Friendship Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (9781455517763) Page 8

  “So,” Becky said, as she followed Monique toward what was shaping up to be a wall of lockers, “what worries you two more? Eating in absolute darkness? Or being served by a fleet of blind waiters?”

  “Blind waiters,” Judy responded. “It’s dangerous. Like I’ll get the tip of a steak knife driven into my hand.”

  “I assume they won’t be juggling the knives,” Becky said drily.

  Monique shoved her purse into the locker and held out her hand for Becky’s. “The whole concept is unnerving. Not knowing what we’re going to eat. Not seeing what we’re eating. Trying to manipulate cutlery in the dark.”

  “They’re feeding us meat, fish, or chicken, not bull testicles,” Becky said. “The place wouldn’t last long if it were some grand prank on the sighted.”

  “Down, girl.” Monique shut the locker and pulled out the key. “How did you find out about this place, anyway?”

  “I’ve got a knack for noticing things with the words ‘blind’ and ‘darkness.’”

  She’d first heard about this restaurant weeks ago, back in New Jersey. It showed up in one of her Google searches, for “tips for blind travelers” or “How long does it take to go completely blind?” The restaurant she’d read about was actually in London. Like this one, it featured legally blind waiters serving a mystery meal in total darkness. If she’d had the nerve last night in London, she might have suggested they’d go to the trendy section of Clerkenwell and give it a try. But they’d all been so exhausted she’d let the moment pass. Noting, even as she did so, that there were similarly themed restaurants in Florence, in Paris…and in Amsterdam.

  “Don’t worry, ladies.” Becky lifted her glass, making it a target for easy clinking. “We’ll all manage just fine. You’re dining with a professional.”

  A waiter emerged from across the room and asked for attention in a voice that carried. He introduced himself as Hans and then repeated, in three languages, the instructions to form two lines of twelve and put their hand on the shoulder of the person in front of them. He then led both lines through a curtain into an antechamber, and then through another room into utter darkness.

  Becky didn’t squeal, like some of the other patrons did, as they encountered the thickness of the gloom. The blackness washed over her with a peculiar sort of comfort. Here there were no confusing, darting blobs of light. Here there were no problems of depth perception or mistaken identity. She heard the voices of the other diners, felt, once, the brush of a chair against her thigh. She smelled sautéed garlic and the slight wood-chip scent of char-grilled meat. As they filed deeper in a room of indeterminate size, she heard the clatter of a utensil, the squeak of something against the floor, and the undeniable sound of a glass tumbling off a table and shattering.

  Becky muttered, “Greenhorns.”

  Monique snickered.

  The waiter guided them to what seemed like a very long single table but, as they were directed to take the seat in front of them, they realized they were sitting at a series of smaller tables, pressed so close together that they may as well have been sitting on the laps of the Germans beside them.

  “Wow,” Monique murmured. “This is cozy.”

  Judy muttered, “I’ve got my wine right in front of my face, and I can’t see a thing. These waiters could be naked for all I know.”

  Becky snorted. “That might make things interesting.”

  “After the red light district,” Monique murmured, “I’d believe anything. Becky, you sure this isn’t some kind of twisted strip club?”

  “Right. Like I’m into oiled, hairless, gyrating men.”

  “Well, if it were,” Judy said, “at least nobody would be staring.”

  In the silence she knew their thoughts had turned back to that window in the red light district, to the young girl dancing inside. Becky had only seen a swaying silhouette in a pool of pink light, but her imagination had filled in the rest. It might be the first time she’d ever be grateful for partial night blindness.

  A waiter announced his arrival. He asked them to sit back as he slipped the appetizers on the table in front of them. Becky could smell onions and something vaguely fishy, which made her remember the raw herring sandwich Judy had fed her. Her stomach turned a little, and she told herself it was because she was so hungry. He took their orders for the main meal—chicken, fish, or beef—and then slipped away.

  “What the hell is on these plates?” Judy made an exaggerated sniff. “I smell the onions, and maybe some peppers. I think I’m touching an olive but I can’t be sure. It’s slick. For all I know, it could be a cow eyeball.”

