods as ifhe knows. There is a funny echo Rabbit's ears pick up. Things said between Janice and Stavros sound dead, duplicated. Of course they work together all day. Stavros tells them, "It's lousy."
"Why is it lousy?" Nelson asks anxiously. There is a look his face gets, bloating his lips and slightly sucking his eyes back into their sockets, that hasn't changed since his infancy, when his bottle would go dry.
Stavros relents. "Nellie, for you it'll be great. It's all toys. For me, it just wasn't sexy. I guess I don't find technology that sexy."
"Does everything have to be sexy?" Janice asks.
"It doesn't have to be, it tends to be," Stavros tells her. To Rabbit he says, "Have some souvlakia. You'll love it, and it's quick." And in an admirable potent little gesture, he moves his hand, palm outward as if his fingers had been snapped, without lifting his elbow from the table, and the motherly woman comes running to them.
"Yasou."
"Kale spera," she answers.
While Stavros orders in Greek, Harry studies Janice, her peculiar glow. Time has been gentle to her. As if it felt sorry for her. The something pinched and mean about her mouth, that she had even in her teens, has been relaxed by the appearance of other small wrinkles in her face, and her hair, whose sparseness once annoyed him, as another emblem of his poverty, she now brings down over her ears from a central parting in two smooth wings. She wears no lipstick and in certain lights her face possesses a gypsy severity and the dignity present in newspaper photographs of female guerrilla fighters. The gypsy look she got from her mother, the dignity from the Sixties, which freed her from the need to look fluffy. Plain is beautiful enough. And now she is all circles in happiness, squirming on her round bottom and dancing her hands through arcs of exaggeration quick white in the candelight. She tells Stavros, "If you hadn't shown up we would have starved."