The diners smell like pickles or fries or burnt coffee. They sound like murmuring, like the scraping of forks and knives, cursing rusty pipes; soup slurped, women gossiping and kids shrieking, staining their crested polo’s with Heinz 57 ketchup. (If you hit the 57 it comes out faster). We will miss him, that man dragging his walker—neon tennis balls on the bottom—New York Post in a sun-spotted hand. We’ll miss them, too, the seven teenagers crammed in a booth meant for four, knees on knees, lanky arms intertwined, heads on shoulders, eventually. The windows look onto Third Avenue or Gates Avenue or Madison Avenue. The windows are never clean, yet looking out we can city the whole city.
And when we lose them, we’re not only losing Old New York or character or whatever we call it. We’ll lose the only places that provide radical specify and repetitive familiarity; the only places which concretize that unrelenting New York sense of alienation and at-home-ness.
There are only hash browns left on her plate (chipped, like the mug). She ate the eggs, avoiding carbs. The fork hovers above the mash of starch, and I watch, rapt. I do know her, the type of woman who takes the patty off of the bun, eats the burger with a fork, pauses, and then eats the bun plain.
I’m watching her here, at my diner on Amsterdam. Its North of Lincoln Center, south of the Sephora where I slipped lipstick into my sleeves, growing out of that habit way later than appropriate. I’m a few subway stops away from my Alma Mater and a crosstown bus from where I grew up. I’m here every Monday at 5:30 after therapy.
In my diner on Amsterdam, Dmitry says Best seat in the house no matter where he squeezes me in. He doesn’t know my name, but he says Hello, Bella when I come in. And I say I thought you were Greek, Dmitry. A Greek with a Russian name who greets me in Italian. The diner on Amsterdam reminds me of the diner on First, which I frequented before college, where I begged my parents for mozzarella sticks for lunch until I slurped them at 2AM, fifteen and drunk and indulgent. I make the pilgrimage when I go to my parents’ house, where I go when my approximation of adult life feels like Goya, like standing inside Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son. At the diner on First, I feel nostalgic for my high school melancholy, when, at seventeen, I thought my life must begin now or I would simply die of it. Ten years later, I think this still.
The woman’s eaten most of the potatoes. I’m eating my bagel open-faced, and when I’m done I’ll eat the second half. I know I am reducing her to a type, and I like that I can reduce her to a type. She has depths and secrets of course: a college boyfriend she thinks of while masturbating, her husband asleep next to her, his bedside lamp keeping her awake; her favorite son in San Francisco even though she claims she doesn’t have a favorite son. Some private pain, her own regrets. What is she nostalgic for?
I will miss this woman when I leave this city. I will leave this time. I’ve aged out of my excuses. My mother says she’ll support me no matter what, and I believe her. I believe her even though on Thanksgiving she drank too much wine and said Your father and I have only fifteen years left. We’ll visit you wherever you live, though. She slammed though down hard on the table. This better not be true because I need my parents as much as I need somewhere not-here. Because never leaving your hometown is never leaving your hometown even if your hometown is 6.7 million people, among them me and my parents, this woman and all of us at the diners.
She gets up to leave before I do, and Dmitry says, This weather in April, can you believe it? Next time we’ll get you some sun with you eggs. The foggy door yawns behind her as she leaves and yawns again when she comes back for her bag of avocados. Dmitry is ready, holding it up with a wink. I watch her leave, knowing I don’t know her or any of them. We have the diners in common. Just as we have the unmistakable good fortune of being from New York.
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