Slice of American

Like all stories, this one may or may not be true.

(For my brother…)

We stopped at McDonald’s by the highway. Dad was driving the big yellow station wagon with the side panels that looked like wood. I rode shotgun so I could control the radio after he finished listening to the game. I liked the game too but not as much as Electric Light Orchestra.

The air-conditioner was cranked, blasting a cold mist toward the back seat so we wouldn’t have to breathe Mom’s cigarette smoke. She was back there with Mom Mom.

Mom Mom was Dad’s mom. Twelve years ago, she had a stroke. She was mean and miserly before it, kind and funny after. It changed her brain and body. It changed everything. Now she had to use a walker, which I’d folded and loaded into the back of the station wagon with our luggage. We were going to my brother’s graduation.

At the McDonald’s drive-thru, there was trouble right away. The speaker wasn’t working right. It crackled and hissed like there was a short in the electrical system. Probably the voice coil overheated. That’s what happened to one of the stereo speakers I got for my birthday.

“Can I take your order?” asked a worker, his voice scratching through the speaker.

Unless he’s the one making it, Dad’s pretty sensitive about noise. The speaker startled him, and he spilled his coffee. This happens a lot when he drives, because he refuses to use a lid. He’s very specific about that. He says there’s a right way to drink coffee, and it doesn’t involve a lid. And yet it doesn’t work for him. He spills the coffee. But he won’t change.

It wouldn’t matter if he didn’t throw a fit and make it everyone else’s problem. Tantrums and cussing, two things my dad does with expertise. It’s embarrassing in public but sometimes funny, depending on the situation. A lot of it has to do with depth and degree, which is hard to gauge. You don’t always want him to know you’re laughing at him.

“Hello?” said the worker.

“God damn it!” said Dad, fumbling his coffee mug.

“Danny!” said my mother.

It just so happens that the only two people in the world who call him Danny were sitting in the back seat. Mom’s the only person brave enough to tell my father to use a lid when he drinks coffee in the car. He just grumbles. He does that a lot too. He grunts and growls more than he uses actual words.

“That damned speaker made me spill my coffee,” he said.

Mom sighed. “Danny, it didn’t make you spill it.”

“The hell it didn’t!”

“Hello?” said the worker.

“I’m here,” said my dad. “Just a minute.”

The speaker screeched. The worker said something through the noise, but we couldn’t make it out. The speaker was getting worse.

“Damn it,” said Dad, “what’d he say?”

“He’s ready when you are,” I said.

Dad poked his head out of the car and yelled. “I want three hamburgers!”

A few seconds passed before the worker responded. The speaker crackled and hissed. “Can you repeat that?” he said.

“Three hamburgers!” said Dad.

“Three?”

“Three!”
“You want cheese on those?”
“No,” said Dad. “That’s why I said hamburgers.”

There was no response. It was strangely quiet. I thought maybe the speaker had died.

While he waited, Dad dabbed coffee out of his pants. He did this with a white handkerchief that was so old it was yellow. Disgusting. I couldn’t look at it.

There were several cars behind us. Cars as far as the eye could see. The line curved around the building.

“Hello?” said Dad.

“Anything else?” said the worker.

“Did you get that?” Dad said. “Hamburgers. Nothing on them.”
The speaker was silent again. The silence was deafening.

Dad was getting worked up. Everyone could feel it. This was just the kind of situation that got his blood boiling.

“Damn it,” he said. “Are you there?”
“Danny!” said Mom. “Language.”
“Oh, hell,” said Dad.

The speaker crackled. “Our hamburgers come with everything on them,” said the worker. “Ketchup and mustard, tomato, onion and lettuce.”
“I don’t want all that,” said Dad.

The worker didn’t respond. We couldn’t tell if he didn’t know what to do or the equipment wasn’t working.

“Did you hear me?” Dad said. “Nothing on them. No ketchup, no mustard. Nothing.”
This request was met with more silence. Now everyone was feeling uncomfortable. Dad shifted in his seat and pulled himself up closer to the speaker, his ribs pressing against the door. “Hello!” he yelled. “Did you get that?”
“Yes,” said the worker. “Is that all?”

Dad laughed. “God no,” he said. “I wish.”

He looked at me. “What do you want?”

I gave him my order. Quarter-pounder, French fries and a Coke. I knew their burgers came with everything on them and I accepted it. How hard is it to remove what you don’t want? Not very. Personally, I couldn’t understand anyone who liked pickles on burgers. But they were easy to take off. I didn’t like mustard either, but I accepted it. Sometimes I tried to scrape it off or put more ketchup on there to kill the sour taste.

Dad gave the worker my order. There was no reply, no confirmation he’d heard him. Dad dropped his head. The whole world was against him now. You could tell what he was thinking.
He sighed and asked my mom what he should do. He wasn’t serious. It was just his way of expressing how absurd everything was. That’s what he did, complained to my mom about how absurd the world was.

