“You had moved to DC for your internship, and we had known each other in college, and the plan was to go to lunch and hang out for the afternoon. You didn’t call it a date. I wore an old T-shirt and ratty jeans. We had worked together in a grungy takeout pizza restaurant where everyone always showed up in their sloppiest clothes. You lacked direction. You wore battered work boots I scorned for being hideous. You fought with your father, who phoned the pizza restaurant late at night, during cleanup, and your face turned grim. ‘Uh-huh,’ you repeated in a monotone, ‘uh-huh, uh-huh.’
“I got confused by the quadrants on Capitol Hill, not understanding that 500 A Street SE is nowhere near 500 A Street NE. You were perched on the brick steps outside, about to leave when I trudged up forty-five minutes late. Hot, muggy. My face all pink, all sweat. You scoffed at my old clothes the way I had scoffed at your boots. You wore a clean T-shirt, clean jeans: no frayed seams, no holes. Chuck Taylor high-tops, black with red laces. We hugged. It had been two years since we’d seen each other. You had found enough direction to leave our college town to go teach English in Japan. Back then, everyone without direction went to teach English in Japan.
“Lunch was at a Greek restaurant you knew. We split the check. I ordered grape leaves—dolmades—which I had never eaten before, and I admired the tight, tidy rolls lined up across the plate. We walked to the National Gallery, talking about music and restaurants and people we had both known who were doing interesting and not so interesting things. Tramps like us, I thought.
“Picasso and Braque, a special exhibit I had already seen earlier in the summer, with a different man who also wanted to be more than friends—but with you, the paintings were refreshed—fractured guitars, chunked-up women, violins. You read each plaque and stared hard, wanting to see how the artist saw. (Later, I joked that this was the only art museum visit you initiated.)
“Outside, we bought red, white, and blue popsicles at a truck parked at the curb of Pennsylvania Avenue. We sat on a low cement ledge outside the museum, letting our tongues stain purple, letting tourists in fanny packs and tennis shoes blur by, and you suddenly asked what I was looking for in a man. I had a list to reel through. All girls back then had checklists for focus, to keep from wasting time on guys who didn’t match our exacting criteria. I reeled through my list: funny, confident, smart, kind, must love Springsteen, and the rest, down to favorite pizza toppings and not a morning person. You smiled, the edges of your teeth sky blue. ‘Good luck finding all that,’ you said.
“I said, ‘I think I’m describing you.’ My realization and those words came at the same time, and you said, ‘Yep,’ leaning in to kiss me.
“Oh, wow, I thought, wow, oh, wow. Like seeing Springsteen from the second row, his finger pointing at me. What my life was missing was passion. Was you.
“The Greek restaurant is closed; the truck that sells popsicles sells sushi now; the Picassos and the Braques hang on other walls; our group houses have disbanded, the men and women now in their forties and fifties, in the suburbs. Yes, Springsteen still tours, but Clarence is dead.
“I can write all these things—these stories and these words—and I can tell the truth or I can tell it slant but you’re not here to read what I’ve written. To add a detail, to tell me I got it all wrong or remind me what I missed, or to laugh. You’re not here to say, ‘I remember those days and how we were and us.’ You’re not here to say, ‘I remember you. I remember who you were back then.’
“And so it turns out that what I’ve been writing about all along has been myself.
“How embarrassing.”
Write about love. The man with the shaved head reads about his dog. The woman who knits reads about the birth of her twin granddaughters. Jinx smiles through everyone’s critique, her hair tame and calm, the phone silently tucked into her purse, unnecessary. It’s as if a storm has sailed far out to sea. We like everything that everyone wrote and find much to admire in what The Writer has accomplished with the words on the page.
The young man with Y’s name does not sit directly across from me. He plops down in the desk next to a young Indian woman with olive skin and waves of dark hair like a cape all the way down her back. She wears thin gold bracelets that tinkle when she talks with her hands, which she often does; she’s beautiful and expressive and makes smart comments. She is twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four. Her voice is soft, and the group falls silent when she speaks or reads, leaning close to catch each word. Even the man with the shaved head sets aside his Starbucks to listen. Her essay is about a tree that she watched through a bedroom window of the house in India where her grandmother lives, where she visited every summer when she was growing up, and how the tree moved and whispered to her, how she felt the tree understood her sadness about her lost father, and how when she is sad now, late at night, she closes her eyes and feels her hand pressing against the rough bark of that tree.
