Black Virgin Mountain by Larry Heinemann

Author:Larry Heinemann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780385515788
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2005-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

There was a good restaurant at 59 Nguyen Du Street, just down the block, which we came to call the Sourpuss Café, because that first morning the waitresses didn’t seem glad to see us at all—perhaps because we showed up long after the morning breakfast rush (8:00 A.M.)—good God, more work. When we came back morning after morning, engaging them in what little conversation can be had with limited vocabularies (slowly enunciated English, some grammar-school Vietnamese, a smattering of pigeon-French and GI-German as well as outright pointing and creative body English), the waitresses’ attitudes changed, but the name—Sourpuss Café—stuck. We’d walk into the small room of stucco-covered walls, take our pick of tables, turn on the floor-fans, look at the menus (in Vietnamese and French), and try to order—usually omelets, French bread, fresh-picked in-season fruit, and coffee. The waitress would take the order back into the kitchen; someone would get some money from the cash box, hustle over to the market down the street and around the corner, and buy the fixings. The eggs were so fresh that some still had the farmyard dirt and straw on them.

The kitchen women were generally delighted with us because we would flirt and carry on and play our own tapes (my homemade put-togethers of Chicago blues, rock ’n’ roll classics, and Larry’s Ozark mandolin, banjo, and fiddle “jazz”) on their large semiportable Sony boom box with bad bass speakers—of a kind and size found in any self-respecting Vietnamese café. And too, because one morning Larry went into the kitchen to show them how to cook an omelet—“Missouri Ozark” style.

Before then, if we asked for one, they’d bring us plates of duck eggs fried to death on both sides (the pullet eggs are too small); not what anyone—especially the French—would call an omelet with a straight face.

Larry let it be known that what they had been serving us were not omelets at all. He went back into the kitchen and called for the iron skillet, eggs, some green onions, cilantro—whatever was at hand. They looked in the old, round-top refrigerator and saw that the eggs were “finished,” as they called it. Someone was sent to the market to fetch half a dozen. Not a moment later back she came with a basketful of eggs and other fixings. Larry grabbed a large bowl, whipped up the eggs, chopped up some scallions (with one of those large, flat Chinese-style cleavers), diced a couple tomatoes, some asparagus tips, hot green peppers, and sprigs of cilantro, added them, sprinkled in several pinches of salt and a long pour of condensed sweet milk, then turned to the old gas stove and greased up the skillet with lard. In no time at all he had rustled up two tolerably good-looking omelets, working the skillet and spatula with the grand and showy flourishes of a Toddle House short-order cook while the kitchen women and several late-arriving passersby watched with sputtering astonishment that soon transformed itself into gleeful amusement and high humor.

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