Short Story: “Finger Food”

It had been about three weeks since his breakup when Thad met Zewditu, and it took another three months or so before they started dating. He met her at Sol Azteca on Beacon Street in Brookline but did not actually see her eating much, merely sitting forlornly at a table with chips and salsa nursing what seemed to be a virgin margarita. Thad normally did not make it his practice to try to start conversations with strange women sitting alone in restaurants, both because he knew that most women did not appreciate it and because he himself did not enjoy it, but he made an exception in this case because Zewditu herself kept looking up at him and his nopalitos with soulful, probing eyes. When he walked up to her and asked her why she was staring, she pointed to a splotch of salsa verde that had gotten onto his shirt just to the left of his necktie, and he had wiped it off madly in deep embarrassment while she stifled a chuckle.

            “Why are you wearing a dress shirt and tie to eat dinner by yourself anyway?” she asked. “Did you come here wanting to impress a stranger?”

            “Business partner stood me up,” said Thad vaguely, wanting anything but to get into the situation with Jason in front of this woman. “Well, are you?” he asked. She raised her long, thick eyebrows and pursed her lips. “Impressed,” he said. “Are you impressed?”

            She stopped trying not to laugh. “I would have been impressed if it weren’t for the salsa verde,” she said.

❦

Over the next few months, and especially when they finally did start dating, Thad learned a lot about Zewditu that distinguished her very sharply from Noriko, and his present with her from his past with Noriko, in his mind. Zewditu was from Ethiopia but had grown up in Washington, DC; Noriko was from Fukuoka and had not left Fukuoka for any length of time until she had come to Boston for graduate school, at which point the winters had descended upon her with almost mechanical ferocity; she had always said during winter that she could never get warm, even in the unseasonable and in the context of world history deeply frightening January and February heat waves of the past two years. He had not been through a winter with Zewditu yet, but she told him that she liked the cold; it distinguished her adulthood from her childhood. And yet it would be a mistake to conclude from this that she did not like Ethiopia or being Ethiopian. She listened to Ethiopian pop music, which Thad had not known existed, and took him to Ethiopian restaurants where he somewhat queasily watched her munch away at elaborate dishes with her fingers no more self-consciously than she had eaten the chips and salsa, or than she had eaten burgers and fries on the day they had driven out to the Five Guys in Framingham. Noriko had always been finicky and even when she ate sushi she was always very careful to use chopsticks; it had actually not been until Thad had seen some sort of video about sushi etiquette online that he realized that there were Japanese people, lots of them, who thought that using utensils with some kinds of sushi was a faux pas.

            Noriko was a Japanese Anglican, rare as hen’s teeth, and once she got started you could never shut her up about the self-righteous liberalism of North American Anglicans or the hidebound conservatism of other Asian and African ones. It had taken her and Thad longer than most young couples these days to sleep together but once they had started they had proceeded more or less as normal for their age, although Noriko made it very clear to him that she would choose motherhood if she got pregnant. (She had made, on a few occasions, nonspecific allusions to a miscarriage suffered after a hectic argument with her parents about an accidental pregnancy when she had been in her late teens.) Zewditu, by contrast, even though circumstances in her childhood had led her to be militantly secular as an adult in a way that made Thad vaguely but distinctly uncomfortable, had said outright on their first real date that she had no plans to “put out” any time soon, refused to use hormonal contraception if and when she did, and had never had a very high sex drive anyway. “You have two hands. Pick one of them and use it,” she had said when Thad expressed concern that infrequent sex might lead to an insufficiently close relationship. He tried to imagine Noriko ever encouraging him to masturbate and realized very soon that he could not under any circumstances.

