There is a tipping point. There is an extremely rare circumstance in which a guest is so out of touch, so deliberately rejecting the norms of dining socially and the respect of the service behind it that instead of getting angry and masking your bitter reaction behind a saccharine sweet smile, you embrace them for reasons even unbeknownst to you.
This is the Wasco’s. A couple that is so deliberately ignorant to the proper way to behave inside of an establishment that it’s actually endearing. And captivating. And I somehow have the beleaguered opportunity to serve and observe them nearly every week now, and I equallly wish I did and did not have this honor.
They arrive around 6pm. “In time for the music,” he tells you with a grin.
The music, of course, starts at 8:30.
“We like to dance,” she says with a wink. You know this of course. You know them.
“Sounds lovely,” you say, and you mean it, somehow. You do.
They sidle up to the bar, inevitably at the most prominent and desirable seats around your pristine and rather seductive round marble structure. They mark this coveted territory first with their preferred dining companions – a thick stack of noticeably rumpled New York Times sections, a bright book of crosswords, a romance novel that you have an ominous feeling is part of some omnibus of which the 8 that preceded it and the limitless number that will follow it all were waiting at home; all with the same plot lines and characters; all with no twists or turns, just the shudder of a seductive curve being traced by a hesitant finger; all that she would find herself lost in again and again.
Sometimes, on special nights that you either presume or hope are as such, they also bring Scrabble. The travel version, the one made with the rigid plastic grid usually reserved for bumpy car rides or for swaying train cars along foreign high-speed railways, but in this case, these speed-resistant grids only slow them down as they tentatively place tile after tile in its painstakingly designated container.
They get settled for what seems like an hour and then look to you confusedly as you try to hand them menus. “No, no, we like to eat late.”
Very late. You know this.
“Ok, would you like to have a drink at the bar while you wait for a table?” You ask, recognizing that you sound a bit too eager. Because not waiting for a table means they’ll be there with you for the next 5 hours, before which they’ll plan their next move. Which, of course, I’ll get to later.
After thumbing unnecessarily through the few pages of your drink list, he gently gestures for her to put it down before giving you the same familiar response. “We’ll start with a bottle of Pinot Grigio,” winking at you, as if it’s a special varietal reserved for just them. That same varietal you’ve reserved just for them, every weekend every Saturday, always reluctantly. And then nearly before you respond, they are shuffling through the evening’s chosen paper materials and coughing or clearing their throats, peering over their thick glasses and trading papers and grunting or coughing then trading back.
Once they finish this odd elderly mating ritual from the human species of Long Island, you say, “May I?” as you try to find a paperless landing place for the stemmed wine glasses as they peer back at you over their sordid papers.
Shuffle, shuffle. You read his hand cues for where to place the glasses. You’re learning, as she has, as they have.
“Would you like to taste the wine, ma’am?” She seems both bashful and complacent. She points to his glass. He taps it twice. You pour a sip. You’re learning.
“It’s nice,” he says with an air of dignified victory.
As she eagerly takes another sip, you admire the fact that once again, she’s chosen to wear nearly every piece of statement jewelry in her arsenal. And you are confident this wasn’t from indecision, this is simply her statement. Every statement. All of the statements.
“I love your jewelry tonight,” you hear yourself say, and mean it. You mean it, somehow. It’s refreshing to be in the presence of someone so boldly disobeying every rule of accessorization in North Brooklyn these days.
She beams. “Oh! Thank you.” You can tell she means it. She likes you, and this has taken a while.
After the Scrabble grid is unzipped, they position their travel-sized letter sleds and thick, worn Scrabble-official dictionary so as to cover at least 5 spots in your 10-seat bar. On a Saturday night.
As they select their letters and get down to business, you realize that all these years of marriage neither yielded a particularly confident vocabuary nor competitive sense of trust as part of every turn requires a smug shuffle through the tattered pages of said word dictionary.
“Are you sure that’s a word?”
“Bob,” she says, slightly exasperated and with a significant eyebrow raise as she lowers her very strategic move into its chosen receptacles that will somehow propel her into first place and just noticeably a bit out of her barstool.
