Breakfast
ALANNA WILLMAN
The dining room windows let in light from the icy white world outside, casting thin shadows across a table and a woman sitting there, staring holes in the tablecloth in front of her—a bright yellow checkered pattern thick enough to hide the paint-stained and scratched table top that is older than she is. It has been there through all her school project disasters and mealtime gossip with friends, all her stern scoldings and sleepless nights so crowded with homework that that ghastly yellow was hardly visible. The struggle this morning isn’t homework or the latest drama with friends, but the daunting task of breakfast.
A plain white plate, her only plate, with no blemishes or decorations or chips sits before her on that perfectly smooth and equally horrid tablecloth. A toaster waffle is on the upper right corner of the plate, each catacomb of golden sugar hell meticulously filled with syrup so that not a one overflows into another. Next to it, but never touching, is a single piece of bacon leftover from the other breakfast goers this morning that left it to her so kindly. It’s wrinkled like the plants crowding the other end of the table, all withered in neglect and ugliness.
Along with the bacon and waffle she places a small tangerine right in the middle of her plate, unpeeled and daunting. She ignores it for the moment to shake the salt and pepper shaker twelve times over the single fried egg. Its freckled white surface sill lets off vapors and provides a clean canvas for the seasonings. The yolk, she hopes, is unbroken. Exactly six inches away from her plate is a half empty glass of fat free milk and six below that is a fork, knife, and spoon, though she never really needs the spoon, lined up on a crisp napkin. The alignment of the utensils is always the hardest. Do you line the top of them up, or the bottom?
Breakfast stares her in the face like a dog staring at a cat with a steak strapped to it. With the weight of the proverbial steak on her arms she reaches blued fingers to the knife and fork that clatter together with the rattling of her small bones. The weight of the fork has never seemed greater as it does in this moment. With the careful precision of a machine, her hands are as steady as they will ever be as she begins to cut the waffle into twelve pieces. After each piece is taken away from the whole, she compares them to make sure they’re the right size and shape as the last. She carefully herds the bacon away from the oncoming wave of syrup but not too close to the egg. Exactly how she likes it.
Then she faces the tangerine. She peels it slowly, savoring the fresh smell of citrus and the porous skin against her own, but that’s all there is to savor. The painstaking process of removing all the white, veiny fibers from the surface of each slice makes her nervous. She can’t miss a single one; she won’t miss a single one. Her perfectly smooth and fibreless tangerine slices are like little shards of broken stained glass on the tablecloth when she finishes, but still she picks at them for any imperfection. Breakfast must be perfect.
After an extra twenty minutes of picking and perfecting, breakfast seems complete. She has ten tangerines and twelve waffle slices, stacked by their tiny size difference. She has one egg and one bacon strip and forty-seven pepper flecks. Nothing on the plate touches. The aroma of breakfast is filling her nose and her stomach, and she knows it will be stained on the tablecloth tomorrow too.
She stands and takes her plate in hand, cup and silverware balanced in the other, and moves her freezing feet across the plastic tile floor to the kitchen just behind the dining room. Its green countertops shimmer with cleaning product under the fading and flickering lights. The ceiling paint crumbles from a peeling spot when she walks past the looming fridge, as if on cue for a dramatic scene. She steps on the polished but still plastic foot pedal of the trashcan and turns her breakfast plate over it, watching with a disgusted fascination as all her perfectly laid out food tumbles into a messy pile, so unorganized and out of her control in the bottom of the bin.
“My stomach isn’t feeling well,” she practices saying to herself, just in case someone bothers to look in the trashcan. “I couldn’t bring myself to eat breakfast because I’m not feeling well.” She turns the cup out and closes the lid over those clean tangerine slices. She can’t bear to see them now, covered in syrup and all jumbled together.
She waits in the kitchen, toes gripping the floor and knuckles white on the granite, hoping that this emptiness will go away. A void inside that makes her stumble back over to that dreadful dining room and look for answers. They’re not in the soil of those wretched plants that somehow jumped off the table onto the floor, or under the legs of any of the chairs. She leaves them tipped over onto the floor, just in case she missed something. Then she turns to it, the purveyor of disorder and discomfort in the room that makes her grind her teeth. She tears the tablecloth away from the table and wads it up in her arms, squeezing so tight she hoped she could just force it out of existence. But as the laws of physics and space are never on her side, she treks dirty brown footprints across the tiles back into the kitchen where she takes that bright, butter-yellow, putrid tablecloth and shoves it right into the trash.
She can feel the breakfast give way underneath, hear the sticky sounds of syrup-soaked waffles against fabric, and an immense pleasure overwhelms her. She smiles, and lets out a rough, coarse laugh as she forces the lid closed over the mess she’s made. Finally that yellow beacon is out of her life. She knows she’ll get in trouble when her mom gets home. She can see Mom’s red face now, her pointing finger and her disappointed looks, but she can also see that yellow tablecloth in the trash with all the rest of the useless things in her life, and she knows in this moment that it will be worth it.