LUNCH AT THE SACRED DATURA CAFÉ

by

D. S. Olson

Every Tuesday I go to the Sacred Datura Café for lunch and get the special. This week it was a green corn tamale with a cup of chicken posole soup that had, it turned out, these big chunks of white hominy in it. Never had anything like that before. Diane is the cook there. I know this because the gal at the counter sometimes calls out her name when someone places an order. Whenever I enter the Sacred Datura, Diane always looks up from the prep table and then back down and smiles to herself. Or so I imagine. Every time I eat there I find a hair in my food somewhere. Every time. I’m almost certain that Diane is flirting with me.

The Sacred Datura is laid out shotgun style in half of an old building on Colter Avenue, one block off the seedier main street downtown. The kitchen is at the back of the room, separated by a deli counter. You walk up and place your order with the counter gal and then get your fork and knife and water and napkins that are arranged on an old unused woodstove next to the counter and sit at a table. After a while someone brings your food to you. Even though the food is organic and caters more to granola-head hippie sensibilities, it’s really good tasting and the portions are big, too. It’s even cheap. The Sacred Datura Café is the only place that I’ve ever eaten tofu. I started doing that after I saw Diane’s reaction when I asked the counter gal about it one time. It was actually good, though the texture has a snot-like quality that puts me off if I think about it too much. On the other hand, it was after I started eating tofu that I began to really pay attention to the white girls with dreadlocks that eat there all the time. They’re so cute.

Business is good and steady but I always get a table, and when I do I always make sure that I’m facing the back of the room so I can see Diane doing her work. In winter the drafts leak around the purple door to the café and I have to eat with my coat on like a bum. Diane stands by the stoves with the bread oven at her back, so she always has just a t-shirt on under her apron. I don’t know when she does it because I never see it happen, but at some point in the preparation she pulls one of her red hairs out and hides it in my order. She’s a real redhead – I’ve tasted the evidence.

Diane is not small – 5’8” or so – and strong. Her legs are sturdy and her bottom is round and heavy like ballast in a wooden-hulled ship as she turns from the cooler to the prep table to the soup pots on the stove, always rolling right back to the center of things. Sometimes there is a sweat stain between her breasts or soup splashed across them. They are full but not overly large. Diane is real ripe, as I see her, like a big basket of fruit. Whenever I see her the one word that always comes to mind is “juicy.”

This is the 17^th Tuesday in a row by my count, both for the special and for the red hair I should find. Today I came late – they close at 2:00PM – because my courage is up and I’m going to say something to her about it. I like her food. I like her hair. I like how round and healthy she looks. Something needs to be said.

At two o’clock I’m dawdling over my plate, and the counter gal comes out to turn the sign around to “Closed.” She eyes me a little going toward the door, and I can feel her still eying me on the way back to the kitchen, giving me the “time to go” look. Maybe she knows something about those hairs. Diane is covering things and putting them in the cooler and then scraping the grill and generally squaring up the kitchen. The other women who work with her are sticking dirty dishes in the clipper and washing pots and everything is humming along and I feel really awkward just sitting there. I decide I’ll carry my dishes back to the clipper so they can put them in with the rest and have everything clean all together. The hair I found this time was in the posole soup and I carefully folded it into a piece of paper I brought especially for it. I want to show it to Diane. I want her to explain things to me.

When I cross past the counter the three other women look up, but Diane is focused on what she’s doing. I put my plate and bowl and cup on the stainless steel shelf of the clipper and smile at them and one – the counter gal – says “Thanks,” in a very tight way. My courage kind of folds at that point, but as I walk back past Diane, she says under her breath, “Wait.”

I go and sit back down. Thirty minutes go by. One by one the other gals take off their aprons and wad them up and toss them in a canvas bag stretched over a wooden frame. The counter-gal leans over the prep table and I hear her ask Diane, “You okay?” Diane just smiles down at the table and says, “I’m fine. Go on home,” so now there are just the two of us in there. My heart is beating a flutter in my ribs and I don’t know whether to get up or stay put. Finally, Diane stretches up, then walks to the cooler and takes out something and comes to where I’m sitting. She slides it in front of me. It’s a piece of pumpkin pie.

“Would you like a cup of coffee with that? I’m going to make one for myself.”

I’m a little stunned but I smile and say yes, and she goes back and makes some noises over the espresso machine and comes back with two coffees – Americanos, they call them for some reason.

“Take a bite,” she says, handing me a fork. I notice that she’s got a sweat stain across her breasts. Her nipples are visible perking through the wet cotton.

I cut the tip off the pumpkin pie and put it in my mouth and slowly crush it against the roof of my mouth with my tongue. It’s like nothing I have ever tasted.

