Ken Poyner - Tim Serre

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Ken Poyner

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Ever since I was just a moth-bedazzled child, I have loved Roger’s.  The burgers there seemed, back in my haloed childhood, to be nearly as large as I, and as equally enthusiastic.  The fries would come in a heap, sliding energetically off and onto the enameled table top.  I could lose myself in the dreary, sober thickness of their unbelievably deep chocolate shakes.

 

No doubt, I still love Roger’s in part because it is a bridge to my childhood – the great giggling reservoir of that titillating innocence; the quailed florets of joy released by memories of the tastes and smells and sounds of even strikingly ordinary things.  When I see the furiously yellow façade of the restaurant, or the raised red sign that shamelessly proclaims “Roger’s” in golden calligraphy, I am again eight or nine and my appetite yawns as unselfconsciously as a housecat waking in tattered sunlight.

 

It is the last restaurant before you get to the Appeasement Pit, and thus the first one you hit on your way back.  A lot of people these days just park at Roger’s, and walk the last hundred or so yards:  no need to fight for parking in the small public asphalt lot, then drive in a disjointed crowd back, just to park again at Roger’s.  If you plan to end at Roger’s, you start there.

 

Some people go farther into town to eat at less cartoonish establishments; or they go home to family gatherings, where generations count each other and with curious care compare cooking styles.  A few of the discredited old-school simple souls retire to their dark homes and sumptuously fast for the remainder of the celebration day.  Some join in neighborhood repasts.

 

For me, from my first disjointed, purposefully complex memories, it has always been Roger’s.  Forty years, and through likely four or five owners, it has kept its bright family appeal:  its near comic book festoonery enlivening the children; its celebration of stereotypes embracing the adults; its offer of the expected settling everyone on their expected and comfortable tracks, if only for a meal.

 

I don’t know when the place was founded, but it has been added on to so many times it looks a bit like the leavings of a train wreck.  There is more new addition than there is original, though deciding what is new and what is original might be a question of picking a random date.  For everyone who loves Roger’s, there is a particular time and architecture when Roger’s became a legendary addition to life – and that is, for them, the time of the original Roger’s.  Collective memory is littered with countless array of images of Roger’s, each pristine and stuffed to the roof with uncomplicated memories that hum lovingly through ordinary lives.

 

Once a month, during the Appeasement ceremony, it stays laboriously full all day and even holds itself open extra hours.  The rest of the month, it does a fair business – speckled mostly with a family crowd, or with un-ambitious, becalmed dating couples.  It does not impress: it enfolds.

 

I would never hold a business lunch there:  the place would spoil the business; the business would spoil the place.

 

No.  It is best to leave Roger’s as the place you go to eat on the sly side of today what you might have eaten decades earlier, when your expectations were as huge as the Southern Plains, and your heart could beat without knowing its own rhythm.

 

I take my family there only after the Appeasement celebration.  I know how to keep a ritual special by keeping it appropriately at bay.  I arrive early enough to park in the wide, wise front lot -- vice the overflow lot unpaved on the side -- and walk the family over to the Pit.  As the children complain about the distance, I tell them yet again the stories of when the Pit was a volcano – even though that was generations before my time, and there was no Roger’s:  everyone had to park even farther away, the family car set in line with everyone else’s, the front grills looking like a row of teeth; and everyone walked and walked and walked and thought about having to walk back; with the anger of the stupendously crazy volcano a constant threat, a threat appeased only with our periodic gift, and the hair on men’s arms standing up, and women going weak in the knees from un-housed heat.  No town then.  No Roger’s then.  Just a long walk there, a long walk back, and stewed potatoes when you got home.

 

They don’t believe me, of course.  This town, this restaurant, this walk, is their baseline.  For them, this is as hard as it gets.  For their children there will be a closer restaurant with a closer parking lot.  Maybe a shuttle, picking up passengers at a flailing of local parking lots and dropping off people en masse at the Pit, waiting with heat or air conditioning running for them to come back.  Everything orderly, everything on schedule, everything convenient.  Perhaps a box lunch included in the cost of shuttle fare. Our children would find it funny if I told them that, like me, they will look back on their reward time at Roger’s with a kindness and a stiletto longing and, if the place is still here, they will come cowering back to swindle themselves with the joys of childhood again.

