Of Life and Lemons
by Robert kingett.
The little wedge of yellow inside my glass seemed to smile at me menacingly. My eyes grew to roughly the size of saucers, and my mouth went dry. This kid was definitely not my usual waiter, he didn't understand.
"Is everything alright, Mr. Godfrey?" he asked, seeking reassurance, which he wouldn't be getting from me. "Loraine told me what you liked. Iced tea, she said, and he'll be happy as a clam!"
More than anything I wanted to inform him, I didn't speak to strangers and hurry from the diner, but my daily tea was a necessity if I was to live until the following day. My schedule just didn't permit me leaving.
His nametag - crooked nametag - read "Lenny", and his shirt was easily two sizes too large for his lanky frame. Although he'd tried his best to tuck it in neatly, it still ballooned around his abdomen like a pouch.
Lenny raised an eyebrow. I'd been staring too long without answer. Nothing was all right. He'd put a lemon in my tea. A LEMON.
Never the less, I tried to loosen my tensed joints and nod. It was stiff, awkward, strained, but Lenny accepted it as an answer and left my table so quickly it could have been rude. I hated being so shy. It frequently made people uncomfortable. Imagine how I felt.
The lemon smiled on, mocking my struggle, even as he drowned in the rusty brown tea. I liked the idea of him dying a horrible death. Deserved it. My refusing to save him gave me a certain satisfaction. I condemned him to this fate.
I weighed my options. I could leave without drinking the tea, but that would be terribly rude, and besides, I needed my fix. I had tea every single day, I couldn't just skip out on my "me time". I could ask for a new glass, but Lenny surely would argue it was perfectly fine, or worse; ask me what the problem was in that overly nice teenage voice of his that screamed, 'You can leave your tips on the table, sir'. How could I explain myself without sounding crazy? "Well, Leonard- can I call you that? Leonard? - I'm afraid of lemons. And quite frankly, this glass of tea, complete with lemon, scares the piss out of me."
Of course, there was always the option of drinking it.
Shivers erupted over my whole plot. They started in my legs and crawled their way upwards until my teeth chattered. No way in hell was I drinking that iced terror.
So there I sat utterly trapped in my little booth. I could see down the row of similar booths spread down the length of the little diner, all the way to the exit where my eyes came to focus. I glanced down at the tea then back to the door. A waiter ran by with a few milkshakes, shaking the table slightly. The contents of the glass shifted and the lemon seemed to shake its head no, the smile never faltering.
Unfolded my napkin, I dabbed at my forehead before sinking into the booth. Here I was eye level with the glass. I was the prisoner of a glass with a Coca Cola logo printed on its side. And since I refused to spend my afternoons at the diner with anyone else, I was stuck with just the lemon, and my thoughts to keep me company.
I shifted my weight, and the seat groaned.
"Your father is concerned," my chair at our dinner table has a squeaky leg. I rocked back and forth slightly, listening to the leg creak under the stress.
"He thinks you might have - Oh, what did he call it? - social anxiety," my mother sat at the head of our mile long dinner table. She and I were usually the only ones who ate dinner there. My father had 'other business' to attend to. Military business. When my mother had noticed I wasn't paying attention to her, she gulped down a sizeable glass of red wine, hiccupping a little.
"Rudolf?"
"I think he has erectile dysfunction, and feels the need to assert himself in the only way he can," I mumbled, never taking my eyes off the plate. She had poured herself another glass by that time. We didn't talk about my 'condition' ever again.
The diner's overhead fans whirred softly above my head, blowing a cool breeze down the high collar of my jacket. The silverware bundles by the window called to me, and I cautiously reached around the tea to grab three of them. I liked the number three; there was always a clear middle. Removing the silverware, I arranged them all by type. I removed three sugar packets from the ceramic container, and three creamers from the little bowl nearby. My collection of goods sat in front of me, like a happy cluster of islands. A woman walked by the table, clearly headed out. She glanced at my table, then at my wide-eyed expression.
I think my guilty look made her nervous.
Hands awkwardly folded into my lap, I leaned back from the table.
"They raise an interesting point," Grant, named after General Ulysses S. Grant, was my go-to person in the military neighborhood when my family became too much to deal with. The morning following my 'diagnoses according to dad', he and I had chewed the idea over. Surprisingly, Grant had not been on my side.
"You're kind of, I don’t know… Hiding from everything. The diner thing consumes you. Would it kill you to break your routine just once?"
Break my routine? BREAK MY ROUTINE? As in, not go to the diner? Not order my tea? That would be like me asking him to stop breathing. 'Would it kill you to stop breathing just once?' If I didn't take this time out of my day, I frequently was attacked by headaches. The diner was my sanctuary. It calmed me down. The tea was a drink of water after crawling around a desert all day.
I pulled over the ceramic sugar container and slid the packets back in neatly. My time in the restaurant prison was being to wear on me. I still hadn't decided what to do about the lemon.
Loraine… Where was she? She would have never put a lemon in my tea. She knew, she understood. I'd been coming here for years, and somehow, she'd grown attached to me. "Her favorite little regular", or sometimes she called me "honkey". It changed with her mood.
I eyed the lemon suspiciously. It had sunk a little further down in my glass, and was now hiding behind the Coke logo. I felt Lenny watching me from the hot plate across the room. I hadn't touched my drink, and it was putting him on edge. His scrutiny made me feel sick. I hated thinking people were judging me, even thinking about me.
