The place is cramped, but homey. At around six o'clock at night, it fills up to the brim with clamoring diners, all intent on the scent of cooking calzones just out of their reach. It's called Gypsy's Trattoria Italiano, and they serve pizza, lasagna, and all manner of other Italian foods. It's lit by a number of small, jeweled, color-bright lamps hanging from the ceiling around the perimeter of the restaurant, along with more mainstream lighting embedded in the roof. Plants at the front entrance, along Durant Avenue, add to the aesthetic feel of the place; the greenery is spaced along the bar-type counter of the front windows. To the right of the counter, the expansive menu hovers over the heads of diners, leading to the cashier. The line weaves between tables, worn and wooden and spaced haphazardly in the small space. People are waiting in the corners, near the drinks fridge and the soda fountain, for their meals to be ready. This has been twelve long years of delicious food produced day and night - since 1997 in this college town of Berkeley - and it seems the place will continue on until the end of days.
A group of college students is forced to push a few tables together in the center of the restaurant to have enough space for the six of them. They settle in with their food, chattering about last weekends and the parties they managed to get into and how much alcohol they consumed there, hoping the next weekend will be just as good, if not better. They've heard most of the events are guest-listed at the frats, but that's nothing a pretty girl can't bypass as long as she gets there early enough in the night, and there are plenty of pretty girls in this group, girls that will be a twelve on a scale of one-to-ten once the guys start taking shots. A new group joins the line at the cashier; the college students pause, forks suspended above their plates as the girls with Greek letters across their chests enter the restaurant. The boys of the group dig into their food again, eyes watching the girls with interest; their female companions watch the sisters with narrowed eyes.
Gypsy's is a nice little place, but a death trap for a sorority girl with five pounds to lose before she can look more like her sisters; she never will. The perusal of the menu makes her stomach ache. Ravioli, calzones, pizza! The smell is delicious, enticing. These are things she only dreams of, now that she's living in this house with these vipers. They rattle off their weight in pounds and ounces as if they step on the scale every morning and evening, and she shies away from the recital because she hasn't weighed so little since before she hit puberty. She is not overweight; she has curves, looks natural, is thinner than most girls but not really as thin as they are. The pixies who join sororities show off their thin bodies whenever they can, but since moving into the house she's only showered when no one is around.
Like them, she wears shorts; unlike them, they're not short shorts, but mid-thigh length, a little loose, not so tight, and a sweatshirt bearing the Greek letters of her sorority, rather than the tight tank tops the others are boasting. After a moment of agony and indecision, she chooses the Greek salad and hopes that it's low in calories. The gym can only burn so much and she has so many classes to study for that there's really no time for an extra half an hour of working out. She stays out of the conversation and tries not to think about the boy in her Biology lecture that she's good friends with, because her sisters would laugh at her if she was refraining from hooking up at parties just to wait for some future doctor wearing glasses to notice her. They're proud of it, the boys they've caught and led upstairs and whose names they've forgotten. She could never be. She cares too much, she worries too much; she thinks of the people around her and wonders why that old man by the eastern windows is staring blankly down at his pasta, the seat across from him empty.
His lips tremble. He feels his age as he never has before. It is pathetically strong, heavy on his bones, dragging his body down as though gravity has strengthened over the years rather than relinquished its hold. The taste of marinara sauce is almost too much for him; it fills his sinuses with the scent of brighter days, when everyone was still alive, when it was unremarkable to have everything one needed to live. Companionship, enough money to get by, a cozy roof and a home where the most important things were immediately at hand. The world is no longer this place. It has gotten bigger rather than smaller, and he is less capable than ever of swimming in the massive ocean that is life on one's own. He cannot stand outliving everyone who ever mattered; he can not comprehend the loss he has sustained, and still, he is living, the seat across from him empty, his view of the woman with her head bent over her laptop very clear. Weariness is in every line of her body, and he asks why young people never appreciate what they have until it's gone.
The woman finds it absolutely impossible to look at her husband. She would rather do anything else, including clicking over and over again on a broken link in an e-mail, than even glance at the man sitting across from her. His dark hair is graying at the temples, and the glasses give his face a stern look, a fatherly look, almost like her own father before he died so suddenly three years ago; how on Earth could he have caused this ugly thing to grow inside her? She feels the crow's feet at the corner of her eyes and knows that she, too, is aging, and if their first two children were a mistake then this one certainly is. People who don't love one another shouldn't spend their lives together and shouldn't bring children into the world, but the way things should have worked out simply didn't work out, and now they are trapped. They are trapped in marriage that will never end and only death, the endless sleep, will release them. The problem with cowardice is that you must fester in it, knowing that life, to you, will never be more than gritting your teeth and bearing it because you don't have the will to change a single thing.
The calzone is nearly inedible; the homey atmosphere of the restaurant is merely driving the pain deeper into her heart. It's unbearable and yet, she is bearing it, and she wonders if the owner standing along the calzone oven, waiting for more customers and twisting the ring on his finger, is happy with his wife, if they have children and a pretty house. Are they comfortable, in ways that she will never be, because she lays on pins and needles all night and wakes up to face her dreary job and the man she doesn't love? Did they make the right choices where she made all the wrong ones? Do they take solace in these worn but well-polished wooden tables and the brightly patterned lamp over the bar counter, because these things are of the material world, but they make a living? She does not see anything wonderful in the faultless china set and stiff furniture in her home. She sees only unbearably bearable emptiness.
The scent of marinara sauce, mozarella cheese, and cooking vegetables is pungent, part of his pores; the absence of sweat is in his knitted sweater and glasses, impervious to the kitchen's heat, dark hair graying at the temples where his age is showing. Customers and reviewers, clamoring to praise the food, report that he's there so often, working day and night in his little restaurant. He bleeds for this, the buzzing neon sign in the front window, the painstaking arrangement of drinks in the refrigerator, the smooth process of baking food that people will buy and enjoy. He is waiting for business. He hates the momentary lulls during the busiest hours, because they allow him to fall into brief contemplation of what's waiting at home and how much he would like to get there to it. He doesn't need to work, but he can't really justify letting his employees – some of them his family and friends – face the crowds alone at this time of night, the busiest time, even if it means he won't get dinner with his wife and daughter and will have to eat a half-cold meal. At least he will get to hear them speak about their days. He is never so late that he misses his child going off to bed; that would be unacceptable; he wants her to grow up in a decent home, where both her parents are present often (if not as often as he'd like) and where she is comfortable, but not spoiled. The business does that well enough.
His eyes sweep over the crowd as his fingers twist the ring on his left hand round and round, focusing on the girl just under the brightly-patterned lamp with the yellow pad of paper, and the unhappy couple by the window just trying to stomach one another, and the sorority girl with her sisters struggling to fit in, and the jovial group of college kids talking about last weekend and how Halloween will be, and the broken-hearted bumblebee standing in the corner with her costume dilapidated and exhausted, and the couple at the bar counter who look at one another with love and the future in their eyes, and the suffering old man by himself. There is a piecemeal association of a few walks of life, all in this cramped little room that is his, and at times, he feels repulsed by it.
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