Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated teachers, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.
In her 83rd post, Helena recalls an experience of considering her place in the world during a late-night meal at a favorite bar-restaurant.
Dinner with Edward Hopper
My son Galen had come for a few days. We’d had long talks, a jam session, he played drums on a pile of books, I scat sang. Hanging out with Galen is my true north. Now he’d left to drive home. The house felt silent, empty. I couldn’t bring myself to improvise a small dinner. I decided to go out. But where? It was 8:30. Everything in my country town would be closing, except—I thought—the diner. Even the diner would do tonight.
I set out. I drove too far. I’ll turn at Casi’s, I thought.
Casi’s, the place that closes early, if it’s open at all when I get there. At this late hour, early for me, late for my country town, I could only dream of eating at Casi’s; their food is good, their salads fresh, their desserts, divine. Casi’s has key lime pie. I’d discovered key lime at Casi’s. I could have turned at the post office, but maybe my car knew. I passed the mall, another place I could have turned, and pulled into Casi’s parking lot—blazing red lights at the doorway! “Open” it read! A car and a black van are in the parking lot—no drivers. “Open Til Three a.m. —Fridays and Saturdays, Bar Only,” a window sign flashed, dreamlike, my favorite place to eat, open til three in the morning on Fridays and Saturdays. And this was Friday! I think that sign was in neon. But it might have been lettered with a marker on a piece of white poster board.
I pulled into a spot. Shut off the engine. Got out. Didn’t lock the car. Walked to the front door, opened it.
The place was empty but for the owner, and two men who didn’t turn to look at me, short, stocky, dark-haired, absorbed in the work of setting up speakers booming music I couldn’t identify, music from some far away land someone could dance a polka to. It was disorienting. Ridiculous. This is not a Brau House. There is no dance floor—some of the things that ran through my head.
The place was empty.
The lovely owner, a small woman, dark curly hair pulled into a soft pony tail at the nape of her neck, dressed in the same maroon shirt and pants she is always dressed in, when I’ve had the luck to find them open, as if she worked in a hair salon, sweeping. No ego; this is her place. She stepped out from behind the cash register and we approached each other, I, all questions, …open until three?... can I dine? she, with her quiet face answers, “Only the bar.”
I once asked her if she was Greek, hoping we could bond, me shaped by Greeks, having married into a Greek family, who also had a restaurant. “No,” was all she had said, offering nothing but her solemn, open face and her hospitality.
I thought about her silence and it struck me, she was from a Muslim country. Simple, present, understated; only God knew what she lives through. I wonder, is this her place? It feels like hers. She is in charge. She’s serious about getting more people into Casi’s, I think. The new hours make sense—still, I’m the only one who’s showed up.
All the televisions are on. Five televisions covering every line of sight. I couldn’t have escaped what my eyes clearly registered—a prize fight. I look away.
I find another way to ask. “Will you serve now?”
Her solemn, honest eyes, looked uncommitted, “I have to ask the kitchen…” she answered. “What would you like?
“A hamburger and—dessert,” I say.
An anonymous hamburger, in this empty, now cavernous space, two guys working on the volume control of this music I can’t identify, their equipment, black speakers the size of overstuffed chairs, sitting on a kind of cart, pushed up against the glass door of the dessert refrigerator. I’ve drifted over to that display of beauties I can taste: chocolate cake, custards, puddings, mousse, lemon cake, apple pie, and one piece of creamy something, sitting on the top shelf. I ask about it, pointing over the equipment, wires drooping over the sides of the cart. I smile at the two guys, making contact in a situation that someone less adventurous or improvident than I might call spooky. Neither returns my smile, but one of them moves the equipment, looking inconvenienced, so I can get close to the glass door and the owner can take out that cream covered thing, me full of hope.
“Key lime lemon pie,” says the owner. I vaguely know that has a different sound than key lime pie, that knowing sits in the back of my mind. In some dull way I am rationalizing that what she’s just said is very like what I was hoping to hear. She’s called the piece of pie something that is in the realm of key lime, the pie my lustful dessert appetite is set on.
“Yes…thank you,” I say.
I plan on only eating a third of my hamburger, no fries, but that small salad they do so well, to save room for that pie. I could live on Casi’s desserts and would if I didn’t know that would kill me. But the vacancy inside, my son driving an hour and a quarter home before I’ll get his text, is the permission I need this Friday night to have that lone piece of cream-covered pie sitting on the top shelf of that glass dessert closet.
