zone. Michele’s got me in the rearview mirror, keeping an eye on me the way you might keep yourself aware of where the scorpion is in your room when you check into the hacienda you booked in Tijuana. You are game for an adventure, but best to know where the scorpion is at all times.
Now we are heading toward the Slope and looking for Mary’s Fish Camp—I’ve decided I will, at this point, happily sink into an excellent lobster roll and a beer at a counter with plain paper table mats. I make the call and they also won’t reopen until six p.m. for dinner service. Brunch until three. Dinner at six, said the outgoing message. So now it’s done. I am tanked.
And just at that moment, Leone started to cry his pitiful not-so-little falling asleep cry. I have never understood the heartless Ferber people who let their kids “cry it out.” If you are inclined to view your three-month-old infant’s cries as “manipulative,” as a means of discovering if she can get you to come into the room and pick her up “on command,” then you should rethink parenthood in the first place. I don’t think you are mature enough, frankly. An infant, to be sure, can’t haul herself downstairs and help herself to a glass of water, can’t call upon a good friend at two in the morning to discuss the finer points of her fears and anxieties. I feel compelled—involuntarily compelled—to pick up and try to comfort my child when I hear him wailing. My hormones shake like a passing tank when I hear children—children on an airplane not even my own—wailing in distress. I long to just pick them up and comfort the little guys. After all, they are crying. I’m going to assume they are crying for a good reason—even if it’s just an infant’s run-of-the-mill: Pick me up and hold me because I’m afraid of falling asleep because sleep is like death. For me, that is a good enough reason to pick up and hold my kid, so that he may feel—at a minimum—accompanied to his perceived death by someone who gives a shit.
Michele doesn’t feel as I do, unfortunately. So there I am, stuck in the driver’s seat driving, cell-phoning, and having a blood sugar crisis while my eight-month-old expresses his perfectly good reasons for wanting comfort to his totally unpersuaded father, who is able, somehow, to sit through the tears completely nonplussed, while giving me friendly suggestions about some $8.99 brunch place he used to eat at with his old girlfriend twenty years ago. “And you get a frrrree mimosa,” he tells me from the backseat.
Meanwhile, I don’t eat $8.99 brunch with a free mimosa. I have rules. Standards.
I do not get vague or generic appetite, which will be satisfied, more or less, with just anything that is handy. I will skip a meal rather than eat the corner joint’s interpretation of eggs Benedict with spinach, button mushrooms, and “blood orange” hollandaise sauce. I don’t eat that kind of shit. Michele, from the backseat, kept saying, “I rrrreeeeemember a place, verrrrry good brrrrunch, up here on the left.” But when we approach and I see the chalkboard on the sidewalk advertising free mimosa, I speed up and drive on.
Free mimosa is the kind of signal I rely on to stay away from a place. Why is the mimosa free? What is wrong with a place that it needs to provide the customer with an incentive to eat the food? On the other hand, things are now kind of urgent and a mimosa would really soothe and refresh. I’m saying things I don’t mean, that I will later regret, and that Marco is sure to repeat as soon as he can think up a way to work them into a sentence. I’m saying things like: Maybe if I just order poached eggs and toast it won’t be so bad up here at The Red Potato Bistro.
Four o’clock or so is a diner’s wasteland. Nothing’s open, it’s between services, and those few places that do stay open continuously go through shift change so you spend countless minutes being ignored while the bartender restocks his wine for the evening service and a busboy resets tables and you can hear a dishwasher on the intercom in the kitchen yelling down to the cooks: Here is a ticket! Here is a ticket! But this is my favorite time of day to eat, to eat well, to eat