Table For One Dining Alone Tests Appetite For Rejecting The Social Norm

The waiter looked at the large book sitting on the table and then at me.

“Will there be one for dinner tonight?” he asked in a snickering manner. He knew. I could tell he knew I was alone and already chalking up a small tip and bad service in his mind.

Worse than a first date and more embarrassing than junior high dances, I was eating alone in a restaurant. Everyone in the whole room was staring directly at me, and I was terrified while pretending nonchalance at the waiter’s question.

Yes, it was Saturday night, and there I was sitting alone with a library copy of “War and Peace.” I’d brought something weighty and substantial just in case the service was slow or I needed to hit someone.

Eating alone is not a social activity I’d ever done before but, after watching some dark foreign films and crying over the subtitles, I had decided to begin my new life as a woman alone by going out to dinner solo on a Saturday night. It was to be a symbolic gesture of my independence and ability to live without a man.

Staring down the looks of all coupled eaters, I had no idea why I placed myself at such an unfestive table. At the moment, I craved to run home and see if I could find a happy Ingmar Bergman film, eat frozen pizza uncooked, and die in my bed whispering, “She ate at home and died alone,” while gagging on the last frozen morsel of tough pizza crust.

Did I say I was a woman of the ‘90s and a feminist? Did I tell you what a tough business person and altogether shrewd operator I am? Yes, I’ve faced tax audits without benefit of a CPA, thrilled as stampeding elephants rammed the sides of my very small van in Kenya, and spent an entire weekend looking for Waldo in a nudist’s camp.

But here I was scared and alone in a restaurant surrounded by strangers - which was a very good thing because if I’d run into someone, a couple of course, I knew I would have curled up and died like the witch in the Wizard of Oz making sure that my dress was smoothed down before I curled completely. Everyone knew what eating dinner alone with a big book on a Saturday night signified.

I was dateless. I was manless. I was not a couple. Therefore, I was invisible.

They glanced through me pityingly, and then looked over at their mate thinking that for all his/her faults, they themselves had someone to at least glare at and not speak to during a restaurant meal on a Saturday night. And they did have the talking option. If they didn’t exercise it, still it counted because they had a body instead of a book sitting across the table.

Therefore, these men and women were not invisible.

It meant they could feel smug and I was sure I saw several women smile more deeply at their companion after casting their eyes over me and my book date. Where was Dostoevsky when I needed him? Or a mystery lover? Or just a boring date who would talk my ear off beginning with how he began his parakeet breeding business right after the war? (With this remark, I would try gauging the man’s age by gentle questions probing whether the “war” was World War II, Korea, Vietnam, or a food fight in the high school cafeteria.)

I found myself asking the smug waiter whether I should have the thigh builder special of lasagna with extra cheese or the diet plate…So when the diet plate came, I was rereading one sentence lasting three pages for the seventh time and wondering whether I could fully comprehend the English language. Dost, as his friends and I always called him while eating alone, was a little on the heavy side for a Saturday night - or any other night.

The cottage cheese with parsley, tomato wedge and cold turkey slices with pickle looked readable. But I was stumped about eating out alone etiquette. Did I close the book with the appearance of the food and hunker down to stare at my plate until the food disappeared entirely? Was it appropriate to gaze around the room enduring the looks of all the other restaurant-goers? Did I open the library book, try to eat and read at the same time and hope that I didn’t spill anything on the pages of a book I didn’t even own?

The waiter solved my dilemma.

“Put the book away,” he hissed behind his palm as he passed my table placed so close to the kitchen door some patrons, I vainly hoped, took me for the part of the staff.

And so I ate the diet plate in silence, eyes glued to my fork until I popped the parsley sprig in my mouth, threw down some money and stampeded out of the restaurant. Passing a phone in the lobby, I fought back the urge to call my old boyfriend explaining that I had been out of my mind when I refused to marry him because his trust fund that would choke a horse had allowed to him to retire early and become boring.

No, I didn’t call. I was an independent woman who had just ingested a complete meal on a Saturday night totally devoid of male companionship and not thrown up.

I felt alone and miserable, and the feminist part of me knew I was perpetuating stereotypic behavior. Somehow that made me feel better. I always feel better when I fit in.

Looking misery in the plate and being a resourceful creature, I bought a Sunday paper racing home to peruse the personal columns madly circling potential dinner companions at each stoplight. Better to find another boyfriend or a good pizza delivery company or starve to death than to spend another Saturday night with a dead writer.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Leslie A. Duncan Special to Women & Men