This story was inspired by a Suzanne Vega song, "Tom's Diner". It's one of those songs that just won't go away when it gets caught in your head. It's been stylized by many musicians as a cover tune, and there are some amazing versions out there, ranging from a hilarious satire of "I Dream of Genie" to a poignant report from the front lines of Desert Storm. Anyway, when I started the story a few years ago, I had the lofty aspiration of making all the sentences fit the rhythm of the song. Failing that, I tried to make all the dialog fit the tempo. Failing that, I decided that the song had already been covered enough by talents far greater than mine, and it was time to just let this piece be a story in its own right.

Tony's Diner

"Doo doo, doo dee, doo doo dooooo dee," the voice insists in her head.  "Doo dee  doo doo,  doo doo doooooo doo."  It floats through the air and sets a tempo to all of the motion around her.  The notes echo off the gray stone sky that she could still see through the arches, if she craned her head to look up and out.  But she doesn't look up.  She always looks down, because if she looks up, she knows Lonnie will see her.

"Hey, watch where you're goin', lady!" yells the boy who runs the shoeshine.

She has wandered into the train station and doesn't know where to go.  So many people!

"BOARDING NOW HERE AT THE STATION," boomed the box up in the corner.  "METROLINER TO NEW YORK, GET OUT NOW WHILE YOU CAN TONY."

She shakes her head to clear that.  Another blackout?  A handsome man with soft brown skin watches her thoughtfully.  She looks away.

"Do you need any help, madam?" he asks politely.  His accent is English, maybe.  Odd, that stress on the first syllable.  His eyes are deep and dark; he is donned in a fine suit and wears a turban.  A sand nigger, Tony hears Lonnie's voice snicker.  Talkin' like a fruit.  Her throat freezes in terror.  Maybe the man can hear Lonnie's voice.  Maybe he knows everything.  She wants to scream back at Lonnie, that the man is handsome and polite, that Lonnie should shut up, that he got what he deserved.  But she doesn't.  She's not quite that crazy yet.

"Going to New York," she mutters.  He nods.  "You can buy the tickets from the electronic ticket machine," he offers, turning to point at a machine hulking in the corner.  She looks at it fearfully.  These new conveniences scare her.  They are too smart. Who knows what the machine might do?

The man glances at her, still smiling.  "I can help you if you want."  Tony nods gratefully.  The man leads her confidently to the machine and makes a show of buying his own ticket first.  "To Baltimore," he explains delicately.  She senses he is comforting her somehow, pointing out that he will not follow her.  She breathes a sigh of relief and takes the crinkled 20s out of her pocket.  "Will you do mine?" she asks.  She hears the rust flaking off of her voice.  The man just smiles, takes her bills gently, and buys her ticket in a flash.  "You can go to your train now; I think they are boarding," he urges.  She thanks him, and he winks at her, inclines his head politely, and walks away.  She winces.  Lonnie used to wink at her.

Lonnie.  She shudders, remembering the pale flabby flesh, the potbelly, the scrawny arms, the dirty fingernails grinning grimy half-moons at her as they smugly raked her flesh.  His crooked teeth grinned at her too, happily bared, and it didn't matter if his teeth were dull and brown and couldn't really cut meat anymore.  There are other ways of biting, maybe, that hurt more.  He was gumming her to death over the years, with those soft teeth.  He was like an apple going all soft and brown.  Rotting.  That's what he was doing, he was rotting, him with his combed-over muddy brown hair and drooping mustache that matched his muddy brown eyes, his muddy brown breath, his muddy brown voice.  Mud devil.  You might not guess it from looking at his toothy grin.  You'd think, the devil's smart, and this guy ain't a full gumball machine. Lonnie wasn't smart; he was as dumb as a rock.  But all he ever wanted was to be smarter than her.  She guessed that made her even dumber.  Tell me again, ya stupid bitch.  Who's smarter?  That's right.  Say it again.  I just wanna hear you say it.  Say it now, goddamn it, say it!