            “He’s dating Noriko Kisui,” he had heard his friends say in awed tones for the first few weeks of his and Noriko’s relationship. They had been similarly awed when it had become manifest to them that breaking up after two and a half years together had been his idea, that her solution to the problem of their divergent career paths had been to get married so that their employers could not justify separating them as easily. He had actually been entirely willing to entertain the idea of marrying her; he had only broken up with her instead because he had an unshakeable suspicion that the real reason why she was suggesting it was to ratify or authenticate her guilt over having had a sexual relationship with him for the past two years, a suspicion that even if false would probably poison their marriage at the root. He had never heard “He’s dating Zewditu Gebremeskel” said in the same tones, and although he really did not mind this, he wondered, and worried for Zewditu’s sake, about the possibility that the reason had too much to do with her bushy eyebrows and jutting jawline.

            Zewditu was a cheaper date than Noriko. In addition to the Five Guys, which she had insisted on going to because it was near one of her bicycle touring friends’ house, she liked walking around Brookline and especially “people-watching” in Coolidge Corner.

            “Honestly,” she said to Thad one warm September day as they were sitting at the Coolidge Corner T station, “I am a little surprised that you didn’t marry her, you know.”

            “Why?” asked Thad, who was not sure that he wanted this brought up right now, especially since before today he had not seen Noriko (he still saw her socially) in more than a week and he and Zewditu had not discussed her at length in almost a month. “I just wasn’t sure she wanted it for good reasons.”

            “I know,” said Zewditu. “But, still, it’s not like it would have taken too much of your time and energy. Just go down to the courthouse and bing-bang-boom, you’re married. I guess she might have insisted on an Anglican church wedding, but even though my knowledge of Episcopalian weddings is rusty I can’t imagine they’re as much of sticklers for discernment as the Catholics or the Orthodox. It’s easy enough to get married these days and there are so few irreversible consequences of doing it that it really does surprise me that you didn’t just go for it.”

            “Do you think it would have been a good thing?”

            “For you? I don’t know; I don’t know Noriko.” Zewditu feel silent for a few moments, then suddenly grasped his hand tightly and turned to him with a wide-eyed, solemn expression. “I am glad you didn’t, you know,” she said. “I am glad you’re with me.”

            This was the sort of conversation he might well have had with Noriko as well. It had taken her longer to open up to him, but once she had, the acidity and incisiveness that was in Zewditu now had been in Noriko also. It was probable that, if their positions had been reversed, if Thad had been first with Zewditu and then with Noriko, then Noriko’s reassurance that she was glad that he was with her now would have come in a somewhat subtler form. She had always harbored a little bit of pride in her harsh tendencies. Thad had never been sure what to make of it or how to feel about it, other than that it definitely neither impressed nor appalled him. As with Zewditu, he had worried then that it was mostly the way Noriko looked that made his friends so awed that he was dating her.

            And what did he himself bring to either of these women? People said he was funny and he understood clothing and makeup, but Noriko had cared about clothing and makeup and Zewditu did not. He had some interest in “trends” and was also stably and almost impressively employed, but Zewditu cared about those things and Noriko had not. The interest in “nerdy” girls that he had had in high school and early in college, girls who had shared the interests that he had had at that time, had given way to his relationships, as a grown man who thought of himself as boring and consoled himself with the fact that it was not his job or his destiny to entertain people, with women who were “nerdy” mostly about things like classic big band music and, in Zewditu’s case, aerobic exercise.

            On this subject, when after a certain point Zewditu had a bit of a crack-up and had to change careers, she found work at a bike shop out in the suburbs in very short order, to the point where Thad had to wonder, at least idly, whether she might have had this bike shop in mind in case something like this happened to begin with. The next time they were together—in his apartment, listening to Gene Krupa at her suggestion—he asked her when and how she had gotten so into bikes.

            “I’ve just never met somebody as passionate about bikes as you, especially somebody who lives in the city.”

            “Really? Don’t more people in cities bike?”

            “I mean the sort of bike touring that you’re really into, not just biking to work. It’s interesting. I kinda like it.” Thad was saying this as someone who himself biked to work when the weather was good for it but didn’t get much use out of his bike otherwise.

            “Well, it’s something I grew up with, obviously,” said Zewditu archly. “I’m surprised you didn’t know that. When you think Ethiopia do you not think bike touring?” She grinned anarchically and tilted her chin up a little.

