The Jause

The story of Grandma Melanie’s broken-hearted bohemian painter-lover was one of the stories Fritz and his friends told like mantras as they sat at home in Rego Park or Flushing or in the Giant Pickle Diner, stories about people from the Other World,  the  world  before the war, about thwarted destinies, eternal searches, miraculous recoveries, relationships lost and found, or found and lost, people who appeared in the hallways of old-age homes right here  in Queens, or  at  the edge of  the Grand Canyon, in a restaurant in Florence, or at an airport on the way home to Australia.

They told these stories during the jause, the Austrian afternoon gathering of infinite sweet-and-salty little plates, over coffee cake, pound cake, giant stale Danish, wet prunes and  fruit compote, strange deviled eggs, mixtures called “salads” with mayonnaise and chopped pickles and minced cold cuts, sugar-free mocha cakes, coral-pink sauces and trembling gelatinous mysteries I refused to eat, and weak coffee from the Endless Coffee coffee pot, or from the big percolator, or staub, (dust), which was my name for the off-brand instant coffee they pronounced acceptable, or tea from teabags of various provenances.

“What, did you carry this box of teabags with you when you crossed the Red Sea?”

“That tea is perfectly good!”

“Do you want real coffee or staub?”

“As long as it’s hot. And put some milk in it.”

“Do you mean real milk or fake milk?”

“As long as it’s white.