Au Crawfish

Tuesday. 6:25 AM. She has a fever. She has a peppermint tea and turns off the ringer on her phone. Now she’ll only hear the passionate cat fights in her driveway. She watches the sun rise through beaded curtains with fraying bottoms. 

            On Tuesdays, Marlene speaks French with Murray at the Crawfish Café. It’s a tradition that was conceived during their marriage, unlike their children. Thirty years ago, the ex-couple honeymooned in Paris—although they both agreed that such excursions were trite and overdone—and fell in love with the language on a Bateau Mouche. Now Marlene and Murray, long since divorced, both have jobs that involve too much talking. They reconvene at the Crawfish weekly, so they can share their lives but seldom hear a word of English.

            Today Marlene only has ice water with a slice of lemon, still slightly queasy from the peppermint tea she drank on an empty stomach. She had fed the tea bag to the cat; she read recently that peppermint shares several key characteristics with catnip. Priscilla had jumped out the window shortly after eating it, but landed safely on four feet.

            Murray gets a whole Cajun breakfast. Grits and a Creole scramble with light Tabasco sauce, hot cup of chicory. He drinks the whole coffee first and asks Marlene, “Ca va, ma petite?”

            She nods, thinking that she can feel her whole brain sliding forwards and backwards. She closes her eyes and touches her hand to her forehead. 

“Dites-moi quelquechose amusant,” he says, making fists and punching the air in front of him. He’s dancing, to the Mardi Gras horns on the stereo. Tell me something funny.

Marlene surprises herself by rolling her eyes. Typically, she still finds her balding ex-husband charming. An old fashioned tease. When he doesn’t know a French word, he says it in English with an exaggerated accent, always making her cheeks look like overripe pomegranates.

This time, though, she can only clench her teeth when he whispers, “Oh ma cherie, quelle est le probleme? Cest le meenopawzz?”

“Let’s just stick to the native tongue today?” Marlene pleads. Murray stops, mid-gnaw. He pulls a piece of onion out of his teeth. He hasn’t heard his wife speak English almost since she stopped being his wife. “I feel fuzzy,” she says.

“Oh okay no problemo!”

They’re silent for a while, though, watching the waitress who used to be a man take cocktail orders at 9 AM. Marlene dips her fingers in her water and slowly squeezes the lemon until it’s just peel.

She is suddenly embarrassed and lets the lemon slip from her fingers into the tall glass. “It’s a lemon!” Murray had said of the first car they bought together—a silver ’65 Mazda—and they would frequently make lemonade for the kids in its honor.  

“Ol’ Ellen still off her rocker?” says Murray. He says this a lot. It’s an old joke. Ellen is Marlene’s neighbor, though she used to be both of theirs, and once knocked on their door asking for three eggs and some flour at 2 AM.

Marlene is silent still. Part of her just doesn’t want to feel her brain slide around again, but part of her doesn’t know how to answer the question. She could say, “Yup, that Ellen, what a bad egg,” but she also could not. She drifts off. Everything is magnified and overwhelming today. The crepe paper pineapples hanging from the ceiling are garishly yellow. 

Murray looks hurt, and Marlene feels bad. “I’m being a bitch,” she apologizes.

“Marly! I’m having a fine time with you this morning.”

His optimism tastes tired and familiar. He had totaled the Mazda a few years after they had bought it by driving it into a tree. He had been completely fine, and so had the pigeon he’d swerved away from to avoid hitting. That evening, when she had yelled at him, he had gotten teary-eyed and apologized profusely, but he acted as though there was no need to. “Everything will work out just fine,” he had promised. “I’ll get you a brand spankin’ new vehicle tomorrow!”

He always made her feel guilty for being upset or annoyed or exhausted or anything but compliant with his cheeriness. But today, Marlene reasons, she shouldn’t feel bad for not wanting to say “oui, oui!” and choosing not to toss her head back laughing like les francais at his constant witty banter.

