Nymph on a Swing

B&J's Restaurant was a tiny square of a building about the size of a Waffle House, set in the middle of an asphalt parking lot with no shade in sight for fifty yards or so.

Across the street, in a neighborhood of small ranch houses with crepe myrtles blooming in their yards and trees showing down shade, a man was moving his lawn in the relative cool of morning, meticulously trimming the grass at the base of an old tree trunk where once a tree grew so large that it must have hung over the street.

B&J's served up heaping plates full of hash browns and buttermilk pancakes and bacon and thick slabs of ham and over-medium eggs. On the ceiling, between the water-stained tiles there were high capacity AC vents, a dozen or more in one tiny glass-enclosed room, suggesting what summer is like in central Oklahoma.

And on the wall above the table where two boys sat struggling to finish the breakfasts they were served, there was a sun-faded poster print of a brown-haired man in a loose tunic and a yellow-haired nymph in a filmy sheet that left little to the imagination. Her head rested on his muscular shoulder.

A woman and a man sat with the boys. Sometimes she leaned her head on his shoulders but not this morning. She stood up, leaving him and the two boys sitting.

It's time to go, she said. I'm getting up to pay.

This is what they don't tell you in pictures like that, the man said to the boys, pointing to the nymph in the swing, smiling at the woman who was making her way to the cash register.

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B&J's Restaurant, Muskogee OK

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