Luscious Lemon

by Heather Swain

  For the first week after I closed Lemon, I moped around Eddie’s apartment, moving from bed to couch to refrigerator and back to the bed while he paced, talking on the phone, selling his latest press of oil and small batches of vinegar to my old competition. When he wasn’t on the phone or the computer, he usually followed me around and asked me what I was doing, what I was going to do, and what I’d do while he was gone.

  The other problem was his mother. She still calls every few days and asks to talk to me. Mostly I’ve avoided it by being asleep or going on walks or by conveniently locking myself in the bathroom when I hear him say, “Hello, Mother!” A few times I simply refused to take the phone when he shoved it toward me and begged me to talk to her. I don’t need to listen to ’Scilla’s subtle scorn and inanities about how to get back up on my horse.

  Most days, I mosey over to my grandmother’s about mid-morning. I walk the back streets from Park Slope to Carroll Gardens, through the little hidden neighborhoods forbidden to me as a child. Past the ironwork shops and warehouses, over small bridges crossing the Gowanus Canal. When I was a kid, my aunts led us to believe these neighborhoods were rough, full of Dominican and Puerto Rican hoods who’d sooner slit our Italian throats than let us walk their streets.

  Once, to prove that no one was in charge of me, since my parents were dead, I ran all the way down Smith Street and crossed the invisible line from good to bad. What I found was a neighborhood exactly like mine. Old men still sat outside in their undershirts, but these guys played dominoes. Women still yelled out of apartment windows for kids, but they yelled in Spanish. The shops sold avocados and plantains instead of tomatoes and bananas. When I got back, I told my cousins that my aunts were right. I said that bad kids with knives chased me all over the streets. I didn’t want to share my discovery with anyone else.

  Now these streets are undergoing the same quick gentrification that happened in my grandmother’s neighborhood a few years ago. Odd boutiques and small restaurants are taking over the old ninety-nine-cent stores and bodegas. Hipsters in their grubby chic clothes walk to the subway stops, carrying cups of steaming lattes. Dozens of storefronts are for rent. I pass it all and wonder where all the people went who used to live here, and who will replace them.

  So now, Livinia and I spend the day watching TV. Montel is our favorite show. Although Judge Judy runs a close second. I’m not sure why Livinia loves these shows so much, but for me, any chance to see people who are bigger failures than myself makes me nearly giddy with pleasure. Today the show is about men who secretly marry more than one woman at the same time.

  “Oh, come on,” I yell at the big blond woman who claims she thought her husband worked overnight shifts at the car factory every other week. “How could you be so stupid!”

  “She’s a whore!” Livinia yells as the show cuts to a commercial for teeth-whitening strips. I giggle at hearing my weird old aunt scream the word whore. When Montel comes back on, she mutters, “The baby wasn’t yours!” I have no idea what she’s talking about, but the anger is clear in her eyes, and her jaw trembles.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  “I told him that, but he didn’t listen.”

  “Who?”

  She stares at me blankly, then goes back to her doily. I lay mine aside. I need to get out of the stuffy room for a while. In Livinia, I see too many things that are becoming familiar in myself, and the combination of our hostility scares me. I leave her grumbling and crocheting as I climb the stairs out of the dark basement.

  The rest of the house is quiet. My grandmother must be out. I browse through the kitchen, opening cupboards and staring into the fridge. I’m not hungry, so I wander through the other rooms until I end up in my old bedroom. Everything is in its place. My shelf of angsty novels that I loved as a teenager—Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Kate Chopin. A shoebox filled with mixed tapes made by long-ago friends. Yearbooks and albums of pictures from high school. All of it covered in dust and left undisturbed for over a decade.

  I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror above the empty dresser. It’s odd to watch myself snoop through my old life, as if I’m trying to ascertain who the girl was that used to live in this room. In this same mirror, I examined that girl’s adolescent face over and over, looking for traces of my mother. I felt forever clumsy and dopey next to the memory of her, perpetually cool and beautiful in her low-waisted red dress, slim cigarette between her long elegant fingers, a squat glass of whiskey sweating on top of the piano where she teased notes and flirted with melody. She has always remained an enigmatic woman to me, drawn away from her riverbed to the depths of the ocean by the suck and pull of tides.