 

The volcano is long out, so there is no heat to contend with.  We can park closer, dress for the ambient weather, expect to keep our eyebrows when we lean over to peer into the calm, starving Pit.  For every generation, the difficulties and drudgery of propitiation seems to become less and less to bear, and yet to be more and more begrudged.

 

When we get to the Pit, they will exaggerate their imagined exhaustion.  My wife will roll her eyes in our shared secret mode, then finally smile as though it were dessert time already.  That night, as we lie alone in bed and I slowly draw my drowsy fingers across her interconnected options, she will remark how the children are too consumed with modern ease, too unready for the hardness and breakable stillness ahead.  In her voice will be the same social stitchery as was often lurking in her mother’s.

 

Once the ledge of the Pit is reached, everything always moves at a gallop.  Every one there has other, more personally inviting, places to be; other, more individualized, rituals to follow.  Roger’s will have put a full grill of burgers on.  Fries will be poised in the fry basket, waiting to be dropped when the first customer lays his shadow at the door.  The old shake machine – the kind you see now usually only in antique shops – will be ready to twirl its off-beat thump and clang in the ritual of making the best shakes within driving distance.  Thankfully, the formal Appeasement ceremony has been slimmed down to just a sentence or two.  We will chant “Toss, toss” a few times; and then, in one swing, galumph, the chosen girl will be chucked over the side by the two tree like attendants – generally the two proper sized boys who produced the least entertaining excuses for getting out of the chore – and we then turn to head back:  to competing entertainments at home, to neighborhood gatherings, to buffets held in formal hotel ballrooms, to Roger’s -- most likely before she even hits bottom and caresses the scandalously disorganized bones of her spindly predecessors.

 

It must have been achingly, geometrically different when the Pit was an actual volcano.  I could not imagine standing so close to a live volcano:  perhaps the magma leaping angrily in the background, or splashing the dangerously close stone lip – or maybe just down a hundred feet from the edge, swirling in a lazy, unimpressed pool.

 

In the distance, a Roger’s the manager will prop open the glass door that sits like a mime’s smile in the center of Roger’s squat front wall face.  Get the customers in, get the customers out.  It is -- in the final light and cold of the matter, in the dark and heat of the matter -- a burger and fry emporium.  Three flavors of milkshake, and one constabulary of mustard.  The children will wake from their somnambulance.  The smallest child will want the largest shake, and he will have it.  I will feel myself grow small in my clothes, and the garish walls will seem strictly comforting again.  I will see my own hands as the elfin works of wonder they once were, and are for a while again; and tastes that are forty years old will reach grappling into the dry, spackling well of my consciousness.

 

More booths than tables.  Formica countertops.   Waitresses in uniforms.  Cooks in disposable, fold and stack hats. A dessert stand that spins.  A child, knees in the bench seat, spun back around to play at making faces with the unknown family seated in the booth next.  Coats and hats on a limited forest of metal coat stands.

 

Food is served here.  Food that has always been more than sustenance.  More than a design imposed upon necessity.  Food, and the baked, yellow shrouded pottery of memories.

 

 

Ken Poyner has lately been seen in “Analog”, “Café Irreal”, “Cream City Review”, “The Journal of Microliterature”, “Mobius”, “The Watershed Review” and many other strange places.  His latest book of short fiction, “Constant Animals’, is available from his web, www.kpoyner.com, and from www.amazon.com.   He is married to Karen Poyner, one of the world’s premier power lifters, and holder of more than a dozen current world power lifting records.  Together, they are the animal parents of four rescue cats and several self-satisfied fish.

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Tim Serre

Learn To Love Again

 

He held the black lace close to his face. It smelled sweet. It smelled like her. He lay tucked in a ball on top of the covers, running the blouse across his cheek. Slivers of late afternoon sun shone through the blinds casting orange bars across his body. His suit was creased and he had smeared black polish from his shoes all over the bedspread. He looked like a boy, bored from playing dress up.

