Megan Stielstra's Blog

Steve, Jim, Mark and Chip come into the Bongo Room every Sunday, along with several hundred other people who’d read in some online review that only “cool” people got to eat there, and Steve, Jim, Mark and Chip certainly considered themselves cool, yeah, they were cool, and loud, usually hung over, talking about last night at the Cubby Bear or the Hunt Club, they paid with Gold cards, were all good looking in an Ambercrombie and Fitch White-Sox-watching prepster sort of way, and they knew it—they used it—they tried to buddy up their waitress for faster service. “Hi, what’s your name?” they said when I came to the table, and I said, “Megan,” and they said, “Hi Megan, I’m Steve, and—“ he’d point—“Jim, Mark, Chip,” and I didn’t bother to say I knew all this, they’d done it before, done it last week, I’d told them my name about eighteen thousand times already and could they just get on with the pancakes, please? ‘cause the wait for a table was an hour and a half and the guy at twenty-three was bitching about his benedict being tepid (“Benedicts are supposed to be served room temperature, sir”) and I’d just got a nine-top on twenty-four, eight of whom wanted soy lattes—soy, for chrissakes!—and I didn’t have time to yak it up with the fellas for the gazillionth time so could you just order?

No, they couldn’t.

“You see that girl over there?” said Chip, nodding at a girl a couple tables over. She was beautiful, this girl—blonde, perky, button nose, eyes bright, big smile—a television commercial for toothpaste or hairspray—and I looked back at Chip and said, “What about her?”

“Can you find out if she’s married?” he asked.

“You want to ask her out?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I want to marry her.”

The other guys laughed when he said that. “YOU’RE gonna get a girl like THAT?” they said. “THAT girl wouldn’t be caught dead with a guy like you! THAT girl eats guys like you for breakfast! Girls like THAT use guys like you as appetizers for the main course, you know what I’m saying, dude?” Har har, jab to the ribs, and Chip looked up at me and said, “Please.”

It was the please that did it.

I went over to the girl’s table, planning on doing a quick finger check—left hand, ring or no ring?—and then back to Chip with the verdict, but it wasn’t that easy. The girl was sitting with her left arm crossed over her stomach, her left hand tucked underneath her right armpit. She ate—egg white omelet—drank—grapefruit juice—and gestured—hand over mouth to subdue a burst of giggles—all with her right hand. I watched her for nearly a half hour. I turned three tables, poured six mimosas and put in two very complicated orders involving lots of substitutions, trying all the while to catch a glimpse of this girl’s ring finger.

“Well?” Chip asked when I refilled his coffee cup.

“I’m working on it,” I said. I walked past the girl’s table and dropped a napkin on the floor, squatting down to pick it up and trying to see under the girl’s arm from this new vantage point on the ground.

“What are you doing?” Kelly asked, after I was up off the floor and back in the service station with the other waitresses.

I told her, and Kelly found the story extremely exciting. She jumped up and down, coffee spilling over the edges of the pot in her hands. “That’s so romantic!” she sighed, heavy on the so. “It’s like when you’re on the subway and you see someone, and you lock eyes, and it gets too intense so you have to look away, and when you look back, they’re looking away, and what I always wonder is, what would happen if you just kept looking?”

I didn’t know what would happen.

“We’ll NEVER know what would happen,” Kelly said, “because nobody ever DOES anything. If someone would just—” but I stopped paying attention then, because the toothpaste girl was getting ready to leave. She was standing up. She was reaching for her jacket. She was dropping her left arm down and—no, no there wasn’t any ring, because there weren’t any fingers. There was a hand, yes, and some stumps of varying sizes where fingers ought to be, but weren’t.

The girl walked out of the restaurant and I went back to Chip’s table. “She doesn’t have any fingers,” I announced.

“What?”

I held up my left hand and folded my fingers into my palm. “No fingers,” I said again.

Steve Jim and Mark fell all over themselves with comments: “Leave it to you to fall for a girl without—“ and, “What are the odds of—“ and, “The one time you actually try to—“

Chip wasn’t hearing any of it. He looked kind of baffled, and was watching the space where his girl had once been.

I put myself in his line of vision. “Can I ask you something?” I said.

He waited.

“If she hadn’t of …. I mean, if she had … would you of done anything anyway?”

“Hell no, he wouldn’t of,” said Steve and Jim and Mark. “He’s chicken shit, he’s a pussy, she doesn’t have any finger—“ and they kept talking but their voices faded out, like some great sound engineer turned the volume down, and Chip looked at me and said, “Yeah, yeah I would’ve done something.” He paused, then said: “I’m not sure what, but something.”

You know what? I believed him.