Still Life with Bread Crumbs

by Anna Quindlen

  Sometimes she thought it was not losing her husband she had minded most, but losing the lovely big apartment they’d shared, with its windowed kitchen and its herringbone floors. The university’s apartment, into which the assistant curator would move, and where she would eventually raise their twin daughters after giving up her job. Bad move, Rebecca had thought, assuming, correctly, that in the foreseeable future the curator would need to support herself once more.

  “I like my old room better,” Ben had said when he and Rebecca moved into the place on West Seventy-Sixth Street. The curator wife had called him Benjie, until her own children were born, when she began calling him “your son” and his bed had been moved to the smallest bedroom so the twins could have a larger one. Until then Rebecca had occasionally thought of warning the woman of what would happen when Peter turned sixty. Which did happen when Peter turned sixty. The new woman was a graduate student whose name was Piper. The twins, according to Ben, were acting out because of abandonment. Peter was unchanged.

  “I thought you’d seen this coming,” Peter had said the night Rebecca had surprised him with the soon-to-be third Mrs. Symington.

  She hadn’t. Sometimes now she was still amazed, and mortified, that she hadn’t. Peter liked stories, liked reading them, telling them, analyzing them. Beginning, middle, end. Drama. Rebecca simply wasn’t much of a story. If it hadn’t been for the Kitchen Counter series she wouldn’t have been a story at all. It was only in the last few years that she had begun to realize that this wasn’t her fault. She realized that marriage doesn’t really make much of a story. Even in a marriage as truncated as her own—nine years, more or less—most of it is the mundane middle part. That was the part Peter couldn’t bear. That was the part Rebecca had liked most. It was the part she still missed, missed terribly without even knowing it.

  ONE TURKEY AFTER ANOTHER

  THANKSGIVING 1956

  Bebe hired a black woman who lived in Harlem to cook dinner for her husband, her six-year-old daughter, her parents, and a couple who lived in the apartment above. There was a twenty-four-pound turkey, corn bread dressing, mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows, and three kinds of pie. Bebe refused to tip the woman because she arrived nearly forty minutes late to the apartment. The next day, eating a turkey sandwich with salt and mayonnaise, Rebecca decided Thanksgiving was the best holiday, although she had little to choose from: her family never celebrated Hanukkah but her father was militant about ignoring Christmas and insisted they spend December 25 eating Chinese takeout and going to the movies.

  Rebecca liked moo shu beef but liked turkey sandwiches better.

  THANKSGIVING 1966

  Bebe decided to try Thanksgiving at the Berkshire Hotel. From then on, Winter family Thanksgivings were held at the Berkshire. However, by the time Rebecca was married and concerned about how to explain that she and Peter did not want a hotel meal on a holiday, her parents had decided to go to Delray Beach from November to March.

  The Delray Beach and Tennis Club had a Thanksgiving buffet. Rebecca did not visit her parents in Florida until December. Peter did not visit them at all.

  “It’s not my holiday, darling,” Peter said when she expressed relief that they could have their own Thanksgiving meal, in their own home. He said this every Thanksgiving at some point. He said the Pilgrims ate turkey because their religion forbade joy. The American guests all laughed, secretly impressed by the use of the archaic past tense of forbid. One year a historian became contentious: “Now, you see, that’s a basic bowdlerization of the Puritan experience in America,” he said with his mouth full. “Oh, dear Lord, Owen, next you’ll provide us with a history of the yam in an agrarian culture,” Peter drawled, and everyone laughed again.

  THANKSGIVING 1990

  Rebecca and Ben had Thanksgiving dinner at the Delray Beach and Tennis Club. “This is like a restaurant,” said Ben, who was six. “He misses his father,” said Rebecca’s father, making a well in his potatoes for his gravy. “Look, Benjie, do it like this.”

  “This is my daughter,” said Bebe to one of her friends who stopped by the table.

  “The famous photographer?” the woman said.

  “She’s getting a divorce,” Bebe said.

  THANKSGIVING 2010

  “Anyone can prepare a turkey,” it said in one of Rebecca’s cookbooks, still sitting on the shelf above the refrigerator in her apartment in New York. She groaned, and not simply because she imagined she could hear Ben, on the inflatable mattress in the cottage’s second bedroom, having sex with the young woman he has brought up to visit with him.

  (In fact Ben was doing push-ups. Rebecca is unable to tell the difference between the breathing of a man performing rhythmic exercise and one in the throes of coitus. Which may be the clearest reflection of her sex life during her marriage. Peter Symington was a thrilling and imaginative lover before the clinking of champagne glasses at the wedding lunch; after, he was burning calories and fantasizing about the girl in the short skirt in the front row of his survey course. While Ben does push-ups, Ben’s girlfriend, a young woman named Amanda, has gone outside to have a cigarette. This habit will eventually, nominally, lead to the end of her relationship with Ben at a New Year’s Eve party. That, and the following conversation between Rebecca and her son over Thanksgiving dinner:

  “So then he shot the raccoon.”

