Martha’s Diner | Hot Plate for a Cold Day

It’s -16 at 6 a.m. I’m kneeling on the kitchen floor, setting up a portable space heater to blast hot air beneath the sink. Our cold water pipe froze, despite the cabinet doors having been left open overnight. My husband heads off for work and comes back after an hour because none of the equipment will start. On a lark, we decide to drive to Martha’s Diner for breakfast; might as well, as we wait for things to warm up. I scour a little porthole through the rime on the inside of the windshield. The snow crunches and barks as my husband walks around jabbing and chiseling the outside windows. Soon we’re jolting down the rutted iron road, past the stark open fields, headed north toward the diner.

  Martha’s Diner hunches beside Route 14 in the lee of Jay Peak and just downslope of the Coventry Landfill, which is why if you sit at the counter, you may bump elbows with a skier, a trash hauler, or both (a skiing trash hauler). This morning, the parking lot’s mostly empty, except for a dump truck, a fully loaded log truck and a pickup truck with a bed full of sand. Now it’s warmed up to -6. We park, and on our way in we pass the hulk of an old payphone booth and a cow watering bowl sticking out at hip height, where you’re meant to stub your cigarette. As long as we’re stumbling through the negative temperatures, we might as fall back into the past as well. The diner was delivered to Coventry in the 1970s. But inside, the shiny aluminum décor takes you back even a few decades further.

It’s pretty quiet. A few men sit at the counter, and a couple occupy one of the booths. Nobody’s talking. The TV in the corner blares cheering hoopla from “The Price Is Right.” I already know what I want, so I watch a contestant guess incorrectly (the candy costs more than the body wash) while my husband puts cream in his coffee and decides to go with the omelet over the pancakes. Dorris, our waitress, says this is the lull. “It gets pretty quiet right after Christmas, then people get their taxes done and start coming back in again in February.”

A man at the counter settles up for his two eggs, sunnyside. The contestants on TV clap passionately and Dorris comments that the new host isn’t as good as Bob Barker as she refills the sugars jars. Pretty soon, we’re the only ones left in the place named for the owner’s mother, Martha, who died in 2006. We pay and head out to start the car. By now it’s inching toward 10 a.m. and 9 degrees above, the friendlier side of zero.