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Coffee Shop My daughter Anna and I were sitting at the window counter at Starbucks looking out through the drizzly twilight at 57th Street. We were tired from traipsing around New York; we'd explored the Village, logged an hour or so in the tiny Oscar Wilde Bookshop there, walked down to Chinatown then back up to Central Park. This Starbucks, a block from our hotel, was as far as we could drag our spent selves that evening which was just as well; we weren't traveling on a budget that would cover theater tickets. Exhausted and giddy we had lapsed into what's recently become our favorite game: we name things. "Let's name things we hate," Anna yawned, wringing out her tea bag. "Okay." I was pulling books from my bag and setting them on the counter. "Umm, Secret Santas, pelvic exams, corsages…" "You've already said those." She was right; I was pulling items from the canon of our previous lists; we seem to hate a lot of things. "Well, what do you hate?" She considered her mug. "Ann Coulter…and red states—all of them…" "Family values," I cut her off. "And those everything happens for a reason people—it's a nice philosophy unless your whole village is leveled by a tsunami." "What else?" She was nibbling her scone, making me do the work "Fundamentalism. Toenail fungus." "Which would you rather have—a pelvic exam or toenail fungus?" she asked. We had moved on to phase two of "Things We Hate"—creating the hierarchy. "A pelvic exam—they only take a few minutes but toenail fungus is for life—practically." "Okay, a fungus or a Secret Santa?" Now things were tied up. For the sake of moving along I broke the tie. "Secret Santa." "Toe fungus or being put on the mailing list for The American Family Association?" "Toenail fungus! Let's read." I opened the book of Thomas Lynch's essays that I was rereading and cut into my scone. We were in New York looking at colleges; Anna was a senior in high school and this was likely to be the last trip we took together for quite a while; looking back, I don't remember ever traveling with my parents once I'd graduated high school. Lives part. I would miss her and I was determined to make the initial "leg" of her future as safe as possible. I was checking dorm security, proximity of hospitals to campuses, booster dates for meningitis vaccinations. Off to my left I noticed a tiny commotion. Abandoning Thomas Lynch I leaned onto my elbow and slid discreetly toward the little situation that was taking shape on the far side of Anna. Here is what I discovered: an absurd, entirely grown-up man was hitting on her—on my daughter! Who did he think I was? Probably he hadn't seen me at all; unwisely he had overlooked the mother factor. Not likely to survive the city, he. But for the time being there he was just to Anna's tender left with his receding hairline and his slick smile—trying to engage my beautiful 18-year-old daughter in a co nversation designed to lead… "Do you come here often?" He actually said do you come here often? I was embarrassed for him now—poor, balding fuck—yes, he was a fuck, most definitely a fuck. Did he have no clue, no faint intimation as to who was sitting to her immediate right? I said nothing, a little interested in an appalled sort of way, to see just how Anna would respond. "He's trying to pick you up!" I whispered, leaning in close. "It's not like it's the first time, Mom," she laughed—laughed! Not the first time! "What are you reading?" he wanted to know. She was reading Barbara Kingsolver, my beautiful, literary, language-loving daughter and, ohmygod—impossible—so was he! The fuck was reading The Poisonwood Bible—there it was next to his laptop! Shapes shifted for a minute. New York City was shaking the Etch-A-Sketch in my head; then clear images arose and the scales nearly balanced. But no—receding hairline and crow's feet (which I'd invented for him—I didn't want to stare) outweighed the fuck's principled reading and commendable taste in literature. He was too old and strange—an old stranger, in fact. A moment later, without a word or sign from me, Anna turned slightly away from him, a dismissive gesture but not quite a snub, nothing so rude and heartless as a snub—polite but uninterested, and resumed her reading. He was a fuck discouraged, a fuck scorned, a fuck put out with the cat. I was the proudest mother on 57th Street. When we were too tired to prop ourselves up on our stools Anna and I started back to our hotel. We wove and loitered, looked at menus posted in windows, paused to examine a card table loaded up with books for sale outside a storefront church, in no hurry, despite our exhaustion, to call it a night. "Let's think of words we hate," Anna sighed. We leaned into each other. "Ointment…panties…" "Pulchritude!" "Kudos, scrotum, womb.—Oh my God—don't you just want to kill yourself—living in a world with a word like womb?" We had crossed over; there was no going back. We were walked-out women, giddy on the city. Midwesterners hopped up on Big Apple juice. "Oleo…tony…tuity-fruity!" "Can you bare it?—bowel!" We checked in to our room. The next day we flew home. On Monday I was back in school teaching a proper reverence for the English language while Anna spread her post-secondary options before her on the living room floor and finally picked a college. Halfway across town I all but heard her sigh with relief. Then she picked up her keys and headed out to the Starbucks down the street. Jan Shoemaker is a writer and teacher living in Okemos, Michigan. Her essays have appeared in The Sun, The Progressive Christian, The Other Side, Magical Blend, Fourth Genre, Karamu, The Redwood Coast Review, Driftwood, Passages North and Steam Ticket.
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