Expo

We were waiting for our appetizers when my friends Ann and Bill got into a fight. Normally this kind of thing wouldn’t phase me; anyone with friends in long-term relationships understands that disagreements do happen, and in these instances the best thing for a bystander to do is give the couple some space. It’s a straightforward action made not so simple when you’re sitting at a restaurant, crowded around a table the size of a pizza delivery box. I was just glancing over the menu when things started going downhill.

Bill was taking in his drink options, listing out loud the beers he might like to try, when Ann glanced up from her menu to glare at him. This was after mentioning, briefly, something about a steak dinner for himself as well. That act had garnered him his first in a long litany of looks. From across the table, I watched the two of them with a growing sense of unease, and when I started to put down my menu, I reconsidered.

“Or a Corona,” Bill said, more to himself than to either Ann or myself, and that was the tipping point.

“Honey, we can’t afford that,” Ann said. She shook her head, but didn’t look away from her menu. The two of them had recently moved in together and were in the process of discovering the joys of a budget. In her voice ran the undercurrent of the hopeless. Had this been a battlefield, I imagined, she would have played the part of the bullet-ridden soldier, doomed but still reaching for her gun.

“Why not?”

“Because we just went out to eat last week. Remember, we said we were going to cut out restaurants?”

Bill didn’t look up from the drink list. “I know,” he said, “but I want a beer.”

“And a steak dinner.”

A quiet settled on our table, and as I scoured my menu, looking to see if maybe some more listings under the “Chicken” heading had been added in the past five minutes, I listened to the sounds of the other tables, laughing and carrying on. After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, I checked the surrounding tables, wondering which would be more awkward: my continuing to sit here, or going and joining a table full of strangers.

Our waiter, a young man named Brian or Ben, flew over to one of our neighboring parties, and with his best buddy personality took their orders, marking each one with a “Good choice,” or “That’s one of my favorites.” When he’d first arrived at our table ten minutes ago, I had to ignore his forced friendliness. It takes a certain talent to make people believe that you have an actual investment in what they’ll be putting in their mouth, but this guy seemed to be in between careers at the moment and wasn’t at all convincing. In light of our table’s new mood, however, any attempt at happiness was a step up, and so I tried to make eye contact with him as he got ready to head back to the kitchen.

In my mind, our eyes locked and we shared an understanding. He dropped off the menus with the hostess and then returned, maybe stepping over a fallen elderly woman to get to us faster. In reality, after he grabbed the menus, he ran off in the opposite direction. Seriously, he was like a cheetah.

I was left wondering if it would be possible to choke to death if I swallowed, say, my napkin or the tongue of my shoe. I was just fiddling with the laces when Bill spoke up again.

“I’m going to get it.”

“Get what?” This time Ann sounded exasperated, like we were about to hit the five hour mark on a cross-country trip inside a Volkswagen.

“The steak dinner and a beer. Or two.”

“Bill,” Ann said. “We can’t afford that. Really, we shouldn’t have even gotten an appetizer, and we shouldn’t be drinking.”

They started going back and forth with rationalizations and hard facts, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of one of the few times I could remember seeing my parents fight like that.

I was maybe sixteen at the time, and my parents, my brother, Matthew, and I drove to an electronics expo in Collinsville, Illinois. It was my idea to go; the previous Christmas my parents had scrounged up an outdated laptop computer from one of my dad’s work friends and given it to me as a gift. Though I never would have admitted it back then, I was a nerd, and in my head was the notion that this place would hold at least five of the seven wonders of the technological world. Besides, I was wanting some accessories to go along with my computer — things that excited me, like a floppy disk drive and screen cleaner — and so, after seeing a commercial for the Gateway Convention Center on a local television station, I’d pestered my parents until they felt a forty-five minute drive to Collinsville was preferable to me talking, incessantly, about going.

When my father drove us places, more often than not, we crammed into his truck, a two-toned blue Chevrolet which he has had since, like, forever. This trip was no different, and after nearly an hour of driving, my legs cramping and me having listened to the soft mix of classic rock and my parents’ simple conversations up in the front seats, we pulled into the parking lot of a building that looked like a stadium.

To say that the place was large would not necessarily be an understatement; it was big — enough so, anyway, to be packed with soil in a few months for dirt bike races and monster trucks — but its sense of scale for me came from my lack of firsthand knowledge. Back home, a building could have two stories and I’d think it somehow special, as if were populated by important people making life-changing decisions. In reality, the building might be nothing more than an apartment above a drug store. The Gateway Convention Center, to me anyway, looked as the Coliseum must have looked to the people of Rome. Wow, I thought, after unwedging myself from the back seat and jumping out into the afternoon sunlight.

As with all places that have parking lots the size of lesser third-world countries, the time it took to walk from our truck to the main entrance felt just as long as the drive there. Had I not been so excited, I surely would have been complaining about being tired by the time we arrived, but as it was, my head crammed with ideas about fantastic technologies and rows upon rows of fancy computers, I ignored the burning in my legs and pushed onward.

