The Ninth Dish

Chapter 9: Every Plate Came Back Empty

Every Plate Came Back Empty

They left the car two blocks up, at the corner, because the street past it was too narrow to drive and Ray Ostrow did not like to hold anybody up. Chase came along behind him with both hands in his pockets, still making the argument he had been making since lunch.

"Two hundred dollars," he said. "That's all she wanted."

"You could have paid her."

"I didn't hit her."

"You were on the sidewalk."

"The front wheel was."

Ray kept walking. Sixty years in kitchens and dining rooms had taught him to see a thing coming about four seconds before it arrived. It had never once worked on the person walking behind him with his hands in his pockets.

Sid Feldman came up on Ray's other side and said nothing. He had been saying nothing about other people's sons for forty years, and he was not going to start on the sidewalk.

"The cop ran her name," Chase said. "He said, and I'm quoting, the lady does this."

"Then he should have arrested her."

"He was being nice to me."

"He was being nice to her."

They came around the last turn and Chase stopped where he was, in the middle of a sentence.

The sign over the door said HALE HOUSE. Somebody had painted it twice and been in a hurry the second time, so the first coat showed through the bottom of every letter. There were two windows with the lights on, a bell over the door, and a board hanging off a hook that read CHERRY PORK 14, RICE 2, TEA 1.

"Grandpa," Chase said. "This is where we're eating."

"I've eaten here."

"You've eaten here."

"Get in."

Chase had come along for two reasons. One was the motorcycle, which was under a cover in his mother's garage until he could prove he was not going to run into anybody again, and the allowance that had stopped with it; he had been working on his grandfather about both since lunch and had gotten nowhere. The other reason was dinner. Standing on that sidewalk, he could feel the two of them getting away from him.

Inside, five tables had been pushed together into one square, and somebody had wiped them and set four places, and that was the whole arrangement. The stools were the kind that stack. The sign on the wall behind the register was coming unstuck at one corner. Ray looked at it and decided he liked it. He did not say so out loud.

"Sit down," he said, and Chase was on the stool before he finished saying it.

Chester Bright came in last, folding his coat over the back of his chair before he sat, and he looked the room over the way a man looks over a horse he has been told about. Then he said nothing at all about it, which from Chester was worse than anything he could have said.

The room was theirs for the night, and the empty tables were worth more to the three of them than a wine list would have been. They were not, any of them, at the age where a stranger's conversation made a meal better.

Caleb came out of the kitchen with three plates up his left arm and set them down and named them off. "Three Greens. The braise. Crisp Shoots."

Three plates, all white, no garnish on any of them anywhere except one thing. Of the three, only the braise could be identified by eye: wings in one pile, feet in another, tongues in a third, and a lantern standing in the middle of the plate, keeping them apart.

"Looks nice," Chase said, quietly, to Sid, who did not hear him, because Sid had already put his hand flat on the table and leaned in over the shoots like a man reading a letter from a lawyer.

Chester took his glasses out of his coat pocket, put them on, and lifted the lantern off the plate with two fingers. It was about four inches tall, white, hollowed out, cut with window openings and a little door, and there was a candle sitting inside it so the light came through the shaved walls. He turned it. He held it out at arm's length and brought it back. He was not a man who hurried a compliment, or a complaint.

"Beautiful," he said.

Nobody at the table looked at it.

"We're not the kind of men who need this," Chester said, and set the lantern back down in the middle of the plate. "Don't spend your hours on it."

"Ha," Caleb said. "Ha ha. Okay."

He was through the kitchen door before the second laugh was finished. That lantern had taken Nora under three minutes. He knew because he had come back from the sink one morning with his hands still wet and found a row of six of them standing on the board like somebody had put them out for a photograph, and the water had still been running behind him. He had not told anybody that. He was not going to.

The sound came from the other end of the table.

Sid's teeth came down on the first shoot and it broke, and every man at the table heard it. He had a second one in his hand before he had finished the first. That was the only invitation any of them were going to get. There had not been much on that plate to start with, and there was less of it by the minute, and then there was none, and every man at the table spent the next half minute bent over his own small bowl with one fingertip, picking out what had broken off.