The owner nods and closes the glass door. The men, both, it seems to me, scowling, move their speakers back up against it. Now the owner has disappeared through the swinging doors into the kitchen. I survey the place again, the two guys unfazed by my efforts to connect, to make the moment feel less strange, to make it feel friendly, the five TV screens, two half naked, lovely young men, washboard stomachs, satin shorts, who, I can barely write it, are preparing to beat each other senseless. Strange celebrities also flash on the screens, people I’ve never seen who have body guards, and who are, like the two speaker men, not smiling, followed by the camera. And it dawns on me. Money, I think. This is about money!
The Fights
I don’t live in this world of people beating each other to a pulp for an audience. The Fights. That’s what people in Brooklyn called them when I was a child. The Fights were something dim and far away, something that had nothing to do with my family. Gladiators, lions waiting to devour Christians. Some terrible pornography. I avert my eyes. Me, an Edward Hopper painting. It is so perfect. I am somehow willing, that night, to be an isolated figure in this bizarre world of Casi’s after 9:30, not a customer, only me on a Friday night, seeking to be wrapped in a blanket of the comfort of a good hamburger I haven’t cooked and not eating alone while my son is driving home and will send a text when he arrives, not sitting in front of my own television set, tuned, if I am lucky, to a good movie on Turner Classics, or switched off.
I have eaten here at Casi’s alone or with a friend and asked that the televisions around us blasting news be switched off. But that is out of the question on this night when I still don’t know if I will be welcome to stay.
The owner comes out of the kitchen. “Yes….it’s okay,” she says. They’ll cook for me even though I haven’t come for the bar. She’s gesturing toward the booths but adds in her unsmiling but soft and hospitable way, “Sit wherever you would like.” The men and their equipment and that weird polka occupy the table and chairs side, the place I have often liked to sit because it’s quieter. I take a booth. I am faced with a television. I change sides, I am faced with another. It takes a split second to look away, but I’ve seen the two men fighting. I shut it out. I have my cell phone. I read something. The men with the speaker seem to be working hard to do something with that volume, blasting it one minute, turned down the next.
I look at my watch. It’s almost ten. Sitting at Casi’s at ten is strange enough. It’s become a different place. No sweet wait staff, hospitable to a soul. It’s me, the owner, the two men, and the fights. I am laughing inside, and hold tight to Hopper, one of my first obsessions. Edward Hopper, brilliant with light, with color, with brush strokes, painter of isolated figures, most of them of his wife, Josephine, who gave up her painting to promote his. There are no politics in that for me. They often painted together. He was a master and his work could not have gotten out without the force of who she was, getting it sold, getting it into museums. Edward was an introvert. He barely spoke. The painter that sits on my eyes, a lens, was not a nice man—I saw his bitterness, his arrogance, in an interview recorded on film. He was the one buried in some painful isolation. Degas? An anti-Semite, his peers avoided him, two of the three artists that live on my eyes. And Seurat’s color theory feels severe. Would I have liked Beethoven? These people are my heart, my team. I grieve their pain, and I thank them for what it cost them to lift the world. I am made of their work. So I am glad I didn’t have to know them. Now, this night at Casi’s, a night of this apparently important boxing match, I am hidden in Hopper’s work—grateful to know it so intimately.
The owner brings out the hamburger. It’s cooked to perfection, served on a brioche roll, her perfect fresh salad—lettuce, tomato, red onion, and green pepper—its colleague, adjacent to it. I eat the hamburger slowly, invisible and happy, and also amazed at where I am, at what I have done on this Friday night in my country town, closed up for the night, having come from Long Island, its streets, restaurant rows, open until one, maybe later, filled with people. I prefer this. Anonymity.
What “critics” miss about Hopper’s people is that every one of those lonely figures contains a universe, a lone universe within a universe painted from the outside of a restaurant window—the critics have missed the depiction of quantum physics, something not widely articulated when Hopper painted in the thirties, forties, fifties, sixties. Inside myself I am floating in a kind of delight, happy with who I am, happy with the lovely quiet owner, happy I can go out by myself to this bar that has no customers, wondering if it ever will. Regulars that may be a lonely group of drinkers, seeking company, maybe drinking to dull the universes within themselves. Maybe it takes time, muscles, to begin to decipher that universe. Maybe it takes some work.
