I wished for a moment that Tom had a sister whom I could fuck from behind and tell him about it. The closest thing was his mother, Mother Veronica, a woman so apparently cold-blooded I wished nothing more for her than that somewhere, sometimes, her husband Harvey succeeded in holding her in whatever way she privately hoped to be held. I stopped my tears by imagining Veronica and Harvey snuggling, a ridiculous word for Tom’s mother, snuggling with all their might, under Harvey’s valuable Hans Holbein the Younger.
Another man, or any woman, would have asked me just then What are you thinking about and I would have said Your mother snuggling and we would have been able to return to our noodles in good faith but Tom in those blank moments asks himself what he is thinking about.
The waiter came by and refilled our waters. Tom abruptly grasped the bowl of orange wonton crackers, threw them down his throat, and then asked the waiter to bring more of them. The waiter laughed because he’s a nice guy. I slid the rest of the sesame noodles onto my plate, as if we were in a race or interested in wastelessness. The waiter brought more crackers, took the empty plate. For a moment there was nothing in the center of the table and we both looked at the brown wood.
“Do you feel any guilt?” I asked the table.
“She started it,” he said. “More to the point have you ever felt any guilt? You’ve been, what, casting spells against this marriage for years. You probably have more to do with it than I do.”
I rehearsed the work Mishti and I had done Halloween night. I wondered if Tom fucking Joan away from Barry counted—lemon balm, clover, ginger, High John the Conqueror, rowan, wahoo, Winter’s bark—as “success.”
The wood turned, as I stared at it, into an oval of string beans, chili oil, no pork, for some reason Tom the Uber Goy doesn’t like pork. The beans steamed great Greek columns of steam. Tom crunched a wonton cracker and I lifted my plate to my mouth and began perversely licking the peanut sauce from it until it was clean. Then the beans were cooler and we could begin.
Tom took one, one bean, with his fingers, and put it on his plate. I did the same.
“Tell me about the Captivity hanging,” I said, my pawn to E5.
“Well Joan was right—they’re not thistles they’re bistort.” Somehow he had already taken my pawn. He took three more beans between two fingers and dropped them onto his plate. Then he arranged the four beans into a hash sign. I grabbed a whole handful of beans, my palm smeared with a million oils, and dropped them onto my plate like pickup sticks. I built a double hash: four on top of four, the beginning of a Jenga tower. I looked up and Tom had built his tower three stories high. I pulled a bean from the bottom of the serving plate and ate it.
He chose to use a fork for the first bean he actually ate. Tom could be so quietly and deeply critical when he disapproved, and he disapproved of such eclectic and unpredictable things, I’d always been nervous about what he judged in me and resentful that he should be able to judge with such force. The tidy mercy of a breakup is how immediately the judgments, and the fear of judgments, evaporate. I could eat with my fingers again, who cared. All I wanted to do now was build a bean tower higher than his, and I knew I could.
“Now that you’ve correctly identified the bordering herbs around the unicorn’s feet, they have no choice but to name you a Master of Medieval and Renaissance Studies,” I said. “You get your diploma when, June?”
Tom nodded and then began simply and mellifluously humming “Beauty School Dropout” at me as he stacked and stacked his beans. I looked into his eyes and wiped the red chili oil from my fingers under my right eye and my left, the most glistening, fragrant war paint. You would have leaned across the table and licked it off me. I know you would. You like living. Tom reached for his fork, the fork of civilization, and ate from the serving plate.
CASHEW
Do not eat a raw cashew do not eat a raw red kidney bean do not eat elderberry or a potato do not eat the rind of a mango do not put a hydrangea flower in your mouth and a daffodil will induce severe drooling and aloe the healer will make you convulse.
Cashew shells and poison ivy are covered in the same oil, urushiol, if it touches you it spreads a rash through your armpits, buttocks, groin. The nuts you love are fine but they’ve been boiled out of their shells. To come into any contact with the uncooked shell is to fall into the poison ivy patch at the side of the Appalachian Trail.
