There seemed to be a lot of people peering into the dining area but not going in, and Mr. Amory said rather hopefully, “Looks pretty crowded, doesn’t it. I guess we ought to try someplace else.”
Charlotte swung her head about to see what Beverly thought—and there she was, her back turned, holding on to her mother’s arm and leaning her skin and bones against her shoulder, pointing at the photographs of the deluges of gravy and cream, and, no doubt thinking the Simmonses were looking the other way, made an eeeeyuk face, as if she wanted to throw up.
Suddenly talkative, or talkative for him, Daddy assured Mr. Amory that they’d get a table sooner than it looked like. See there?—you go up to that podium there and let them know you’re here, and you’ll be surprised how fast things move. So Mr. Amory set his jaw and led their procession up to the podium, which turned out to be a gigantic wooden thing, like a podium on a stage but much wider and made of massive slabs of wood. Everything at the Sizzlin’ Skillet was…big. There was a short line just to get to the podium, but it did move along.
Behind the podium stood a bouncy-looking young woman dressed in a red-and-yellow—evidently the Sizzlin’ Skillet colors—shirt-and-pants outfit. The shirt was adorned with some kind of brooch—in fact, a three-inch-long miniature of the Sizzlin’ Skillet sign outside.
She gave Mr. Amory a perky smile. “How many?”
“Six. The name is Amory. A, m, o, r, y.”
She wrote nothing down. Instead she handed him something the size and shape of a television remote. It had a lot of little lenses in a circle on one end and a number—226—on the other. “We’ll signal you when your table’s ready. Have a sizzlin’ good meal!”
Mr. Amory looked at the object as if it had just crawled up his leg. On its shaft was an advertisement: “Try our Sizzlin’ Swiss Steak. You’ll yodel!”
“It’ll go off when our table’s ready,” said Daddy, pointing to the device. “That way we don’t have to git in a line. We kin go over’t the gift shop or something.”
Daddy led them to the gift shop, where there seemed to be a lot of souvenirs, dolls, and candy bars, all of them abnormally big, even the candy bars. Mr. Amory held the…device up in front of his wife without comment. “Hmmm,” she said, cocking her head and smiling in a way that made Charlotte uneasy.
The Amorys kept looking at the people milling about. Many, like Mr. Amory, were holding the device. Immediately in front of Daddy and Mr. and Mrs. Amory was an obese man, probably forty-five or so, wearing a cutoff football jersey with the number 87 on the back. Between the bottom of the jersey and the top of his basketball shorts a roll of bare flesh protruded. Next to him was a young woman in black pants who was so wide her elbows were cushioned on the tube of fat around her waist, and her forearms stuck out to the side like little wings.
“Do you and your parents go to Sizzlin’ Skillets often?” Beverly said to Charlotte.
Charlotte caught a whiff of condescension. “We don’t have anything like this in Sparta,” she said.
Near the see-through, where you could look in and see the cooks working in the kitchen, a single sharp piping whistle sounded, and red and yellow lights began whirling around. It was the thing in the hand of a big woman wearing what looked like a mechanic’s jumpsuit. She beckoned impatiently to two little girls and headed for the dining area.
“See?” said Daddy. “Now she’s gonna go over’t the podium and show the woman the lights going around and the number, and somebody’ll show ’em straight to their table.” Over there…another piping whistle. “What’d I tell you?” said Daddy. “It don’t take long. And I pledge you my word, you won’t be leaving hungry.” He was smiling at all three Amorys, going from one face to the other.
Mrs. Amory smiled briefly, but her eyes had gone dead.
Even though he was prepared for it, when the high-pitched whistle burst out of the thing and the red and yellow lights started whirling, Mr. Amory jumped. Daddy couldn’t help laughing. Mr. Amory gave him a 33º Fahrenheit smile and a single chuckle: “Huh.” He carried the thing to the podium with his thumb and forefinger, the way you might transport a dead bird by the tip of one wing.
Their table had a slick bright yellow vinyl-laminate top. The room was packed. The surf of what seemed like a thousand enthusiastic conversations rolled over them. Cackles, chirps, and belly laughs erupted above the waves. The waitress, wearing one of the little skillet pins, arrived not with an order pad but with a black plastic instrument that looked like a pocket calculator with an aerial. The menus, coated in clear plastic, must have been fifteen inches tall and were full of color photographs similar to the outsize ones on the wall. After considerable study, Mrs. Amory ordered a fried-chicken dish and asked the waitress to please leave off the skillet-fried hash browns and the deep-fried onion rings. The waitress said she was sorry but she couldn’t, because—she held up the black instrument—all she could do was enter the number of the dish, which was instantly transmitted to the kitchen. Mr. and Mrs. Amory looked at each other and accepted this setback patiently, and everybody ordered, and the waitress pushed a lot of buttons.
The dishes arrived with astonishing speed—prompting Daddy to give Mr. Amory a cheery, comradely smile, as if to say us fellas are in this thing together, aren’t we.
The dishes were…big.
“Jes what I told you, iddn’ it, Jeff!” Daddy was now beaming at “Jeff,” as if good times among comrades didn’t come much better than this.
Each plate was covered, heaped, with skillet-fried food. Daddy launched into his cream-lava-ladled Sam’s Sweet Chickassee with gusto. Mrs. Amory inspected her fried chicken as if it were a sleeping animal. No more smiles, no conversation.
So Momma, apparently recovered from the Oh, shit incident, said to Mr. Amory, by way of filling the conversational vacuum, “Now, Jeff, you have to tell us what Sherborn’s like. I been real curious about that.”
A smile of tried patience: “It’s a…just a little village, Mrs. Simmons. The population is…oh…perhaps a thousand?…perhaps a little more?”
“Go ’head and call me Lizbeth, Jeff. That’s whirr you work?”
A frown of tried patience: “No, I work in Boston.”
“Whirr at?”
Patience at the breaking point: “An insurance company. Cotton Mather.”
“Cotton Mather! Oh, I’ve heard a them!” They-em. “Tell us what you do at Cotton Mather, Jeff. I’d be real interested.”
Mr. Amory hesitated. “My title is chief executive officer.” As if to cut off all queries regarding this revelation, he quickly turned to Daddy. “And Billy, tell us what you do.”
“Me? Well, mainly I take care”—keer—“of a house some summer people got over’t Roaring Gap? Used to be I operated a last-cutting machine over’t the Thom McAn factory in Sparta, but Thom McAn, they relocated to Mexico. Maybe you know about these things, Jeff. I keep hearing on TV that this ‘globalization’ is good for Americans. I don’t know why they think they know that, because nobody ever tried it before, but that’s what they keep telling us. All I know is, it ain’t particularly good for you if you live in Alleghany County, North Carolina. We lost three factories to Mexico. Martin Marietta came in and built a plant in 2002. They only employ forty people, but thank God for’m anyway. That’s Mexico, three, Alleghany County, one.”
Momma said, “Billy.”
Daddy smiled sheepishly. “You’re right, Lizbeth, you’re right as rainwater. Don’t let me git started on ’at stuff.” He looked at Mrs. Amory. “You know, Valerie, one thing my daddy told me. He told me, ‘Sonny’—he never called me Billy, he called me Sonny—‘Sonny, never talk about politics or religion at the dinner table. You either gon’ rile ’em up or else clean bore’m to death.’ ”