  I’m older now than she was when she died, but I’ve hit my own less literal version of rock bottom. As I look at myself in the reflection, I catalog every tiny crease etched into the skin of my face. I look nothing like her. I am jaundiced and puckered, a sour little person. (More like Livinia, I think with a shudder.) I’d always assumed that I’d live longer than my mother did, but in my mind, I intended to glide through my adult life as one of those people who was stronger, smarter, and more empathetic for her early grief. How many people can claim the simultaneous deaths of their parents at the tender age of six?

  I’d always assumed that experience had filled my lifetime quota for sadness. But I’ve never become a Zen master of the moment with a preternatural sense of the futility of hanging onto the past. I can’t slough off sorrow like dead skin. I cling to indignation. So maybe Franny’s right. Maybe my false sense of entitlement to a happy ending has made me selfish.

  Clearly I’m not one of those heroic people, like some blind one-legged hiker hopping to the top of Mount McKinley, who plants a flag in memory of my long-dead mother. The truth is, I resent my mother for dying. Nor have I been able to dauntlessly redirect my anguish over losing this baby to better humanity in the name of my lost daughter. I resent her for leaving me, too.

  And, somehow in all of this, I’ve lost the person I thought I was. I ask myself, What happened to that self-sufficient, world-weary woman I worked so hard to become? The one who would never give up. Maybe my parents glimpsed my future when they looked into my infant eyes. Maybe they had some inkling of what I’d become. Perhaps that was their consolation prize for never knowing me past that grubby six-year-old trying desperately to make them stay. Well, thank you, Mom and Dad. You must be very proud. Finally, I’ve lived up to my name.

  I fall asleep, facedown, on my old bed, something I do frequently these days. When I wake, the sky has gone gray. I roll over and breathe in deeply. The smell of stuffed bell peppers wafts up the stairs—the brawny aroma of browning beef with garlic, onions, and tomatoes; the starchiness of the rice; and a vibrant whiff of blanched green peppers. My grandmother has been cooking all my old favorites lately. Chicken and noodles. Linguine and sausage. Minestrone with beans. Scalloped potatoes and salmon patties. I’d forgotten most of these simple old dishes, made from recipes that have been circulating through the able hands of my maternal line for decades. A lot of them are the first dishes that Poppy taught me to make.

  I drag myself off the bed and venture down to the kitchen to sit on a stool and watch my grandmother work her alchemy of ingredients. She is the picture of efficiency in the kitchen. There are no wasted motions, no extra steps. She is a one-woman assembly line. The rice goes in the meat, the meat goes in the peppers, the peppers go in the oven, the dirty dishes go in the soapy water. I’ve watched her cook this way for so many years that it seems natural, normal, the only way to do it.

  As I sit here now, I think back to the kitchen at Lemon. The anarchy of every meal. Ernesto, Franny, and I built each dish as if it were an architectural feat. We swirled sauces on the bottom of every plate. Towered potatoes, beets, roasted squash, anything that would stack up to dizzying heights and teeter beneath bouquets of fresh herbs. We used squeeze bottles, molds, Parisian scoops, and sifters. Our goal was to make the most complex and gorgeous food we could imagine. We
had no order, no structure, no overarching plan except to outdo everything we’d done before. No wonder we were continually exhausted and over budget and irritated with one another.

  “Didn’t Poppy put raisins in her stuffed peppers?” I ask my grandmother as she finishes up the dish.

  She thinks for a moment. “Sometimes,” she says. “And pine nuts. She liked pine nuts when she could afford them.”

  I think about Poppy’s gnocchi. Those little pillowy puffs of potato, so delightful on my tongue. Sometimes in the late fall, she would make them from butternut squash out of her garden and coat them in brown butter. Once she made a creamy gorgonzola sauce with walnuts served over the top of a velvety steamed polenta pudding, and I thought I had discovered the food of nirvana.