The shavings were the color of weak tea and thin enough to see through at the edge. They were dry in a way that fried things almost never are, without a trace of oil on the fingers, and they gave up before you used any force on them at all. There were no strings in them. That was the part Chester could not get past, once his mouth was empty. Nothing that comes out of the ground is without strings.

"What is it," Chase said. "Potato?"

"It's not potato," Ray said.

"Taro," Sid said, and then, before anybody could answer, "No. Not taro."

Chester had the last shaving between his fingers, holding it up against the window.

"Magnolia," he said. "The flower."

"Shoots," Caleb said from the end of the table, with the next tray in his hands.

"Shoots," Chase said. He was looking at the empty plate. "Shoots, like, out of the ground."

"Bamboo."

Chase sat back. "That's bamboo. I've had bamboo. That does not happen to bamboo."

"There was no fiber in it," Chester said, still working on it. "A shoot is fiber. You cut a shoot thin and it holds together, it fights you, unless you've done something to it first, and I would very much like to know what you'd have to do to it, because I have eaten this all my life and I have never—"

Sid had the plate of greens by one corner and was loading his bowl.

"—are you listening to me?"

"I'm eating," Sid said.

"You've still got the last one in your fingers while you say it," Ray said.

Chester looked at his own hand. He ate it.

The greens were cut so fine they were closer to string than to salad, cool and wet and slippery in a way that made a man want to slow down. Nobody had expected to slow down at this point in the meal. There were threads of two other things in there that were not greens: something sweet and bitter and orange, and something with a clean bite under it, both of them cut finer than the greens themselves. You could see all three of them lying in the same bowl, and the only way to tell them apart was to eat and stop thinking.

Then they got to the braise, which every one of them had eaten a hundred times before, at tables where it had been on the menu since before they were born and had stopped meaning anything at all.

The wings came apart without a fight. You put the whole joint in your mouth and the clean bones came back out, and Ray did it twice to be sure it hadn't been luck, and both times the meat came off whole, with no string to catch in his teeth and no grease on the third knuckle of his hand.

The feet had no bones in them. Somebody had stood at a counter with a small knife and taken the bones out of a duck's feet one at a time, and Ray took a second to think about that, because labor like that came with a name on a menu and a price printed under the name, and it did not come out of a room with five tables in it. He ate his and did not mention it. They were soft and springy, and when he bit down the meat and the tendon went together in one piece, and there was nothing left to chew, so he had another.

The tongues had a small piece of cartilage down the middle of them, more like a filling than a bone, and around it the softest, darkest, richest meat on the table: two bites at the outside, and then it was gone and there was no getting it back.

Chase had been sitting there with his jacket on. He ate a foot and then he ate another one, and he did not say a word to anybody about it, because the plate was in the middle of the table and his grandfather was watching.

The cold plates came off and the hot ones started and did not stop.

Rice cake soup came first, a small bowl at each place, the color of milk, and down in the bottom of it two or three slices of rice cake and one or two of ham and nothing else. The cake had cooked so far down that it gave up under the spoon and came apart where it stood. The last third of the bowl was different, still holding its shape against the tongue, and that was the part Ray took his time over.

Scallops after that, four apiece, each one about the width of a half dollar and as thick as a thumb, seared hard on both sides so the edges went brown and the middle of them gave. There was nothing on the plate with them. Not a leaf, not a drop.

Then the rabbit, which came out on one plate and got set down in front of Ray and nowhere near the middle of the table.

"That one's yours," Caleb said.

"Why."

Caleb shrugged and went back through the door. That was the whole answer, and it was going to stay the whole answer, because Nora was behind that door with her back to the room and had been since the first plate went out.

The rabbit had been pulled apart by hand instead of cut, and the smell of it reached the table before the plate did. Sixty years of eating in other people's dining rooms, and nobody had ever sent a dish out for him alone, without being asked, without being told. He looked at it a second longer than he had to.