I hear a bell clanging, glance up at the television and feel such compassion for the boxer who is now is in his corner, his mouth swollen and bloody, looking sad and scared. His people are around him, talking to him, washing him, icing him, toweling him dry. I am sad for the pornography of a crowd, betting on these two boys, struck at and beaten, willing to be hurt and reduced to something animal, bodies broken to their souls in public, to die for people who are there to profit from their humiliation. I am sad because I know they have their reasons. And I realize, everyone there, all of them filled with universes within universes within universes, quantum, quantum, quantum! Every one of them has their reason.
Then I’m struck by something terrible, sad and grotesque, something caught by another painter, George Bellows, Hopper’s Ash Can School colleague. Raw, New York City scenes, the next spotlight on painting after the sublime alchemy of France’s light. Bellows’ “The Boxing Match” is brutal. The crowd rages, the boxers rage; what is that rage that can surface to watch people beat one another to a bloody pulp? What is it?
A painting and a piece of pie
I shut it out, look back down at my plate, eat every piece of salad, and a small piece of that brilliant hamburger. I ask for an aluminum container to take the rest of it home for later. The owner may not speak, but her food does. It’s ordinary, tasty, well served, even simple food, yet everything she serves seems original. An omelet, served over hash browns and chopped sausage in a pie dish. I ordered that on one of my evenings out, at the dinner hour, the place filled with other diners. I’d had the key lime pie then, savored it. I’ve ordered mashed potatoes there and gotten potatoes that were boiled and mashed with butter. They could have been my mother’s. Everything at Casi’s has that ingredient, that mysterious touch, my in-laws had it, a rare thing. A thing that sets a place apart fills it with customers. Her bar will succeed, I think, with word of mouth, time.
Now the owner serves the key lemon-lime pie. On the plate sit three dollops of fresh whipped cream. She’d never served the key lime pie that way. It was beautiful. I took my fork and began. I knew I would finish this. It was the point of this meal. Three dollops, something new. An apology? This last thing shot through me, something swift, like my car, horse-like, finding its way to Casi’s. The cream lacked fluff. Had the pie been sitting too long? Now I recall that there was only one piece left on that glass shelf.
I put my fork into the pie, much yellower, with a green cast. Yes, lemony, very good, good graham cracker crust, crusty, rich, homemade. I tried the cream. I am eating this pie, pondering, deep in Edward Hopper’s painting of the Woman at the Automat—deeper, as deep as the hidden universe, hidden in that figure Jo Hopper likely modeled for. That was the trade she’d exacted from her Eddie. I’ll get you the fame your paintings deserve if I have to live with your punishing silence, but no other women will model for you but me. I was feeling free, joyful, drunken on the frequency of that evening. I wanted to laugh that the cream had the taste cream does when it’s just on the edge of turning—but still good. Then I jumped to the cream on the pie. I’d always questioned that cream in the same, back-of-my-mind way, now it came forward into consciousness. It was not real, not whipped cream, but some approximate confection. I wasn’t inclined to complain; they’d all done me a favor, I felt, by letting me eat there at all when it was open just for the bar, albeit one deserted. It was good enough to eat, to finish, but the noises of the fight began to pierce my anonymity. My eyes flickered up to the TV screen. A sheik, from Saudi Arabia, and his cold, cold bodyguards looking bloodthirsty, like the crowd in the Bellows painting. The two boys were locked together, raw, revolting. I could more clearly hear that strange, dreamy unidentified polka music, soft then loud, soft then loud. How long had this been going on? How long does it take to adjust the volume of two speakers? I realized suddenly, this was more than a Hopper painting, it was an Edward Hopper movie. I finished the stale pie. A quarter of a hamburger, a salad and that key lime lemon thing. I was stuffed. I asked for the bill. My obsession with Casi’s key lime pie had spent itself.
Yet I was dizzy with the experience. On that lonely Friday night, in the desert of separation waiting until my son texted he’d arrived home after our quantum visit, having sat eating a meal at Casi’s until 10:30, well, as my friend, also named George, liked to say, I’d gone whole hog including the postage.
Suddenly there it was, “Home!” lit on my phone screen. Home with a row of hearts. And I could face going home too.
Before sleep came, my thoughts floated with universes, and drifting off I felt the sweetness of certainty that even brutality could not destroy that quantum, transcendent reality.
I could see those universes waiting for us to discover our humanity.
Have you ever had a revelation over a meal alone? What did you think of Helena’s latest column? Share with us in the comments.
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