  “Do you remember her carbonara?” I ask my grandmother.

  “Sure,” she says. “She made it just like my mother.”

  “With the raw egg yolk in the middle of that black-flecked pasta. It grossed me out as a kid. I always made her stir in my egg so it’d cook.”

  “You were missing the best part,” Grandma says.

  “You know what I loved? Poppy’s veal chops. I don’t know how she pounded them so thin.”

  “She used a hammer wrapped in a dishtowel,” Grandma tells me. “Or an iron skillet. She was surprisingly strong for such a little person.”

  “The chops were always so crispy and juicy.”

  “She put parmesan in the flour.”

  “And in the summer she’d pull those little bitter arugula leaves out of her garden and chop them with fresh tomatoes and red onions and throw it on top of the veal. God, that was good.”

  “Poppy was a real cook,” says Grandma. “Like you. She loved to experiment.”

  As my grandmother says this, I realize how incredibly inventive Poppy was. Although my grandmother is an amazing cook, she was always busy preparing meals for her family and didn’t have the time or the money to experiment. Poppy, though, loved to be in the kitchen, creating new concoctions. Putting together unexpected combinations or turning out classic dishes to perfection.

  When I was a kid, all of the recipes seemed so complicated and time-consuming. Now as I think back through them, I see the beautiful simplicity of her cooking. There were no exotic ingredients. She didn’t have access to such things. She used what was available in her garden, at the butcher, or the little greengrocers where she shopped.

  “What was in Lemon’s linguine?” I ask. That was the dish Poppy said she made up and named for me.

  Grandma shrugs. “Probably just some garlic, butter, lemons, pancetta, heavy cream. Maybe a little grappa at the end, if she had it around.”

  I think back to that taste. The tart creamy sauce and the salty ham sticking to the impossibly long linguine. “She always made it for my birthday,” I say.

  “That and a black raspberry pie,” Grandma says.

  “God, I’d love to have one of those.”

  “I have some frozen berries in the freezer,” Grandma tells me.

  Our conversation is interrupted by the squeak of the front door. We both turn and look into the hall. “Hey, y’all,” Eddie calls from the foyer.

  Grandma looks up at the owl clock. “Right on time,” she says. It’s nearly six.

  Eddie and I have come to some sort of unspoken arrangement. I spend all day here, he comes over for dinner, then we go home together and go to bed. It seems to be working well for us, since we barely have to see one another or talk. I wonder how long we can sustain this awkward truce before one of us explodes.

  He comes into the kitchen with a bottle of wine. “Smells delicious,” he says, then kisses each of us lightly on the cheek.

  “You have a good day?” I ask him, rhetorically.

  “Yep,” he says. “I’ll tell you about it later.”

  This surprises me. He hasn’t shared much about his days lately. I take three plates out of the cupboard and lay them on the table. “Anyone else coming?”

  “Not that I’ve heard,” says Grandma, but that doesn’t mean much. Usually someone else shows up for dinner. One of my aunts, a cousin, a neighborhood friend. There’s always enough food plus leftovers to take home or eat the next day for lunch.

  As we’re sitting down and filling our plates with the peppers, the phone rings. My grandmother rises slowly and answers it. “Yes,” she says and smiles. “Oh, that’s great. Is everyone okay? Uh-huh. They still there? Going home tomorrow? How much did she weigh?”

  I put my silverware down and glance at Eddie, who digs into his pepper. My appetite has vanished.

  “Well, send them our best,” Grandma says. “I’ll put some food together and drop it by tomorrow. Bye now.” She hangs up and looks at me uncertainly.

  “Trina?” I ask, saving my grandmother from the uncomfortable position of finding the most delicate words to tell me that Trina had her baby. She nods. Eddie stops eating and looks at me. I wad up my napkin and lay it beside my plate. “It’s okay,” I say with a clumsy little laugh. “She had to have it some time.”

  Chapter

  Twenty-Six

  S o I had a really good day,” Eddie says in the car on the way back to our apartment.