            Zewditu wanted the people who worked at the bike shop and the people who were its customers to call her Judy. She said that the idea that Zewditu was the Amharic form of Judith was a common misconception—Thad had been surprised at first that any misconception about cognates of the name Zewditu was “common” but Zewditu had told him that there had been an Ethiopian empress with her name in the early twentieth century—but she asked people to call her it anyway so as to smooth over some of the possible clashes of culture or understanding that might otherwise befall her in the bike shop.

            “There aren’t too many people your age named Judy anyway,” he said to her.

            “There are some. I’m taking a chance on Newton people being less snooty about someone who’s named like a grandmother than about someone who’s named like a famine victim.”

            “I don’t think they’d’ve been snooty. They might’ve patronized you or pitied you.”

            “That’s another consideration that I have, yes.” Zewditu flopped down on the couch. “Is your work still going okay, Thad? I remember that the last time we discussed this there were some problems but you thought they should be dealt with without too much difficulty. How has that been going?” She turned that probing gaze on him again, and her lips quirked downwards a little. He did not know how he wanted to answer. The truth was that he was almost burnt out. He had, a few years ago, before his current career had begun, done some time as a substitute teacher for the Boston Public Schools, and had subbed mostly for paraprofessionals at the elementary school level. Chanting “I hear talking, I hear talking; I SHOULD NOT! I SHOULD NOT!” at seven-year-olds whom he did not recognize had not been the best job in the world but he found himself pining for it as his current job got further and further out of his ability to adjudicate or see the point of.

            Thinking of his stint in the public education system reminded him of that old Simpsons episode with the “Skinner and the Superintendent” skit (Skinner, with his crazy explanations! The superintendent’s gonna need his medication when he hears Skinner’s lame exaggerations! There’ll be trouble in town tonight!). His own schooling had been private from third grade up through college. There was a certain dirtbag style that he had picked up as a sub that he genuinely felt he had been lacking before, lacking as one lacked something that one should have rather than something that one should not, and he thought that it was this dirtbag style that had appealed first to Noriko, who envied it, and then to Zewditu, who shared it. (Or was it Noriko who shared it and Zewditu who envied it? His preconceptions of them, which might be mildly racist for all he knew, meant that he had a hard time telling.)

            One time he had asked Zewditu if there were any other sports that she was into besides bike touring and she had talked for half an hour about figure skating. Zewditu called hockey rinks “honky rinks,” which Thad strongly suspected was a Simpsons allusion of her very own, but she did like figure skating. He tried to get her to watch I, Tonya with him but she refused because she had heard that the movie took liberties with the music in some of the Historical Tonya Harding’s routines, so instead he had let her show him several hours’ worth of actual early-nineties skating routines on YouTube, all with elaborate running commentary on people whom he recognized no better than the seven-year-olds. “Nancy and Tonya were actually more similar than people think. Both were power-driven skaters rather than artists. Both were huge bitches.” “Surya kept getting underscored because of racism but there was some drama between her coach and her parents too, although part of that could also have been due to racism.” “You might recognize Brian because he’s a recurring character in South Park. At least that’s what I’ve heard; I’ve only seen one episode of South Park in my life.” She had these sorts of comments about everyone other than Kristi Yamaguchi, whom she seemed to hero-worship.

            She had two photographs hanging in her living room; Noriko had had one, of a Japanese Christian leader in the early twentieth century named Toyohiko Kagawa. Zewditu’s were of Vincenzo Nibali, who was an Italian bike racer, and an Ethiopian feminist activist named Bogaletch Gebre. Thad watched some videos of Vincenzo Nibali and had to say that he did see the appeal. He tried to watch some videos of Bogaletch Gebre too but found the subject matter too upsetting, which he was worried made him a little pathetic and unhelpful but which Zewditu said actually reflected pretty well on him. Of videos of Toyohiko Kagawa he had found none but he did still have on his bookshelf a short collection of Kagawa’s meditations on the Bible or on Christian doctrine or on something of that nature, things that Thad did not spend much time thinking about and that Zewditu held in patient but unapologetic contempt and that for Noriko been of supreme importance and well worth every scintilla of attention that one might give them.

