by Lara Vapnyar
Oh, really? Luda thought to herself, having caught Milena’s stare. Respectable? Boring? For your information, I have had lovers too. Lovers was stretching it a bit, but Luda had had one encounter, with a colleague, on the last night of the three-day conference in Bulgaria. The man’s name was Stoyan; he was heavy and dark, with jet black hair spurting above his collarbone. He offered to see her to her hotel, and as they walked, discussing the problems of the advanced Socialist economic system, Luda couldn’t help but marvel at the linguistic similarity of his name to the Russian word for erection. Later, in bed, he had wanted her to yell out his name, but she wouldn’t; she was too bashful for that. I’m not as innocent as you think, Luda thought, fixing her scarf with defiance. Let’s just see.
But then Angie announced that it was time to eat, and the students ditched their conversation partners and rushed toward the food. Plastic tops covering the dishes were removed, foil was peeled off, paper containers unclasped, and the room filled with happy clatter and the air with culturally diverse aromas of curry, ginger, garlic, and basil. The spring rolls were the first to go. It seemed as if one moment there was a whole plateful of them, and the next there was nothing but the oily stains on the students’ fingers and a wonderful shrimp-and-scallions aftertaste in their mouths. Tostones and pastelitos followed suit. The Dominicans and the Russians were a little skeptical about duck gizzards but soon learned to appreciate them. Nobody was particularly enthusiastic about the two varieties of potato salad, so the two Russian couples who brought them ate each other’s offerings. And the extra-value-meal couple ate their extra-value meal. By the end of the feast there were only two items left, the hard, round pretzels and the hard, square biscuits. Angie ate one of each and politely pronounced them authentic and interesting, but nobody else appeared to share her interest.
Both Luda and Milena saw they’d made a mistake: they should have brought something more exciting. They knew it as soon as they saw how Aron’s face changed when the food was uncovered. At first his expression was hopeful but uncertain, as if he were a child seeing his favorite toy but wasn’t sure if it was meant for him or not. But as he filled his plate, his cautious grin disappeared in the deep furrows of a beaming smile. He chewed slowly, with his eyes closed, making sounds similar to the drone of a happy electric appliance. His cheeks became flushed and tiny beads of sweat gathered on the bridge of his nose. “Who made this? This is divine!” he would exclaim from time to time. Aron finished the last spring roll, crinkled his nose, and laughed. He looked radiant; he looked twenty years younger; he looked—Luda couldn’t think of a word right away, and then it hit her—he looked inspired. You couldn’t help but smile when watching Aron eat. And so Luda smiled. And Milena smiled too. Luda and Milena had heard that the path to a man’s heart ran through his stomach, but they’d never believed it. Aron Skolnik proved them wrong.
THE PROBLEM was that neither Luda nor Milena cooked. Milena had a particularly tortured relationship with food. For years and years, her life had been structured around her lover’s visits. He would come to her place after work, twice a week, to spend about an hour with her. “No, no,” he would say, when she offered him food. “Let’s not waste time. My wife is waiting for me with dinner anyway.” Milena would attempt to cook for herself at times, out of spite, out of defiance. She would mix the ingredients in the bowl, telling herself that she didn’t care; she would cook and enjoy a good meal by herself. “I don’t care, I don’t care,” she would still be saying as she scooped the contents of the bowl into the garbage pail.
And Luda? Luda had always been too busy working. Moreover, for most of her married life she had lived with her mother-in-law, who cooked a lot and enjoyed cooking, especially if she could come up with a dish that Luda couldn’t stand. Once Luda figured that out, she learned to fake her culinary partialities. To confuse her mother-in-law, she would feign great enthusiasm for the food she hated (“Zucchini pancakes! Can I have another helping?”) and appear indifferent to something she really liked. She mastered the art of faking so well that by the time her mother-in-law died and Luda could finally start eating according to her real partialities, she found that she no longer had partialities. Her sense of taste was ruined, her interest in food gone.