“Close your eyes,” she tells me, “when you take the next bite,” which I do.

As I’m gently chewing the pie I can feel the long hair materialize on my tongue. When I open my eyes, Diane is smiling at me and taking her apron off.

“So, what do you think?”

“You’re a real redhead is what I think.”

“Is that important to you?”

I pull the hair out of my mouth and slowly taste the pie. I take the paper from my pocket with the other hair in it and carefully open it and put the hair from the pie next to it. Then I fold the paper and put it back in my pocket. I sip the coffee a bit to wash down the bite of pie. I look at Diane. Diane looks back at me over her coffee cup.

“You’ve been coming here every Tuesday for a long time,” she says finally.

“Seventeen weeks, to be exact.”

She smiles with her eyes at me and with her mouth to herself and sets her cup down and puts her hand on my forearm in the familiar way that some women do that makes you instantly fall in love with them.

“You like the food here,” she says. It is not a question.

“Obviously.”

“Even with my hair in it.” Again, it is not a question.

“Guess so.”

“You wonder why that always happens.” Not a question.

“I have some ideas.” I am trying to be really cool about everything.

“Do you?” She is staring right down through me now, but smiling as if she knows something that I don’t. Her hand squeezes my arm a little and I realize that she has very strong hands.

I take another bite of the pie, pretending like I have conversations like this every day, but I can feel my face flushing and my armpits getting damp. The pie, though, is heavenly, the crust all buttery, the filling firm and fresh and when I press it with teeth or tongue the flavor coats the entire inside of my mouth the way your chest fills when you first find out that someone you love loves you too. Up close it’s clear that Diane is no spring chicken, but there is this power moving through her, like the source of all health, and her hand on my arm is connecting me to that force just as each bite of pie is sending me closer to what I can only see as ecstasy. Her smile and her eyes are more focused on me and I am seeing her almost glow in front of me. It’s a little peculiar.

I take another bite of pie, and now I feel like I am becoming weightless, like I am two or three inches above the chair and as I begin to float, Diane, with her hand on my arm, is keeping me from floating away. My God! I’ve loved the food here but this is more that anything I’ve ever eaten has done to me before. I hurriedly cut another bite with the fork, and as I raise the piece to my mouth, its burnt orange hue and texture with tiny pits almost dances toward me, and as I put it in my mouth, I feel like I am filling with something beyond elation, beyond orgasm even, and it fills my head too, and when I look at Diane as I am chewing she seems like a goddess, fringed with rays of light, and now she is floating with me, and the colors of the restaurant – the purple trim, the chrome yellow front of the deli counter, the sky blue of the walls – are all starting to flood right through her as she becomes translucent.

The coffee cup and saucer drift toward me out of the colors flooding through Diane and I hear her voice, like music now, like something from a chorus of angels, and she tells me, “Wash it down, wash it down.” I drain the cup, the heat searing my mouth but the pumpkin pie taste still there and almost breathless I crash my fork against the plate, but I miss the pie and the fork flies from my hand and bounces off the table, streaking a silver tail as it arcs across space. Now the pie comes floating toward me and it’s in Diane’s hand and she’s hanging in the air with me and floating the pie towards my mouth and I’m opening my mouth and feeling her slide it against my lips and teeth and tongue and I am almost frightened because if she lets go I’m going to drift far, far away. Violets and indigo and blood orange and radium yellows are streaking from Diane’s eyes and mouth and from the tips of her fingers and I savor the pie as if it is my very life than I am chewing and swallowing and almost swooning for.

And now she’s pulling me, pulling me toward the back of the Sacred Datura like a drowning man and the colors are screaming at me and I am desperately, hopelessly, endlessly in love with her. I hear a “thunk” and then feel the cold when she opens the cooler door and gently pushes me inside and says to me in that angelic voice, “I always thought you’d be a tasty one, a very tasty boy.” My body sails to the back of the cooler and bounces off a metal rack and comes to rest hovering in the middle of the cooler.

A very tasty boy! She loves me too!

And then the door sucks shut and there is a clanking and the sound of something solid closing and it is dark inside. Very, very dark. And quiet. Very, very quiet now. And getting a little cold. I feel a little fright mixing in with the love. I can still taste the pie, but something seems wrong. Something seems terribly, dreadfully, horribly wrong. And I feel sleepy now, the darkness wiping out the last trails of color, and I’m very tired, very tired and sleepy and when Diane comes back I’ll ask her about those hairs…yes, when she comes back…I’ll ask her and then she’ll get me and I’ll ask her and I’ll ask her. I’ll ask.