The Tuesday Picnic

A picnic is better on a Tuesday in the second half of May than it is on any Saturday the month can offer.

On a Tuesday, with the clock running

The park at the hour when the evening meal is normally being eaten indoors: a scatter of cars in the lot with their hatches up, one after another, settling for the same reason. The grass is the tall green of May, mowed twice in the week and already knee-high at the edges where the mower swung wide. The light comes at the trees sideways and lays the shadows out long across the grass. The air is the particular May air of the last two weeks of the month, the one that carries lilac and the first cut hay in the same breath.

The supper is assembled, not planned. Leftover chicken from the Sunday before, the heel of a loaf, a jar of pickles down to the last third, a deli tub of potato salad bought on a whim because the line moved fast. The blanket is an old quilt off the back of a couch. The cooler is a canvas tote. The table is the hood of the car, still warm. There is a kind of honesty in a picnic with no picnic equipment: nobody is performing the idea of a picnic, so the whole thing rests on the evening itself.

And the evening will not hold still. Everyone at the blanket is aware that the night has obligations waiting — a bath, a book, an alarm going off before the sun is well up. The meal therefore has a pulse. The chicken is eaten off the bone while standing, the bread torn instead of sliced, the salad eaten out of the lid. Because there is no time to let the afternoon go slack, the food is given actual attention. The light is leaving and everyone watches it leave, eating faster than tastes allow, but tasting it anyway. There is a scarcity to the hour that a Saturday has no way to produce.

There is also the emptiness. The swings are still and the slide has no queue. The little-league diamond sits with its bases raked smooth and no one running them. What company exists keeps to itself — a man on a bench with a newspaper, a bicyclist doing a loop of the path. On a Saturday this park belongs to everyone; on a Tuesday it has been left empty for the one family at the table, as if the town had granted the hour between work and night to anyone who thought to take it.

But the weekend has the whole day

The Saturday picnic in May does have something the Tuesday cannot touch, and it is not the food. It is the day behind it. A Saturday meal outdoors begins in the morning, with a real errand: the market, the deli counter, the argument about which direction to drive. The potato salad is then made from actual potatoes, the chicken actually fried, the blanket a real blanket kept in the trunk for exactly this purpose, the cooler a proper one with proper ice bought at the proper place. None of it is pretending. A day-long picnic is a feast; the Tuesday one is a chicken leg eaten leaning against the car.

The weekend brings the people, too. On a Saturday in late May the park fills with the first crowd of the year — a birthday pavilion, a family reunion spread on the big lawn, the graduates in their robes being photographed. Everyone is still pale from winter and sits on the grass with the novelty of it, like coming above ground. That assembly is a sight that belongs to late May alone. The Tuesday picnic proves nothing to anyone but itself.

But the crowd is exactly the complicating thing. The Saturday picnic has to be planned around other families' plans: the table claimed before the lot fills, the radios all playing at once, the day stretching so long that the meal unravels into napping, then into packing up, then into a low argument about when to leave. The long day is the long day. The Tuesday version fails to be any of that. It is over before it can go wrong, and the reason it goes right is that it does not have time to go wrong.

So the weekend has the day, and the Tuesday has the hour. The long weekend that closes the month is the official picnic, the one the month is organized toward. But the Tuesday one, eaten at a rate that made the chicken taste like the only thing in the world, is the month being used right then, in the time it is given, rather than banked for a weekend that may not hold.

The proof is in the leaving. Back in the car: the tote emptied, the quilt folded with grass stuck to it, the last of the light running along the roofs of the parked cars, the park returning to the quiet it kept all day. The lot lights come on with no one there to need them. The lilacs go on holding the air. The Tuesday picnic leaves no trace at all — except that the car pulls out of the lot slower than it needs to, with the windows down.