In Retrospect, Tonight's Dinner Wasn't That Bad

Elizabeth and I went to Brio's Tuscan Grille for dinner tonight. Elizabeth had prepared an elaborate early New Year's meal while Madeline and Joseph were here, featuring a $70 prime rib, and I wanted to return the favor and take her out someplace nice to eat.

Unfortunately, the restaurant was chaotic and incompetent. Our bad experience began when the hostess seated us for our 4:30 reservation at a table that wasn't staffed with a waiter until 5 p.m. Elizabeth eventually went to complain, but we waited another five or so minutes before anyone came to greet us. The poor waiter apologized and promised to make it up to us, but that was not to happen, as he immediately got a huge table of Brazilians who neither spoke nor read English. I watched our waiter spend 30 minutes just trying to take their orders.

When our tournedos arrived, we discovered that the chef had mistaken medium rare for medium well. One of Elizabeth's little filets had the consistency of a piece of charcoal. She insisted on speaking to the manager, who took her entire meal off the ticket. We were so unhappy that we left without crème brûlée or cappuccino, two extravagences we enjoy when we eat there.

In retrospect, though, tonight's meal wasn't that bad, just disappointing. My worst restaurant experience happened many, many years ago. My father had come to town and wanted to assemble and feed the family in the excessive and expensive manner that is his style. We had reservations at a steak house; I made the mistake of walking over to my grandmother's house, where my father picked us both up. I'm sure that a step-mother accompanied Dad on this trip to Florida, but which one I don't recall. We met my sister and her dick-brain first husband at the restaurant. Dick-Brain was an assistant manager at a Firestone; he met my sister Melody while selling her tires after a boyfriend's ex-girlfriend had slashed hers.

Melody and Dick-Brain had driven in from Lakeland. They arrived first and waited in the bar drinking. After greeting them, we followed the hostess to a table where the horror began.

The waitress arrived, which immediately soured my father, for he believes that men are the only capable servers. The waitress detailed the specials and began to take drink orders. My sister and Dick-Brain ordered a second round of whatever they had gotten from the bar. Dad was paying, so they planned to get smashed on free booze. This was years ago when we were all a lot younger—so young, in fact, that the waitress asked to see ID to confirm that Melody and Dick-Brain were both 21.

Despite having driven an hour from Lakeland, despite the very real possiblity that they would be drunk on the way home, die in a car crash, and need identification so that cops could call their next-of-kin, neither of them had a driver's license. Dick-Brain mentioned that the bartender had had no problem serving them.

The waitress explained that she would lose her job if she didn't check ID; Dick-Brain countered that he would just walk back to the bar when he and Melody needed their next drink. Dick-Brain was displeased because he, rather than my father, would have to pay for any future alcohol. My father growled, "Just get them their drinks," but the waitress stood her ground.

Now Dick-Brain should have apologized and ordered Cokes; it was his and my sister's fault that they didn't have their licenses, not the waitress's fault that her job had rules. Meanwhile, my father stewed; he couldn't ask to see the manager about this problem since the waitress was clearly in the right, but on his face, I could see him planning the many ways he would make the waitress miserable as the meal progressed.

We ordered our food, and while we waited for it to arrive, Dad and Dick-Brain bitched about the waitress. We were a party of six at a large round table in an intimate little room with four or five other tables of guests. Dad and Dick-Brain were loud and mean, and I could tell that their conversation was making everyone within earshot uncomfortable. I'm sure that other wait staff delivered the gist of their comments to our poor waitress.

When the meals arrived, my father found something wrong with his and sent it back. When the waitress grabbed his plate only, he insisted that she take everyone's with her because we were there to eat together, that he refused to watch everyone being polite and letting their food get cold while he waited for the return of his steak.

The waitress took away all of our dinners, fixed whatever Dad had found complaint with, and returned. My father then scrutinized everyone's dish. He found something wrong with someone's plate—maybe the bernaise sauce had thickened on the meat, maybe the vegetables looked wilted, I don't remember. He made a big production of how he wasn't going to let his family eat inferior food because a stupid waitress had messed up his initial order. He demanded to speak to the manager.

Our frazzled waitress left to get her boss. I was nauseated with Dad's behavior long before this latest outburst; dinner was irrevocably ruined. I should have excused myself and left the restaurant, but I didn't have a car, and the pair of dress shoes I was wearing would have tortured my feet during the five-mile walk home. Plus, Dad was such a tyrant. Even though I was already an adult, gainfully employed at the college, I felt like a child in his presence and couldn't stand up for myself or for the waitress.

The manager took away all of our dinners a second time. Then he served our table through the rest of meal; we never saw the waitress again. Even though we now had a male attending to our needs, my father criticized every part of the experience. Dick-Brain, who was enjoying watching Dad control the staff, egged him on.

I refused ever to eat with that group again, fabricating responsibilities that I couldn't escape when asked to join them. Melody soon after divorced Dick-Brain and moved to Husband #2, so the possibility of that particular combination of personalities disappeared. I have never since allowed my father to pick me up, insisting that I meet him at the restaurant in my own car. As I recall this meal with my father, I realize that I would rather suffer through a bad experience happening to us, as occured tonight, than watch people at my table bullying the staff.

Alas, Another Year

My mother called this past weekend. "What are you doing next Saturday?" she asked.

"Nothing special."

"Would you like to go out for 'high tea'?" [In my head, I hear quotation marks around "high tea."]

