Sushi Date
Short story | Memoir | 16 min read
A simple miscommunication about where to meet for dinner spirals into an hour of mounting dread for two siblings waiting on opposite sides of the same restaurant window. The narrator's mind races toward the worst possible explanations while his sister, paralyzed by her own anxieties, can't bring herself to check inside. Their eventual reunion in the rain becomes an unflinching conversation about fear, family patterns, and the strange comfort the two take in each other. Contains themes of death, anxiety. "I love you, my brother"
One time I lived in Philly with my sister. We lived on Watkins Street, in Pennsport, South Philadelphia—my sister Joanne and I.
We would walk from our house to South Street to go to restaurants. We were used to walking long distances in Philadelphia from our childhood, and I thought South Street was maybe five blocks from our house. I looked it up recently on a map though and South Street and Watkins Street are like 20 blocks apart. We walked it anyway. We used to take much longer walks than that in nice weather.
Usually we met at Bridget Foy's—one of the first restaurants where I got to explore quality bartending. Usually those nights we'd cab it home because I tended not to feel like walking when I was that drunk. Plus, once you've spent a hundred dollars on drinks, what's eight-fifty plus a two-dollar tip to zip on down to Watkins Street?
This night, though, we had planned to meet at a new sushi restaurant we had both seen and wanted to try. We did this occasionally. The time before it was a Moroccan restaurant that looked intriguing on the outside and amazing on the inside. Every surface covered with blankets. We sat on the floor. Ate with our fingers. Could not withhold laughter when belly dancers came out and danced right in front of us while we ate our food. It was a great experience but we never went back—too expensive, not filling, awkward though beautiful—the culinary equivalent of a one-night stand.
This night it was sushi. It was right across from Bridget Foy's and it was big and bright—a huge space for a restaurant in a city. We're both mad fans of sushi and at this point we've each tried so many sushi places around the country and the world that for pure sushi quality neither of us would probably ever go back there again, but we were new at the time and this place was a good next step along the journey.
I got there first. Went inside. Got a table. We had agreed to meet at a particular time and I just stayed at work late and rode the bus to city hall, then cabbed it to the sushi place. There was no one there. Two geisha-looking hostesses with the huge bows in the backs of their costumes fought over who would seat me—that's how new the restaurant was. I told them I was meeting someone. They asked if I wanted to wait at a table. I said yes.
The menu was huge. I wanted to try everything. But I didn't want to start without Joanne so I ordered only tea.
I drank six glasses.
The servers seemed concerned that I wasn't eating but I assured them my date would arrive soon and we would order lots of food and it would be great for everyone.
When 20 minutes went by, I felt annoyed.
When 35 minutes went by, I felt angry.
When 45 minutes went by, I felt worried.
At an hour, I was terrified. She was dead. Something horrible had happened. She had been pushed in front of a subway train. Robbed and killed. Beaten and raped. Mugged and taken to the hospital. I knew these events were statistically unlikely, but when someone is an hour late, something has happened. You don't know what it is—that's the part that's terrifying.
I called her phone.
"Joanne, hey, it's your brother. We were supposed to meet at seven at that new sushi place on South Street right across from Bridget Foy's. Remember? Anyway, I'm here, I hope you're ok, and I'm waiting. We said seven at the new sushi place, right? I don't even know what it's called. But I'm inside. And they have wonderful tea. I have to go to the bathroom. Bye."
And these Japanese teenagers keep bringing me tea after tea after tea even when I'm not asking for any and I finally have to ask them to stop bringing me tea and I assure them that:
"My sister will be here any minute!"
"Would you like to order?"
"No. Thank you. I have to wait for my sister."
Then I'd leave another message.
"Joanne, I hope you're ok. I just keep imagining..well..I guess I don't need to scare you with my paranoid fears but I am extremely worried because I haven't heard from you. Maybe I'm at the wrong restaurant. But please check your phone and call me—even if you're mad at me and don't want to meet—just let me know you're ok. Ok? Alright."
Then I'd call again and say:
"Joanne, whatever the situation, whatever I did, just please call me back and all you have to say is 'I'm ok' and that's it, we can end the conversation. You don't have to talk to me just please, please let me know you're ok."
Then like a fourteen-year-old girl in a sexualized Japanese babydoll costume (the one with the huge fucking bow?!) comes up to me and kneels beside the table and I'm sliding away from her on my bench. She saw me recoil and she bowed and backed away. I thought: I'm scaring the servers here. I'm being rude. I thought: this child is flirting with me but if I took a picture of her I could be arrested for possession of child pornography. But I did, I wanted to fuck every one of those Japanese teenagers with the big bow costumes. Something about wearing chopsticks in your hair and a huge bow in the small of your back mysteriously makes me want to fuck someone—or at least unwrap them like a present.
