Fiction: Brunch(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

While speaking of splurging and the topic of champagne, Paula opined that brunch was the most exquisite form of splurge.
    Billy could not yet concur. “So many conflicting feelings about brunch!”
    Paula answered, “Not one single thing is ever simple with you,” shaking her head.
    “Wait. Wait! I’m sure we will agree on this one point.”

“You’ve already lost”

    “You’ve already lost, right there.” More shaking.
    Billy noticed, for the first time, the new way she wore her hair, letting the natural gray show, but just slightly. “That one point is that one hosts a brunch in order to gather with friends and loved ones, no?”
    “No. I mean, yes! Brunch is a relatively new form of socializing that makes drinking early in the day acceptable and fun.”
    Laughing and clinking, Billy continues: “Brunches are reserved mainly for weekends, yes?”
    “Yes, mainly, but not necessarily.”
    “Correct. So already we have several points of agreement.”
    “I don’t agree with the tedious amount of time your point is taking to get here.”
    “But isn’t brunch reserved, especially, for Sunday, when you don’t want to see anybody at all, and you particularly do not want to be banging around in the kitchen, slicing and dicing, boiling and broiling and sweating, just to give away your bacon and your precious champagne to your so-called friends?”
    “With all that mess to clean up after they all finally leave.”
    “And they leave only after they’ve polished off all the beer, after they’ve drained all the bubbly.”
    “Even the last eggs. I feel like Atlanta felt when Sherman left. Who wants friends like those?”
    “Nobody, that’s who.”
    “Too long have I feigned a pleasure in brunch potatoes.”
    “Too much of a pain in the ass. But what about this: cute lil cubes of cantaloupe and honeydew? Grapes? A fruit plate? Come on!”
    “Well, everybody does like strawberries, but I’m with you. We shall ban the fruit plate! Kiwis? Pahh!”
    “Banned! I just don’t want any friend who eats grapes. Grapes are meant to be enjoyed in liquid form, only.”
    Paula complained that brunches force struggling couples to splurge on cheeses.
    Billy agreed. “They’re so Yuppie, so 1982. Thank Aphrodite John Lennon wasn’t around to worry over the proper grape-to-honeydew ratio.”
    “Mushrooms, though.”
    “Yeah.”
    They share a simultaneous sigh.
    “But alfalfa sprouts, Paula! Remember those?”

They double over, laughing

    They double over, laughing.
    “And those idiots who offered raw carrots for breakfast. The perfect mechanism for killing the champagne-tipsy buzz.”
    Faint from laughter, they fell into each other’s arms.
    “Most fun argument we’ve ever had,” Billy proposed, giving his girl a squeeze of surprising duration and affection. I think there was some humming.
    “We’re not arguing,” she countered.
    “Are, too.”
    “Are not!”
    “Are, too!”
    “Only you are arguing, but okay, you win. I actually love honeydew. What are we arguing about? Oh, yeah: you hate brunch, and I love it.”
    “You do not, you liar!” Still holding her, he pulled her closer and nuzzled into her neck, the scoundrel, knowing her defenseless against throat and neck kisses. Over halfway into a swoon himself, he managed to admit she was right. “That is a fight, but let me ask you this: can anything conceivably be worse than a doorbell interrupting our finest lazy Sunday-morning love extravaganza, only to reveal some beloved loser friend holding no bottle of wine, no bag of coffee beans, no matter how small?”
    “Not one single croissant. Not even a partial roll of paper towel. Get rid of him!”
    “No fancy cheese!”
    “No cheese at all! But yes, one thing is worse,” Paula said, suddenly thoughtful.
    “Name it,” Billy said, still entranced by the perfume from her hair, her soap, her skin?
    “Sex on Sunday morning.”
    “Owww!! That hurts, babe. Really hurts.”
    “Sorry, baby. I didn’t mean it. Sometimes I just want to sleep in.”
    “So you did mean it.”
    “While you surprise me with coffee and warm Krispy Kremes.”
    “That is better than sex, isn’t it? For you.”

“But Billy, does life have a purpose?”

    “But Billy,” she said, and paused, and asked, “does life have a purpose?”
    “That’s a major switch from brunch. But it’s a great one, darling. People avoid actual conversations nowadays. I’ll need to think on it for a good while. I mean, of course, I have thought about it before, but I haven’t formulated my apologia, my manifesto, my summa cum whatever, but I know what Kurt Vonnegut said.”
    Paula said, “I know you just said you’d have to think it over, where I am prepared to testify now.”
    “Cool. Lemme just say what Kurt said, before I forget. He said we’re here to fart around. That was quick, wasn’t it?” He watched her pondering.
    “Yes, it was quick, and cute, too. I believe we are put here to love. So: loving versus farting.”
    “Hey, now! KV wasn’t being literal, and you know it. He said it at the end of his long, very thoughtful life. I believe he meant taking time to savor the present. He loved getting out among the people. He loved buying stamps and envelopes, just because that got him away from the typewriter and back onto the street. I’m not sure he was mocking humankind, though he had done a lot of that in his earlier writings, but he was decidedly non-anthropocentric, finding, I think, birdsong better than a mind that could think up an A-bomb. And that’s a lot of some sweet kind of love. Pardon me. Love? What were you saying, or trying to say?”
    “Take your time. Gather your thoughtbuds, if ye may.”
    “I’m sorry. The floor is yours. Give us love.”
    “Thank you. Yes, I believe,” she said, “that love is a beautiful thing, even though it’s been such a long time since the 1960s.”
    “It’s just that you asked me a serious question and then cut me off so rudely, just as I was beginning my answer. But go ahead, please.”

