There was once a woman who made a remark about another woman’s children . . .
OK, there was once a woman who implied that the other woman’s children . . .
OK, once one woman thought she heard another woman imply—
well, she thought she saw a sideways glance from the woman
at the next table, a cleaner table, not the sticky one
where her six-year-old was being whiny again, sucking on her sleeve, dragging
her cheek across the table while the four-year-old chanted
“mom mom mom mom mom mom,” pounding his fist on ketchup packets
while the other woman’s six-year-old sat at that neater table coloring quietly,
hair still neat in its braids with bows (probably prissy, probably very prissy
and boring, that other girl, no creativity at all, see how she stays
in the lines so carefully)—
Anyway, this woman, our woman, so sick of the smell of fries, so tired
of her own baggy jeans (the top button undone beneath her t-shirt), the minivan,
and nothing on the calendar but making dinner when she got home, again, the ground
beef—oh, the ground beef of it, the ground beef of her day, of her life,
all the ground beef days ahead of her—felt the other woman looking at her
sideways, a woman in an ironed shirt and even a floral scarf—
in McDonald’s!—a woman who looked like spring and all the things
the tired woman meant to be, had planned to be, a woman who was probably
a good cook, planning something elegant tonight, something with fish,
which the braided girl probably loved and ate with a fork, sitting up—
what was this woman even doing in McDonald’s anyway?—
The thing is, once there were two women dreaming of something else
in a McDonald’s, and they fed their children fries,
managing to stretch an hour thin, and then
they packed up and took their children home and let them watch TV
and raided their chocolate stashes and hid in the closet and cried
for a few minutes before starting dinner.
