Place butter in a large soup pot (at least 1 1/2 gallons) on a medium-high
burner. Add the sliced onions and caramelize them, stirring occasionally. This will take 20 minutes or so.

While waiting for the onions to caramelize:

Combine the veggie stock and the walnut butter with a hand whisk and set
aside. Place the rosemary, star anise and bay leaves into a piece of cheesecloth
and tie off. (If you dont have cheesecloth, dont sweat it. Just remember to
fish all that stuff out before you start serving the soup!)

Grate the cheese. (Drink some sherry … eat some cheddar.)

Let the onions get a deep caramel color and then add the shallot and celery
and cook for another minute. Add the sherry and stir vigorously. Once the
sherry has evaporated, add the apple cider and the veggie stock/nut butter
combo. Bring the soup to a simmer (just under a boil) and leave it there
for at least 1 1/2 hours, until it is reduced in volume by one-third. (Come on,
you can wait that long.)

When the soup is done cooking add the salt and pepper to taste.

Serve in a warm bowl with a crouton in each, and top with grated cheddar.

Celia herself breezes in every couple of days, always in the same gay, tropical-print visor, to take a $20 bill from the till and fix herself a double order of Chicken Adobo. Sometimes her children call, and she hustles behind the counter to get the phone. After a minute her face is screwed tight with irritation.

“Hang off the phone!” she yells over and over into the receiver as they complain and fight. I wonder why she doesn’t just cut the line herself.

Usually, though, it’s just me in the dining room, our 16-year-old cook in the kitchen, and sometimes a dishwasher loitering out back.

“I’ll have the Bleu Burger” a customer says, as I hold my hand on the red vinyl back of their booth. I am steadying for another unhappy transaction.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “but we’re actually out of bleu cheese right now. I’m really sorry.”

“Oh, shoot,” he answers, “Meg, you order.”

Meg looks at the entree side of the menu, at the eternal, obsolete list of specials, and my hand cradling the order ticket seizes up.

“I’ll have the turkey special.”

I know that there is no turkey special. There is no special at all, ever. I excuse myself anyway, while the customers look over their menus at each other, in silent consultation. I walk back to the cook, playing flip-the-spatula, fixing himself the last strips of bacon, and try to think up the perfect consolation meal I can suggest that will keep them from leaving in a huff. I consider sneaking out back. Eventually it is my sense of duty that returns, and faces them. “Well, what do you have?” they ask.

The next time Celia comes in I tender, as always, a list of food we’ve run out of, or never had, which I’d appreciate if she could someday procure. Ice cream, for instance, or Coke — for those customers unwilling to change their soda preference, simply because it is overstocked — to Mr. Pibb.

I work here four afternoons a week, and it feels like an eternity.

The last time I was a waitress I was 9 or 10. My brother, two years older, began to invite over boys from across the street and next door, and they came in the evening to play cards, sprawling at our round dining room table. While they set up I stood in the kitchen, rigging together a makeshift apron. An apron, the kind of thing disdained by my mother, several years divorced and deep into her feminist grad-student days. I rushed up to the table after they were all seated, the breathless waitress overburdened with customers.

“Can I take your order?” I said, holding a piece of scratch paper and a stubby pencil on a copy of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” or “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” One by one they said what they wanted: Joel from across the street, with all the sisters, asked timidly; Douggie, the boy next door who had a doting mother, bellowed from his wheelchair, head lolled against the top of his shoulder. My brother, with princely nonchalance, nodded his round head in agreement.

“Water,” they ordered, and I scratched it down. “On the rocks.”

As essential to Celia’s as its haphazard management are the regulars I serve at the counter each day. They are from just down the street. They are all men, all coffee drinkers, drawn to our cafe for the bottomless refills, or perhaps for the anonymity — the barstools in back where their wives will never find them. A cloud of cigarette smoke blooms in their corner. There are men who stare into nothing, men who occasionally talk to each other, newspaper readers and gregarious men, who seek any line of conversation.

“I’m just a sassy guy, aren’t I?” the bald man asks me, each word stretched slowly out as if he is set on the wrong speed.

“Bless us oh Lord for these thy gifts … ” the guy who went to my Catholic grade school, 25 years before me, intones into his cream of broccoli. After he says grace he follows me with his eyes as I walk back and forth to the cash register in front of him, aroused, I imagine, for a brief moment with the laziest tail end of lust. He soon slips back into the haze.