Upon entering, the first thing I noticed was the crowd. People were pressed up against one another like cattle, and the roar of their conversations made it difficult to hear anything, much less understand it. Matthew and I stuck close to our parents, and as we made our way through the complicated network of booths and counters I kept on the lookout for the first magical piece of machinery to impress me. We passed by a man sitting behind a glass counter where four or five laptop computers demonstrated their DVD playback features. Each computer had a hand-written tag on it, blandly stating a marked-up price and offering a few details, and in looking at the man, slightly overweight and resting on a metal folding chair, I realized how appropriate his smoldering cigarette was there in his hand.

I held out hope that there would be something better the further in we got, but after an hour of making our way through throngs of what looked like single men and only the occasional family, past metal folding tables supporting cardboard boxes labeled in permanent marker, that there was no section in which I’d find something fantastical, something that would make me marvel at the “future-is-now” ingenuity of technology. When we at last came to a man selling some laptop accessories, my mom and brother went off to look around on their own. My dad found a floppy disk drive sitting on the man’s table and marked with some undemanding price — five dollars, maybe — and he asked me if I wanted to get it. The thing was black, with a little cord running out the back of it like a rat’s tail. Its exterior was smudged with what might have been dirt or chocolate or God knows what else, and had the man selling it said in a thickened, world-wearied voice, “Yes, I pulled it off a dead man in Russia,” I would have believed him.

I was disappointed by how crummy everything around me was, and I only halfheartedly said yes to my dad. The man behind the table was busy, answering questions from other, more invested buyers, and as we waited and waited, I realized my heart just wasn’t in it anymore. The journey here, the wading around through boxes of unwanted junk, the increasingly bored look upon my brother’s and my mom’s face — how had I set my hopes so high? Finally, after ten minutes of waiting, I turned to my dad, looking up into his bearded face, and said, “Let’s just go.”

“You don’t want it anymore?” I could tell he was annoyed by the prospect of my giving up. It was like a marathoner getting to within a breath of a finish line and then turning around to go back for one of those little cups of water people hand out.

“No,” I said, and I set the floppy drive back on the table.

We left the table, and after finding my mom and Matthew, who were standing at a table with stacks of old cookbooks, I rejoined them. My dad made mention of the fact that I had changed my mind, and he excused himself to look at some things a few rows away. We could all tell that his mood was starting to sour, and as my mom continued to flip through recipe after recipe, my eyes followed my dad over to a large offering of DVDs.

They, too, were set up on folding tables and inside large cardboard boxes. These boxes, however, instead of a simple price or boring description, had three large x’s scrawled on the side. I had to look twice to make sure I was actually seeing things correctly. There my father was, leafing through one disc after another, in a pile of used porn videos.

I’d never seen my father with as much as a dirty magazine, and although I’d heard from friends that sometimes their dads would have a secret Playboy stash, the closest my father got was the car magazines boasting a vintage Corvette next to a model in a bikini. To say that it was disturbing watching my father peruse pornography would be yet another understatement. In fact, I wanted to curl up into a ball and forget that I’d seen anything at all.

This might have been possible had my mother not seen the exact same thing I had.

In an instant, she had told us to stay right where we were and started making her way over to my dad. Matthew and I stood there by the tables of dog-eared cookbooks and watched our mother’s back as it maneuvered through the crowd. The way she moved carried with it a determination I knew all too well; it was the same as when she knew that something she didn’t approve of was going down. Had she been a cop or a DEA agent, her walk might have suggested an impending arrest or drug bust, and even though she was neither of those things I could tell that today was not going to turn out well.

I watched the two of them exchange silent words, and the din on the conventioneers faded into a hazy white noise. Their entire conversation lasted little more than a minute, and then we were back together and heading out to the truck.

Inside, we buckled in and let the parking lot. Things were quiet for a few moments until my mom spoke up.

The following argument was charged with questions about what my mother had seen, but the topic quickly changed to other things, like an upcoming promotion for my dad, his accusation that my mother was greedy and interested solely in his making more money. In effect, their fight was a generalized clearing of the air, a bloodletting of sorts, and one that neither my brother nor I was used to seeing. It was odd and uncomfortable seeing them fighting — a rare occurrence — and to have such close seats. It was almost what I imagine being at a wrestling match must be like when you’re sitting in the front rows. The ability to see every anguished look, the way you could almost certainly hear all the blows landing, and the fear, settled inside you, of the rage overspilling the ring and claiming you as a victim.

So, too, was the experience of dinner. And as Ann and Bill picked at one another, I sat there quietly, trying to make myself fade into the background. If their fight was anything like my parents’, soon enough they would be back to normal, acting as though nothing at all had happened. Until then, however, I sat and counted the passing seconds, rubbing my empty hands together, thinking all the while, Where the hell is that goddamn waiter?