AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The place where Ben took her for dinner was about as wide as a single lane at a bowling alley, not quite as long, and far more crowded. Two-seater tables lined one wall. A counter with stools marched along the other. The aisle in between was barely broad enough to walk.
Behind the counter, two men in white aprons took orders and worked a grill in a long, narrow space they couldn’t have polkaed in if they tried.
“What is this place?”
Ben led her to the only open stools at the counter. “The B&H Dairy. An authentic kosher vegetarian Eastern European diner.”
“Huh.” She settled her Macy’s bags around and in front of her feet. They didn’t have kosher vegetarian Eastern European diners back home. Actually, they didn’t have diners with any of those adjectives.
One of the two men behind the counter handed her a menu. Scanning it only made her feel more out of place. What did one order at a restaurant that served omelets, wheat-grass juice, and latkes? Not to mention that behind the counter, a bunch of neon-colored laminated signs announced the availability of salmon croquettes, split-pea soup, and egg creams.
“Harriet the Spy always drank egg creams,” she told Ben. “I thought it was very New York.”
“Don’t get an egg cream here.” He plucked the menu out of her hand. “Here, you get the borscht, and we’ll share some pierogis.”
“I’ve never had borscht.”
“Good.”
He put their order in, and May watched him, amused. She supposed she should take offense at the way he kept telling her what to eat and even what to do. Get your ass in a cab, May-Belle wasn’t exactly the nicest thing anybody had ever said to her. But it wasn’t as though she had a better plan to offer. She certainly never would have come into this place on her own. It looked like a dive, and she wasn’t accustomed to sitting so close to the people making her food. There was a bug-under-the-microscope aspect to the experience that she would have avoided.
With Ben, though, it was fine. Even kind of entertaining. The cook-waiter seemed to know a lot of the people who came in, and he’d ask them how their families were doing, how their days were going. He’d greeted Ben like an old friend but had been too busy to talk when they came in.
He dropped off small paper plates containing half slices of thick bread and tiny plastic tubs of butter, along with a plastic knife. The presentation left something to be desired.
The bread didn’t.
“Ogmuf muh gahh, whabgt iss this?” May asked after she’d taken her first, inadvertently huge bite.
Ben smiled. “Challah.”
She swallowed and forced herself to pause for a sip of water before she shoved the entire piece of bread in her mouth. All that shopping had made her hungry, and the bread was eggy and exactly the right balance of dense and light, chewy and fluffy. “Is it made from ground-up baby angels?”
He shook his head, smiling. “Never let it be said that you’re not a weirdo.”
“Takes one to know one, bee man.”
“Speaking of, it’s really good with honey.” He handed her a bottle. “Drizzle it on the butter.”
May did. And tried it. And died of happiness.
Once she had bread in her stomach, she started to get used to the B&H experience and to forgive it some of its chaotic miscellaneousness. A woman came in and ordered a shot of wheat-grass juice. The waiter leaned way down and brought up a plastic tray of grass from a shelf beneath the cash register, cut off a big handful, and put it through a juicer. It was decidedly odd, but impressive in its efficiency.
It was also the kind of thing that May’s mother would have turned into a story—and not a flattering one. Whereas her father would have found it quietly amusing.
May found it quite entertaining.
Little glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice joined their bread plates. Someone ordered an apple cheddar omelet, and the waiter grabbed an apple from a box beneath the counter, sliced it in half, chopped it into pieces, and handed it to the grill guy, who cooked it with onions and eggs while talking to a customer.
The clientele were interesting, too—wrinkled old people and hip students, families and singles, a uniformed policeman who ate three gigantic blintzes. The B&H didn’t seem to serve a particular demographic. It was simply here, and so were all these people.
Their soup arrived, steaming and alarmingly pink.
“Wow.”
Ben smiled. “Dig in.”
“It looks radioactive.”