But that's not where my mind was mostly at. Mostly, my mind had entered this dark psychotic fantasy wherein I was sure my closest person in the world—the sister seventeen months younger who I had played Indiana Jones with in the mud in the back yard—was dead. There was no other explanation for her not showing up and not answering her phone or responding to my messages. I imagined myself in a hospital later that night, identifying a body. And I thought of how bleak life was going to be without my housemate and most ideal conversation partner—one of the only people who will actually listen to me when I talk, one of the only people I know who actually has something to say.
These thoughts spiraled. In a vacuum of information, everybody's mind makes things up. But mine does this quicker and more convincingly than most. I'm great at coming up with theories that are completely wrong and believing them without any evidence—the fact that I thought it is evidence enough, apparently. I can't dismiss my own unlikely ideas. Everything in my head got worse and worse and worse until finally I had already entered the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross stages of grief and was already on step five over someone I didn't even know was dead.
But in my mind she was.
Finally I thought she had probably committed suicide or just been hit by a car or something random like that. I was desolated at the loss of my sister and I decided to leave the restaurant. I tried to pay for the many pots of tea I had consumed while sitting there. I begged every one of the five very hot Japanese server girls and none of them would allow it. I was their guest and they hoped my sister was ok. I bowed to them and left.
And right outside the restaurant was Joanne, standing in front of a huge concrete column, almost exactly outside the window I was looking out of when I was inside. But she was leaning against that column such that I couldn't see her from my table.
She looked terrible—like she'd been through an ordeal.
She told me that she had thought we were supposed to meet at seven but when she got here she didn't see me so she waited. She wanted to call me but her phone battery was dead so she waited outside, getting more and more worried that she had messed up—that the time we had planned to meet was really eight, that she had done something extremely wrong. So she waited, outside, in the cold and rain, for a whole hour, waiting for eight to come and hoping to see me then.
And when eight came and and went she started to get extremely worried that something terrible had happened to me. She reviewed it in her mind and recalled that we were definitely meeting at seven and it was definitely this restaurant and she had assumed we would meet outside and go in together so that we could pick a table and be seated together—of course we would do this—it would be odd if one of us got here first and went in alone.
This may have been some big-city etiquette she had picked up in her time in New York—I didn't know. But, standing out there alone, she slowly realized that what had happened is that nothing terrible had happened to me at all, but that most likely I had gone into the restaurant already, having arrived early, and that I was waiting for her inside.
But even knowing I was likely right inside the restaurant she was standing in front of, she became paralyzed, thinking along the same lines as I had, that her best conversation partner and housemate and long-time brother had met some horrible end and this would be how she began to find out: waiting in the rain in front of a sushi restaurant for a dinner partner who not only wouldn't sh0w for dinner, but would never show up again.
And as she said this, as she explained all this to me, I examined my own thought processes as I had been waiting for her, inside, drinking sencha and looking at sexy Japanese girls, engrossed in my psychotic fantasy that my sister was dead.
And what I realized was horrifying: there was some joy in this fantasy.
I certainly didn't want to lose my sister!
My best friend and most ideal conversation partner!
But the horror and sadness and loss was something I was so used to feeling, having lost a soulmate-type girlfriend to bulimia not two years earlier. I found myself thrilled at the idea that my very best company in the world had once again disappeared into death and I found an excitement that Joanne, one of my two only sisters, had died young and in some horrible way and that made the story of my life all the more tragic and appropriate, somehow, as if I deserved tragic deaths to follow me around throughout my life. It's not that I wanted her to die!—that was the worst thing I could imagine! But imagining the worst thing was thrilling nonetheless.
And now that Joanne was standing in front of me, in the rain, reaching her arms out for a hug, I became aware of how engrossing my psychosis was—though at the time I didn't know it was psychosis so I just called it imagination. I thought about us: two siblings, brother and sister, standing forty feet away from each other for two hours, each thinking the other dead. And me instinctively recollecting the disbelief, the unfathomability, of someone being here and alive and in your bedroom and then them being dead, gone, disappeared—forever! You do not wish for this—but it is a fantastically devilish thrill, death. Horror is still exciting, even when it's so real that it is something you never could enjoy.
And Joanne told me that when she realized it was after eight, and we had planned to meet at seven, that most likely I wasn't dead at all but was sitting inside the restaurant waiting for her.
But she became paralyzed, feeling the foolishness of not having simply checked inside, when she got there, to see if I was inside. And the more time that passed, the more foolish she felt for not looking, and the more paralyzed she became to that spot by the beam. And she was afraid for herself, at what her inaction meant—that she was so unassertive that she could not make herself go inside the restaurant and ask if I was there.
The thought of this compounded in her mind and reached out to include her job choices (from working for Dad's shitty real estate development company to working at a video arcade—jobs that had nothing to do with dance, which was her training) and it reached out to include her inability to make friends (romantic or not) because she was too scared to go up to someone on the subway who looked interesting and say, "So what do you do?" or "Hi, I'm Joanne, would you like to have sex?"