            Trying to watch I, Tonya with Zewditu had been after it came out on digital media. When it had been in theaters he had seen it with Noriko, just a couple of months before the breakup. They had gone to the Regal Fenway because it had nice seats and a good selection of snacks and was a quicker ride in along the Green Line than the Tremont Street movie theater was. Neither Thad nor Noriko cared about any sport nearly as much as Zewditu cared about bike touring, bike racing, and figure skating, but Noriko wanted to see the movie anyway, and they had both ended up enjoying it. Somehow it had dripped out of Thad’s mind afterwards. He did not remember much of most movies that he saw anymore. Books stuck a little more firmly in his thoughts and recollections, but not by much, certainly not by as much as he would have wished. In any case he would often remember that something would be “relevant” to Zewditu or to Noriko, or even to Jason or one of his other male friends, but not remember why, beyond very general strokes. I, Tonya was about figure skating so Zewditu would like it. The Remains of the Day was about a butler so Jason, whose great-grandfather had been a butler to some minor Vanderbilt or Vanderbilt-adjacent person, would like it. The Old Man and the Sea was about fishing so Cousin Colin would like it. He was always trying to connect with people this way, but he could barely remember with what he was doing the connecting.

            Zewditu got him to go on a bike tour with her. A couple of days before they left Boston—he had taken a week off, and they were going to try to get up to the Lake Winnipesaukee area before leaving the bikes with a friend of Zewditu’s up there and taking a bus back—he had lunch with Noriko to catch up after hearing that she had started dating someone named Johannes. He did not find out much about Johannes other than that he was Catholic and that Noriko felt more comfortable living her life to his specifications than she had living her life to Thad’s, but he did find out a lot about Noriko. Not least of what he found out was that Noriko had seen herself as “living her life to his specifications,” something that horrified and ashamed him to think about but that he did not know how to dispute if that had really been what she had wanted to do. He wondered if Zewditu lived life to anybody’s specifications. He did not think that she did, but he would not have thought that Noriko did either. Was it something particular about or typical to being a woman, he wondered? He guessed it was; he thought he liked women who were past that, but did he really? Was he even able to say what he liked?

            The other thing that he noticed about Noriko was that she was much more annoyingly religious than he had remembered. She kept talking about things as “providential” or as being about “grace in the world,” grace that came down from on high and lent a sort of significance that she refused to define and claimed not to be able to understand herself to everything that she felt or thought or said or did or was. They were eating at a crappy little restaurant near South Station, a restaurant all the crappier for its strenuous avoidance of the normal aesthetics of crappiness, and she kept saying that everything he was doing with his food was convincing her that there was something important and delightful about the world that was happening to and through both of them. He would pour a few potato chips out onto his napkin before eating any of them. She would say that this was beautiful and spectacular. He would glance up at her with wide, surprised eyes, with his mouth full of second-rate parfait. She would pick imperiously at her salad with the fork with which she was judiciously eating it and, with laughter lines rocketing outward from below her eyes, say that part of her did still envy the people who got to have his graces in their lives every day. He was not sure if she was being sarcastic when she said this, nor was he sure if she thought that “his graces” were really his graces, really things that could be associated with or attributed to him except through at least partly uncalled-for conflation and oversimplifying. She was using the fork on her sandwich also, a characteristically Noriko touch that he realized with a start that he had missed for many months and did not miss anymore.

            “I’m surprised she wouldn’t watch it with you but I’m glad you and she are sharing your interests,” she said at one point, which got Thad to wondering what interests, exactly, it was that he really had to share with Zewditu. “Have you talked to her about your time as a sub? I always really liked the stories you’d tell me about that. That ‘I hear talking’ one was hysterical! I think she’d really like it.

