Sweet Potato Fries Please, by Frank Hinton
There is a sale on fish and chips at a popular, local fish and chip restaurant. The place is strung out with nautical equipment and teal fish netting and dozens of little wooden fishermen with little wooden pipes. There is sea music playing. Every person in the room is fat or, with somebody who is fat. I count fat people in public.
We sit at a booth and I order coffee. Katie asks me why I’m ordering coffee. She says coffee and battered fish don’t mix, it’s past five, the coffee is non-refillable. My coffee comes and I play with it. I poke around the menu. Katie pokes around the menu and wonders if they have sweet potato fries. I imagine sweet potato fries. I imagine them and drink down coffee. The coffee is reheated coffee. I think cancer-taste. The waitress comes and brings us water and tells us that there are no sweet potato fries. I feel hurt. We both order the 5.99 special: two strips of battered fish, some fries, a paper cup of coleslaw and the restaurant’s famous tartar sauce. I am upset about the sweet potato fries, just as much as Katie.
“Tonight I will work out for forty minutes,” I say.
“I’m going to eat half and take half home,” Katie says.
I tell Katie that reheated food is bad for you and that battered fish and French fries taste bad when reheated. A little fat boy waddles into the restaurant with his skinny mother. Katie shows me a message on her phone. I drink all of the coffee. I ask for a refill. The mother lifts the fat boy up into his chair.
“There are no refills,” the waitress says. She isn’t our waitress.
“This coffee wasn’t fresh. I drank it because I was thirsty,” I say.
The waitress rolls her eyes. She looks unhappy. She looks as if she’s passed through the point of no return in this restaurant. She’s been here over a year. She goes home to a shitty environment. She’s had babies come out of her. Things aren’t going well in her life. I’m a little bitch breaking restaurant menu rules. She’s going to get scoffed out by her boss. I’ve added just a little bit of shit to her already shit-filled plate. Her eyes look kind of dead as she rolls them. She’s defeated, she knows it. She already heard us complaining about the sweet potato fries. Katie and I are skinny and young and powerful, in that way. I want to jam sweet potato fries into my mouth. The waitress looks familiar. When little girls are young sometimes they kiss each other and touch each other’s privates. The waitress reminds me of a play-friend. The waitress leaves to get more coffee. I watch her as she leaves. I sniff the air.
Katie asks me about Rich. I tell her he has shiny silk sheets on his bed and he mentioned the thread count when he showed me the bedsheets. Katie asked me if I had a picture. I told her I would take a picture.
“I threw up in Rich’s bathtub. We had been drinking ice and rye. He had a cross on the wall with a ceramic Jesus stapled to it. I started praying to the cross in between vomits. I was so drunk. I told myself I would be a better Christian. I promised myself in the bathroom mirror.”
“So are you religious now?”
“I’m not any more religious than I was before I drank. I’m not religious unless I’m desperate. I don’t know. Religion should be more interesting.”
“Did you and Rich hook up?”
My coffee comes. Our food comes. We poke at the fish and cut into the fish with our forks. We are silent. All of the grease from the battered cod slides around in my mouth, warm and quick and heavy. Grease. Cancer-taste. Fat boy.
I focus on every bite of the meal. I read on zenhabits.com that you should chew each bite of food thirty times to achieve a meditative understanding of your body’s relationship to the food you are eating. By chew twelve the fish is nothing, a strange mire of goo-meat. I finish thirty chews, swallow and take another forkful of fish. I add a French fry to my mouth. I go slow. I feel myself filling. I was a vegetarian last year. I caved. This is my first battered fish in three years. I feel one step away from a bucket of KFC. I am upset but I keep eating and eating. I lessen my amount of chews. Accordion music is playing. I progress through the fish and the fries ahead of Katie. Katie looks at me, she notices, she is thinking about whether it’s okay. She is thinking about breaking her promise to keep half of the fish and chips and take half home.
“You should eat it all.”
“No. I promised myself I wouldn’t.”
“I’m proud of you.”
The little fat boy’s food comes. His mother’s food comes. The fat boy has chocolate milk. The mother has water. Chocolate milk and fish don’t mix. The fat boy has a bib, but he looks too old to have a bib. Katie asks if Rich’s friend Mark is single. Mark is a comedian. I tell her Mark is single, but he’s moving to Toronto. Katie says she will try to hook up with Mark some day. I tell her comedy is a turn on. I tell her misery is a turn on. Katie laughs and a little piece of unswallowed fish shoots out of her laughing mouth.
The waitress brings us our bills because we tell her we don’t want pie. We pay in bills and change. I leave a ten percent tip. Katie leaves a toonie. We zip up our coats and leave. We talk about feeling bloated. We walk outside. It’s snowing.
