The Table in the Corner: Why a Quiet Solo Lunch at an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet Triggered a Public Confrontation
The brass bell above the kitchen door of the Golden Wok Buffet gave a dry, tinny rattle every time the waitress carried out a fresh tray of orange chicken. I sat there in the middle of the main dining room for about forty seconds before my shoulders started creeping up toward my ears. The room was too wide. The ceiling tiles were too high and white. I could feel movement behind my left shoulder, out in the open air where anyone could walk past without me seeing them coming until it was too late.
My breath got a little short, right down in the top of my chest, that old familiar tightness that never really leaves you once you have spent enough years looking at terrain that did not want you there.
The waitress walked past with an empty tray and noticed me staring fixedly at the exit sign by the cash register. Her name tag said Brenda in faded blue script. She didn’t ask any dumb questions or give me that tilted-head look people give you when they figure out you are wired a little crooked. She just saw the way my hands were flat on the gray laminate table and the way I kept checking the blind spot behind my left ear.
“You want that corner booth over by the soda fountain, hon?” she asked, already reaching for my paper napkin and my glass of iced tea. “Nobody’s sitting over there. You can watch the whole room from that spot.”
I grabbed my silverware and followed her across the linoleum floor, feeling the tension drain out of my calves the second my back hit a solid, load-bearing partition wall. That was the rule I lived by ever since I came back from overseas and tried to fit back into regular towns with regular grocery stores and restaurants. Back to the wall. Eyes on the exits. Keep the perimeter small enough to manage. Brenda set my glass down on the sticky wood grain and told me to help myself to whatever was fresh on the steam tables.
I went up and loaded a modest plate with pepper steak, some spring rolls that looked like they had been sitting under the heat lamps since the previous Tuesday, and a mountain of fried rice. Nothing fancy, but it was hot and I was completely alone for the afternoon, which was the main goal anyway.
My wife had gone down to Knoxville to stay with her sister for three days to help sort out some family property dispute, leaving me to rattle around our small brick house with only the television and the old basset hound for company. By Saturday noon, the quiet of the house started getting too loud, so I drove my truck down to the strip mall behind the car wash.
The corner table was perfect. I could see the front door, the register, the salad bar, and every single chair in the central section without having to turn my head more than a few degrees. I took a bite of a spring roll, felt the crunch, and let out a long breath through my nose. It was peaceful. Or at least it was peaceful until the hostess seated four girls right at the table directly in front of my line of sight.
They were all around twenty-one or twenty-two, dressed in matching oversized hoodies and chunky sneakers, carrying enough plastic shopping bags from the boutique down the street to stock a small store. As soon as they sat down, the noise level at their table went up about fifty decibels. They didn’t talk so much as narrate their entire existence to each other at the top of their lungs. One of them had her phone propped up against a sugar shaker, recording a video of herself unwrapping a straw while making exaggerated faces at the camera.
I went back to my pepper steak, trying to ignore them. That is the trick you learn after a while in crowds. You become invisible by choice. You make your world about three feet wide and you stay inside it. But when you sit with your back to the wall, your peripheral vision is actually sharper than normal because you do not have to worry about your blind spots. You notice every shift in light, every sudden movement, every change in the pitch of a voice.
The girls ordered four iced teas and spent the next ten minutes arguing over whether they should go to the movie theater after eating or just drive back to the dorm. The ringleader of the group sat facing me. She had long, bleached-blond hair extensions that kept falling into her soy sauce dish and heavy bronze makeup that looked like she had applied it with a putty knife in a dark car. She kept picking up her phone, checking her reflection in the dark screen like it was a compact mirror, and then glancing back up.
The problem was that my natural resting posture when I am scanning a room looks like a glare, even when I am just trying to figure out if the beef is tender. I wasn’t looking at them. I was looking past them at the guy in the blue flannel shirt who was standing near the register trying to pay his bill with a crumpled twenty-dollar bill. But because of the way the tables were arranged, my line of sight went right over the blond girl’s left shoulder.
She caught me in her peripheral vision the same time I caught her movement. I saw her stop mid-sentence with her straw halfway to her mouth. She lowered the straw very slowly, set it down on the paper place mat, and turned her whole upper body around to face me directly. Her friends went dead silent instantly, sensing the shift in air pressure the way kids do when a teacher stops writing on the chalkboard.
“Do you mind?” she asked.
Her voice wasn’t loud, but it had that sharp, thin edge to it that carries across a quiet restaurant better than a shout. The whole dining room seemed to dip down into a strange kind of hush, like someone had just turned down the volume on a radio.
I didn’t blink. I just sat there with my fork halfway between my plate and my mouth, looking at her across the four feet of linoleum separating our tables. I could feel the old, familiar prickle of heat at the back of my neck, that split-second warning system telling me something was about to happen, but I kept my hands steady on the table.
“Excuse me?” I said. My voice came out flat and dry, sounding like gravel being turned over with a shovel.
“You’ve been staring at us since we sat down,” she said, her chin coming up a notch as she performed for her three friends, who were suddenly staring very intently at their napkins. “Some of us are trying to have a private conversation without some weird old guy glaring at our table the whole time. So yeah. Do you mind looking somewhere else?”
The three girls on either side of her shrank back into their plastic booth seats. One of them, a girl with a green canvas jacket, mumbled something about leaving it alone, but the blond girl ignored her, puffed up with the absolute certainty of someone who had never once been told no by anyone who mattered. She sat there waiting for me to apologize, or pack up my plate, or slink away to another table like I had been caught doing something shameful.
I looked down at my plate. The pepper steak was starting to cool off, the gravy forming a thin, gray film around the edges of the white rice. Then I looked back up at her face, taking my time, letting the silence stretch out until it started making her fidget.
“I was watching the exit,” I said quietly.
She blinked, her eyebrows drawing together in a confused little knot. “What?”
“I was watching the exit,” I repeated, my voice not raising by a single decibel. “And the guy at the cash register. I didn’t even notice you were here until you started talking about your shopping bags.”
The dining room stayed completely still. From behind the counter, Brenda stopped wiping down the glass dessert case and looked over her shoulder at us, her rag frozen in her hand.
The blond girl’s face went from a bright, defiant flush to a mottled, uncomfortable pink. She opened her mouth to say something else, some smart remark about how she didn’t care what I was looking at, but the words kind of died in her throat because she realized right then, looking at my face and the way I wasn’t moving an inch, that she had picked a fight with the wrong person. She had assumed I was just some creepy guy invading her space for fun, and instead she had run headfirst into a man whose brain was permanently locked in high-alert mode.
Her friends weren’t looking at her anymore. They were staring down at their untouched plates of noodles with intense concentration, their shoulders hunched up just like mine had been five minutes earlier. The phone on the sugar shaker continued to record the empty ceiling tiles above our heads.
“Have a nice lunch,” I said.
I picked up my fork, cut another small piece of the beef, and chewed it very slowly. It tasted like salt and cornstarch and cheap soy sauce, but I didn’t care. I chewed it until it was gone, swallowed, and picked up my glass of iced tea.
The girl didn’t say another word for the rest of the time they were there. Within three minutes, she had shoved her plate away, grabbed her shopping bags with both hands, and muttered something to her friends about going to look for parking down by the bookstore. They practically tripped over each other getting out the front door, not once looking back in my direction.
Brenda walked over a minute later with a fresh pitcher of tea and topped off my glass without saying anything about the commotion. She just reached out, tapped the edge of my table once with her knuckles, and gave me a short, understanding nod.
I sat there for another twenty minutes, eating the rest of the rice and watching the front door swing back and forth in the midday breeze, with my back safely against the wall and the whole room right where I could see it.