            “I’m interested that it keeps coming up that she’s so sporty,” Noriko went on. “I know I was never really into sports until very recently, but in the past few months I’ve started fencing, just for fun. It wasn’t actually Johannes who got me into it but Kayla—remember Kayla? From the gym I did aerobics at for five seconds?” Thad nodded with recollection whose strength surprised him. “It’s something that I wanted to do a long time ago, but my knees weren’t good enough because of that injury. I’m better able to take the bouncing around now.”

            The injury was a story that, as far as Thad knew, Noriko had pretty much always enjoyed telling. She had been about seven or eight and playing some Japanese variant of duck-duck-goose that she had never really succeeded in explaining to his satisfaction. Something had gone awry and she had ended up chasing a boy her age halfway across the playground and into a thick stand of camphor trees; they had come across a protruding root, he had jumped over it, and she had missed it, caught her foot under it, and fallen on her face with a twisted knee. Such was the story that she had told so many times. This time, over this lunch, she supplied the further knowledge, hitherto unrevealed to him, that this had been the same boy as in the pregnancy a decade later. She volunteered also, and almost convinced Thad that it was related, and succeeded in convincing him that it was important, that she had at that time been strongly leaning towards the name Hikari.

            “Anyway, I hope you enjoy this bike trip,” Noriko said. “I’m not sure if it’s something I would go for personally but maybe if my knees keep holding up after I’ve been fencing for a while I’ll look into biking or running. I think it’s great that Zewditu is sharing so much with you.”

            “It feels a little weird to have this shared with me,” said Thad. “I don’t really know what to make of it, especially since she’s a pretty closed-off person otherwise. She doesn’t seem like she’d make a good shoulder to cry on after a bad day.”

            “And do you think I would have made a good shoulder to cry on, looking back on things?” asked Noriko. She asked it sharply and forcefully, with her forehead wrinkled and her lips slightly curled, but it was clear to Thad after long years of knowing her that it was a sincere question.

            “Honestly, no, I’m not sure I do,” said Thad. “I don’t think I would have either,” he added, to dig himself out of the hole a little, but from the at-peace look that pooled over Noriko’s face he got the distinct feeling that the hole was as deep in her eyes as in his own.

            “Maybe she’s sharing herself more fully with you than you think,” said Noriko.

 ❦

This comment came back to his mind a week later as they sat in a diner in Belknap County munching on poutine after the second-to-last day of biking. They had come up through winsome woods trending towards redness. Their bikes were locked up outside and Zewditu had her jacket tied by the sleeves around her broad, sweat-flecked shoulders. She was chewing more primly than usual, possibly because she had just been ranting at him about the concept of “ethical non-monogamy” and wanted to play the role of propriety some more. (“Ethics are morals for people who think Eliezer Yudkowsky has original insights,” she had said, whatever that meant.) On the table between them was a heavily dog-eared and marked-up copy of selected Zora Neale Hurston essays that Zewditu had been rereading on the road. Thad aspired to understand Zewditu’s political opinions someday.

            “I think I’d like to spend a day or two with Rick and Cara if that’s okay with you,” Zewditu was saying in between bites of poutine, wiping gravy from her hand with a coarse paper napkin.

            “Separate beds, I’m assuming?” said Thad.

            “Separate sleeping bags, yeah. We packed them for a reason. I don’t know that Rick and Cara have a guest room. They live in one of those A-frames you sometimes see thrown up around the edges of ponds in the woods. They’ve been married for longer than we’ve been alive and have been bicycle enthusiasts for longer still than that. They have a daughter in Hollywood and a son in academe.

            “If we did have kids, you know,” she said, completely without sneer, “I’d want them to have one foot in the real world.”

            “I would too,” said Thad. “If we did.”

            “If we might,” said Zewditu with a faint smile.

            He looked at her munching on her poutine again. The hand that she had once told him to use felt still and numb on the tabletop. For the first time he was filled with love for the woman sitting across from him.

❦

This is the first in a six-story cycle called Haters and Losers.