When she finishes reading, a tear drops from her eye and falls onto the Formica top of the desk. I watch the young man with Y’s name staring hard at it; I feel him wanting to reach for that tear, to swipe it away with his finger.
He won’t today. Not now, not here. But he will: he’ll hold her when she cries, and she’ll hold him; there will be times ahead when he might be the cause of her tears, or when her words make him curse in frustration. They will travel to India, where he will see the tree for himself, this tree that has brought them together. They will grow old together, or expect that they will, promising “till death do us part.” He is bold, this young man with Y’s name, he is funny, confident, smart, kind. Possibly he loves Springsteen, possibly he’s not a morning person.
As it should be. Definitely, all is as it should be, and I have no choice but to believe that.
Because something exists entirely inside your own mind doesn’t mean that the end of it isn’t painful.
I read my piece about the playful black cat that I loved.
Jinx asks, “Has The Writer achieved honesty?”
The man with the shaved head nods, and so does the lady who is always knitting. So does everyone. They like the story about my cat.
“Quick break,” Jinx says, sweeping the crumbly edges of her Triscuits off the desk and into the palm of her hand, and we scatter.
I will never show these assignments to the lovely man who is my husband. I will never write a book. I will never know the difference between truth and honesty, and I will never, never understand why you died.
And I will not return to “Tell It Slant,” after the break, or ever.
CHAPTER TEN: AN INDEX OF FOOD (DRAFT)
My publisher is making me write this “index of food.” My editor has politely but definitively informed me that I should think about including lists in my book. Readers aren’t interested in long blocks of text, she tells me, not in this 140-character world. A gust of a sigh before she adds, Everyone knows that readers want short and snappy.
My agent agrees. She confesses to me a horror of short stories that stretch to fifteen pages and novels that tiptoe too far into the two hundreds.
My husband agrees. He reads my work in progress from time to time but usually starts snoring five pages in. His excuse is that he works hard in a stressful job, but what if it is a short and snappy world now?
Maybe think about adding a dog, my editor suggests. Books sell big when there are dogs, and also any connection with a celebrity helps.
First, I don’t like dogs (but please keep reading!). Second, my connections with celebrities are obscure, vague connections to obscure, vague celebrities, like seeing Julia Louis-Dreyfus in a student production in college during our freshman year. (She was quite good.) But can I really capitalize on that? Ha—I guess so, because here I am squeezing in a celebrity, and upfront, too! (Author’s note: No offense, Julia—you win Emmys, so clearly I’m using poetic license in referring to you as “obscure and vague,” but I think we both know your name isn’t the biggest headline on the checkout magazine rack. Still, I hope
you’ll overlook this pathetic name-dropping should we ever cross paths.)
So, How about recipes instead? I ask my editor. I’ve got recipes.
Done to death, she groans, don’t you want your book to sell?
Do I?
Of course. Of course I do.
And because I want my book to sell, here then is a list of the food mentioned in my book. Not content, but an easy-peasy list of content. Here is what they tell me readers want:
Pizza, pages 38, 40, 98, 146–47, 164–65, 187, 209, 211.
♦ “If I could eat only one food for the rest of my life, I choose pizza.”
♦ “Bad pizza is at least edible, but bad Chinese food and bad barbecue are just baaad.”
In my real life, these are my two biggest pizza proverbs, so of course I have to put pizza in my book.
And of course I would include pizza in a book that’s about you.
(About you, how? Novel? Stories? Memoir? Yes and no. I grandiosely like to claim it’s the truth of you with an overlay of fiction.
Call it a novel, my agent says, novels are what sell. Don’t even mention stories.
Okay—this novel about you. This novel.)
