Nobody's Fool

Northwoods Motor Inn disappeared from sight in the rear window, Mrs. Gruber let out a loud sigh. Several blocks farther on, when they stopped at a traffic light, Mrs. Gruber spied an alternative. “That might be nice,” she offered. “It certainly
looks
nice.”
    â€œThat’s a bank,” Miss Beryl said, though she had to admit that except for the huge sign identifying it as a bank, it did look more like a restaurant.
    Mrs. Gruber sighed again.
    Miss Beryl turned, looped through the bank’s empty lot, and headed back the way they had come, a maneuver that befuddled Mrs. Gruber, who expressed both surprise and excitement when the Northwoods Motor Inn came into view a second time, now on the other side of the street. “There!” Mrs. Gruber pointed. She also directed Miss Beryl to a parking space. “There!” she pointed again after her friend had slowed, signaled and begun to turn into the space. Things were going to work out after all. Things had a
way
of working out, even when they looked the darkest, Mrs. Gruber mused. It was a lesson in life that she’d learned again and again, and she made a mental note right there in the front seat of Miss Beryl’s Ford to quit being an old Gloomy Gus.
    The Northwoods Motor Inn catered, especially on Sundays and holidays, to old people. The dining room was large and all on one level, and there was plenty of room between the white-clothed tables for wheelchairs. The young waitresses, attired in friendly Tyrolean costume, were all strapping girls, sturdy enough to support an elderly diner on each arm when itcame time to sidle down the soup-and-salad buffet. These girls knew from experience that their clientele were enthusiastically committed to the buffet concept in direct proportion to their physical inability to negotiate it. The more compromised by arthritis, ruptured discs, poor eyesight, dubious equilibrium and tiny appetite, the more the Northwoods’ diners were enamored of the long buffet tables with their sweeping vistas of carrot and celery sticks, cottage cheese, applesauce and cheese cubes speared with fancy cellophaned toothpicks, as well as the exotica, pea and three-bean and macaroni-vinaigrette salads, many of which required explanation. The buffet tables had a way of backing up as these explanations were made and choices narrowed, until the line snaked halfway around the room.
    This was the state of affairs when Miss Beryl and Mrs. Gruber were seated at a table far too large for the two of them in the very center of the room. Miss Beryl was still unnerved at having driven right past the restaurant, and she was far too peeved at her companion to think seriously of food. Mrs. Gruber was all for joining the buffet line immediately, before it got any longer. Miss Beryl refused, ordering a Manhattan. “It’s not going to get longer,” she explained. “Except for us, everyone in the room is already
in
it.”
    â€œIf you say so, dear,” said Mrs. Gruber, who deferred to Miss Beryl, albeit reluctantly, in most worldly matters. “What’s that tasty highball I always like?”
    â€œAn old-fashioned,” Miss Beryl reminded her.
    Mrs. Gruber ordered an old-fashioned.
    The menu was a special Thanksgiving issue scripted onto an onionskin page with scalloped edges, and Mrs. Gruber studied this as if it were the Rosetta Stone. They had a choice among roast turkey, glazed ham, and Yankee pot roast. Mrs. Gruber’s lips moved as she read each description and broadened into a smile as she arrived at her decision, which Miss Beryl could have predicted at the outset. “I’m going to eat Old Tom,” Mrs. Gruber announced, much too loudly. Several people nearby looked up, startled. “Old Tom Turkey will be just the thing,” Mrs. Gruber said. She was reading the menu a second time, just to make sure. “Succulent, it says.”
    What Mrs. Gruber liked about the food at the Northwoods Motor Inn was precisely what Miss Beryl disliked about it—everything came overcooked. Vegetables were recognizable only by their color, or a bleached version of it, the original shapes and textures lost to the puree process. Meats too were always on the verge of losing their natural composition,so broken down by heat and steam that Mrs. Gruber was always prompted to remark that you could cut it with a fork.
    â€œSucculent is the wrong word to describe turkey,” Miss Beryl