Which didn’t mean that she couldn’t learn how to cook, Luda thought, on the Thursday before the next feast, while flipping TV channels at home. Learning how to cook was a challenge, and she was used to meeting challenges head on. The first three shows of Food Network were a complete waste. Luda couldn’t care less about the chili cookoff, nor did she need information about candy-making technology. In the third show, the host explained how to make tiramisu, which could have been helpful if not for her cleavage—so prominent that Luda couldn’t concentrate on the movements of the woman’s hands. The fourth show, however, turned out to be much better. The host was making Greek feta and spinach pie, and she seemed to know what she was doing. Besides, the cleavage, if there was any, was well hidden under her chef’s jacket. Luda opened her brand-new notebook and prepared to write down the instructions.
The pie did work! Luda herself was surprised how well it worked. She had had some doubts as she was spreading the filling over the dough. To make the pie more authentically Russian, she had substituted cabbage for spinach, boiled eggs for feta cheese, and gotten rid of pine nuts altogether. She had a moment of worry that maybe those stupid pine nuts were the key ingredient after all. But when Luda took the pie out, not as perfect as on TV, far from perfect, but warm, and gleaming, and fragrant, all her doubts disappeared. She knew it would work. She closed her eyes and imagined that her own pie looked just as golden and perfect, and then she imagined Aron’s smile, and then—and this was the most delicious image—the stunned and furious expression on Milena’s face.
ARON ACTUALLY MOANED when he tried the first piece. When he finished the second piece, he took a napkin, wiped his lips, and looked at Luda. Looked at her and saw her. It had been such a long time since men saw her when they looked at her. “So good. I could eat it every day and not get tired of it,” he said. But even this didn’t give her as much thrill as the lost expression on Milena’s face. Poor Milena, Luda thought. Poor Milena, who wore a low-cut blouse and had brought store-bought eggplant caviar and to whom Aron said, “Did you buy it at the International on 5th and Brighton? They make a much better one in the Taste of Europe in Bensonhurst.” Poor, poor Milena.
I WONDER what the fat pig will make today, Milena thought, as she entered the bathroom the next Friday morning with a steaming coffee mug, a pack of cigarettes, and a book squeezed under her arm. Milena sat down on the toilet, put her coffee and the book on top of the laundry hamper, and lit a cigarette. People like Luda resembled battering rams; they would pummel and pummel, patiently, without taking a break, for as long as it took them to get what they wanted. Her lover’s wife was the same way, and she got her prize in the end; she still had her husband, who finally became a really good husband, because by now he was too old, too worn out, too scared, and too beaten to cheat. And Milena, stupid proud Milena, who had always thought it was beneath her to fight for a man, what did she gain? Nothing. She wound up with nothing. Just look at her: old and alone, sitting on a toilet with a coffee mug and a cigarette! Well, she wasn’t above fighting for a man this time.
She took a sip of coffee and started leafing through her book—pozharskie kotlety, kotlety pokievski, rasstegai—an old cookbook, with fine yellowed pages and elaborate drawings, a legacy from Milena’s allegedly aristocratic grandmother. There were countless long mornings when Milena’s grandmother would sit little Milena at the table and teach her how to make pozharskie kotlety or rasstegai. Afterward, she graded Milena’s work, usually poorly, because Milena was too impatient and wouldn’t do everything just so. How she hated those mornings! But she had learned how to cook. Surprise, surprise, fat pig!
LOOK, GUYS, we have something new from one of our Russian students today,” Angie said, taking a blue cotton napkin off Mi
lena’s porcelain plate. There under a napkin were perfect golden squares of cheese puffs that smelled as if they had been taken out of the oven a second ago. There was a secret to that, which Milena’s grandmother had shared with Milena as a gift on her sixteenth birthday (Milena would have preferred new earrings). The puffs were so beautiful that people couldn’t bring themselves to grab them, as they did with other food at the feast. They picked up pieces with two fingers and chewed slowly and didn’t talk while they chewed, so all you could hear were the sounds of small crunchy bites. When all the puffs were gone, Aron flicked the few golden crumbs off his shirt and asked Milena what her name was. “Beautiful and unusual,” he commented.