 

It hadn’t hit him until this afternoon. After all of the post death bedlam, it hit him like a knee to the gut. She was gone.  Without his mind preoccupied and the house full of relatives, there was nowhere to retreat. He still had the song “Ave Maria” in his head. It had played while the men shuffled out, shouldering her casket. She had told Jared once how she thought it was the most beautifully sad song that she had ever heard. Jared never forgot things like that.

 

Here in this empty house, in the bed where they made love, the same bed that smelled like her, that held blond stray hairs on the pillows, with the Egyptian cotton sheets that they had picked out together, the sheets that were now smudged with black shoe polish, Jared lay thoroughly alone. 

 

Two weeks after the funeral, Jared went back to work for the first time. His friends told him to take more time, but staying in that house all day was torturous. It was a minefield. He would pick up some innocuous thing like a coffee mug and he’d remember how she would look sitting there at the table, with her knee pulled up, sipping. These moments were devastating. Usually twenty minutes would pass before he’d be able to open his swollen eyes and wipe away the strings of mucus with his sleeve.  He knew he needed to immerse himself in a new environment, a foreign environment that wasn’t packed with emotional triggers. Jared wanted to drown in the reassuring heaviness of paperwork.

 

So Monday came and he was clean-shaven. Buried at his desk, he didn’t raise his head except for a few bites during lunch and when his clock read six-thirty. He repeated this process for the next three weeks and found that the monotony helped.  It was only when he returned home that that sinking sensation came back. He could feel Marion lingering in every corner of the place. For the past week he had been sleeping on the couch because being in the bedroom was too difficult. On three occasions during the third week, when Jared was just about to drift off to sleep he swore that he could feel the solid prickling of movement beside him.

 

He started going to a bar after work. He drank scotch. He hated scotch. Around ten or so he would head home, sometimes circling the block a few times until he finally pulled in. There was something seething underneath all of his sadness. He missed Marion with a pain that struck bone, but there were also traces of fear. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was afraid of but he could sense the edges of it.

 

One Friday in late August Jared was driving home against his better judgment. His belly was a furnace of liquor. The heat of the booze and the sticky summer night had made him sweaty. As he pulled into his driveway, he saw something that cut through his buzz. The light of his bedroom was on. Jared’s flesh crept. He hadn’t been in the room for months. He had even moved his clothes into the first floor closet to avoid going in there. Something felt off about the room, something that told him to stay away. He tried the front door. It was locked. New beads of sweat formed in cold globs. He entered the house, leaving the keys in the door.

 

Jared climbed the stairs toward the incandescent glow coming from the slit under the door. After each footfall he paused to hear for something, anything. Silence. He continued his ascent until he stood before the door. His legs were like a newborn calf’s, but he urged them forward, grabbing for the doorknob. The oak slab swung forward on its hinges. He scanned the room with wild eyes expecting some dark figure to be lurking in a corner. There was no figure. In fact, nothing looked disturbed at all; the cupboards and closet were closed just as he had left them. Even the bed was still made… and then he noticed it. He stepped back, repulsed by the sight. Draped across the bed, as though she had laid it out herself, was Marion’s black dress. It was the dress that she had been buried in. He could smell the rot. Locked in a horrific tableau, he stood rigid with his eyes on the dress until a sound jarred him out of his trance. He heard it come from behind the bathroom door. It was a sloshing sound that came from the tub. The smell made bile rise in his throat. He had only fainted one time in his life. He had been about 9 years old at the time. His mom had forced him to go to Sunday Mass even though he said that he had felt sick. As he stood in the pew the pungent incense worked upon his fever. The stained glass blurred in a swirl of deep reds and he crumpled into a fleshy heap. Now as he stood in the bedroom he felt that swirling sensation again. His mind was cracking. He reeled like a punch-drunk fighter under the weight of the terror. But just before he hit the carpeted floor he heard a saccharine voice coming from the bathroom. It was humming the melody to “Ave Maria”.   

 

 

Tim Serre is a freelance writer and teacher from Canada, currently living in Seoul, South Korea. His non-fiction work has been featured in the regional magazines Niagara Life Magazine and The Score. His short story February 20th has been published in Through The Gaps Magazine.