In Common
I stepped through the doors, first in line.
"Go on," said Roberta. The brown haired woman tilted her head to the stairs. With her not-yet-used hole punch in her left hand, she waved me through.
I was on the minimum meal plan at the Hampshire College dining commons, so I was usually hungry by dinner. Roberta knew it. She let me go through without punching my meal ticket about half the time if I was among the first to report. That way, she let me eat a few lunches during the week.
Every time she punched my ticket at lunch, it seemed to make her happy.
I put the meal pass back into my wallet and turned down the steps to the front-kitchen meal line. Unfortunately, I already knew from the eye-watering odors that I wasn't going to find anything I liked. There are only three things worse than eating a skunk, I guess, and those are: cooked squash, cooked eggplant, and cooked carrots. It's astonishing how carrots are transformed into a force for evil by the act of cooking. When they're raw, they're tasty.
Possessed by chaos spirits, the chefs had added carrots to otherwise fine spaghetti.
Tray in hand, I marched around to the back kitchen in the hope there would be something tasty and hot. The attendant waved me in. He gave me a big smile as I picked up a plate of spinach pie. (Other students called it spanikopita.) Then I smelled the pie. It reeked. I put the plate back where I'd gotten it. I crouched and squinted.
The pie was spinach and squash. Inedible.
A few minutes later, I found a place in the middle room of the dining commons. One drawback of arriving early was that I sat alone. A benefit, though, was I sat alone - sometimes with my writing pad or a paperback.
I was staring off into space, not writing, when a short, cute woman poked her head through the middle room doors. She spied me, gave an uncertain smile, and made a decision. She stepped in.
“Mind if I sit here?”
"Not at all!"
She lived on the hall near my girlfriend. Her name was Annette. All I knew about her so far was she seemed smart, funny, and a little shy.
She started talking before she sat down. I tried to move a chair for her. She pulled up another. Her conversation seemed to come in bursts, each carefully measured, like leveled tablespoons of complete thoughts. When she gave me room to respond, she laughed at my responses. Her dark eyes seemed to sparkle.
To my dismay, Annette carried a plate of the forbidden spaghetti on her tray. She ignored it and took a sip of her drink. She eyed my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
"Why aren't you eating the dinner?" she asked.
I looked at the carrots in the marinara sauce. At this point in life, I sat quietly in meditation an awful lot and I didn't think I needed to use words, so I just gazed at carrots more meaningfully. You could smell them in the sour red sauce all over the dining commons.
“Well?” She indicated my sandwich with her water glass.
"Can't you tell how bad it is?" I replied after a few seconds.
She tilted her head to one side for a moment. She could smell it all right. She just hadn't thought it was as bad as I did. She chatted a while longer, hands pursed together. Her wit about her classes, professors, and life in general made me laugh. Finally, she picked up her fork.
"Wow." She chewed for a moment and, as if determined to prove me wrong, she swallowed. She looked me in the eye the whole time. I gagged a little as I imagined the taste. "Yeah, that's bad."
"The salad bar is the best thing in the dining hall." Today I felt particularly strongly about it.
She waved her arm and continued her thoughts on politics. I liked her gestures, graceful and quick. But her sarcastic opinions and general smart-assedness were even better. She paused at the finish of a complete thought and gazed down at her plate.
"I've never tasted spaghetti this bad," she observed. She gave her food a sort of disappointed smile and she was off again, conversationally, this time back to life in the dorms. As she described hanging out with her friends, I started to hope, just maybe, that I would fit in with them. They sounded great.
To my surprise, Annette stirred up another forkful of spaghetti, complete with a carrot. While checking me out to see if I was staring in horror, as I was, she popped it into her mouth. Again, she chewed - this time, slower.
"It really is awful." She frowned.
I stared in astonishment. She had eaten the cooked carrot.
"If you don't mind my asking." I put down my sandwich. "After you said it was bad the first time, why did you take a second bite?"
She barked out a laugh.
"To make sure I was right?" Her eyes sparkled. She got me laughing about this, too. "I couldn't quite believe it."
She stirred the spaghetti a third time.
"Fuck this," she said. She put down her fork. "I'm going to go make a peanut butter and jelly or something. Save my place?"
For the cutest smile and sharpest wit around? I would have been happy to wait as long as I could sit still. Longer, really, since that usually wasn’t long enough.
"Sure!"
And when she walked away, I felt instantly bereft. Sometimes I felt lonely in the dining hall. This was a little like that but this time accompanied by a feeling of warmth, as if I could feel the layer of affection that underlies the world.
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