She felt lifelong aloneness.
She told me this.
She felt unable to risk anything.
That's what glued her to that spot behind the beam where I could not see her as we both tortured ourselves from about 7:15 to 9:30pm.
"Can I have a hug?" Joanne asked.
She was crying and her tears were indistinguishable from the rain.
I hugged her so tight and I said, "Didn't one of those guys who jump out from nowhere to sell umbrellas the second it starts raining, find you and sell you an umbrella?"
"I have one in my bag," she says. "But I was too afraid to open it."
She bawls into my shoulder.
"You didn't do anything wrong," I tell her.
"But I should have gone inside the restaurant. I knew you were in there."
"Well you didn't know I was in there. You didn't absolutely know I was in there. You thought we were meeting outside. I just went inside because it was raining. We never discussed it."
"That's right," she sobs. "We never discussed it."
"No, we didn't. We set the time. We had that right—seven o'clock. We chose the restaurant—Pod—strange name for a sushi joint but Zagat says they're good and they've got those sexy little Japanese girls with the big bows on their back as servers—you know I like that."
I raise my eyebrows.
Joanne and I both smile.
"Yes I know you like that."
"Anyway we set the place, we set the time, but we never decided exactly where to meet and that's the only problem that actually happened here. No one died. You didn't get hit by a car or commit suicide."
"And you didn't forget," my sister says.
"Were you afraid I'd forget?"
She cries and says, "A little bit."
"Did I forget when you got us Cirque du Soleil tickets?"
"No."
"No, I didn't. I even left that rat-ass hedge fund before market close and when I walked out the door I literally said to my officemate, 'You can kiss my ass 'cause I'm going to see Cirque du Soleil so have a nice night writing C code that fucks people over on their mortgages.'"
Joanne laughs.
"Did you really say that?"
"Yeah, pretty much."
"What did he say?"
"My officemate?"
"Yeah, isn't he Italian but you said he's a big Mozart fan?"
"Bozzini. Yeah. Huge Mozart fan. He said he's never been to see a Cirque du Soleil show because to him it's just a glorified interpretive dance number and it's not worth the ticket price."
"He said that?"
"Yeah."
"You work with some uncultured.."
"I believe the word you're searching for is motherfuckers. Anyway, I showed up on time for Cirque du Soleil, I showed up on time when we went to that Moroccan restaurant, I always show up on time when we go to Bridget Foy's, and I showed up on time tonight—as did you—we just had a little misunderstanding and our brains took us to places we didn't need to go."
"Right."
"I always show up on time. It's Dad who doesn't show up on time."
"Right. That's about Dad. You're not Dad."
"Thank the fucking stars."
Joanne sniffles.
"Well?" I say.
"Well what, brother?"
"Well you wanna have some sushi?"
"I thought it was too late—aren't they about to close?"
"They're not about to close. We're their only customers. There's like..fifteen of those Japanese server girls and one guy at the bar doing sake shots—he's got problems way worse than ours. Sushi's on me..let's try to spend at least two-hundred dollars."
She laughs.
"Are you serious?"
"I'm so fucking serious."
And while we ate, I told her the story of the Boskop brain.
"What's the Boskop brain?"
"It's the brain that went inside this huge skull they found in South Africa. There was a village of fossils, all together, and then a little ways away, there was a hut, and inside that hut, there was a human creature except it had a really big brain. And anthropologists who studied the layout of this village, the tools, the fossils, local legends, found that this Boskop man was—not like a god—but like a demigod to these regular humans. Because he had a huge brain, he could solve their problems for them easily. Like if they had interpersonal problems or family problems or engineering problems or agricultural problems, they would go to the Boskop and he or she would solve their problems for them. So they worshipped this person like she was special, a pseudo-, demi-goddess sort of presence."
"Why was her hut away from the rest of the village?"
"Right. Well that's the critical question, isn't it? They think it's because if you have a brain much larger or more powerful than the human brain, that it becomes much more interesting to spend time alone with your thoughts than it does to spend time socializing especially with creatures whose brains are much smaller than yours. So they theorize that this Boskop was a creature who had a deep, deep imagination. The Boskop brain would be so deep that the Boskop would rarely ever leave it. It could make up worlds and see them as though they were real. There was basically more going on inside the Boskop's head than there was going on outside of it. So it lived in its imagination!"
"Is there a reason you're telling me this story?"
"There's always a reason I tell you a story. What is this, fucking Teletubbies?"
"Is this a true story? Or are you making all this up?"
"Well. It's based on a true story. Real findings. Real research. Which all got discounted and no one takes seriously anymore. So: is it true, is it not true—there we're in a gray area. But the general concept is true."
I hold up my cup and say:
"Can I get some more tea over here?! Preferably from a fourteen year old wearing a bow."
Joanne taps my chopsticks.
"I love you, my brother."
I tap her chopsticks back.
"I love you, too."