“Try to be patient,” said Mom.

Dad laughed. Because the question was rhetorical, he wasn’t interested in her answer, especially that one. He leaned back toward the speaker. “Did you get all that?” he said.

The speaker returned to life. Somehow, it seemed louder.

“Quarter-pounder,” said the worker.

“Right,” said my father. “With fries and a Coke.”
“That’ll be eight dollars and forty-three cents,” said the worker.

“Wait!” said Dad. “We got two more orders.”

The speaker crackled and popped.

“Damn it,” said Dad, “there’s something wrong with this thing.”

“Will there be anything else?” said the worker.

Mom said she wanted a cheeseburger and Coke. Mom Mom asked for coffee and a hot apple pie.

“That’s all?” Dad said to Mom Mom.
“That’s all,” said Mom Mom.

Dad leaned toward the speaker again and relayed the order. Before he finished, the speaker lit up, crackling and snapping like a row of Black Cats. The worker started to say something but then it went silent. Finally, after a few seconds of waiting on both ends, my dad and the worker spoke at the same time. They each stopped and waited for the other, and then they spoke again at the same time.

“God damn it!” said Dad.

My mom got tickled. She and Mom Mom were laughing. My grandmother’s high-pitched titter filled the car. It was pretty funny, how my dad and this kid couldn’t get it together, but I didn’t laugh. I wasn’t as brave as them. And I was sitting closer to him.

Finally, the worker broke through. “Will that be all?”

This time, oddly, the speaker didn’t make any noise. It was like someone fixed the electrical short. The worker’s voice came through loud and clear.

“Hey, you fixed it,” said Dad.

“What was that?” said the worker.

“Nothing.”

“Will there be anything else?”

“No,” Dad said. “Thank god.”

“Okay,” said the worker, “let me repeat this back to you.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” said my dad.

The worker ignored him and repeated the order, some of which we couldn’t hear because the speaker started acting up again, back to screeching and crackling and cutting out. Now it was worse because the worker was distracted. While he was talking to us, we could someone inside the restaurant talking to him.

“Yeah, sure,” said my dad, “that’s fine.”

When he said this, I know Mom and Mom Mom thought the same thing I was thinking: But what if it’s not? What’s going to happen then? Things would not be fine. But it wasn’t worth going over it again. We decided the misery of hearing the worker repeat the order again and again through the scratchy speaker would not be as bad as listening to my dad complain later if the order was wrong.

Behind us, a car honked. It wasn’t more than a toot, but still. Without turning my head, I look at my dad. He glared into the rearview mirror. The pinch of his brow said it all: That little toot better not be directed at me.

Finally, after another long wait, the worker came back on the speaker and said we could pull forward. “Thank you, Jesus,” said my dad, yanking the gear shift into drive.

As we rolled forward, Dad asked Mom for money. She dug cash out of her purse and handed him several bills. He reacted with surprise when he saw how much she gave him.

A girl came to the window. She was ready to take the money. She had a strong Southern accent, which of course Mom had to point out because she’d grown up in the great cosmopolitan center of Kansas City. She claimed she couldn’t get used to the way people talked down here, though we’d been living in Arkansas my whole life.

The girl took the money and said it would be just a minute. Dad rolled up the window. We sat there in the stale air, the dashboard fan clattering. It smelled sour in the car from Mom’s cigarettes.

“Damn it, Jill,” Dad said, “crack that window.”

“I hope we make it to the graduation on time,” said Mom Mom.

Dad puffed. That was unacceptable.

The drive-thru window whooshed open. It was a boy this time, maybe the one who’d taken our order. He didn’t say hello. He was busy, trying to do two things at once. When he shook loose from whoever was talking to him, he started handing bags to my dad. He gave Dad three bags in all. Then handed over our Cokes and Mom Mom’s coffee.

After giving Dad the change, he remained at the window, staring at my father as if he expected him to say something, to request condiments or napkins perhaps.

“Is that it?” said Dad.

“Yes, sir,” said the boy, and the window doors whooshed shut.

As the boy receding into the restaurant, disappearing altogether when his coworkers walked between him and the window, Dad lifted his foot off the brake and we rolled forward. We’d gone about ten feet, and he stopped in an area that was both drive-thru lane and parking lot. Here, a big farm truck honked at us, the driver possibly thinking Dad was going drift over in front of him.

Dad cursed and waved him through. “In a big hurry to get back to slopping his hogs,” he said.

He found a parking spot near the exit. After slamming the gearshift into park, Dad grabbed one of the bags from my lap and looked into it. He told Mom and me to go through the other two bags and make sure the order was right.

I reported the contents of my bag, and Mom did the same. Her bag contained his order. She handed it to him, Dad snatching it and spilling fries when the bag clipped the edge of the seat. This made him curse again, but he had no one to blame but himself.