Tony makes her way away from the machines, considering her next move.  She will be safer in New York City.  Where lots of people never look up.  Where the multitude of eyes are less likely to notice her.  She glances at her ticket.  Her benefactor was mistaken; her train doesn't leave for two hours.  Is it soon enough?

Two young men jostle in front of her, both in sweatshirts that say Washington Redskins, scuffling and laughing.  They stumble against her as the taller one punches the shorter playfully.  Tony can't help recoiling from the remembered fist. So many times.  Until he stopped, or she blacked out.  His fist seemed to follow her.

Even worse than the blows was the weight of knowing that she had made it happen again each time.  Of knowing that if she had only been smarter, sweeter, prettier, then Lonnie wouldn't get so mad.  And there were the excuses she had to make for him.  She had to, because it was really her fault.  It was an accident, Ma, you know.  Yeah, girlface, I know.  I told ya.  Ya ain't never gonna learn.  Ya ain't never been no scholar.  Why start now?  Jesus Christ!  Her mother wasn't the only one who knew.  Tony felt the accusations from every direction, no matter where she went.

It was that song that finally got her out.  She had never dreamt that there were people who didn't live like she did.  And then she heard this crazy song that some lady sang in a breathy voice about walking in the rain to a coffee shop and sitting there reading her paper and watching the people around her.  Sitting there all morning thinking about how the cook didn't give her enough coffee, and watching the people go by, and remembering some long lost love.

Tony never watched anything, because watching was dangerous.  Looking at things always got her into trouble.  So, she got very good at not looking at things.  Not looking Lonnie directly in the face.  Not looking up when people called you, because sometimes when you moved your head, the blinds in front of your eyes would fly open just for a second and they'd see in, and then they'd cause trouble.  Not looking anyone in the eye, because sometimes people could hit you with their eyes even if they never took a swing.  Sometimes, she thought, if she didn't have eyes, her life would be different.  There would be no pain, no blackouts.  So she tried to live like she didn't have them.  She didn't look.

She listened, though.  It was oh so important to listen.  If you were careful with your ears, you could hear Lonnie's voice start to slither into a coil before he lashed out, and maybe sometimes if you were really, really careful you could charm him out.  So she listened very carefully, to everything.

She found the song on some old disk someone had left by accident at the store.  She played it on Lonnie's newfangled machine, and she was transfixed.  She played it again and again, as often as she could.  It was the ultimate decadence, to let the rolling bass line carry her into a trance where she could see what she wanted to see.  She would listen to the song, and close her eyes, and she could feel the rain, and smell the grease.  She could taste the coffee, she could hear the sizzle of the grill and the dull hubbub of the customers talking.  She could see her mug in front of her beside the folded up comics, all old and stained.

Lonnie caught her once in this reverie.  He didn't like it.  Lonnie didn't like anything, and he was careful to let her know just how much he didn't like this, in particular.  He broke the CD into tiny little shards and he threw it at her, and she didn't look at him.  She closed her eyes and listened for the song somewhere in her brain as he shattered her dream.  She knew if she was patient, the song would come to her and the notes would carry her away.  To a place where all she had to worry about was that they didn't fill her coffee cup all the way and where she could just sit and watch the customers.

And miracle of miracles, the song did come.  It began to whisper in her head.  She smiled.

Lonnie saw the smile, and he hit her.  But that didn't stop the song.  She heard the sizzling of the grill as Lonnie's punch connected, and it was so real that she let her eyes drift from the floor to the counter to see if she needed to turn the burner off.  Instead she saw the heavy pans, the knives just within reach.  She smiled, and Lonnie hit her again, driving her backwards, as if he were helping her.  Tony fell back, and then she had her hands out, and something fell into her hands, and the song still came.  She heard Lonnie screaming and thrashing and somewhere through it all between the notes she heard a deep laugh that she had never heard before.  And then it was quiet, so quiet.  Except for the song that still lilted tenderly through her mind.  Taking her to a place where she could watch harried commuters looking at themselves in the window and she could sit and dream about some lost love.

