Fish & Chips

I’m so desperate for a break from this muddy and uncertain Spring of 2021 that the drive to the Berkshires seems like a vacation all its own. I’m setting off in the morning to solve a minor mystery. In high school and college I worked at a restaurant. A tiny place, a dozen tables, and a robust takeout business. Fish and chips cooked to order, to the specifications of a long dead Irishman. An online review once described it as having great food, but looking like someplace out of Deliverance. They were not wrong. My memories of my teens and early 20s are all tied up in the place. Sneaking cigarettes out back between orders. A beer at closing. The inevitable dating of the hot dishwasher. And last week, someone went there to find me and leave me a message.

I don’t know what the message is. My mother called to tantalize me, telling me in her most gossipy tone that Wayne had called, yes Alice, that Wayne. And she couldn’t imagine why he didn’t just send me a message on social media. The upshot of her tale was this: sometime last week an unknown woman had left an envelope for me at the restaurant. They couldn’t get more information from her, Wayne had told my mother, because it was busy, so he had brushed her away and promised to get it to me. My parents were still regulars there, strictly takeout these days. My mother decided that they’d skip the fish and chips this week and instead she would entice me home for a visit with a side of suspense.

My mother has compelled me home for my school’s Spring break, lured me back to my ancestral home as surely as a salmon returning to spawn...I ponder that line for a moment. Nope, I shake my head and cross out the last line with vigor. Returning home like a salmon? What have I become? Then again, my day job teaching High School English online to dis-interested teenagers in the void. I’m waist deep in cliches all day long, it’s no wonder they slip so easily into my personal narrative.

I slip my little black notebook back into my apron pocket. I sanitize my hands and set the order on the counter, The delivery guy gives me a wink over his mask and heads on his way. There won’t be a tip with this order either. I used to make great money here on weekends and vacations, waiting tables, but now I only fill in packing and passing off the takeout orders. This place is too small to open in any meaningful way until things get back to normal. Like my after school tutoring and club advising, the pandemic has rendered this side hustle moot.

With the delivery guy gone, I pull out my notebook again. I don’t put enough time into this. The thought has formed before I can squelch it, beat it back: I don’t have time. That old refrain, except Covid has guaranteed that I do. But real life endures. As so many have posted on social media this year: “If you don’t come out of this quarantine with [insert dramatic accomplishment here] You didn’t ever lack the time, you lacked the discipline.” The memes shame me every day.

I’m a mediocre teacher, and that’s being kind. I’m just not that into it. I had imagined some sort of Dead Poets Society idyll, with teenage intellectuals and chatting esoterically about high minded literary fiction and poetry. That sentence floats on the page. I add the reality to counter the fantasy. Instead I drown in bureaucracy, standardized tests and disciplinary referrals. My students loans have me pinned. My expenses. The apartment I’d giddily selected as a young married, planning our early days with two solid incomes was long gone. I’d downsized by my 25th birthday, before the ink had dried on my divorce decree. Once I’d accepted the premise of the sunk cost fallacy that was our ostentatious wedding, the fledgling marriage had sputtered to an ignominious end. I crossed out ignominious. Anonymous. That was closer. It was like the whole thing had happened to someone else.

And now, closing in on 30, I live that old chestnut about how English majors end up bartenders, and frustrated teachers have an unfinished novel in their desk drawers. You know the one. The Great American Novel they were so sure they would have time to finish on summer vacation. I needed more money to make a real change. Needed to make enough money to catch me, so I could feel safe to jump. But my grandiose goals to self-publish online had become just something I talked about sometimes. It turns out that it’s easier to phone it in than write it down.

Which is why I’m narrating tonight at work. Putting my thoughts in order. In my little black notebook where I house all the words I need a place for. If I write it down it becomes a record and that makes it a thing that’s closer to real.

The drive home never seems to change. Either the Pike is under construction or it’s Route 2. I’m blatantly fantasizing now, as I close in on home. I can’t imagine what’s in the envelope. An old friend trying to track me down? A former dine & dasher, making amends? I vividly remember a couple I served back then who had come in on their 20th anniversary. I gave them all sorts of special attention. Rice pudding with a candle. They shorted me $15 on their bill and I had to make up the difference. I was about 16 at the time and so struck by the petty injustice of it.

I chase ideas the whole drive back. When I get there, it’s raining, and I dodge the drops and the potholes as I go in through the bar door. People greet me in that stilted way we have now. They’re all glad to see but I’m from away, and things seem cautious here. To survive this you’ve got to stay open.