"I think I'll pass." I have had many miserable experiences at "tea," a ritual all of my British-lit-loving colleagues practice with glee. We have one anglophile who likes to invite select female professors to her house at least once a year for such an event. These parties are excruciating for me to attend, especially since I always get stuck with silver tongs and the sugar bowl asking everyone, "One lump or two?" during several tours through the house. The last time I agreed to meet someone for "tea," the establishment dressed its employees in floor-length nineteenth-century garb which didn't complement my khakis, polo shirt, and bad attitude. I felt terribly uncomfortable through the whole meal [little food I was served].

"But you said that you didn't have anything planned! If I took you you somewhere else, you'd go then? We haven't celebrated your birthday yet, you know."

Ah, so the "tea" date was meant to be my belated birthday celebration. Of course Mom would want to take me somewhere I had no desire to go. I'm not sure what picture my mother has of me in her head, but it's not an accurate one.

"My Read Hat group went to the new tea shop on Edgewater while your step-father and I were on vacation. The girls raved about it!"

Of course they did, I thought. Pretentious old women would love just such a place. Gosh, Mom, when are you going to get that my interests differ from the ones you and your retiree friends share?

We finally compromised on the Cheesecake Factory, but in typical retiree fashion, Mom requested that we dine at off-peak hours. "You don't mind if we meet there as soon as it opens, do you? I think it's at eleven o'clock. I'll call to see if we need a reservation that early."

"No, eleven a.m. is fine." Anthing she wants if it will get me out of "tea."

I have a bad attitude about birthdays, and it has nothing to do with getting older. I remember when birthdays lost their magic—1976, the year I began junior high school and turned 13. At 4 a.m. of my birthday morning, my father arrived home from a night of disco debauchery to find his bags packed and waiting on the front steps. After a relatively mild fight with my mother [no refrigerators overturned, no pet gerbils smashed against the wall], he said, "So I guess this is it," gathered the suitcases, and left. We lived in a small house, and my sister and I had heard the entire exchange, but Mom just pretended that we were still asleep. She went about the day without ever mentioning that she and Dad had taken the first step toward divorce.

For this Twilight Zone birthday [Had they really split? Had I dreamed that morning? I knew better than to ask.], Mom had arranged a day at a stable where my friends and I could ride horses. She picked up the gang, drove us out to the country, and expected me to behave as if this was the best day of my life. I had never ridden anything except ponies at the fair. I expected to gallop on a horse as beautiful as the Black Stallion. I got instead some old hack, the largest animal there, who insisted on pulling the reins from my unskilled hands and dropping his head to graze. The trainer kept telling me to kick him with my heels, but even if doing so is a time-honored strategy for motivating equines, I didn't have the heart. So I sat in the saddle, sweating so badly in the hot sun that the seat of my jeans soaked through, wondering what my parents' impending divorce would mean. After our rented hour with the horses, my mother hustled all of us girls to Burger King for lunch. That day taught me to anticipate nothing but disappointment on birthdays.

I got a small bit of satisfaction when my father celebrated his birthday last year. When I called to wish him a happy 63rd, I asked how his day had gone so far. "This is the worst birthday ever," he replied.

"Why? What happened?"

"We're supposed to be on a cruise right now, but your grandmother pulled one of her usual stunts."

My father moved Grandma out to Texas two years ago. He set her up in a retirement community apartment where she quickly made friends with a bunch of Baptist Republicans. This gang of Q-Tips [what Elizabeth calls the white-haired elderly] walked to Walmart everyday, where they spent three hours cruising the store and purchasing single cans of off-brand green beans. After the new house was built, Dad removed Grandma from this paradise on Earth [Baptists + Republicans + Walmart = Heaven] to live with him and Step-Mom in the "mother wing." The house is in the country, and although Dad promised Grandma some chickens as pets [she's a farm girl from South Carolina], I'm not sure he has delivered. Alone with no peers and nothing to do, I'm sure Grandma is miserable.

"What did she do?"

"Well, you know, she had one of her 'allergy attacks' right before we left. She was having such a hard time breathing, we took her to the ER. Because of her age, the doctors offered to keep her overnight for observation, which she wanted. So we had to cancel, and since we didn't buy the insurance, we lost all of the money."

"Wow, Dad, that's terrible. I hope that she's okay now."

"Oh, yeah, she started feeling better as soon as it was too late for us to catch the plane to Fort Lauderdale."

Oh, well. It was time Dad learned that birthdays are big disappointments. I learned that lesson 29 years ago and so just tolerate the damn day the best I can.

For the Birds

Today ended bird duty at my parents' house. Mom and Step-Dad were out tooling around in their RV for a couple of days, and I—as I have done many, many times in the past—took care of the flocks of wild birds and families of squirrels that visit their yard for free eats. During just two trips to the house, I must have dumped 20 pounds of seed, 5 pounds of peanuts, and a dozen ears of corn into the various feeders around their backyard.

The job is far from rocket science, but every time before she leaves, Mom calls to give me twenty minutes of instructions. Then, when I get to the house, I always find a long note detailing again what I am supposed to do. This time, she added at the end, "Call me if you have any questions!" and included both her own and Step-Dad's cell numbers, thinking, I guess, that I might forget how to lift the top off the feeder or turn on the hose.

Elizabeth accompanied me on one of the trips and, after reading the note, remarked, "Your mother doesn't know who you are, does she?" At work, no one questions either my intelligence or sense of responsibility. Alas, for my mother, I will always be the five year old who insists on eating snow, despite the warnings that a dog might have peed in it.

Mom could't turn her back on me for a minute before I was scooping up a "lemon freeze" for Melody, my rotten little sister.