I am in a haze, too — of pleasantness. I answer their questions. I refill their coffee when they call me over, and even when they don’t.

Some days Bill comes in to Celia’s to see me. I met him in a class at the local university when I was home the summer before. For those first months I thought he was beautiful. His skin was golden and smooth, and his hands — What hands! — were bigger than they should have been, as skillful and strong as paws. I wanted to be with him all the time. He was the first boyfriend since high school I felt that carnal about, and I liked it, the way sexual hunger, like an appetite for food, finally was something certain I could steer by, there to be indulged or overcome.

When I was a kid, my mom had given me a book on my astrological sign, and I’d studied it closely. A female Libra, it reported, was “a delicate flower.” I’d pictured myself this way, easily blown around, nervous and fragile. It had also said I was indecisive, and again I’d known that’s how it was, me dickering until fate stepped in.

This new craving was definite; seemed lucky for me, born under such fragile stars.

Only this year I’m not sure how I feel.

At Celia’s I maintain the facade that we are a working establishment. I send the dishwasher out with money from the till to replace the dressing, corrupt in the broken prep cooler; I return to our young cook the orders that look especially dire; I pluck the listless tomatoes from the tops of dinner salads before delivering them to my few tables.

One night I plan to write a story called “The Law of Inertia.” “My life — how much duller will it become?” I write in my journal.

There is one other regular in the restaurant, who takes a seat of his own at a table in the center of the dining room, set for 5 and rarely taken. He is usually surrounded by a sea of empty booths. I am told he has Alzheimer’s, and he stares blankly at me when I ask for his order. He is small, hunched in on himself like someone conserving energy. His round head is adorned with only a few wisps of hair, and his face looks as soft and mutable as a child’s. I feel sympathy for him, even while my patience ticks irritably away. Was he once a strong man, I wonder, thick-haired and decisive? He has such a hard time remembering what he wants, and, when he does, getting it out.

“I-I’d like” he stutters, looking up at me with startled eyes, and with his mouth slightly open, as if waiting for the end of his sentence to emerge. “I-I’d like.” It is always the same thing, coffee and a cookie, and it seems so sadly un-nourishing that I always wait for him to say it, hoping that perhaps he’ll change his mind, forget, even, and try something better. “A-a-coffee?” he finally warbles. “A-a-nd a cookie.” He looks at me blankly again when I bring him what he’s ordered, as if I could give him anything, and he’d accept it. Later, when I deliver the bill, he just opens his wallet, and I count out the change and pennies myself.

I don’t know why Celia is so casual about letting her restaurant go under. Sometimes I detect a trace of shame beneath her usually inscrutable, slot-playing expression, as if she is seeing the place for a minute through my eyes. Then she goes on cheerfully out the door, tilting her head up to look from under the visor at me, and promises to bring my paycheck tomorrow.

Eventually even the local, occasional customers see through my thin scrim, its upbeat picture, to the disorganized props behind: the dishwasher lopes through the dining room dangling a Safeway bag from his fingers, Celia enters and yells into the phone, George at the counter nods off to sleep. Then no one comes. Only the hapless tourist from New York or Cleveland, in search of something without sun-dried tomatoes, might give us a try.

“I’ll have a cheeseburger”

“Sorry, we’re out of cheese right now, but what about one of the other burgers?”

“Can I get a Coke?”

“Would you settle for Mr. Pibb?”

Later I clean the table and find nothing, or sometimes, when they feel sorry for me, a crumpled dollar for my elaborate efforts.

And still I stay on.

As the customers at Celia’s, that sinking ship, bail one by one over the course of the summer, the counter men hold fast to their nailed-down bar stools, gray soot from the cigarettes they never put down scattered around the black plastic ashtrays before them like ancestral dust. Their hands tremble as they lift the cheap coffee to their lips. “Bless us oh Lord,” they say, and “how ’bout a warmup?” “I-I-want …” hangs in the air.

