It sounded like thunder: A bang. A flash. The lights flickered. Everyone in the Lily Room held their breath, waiting to be plunged into darkness. When the lights resurrected, I looked at Jillian, my wife, who looked at Jerry and Nadene, her parents. Jerry was, of course, unhinged and loud. He was still physically imposing with a neck so thick that it could be driven into a river bed as a piling. His eyes were that ice blue that could still bore through me as they did when Jillian and I were dating. But I knew—and he didn’t—there wasn’t anything behind them. The bowl of cottage cheese on the table was far more capable of cogent thought than Jerry. “This is Hell,” Jerry bellowed. Nadene blanched. Jillian bowed her head.
Why we had to drive two and half hours from Chicago to the heart of tornado alley so Jillian could treat her father to his previous favorite restaurants was beyond me. “This could be the last one he has,” she said. “He loved Haber’s broasted chicken. In his day, he could eat a whole chicken by himself.”
“We could take him to KFC around the corner and he would be none the wiser.”
Her withering look was sufficient to privatize my opinion. This is what happens when an east coast Jew, who escaped the hypoxic clutches of a family who treated holidays as an opportunity to circularly criticize, marries a Lutheran girl from a family who exchanged Arbor Day cards.
I waited in the driveway of the assisted living factory as Jillian coaxed her parents out of the prairie dog den apartment. Nadene did not like to go out with Jerry, afraid that his Tourette’s invectives would embarrass her. Before dementia addled his brain, the worst curse Jerry would utter was darn. Now, when agitated, he could intimidate a sailor with his vocabulary, creativity and agility. Abby, Jillian’s youngest sister took Jerry’s descent to infirmity as karma for a childhood of disapproval. Although she lived a half a mile away, she would have nothing to do with her father. Margaret, the middle daughter, had married a man from an enormous and energetic suburban Italian family. She was perpetually going to a christening, wedding or funeral.
Waiting in the driveway for half an hour, I prayed that Jillian will come down, her face awash with tears, to tell me Jerry was gone. I suppose there is some selfishness to this wish, but I knew Jerry would not want to be the way he was. He had too much pride to descend into an angry toddler.
But as toast always lands butter side down, out came Jerry, cursing and twitching. Nadene, prayed the ground would swallow her whole. Jillian looked like Atlas had taken a long lunch and asked to hold the world for him. With a Honda-full of discontent, I pointed the car west, towards the dark sky that portended nothing good. It was a race to see who would rage more, the thunderheads or Jerry.
Haber’s Farm disappointed. Morbidly obese white people scuttled along “The Museum of America,” which was really a collection of rummage sale shit. Everyone carried a yellowed tag waiting for the PA to crackle and a voice that could challenge a rooster for discordance to call their number.
Finally, our number was called and we were instructed to go the Lily Room. We went through two sets of doors that had not been lubricated in years. We were seated by a sullen teenager who cudded her chewing gum as she invited us to “enjoy ya dinners.” She was replaced by an enormous apple dumpling of a woman, whose name badge clung precariously to her voluminous bosom, announcing her name as Tina.
The dinner was predictably bland. My cocktail was erroneously called Haber Farm Famous Old Fashion unless it was famous for as “flat Sprite with an orange wedge and a diabetic grenade for a maraschino cherry.” The famous Haber Farms relish tray looked the relicts of a pathetic pantry: cottage cheese, kidney beans and canned beets. The famous broasted chicken tasted of depressed fowls that willingly ended their misery to increase mine. The vegetable choice was some variation of a potato, be it fried, baked, mashed or hashed. The only thing green was an odd stain in the middle of the tablecloth.
What the meal lacked in taste was made worse by the conversation of the table. Jerry was grousing loudly about some unseen demon that taunted him. Though a Lutheran, Nadene crossed herself, looking for any port in an ecclesiastical storm. I was willing to offer a card with the Mourner’s Kaddish that I had in my sport coat’s pocket.
After clearing the dishes and declining “doggy bags” (I loved my dog too much to inflict Haber’s on him), I had a chance to look at our fellow diners. At the next table, an Aryan father and son ordered basket after basket of rolls that they squirreled away for an impending famine. While their tattoos were not matching, they both gave off an ominous air that they were planning something pogromish.
At the long table in the corner, a family of seven that looked like they had taken a wrong turn on their Grapes of Wrath road trip. The younger children ran around the dining room in feral glee with no thought that they might be annoying the rest of us.
Rounding out the diners, a couple and their infant daughter with matching freckles and a beatific aura as if they just moved into a Norman Rockwell painting. The rest of the tables were empty save for the cheap utensils wrapped in paper napkins.
And then bang. Not a cataclysmic, stop-your-heart explosion. But something not so quiet enough to ignore. We felt it in our stomachs. The ice rattled in our glasses. The dust flurried down from the hand-hewn rafters. It was disturbing, but not frightening. And we soldiered on through dinner.
It was getting late and Jerry was growing coarser. The Nazis next door looked simultaneously insulted and impressed. Nadene was fidgeting, checking her purse often. That there would be a Jerry-storm was a given. I looked at Jillian, whose eternal guilt always prompted her to stay longer than required. I knew better than to suggest we leave, but a few well-timed eyebrows raises eventually elicited the desired effect.
She nodded once and I leapt into action, signaling Rita that we were ready for our check. She smiled and deposited a few bags “for leftovers just in case” and headed towards the main room to print the check. Laughing with the busboy with the faux hawk, she pulled the door open. She screamed, staggered back and would have capsized if it wasn’t for the busboy catching her and simultaneously copping a feel. It was as if Rita had turned to Jell-O, but mustered whatever solidity she had to point towards the door.
As if she was auditioning for one of the Weird Sisters in Macbeth, she moaned: “They’re gone. They’re all gone. Everybody..everything is gone. This got our attention and the “Dads” except for Jerry stood up while the moms, save Nadene, comforted Rita and relieved the busboy who was starting to weaken. The Dads walked quickly to the door to see what was beyond the threshold.
“Gone” was the operative word. Not only was the Rose Room and the Ivy Room and forever-lost-to-history other rooms were gone; everything we knew was gone. Starting at the threshold and for as far we could see, the world, as we knew it, wasn’t. The earth was black with pots of flame-red bubbling ooze. The sky was vomit green through which the sunlight could barely penetrate. There was nothing familiar. It was as if we were picked up and transported to another planet in the process of forming or falling apart. The “Grapes” father crossed himself maniacally, trying to cover his multiple children’s multiple eyes.
Mr. Rockwell walked into the kitchen on the opposite side of the room and returned ashen. “It’s the same that way, too. It looks like the apocalypse and we are the ones left behind.”
Looking around the room from the Aryan Senior and Junior, the Rockwells and Jerry’s demands to go home now “fucking now” ringing in my ears, I realized we were the leftovers and just as desirable.