Okay, so maybe my father had said something of worth. He spoke through my mother to me most of the time, which was probably why it had made sense in the first place. I didn't like people. It's impossible to know what other people are thinking, and that uncertainty fried my brain, turned my stomach into knots. Was that considered anxiety, or just not enjoying people? The trips to Mama's Diner were therapeutic, if anything.
I couldn't control everything in the world. I could, however, always be sure I'd make it to Mama's for my iced tea. In the event I didn't, heads would roll.
"What are you most afraid of?" Grant asked more serious than I had ever heard him before.
"Lemons," had been my distant reply. "I'm terrified of lemons."
The conversation came back to me in a more vivid memory than any other did as my eyes locked onto the little grin still suspended in ice cubes. We had been walking to the library.
Grant had wanted me to say 'living', the obvious answer. In truth though, living didn't scare me anymore than the dark, or open doors in a long hallway.
Living just made me anxious.
Lenny returned to the table. The smirk on his face was erased by my untouched glass of iced tea.
"Mr. Godfrey…? Is your tea okay?"
I stared up at him, trying my best to form words. If I didn't say anything at all maybe, he'd just walk away. I hated socializing with waiters, especially handsome ones. He switched his weight from one foot to the other, impatiently waiting for my reply. Apparently, the silent treatment wasn't working on him.
"Sir-"
"IT'S FINE," I scared even myself with the snap of my voice. My tone had been so unnecessary for the situation and setting. Lenny seemed taken back too. He slowly nodded, backing a safe distance away from the table before turning back to his work. I only later noticed he took my knives and forks with him.
The realization that I had just given up my 'Get out of Jail Free' card settled in slowly, drooping my shoulders. I could have just asked him to take the tea away. It could have easily been over now. I looked back at the lemon.
"YOU," I whispered in quietly, pointing a condemning finger when I was sure no one was looking. "This would be so much easier if you weren't here."
"It's not the lemons, is it?" Grant had set a book back on the library shelf while I watched on. His voice was never good at hiding his frustration in me.
"You just need something to fret about. You used to like lemons."
Actually, I used to tolerate lemons. I wanted to correct him so badly, but somehow I'd managed to keep my mouth shut.
The lemon at this point had sunk to the bottom of the glass, weighed down by tea and trapped by ice. Its smile was considerably less imposing now. The fruit had absorbed so much liquid; it now faintly resembled a toothless old man. I scrunched my eyebrows.
That was what I was afraid of?
Lenny stood over by the hotplate, waiting for other table’s dishes. In the steel surface of the counter, he checked his hair, slicking the blonde pieces back, and making faces to test out the look. Once he was sure his hair was in tiptop condition, he checked his teeth, running his tongue over them quickly.
That was what I was afraid of?
I reached out for the glass, cautiously. My hand gripped around it tightly, pulling it close enough to smell the familiar musty smell of tealeaves. This wasn't about lemons and diners. I used to actually kind of like lemons, I'll give Grant that. This was about my stupid excuse of a life.
The last few years I'd been stuck in the same booth with lemons surrounding me. I'd been a prisoner all along, hadn't I? Trapped by my own anxiety. It wasn't lemons I was afraid of. It was people, and all the uncertainties that went with them.
I was so fed up. I was so fed up of living a life afraid of "lemons".
I fixed my grip on the glass, a spoon in the other hand. The reign of lemons ended here. With what I thought was precision handling, I reached my spoon in to extract the drowned lemon wedge.
And that's when the glass tipped over.
The contents spilled across the tabletop. Brown tea swept ice cubes to nearly the edge like rocks in a mudslide. The pathetic smiley wedge lay in the wreckage, its back to me. Eyes from all over looked my way. My face drained of color. Even the lemon had abandoned me.
The ache for my routine kicked in. My liberation suddenly didn't mean much of anything. If I hadn't gone all Braveheart, surely we wouldn't be in this situation now; tea spilled, people staring. This must have been a sign from the man upstairs. I'd go back to my routine if that were what he was trying to tell me. If it meant I'd never have to be looked at like I was some kind of poor, sad creature, sitting alone ever again.
Lenny rushed over to my table, faded white rag in hand.
"Mr. Godfrey! I'm so sorry! I'll clean that right up."
He began mopping up the mess, sliding the ice into the grey container. I watched as the lemon was whisked away, and I almost felt sad to see him go.
"I can bring you another, sir…?"
I began to shake my head no, but something stopped my reply. Grant's voice in the library flooded back to me once more.
"It's time to start living, don't you think?"
I'd simply stared blankly back at him. It was my number one defense.
"You know…'man up'."
He and I both enjoyed a quiet snicker over that, and the memory was so vivid I even grinned right there at the table. He'd quoted my father, the man who said things like, "That's not how they did it in 'Nom."
I looked into the bin Lenny held against his body at the lemon once more. Its swelled fruit, stained brown from floating in the tea. I rather wanted to show it who was the bigger man, or rather, who was the man to begin with, and who was the lousy little section of a fruit. No little yellow wedge was ever going to take control of me ever again.
Grabbing Lenny's gaze, I opened my mouth to speak. He blinked at me, waiting; nearly terrified it seemed, to see what I was going to do next. Yell at him, throw something at him. Anxiety started to kick back in. Did he think I was crazy? Did he suspect I'd fallen off the deep end?
Shoving past him and out of the booth, I hurried toward the exit, and didn't look back. I'd need a new diner. A new escape.
I don't think I was ready to confront life… or lemons.