“I’m going pee,” she says, even though she doesn’t need to. She slowly gets up from the booth, and smacks her head into the waitress’s. The waitress was bringing extra Tabasco sauce for Murray and extra lemon for Marlene, and now she drops the Tabasco sauce bottle at Marlene’s feet, where it opens and spills all over her mustard yellow Birkenstocks. The sliced lemon sticks to the floor beside her chair. Marlene starts to cry.

“Honey!” The waitress says, confused. Marlene knows that, relatively speaking, the collision was barely painful, but it isn’t helping her headache. And now Murray will think she’s helpless and needy.

“I got you, darling,” he says, winking at the waitress and patting her on the shoulder. He stands up and helps Marlene sit down.

“You can’t just save me,” says Marlene, meekly.

“What?”

“You’re not some wonderful savior. This has nothing to do with you. I’m not crying because of you!” Oops, that was a little loud. But everything is magnified already and a few more decibels really should not make people stare like that. She wants to shake her shoulders so he’ll stop gripping them. “There’s really nothing to smile about,” she hisses.

Murray drops his hands. He looks smaller and pathetic. Marlene feels the familiar guilt churning in her empty stomach, but quickly looks away from him. The café is mostly quiet now, and the other diners are either subtly looking at them or contentedly slurping their onion soups.

What happened to the commotion? The waitress seems to have already wiped up the spilled sauce and someone has brought her a new lemon. It would be silly to scream now, since the couple across the room could probably hear her if she so much as whispered. But it had felt right to suddenly abandon the self-consciousness and shame. She wanted to yell at Murray—to tell him that she knew these weekly rendezvous (as he aptly labeled them) were his way of keeping tabs on her. But she could not very well shout at him while that woman over there was calmly pouring vinaigrette over her lettuce and chatting about this and that with her girlfriends.

In a brash flash of brilliance or insanity, she says aloud, “I should start a real commotion.” She pictures chandeliers rocking and the hostess slipping on spilled orange juice. Plates breaking noisily, and customers shrieking as a tray of beignets heaped with powdered sugar comes hurtling towards them. And she, above the din and chaos, calmly but loudly setting Murray straight.

Dreamily inside of this revelation, Marlene picks up the salt shaker and prepares to throw it, but Murray grabs her wrist. She realizes that such an act would only confirm his misguided notions. “Alright,” she says. “But there’s a lot you don’t understand.”

For once he stops grinning like a fool.

“I’ll tell you if you’ll take me seriously.”

“Of course, sweetie.”

“I think it’s great that you’re always happy,” she speaks slowly, pulling a loose thread from her skirt.

He laughs, predictably. “I’m not…!”

“You are,” she speaks with force, gaining confidence. “And it’s fine. But I’m not like that. Remember when you took Ellie to the beach when I was sleeping and then you came home and she didn’t get why I was upset and you kept saying you’d tell me next time but shouldn’t I be happy that you guys had tons of fun?” Marlene takes a deep breath. Quickly, so he can’t interrupt.

“And I felt like shit, Mur. For a long time. But now I realize that I had been worried about you guys. And jealous that you’d gone without me. Goodness, I’m allowed to have emotions! You made me think I was crazy and sensitive and I know that’s what you think too.”

There. Her fever is still there, but her forehead feels lukewarm instead of scorching hot. He smacks his lips together and widens his eyes like a fish, evidently hoping to inspire a fit of giggles.

“Honey, we realized a long time ago that we were unmatched socks. I just didn’t really understand why until recently,” she says. Murray makes the face where he furrows his bushy brow and pushes his bottom lip up. He lifts his shoulders as if he is about to shrug, but leaves them there, by his ears.

“Sorry?”

“No, no,” says Marlene, batting away an invisible fly in front of her face. “The whole point is that you don’t understand people like me. I don’t expect you to have any idea what the heck I’m talking about!”

She stands up, picks up her sweater and purse, and leans over to kiss Murray on the cheek. He looks at her and tilts his head to the right. They both look down at their food, and then back at each other.

“Basically, I’m just saying that we probably won’t be sharing cups of chicory any longer,” says Marlene, a little softer. “Au revoir, mon petit!”