It was shortly after five o’clock on a recent weekday evening when a friend of mine pushed open the door of a rather nice Japanese restaurant. She had been eating early dinners with her children for years, and now she decided on impulse to treat herself while theywere at sports practice. Given the time, the place wasn’t busy. Two heavyset women sat at one end of the sushi bar. A blond mother and teenage daughter sat at the other end. Between the customers, on the far side of the counter, a chef moved around quietly and competently, his knife flashing as he worked.
My friend took a seat at one of the empty tables, and, after the waitress took her order, opened the detective novel she’d brought with her. It was nice to have a quiet moment, she thought.
But wow, it was quiet. Weirdly quiet. The minutes ticked by in silence. Other people were dining here, and not by themselves, as she was. Why was it so quiet, anyway?
My friend looked more closely at the two women perched on stools. They had evidently come to the restaurant together, but they were not talking.
One of them reached for a piece of sushi from the tray in front of her, and, without removing her eyes from her smart phone, slid the food into her mouth. The other had paused in her eating. Leaning forward, she was scrolling, absorbed. Her thumb mechanically stroked the surface of her phone.
Half a dozen stools away, the mother and daughter too were absorbed in their phones.
“California roll,” said the chef, sliding a small tray on to a raised area in front of the girl.
“Uh-huh,” she said, not looking up.
“Sashimi,” said the chef, as he served the mother.
“Thank you,” she said, not looking up.
My friend says she almost laughed out loud; it seemed bizarre that people would go out to supper together yet not engage one another. Her own food came, and she turned her attention to it and to her book. She might have been in a library, had it not been for the fragrance of spicy pickled ginger.
Silence. Chewing. More silence. Then, suddenly, someone spoke. It was the mother.
“Cool …” she said, in a voice of abstraction. My spy observed that the woman was looking at her phone.
“What?”
“Your school is doing a trip. To Copenhagen.”
There was a pause.
The mother spoke again, as if in a dream. “Do you want to go?”
“Sure,” said the languid daughter. After a moment, she asked, “Where’s Copenhagen?”
The mother didn’t answer at first. She was reading something.
“It’s uh … near Sweden. That area.”
“OK,” said the daughter mildly. “I’ll go.”
The two of them lapsed back into silence. The whole place lapsed back into silence. Some time later, silently, the two women paid their bill and left. One of them was still checking her phone as she went through the door.
By the time my amazed friend departed, the mother and daughter had finished eating. The waitress had served them tea. Two cups of it steamed in front of them. They were still on their phones.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