  “I think I’ve got a sausage.” Monique sounded as if she were facedown in the china. “Or maybe a pickle.”

  “Sausage.” Judy breathed deeply. Even in the darkness, Becky could sense her nodding and leaning back in her chair. “Nice. A little spicy. You’ll love it, Monique.”

  “The garlic smell is coming from shrimp.” Monique tip-tapped her way through the plate with a knife or a fork, and Becky held her hand back until Monique was done exploring. “And there’s some kind of…I don’t know. I guess it’s chutney? It’s got a sweet-onion sort of flavor.”

  Judy murmured, “I think this is an olive. I never really knew how much olives felt like slimy little eyeballs.”

  “Yup. They’re definitely olives,” Becky said, popping a slimy orb into her mouth. “I’d guess green ones, Judy, pitted with pimento.”

  Monique spoke around a mouthful of something. “When you can’t see it, it even tastes different.”

  Becky then bit into a plump, greasy bit of shrimp, listening to her friends chatter. She didn’t need light or eyesight to know what her girlfriends looked like right now. She’d eaten so many meals with them that she knew Judy was digging in with gusto, using her fingers without hesitation. She’d be chewing with enthusiasm and finishing everything on her plate. Monique, on the other hand, was struggling to use her silverware. Monique would prefer to slice up the shrimp and then spear each individual piece, chewing thoroughly before picking up the next, and Becky suspected it might take a course or two before Monique finally gave it up to eat with her fingers.

  Becky’s throat grew taut. When her eyesight faded to nothing, this feast of sound and smell was what dinner would always be like. The three of them would be old ladies catching the early bird special at the local diner, but in her mind’s eye Monique and Judy would always be the vibrant middle-aged women they were right now.

  Only their voices would age.

  “So,” Monique said, as she did something with her fork, a low, scraping sound. “How are you managing, Becky?”

  Becky forced words out of her throat. “Just peachy.”

  “This isn’t freaking you out?”

  “No.” She winced. In the dark she could hear the wobble in the word. She hoped her friends couldn’t. “This place is just like a romantic Saturday night dinner at Epernay.”

  Monique laughed. Epernay was a fi-fi little French bistro in their hometown. “At Epernay there are candles on the tables. You can see what you’re eating.”

  “Well, you can see what you’re eating.” She rolled the wineglass under her nose, breathing in the perfume of the fruity white, as an excuse to take a long, deep breath. “I should tip extra every time Marco and I go there, just to cover the cost of cleaning those lovely linen tablecloths.”

  “So is that what this is all about? You’re evening the odds?”

  “At least here I’m not the only one making an ass of myself.” As if to punctuate her comment, somewhere deep in the room a glass clattered over. “And maybe, after an evening in mutual darkness, you’ll see how well I manage. Then you’ll both stop treating me like I’m going to stride off a bridge and drown in some canal.”

  Monique sputtered, the sound echoing, as if she did it from within the bowl of her wineglass. “That’s a little harsh.”

  Becky set her glass on the table. “Truth hurts.”

  “Listen.” Moniqu
e shifted in her seat. Becky knew because the action made the table shake. “I know we’ve been a little overprotective.”

  “You’ve both been smothering me.”

  “Well, frankly, in the past thirty-six hours I’ve seen you trip over more things than I’ve seen you trip over in the last four years.”

  A slow heat prickled across her skin. Becky had a new reason to be grateful for the darkness. Her fingertips grazed the point on her thigh where she’d bumped into the sharp edge of a planter at Heathrow. A throbbing began on her foot, where she’d miscalculated the size of a man’s trailing luggage. Her shoulder ached from where she’d taken two full-body blows into commuters rushing across her path. And she’d already broken into her pack of emergency Band-Aids to hide the cut on the shin she’d received as she hurried to dress in the hotel room, sliced by the edge of the lower bureau drawer.

  “You know what, Monie?” Becky said. “You’re right.”

