Lunch Counter Latte

I sat with my mother and her friend at a Woolworth's lunch counter. Swiveling left and right from the ten o'clock to the two o'clock position on the round rotating red vinyl stool rimmed in aluminum strips, I slowly munched on a grilled cheese sandwich. A woman took the stool on my right. Her face wore a sadness that entered my bones and never left. I wondered why she was so unhappy. Her eyes darted back and forth with a nervous vigilance as if someone was looking at her. I averted her gaze, swiveled back to ten, stopped at twelve, and took another bite of my sandwich. Slowly moving towards two o'clock, I listened as the woman gave her order to the counter waitress. A cup of black coffee with a large glass of milk. Regarding her strangely, the waitress suggested that she might prefer milk with her coffee. She insisted on a tall glass of milk with a cup of black coffee. I checked in with my mother at ten, took a bite at noon, swallowed at two when I observed the woman drinking some of the milk and then pouring her coffee into the remaining milk in the glass. I watched as the whiteness in the glass went from a beige and to a brownish hue. I thought, cafe con leche. She added lots of sugar into the milky mix. Embarrassed for her in the way six-year-olds are easily embarrassed by adult behavior, I cringed inside as if to say, "I don't know her. Why couldn't she just drink coffee like everybody else, like my mother and her friend to our left? It's really very easy. You take the metal creamer and pour a little milk into your cup and add a teaspoon or two of sugar, stir it with a spoon, and sip. My neighbor at two o'clock carefully stirred her drink by holding the spoon at the very tip of the handle to avoid submerging her fingers into the liquid; trying also, perhaps, to keep herself from being submerged into the deep sadness she couldn't keep to herself.

It hit me later. What the sad woman did at the lunch counter, we did at home. What I wouldn't be caught dead doing in public, my parents and I did in private. We too drank cafe con leche. Coffee with milk. Today known by its upscale Italian name: caffe latte. Through the curious stare of a bored little boy and under the scornful scrutiny of the waitress, my silent partner at the lunch counter drank her improvised coffee. Each sip maybe brought her closer to her native San Juan or Mayagüez or wherever. The sweet, creamy texture of the coffee reminded her of family and friends left behind, of happier times. Surely her tenement apartment in Brooklyn afforded little comfort beyond the few modern conveniences she lived without back on La Isla. With this concoction, the woman created an island of comfort in an environment that could not understand, in a culture that would never know the depths of her pain or loss poured out in silence at a lunch counter in a store that has long since vanished as an icon of American life.