Upon entrance I pass men in khaki shorts and button down tops, bald with sunglasses and brown skin. The place is nice and smells of deep fried sea bounty and cornmeal but high class. I walk through the wood and lacquered floors to my table behind a stick thin blonde hostess in a black button down shirt and shimmery slacks.
My seat is next to windows and my waitress is a shorter and chunkier, dyed redhead that I ask for recommendations. I order beer, an OBX (i.e., shorthand for Outer Banks, NC) on tap, in homage to the ortgeist of the water, choppy and brown, and the shore. A light-medium wind, up from the barrier islands and open ocean beyond, shoves in toward me, brackish, and even indoors, the smell and breeze relieve the heat of the day. Gulls hold station 20 feet from my window, flapping into the breeze. Chunky waitress informs me that OBX is out and so I get her recommendation, UFO, and I order food. She brings the glass, golden beer bubbling up the sides and smelling of crisp lightness and lemon zest, a feeling, an alive-ness in the heat. The taste does not disappoint.
Brown-skinned delicacies out on the patio late lunch/dine early with wind tousled hair. The motion of their hair somehow makes them more delicious while behind me an unseen gay man raves about crab cakes to his companion. Gay man is a teacher. He says, "It's too hot here to exercise outside," and further complains of his job and how he gets no breaks. It's exhausting. They order an appetizer, the crab cakes, and it comes and they descend on the food. Gay man talks and though I can't see him, I know he's holding his hand over his mouth as he chews and talks.
The beer is easy to drink, dangerously so. Shrimp boats sit across the water, gulls float, and triangles of water rise and fall amidst the eating noises and the hum of air conditioning. One could be alive here, I think. A new dock or pier is under construction outside my window as the food arrives on my table: pesto with scallops. Four scallops (the two large ones are cooked perfectly but the two smaller ones are chewy with over cooking). The pasta is a little larger in gauge than I prefer and cooked a shade longer than I like but the pesto is this explosion of butter flavor and basil tossed with fresh tomatoes and pine nuts. A simultaneous freshness and heaviness in the palate, a completely accomplished mixture that produces a film of sweat on my forehead and in the small of my back. I foolishly order a second beer in order to cool off. Throughout the meal, a silver and blue variegated and color shifting pigeon observes me through the window glass with his yellow eyes that are at once accusing and hopeful and stupid. The pigeon lifts off as I finish the plate and doesn't return.
A man on the water in a small sail powered craft cuts figure eights before a wooded spit of sand mid-stream. The water is technically a river, but waves still wash in as if it is simply an inlet for the ocean's thrusting. Clouds gather and encroach from the north. I pay my tab and leave and something in me calls me out to the beach that lies some miles distant. I get in the van and heed it.
(To be continued.)