  The scrape of utensils on Monique’s plate stopped. Judy’s noisy chewing slowed. Becky pressed her spine against the back of the chair until the wood squeaked. It was always easier to speak frankly in the dark. This was why she’d brought them here, after all. She was freaked out enough by her diagnosis, but each time they coddled her, they drove a sharp spike through her pride. She didn’t need to be reminded that someday she would be completely and hopelessly dependent.

  “Look,” Becky began, “this is the situation. Back home, on the third stair to the second floor in my house, there’s a crack in the riser that I’ve been nagging Marco to fix, but we’d have to rip up the carpet to do it right.” Ripping the carpet up meant spending money to have it repaired or replaced. And all nonessential repairs had been put off until Marco was no longer on furlough. “That riser always gives under my feet, especially if I’m racing up the stairs. It’s a slight difference. Marco doesn’t even notice it. But when Brian was sick with the flu last winter, and I heard him cry out, I took the stairs too fast. I didn’t compensate for the change in the rise. I stumbled and bruised my knee up good.”

  Becky felt a rush of air against her cheek, like Judy was waving her comment away. “Beck, do you know how many times I’ve skipped a step running up the stairs in my house? After all the knocks I’ve taken, I’ve now got shins of iron. Anyone could have done that.”

  “That’s my point.” Becky quite carefully, quite deliberately, placed her fork down, fingering the linen tablecloth until she found the spot for it right next to her plate. “Back home I just know these things. I know to walk carefully on the sidewalk by the old Norway maple halfway to town because the roots of that tree have pushed up the pavement. I also know that the Reeses never trim that ash tree in front of their house so I have to remember to dip my head not to get a branch in the eye.” Neighborhood memory, a map she’d sketched in her head. “But here, in strange places, I know none of this detail. Plus it feels like the whole European world is proportioned differently.”

  The risers on the hotel stairs were lower than she expected. The step to get into a taxi was higher. The ratio of the seat in a pub in relation to the table was different, somehow, so that in London she’d knocked her pint hard against the wood and sent ale sloshing. Walking on cobblestones made her feel like she was stumbling over a loosely packed ball pit. Amsterdam swarmed with bicycles, zooming without warning across her path.

  “I’m tripping up so much because everything is new,” she said. “It’s not because my eyesight is getting any worse.”

  Monique’s voice, flat and straight. “Beck, we don’t think your eyesight is getting any worse.”

  “Good. Then you both can stop seizing my elbow every time we approach a curb and warning me of every little obstacle. I have to figure this out by myself.” Becky patted the table in search of her wine until her fingers came in contact with the round bottom of the stemmed glass. “As long as the light is good, and the day is bright, then treat me like clumsy Becky Lorenzini, who’s run whitewater on the Lehigh River, climbed the high ropes in the park, and is currently in charge of a somewhat successful household. Just like the two of you.”

  Monique was doing something with her fork upon her plate, the little tines making scratching noises. “The rules change at night, though, don’t they?”

  Becky suppressed a ripple of helpless frustration. She really didn’t want to talk about this anymore. Hadn’t she already told them what they needed to know? She didn’t want to tell them about the dark puddle she’d seen on the floor of their hotel room last night, only realizing afterward that what looked like motor oil was actually Judy’s slick new raincoat.

  But Becky knew she wouldn’t win a face-off with Monique, not on this subject. “It’s true that my night vision is not so great,” she conceded. “I see lights, but I have questionable depth perception. My doctor compared it to looking at the night sky. You see a flat layer of stars. The truth is, those stars are hundreds of thousands of light years away from one another.”

  Monique murmured, “Did you and Marco talk about all this?”

  “Of course.”

  “All of it? Like you just told Judy and me?”

  “Verbatim? No.”

  One beat between the words, and in the darkness, that hesitation revealed itself as too obvious a lie.

  “You want to talk about that, Beck?” Monique asked. “Because though I’m glad to finally hear some detail about exactly how this disease is affecting you, I get the sense that there’s something even more serious going on. Something you’ve been hesitant to share with us, maybe?”