  “Really,” I say absently as I watch the passing storefronts, all lit up and full of people. These streets bustle in the evening. People come and go from the train, walk in and out of shops, line up in front of restaurants. So different from when I was a kid and everything on this strip closed by six o’clock.

  “I think I’m going to get that Italian Stallion contract.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I told you about it,” Eddie says. He may have, but I don’t retain much these days. “It’s that new chain. They’re opening stores on the Upper West Side, in Times Square, and down by Wall Street.”

  I nod as he talks, but my mind wanders toward Trina. I imagine her in a hospital room, surrounded by bouquets of flowers and bundles of balloons. Her baby snuggled sweetly under her arm.

  “These suckers have five hundred seats and horrible food,” says Eddie. “But they want good oil on the tables so the customers will think they’re getting something authentically Italian with their four-cheese-stuffed chicken breasts.”

  Eddie looks at me for a response. “Sounds lovely,” I say derisively.

  “I’ll take you there for our anniversary,” he says with a laugh. I’m not sure if he’s serious.

  At home in bed, we lie side by side in the dark. This has become our routine. Not touching, not talking, just lying. Sometimes Eddie reads; sometimes I stare at the ceiling before I fall asleep. Tonight I wonder what Trina’s doing. How she was during labor. She’s probably psyched for the drugs she’s allowed to have and for my aunts gathered around, attending to her every need and whim.

  “Did you feel weird when your grandmother told us that Trina had her baby?” Eddie asks me out of the blue.

  I’m not sure how to answer because I’m uncertain what he’s getting at. “What’d you mean, weird?”

  He’s agitated and twitchy beside me. He shimmies his legs and chews on his lips. “It pissed me off.”

  “That she had it, or that Grandma told us?”

  “I don’t know. Both, I guess. It just seems unfair.”

  “Unfair for who?” I snap. It comes out harsh, all hard edges, and ready to fight. What’s Eddie getting at? More blame?

  “I mean, she doesn’t deserve it. Neither does that criminal she’s marrying.”

  I’m perplexed. This is the first time Eddie’s said anything other than happy shiny things designed to cheer me up. For weeks now, he’s gone along as if nothing happened.

  “It makes no sense,” he says, then he looks at me. His eyes search my face. He seems genuinely confused. “Why did they get to have a healthy baby, and we didn’t?”

  “Because I lost it,” I say bitterly.

  Eddie sits up abruptly. “Would you stop saying that!”

  “Oh, sorry. I forgot, we don’t talk abou
t it.”

  “I am trying to talk about it,” he says.

  “No, you’re talking about Trina, not about what happened to me.”

  “It happened to us.”

  “You weren’t here,” I say sarcastically.

  “Goddammit, Lemon,” Eddie says. He twists his fingers into his hair. “I can’t change that, and you can’t hold it against me forever.”

  I sit up and smack my hands down on the bed. “You’re such a selfish bastard!” I yell. “I don’t get to hold it against you for being gone, but you get to blame me for the whole fucking catastrophe.”

  “I don’t blame you!” Eddie booms. “You blame yourself!”

  “Because you said it was my fault!” I scream back at him.

  Eddie grabs me by the shoulders and turns my body to face him. “I don’t blame you,” he says angrily, his grip tight.

  I resent his strength and try to squirm away. I flail around, smack him with angry open hands. “You did.”

  His grip loosens, and he kneads my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Lemon. I’m really sorry.” Then his face softens, his lips go slack, and his eyes squint. “I should’ve been here. I should’ve helped you. I should’ve never left or said what I said.” He’s crying, and I’m stunned. I’ve never seen him cry, and it makes tears sting my eyes. “I let you down,” he bawls. “I let our kid down.”

  “No,” I say and shake my head, but what I mean is yes. Yes, he did, only it doesn’t matter now, because what I’ve needed this whole time is for Eddie to feel the same as I do. To cry because he is as sad as I am. I’ve felt isolated and alone without that commiseration, but now it’s different. I wrap my arms around him. “I miss her so much,” I whisper.

  “Me, too,” he says.