"I thought you didn't eat hot food," he said to Chester, who was reaching across him.

"At my age I'm allowed to try something new," Chester said. His face was red to the ears and his hand did not stop.

"Grandpa, Dad said—"

"Your father can eat his own dinner."

"He said the—"

"I heard what he said."

Chase got his fork over the plate anyway, and Ray took it back off him, and after that nobody at the table said anything for a while, because every mouth at the table was full and two of them were on fire. Sid said nothing and ate the most of it.

The ribs came next, sweet and sour and small, one to a bite, and the meat let go of the bone the second a tooth touched it, and the bone itself was worth two more pulls before it went into the bowl. Chase was young and got three extra while the other three were occupied with the last of the rabbit, and he did not feel one thing about it.

By the eighth plate nobody at the table was keeping count of what they were eating, only of how much was left, which is a different habit and an older one. The plates kept coming, one meat, one vegetable, one meat, and every one of them was sized for four and priced for four, because she had counted four heads when they walked in and cut everything back to match. A kitchen only does that for somebody who is counting heads and not plates. The rice came out last in a small pot that held four small bowls and no more, and when that was gone there were twelve empty plates on the table and not one of them had seen it coming.

Chase sat back and put a hand on his stomach.

"I was going to get noodles after this," he said.

The last two things were sweets, a bean cake and an almond custard, and not one of them could have eaten either one on a bet, so they went into a box, four of each, and a jar went into the bag with them: the dark plums, the candied ones, the same ones that had been sitting in a plastic box behind the register all week. Nobody asked for the jar. It went in the bag anyway.

They got up slowly.

Nora had come out when the last plate went back and had been standing at the register since, saying nothing. Chester was there first, with his coat already on, and he had something in his hand: a card.

"You're going to want a dining room," he said. "A door you can shut. A floor you can put a chair on. Somebody at the front who knows how to say no to people."

"Okay."

"When you've got one, call me before you call anybody else. I eat with six men every Tuesday. Between them they've eaten in every restaurant in this city twice and complained about every one of them. Say the word and I'll bring all six."

He took the pen off the counter and wrote the number on the back of the card himself and pressed it into her hand. Then he stood there a second to be sure he was the last one to say anything.

Sid came next. "Three times a week," he said. "I don't care what's on the board and I don't want to hear about the board. And when I say a thing is good, there are people I know who go and find it." He laid a card on the counter, borrowed the pen, wrote his number on the back of it in a hand that pressed hard, and pushed it toward her with one finger.

"You already have mine," Ray said. "The one with the number on the back. That's my son's office. It rings on a desk and a person answers it, and if you want something that comes in on a truck, that's the number to use it for."

"Thank you, Grandpa Chester," she said. Then, "Thank you, Grandpa Sid." Then, "Thank you, Grandpa Ray."

Chase watched this happen from the back of the room with a box of sweets under one arm and understood that the evening had produced nothing for him at all.

It crossed all three of their minds inside about the same four seconds, for three different reasons and with the same answer: none of them had a granddaughter who could cook.

"Call me whatever you want," Ray said.

He paid at the register on his way to the door, with his back to the room. Chase held the door while he went through. Sid came out last and stood in the street looking back at the two small windows with the lights still on behind them.

One thousand and eighty dollars. Four people and seventeen items if you counted the sweets in the box, and counting the sweets was the honest way to count it: two hundred and seventy dollars a head, sixty a dish. There was a place twelve blocks north with a coat check and a wine list and a chef who got written about, and four men could eat there for a little more than this and drive home still thinking about dinner.

Every one of them knew that. Each of them said something about it out in the street, at the same time, over the top of the others.

If the number had come first, one of them would have called somebody. It came last. So it was a bargain, and they said so the whole way to the corner, and they said it the way men say a thing they have already decided to do again.

"Grandpa."

"No."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were going to."

They started up the block. Chase looked at the two cars and then at his grandfather.

"It's a long walk," he said.

"It's two blocks," Ray said.

They walked it.