Kidney beans house phytohemagglutinin. The elderberry carries cyanide. The potato, uncooked and exposed to sunlight, is loaded with solanine poison. A potato that’s begun to turn green is remorselessly, ferociously toxic.
I don’t understand how it occurred to humans to cook the inedible into the edible. Why we peel the mango. Why daffodils go on the vase on the table and not the plate, why aloe is softened into a goo, where we found as a species the courage to say this bad thing can be made good again, can be made, furthermore, delicious!
It’s religious, it’s a very small, very daily resurrection.
It’s a courtship of the sinister.
Whose shell would you boil off and what’s the flavor of their inner nut?
Joan have I been itching from the oil of your outsides and has Tom made it through to your safe meat?
WAFFLES
Mishti had invited me to a pancake breakfast with Carlo because she wanted me to get to know him better, but after twenty minutes Carlo hadn’t yet come.
We were sitting at Sarabeth’s on Amsterdam, which seemed that morning to be an odd place for anyone to sit voluntarily. It felt like crouching in the hot insides of a Macy’s Parade float sponsored by Pillsbury.
Mishti needed a way to get the meal started, in Carlo’s absence or to avenge Carlo’s absence, so she ordered something from the “Fruity Beginnings” section of the menu that cost thirteen dollars. I realized that breakfast was on Carlo. The empty floral-upholstered chair became at once the most substantial presence at the table.
I leaned back into my own upholstery in silence because I wanted to tell Mishti about you and Tom and I couldn’t. What confused me most was that I didn’t know how she’d respond. Would it mainly surprise her that Tom did something? The funny little verbs for fucking filled me like zoo animals: did, banged, boned—would she protest the grading advantage? Would she laugh at Barry? Would she marry Barry herself?
I wondered if she could hear my thoughts (or indeed if she had always been able to hear my thoughts, if our friendship had been founded on that kind of channel) when she volunteered, “The thing that makes it easy is that Barry will never actually leave Joan. And Joan’s too deep in the logistics of Barry’s financial life to leave him, either.”
I was grateful for my previous silence then because it wasn’t weird to stay silent, to betray nothing on my face. Carlo rushed in.
“Mendelson,” he said, as he took his seat. “Mendelson,” he repeated.
Mishti had just finished her berry bowl and she glared at Carlo while licking the curve of her spoon. Carlo had apparently exerted himself—a thin mist of sweat, the most sweat I could imagine his body embarrassing itself by producing, mustached his upper lip. He knew it was there and he wiped it.
“He needs me, day and night, and I can’t find a way to say no to him.”
The bafflement about Carlo was that he really was excellent, his excellence was pristine, and he was sexy too, and the fact that I didn’t appreciate him was my fault.
He ordered a lemon ricotta waffle and it came instantly, as if a certain number of lemon ricotta waffles were ordered each morning and they had them ready to deploy. Mishti and I had both ordered omelets that came out a minute afterward.
“Tell Nell about Bermuda,” Carlo cut his waffle along its grid lines, “did you tell her about Bermuda? Mishti and I are going to Bermuda.”
“For Christmas,” said Mishti, dutifully, as if she hadn’t already told me. She didn’t touch the eggs in front of her,
she wanted to watch our interaction closely, she wanted to ensure its success.
“I’ve heard.”
Carlo reached out across the table and took Mishti’s hand. He smiled so wide it was actually beautiful and luminous. He couldn’t wait to go to Bermuda with Mishti. He looked at her with eyes that said You’re hot and smart and he looked at me and said that he loved dolphins, and that there’s supposed to be an incredible aquarium.
“I want you to put all the textbooks away and relax,” he told her, holding her hand. “It’s going to be our real vacation.”
Mishti smiled a sincere and bashful smile because she has never been encouraged to relax in her entire overachieving life and finals are coming up and the truth is she’s exhausted.
