Toast

I'd like to tell you about when I was a young boy. I must have been three or four months old at the time. I didn't really know what I wanted, and if I did, I wouldn't have been able to tell anybody, 'cos all I could do was gurgle. So I sat there in me highchair, thinking one day, looking at me tray and thinking what I'd give for a meal on there. So I started looking round to see what I could have. I was rubbing me eggy soldier in me head, trying to think, and then I looked in the corner and there's a little breadbin with its mouth open, just staring at me, like. And then I looked in and I saw bread. I thought, oh yeah, I'll have toast. A little piece of toast.
—Paul Young

One day last summer I'd been making toast and the phone rang just as I was waving a dish towel under the smoke alarm to make it stop sounding. It was Jack. When I told him what I'd just been doing, he said he found it charming.

"You think it's charming that I'm such a klutz I burn my toast and set off the smoke alarm?"

"Yes," he replied. Jack always says yes; never yeah, or yup, or uh huh. "It means you like real toast. Toast that's actually toasted, not just waved over the warmer for ten seconds."

What I was thinking was, What it means is I need a new toaster. But what I said was, "Ooooh, I hate it when they give me toast like that in a restaurant."

"Me too."

The weekend of my birthday, not last summer but the summer before, when Jack took me dancing at The Starlight Room in San Francisco and I had, let's say, to be kind, one martini too many, I had a hangover the next day that only corned beef hash could cure. When I woke up that morning I communicated this prescription to Jack, who was lying on the floor between the king-sized bed and the luxurious armchairs in front of the window. Something about me stealing the covers and, um, kicking. You'd think that a hotel as luxurious as the Mark Hopkins Intercontinental would have a bed that two people with a combined height of almost thirteen feet could sleep in comfortably, together, but then Jack and I never had enough practice at that. Sleeping together, I mean.

He mumbled something about, whenever you're ready, and then, come back up now? And I said sure, you can have the covers, I'm going to get up. And then I got out of bed and ran to the oh so elegant, marble bedecked, mirror bedizened bathroom and threw up.

Yeah, I know. Hard to believe he dumped me a second time, isn't it?

With my stomach contents emptied, and only the pounding headache to combat, I was ready for a greasy good breakfast of corned beef hash and fried eggs, over easy. And toast.

We had planned to spend the day at Half Moon Bay. Jack drove down the 101 to San Mateo, and took me to his favourite diner. I'd never told him that I love diners, only that I love corned beef hash, and him. I can't recall the name of that diner; not sure I even knew what it was at the time. I'd been too busy keeping my head down and breathing deeply, trying to keep the nausea at bay. There's nothing in there to throw up, you idiot, I'd been telling my stomach silently. So just shut the fuck up, OK?

The waitress led us to a booth with dark red vinyl benches, and a chrome edged table with a miniature jukebox on it. It was awesome. I took off my sunglasses, looked up at Jack, smiled weakly, and, thankfully, did not throw up on him. The waitress poured coffee for me—Jack doesn't drink coffee—and then took our order.

A few minutes later, she set our plates down in front of us, and as soon as she'd gone I said, "Damn."

"What is it?" asked Jack.

"I forgot to ask her not to put butter on the toast."

"Don't you like butter on your toast?"

"Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, but in any case I'd rather they didn't put it on for me," I explained. "They always put too much on, sometimes so much that you can see it there, in little clumps, too big to melt into the bread."

"I see," said Jack.

"And also— fuck, I wish I'd remembered to ask her this, but I don't go out for breakfast often enough to remember... if I think of it, I like to ask them not to cut the toast, either."

"And why is that?" Jack inquired, with the patience of glass blower heating his latest project.

"Because they always cut it on the angle, so the two pieces are triangles. I know it sounds silly, but I don't cut my toast that way—I cut it into two rectangles, because, well, because that's the way my mother always did it."

"So it looks wrong this way."

"Exactly."

He understands why this matters to me. He's not making fun of me, not even a little bit.

"Would you like me to ask the waitress to take it back, and bring you some toast that's uncut and unbuttered?"

How much do I love this man?

"No, I can't do that," I replied. "See, that would make me one of those customers. You know, the kind waitresses talk about behind their backs. Making unreasonable demands. It wouldn't be fair; she didn't do anything wrong, she just brought me the toast they way they always bring the toast. If I'd wanted special toast treatment, I should have asked for it, but I forgot to, and that's my fault, not hers."

"You have toast sensibilities," Jack declared, and then he added: "You know that thing?"

"Which thing?" I asked, though I knew. It was a game we'd been playing for almost fifteen years. A sprachspiel.

"That thing we never say."

"Yes."

"Well, that."

"Me too."
* * *

Last week, I finally bought that new toaster. I went shopping for it on Tuesday, but that was just by coincidence.

I wish everything didn't remind me of Jack.


In the next story, Postmodern Sass wonders why her marketing students don't know what marketing is. Instead of giving them all Fs (or, as a professor and musician friend of hers might say, Q minuses), she goes to The Banknote with Maria again.