Shopgirl

breakfast

AT BREAKFAST, EARLY BECAUSE SHE has to get to work, Mirabelle becomes age seven. She sits, waiting to be served. Ray Porter gets the juice, makes the coffee, sets the plates, toasts the bread, and pours the cereal. He gets the paper. Mirabelle is so dependent, she could have used a nanny to hold open her mouth and spoon-feed her the oat bran. She speaks in one-word sentences, which requires Ray to fill the silences with innocuous queries, like an adult trying to break through to a disinterested teenager. In this snapshot of their morning is hidden the definition of their coming relationship, which Ray Porter will come to understand almost two years later.

“You like your breakfast?” Ray decides to try a topic that is in both their immediate vision.

“Yeah.”

“What do you usually have for breakfast?”

“A bagel.”

“Where do you get bagels?”

“There’s a shop around the corner from me.”

Total dead end. He starts over.

“You’re in great shape.”

“Yoga,” she says.

“I love your body,” he says.

“I have my mother’s rear end. Like two small basket-balls covered over in flesh, that’s what she said once, on a car trip.” She emits a little chuckle. Ray gets an odd look on his face, and Mirabelle reads him and she says the only funny thing of the morning:

“Don’t worry, she’s older than you are.”

He wants to reach over and slide his hand in between the opening in the robe that he has lent her. He wants to relive last night, to trace his hands over her breasts, to analyze and codify and confirm their exact beauty, but he doesn’t. This will take place on another night with dinner and wine and walking and talking, where the seduction is not assumed, and the outcome undetermined. His sexual motor is already whirring and purring for their next date.

Ray’s libido is exactly twenty-four hours ahead of his reason, and tomorrow at this time he will recollect that Mirabelle became quite helpless in the morning and wonder about it (his mind works slowly when it comes to women; he often does not know that he has been insulted, slighted, or manipulated until months or sometimes years later). But since he does not know what to expect from a woman – his four years of dating have not really educated him – he accepts Mirabelle’s morning behavior passively. Ray’s former experience has been with tough-minded, outgoing, vital, ambitious women, who, when displeased, attack. Mirabelle’s dull inertia draws him into a peaceful place, a calm female cushion of acceptance.

He drives Mirabelle home, just in time for her to get ready and be late for work.