I go to the park for an astronomy class, to count one night’s shooting stars. Bill agrees to come with me. That evening we walk from my house down to the park where I spent half my childhood. I’d thwacked tennis balls around with all sorts of friends, but mostly I’d roamed a lonely thatch of trees and shrubbery by myself, lost in my vague dreams. Where we walk now is dense with trees, but for one open field that slopes downhill, where we spread out a blanket and lie back to stare at the sky. Bill falls asleep quickly and I stay up, keeping a bored watch. After a while I look over at him, gawk, really, at his pretty, sleeping face. I look at the sloping planes of his cheekbones, at his white eyelids and the tendons in his neck, taut as bowstrings. Why not touch him? I wonder. But I don’t dare do a thing. I lie back and the stars are shooting now. I make hatch marks in my astronomy notebook, keeping track.

Only this to add: how I looked then. Pleated skirt, long hair, indirect gaze. My arms folded before me protectively. A few too many curves, I thought, and I wore black.

A new guy sits at the counter one day, younger than the rest but just as hopeless, an old-fashioned salesman in search of a job. He is small, dressed in a dark suit and a thin shirt, partially unbuttoned. He looks perhaps 34. He is silent for awhile, then talks aloud with himself about the price of a lunch plate, the possibility of economizing with a dinner salad. (I want to say: don’t waste time choosing, guy. There is no lunch plate. There is no dinner salad. I wipe a spot on the counter instead.) He orders soup, then peppers me with stories of his endless search for work.

He speaks in staccato, nasal bursts. “It’s a crazy job. It’s crazy!” he says. “You go in, you gotta say to people, ‘Hey, you wanna buy an alarm? There’s been a lotta crime lately.’ Then, you know what they do? Then they say, ‘Fuck you,’ and then you gotta say, ‘Fuck you’ back, and go to someone else and say the same thing.” He looks down into his bowl, waving the empty cellophane of a saltines packet above him to indicate the hopelessness of other people.

After he leaves I sweep into my hand his tiny tip, a small mound of change hardly worth pocketing. He comes back and talks to me, and drops off change, for three successive days. I begin to invent tables that need cleaning and salt shakers to fill, in order to stay out from behind the counter.

One afternoon, moments after I bid him a relieved goodbye, he calls. “I’m at a pay phone down the street,” he announces. Then he asks me on a date. I say no; I don’t even waver. I hold his quarter tip in the palm of my hand, in awe of his bravado; relieved, a little, at my own. “How can he have thought …?” I marvel. I am disgusted, but impressed, too, with the way he’s called for me, and expected me to come.

It is almost the end of the summer. I am taking a class in Medieval literature, and I begin to do my homework in a booth near the kitchen, glancing up occasionally from “The Age of Bede” or “Beowulf” to survey the empty tables and the static backs of the men lined up along the counter. The coffee pot perks away, filling the back of the restaurant with a stale smell. Outside I see people wandering in the sunlight on our busy, commercial street, and sometimes they look in the window. They take in the empty booths and me, traveling with monks on “The Voyage of Saint Brendan,” then move quickly along to a place with some hope.

I’m in retreat right now, but there’s hope for me, too.

Sure, I’m 21 and still uncertain, so Libran I believe my own astrological fate, to be delicate as a flower, blown by every strong wind. But at least I have begun to ask, What do I want? Sometimes some soft answer of my own rises up inside me and I can speak for myself and say just what it is. Sometimes I slip. I open my mouth and someone else has to count it out for me, decide my change.

“Water on the rocks!” I hear Douggie howling, pressing his double-jointed fingers down on the oak table until all the pink has left them. “Water on the rocks!” The others join in, laughing hysterically, hammering their fists on the table. “Water on the rocks! Water on the rocks!” and finally I’m wondering, is this really it? I just need to come out again from the kitchen, to refill their glasses with my pitcher?

We go over the edge and for a moment, before I can fight the momentum, I am excited and not quite sure I will make it, moving fast over fat powder I’ve always known was there, way up on top. Soon enough, though, on our steep slope, I am able to make things fine again. I move slowly. Everything glistens in this high altitude light. I can see far, across to other mountains and wisps of hovering cloud. It smells like the inside of an ice machine. Where the hillside is especially steep, terraced grooves have been cut by other skiers and boarders, and as I ride I can drag my bulbous mitten across the snow above me, which blows out from beneath my hand like flour. There are faraway sounds of people calling to each other, and then up close the Styrofoam creak of flakes packing down under a skier’s weight; the rasp of their humid, gusty breath.