  “He shot him? He couldn’t trap him and take him somewhere else?”

  “Apparently if you do that they come right back. He’s something of a wildlife specialist and he was convinced that the raccoon would be back in the attic within a day or two if it wasn’t killed.”

  To which Amanda said sadly, “I can’t imagine any circumstances under which it’s necessary to kill an animal.”

  Rebecca has become accustomed to the speed with which her son’s romantic relationships begin, blossom, and then blow apart, like a time-lapse photograph of a claymore landing in a rose garden. She also knows that hearing the sort of sentence that admits to no possible alternative to a set scenario is, to Ben, like being force-fed adrenaline. She can almost see the pressure increase in the blue vein in his slender throat.

  “Wait, you’re saying there’s no circumstance under which you’d shoot an animal? Like a grizzly bear attacking in Yellowstone?”

  Perhaps because his father believed in the Socratic method of child rearing—“Tell us, Ben, what precisely is it about rap music that you find particularly compelling?”—Ben has become an indefatigable arguer. It is on New Year’s Eve, when a rat crosses their path on Avenue A and Ben mutters, “Under no circumstances could I hurt that animal,” that Amanda had had enough.

  “She just wasn’t smart enough,” Ben would tell Rebecca on the phone. “And she smoked. Her mouth tasted like an ashtray.”

  But that was later.)

  Rebecca groaned at the thought of her tenants opening the holiday cookbook, or any of the other cookbooks that were relics from her marriage, with their India ink marginalia: “P. didn’t like”; “P. hated”; the blessed, very rare, “P. liked.” Only boeuf bourguignon, which took her all day, with those endless pearl onions to blanch, score, peel, has the legend “P. loved!” The memory of that exclamation point is a mortification. So, too, is the fact that this morning she realized she had violated one of the basic tenets of any competent cook: she had purchased a turkey without comparing its size to the size of her oven. For fifteen minutes she sat at the table, staring at the bird, greasy with butter, caped in cheesecloth, as though it might shrink.

  “No way,” Ben had said as she held the roasting pan in front of the oven door and angled it this way and that.

  And an hour later, “Wow, Mom, you totally lucked out.”

  That was after she had sent him and the turkey to Tea for Two, the only place in town she could imagine that had both a large oven and no turkey inside it. “Sarah—man, can she talk!—Sarah says she’ll send someone over with it around five.”

  “What a sweet thing,” Aman
da had said.

  “You didn’t have to listen to her,” said Ben.

  (Later Amanda would remember this as one of the moments when she fell a little out of love with him. Also when he ate the last piece of pumpkin pie for Sunday breakfast and then went running alone without asking if she wanted to come.)

  The potatoes were waiting to be mashed, the string beans steaming, and deep dark sliding up the side of the mountain when there was a tentative knock at the front door. When Rebecca opened it a middle-aged man with melancholy eyes and pouchy cheeks stood holding a large cardboard box.

  “It is I, Ms. Winter, bearing the bird.” It was the phrasing as much as the voice that made her recognize Tad.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Brinks. I’ve never seen you without your makeup.” At the self-serve gas station pumps, going into the pharmacy, several times at Tea for Two—but never with this fair baby skin and slightly flattened pug nose. Rebecca reached for the box.

  “Oh, certainly not. This is both hot and heavy, so to speak, and I would be remiss if I did not bring it in.” Ben appeared behind his mother. “Oh, goodness, I’m interrupting the festivities. Perhaps this young man will take it so I can be on my way.”

  “Would you like to join us for dinner? It’s an enormous turkey, as I’m sure you can tell. Ben, take that from him. It’s really far too large for three people. I can’t imagine what I was thinking.” Living in the past, Rebecca thought, when the long pine table in the dining room was crowded with friends. Ah, well. She had learned to live without them, it seemed.

  “This is turkey enough for twelve,” Ben said.

  “It’s a lovely thought, but I will be breaking bread with my mother and my aunt Ruth. I merely stopped at Sarah’s for corn muffins and she asked me if I would bring the bird to you.”

  “Corn bread stuffing?” Amanda said brightly.

  “Stuffing is a breeding ground for bacteria,” Tad said solemnly. “Stuffing a turkey is as dangerous as botulism.”

  “Here comes a slow painful death!” Ben cried when he shoveled in a forkful of stuffing an hour later. The turkey was perfectly done, and Sarah had sent a thermos of gravy that she’d made herself from the pan drippings and some tawny port.

  “There are some lovely people here,” Rebecca said.

  “That guy wears makeup?”

  “He’s a clown. A professional clown. The Magnificent Mo Mo.”