Luckily, Wayne is working and he comes out to see me, and slides the envelope across the bar. It’s wrinkled, and speckled with grease. My name neatly written across the front. The return address was printed, and it was for a law office in Bennington. The phone rang and Wayne reached for it, waving me off with the other hand. Another time I’d have stayed, but the kitchen was small and I was in the way. He gestures incoherently and I give him a thumbs up, tapping my wrist like I’m wearing a watch. I'll tell him later.

In the waiting room of the law office, I jot down the bit about touching my wrist. How long before that gesture is meaningless? I'm anxious. It’s a singular moment. I have no prior experience with lawyers. Even my divorce was conducted online. We had nothing to argue over, no emotions to boil over.

The lawyer settled at her desk and her eyes crinkled above her mask. She leaned over as if to shake my hand, and then sat down again abruptly. She shrugged and asked if she could see some identification.

She busied herself with confirming my details, pausing to glance at me and murmur that it would take a few minutes. I still had no viable theories. It was the association with the restaurant that really threw me, How was that the only tie to me?

“Alice”, she said, “are you acquainted with a man named James Prouty?

I thought hard. James Prouty. Was there a name more New England that that? Like a neighbor in a poem by a Fireside poet, or Frost. Hoosac River Anthology. And then I could see the name. Not James, but Jim, Jim Prouty, signed on the bottom of a check. Basic green checks that come standards from any bank. Written in a twisty irregular hand. And then I remembered James Prouty, who I had known for years as Old Jim.

The first sign that it was really, truly, winter was when Old Jim would come in. We called him Old Jim to differentiate him from just Jim, who was the owner, and the cook. Jim lived on “the mountain” the generic phrase for the lower sprawl of the Green Mountains, where they slope down to meet Massachusetts. His road was impassable in the winter, so he spent the worst months holed up in the motel above the restaurant. It was a rundown place, with statues of lions built on the scale of house cats flanking the drive. Old Jim was always the last customer of the afternoon and the first of the evening.

He wore a quilted flannel, lined against the cold, and a hat with earflaps. He ordered a Manhattan, up, his “drinky poo”. Even at 16 I recognized that as an eccentric choice for this burly yet wizened man, hewn prematurely ancient by life on a mountainside. His dinner choices varied. Broiled halibut. Spaghetti and meatballs. Liver and onions. Rice pudding. No whipped cream. I’d waited on him so many times that any number I proffer would be meaningless. He sat at a table for two, near my station. He’d come for dinner around three in the winter and it was always empty., We would chat for hours about anything. Books most often. He appreciated my taste and tried books I suggested. I was always happy to see him.

I stopped waiting tables after I graduated college. I was ready to start another phase of my life and I took my leave one Sunday night. I dug as deep as I could, but I don’t think I had seen Old Jim since.

I’d thought of him, from time to time. Especially this year, as Covid reined in number people you saw everyday. Then people in your neighborhood. It made me reflect about my interactions. Deb at the pharmacy. Crystal at my usual checkout at the market. Bill at Walmart, who used to bartend with me during the busy season. In the back of my notebook I had a list of them. People I missed. I wondered if they missed me. Alice, the schoolteacher, who always bought rye bread, or something like that. Some epithet I might not even recognize, but that was my essential nature to them. The fact that Jim had thought of me for so long was extraordinary.

The lawyer told me he had left me a small bequest. She had another client coming, so she gave me another envelope and asked me to call her tomorrow. I decided to extend the time it would take knowing to replace dreaming, so I waited until I got back to my parents’ house to open it.

Despite the chill, I sat on the deck. I wrapped myself in an Afghan and opened the envelope. It held a note, written in Jim’s irregular hand on a sheet from a yellow legal pad.

Dear Alice, I always enjoyed our conversations and believe that you have a bright future. I am happy to think I have given you an unexpected surprise. You were a bright spot in those long winters. I wish you the best. Jim Prouty.

There was a statement from the law firm that stated Jim had left me $20,000.00.

Later, I clutched my pencil. I struggled to find the words to explain. To describe the void fear and anxiety and stress leave behind when they take a break from being your constant companions. That feeling of transcendence. I swore I’d figure out how to put it in words. My old friend Jim has made it possible for me to move beyond the barriers I’ve built myself. To open my desk drawers, take out my notebooks, and start again.