Road-Stop Restaurants

If I hadn't looked out the window at the lights and taxis on Broadway, Toast, an inexpensive restaurant in Morningside Heights, would have reminded me of the restaurants on the fringes of Detroit and Indianapolis that marked the beginnings and ends of my family vacations.

These were cheap restaurants. Not diners?no fluorescent lights turning my skin yellow, no formica tables or ripped pleather booths?but noisy restaurants with wooden tables and distracted waitresses. On the first day of spring break or winter vacation, we'd end a day of driving with a stop at a Michigan restaurant and gear up for the imminent family reunions awaiting us in the Detroit suburbs. On the way home, we'd eat somewhere just past Indianapolis. The restaurants were all the same?a room a little darker than it needed to be, a weak speaker system playing Rod Stewart, and cartoons or sports on the tv over the bar in the back. Carloads of vacationers crowded the tables, ordered cold drinks and hot food and traded keys with spouses for the next stretch of driving. Between southern Indiana and the Motor City, you can always find a small, noisy restaurant serving cheap, greasy food. My parents would look for the peeling billboard advertisements mounted over the highway. The days shuttling between Bloomington and my grandparents' Michigan houses were spent eating boiled eggs and pita bread for lunch, spilling salt all over the car. Sometimes our dinners were better than that. Not always.

When we were headed back to Bloomington, road-stop restaurants, with their air of transience, always made going home seem like a good idea. I was impatient to leave Indianapolis restaurants and get back on the highway that separated me from my house. But going in the opposite direction, going to Michigan, I liked to linger on the Detroit fringes before we reached our destination. I wasn't heading home. My parents were. When we pulled into my maternal grandmother's driveway, my mother would say, "It's nice to come home." In the backseat, I pictured our house, where I could be a bitch and make a mess after a bad day at school. At home, you can complain about washing dishes. You can stay shut up inside your room without someone blasting you for being antisocial. You can even get up in the middle of the night and throw the phone across the room because the dogs next door are keeping you awake and you can't fight the urge to break something. Home is a place where people love you and all your stupid imperfections, a place where you don't have to worry about impressing anyone.

I've never thought of the time spent with my extended family as coming home. Their houses are familiar and welcoming, but I have to hold my breath and watch my step when I'm inside. I have to write at night, when everyone's asleep, or else my grandmother thinks I'm depressed and my aunt thinks I'm a misanthrope. I have to remember the names of an endless line of distant relatives and not say "fuck" or fight with my mother in front of my grandmother. If I'm quiet but not too quiet, if I talk to the adults and "play nice" with my cousins, if I toe the line between childhood and adulthood, then before we pile into the car and head back to Indiana I will be pronounced a "good girl." This has always meant a lot to me. It means so much that even in the throes of adolescence, I would refrain from fighting with my mother for a full week, just for those brief, laudatory moments with my grandmother. I can't be flawed and imperfect in Detroit the way I can in Bloomington.

But my parents can be flawed and imperfect when they arrive in the Detroit homes of their parents. In Michigan, they aren't adults?my mother's the girl who bought ice cream with the pennies she collected "for the poor," and my father's the golden child struggling not to overshadow an older brother. They act like kids: they overreact to criticism, demand affirmation and argue with their siblings. Michigan allows them a place to be bratty. When the three of us sat around a table of greasy fries and crunchy pasta, half an hour from Detroit, I didn't realize that they were making the psychological transition from one home to another. I only realize it now because I'll have to make the same transition in a few months, when I return to Indiana. At some point, though I haven't been here long, New York became home. It just happened. My magazines and newspapers are stacked on the table surfaces in my apartment, my books fill the shelves, and the hissing gas heat has stopped bothering me. The door buzzer doesn't scare me anymore. I don't wake up hearing a pigeon and think I'm somewhere in the country. When I leave work, I don't go "uptown," I just go home: a tiny, three-room apartment in which I no longer feel obligated to hang up my coat or put away my shoes the minute I walk in the door. It's my place now. My mess.

But home is also a two-story brick house in the Midwest, sitting next to a hayfield. It has white shutters and a back porch. There are two cats inside, a two-car garage attached and a circle driveway in the front. The basement leaks. In the summer, crickets hiss in the backyard, the noise lifting and dropping like the sound of my radiator. If you stand on the porch, you can see deer in the woods. You hear branches slapping their coats when they see you watching them and run. You hear woodpeckers knocking against dead trees. You hear cars, too. They make a distant, sighing sound that carries over a half-mile of fields. The wind is usually louder.

I was thinking about all this as I walked home from Toast. Toast had felt like another road-stop restaurant, somewhere to sit and unwind and enjoy company that's hopefully better than the food. Susannah had just arrived from New Jersey. She's good company. She was sick of being on the train and wanted to eat something hot and drink something cold. Her mood fit Toast's ambience perfectly.

The noisy chaos of young parents and their preschool-aged children made the place seem smaller than it was. Like all the restaurants you run into driving up to Detroit, Toast was fun and busy. People laughed loudly, rivaling the sound of screaming children. The kids pointed at the tv broadcasting the Cartoon Network. A girl with braids and a pink sweatshirt tried to stick her hand in my cheesecake's raspberry sauce. To me, everyone looked like they had just pulled off the highway?kids releasing bottled-up energy, parents collapsing in booths to plates of mediocre food.

It was easy to imagine that Bloomington was 30 minutes away. If I looked outside, I should have seen hills of dead grass obscuring most of the highway. Next door should have been a gas station supplying truckers with fuel and two-liter bottles of Mountain Dew. When I left Toast, I should have found the Midwest at the door, because I'd been holed up in a road-stop restaurant.

As an appetizer, Susannah and I split a large basket of good french fries. We should have stopped there?the entrees were less impressive. My garlic-less garlic bread dripped oil when I poked it. The half of my pasta that didn't stick together was dried out and crunchy. The crust of my cheesecake was soggy, drenched in the raspberry sauce that the three-year-old at the table next to me kept reaching for. Her mother slapped her hand lightly. I wanted to tell her it wasn't very good anyway.

Toast had thoroughly prepared me to slip out the door and into the Midwest's rolling hills and long stretches of nothingness. Instead, when we left the restaurant, we stepped onto a sketchy strip of upper Broadway. We were in the middle of people, cars and apartment buildings that would tower over downtown Bloomington. But I was struck by how small New York felt to me. Bloomington?with its short, spacious buildings and vast fields highlighting the enormity of available space?seemed very large. Indiana has a long sky, fat stars and miles of drab emptiness. I walked through puddle reflections of Broadway's claustrophobically spaced buildings. Every street and corner had a smallness about it, a dense, self-contained existence, like the buildings would never let on that there was anything beyond their concrete walls. I could see both places at once, one in my mind's eye, one in front of me, both cities simultaneously small and large.

Down around 114th St., someone asked us for change. While Susannah pulled some money out of her purse, I surveyed Broadway. Columbia students stood on the corners and danced in a glass-walled restaurant/bar. Store signs illuminated the rain. The sidewalk grates shook as the subway roared under my feet. Bloomington suddenly seemed very far away.

Toast, 3157 Broadway (betw. Tiemann Pl. and LaSalle St.), 662-1144.