John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

“BRAT-el-burrow,” May enunciated with near perfection.

“Definitely not an Injun name!” Dot said, and the two old ladies cackled some more.

“There’s gotta be a pizza place in Brattleboro, don’tcha think?” May asked her friend.

“Let’s have a look,” Dot said. She took the second Brattleboro exit, which brought her onto Main Street.

“The Book Cellar,” May read out loud, as they drove slowly past the bookstore on their right.

When they got to the next traffic light, and the steep part of the hill, they could see the marquee for the Latchis Theatre. A couple of the previous year’s movies were playing-a Sylvester Stallone double feature, Rocky III and First Blood .

“I saw those movies,” Dot said proudly.

“You saw them with me,” May reminded her.

The two ladies were easily distracted by the movie marquee at the Latchis, and Dot was driving; Dot couldn’t drive and look at both sides of the street at the same time. If it hadn’t been for May, her hungry passenger and compulsive sign-reader, they might have missed seeing Avellino altogether. The Avellino word was a tough one for May; she stumbled over it but managed to say, “Italian cooking.”

“Where?” Dot asked; they had already driven past it.

“Back there. Park somewhere,” May told her friend. “It said ‘Italian’-I know it did.”

They ended up in the supermarket parking lot before Dot could gather her driving wits about her. “Now we’ll just have to hoof it,” she said to May.

Dot didn’t like to hoof it; she had a bunion that was killing her and caused her to limp, which made May recall Cookie’s limp, so that Cookie had been on the bad old broads’ minds lately. (Also, the Injun conversation in the car might have made them remember their long-ago time in Twisted River.)

“I would walk a mile for a pizza, or two,” May told her old friend.

“One of Cookie’s pizzas , anyway,” Dot said, and that did it.

“Oh, weren’t they good!” May exclaimed. They had waddled their way to the Latchis, on the wrong side of the street, and were nearly killed crossing Main Street in a haphazard fashion. (Maybe Milan was more forgiving to pedestrians than Brattleboro.) Both Dot and May gave the finger to the driver who’d almost hit them.

“What was it Cookie wanted to put in his pizza dough?” Dot asked May.

“Honey!” May said, and they both cackled. “But he changed his mind about it,” May remembered.

“I wonder what his secret ingredient was,” Dot said.

“Didn’t have one, maybe,” May replied, with a shrug. They had stopped in front of the big picture window at Avellino, where May struggled out loud to say the restaurant’s name.

“It sure sounds like real Italian,” Dot decided. The two women read the menu that was posted in the window. “Two different pizzas,” Dot observed.

“I’m stickin’ to the pepperoni,” May told her friend. “You can die eatin’ wild mushrooms.”

“The thing about Cookie’s crust was that it was really thin, so you could eat a lot more pizza without gettin’ filled up,” Dot was remembering.

Inside, a family of four was finishing their meal-Dot and May could see that the two kids had ordered pizzas. There was a good-looking man, maybe fortyish, sitting alone at a table near the swinging doors to the kitchen. He was writing in a notebook-just a lined notebook of the kind students use. The old ladies didn’t recognize Danny, of course. He’d been twelve when they’d last seen him, and now he was a whole decade older than his father was when Dot and May had last seen the cook.

Danny had looked up when the old ladies came in, but he’d quickly turned his attention back to whatever he was writing. He might not even have remembered what Dot and May looked like in 1954; twenty-nine years later, Danny didn’t have the slightest idea who those bad old broads were.

“Just the two of you, ladies?” Celeste asked them. (It always amused Dot and May when anyone thought of them as “ladies.”)

They were given a table near the window, under the old black-and-white photograph of the long-ago logjam in Brattleboro. “They used to drive logs down the Connecticut,” Dot said to May.

“This must have been a mill town, in its day,” May remarked. “Sawmills, paper, maybe-textiles, too, I suppose.”

“There’s an insane asylum in this town, I hear,” Dot told her friend. When the waitress came to pour them water, Dot asked Celeste about it. “Is the loony bin still operatin’ here?”

“It’s called the retreat ,” Celeste explained.

“That’s a sneaky fuck of a name for it!” May said. She and Dot were cackling again when Celeste went to get them menus. (She’d forgotten to bring the old biddies menus when she brought them their water. Celeste was still distracted by the cook’s crying.)

A young couple came in, and Dot and May observed a younger waitress-Celeste’s daughter, Loretta-showing them to their table. When Celeste came back with the menus, Dot said, “We’ll both have the pepperoni pizza.” (She and May had already had a look at the menu in the window.)

“One each or one to share?” Celeste asked them. (Just looking at these two, Celeste knew the answer.)

“One each ,” May told her.

“Would you like a salad, or a first course?” Celeste asked the old ladies.

“Nope. I’m saving room for the apple pie,” May answered.

Dot said: “I imagine I’ll be havin’ the blueberry cobbler.”

They both ordered Cokes-“ real ones,” May emphasized to Celeste. For the drive ahead, not to mention the slew of children and grandchildren, Dot and May wanted all the caffeine and sugar they could get.

“I swear,” May said to Dot, “if my kids and grandkids keep havin’ more kids, you can check me into that so-called retreat.”

“I’ll come visit you,” her friend Dot told her. “If the pizza’s any good,” she added.

In the kitchen at Avellino, maybe the cook had heard the old ladies cackling. “Two pepperoni pizzas,” Celeste told him. “Two probable pie and cobbler customers.”

“Who are they?” the cook asked her; he wasn’t usually so curious. “A couple of locals?”

“A couple of bad old broads, if you ask me-locals or otherwise,” Celeste said.

It was almost time for the Red Sox game on the radio. Boston was playing at home, in Fenway Park, but Greg was listening to some sentimental crap called The Oldie-But-Goldie Hour on another station. The cook hadn’t really been paying attention, but the featured recording, from 1967, was Surrealistic Pillow- the old Jefferson Airplane album.

When Tony Angel recognized Grace Slick’s voice singing “Somebody to Love,” he spoke with uncharacteristic sharpness to his sous chef.

“Time for the game, Greg,” the cook said.

“Just lemme hear-” the sous chef started to say, but Tony abruptly switched stations. (Everyone had heard the impatience in his voice and seen the angry way he’d reached for the radio.)

All the cook could say for himself was: “I don’t like that song.”

With a shrug, Celeste said to them all: “Memories, I guess.”

Just one thin wall and two swinging doors away were two more old memories . Unfortunately, the cook would not get rid of Dot and May as easily as he’d cut off that song on the radio.

OUT ON THE CORALVILLE STRIP, WITHIN SIGHT OF MAO’S, there’d been a pizza place called The Greek’s; kalamata olives and feta cheese was the favorite topping. (As Danny’s dad had said at the time, “It isn’t bad, but it isn’t pizza.”) In downtown Iowa City was an imitation Irish pub called O’Rourke’s-pool tables, green beer every St. Patrick’s Day, bratwurst or meatball sandwiches. To Danny, O’Rourke’s was strictly a student hangout-an unconvincing copy of those Boston pubs south of the Haymarket, in the vicinity of Hanover Street. The oldest of these was the Union Oyster House, a clam bar and restaurant, which would one day be across the street from a Holocaust commemoration site, but there was also the Bell in Hand Tavern on the corner of Union and Marshall streets-a pub where the underage Daniel Baciagalupo had gotten drunk on beer with his older Saetta and Calogero cousins.