We push open the doors that say Masks required, No mask? No service, Mask up—it’s the law. Who looks at signs on doors. Who listens. We walk up to the hostess, knock on her plexiglass station, say we are ready to be seated. The restaurant has 80 percent open tables, there’s no way they can’t seat us immediately. The hostess smiles behind her mask—it moves up as do the corners of her eyes but it don’t glint genuine. Her whiteboard marker is shaking. She asks us to put on our masks and we say we don’t have masks and she passes us each one from her box, delicately holding them by the strings. We grab damn masks, ugly yellow and white cheap strings. Who are you to tell us what to do? Don’t you know we wear the knock-off Chanel bag and the perfect fit jeans with the celebrity label shirt and the car we drive costs more than nine years of your rent? We are men and women who want America grand again, who know that the past full of deference towards our privileged skin is better than this time now when a lousy hostess thinks she’s the mask police, thinks she can tell us how to act and to cover up our God-given faces.
We crumple the masks in our hands and she says we have to wear them and she stands there with all those empty, spread out tables behind her, and she dares to look us in the eye and watch us cover our angry red cheeks and smear our Rihanna gold lipstick and she takes our temperature and records our names and numbers for the damn left wing conspiracy registration and this is the only way we can get a decent meal out because our governor thinks she’s hitler or something. She better watch out. They almost got her once. They don’t give up, not when she keeps our rights from us, keeps us from feeling human, from our kids playing football, from our businesses making money. She ain’t here right now, is she?
Give us the chicken paprikas, the pork belly ramen, the california roll, the rack of ribs, the panko shrimp salad, the Bangkok house cocktail, the lamb curry, the kimchi hash, the hot mess. Give us a magnum of champagne. We are celebrating here, can’t you tell. Make sure you give us the freshest bread right out the—what? You don’t give bread anymore? Toast points? It’s a menu item now? Damn. You are a restaurant. Customer service, remember? You are supposed to do what we ask. You listen. If you’ve got toast points, you’ve got bread. Give us the bread before you toast and point it. Give us a little of that olive oil on plates. The way you used to before all this fear-mongering. We aren’t afraid of no germs, no flu, no virus floating in the air spooky like a ghost. Woooooo. Ha, ha.
We have to slam our fists down, we have to raise our voices or that little waiter with his double masks won’t get our food fast, the way we like it. We slam our phones down because we didn’t get menus to slam down and now our screens are cracked and you better believe it, we are going to review the hell out of this on yelp, maybe say something about how service has gone to hell and how long does it take to cook when you know you got people coming and it’s quarter capacity? We rip off our masks and fill up the empty spaces with our loud conversations about the wedding we flew to a week ago and the Easter dinner we are planning and who is coming to that and how—damn, where is our food? WHERE IS OUR FUCKING FOOD? hah, that got their attention, here they come—we are seated, what do you mean, we don’t need our masks on, no there is nothing saying we have to keep our masks on—look it’s broken anyway we all have broken strings my face isn’t used to cheap-ass products WE ARE HUNGRY go on and get our food, no we did not push you, yes, we gave you a little nudge to do your job isn’t that what you are supposed to do? You are working for us so we can keep your business afloat so get us our food and comp us another magnum and why is this taking so long, and what? NO WAY WE ARE LEAVING WE HAVEN’T EATEN OUR—We see it there, on that large round tray, we see our food, that’s our food, let us have our food, we are so hungry and it’s probably why we are being a little—no we did not use profane language, no we did not refer to any person as a—what say you now? ethnic slur? that sounds profane all on its own. We didn’t do any of those things and WE ARE NOT LEAVING UNTIL—
We walk out of restaurants, we flip food trays on our way, we hip-check anyone who comes close, we yell our worst words in our angriest voices, we call people what they are, what everyone can see they are, what they ought to know they are, and we yell this in their faces as we stomp out. We march out to our oversize luxury SUV, we go through the drive-through for our hot chicken sandwiches, we get out our phones and write our one-star reviews because the damn app won’t allow zero-star reviews.
We drink free champagne, because we grabbed the bottle on our way out, so ha! We are banned for life, they say. Who cares. We will never go back there, we wouldn’t ever go back there anyways. We search Eater for tomorrow night. Everyone isn’t crazy, right? Right?
Wendy BooydeGraaff has been published in NOON, Smokelong Quarterly, Porter House Review, and elsewhere, and her work is forthcoming in Brink, X-R-A-Y, and Lost Balloon.