  Becky’s insides went liquid. She hoped the chatter from the Germans and the clinking of dishes and the whole ambient noise of the place covered up the swift hitch of her breath. Becky knew that Monique understood a lot about her disease. Monique knew the medical jargon that filled those websites. And Monique had friends at the hospital—doctor friends—who could fill her in on all the terrible details.

  One particular detail Becky kept pushing out of her mind. It was unspeakable, inconceivable. It could not be true.

  So she swiftly changed the subject. “Marco and I,” she stuttered, “had a very bad parting.”

  Despite the Germans chattering just beside them, Becky felt the intensity of Monique’s and Judy’s attention, their magnetic concentration on her words. Without seeing their faces she didn’t know if they caught on that she’d dodged the real question.

  “I bet he feels like a shit,” Judy said into the pause, “for blaming you for the fender benders and the lost keys and the misplaced mail—”

  “Judy,” Monie interrupted, “why don’t you let Becky tell us exactly what’s on her mind?”

  Becky heard the pat of Monique’s fingers on the table, searching amid the dishes, tugging the tablecloth in search of Becky’s hand. Becky pulled her hands away and clutched them in her lap. She did not want comfort. She did not want to speak aloud the unthinkable. Nor did she want to wade too deeply into the sucking, bottomless mess of her relationship with Marco.

  So she condensed her fears into something simpler, something pithy, something that nonetheless cut to the bone.

  “I used to dream,” she said, “that after Gina left for college, things might get better between Marco and me. You know I always wanted a home like yours, Judy.”

  “Filthy?” Judy chirped. “Broken-down and creaky?”

  “Crawling with kids.”

  In the awkward pause Monique made a choking sound while Judy drew in a slow, uneven breath.

  “For a mother who is soon to go blind,” Becky said, “there can be no more little Lorenzinis.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A re we having fun yet?

  Monique pulled the hood of her raincoat over her hair as she handed her ticket to the man at the pier in Cologne. It was a grim, foggy sort of northern German day, not exactly perfect weather for a pleasure cruise down the Rhine River.

  Becky, wrapped in a thin windbreaker, followed Monique over the worn pier to the ramp. Jud
y brought up the rear, grimacing against the needles of rain and clutching her hood as her luggage bumped behind her. As soon as they ducked into the low-ceilinged center of the boat, Judy spied the restaurant. “Coffee,” she groaned. Judy scraped her luggage around and planted it beside Monique. “Check my luggage for me. I’ll save us a table by the window.”

  Monique agreed and headed toward baggage check, Becky in tow. They’d had to check out at 8:30 a.m. from their hotel in a rather grubby part of Cologne before taking a taxi to the pier. She wished she could blame their attitudes on the overcast day, or the three-hour train ride from Amsterdam last night, or the heavy dinner they’d eaten—thick on the potatoes and the schnitzel. She’d even like to blame it on the difficulty they’d had sleeping in a room that smelled like vinegary, fermenting sauerkraut.

  But this trip shouldn’t feel like drudgery. She was German on her father’s side, through a line of Pennsylvania farmers that stretched back to the Revolution. She should be soaking this up, even though all that remained of that heritage was a tendency to enjoy scalloped potatoes and microbrewed beer. Yesterday she, Becky, and Judy had gaped at the soaring nave of Cologne’s famous medieval cathedral. Today this pleasure cruise promised a visual feast of castles, ruins, and little postcard-perfect Rhine towns.

  As she checked their luggage and wound her way back to the restaurant, she told herself to be happy. They were firmly on track with the itinerary. She was checking another item off Lenny’s bucket list. That was, after all, what she’d come to Europe to do.

  They found Judy in the restaurant, nursing a cup of coffee. Two more cups steamed by a plate of pastries.

  “Apfel,” Judy said, pointing to what looked like an apple pastry. “Schnecken.” She nudged what looked like a bear claw and then pointed to a donut. “And a Berliner. My German language skills are rusty but I remember good pastry.”