An Unsound Method

Once in a Mexican restaurant I felt the table shake. I knew it was no earthquake in the typical sense, I was pretty sure it was not a salsa belch, and when my ears took the aftershock I glanced to my left and found what seemed to be a seven-foot giant—seventy percent legs—with even a more formidable perm. The man seated across from the woman exclaimed, "I'm not going to raise my children like my parents raised me," and the woman raised her hand as if going to slap the innocent child in the stroller on top of the table. She did not slap the infant, and I could not decipher what she said, but the violence of her gesture tells me she was saying something along the lines of "I'll slap the devil out of my child the first time he steps out of line."

I could not see the tender nature in this woman. Her voice reverberated with power and force, her stature projected intimidation, and her movements suggested a violence on tap. I watched them without trying to conceal my glare. Between their table and mine I felt some sort of protective barrier, like watching characters in a film, news anchors on the low channels, or people in a separate subway car through two layers of glass. Yet, that hand could have reared back at me. She had already violated the space I assumed as my own for the length of my sit for buying a burrito. In the end she filtered out of my peripheral and I finished my burrito while carrying my own conversation and left the child to live in a state of uneasy speech and gestures.

I exited the restaurant and thought of a mother zipping up her toddler's jacket on a windy day in February before school, the zipper catching two thirds of the way up and the child grimacing as his body jerked from the upward motion inhibited by a small out-of-place lining.