Pizza was more than your favorite food, it was your passion. You wanted to open a pizza restaurant someday—you saved recipes and subscribed to Pizza Today magazine (pizzatoday.com; motto: “the most powerful marketing tool in the pizza industry”). During college you worked part-time in a small, family-owned pizzeria, learning the tricks of Chicago pizza, and after graduation, you went full-time, making hundreds of pizzas each night—not manager, not assistant manager, just a guy who dreamed of opening his own Chicago-style pizza place somewhere beachy. Pi Guy was one possible name I remember you bounced around; “no one likes math,” I had cautioned.
Your father pinballed between embarrassment and horror, exasperation and fury. He didn’t tell his friends what you did. His friends’ kids were getting jobs at Merrill Lynch after college (this was the 1980s, when all anyone wanted was to work in finance). Not you. You were about making pizza—rolling dough; slathering on sauce; cheese by the handful; pinching sausage from a bulk slab and arranging the dots in concentric circles on small, medium, larges, on thin crust and deep dish; sliding pizzas into the oven and back out. Four years of college tuition for this, was the question buzzing your dad’s head.
You loved your life—cooking pizzas until midnight, highlighting and reading stacks of books back home in your basement apartment with the cheap rent, sleeping in to noon. You didn’t own a tie. You walked to work. All you wanted was this life, forever.
We met at this pizza restaurant. We fell in love later, but this is where we met. The “us” of us started with pizza.
You know, it really wasn’t my dream to be married to a guy who made pizzas all day long. So you chose me, also pleasing your dad in the process.
I’m sorry.
Bacon, page 149.
Who doesn’t love bacon? Bacon is perpetually trending, so of course I threw it in.
When I cooked bacon for you, I microwaved it on a special plastic tray, swathing it in layers of paper towels—like half a roll—to soak up the grease. Much healthier cooked that way: fewer calories, less fat.
Now, I fry bacon in a frying pan. No paper towels. Grease everywhere. It tastes a whole hell of a lot better.
I’m sorry.
Watermelon, pages 9, 57.
You had a singular way of eating watermelon with a knife and no fork, and a vocabulary you invented, calling that deep red middle section the “fillet,” and so what did I do? I snagged these unique and quirky details about you—details that capture the essence of who you were, defining you in the most charming and individual way possible, a way that would make a girl utterly fall in love with you—and I used them as a plot point here on page 12. I also threw them in randomly on page 84 because that paragraph needed something.
I’m sorry.
HoneyBaked ham, pages 71–72.
I put out ham after your funeral, but it wasn’t HoneyBaked®, with the registered trademark symbol. It came from the deli counter at the grocery store. It was only an okay ham. People ate it because people don’t fuss after funerals.
I’m sorry.
Malted milk balls, pages 9–10.
The candy you craved. Now and then I bought those big, fake milk cartons of Whoppers at the drugstore as a surprise for you. I was in charge of errands and shopping because you worked full-time and I only worked part-time, so it was up to me to buy the special treats, to decide which treats to buy, and, well, I don’t like Whoppers all that much (plus, they’re caloric, 190 calories in 18 Whoppers, not to mention 35 percent of one’s daily saturated fat), so the treats I mostly bought were peanut M&M’s, also unhealthy, I admit—220 calories in a quarter cup and 23 percent daily saturated fat—but peanut M&M’s happen to be my favorite candy.
I’m sorry.
Snickers bars, page 157.
Another candy you liked. Also, the name of your beloved childhood dog. I’ve used stories of this dog before, in other books I’ve written,* not only here in this current work.
You and your father got teary when you spoke of Snickers, a collie. She was the best dog ever, you would say in unison, nodding your heads in unison. You disagreed about dozens of things, but never this, that Snickers was the best dog ever.
As noted, Snickers is a dog mentioned in a previous novel, and I’m also bringing her up here in “Index of Food” because, well, she’s a dog. I’ve never owned a dog and I expect I never will and I’m talking now about dogs in general and Snickers the remarkable wonder dog in particular because my editor assured me that dogs sell, and now that I’ve gone on about this dog (who undoubtedly even I would have liked), it’s not farfetched to imagine putting a pretty collie on the cover to try to sell more books.