Tony didn't have any long lost loves.  Lonnie had been her first, her only.  She had always been his, and he controlled every bit of her.  He had relished that.  He made sure everyone else knew it, damn good.  It was his constant refrain to her.  Even when he was snapping her magic disk in half.  I didn't tell ya you could listen to this shit.  What the fuck is this?  You'll do what I say, goddamn you.  And now she was surely damned.  What would she do now?

Tony watches the travelers filtering through the clean alabaster cavern of Union Station all around her, trying to remember how she got here and listening in her brain for the song that would make sense of it all.  A half mug of coffee in a foreign world.  She feels like a mug.  An old yellow mug with spreading brown stains like Lonnie's blood around the handles, and a chip here and there.  Dirty, no matter how much you washed it.  That's how she was.

Tony blacks out.  When she comes to, she realizes she is sitting in a bright, cheery café, a deserted islet in the station's mall.  She sits dizzily at the counter, trembling and trying to remember how she got there.  That man, that lovely mysterious dark man.  Hadn’t he followed her after all?  Hadn’t he taken her arm and led her here?

"Hey, whatcha have?"  A voice pokes rudely at her.  She shrinks down.   The voice notices.  "Relax, honey.  It's all the same to me.  You just yell when you know what you want."

It feels like she is lifting forty thousand pounds. Her eyes smart; her neck muscles seize in protest. She slowly looks up.  Only far enough to see the mouth that the voice came from.  It is caked in bright pink, and it's moving rapidly even though the voice for the moment is quiet.  The movement nearly makes her nauseous, but now she can't look away.  The mouth pouts back at her as it works over a piece of badly abused gum.

"Coffee?"  Tony whispers.

"Cream and sugar?" the mouth counters.

"Uh…."

"I'll bring 'em, and you can decide if you want 'em after you've solved the latest Middle East crisis."  The mouth seems to find that enormously funny and it dances grotesquely in laughter.  It strikes Tony with disgust, and she flinches.  Lonnie's mouth twitched like that.  She shakes the memory off.

“You probably need this cup, sugar,” the mountainous waitress booms.  “Crawling in half-dead like that.”  Tony’s excellent ears easily detect the note of greedy anticipation in her voice.  Fishing for information.

“That man,” Tony mutters.  “The Arab who was with me. Where did he go?”

“A-rab?”  The waitress chuckles and shakes her head.  “Boy, don’t I get all the crackpots.”

“What?”  Tony whispers.  Lonnie’s teasing whispers and slithers through those words.

“You came in here all by yourself, honey.  Watched you buy that ticket, and I says to myself, ‘now, there, Margie, that there’s a gal in a world o’ hurt’”.  She bends over and blasts a Juicy Fruit-laden stage whisper into Tony’s ear.  “You got meds somewhere need takin’?”

Tony shrinks.  There is kindness in the woman’s voice, but her bigness is dangerous.  The waitress shrugs and sets a cup down in front of Tony with a “humph”.  Her very own private coffee, a full cup, steam dancing lazily from its lip.  Tony trembles in anticipation and regards the cup in awe.  Solid, smooth, no chips on its surface to betray its past.  Finally, wrapping her fingers cautiously around the handle, she raises the cup to her mouth as if in prayer, closes her eyes, and sips gingerly.  The coffee is smooth, bitter, and utterly delicious.  She shivers from its warmth, and smiles.  Everything is just right. 

When she puts the cup down, she finds the waitress appraising her coolly, hand on her hip.  The radio squawks in the background about a mechanic murdered by his wife in Loudoun County.  Tony stares back.  The waitress casually reaches out a finger and wipes Tony's cheek, then holds it up to her.  A tiny, crimson brown smear broods accusingly on the finger.  The waitress and Tony regard each other calmly.

"Where you from, honey?" the waitress asks smoothly.  Her eyes linger over the bruises on Tony's arm.  Tony slowly pulls her arm away out of sight.  She remains silent.

The waitress takes this in, nodding cryptically.  "Well, you're safe here, now," she concludes, and turns away.

Tony laughs, the same laugh she heard bubbling from her chest for the first time over Lonnie's dying screams.  She turns to the window with her cup and begins to watch the street.

© 2006 Melissa Cross.  All rights reserved.  No part of this piece may be reproduced without the express permission of the author.