For almost the entirety of the first two years of my higher education, I didn’t eat dinner.
Not because I minded dining hall food—I have the great luxury of being a gloriously unpicky eater—but because I was actively avoiding the rest of 3rd Veenstra with a near-religious zeal. It wasn’t fair to them, but one bad Pentecostal spoils the bunch, and I didn’t know how to act around them. They were nice and friendly and utterly unlike me.
On weekends I ate popcorn—sometimes with beef jerky, and then I would wait to feel the calcium leech from my bones. Or, in deference to cliché, made the kind of ramen that one does in college, in a hand-me-down hotpot on the counter of a shared bathroom. The kind that tastes a little like the memory of your suitemate’s shampoo.
Mondays through Thursdays, I would sneak down the stairs after dark and head to Johnny’s, where I’d load my coat pockets with a banana and an everything bagel, plus two of those little paper cups of cream cheese, stuck together and wrapped in a napkin. On days when I had good self control, I’d save the Dr. Pepper in the mini fridge overnight.
It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to interact with the floor; I also didn’t think I could go alone. I was bound by the idea that eating was a social experience and to do it alone in public was to be a loner, as if predatory animals would suddenly descend upon Knollcrest and start with the stragglers. You can only eat alone in public if you’re on your lunch break, or at McDonald’s, or a food critic in a movie.
Getting older, even just a couple years, makes it easier. It’s the caring less what people think, or it’s the realizing that most people don’t think much about you at all.
I still bring help. This month’s dinner date is an author who’s doing a virtual event at the library next month, and I’m overcompensating for the nerves by reading every book he’s ever written. There’s near forty of them, so who has time to take a lunch off?
But I do. I put down the book from time to time and let my eyes wander. I notice the other solo diners, a guy my age in a flannel shirt and aviator sunglasses (we’re on the porch, so it’s okay) and an old woman with a steely ponytail who takes her time with the pot of tea the server has left on her table. He’s using his phone like I use my book, and she mouths the numbers to herself when she calculates the tip.
I can imagine whole lives for them, but they’ll be far less accurate than those I can for the pair at the table next to me, who are a mother and daughter from out of town (but not too far out) with a reservation for a boat rental at 4:00 and who order three house salads, to go, at the end of their meal. When your most salient social relationship is with the server, you tend to give less of yourself away to eavesdroppers.
So I watch. And I listen, and I notice my posture and my mannerisms and I, still, can’t help wondering—just a little—what they’re thinking, seeing me there alone.
Probably nothing at all.
