The Restaurant Outburst

The Restaurant Outburst is the scene in which Nightbitch's carefully maintained facade of domestic contentment finally shatters in public. At a dinner with her graduate-school friends, the women she privately calls The Artists, she rises from her chair mid-conversation, tips the table, sends silverware clattering to the floor, and spills water into the lap of the working mother. She roars, halting all chatter in the restaurant and plunging it into an eerie, stunned silence. It is the first time her transformation has erupted into a social setting, and it announces that the animal inside her can no longer be contained by politeness or self-control.

The Accumulated Rage Behind the Outburst

The outburst does not come from nowhere. It is the culmination of months of suppressed fury, stored, as the narrative puts it, in the puckered dough of her thighs, the sad little paunch hanging around her middle, the dark-brown circles framing her eyes, and the joints of her fingers that had begun to hurt whenever she was tired or angry or sad, which was always. The rage tidal-waved back into her during the dinner, triggered by her friends' self-involved banter, which left her feeling that she could no longer even be a part of their conversation. She recognized that her friends had meant no insult, had not even really been thinking of her at all, but it was precisely this lack of consideration that wounded her most. She returned to those horrible thoughts of her husband sipping coffee in a quiet shop while leisurely perusing a periodical, to her long days of trains and failed naps and encouraged poops in the potty and train tracks and more trains. She saw herself on the verge of throwing a temper tantrum much in the same way her son tossed himself to the living-room floor, kicking and clawing, injuring himself in the process, and then crying even harder. She could not, she would not, stop it. It was either blasting the anger out or turning the anger in, and she was not willing to keep it there any longer. She would not shred herself up inside, would not churn her guts to acid, would not grind her teeth in her sleep or cause her neck to go out, for the sake of being civil and mature and understanding and levelheaded.

The Eruption and the Shout

The trigger is the videographer's joke. Just as she says, "Look, I realize I joke about being a narcissist, but I think I actually am a narcissist," Nightbitch rises all at once from her chair, tipping the table and sending the silverware clattering to the floor, a glass onto its side, and the water therein onto the lap of the working mother, whose eyes widen and mouth forms a silent O. With a great roar, she halts all chatter in the restaurant and plunges it into an eerie, stunned silence. There she stands, panting, so winded already is she from her rage. She growls at the women, then barks and barks and barks, closing her eyes and forcing the animal sounds from herself, her ab muscles contracting violently, her pelvic floor heaving from years of diligent Kegel exercises. Then she yells at no one in particular, "I could crush a walnut with my vagina!" It is then that the people around her come into sharp focus: her friends seated across from her at the table, one of them shielding her eyes as if she were looking directly at the sun, the other with a slight smile creeping across her lips. An old man at the booth behind them sits with his mouth agape. A small girl in the next booth cowers into her mother's ribs, and her mother strokes her hair and shushes her and whispers comforting things as she glares at Nightbitch.

The Flight and the Stolen Burger

Instantly mortified, Nightbitch begins to sweat profusely, descends into an openmouthed pant, and has the fleeting thought that perhaps she is now in the throes of an early menopause. Then, despite her best attempts, she begins to cry hot angry tears as she collects her bag and her coat. The working mother tries to say something in a soothing, low tone, but Nightbitch holds up a hand and says, "Don't," then monstered out of the restaurant in a lumbering walk, more tornado than human bipedal propulsion. She surges toward the door and disturbs everything in her wake, blowing napkins off tables and overturning cups and tripping and stumbling and snorting. Her goal is to get out of the place before the transformation really takes hold, but she cannot resist the smell of red meat after what seems a lifetime spent chewing kale. She stops at a two-seater high-top by the door, where a young couple sits, the woman with a sparkling ring on her left hand, bright with love. The young woman leans back and stifles a scream as Nightbitch grabs her half-eaten burger from her plate, rips a bite from it, then drops the bun, the lettuce and onion and tomato, to the floor as she exits the dining area. She shoves the meat patty into her maw and chews and salivates as she surges away, down the street. She lopes through puddle-strewn alleyways and, once out of downtown, crashes through shrubs, wanting not to be seen, to stay in the shadows, where she can pant and snort and sob.

The Aftermath in the Woods

She points herself toward the nature preserve, toward the dark and comforting woods tucked right into the middle of town, to cry and snarl in the darkness beneath the trees, cry and muck about in the tendril of stream that flows toward her neighborhood eventually, if she follows it long enough, which is what she decides to do as she stands there letting the icy water numb her sore, bleeding feet. She has lost her sandals somewhere along the way, and the water feels so good she lets out a little guttural howl. Snot drips from her nose to intermingle with hot, dirty tears. She careens in the stream, pushing over fallen logs and pulling shrubs from the banks as she searches for something to steady her. It is her goal to make havoc, to leave a mess, to wrest from her form all of the rage and sadness and insanity of these years since her son was born. The scene echoes an earlier moment of animal release, when she crouched by the side of her neighbor Stanley's house and took a monstrous shit, clawing at the grass and ripping up clods of turf, kicking fresh grass seed onto the sidewalk. Both moments share the same impulse: to shit where she pleased, to not be needed by any living thing, and to be only a body in motion in the dark. The narrative reflects that she could not have known that what she had needed all along, more than medical attention or psychotherapy, more than choosing happiness or adjusting her attitude, was to sink her sharp teeth into something living and bloody and feel its essence drain away until it was simply a rotting and unmoving thing. The outburst is the public admission of this need, the moment she stops pretending that structure, a schedule, or the mantra that happiness is a choice, a phrase her husband offered before leaving again at the end of a forty-eight-hour stretch at home, could ever address what is actually wrong.

The Significance of the Outburst

The Restaurant Outburst is the hinge between Nightbitch's private, domestic animality and her public, theatrical monstrosity. It is the first time she performs her transformation before an audience, however unwilling, and it foreshadows the later performances in which she will deliberately stage her animal self before the mothers in the backyard and, eventually, on a wooden stage before a paying audience. The scene also establishes the pattern of her violence: the stolen burger, ripped from a stranger's plate, anticipates the later killing of the cat, when she plunges a knife into its chest and shakes the body back and forth until a sharp snap and the body relaxes into ultimate resignation, blood flung to every corner of the kitchen. The outburst is the moment the rage she has been storing in her body, in her thighs and her paunch and the circles under her eyes, finally finds its way out, and it is the moment she stops being the mother and wife who tries to take her husband's suggestion to heart and becomes, instead, the creature who listens only to the mandates of her body.