Luda didn’t know much about medicine, so she didn’t know if extreme frustration and anger could cause an immediate heart attack. She decided that they couldn’t, because if they could she would be dead by now. The worst thing was the look on Milena’s face when Luda unpeeled the foil cover on her offering. The bitch actually chuckled. Yes, Luda had brought another Greek/ Russian cabbage pie. So what? It worked the last time; what was so stupid about assuming that it would work again? Luda loosened her scarf and sat down, hoping that either she or all the other students, along with Aron and Milena, would disappear somehow. She tried telling herself that Milena’s offering wasn’t better, it was simply new, but this thought failed to console her, as it had failed to console her many years ago, every time she sniffed yet another scent of a new perfume on her husband’s shirt.
The big heavy arm on her shoulder made Luda flinch. “I didn’t like her puffs,” Oolna said. “Show off. Not real food.” Luda wanted to bury her face in Oolna’s soft, boundless chest and cry with gratitude. And then the wife from one of the Russian couples sidled in and whispered that she didn’t like the puffs either. “Too salty, didn’t you think? And she is wearing way too much makeup for her age.” Luda smiled and happily shared her observation that Milena’s face looked like a battle-field for antiaging creams.
IN THE WEEKS to come, Luda saw that she wasn’t just an annoying old woman anymore, she was the star of the show. The whole net of clumsy alliances was quickly spinning around her. There was Oolna, the oldest and truest of her fans. There was the Russian wife, and there was the Dominican couple who didn’t like feeling intimidated by Milena’s clothes and demeanor. The husband even made a show out of mocking Milena’s haughty manner of walking into the room, and the members of Luda’s fan club eagerly laughed.
But Milena too found herself surrounded by allies. First of all, there was the Chinese woman who had nursed a grudge against Luda since the day when Luda’s pie managed to outshine her spring rolls. Her other ally was the wife from the second Russian couple, who identified herself (somewhat incorrectly) with elegant, sophisticated women like Milena. And there was the second Chinese couple, who joined the camp simply because they always sided with the first Chinese couple. All of them laughed happily when Milena compared Luda to Saddam Hussein. The husband of the second Chinese couple was deaf in one ear, so his wife had to retell him the joke loudly and in Chinese, and then he laughed too.
But while both camps acknowledged that there was a contest going on, and while everybody knew what the main prize was, nobody ever mentioned Aron. They couldn’t help but wonder, though, whether he knew what the competition was all about. If he knew, he never showed it. He seemed to be bent on preserving his independence and his right to favor the winner. There were Fridays when Luda’s dish would come out too sloppy (either the fault of one or another Food Network host or of Luda’s overt zeal). And there were Fridays when Milena’s offering would be just a bit too subtle or too bland. And since Aron’s romantic gestures always went strictly in sync with the competition, Luda’s and Milena’s gains and losses in intimacy were fluctuating as well. There were Fridays when Aron seemed to have formed a special connection with Luda. He would sit and talk with her in the corner (after the best food was gone, never before), he would joke with her, he would ask her about her life and even make vague plans for the future, something like, “Do you like Manhattan Beach? It’s nice down there. I go for a stroll sometimes. Not too often.” And sometimes he would even walk her home. Once Aron kissed Luda on the cheek. His lips felt warm and dry and vaguely disappointing.
And there were Fridays that belonged to Milena. Aron would walk Milena home and try to brush against her sleeve or touch the flaps of her jacket, and once he attempted to play with her necklace. Sometimes he would even share his memories. One time, for example, he told her about a lovely woman with whom he had had a brief but passionate affair and who looked just like Milena, “No, seriously, the same eyes, the same cheekbones, even the same oval mole on the neck.”