I want to sell more books.
I’m sorry.
Guatemalan food, pages 151–52.
I admit that I consulted the Internet to get the exact dishes listed in the book, including: churrasquito, chuleta, pepian, or, translated, steak, pork chops, and some sort of native Guatemalan dish that won’t translate but stays a Spanish word that looks authentic on the page and will be fun to read aloud: pepian, pepian. Say it. (Sadly, I don’t know how to make my computer put the accent mark above the “a.” Maybe the copy editor can handle this?)
You and I went to Guatemala for vacation once, but I have no idea if we ate pepian.
I’ll assume so. I’ll start telling people we did. Now, that I reflect back, I actually think we did. Yes—we did. Definitely. I remember. I definitely, distinctly remember—for sure. We ate pepian at that restaurant with the hand-woven turquoise tablecloths and the old, hunched-over waiter who said to me in English, “You are soaked with youth of Lauren Bacall,” when he meant I looked like her. Remember? The restaurant next to that gray stone church we tiptoed into after lunch, where we sat in the cool air, whispering about God and the universe as hopeful votives flickered and the sun pierced the blue-and-red stained-glass windows, scattering colorful shards of light up our bare arms. Remember that church?
Of course you don’t because I made it up, and the restaurant, too. That’s how easy it is to forget things. That’s how ridiculously easy it is to fill the enormous gaps of what I’ve forgotten that I never, never should have forgotten but did.
I’m sorry.
The Majestic Café, see King Street Café (asparagus with poached egg, fried oysters, beet salad, bison hanger steak, chilled English pea soup, whole roasted fish), pages 79, 82, 83–97.
King Street Café in the book, but in real life it’s The Majestic Café, on King Street in the Old Town neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia (703–837–9117, majesticcafe.com; you’ll probably need a reservation—request a booth).
It wasn’t even open when you were alive—or was it? I can’t remember. I could figure that out, because of course I know the exact date you died in 1997, and The Majestic is in a histor
ic building, located in a town that values historical. (George Washington slept here for real.) There’s a tab on the restaurant’s website labeled “The Old Majestic” so clicking on it would tell me everything about the original restaurant in its pre–World War Two life—when it opened, when it closed—and about its resurrection: the new, modern restaurant and what year it reopened. Was that a year when you were alive? I don’t click because I don’t actually want to know. I go there often—Saturday night maybe, dress up a little maybe, makeup. It’s one of my favorite local restaurants, only ten minutes from my new house and twenty minutes from our old house.
Yes, there’s a new house now.
I’m sorry.
Pie, pages 28, 85, 89, 201.
I like pie. Some of this book is about me, right? That’s okay, isn’t it? Or am I just being selfish? I’m probably being selfish.
I’m sorry.
Booze (to include: Crown Royal and Coke, 7&7, Jack and ginger, Johnnie Walker Red, Johnnie Walker Blue, Drambuie, Tanqueray martini, tequila, white wine, scotch, scotch and a splash of soda, white wine, sidecar, Grey Goose and tonic, gin and tonic, cheap vodka, vodka tonic, cognac, Cointreau, brandy, a bottle of wine, vodka, Frangelico, sauvignon blanc, cabernet, a bottle of wine, Chianti, a bottle of wine, drinks at Morton’s, cabernet, champagne, sparkling wine, pinot grigio, rosé, prosecco, sake, a pitcher of gin martinis, a bottle of cabernet, bourbon, Jack Daniels, craft cocktails, crummy red wine, and a bottle of show-offy single-malt scotch), pages TK.
Forty-three items are listed under this single catchall of “booze” because, as the writer, I’m only human and I can’t possibly dredge up separate anecdotes to cover each sip and every slug of liquor consumed in the course of this book. Mea culpa. I understand that I’m basically a failure as a writer for not even trying, and that a better writer would at least divide the entry into subentries, i.e., “Booze, wine” and “Booze, mixed drinks.”
This Angel on My Chest Page 17