We ate in silence for a little while then. Carlo finished his waffle. He broke the silence to say he loved it. “Great fucking waffle.” I finished my omelet and loved it too, but I never don’t love an egg, no matter what you do to it. “Love a motherfucking omelet!” I offered, to be a good sport, but then I felt very shy and sorry, and started thinking about Tom’s mother and my fucking his imaginary sister. Mishti didn’t eat. I wished she would take a bite but she was trying to think of something to say, something that would open Carlo up and reveal him to me.
I, in counter-loyalty, wanted Carlo to see that Mishti would never fully reveal herself to him, that the reflection of himself he saw in her was the excellent surface of a pool, a pool whose floor was irregular and too deep to see.
“Well, Joan’s distracted too,” I said, to remind him that he had been late, that Mishti and I talked about things he didn’t know.
Mishti straightened her neck and said, “You’re kidding.” I wasn’t sure how much she had understood. She looked over my head at nothing, as if looking out a window, and seemed overtaken by total disgust—I hadn’t included disgust as one of the reaction options, but Mishti no longer seemed to be breathing in or out.
A waiter passed behind our table and Carlo spun around and stopped him and asked for the check, simultaneously handing over his credit card. During the exchange Mishti whispered to me, “Who?” and I shrugged and told her, “Tom,” as if it weren’t a very big deal.
“But she’s . . .” Mishti was struggling with something I couldn’t identify. “But she’s so old,” Mishti concluded, a little too loudly. Carlo turned back around and faced us. Mishti kept talking: “Why would she be the one he wants?”
I hadn’t expected this particular grievance. I thought Mishti would mock you for cradle robbing, or mock Tom for ladder climbing, or mock sexual intercourse itself for being such a pathetic human activity, but she seemed utterly and specifically disappointed that Tom had chosen you. I’d never known Tom’s choices to matter to her at all, one way or another. Her disappointment gave your fucking a legitimacy I hadn’t previously given it.
She said, “The Joan epidemic! It was bad enough coming from you—you had to teach it to Tom? What’s wrong with both of you?”
I said, “Sloppy Cupid?”
Carlo’s phone, which had been lying face up beside his water glass, began to buzz and Barry’s pumpkin face filled up the screen. BARRY, it buzzed, BARRY. BARRY.
My eyes shot up at Mishti stupidly, instinctively, my very pupils repeating BARRY, BARRY at her.
Mishti gathered her entire soul in the pit of her stomach, I watched every light retreat from her eyes and relocate, she became a tough piece of rock inside herself and her flesh became irrelevant. She had nothing to hide. She hid herself. She squinted and looked like a superhero.
“Babe,” Carlo said to her, “Babe listen I gotta go.”
HONEY
She told Barry to put it between her breasts.
She felt its weight thunk down.
She wanted his heat.
He gave her his finger.
He denied her his fist.
He wanted her heaven.
She wanted it to take her whole body up.
She wanted to take everything.
She told him harder.
He tried.
He could make her come sometimes and sometimes he couldn’t wait.
He gave her everything.
She wanted control.
She took control.
She opened completely.
She took everything.
She told me it never hurt.
She told me he could be crazy tender.
YOGURT
I stood behind the bar pouring an old man a long Jack and thinking about everyone doing each other, everyone getting it done, doing, done, and what could I do, I’d over-frozen my monkshood seeds and my castor hadn’t bloomed. I couldn’t buy any more seeds, I needed to use my next shifts to pay Tom back for lunch and probably other things, years of miscellaneous expenses I couldn’t remember, I suddenly wanted to clear my accounts with him, to clear myself of him, and to get my own groceries. I pretend I don’t need groceries but I’m going to develop early-onset cataracts for lack of protein. When I imagine winning the lottery now I imagine Greek yogurt: for life! I don’t even want a flavor. I want so much full-fat original Fage that I could swim laps in it.
One thing you wouldn’t expect is that you can use Greek yogurt as a sauce for tortellini. I’d even call it the best of all possible sauces.