He gathered up the spilled fries and tossed them back into the bag. Then he dug inside and found one of his hamburgers. He set it on his lap and unwrapped the paper.

Lifting the bun, he said, “Well, I’ll be god damned.”

“What, Danny?” said my mother.

“They got it wrong,” said Dad. “I knew they would. They put ketchup and mustard on it. And will you look at that. There’s a god-damned pickle on there.”

“You’re so dramatic,” said Mom. “Just take it off.”

“How am I supposed to take off mustard and ketchup?”

“I don’t know, Danny. Just scrape it off.”

Dad took out the next hamburger and investigated. This one also wasn’t right. He sighed. The whole world was against him.

“Danny,” Mom said, “you can’t expect them to get everything right.”
“Why the hell not?” said Dad.

“They’re just kids. They’re not going to give it the attention you expect.”
“What does that mean? I ordered it and paid for it. I expect to get what I ordered. It shouldn’t matter who they are.”
“They don’t do it like that here,” said Mom. “It’s fast food. This isn’t Town Topic.”

Town Topic was Dad’s favorite burger joint in Kansas City, a lunch counter on Broadway between downtown and The Plaza. The beef was fresh, right up from the stockyards. He’d worked there when he was in high school.

Situations like this always turned into self-fulfilling prophecies, my dad’s attitude determining the outcome regardless of the particulars. He would have stayed mad even if the third hamburger was perfect. But, of course, it wasn’t. In fact, this one had cheese on it, a slice of American, the corners melted over the edge of the patty.

His realization of this coincided with yet another car honking, not at us – rather, the driver was trying to get the attention of someone coming out of the restaurant – but it sounded like it. Dad’s nerves were zinging like the tiny vibrations of a tuning fork. All he needed was something or someone to set him off, and the person behind the wheel of the honking car unwittingly obliged.

Dad whipped around. His eyes were wild, like he expected a bird to come flying through car. “Who’s he honking at?”

“I think it’s that woman over there,” I said.

“That’s not what a car horn’s for.”
Never mind that he’d used a car horn hundreds of times to get the attention of my brother and me.

Dad turned back to his food, the cheeseburger that was supposed to be a hamburger. It was lying there on the seat between us, getting cold, looking sad and barely edible.

He peeled back the bun again, as if he didn’t believe what he’d seen before. But there was no self-fulfilling prophecy here, no way to will it into something it wasn’t or something he wanted. The cheese was still there, weirdly synthetic-looking, making the burger even more unappealing.

He muttered while rocking sideways and then slapping the dashboard. For a second, he appeared lost, not knowing what to do next but hell-bent on doing something.

Self-fulfilling prophecy or not, this situation had to be corrected, preferably with a grand gesture. He looked down at the cheeseburger. He kept looking at it but nothing changed. The cheese wasn’t going away. Nor was the mustard and ketchup and pickle. It was too much. Something had to be done.

I sat there and watched him do it. He made a fist and lifted his arm up until his elbow touched the ceiling of the station wagon. With considerable force, then, he lowered his arm, and he punched the cheeseburger. I watched him do this. He hit it so hard the burger bounced straight up, like a child on a trampoline. Its paper unraveled as it took flight.

Time crawled. It was like a slow-motion sequence in an action movie, the burger and paper hovering over the seat in a kind of operatic drama, the paper flapping as gravity took over. The burger flipped once before dropping back to the seat. It landed where it had been, bouncing softly there and flipping over again, like a turtle caught in the backdraft of a semi.

Dad stared at it. The burger was smashed. He was still muttering, now making sounds like a person entering a psychotic seizure. I thought he was going to punch the burger again. He didn’t but, still, more needed to be done.

He whimpered, a sound I’d never heard him make, almost like he was going to weep. He grabbed the cheeseburger and squeezed it. He backhand-cocked his arm and acted like he was going to fling the burger out the passenger window. I ducked. When he realized the window was closed, he changed course. He turned to his right and slung the cheeseburger behind us.

It struck the seat between my mother and grandmother. A square shot. The bottom bun caught wind like a frisbee and flew into the way back, ricocheting off suitcases before landing on my dad’s case of beer.

Mom and Mom Mom were laughing.

What was left of the cheeseburger landed between them. The top bun was still there, the ketchup and mustard gluing it to the patty. The bun was intact, in decent shape, in fact, except for an anatomical mold of my father’s fist, including a deeper divot made by his quartz ring.

My mother picked up the burger and showed it to her mother-in-law. Mom Mom had to rear her head back to see it. When she did, she slapped her leg. “That boy’s crazy,” she said.

Mom took a picture of the imprint before oxygen seeped back into the bun and it unformed.

Later, after everything settled down and we headed off to watch my brother walk across the stage, I reached down into the bag Dad handed to me. There was one more hamburger in there. I took it out and unwrapped it. I didn’t tell him there was no cheese on it.