When the music starts, Scrabble becomes the second priority of the night. Instead of listlessly looking over her letters, she’s watching his eyes and waiting for the slightest signal that it’s time. Which, I imagine he defines loosely based on the rhythm, the beat, the song, and perhaps of some memory of them on a cruise ship once in the late ’80s. And when he gives the sign, one that even the shrewdest poker player could never identify, her eyes, always at half-mast and caked in a shoe polish-esque interpretation of eyeshadow, meet his, and without another word or a slight nod or a missing of a beat, they are entranced in the kind of waltz that is learned after what I imagine must be 52 years of moving together.
The music stops at 10:30 and Scrabble aways wraps up around 10:45, somehow. At this point you drain the bottle of Pinot Grigio but only once you have her attention, waiting with the inverted bottle just above her glass so she knows it’s empty. If not, she’ll ask you to take it back out of the recycling bin. “I think there’s a little left…”
And this is the part where they begin to separately scroll through a digital rolodex of local restaurants that are supposedly welcoming to people who “eat very late!”, and go through one by one and call. “Hello!! This is Sue Wasco! What’s the latest we can come for dinner!” after a pause. “What! Oh. Ok!”
He recites the phone number of their next victim.
“Hello!! This is Sue Wasco! What’s the latest we can come for dinner!” a pause. “Ok! You aren’t going to rush us, are you? We eat very slowly and we don’t like to be rushed.”
At this point I have no idea why anyone on the other end of the line would say yes, come on in. Because once every few months, they get rejected by every restaurant in their rolodex, and they reluctantly ask me for a food menu about 3 minutes before the kitchen closes. “We would have eaten here anyway but your wine is too expensive,” she tells you.
“We have a bottle in the car,” Bob explains. You aren’t really sure how this fits into the narrative or how after 2 bottles of wine and more in the car and a thick eyeshadow regimen that visibly inhibits visibility, they’re able to drive back to Wherever, Long Island.
“We usually go to Oregano, but they’re closing early tonight.” Yep. I bet they just happen to be closing early and likely armed with a new failproof caller ID system on their restaurant phone.
And Oregano closing early means they take their food menus to the first of all 3 recently emptied booths, previously occupied by the rest of non-Spanish society who like to eat dinner before 11pm.
If they stay, they’ll order a red. They’ll order 3 courses that they wish to be coursed out. They will not share. They will not speak. He will, unknowingly, slump the newspaper too far into the candle before tamping it out with an air of what could be nonchalance or a very disciplined control of his own shame, it’s hard to tell. They will not notice that no other patrons have been in sharing the space with them for nearly 2 hours. They will not care that the lights are all the way up and the music is off. They will let the food get cold. They will refuse every offering of, “Can we box up the rest for you?”
“I’m still eating,” she’ll explain, again and again.
“She likes to eat slow,” He’ll say over his newspaper.
They will fall asleep at the booth. You will have to wake them, and tell them that the food has been boxed up, and that yes, the wine has been finished for a while now. You will watch the fairly deceptive dream of them dissipate into a cloud of frustration and evaporated Montepulciano and swear you won’t be so sweet next time they come in.
But this of course only happens every once in a while, the late-night dinner dance. And that is why you can still say with conviction, “I love your jewelry tonight Sue.” or “Bob, tell me again how you two learned to dance so well?” because thankfully, the wine you purvey is slightly more expensive than that at Oregano.
Usually, you are left to watch them leave, Sue with her black-caked eyes at half mast, waiting for Bob to bring the car and her to Oregano.
You wonder about the you at the other end of the deal; the girl who works at Oregano who doesn’t get the evening portion of the Wascos, the oddly charming and barely tolerable pre-dinner antics. She has to suffer through the dinnertime Wascos, every time.
You wonder, sometimes, if she’s ok, as you bike past the unassuming little Italian restaurant on Berry Street. You imagine stopping in and striking up a conversation about the Wasco’s, letting her vent a little. And as you’re tempted to stop, one day you swear you’ll stop, it will only be to tell them their wine prices are far too high for the neighborhood.
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