1369

a woman comes in. she is slouching, almost tottering, wiry hair in a
frizzy bloom, and carries a wrinkled hemp carrier bag. her slacks are
slackening and look like purple spandex. she casts a doubtful eye on
the lumpy-looking "croissants" and enormous cookies sealed away in the
refrigerated vitrine, barely dodges a sleekly coiffured blonde
marching towards the door with a carton of six pre-sugared-and-creamed
coffee cups of scalding plastic, and fairly tumbles onto a chair by
the table just next to the counter overlaid with recycled napkins,
Equal, and soy creamer. lucy tells me that the cafe loonies only come
in the mornings, during which she has had to smile sweetly at, but
finally fend off lonely but extremely garrulous war veterans, assorted
pierced goth-dykes, and social anthropology PhD students with freitag
messenger bags, powerbooks and teflon-coated fleeces. i only ever
come after lunch at which point the place fills up with more earnest
types toying with their hefty textbooks on clinical psychiatry, or
tort law, or feline veterinary science. but here she is, rummaging now
in her hemp bag for a book, looking certifiably odd but perhaps not
quite distinctly so, not by cambridge standards. this town is many
things; richly funded capital of the academic universe, preserve of
patrician glamor, crusty nest of lapsed hippies, extended-lease
enclosure for aging academics to stick around, graze on the outlying
pastures of their former farmstead, and then fade away.

the girl who makes the coffee hollers sweetly but spiritedly. "double
iced soy yerba wheatgrass latte for here?" what difference does it
make, one thinks, since one always gets a paper cup, whether it's to
go or for here. irregardless.

outside there are some plastic chairs and tables in dark green acetate
with their attachable and extensible umbrellas unattached. the al
fresco assembly tends to be almost exclusively slinky
dissertation-toting 20-something females pecking away at their
analyses of deleuzian film theory, or stubbly misemployed men in
slacks, straggly outerwear (even in summer), misshapen cloth-based
headgear, with leery gazes aimed at nobody in particular.