Joan I’m not getting anywhere. Joan you probably hate Greek yogurt, it probably isn’t even really Greek. Joan why are you sleeping with Tom? Why are you a living creature who needs to sleep at all? How am I supposed to sleep when I have such a library of heinous imagery to project for myself on my eyelids? In every eyelid movie Tom’s long hair is brushing gray paint up the length of your back. I get up from the floor and squint at my flowerpots. I’ve planted my stupid frozen monkshood but everyone will tell you they’re touchy the first year (“finicky about germination!” “don’t expect them all to germinate!” “don’t panic!” “dammit!”) and my hopes are low. They could grow to be four feet tall if they grew and blossomed, and so much blue would be a richness, but I need their roots most of all and if they don’t send out roots this year, they don’t.
I’m betting on the castor. The first tiny seedlings have come up from one of the two seeds, can you believe it, you screwed my ex-boyfriend but I got a castor plant to grow in December. These so-called ornamental breeds throw up seedlings in one to three weeks and mine, because they are mine, took five weeks but I’ll take it. We are all very good at taking.
I just want to show that it’s possible to stop something from happening. I know I didn’t stop you and Tom from happening. I—I want to show that anything can change its course. To reset something’s destination from this to that, such that even when it’s at this, it isn’t there yet. The aconite and the ricin are already here in my apartment doing what they think they’re built to do, being bad, and I’m trying to teach them that they have other options. They could become architects. Schoolteachers. They’re city kids but they could live in the country if they wanted to. They’d learn how. They’d start hiking. On the weekends they’d churn butter.
If ricin is defined by its toxicity, what will define a nontoxic or detoxified ricin? It gets to be a whole new soul. It gets to like living. Joan I don’t blame you for changing your destination. But even you, right now, in the height of your abandon, can’t think of Tom as there.
NUTS
Your email said the grant would cover six months of research with some drool-bait adverb like “generously” or “comfortably.” I deleted it and then permanently deleted it like a deranged person because I was reading it too many times.
I guess it’s a relief that the National Science Foundation also finds you worthy of recognition. Mishti had started to convince me that my admiration was misplaced; it isn’t misplaced. You are 63,446 dollars good, Award #1808234, Original Start Date: December 15, Projected Duration: 6 months. The funding council unanimousl
y wagers that your pollen-pistil work is going to help out our country’s bees.
We met on the steps of the library because it was snowing and you wanted to be snowed on. You were completely bundled, black hat, black scarf, black gloves, black boots, but rising up toward your jaw, out from under the top of your scarf, I saw, very purple, a hickey.
A hickey, Joan.
You wanted to be snowed on.
The first time you allowed your eyes to meet my eyes you looked like a woman in love. You, too, are a deranged person. You looked at me with a peaked, frantic, paranoid flush as if the snowflakes could hear us, as if your dry skin had turned into a tarp of secrets.
The first thing you wanted to know was how often Mishti saw Barry. There was something darkly enlightened about the way your husband’s infidelity wounded you not at all, and only gave you the thrilling gift of your own previously inconceivable infidelity. I told you once a week, though I no longer knew if that was true. “Good,” you said, “good, but let’s ramp it up a little,” and I told you to get a goddamn grip.
“What?”
“Isn’t there some orderly way to do this?” I said, pathetically. “Do what?” you said. “Destroy yourself.” You laughed. “I just want a little more time with him.”
“So actually exit your marriage.”
“I don’t want that much time with him.”
“Gross.”
“Toward Tom I feel only, but pure, lust.”
“I don’t think that’s what Mishti is feeling.”
“I can’t imagine what Mishti is feeling,” you said, “Barry’s revolting.”
I looked at you then as if you had been lying to me for five years, which you had.
You felt the very hot wrath in me and burst into an enormous smile, the biggest I’d ever seen grace your face, and you said, “I can hire an assistant, Nell.”
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