My companions, with my blessing, move far ahead of me, and eventually I am on my own. Occasionally I try to point straight down, but each time an achy panic grips my chest and I pull back. I am horrified at the sight of the mountain falling away beneath me, at the dark woods on each side, and especially at the young girl halfway down the slope, yelping weakly while Ski Patrol aides fit her limbs to a rescue stretcher.

After what seems like a long time the way opens out onto a wide hill, with the lodge at its base. As I get closer there are small ridges in the icy snow, and my board slips out from underneath me. My head cracks against the ground, my arms fling out involuntarily from my sides, crucifix-style, and I picture myself in traction for a sport I’m only just starting to like.

I find my friends, and we break for lunch. I am dizzy from my fall, and a little dismayed, but I perk up in the company of these goofy men and a riot of food. Their friend, a former ski instructor, opens a big container of cold pasta, the eco-Japanophile has brought recycled yogurt containers full of cut-up vegetables. I bury myself in a giant sandwich, gnaw my way through a plate of spiced curly fries. When they ask me if I’m having fun, I agree that yes, I’m loving the day, the sun, the nest of fries and those great dunes of snow at the top of the mountain. The ski instructor, broad-shouldered and handsome, goes so far as to point out what good he saw: “You were cruisin’ down that one hill!” he says. “Did you feel how fast you were going?” I want to agree with him, but I know I’ve been a coward.

The most important thing in boarding is the turns. Turn-taking is the
meat, the barbecued tofu of boarding; it is what you go up to the top of the
mountain to do. Only 14-year-olds in the snowboard park executing outrageous
jumps and spinning like maple propellers just to see how it feels aren’t
focused on turning, or “carving.”

To take turns you must, as with skiing, sometimes allow your equipment to
point straight down the mountain. Since your feet are strapped on
perpendicular to the board’s length, they then point across the incline. You
hold your knees and arms soft and turn your head to look over your leading
shoulder downhill toward where you’re going. You should not lean back when
you do this, chin tucked into your neck like the dentist is coming at you
with the vibrating plaque remover tool. You should stay upright and loose as
a hula dancer, lean forward, even, for more momentum. Then, tilting back and
forth on the edges of this board, enjoy going 35 miles an hour without a
single pole or pillow or flotation device to stop you.

A couple of techniques have been created by boarders to get them out of
tight situations. The “Fakey,” for instance. When going down a chute of snow
between trees barely wider than the length of your snowboard, say, you can
learn to crisscross forward and back across the tiny space staying only on
one edge, not turning, keeping things slow and safe until you reach more open
terrain. Another technique, which I have christened the “Slippy,” involves
scooting downhill on the back edge of your board while facing forward and,
again, not turning — a method as exciting and glamorous as life lived on a
recumbent bicycle.

I lean back, tucking the last fry into my mouth, and consider the morning.
On my trip down I’d been fakeying and slippying and occasionally making a
wide turn when I was sure the slope was gentle. The other boarder I’m with
has already gotten better than me, and it’s easy to see why. By lunch time he
had wiped out at least 14 times. After each fall he’d looked back up the hill
toward me from the ground with the face of someone trampled by bulls, but it
hadn’t stopped him from taking the chance again and again, and pretty soon he
wasn’t falling so much. An amateur surfer, he is willing to wipe out, to
suffer bruises and look like a fool.

I had taken my first real snowboarding trip last year with a guy who was
trying to woo me, a quintessentially Northwestern guy, tall as a spruce and
as Type A as Buddha. He moves over the snow like he’s part of it, like a wave
over water. That particular Saturday was icy, and the bunny hill was thick with snowboarders new to the sport, teetering all over the mountain like Ice
Capades Bambis. We went up the short lift and down the hill over and over,
and I fell until the vibrations from landing on packed snow had traveled up
my spine and reshaped my brain. We stopped for lunch, parking ourselves at
his suggestion on a mound of snow at the top of the lift. There we faced the
spot where skiers and boarders are dumped from the chair onto a hill formed
too steep by some snow-grooming sadist. We pulled our high-piled sandwiches
from the sweaty pockets of our parkas and viewed the carnage, like
spectators in the Colosseum.

