Missy sits at the table and pulls the sandwich bag from her pocket. She places it on the table in front of her.
Harve-the-pantaloon struts over to Missy’s table, gives her a glass of water, a plate of hash-browned potatoes, and a bottle of Heinz 57 Varieties Tomato Ketchup. “And a steak knife,” she tells him.
I trip him up on the way back to the kitchen. He curses, and I feel better, more like the former me, and I goose the waitress as she passes the table of an old man who is reading USA Today while toying with his salad. She gives the old man a filthy look. I chuckle, and then I find I am feeling most peculiar. I sit down upon the floor, suddenly.
“What’s that, honey?” the waitress asks Missy.
“Health food, Charlene,” says Missy. “Builds up iron.” I peep over the tabletop. She is cutting up small slices of liver-colored meat on her plate, liberally doused in tomato sauce, and piling her fork high with hash browns. Then she chews.
I watch my heart disappearing into her rosebud mouth. My Valentine’s jest somehow seems less funny.
“You anemic?” asks the waitress, on her way past once more, with a pot of steaming coffee.
“Not anymore,” says Missy, popping another scrap of raw gristle cut small into her mouth, and chewing it, hard, before swallowing.
And as she finishes eating my heart, Missy looks down and sees me sprawled upon the floor. She nods. “Outside,” she says. “Now.” Then she gets up and leaves ten dollars beside her plate.
She is sitting on a bench on the sidewalk waiting for me. It is cold, and the street is almost deserted. I sit down beside her. I would caper around her, but it feels so foolish now I know someone is watching.
“You ate my heart,” I tell her. I can hear the petulance in my voice, and it irritates me.
“Yes,” she says. “Is that why I can see you?”
I nod.
“Take off that domino mask,” she says. “You look stupid.”
I reach up and take off the mask. She looks slightly disappointed. “Not much improvement,” she says. “Now, give me the hat. And the stick.”
I shake my head. Missy reaches out and plucks my hat from my head, takes my stick from my hand. She toys with the hat, her long fingers brushing and bending it. Her nails are painted crimson. Then she stretches and smiles, expansively. The poetry has gone from my soul, and the cold February wind makes me shiver.
“It’s cold,” I tell her.
“No,” she says, “it’s perfect, magnificent, marvelous and magical. It’s Valentine’s Day, isn’t it? Who could be cold upon Valentine’s Day? What a fine and fabulous time of the year.”
I look down. The diamonds are fading from my suit, which is turning ghost-white, Pierrot-white.
“What do I do now?” I ask her.
“I don’t know,” says Missy. “Fade away, perhaps. Or find another role…A lovelorn swain, perchance, mooning and pining under the pale moon. All you need is a Columbine.”
“You,” I tell her. “You are my Columbine.”
“Not anymore,” she tells me. “That’s the joy of a harlequinade, after all, isn’t it? We change our costumes. We change our roles.”
She flashes me such a smile, now. Then she puts my hat, my own hat, my harlequin hat, up onto her head. She chucks me under the chin.
“And you?” I ask.
She tosses the wand into the air: it tumbles and twists in a high arc, red and yellow ribbons twisting and swirling about it, and then it lands neatly, almost silently, back into her hand. She pushes the tip down to the sidewalk, pushes herself up from the bench in one smooth movement.
“I have things to do,” she tells me. “Tickets to take. People to dream.” Her blue coat that was once her mother’s is no longer blue, but is canary yellow, covered with red diamonds.
Then she leans over, and kisses me, full and hard upon the lips.
Somewhere a car backfired. I turned, startled, and when I looked back I was alone on the street. I sat there for several moments, on my own.
Charlene opened the door to the Salt Shaker Cafe. “Hey. Pete. Have you finished out there?”
“Finished?”
“Yeah. C’mon. Harve says your ciggie break is over. And you’ll freeze. Back into the kitchen.”
I stared at her. She tossed her pretty ringlets and, momentarily, smiled at me. I got to my feet, adjusted my white clothes, the uniform of the kitchen help, and followed her inside.
It’s Valentine’s Day, I thought. Tell her how you feel. Tell her what you think.
But I said nothing. I dared not. I simply followed her inside, a creature of mute longing.
Back in the kitchen a pile of plates was waiting for me: I began to scrape the leftovers into the pig bin. There was a scrap of dark meat on one of the plates, beside some half-finished ketchup-covered hash browns. It looked almost raw, but I dipped it into the congealing ketchup and, when Harve’s back was turned, I picked it off the plate and chewed it. It tasted metallic and gristly, but I swallowed it anyhow, and could not have told you why.
A blob of red ketchup dripped from the plate onto the sleeve of my white uniform, forming one perfect diamond.
“Hey, Charlene,” I called, across the kitchen. “Happy Valentine’s Day.” And then I started to whistle.
We owe it to each other to tell stories,
as people simply, not as father and daughter.
I tell it to you for the hundredth time:
“There was a little girl, called Goldilocks,
for her hair was long and golden,
and she was walking in the Wood and she saw-”
“-cows.” You say it with certainty,
remembering the strayed heifers we saw in the woods
behind the house, last month.
“Well, yes, perhaps she saw cows,
but also she saw a house.”
“-a great big house,” you tell me.
“No, a little house, all painted, neat and tidy.”
“A great big house.”
You have the conviction of all two-year-olds.
I wish I had such certitude.
“Ah. Yes. A great big house.
And she went in…”
I remember, as I tell it, that the locks
of Southey’s heroine had silvered with age.
The Old Woman and the Three Bears…
Perhaps they had been golden once, when she was a child.
And now, we are already up to the porridge,
“And it was too-”
“-hot!”
“And it was too-”
“-cold!”
And then it was, we chorus, “just right.”
The porridge is eaten, the baby’s chair is shattered,
Goldilocks goes upstairs, examines beds, and sleeps,
unwisely.
But then the bears return.
Remembering Southey still, I do the voices:
Father Bear’s gruff boom scares you, and you delight in it.
When I was a small child and heard the tale,
if I was anyone I was Baby Bear,
my porridge eaten, and my chair destroyed,
my bed inhabited by some strange girl.
You giggle when I do the baby’s wail,
“Someone’s been eating my porridge, and they’ve eaten it-”
“All up,” you say. A response it is,
Or an amen.
The bears go upstairs hesitantly,
their house now feels desecrated. They realize
what locks are for. They reach the bedroom.
“Someone’s been sleeping in my bed.”
And here I hesitate, echoes of old jokes,
soft-core cartoons, crude headlines, in my head.
One day your mouth will curl at that line.
A loss of interest, later, innocence.
Innocence, as if it were a commodity.
“And if I could,” my father wrote to me,
huge as a bear himself, when I was younger,
“I would dower you with experience, without experience,”
and I, in my turn, would pass that on to you.
But we make our own mistakes. We sleep
unwisely.
The repetition echoes down the years.
When your children grow, when your dark locks begin to silver,