To the Lighthouse

When I look at this menu from the late 1960s, I can’t help but imagine what it would’ve been like if the English writer Virginia Woolf, and her husband Leonard, had lived in Miami at that time...

Miami Beach, 
 ca. 1968

“Yes, it’s fine if we go tomorrow,” Ginny called out from the kitchen. “But there’s no sense in us getting there early. The place is always packed at this time of year.” To her husband, these words conveyed a feeling of annoyance, as if the matter was not really settled. 

Each year on their anniversary, as if drawn by some need, they returned to The Lighthouse, where, amid the ritual of dinner, they revisited the joys and tribulations of their marriage. Feelings of irritation turned to anger, as he brooded over her remoteness. Had a firearm or a cudgel been within reach, who knows what might have happened next? Such were the extremes of his emotions at moments like this. 

“Then it’s settled. But wait, you’ll see; it won’t be crowded,” Len asserted, pouring himself a measure of a Scotch. 

“Yes, it will be fine,” she called back, not knowing he had slipped out of earshot, having stepped out into the backyard to breathe in the balmy night air.

When they arrived the next evening, the manager greeted them as if they were old friends. Restaurants are curious places, Ginny thought, as they made their way through the bustling dining room. Where do all of these snowbirds come from? Ginny and Len hadn't always been as well off as the well-heeled tourists who flocked to this seafood restaurant on a palm-fringed inlet in Miami Beach. In some years, it was a wonder that they had made it there at all, even though they lived only a twenty minute away, gliding over the bridges that spanned the intracoastal waterway north of Biscayne Bay.

Len ordered a whiskey sour for her; a medium dry vodka martini for himself. “Shaken, not stirred,” he joked, flirting with the waitress.

What he and Ginny needed was a real Florida honeymoon, just the ticket for their twenty-third year, he silently pondered, as he opened the large menu. The prospect of an ordinary dinner suddenly put him in a pensive mood. Like a mediocre work of art, everyday food depressed him. 

“Dinner should be good tonight,” he said, setting his menu aside. 

Oh, there he goes again, Ginny thought, momentarily distracted from the appetizers she was perusing. His pretensions always missed the point. Just the idea of an ordinary meal disheartened him, she knew, but could she give him what he really wanted; what every man wants—reassurance. No, she wouldn’t; she couldn’t. Anniversaries are just moments in time, she reasoned, marking the stages of a friendship. She looked up from her menu and smiled. Ginny had done her usual trick; she had been been nice. Even the best marriages are frail things, she knew. People always find themselves slowly drifting apart. 

They no longer gave the dinner parties for six or eight friends that were so much fun, she reflected, as her eyes skimmed the page, lingering on one entrée, then another. She and Len now hosted large cocktail-and-buffet parties, paying off all their social obligations in a single stroke. Life in the suburbs was monotonous, confined by nonsensical rituals like designating Saturday as steak night. There was a nearby Chinese restaurant, but that was about it, unless you counted the country club—its dues a constant strain on their budget. They could always drive up to the Mai-Kai in Ft. Lauderdale, she reasoned, or go to one of the new Cuban restaurants in Riverside, not that they would ever venture into Little Havana, as that neighborhood had recently become known. 

The sun was setting when their drinks were served. “I will start with the seafood cocktail, and then have the red snapper,” Ginny said, tucking her reading glasses in her purse and snapping it shut. She removed the paper umbrella from her whiskey sour and took a sip. The clouds were turning pink against the darkening wisteria sky. So this is marriage, she mused, a man and a woman looking at a menu, deciding what to eat.