    “I believe that ‘Love thy neighbor’ means love everybody.”
    She stopped his poised interruption with a withering contempt that actually burned him inside, somewhere. “Yes, Billy, I know that’s impossible. But what does it mean? It means there is some kind of love one can feel and can give to someone one finds unlovable.”

He slipped his arms around her from behind

    “That’s a lot of ones.” He slipped his arms around her belly from behind.
    She said that good work frees the mind from worry and stress, and this is one of the first lessons we find in Genesis. “Our purpose, or one of them, is to work. Work the land, and by extrapolation, build a house, build a city. Stay busy.”
    “And to sing,” Billy countered. “Birds sing in the morning, at sunset, and, some of them, all the night through. Do they sing for some purpose? Do they purposely try to delight me? I love to think that they do, but I know they do not.”
    “How enlightenedly anthropocentric of you, or rather, Billycentric. You can’t say whether they serve a purpose or not in singing, or flying, or shitting, because you can’t read their cute lil tiny bird brains.”
    This remark tickled her, so she laughed, managing to point a finger at Bill and to call him an idealist, and then to turn that same finger on her own heart and call it a realist.
    “Do I think myself a realist?” she sneered, from a lofty perch. “A realist finds many purposes in life that make it better for the community, and an idealist claims that every pointless birdbrained pursuit qualifies as purpose. Singing, dancing, sleeping, dreaming. Now, I recognize the need to take a break from work just as much as the next guy, but calling dancing or whistling the purpose of life is preposterous. Even for you.”
    “Making people smile and laugh? Giving them songs to sing, and to sing together, men and women, in a huge, public crowd? You are calling art worthless.”
    “No, I’m not. Am I? It does sound like I am, if you put it that way.”
    “I do so put it. What are we talking about? I tuned you out. Sorry, babe.”
    On Christmas Eve, they cracked the bubbly they’d been saving for New Year’s Eve, and watched a sixty-year-old cartoon called A Charlie Brown Christmas that they’d had memorized since before grade school, and the couple of miscreant wild seniors danced along with the little dancing peanuts who disregarded the Christmas play and their roles in it to groove to some jazz. As they danced, Billy whispered to his beloved bride that she was just as lovely to him as when she had turned sixteen. Then he ruined the moment by bursting into song: “When you were swee-ee-eet sixteee-een!”

He pretended to hold some mistletoe

    And Paula didn’t even call him a lying wastrel, but instead, fished out from somewhere in the secret tunnels of the refrigerator a second bottle of pink California Brut and Billy’s hand went up under her sweater and her tongue fished for some sweet spot in his ear, and he pretended to hold some mistletoe over her head and they climbed up the stairs giddier than Scrooge when there remained two full hours before Christmas Day.
    But in the pre-dawn darkness of New Year’s Eve, Billy watched instructional videos online with meticulous step-by-step instructions on how to make Eggs Benedict. He had studied this topic before. He knew the steps. What terrified him so? The béarnaise would be easy. Do you have milk? Do you have half and half? Yes, said the peek into the fridge. Shit! he exclaimed loudly to himself. We have no English muffin! Relax, said his better angels. Biscuits are better. We can whip those up in a jiff, or in a trice, whatever that may be. But Paula will whine that she wants the muffins. No, she’ll be more than happy that you made fresh biscuits to bring hot to her bed. Yes, true, thank you, said Billy, but then the better angels reminded him he had no Canadian bacon and was, therefore, well and truly screwed. In went his nose into the refrigerator’s secret hiding places again. Yes! He still had a wee bit of ham. Cool. No asparagus, but they had that all the time, anyway, the whole year ’round.
    So he served her breakfast in bed on the morning of New Year’s Eve, and she sampled his eggs and declared them “utterly marvelous, Dahlink!” And he thanked her for pretending to be gracious, even though they weren’t anywhere near the ideal of huevos benedictinos, and claimed he’d just been struck by a spontaneous fancy, a craving, and this was a mere trial run-through, and he’d be able to achieve perfection next time, having done a bit of grocery shopping.
    She made a big fuss, anyway, and, happily, his biscuits had turned out well, for once, and she praised him for them.
    Then, the next morning, she surprised him in bed with exquisite Eggs Benedict, yolks the supremest amount of runny, Canadian bacon, English muffins she’d pulled hot and fresh from her oven, a cheese sauce minus the floury taste his had boasted, a few green grapes on the side that she described as ironic.
    She ruined his year before it had even begun.

Copyright © 2023 by Pat Hamilton Pat Hamilton has written three novels, hundreds of songs, and a handful of book reviews for the papers. He taught College English for 30 years, which helps him blend popular and classic literature in his writing. As an Army brat, he traveled the USA and Europe before settling into the beauty of Tennessee, but the rock star he used to be still lives on inside him.