One after another they descended. One after another people jumped off too
late and collapsed, or too early and were bumped by the chair. Much of the
time, people who had come to the mountain to learn to ski together in some
misguided attempt at fun and games got off the lift and groped desperately at
each other when they knew they were about to fall, like people in the process
of drowning. The lift operator shut the machinery down for a minute each time
while they dragged themselves off to the side. I felt guilty witnessing this,
yet curiously relieved.

Now, I realize, those first, head-knocking days were my most daring.

We ride up again.

And on my way down, again, I am too cautious. By the time I reach
bottom the other new boarder has been waiting several minutes, quizzically
observing my descent. “You were fakeying the whole way!” he cheerfully
comments when I arrive. My heart, too, slips out from under me. NO EASY WAY,
I think.

The next time I ride to the top alone, and once there I slippy, and
fakey, until I feel like I’m at Six Flags and it’s my 18th time on the
kiddie coaster.

I force myself to make one turn on a more gentle slope, and it
works, and before I can look down the hill and seize up I make another turn
back again and it works! And I turn and turn and determine not to look ahead.
I move back and forth like a maniacal sewing machine, stitching my path — I am
Alberto Tomba! I am Picabo Street! — and I execute one last lovely turn before
I discover, head dragging on snow, that I have gone over the steep lip of the
universe. I come to a stop beneath a lift full of people on their way to the
top. Their skis dangle above me, and their gloved hands cup the center poles
of their chairs lightly as they peer over the side to see if I have survived.
They quietly analyze my failure among themselves, gliding by. I scoop a small
white shelf from the side of the hill and think maybe I’ll sit on it forever
in these snowboarding overalls that belong on someone else, my feet eternally
attached to this board, my albatross.

I look at my hands and huff. I squint across to the next mountain and sigh.
I pull my hat farther down around my ears. I’d like to cry. I’m disgusted
that I still can’t turn when it’s steep, point downward, let go. I’m strong.
I can protect myself. I can do this for hours.

I look down the hill at boys half my age, their boards afterthoughts on
their feet. I think of friends who brought me up here, boarding junkies
confident where I am terrified, graceful where I am awkward. Who bear bruises
up and down their thighs and skinny asses from every trip, proof that they
have taken chances, proof they have fallen and gotten up.

I will never be good at this.

How do I hate myself for being bad at something as trivial as snowboarding?
I see now, too clearly, how I cling to the easy route, how I am petrified of
being outside safety, of heading straight down. Straight into the abyss. I am
afraid of making the first move. I am afraid of hurting people. I am afraid
to let out the things that clatter in my head. I am lazy. I wait.

Sitting on this mountain in the anodyne sunshine of March, it is
as if I inhabit a carefree place — some Swiss village — and the world is mine.
Except for a dark past that I know will catch up with me.

I begin to think of the people I respect — people I’ve known and those I haven’t, who couldn’t do this. I don’t think my old writing teacher would
have managed it, or that Virginia Woolf, however experimental and wild in her
art, would have taken to such a diversion. I have heard that Einstein
surprised an interviewer by being well-built and vigorous, and I will admit
the possibility that Einstein might, yes, possibly have done this.

To the top once more.

I ride up the first leg with a large man in a bandanna who looks like a bear
just emerged from hibernation. He doesn’t speak to me, and his bulk sags the
chair at an angle so that the whole mountain seems to tilt. I look out over
my side of the hill and wonder about the bad names of most ski lifts, like
cut-rate carnival rides: “Debbie’s Gold,” “I-5,” “Edelweiss,” runs named
after long-gone girlfriends, freeways, mythical European vistas. I watch boys
one-third my age fall down and ring “Fuck! Fuck!” across the mountainside,
already pissed off at the possibility of failing.

I ride up the second chair with a large, jovial man who asks what I
do, and when I say I write, he asks what I write, and when I answer he asks
what I do with that writing, and the questions continue until I think maybe I
am not too afraid to just scoot forward and let go into the mound of snow
falling away so many feet beneath me. His ski pole keeps touching my thigh
and each time it does I turn to look at him, hoping it is his hand touching
me so I’ll have an excuse to scream. When we are about to stand up from the
chair he jostles me, and being a boarder I have no ski pole to hook him into
my flailing dismount. I tumble gently to a stop, as always, alone in this
mess.