But just as it happened with Luda, Aron never walked Milena all the way to her house. He would stop a few blocks away from her building and say that walking was getting harder and harder; he’d better head back. And just as it happened with Luda, come Monday, all the Friday intimacy was gone. He never gave any sign that they had formed some kind of connection, never spoke to either of them before or after class, hardly even looked at them. On Mondays, there was no indication that he wanted either of them, or that he ever would. On Mondays, Luda and Milena felt deflated and tired too, and perhaps even a little ashamed of their Friday excitement. But as the week was coming to an end, the memories of Aron at his best (or perhaps fantasies of what Aron could have been like at his best) grew more and more intense. Luda imagined how she would stroll with Aron on Manhattan Beach past all the other couples, and how if her daughter ever tried to push another piece of furniture on her, she would refuse, saying that her husband didn’t like it. And Milena thought of being in bed with Aron and how he would smile at her and tell her that she still had it. And as Luda’s and Milena’s fantasies flourished, so did their fear and fury at the thought that he could pick the other as the ultimate winner.
THE AFTERNOON before the last International Feast, Luda plugged in the food processor, pushed cubes of beef and lamb down the tube, and pressed the button. The mere image of Aron leaving with Milena after the last International Feast (with Milena’s allies rejoicing and Luda’s allies saying something unconvincing about Aron’s unsubstantial worth as a boyfriend) would send Luda into a state of murderous rage. For several weeks now, all her thoughts were concentrated on her final dish.
The food processor, another discard from her daughter’s pantry, was an old bulky thing with a crack on the side covered by a piece of duct tape. It whirred and vibrated and jumped all over the table surface, but it did its job well. Luda smiled as she watched how the meat cubes bounced under the knives. The onion got stuck in the tube, and she had to hit it with the wooden spoon handle to push it down. Luda stopped before reaching for a bowl where the bread had been soaking in milk; she wasn’t sure if the bread had to go into the food processor or not.
MILENA MOVED about her kitchen quickly and gracefully. She prodded the bread with her finger to check if it was soggy enough. She knew that when making meatballs you should never put the bread into a food processor. First of all, the bread was soft and soggy enough to be easily broken with a fork, but—most important—coarsely minced bread was essential for making meatballs fluffy and plump. She put the bread into the bowl with the ground veal, added some crushed garlic (a lot of it) and a couple of eggs, and started working the mix with the fork, enjoying the slurping sound.
AND NOW for the secret ingredient,” Luda thought, throwing small cubes of pancetta into the hissing skillet. “Pancetta,” The Food Network host had moaned, “So good, your guests won’t know what hit them!”
FAT, MILENA THOUGHT, all the flavor was in the fat, and people are just kidding themselves when they try to believe otherwise. She put a chunk of nice sweet butter and a smaller chunk of lard in the middle of the skillet and swirled it around. The rest was easy.
NO, THIS WASN’T hard at all, Luda decided. Especially if you found the perfect method. She shaped the balls and threw them onto the hissing skille
t with her right hand while holding the spatula with her left. When the meat under her fingers got all warm and sticky, she rinsed her right hand under cold running water and started again. Her small kitchen was quickly filling with smoke and the smell of burning fat, but Luda didn’t pay any attention to that. She worked very fast. So did Milena. It was amazing how fast the bowl was becoming empty. As she was shaping the last meatball, Milena had a sudden urge to squeeze it. And she did just that, so hard that tiny bits of soggy meat came out between her fingers. She wiped her hand and went to open the window.
ON THE MONDAY after the last International Feast, Angie’s hands trembled so much she had to grip the wrist of her right hand with her left to be able to write on the board. Her legs trembled as well, so she went to sit down in the low chair that stood by her desk. She said that it would be nice if everybody said a few words about Aron.