  The week before in Tea for Two, Tad had joined her for coffee and Rebecca had asked him how he’d chosen his profession. “I purchased a kit,” he said. She’d thought he’d misunderstood her, but according to Tad someone, somewhere, offered by mail a beginner’s clown kit: makeup, wig, an instruction manual on how to make balloon animals. Rebecca had thought of asking to photograph some of the balloon animals, but in her experience people only wanted you to photograph them. And even she had to admit that balloon animals in black-and-white instead of color would lose a great deal of their balloon animalness.

  “None of it is of the highest quality,” Tad had added, “but it got me started.”

  “Had you always wanted to—” Rebecca hesitated. Was it possible to use the word clown as a verb?

  Tad had interrupted her. “I was interested in entertaining,” he said solemnly. “Being a clown was collateral.”

  Rebecca thought of the story of the Rothrock competition. The man had wanted to be an operatic singer and had settled for balloon animals.

  “I had a similar experience,” she said.

  “Oh, no,” Tad said. “You were born to be a great photographer.”

  “I’m not sure anyone is born to be anything,” Rebecca had replied.

  “Remember Nicholas Lindstrom at my birthday party, locking himself in the bathroom because of the clown?” Ben said, peeling a piece of skin off the turkey breast.

  “I think of it every time I see Tad. He’s so earnest about his—is clowning a word?—that I’d never dare mention it.”

  “When I was a little girl there was a clown at every single party,” said Amanda, who had grown up on Park Avenue. (Strike two with Ben.)

  “That work on the wall of the room we’re using is really good,” said Ben. “The crosses? Really really good. I keep wondering what’s underneath.”

  “Underneath what?”

  “The crosses. They’re little graves, right? What’s in the graves? Baby birds? Kittens?”

  “What a terrible thought,” said Amanda, putting her fork down.

  “That’s interesting,” Rebecca said. “I’ve thought about them quite a lot, but it’s never occurred to me that there’s anything beneath them. The earth doesn’t look disturbed. Take a good look. I don’t think there’s been any digging.”

  “Are they like those memorial things that you see sometimes on the road?”

  “I had the same thought, but these are out in the middle of nowhere. They obviously can’t involve a car accident, and I have to assume there are too many of them to commemorate a single event. Or perhaps not. I just don’t know.”

  “And you haven’t moved them to get a better look?” Ben waved his knife at Rebecca. “I know, I know, how many times have I heard it: if you manipulate the scene you distort the image. In other words, don’t … move … anything. What’s there is the point. The Rebecca Winter aesthetic.” Ben turned to Amanda. “There exist images of my baby ass that some people genuinely think are sand dunes, or the Sahara.”

  “Oh, you,” said Amanda, aiming for playful and succeeding only at sounding puzzled.

  “You’ve been reading too much art criticism,” said Rebecca, smiling at her son.

  “If you had three or four more of those, you could have a show,” Ben said, making a well in the center of his mashed potatoes and filling it with gravy. “You could call it the White Cross series.”

  “I will if I find any more.” Such a jolt she had felt, when she’d stepped off a deer trail beneath a lanky old pine and had seen another white cross leaning against its trunk. Beneath it was one of those plaster casts of a handprint that kindergarten teachers must learn in Education 101. Rebecca had made one like it herself for some long-ago Mother’s Day, but she was quite certain that after the statutory time limit—a year? a month?—Bebe would have asked Sonya to dispose of it. Only the items she gave her father were safe, ranged along a shelf in his office that, for some reason, also held a burgundy leather set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: an ashtray painted blue and white, a mosaic tray from day camp made out of shards of old dishes, later some small paintings of a Sabrett cart on a corner and the Empire State Building spire stabbing an unlikely collection of cumulus clouds. Her father had mourned her career as a painter. He never said so, but she could tell that he thought photography was a second-rate artistic pursuit.

  “I went to see Pop Pop last week,” said Ben around a mouthful of stuffing.

  “How was he?”

  “Good. He’s always good. We watched the news and the Giants game. Sonya made us some kind of goulash.” Sonya may have once been a good cook, but decades of making food for the Winter family had flattened any formerly sharp edges of her cuisine. Rebecca’s mother was fond of what Peter had called “Presbyterian meals”: chicken à la king, tomato juice, and oyster crackers. “As an Englishman, I feel perfectly at home with the food served in your parents’ home, darling,” he had said when he was still in his early charming phase, before Rebecca realized that darling was a British social convention and not an endearment, and that it was frequently used to mean its opposite.

  “Did you go to see Nana, too?” Rebecca said.

  “Nah. I mean, what’s the point? She thinks I’m the guy who’s there to mop the floor. Or she doesn’t even notice because she’s playing the piano.”

  “Your grandmother plays the piano?” said Amanda. The poor girl, her sentences dropped like stones into the pond of their conversation, fell to the bottom and disappeared. Rebecca blamed her son. For some reason he always picked women he would find easy to discard.

&n
bsp; “Endlessly,” Ben said.

  Bebe had never noticed much of anything while she was playing the piano. Rebecca had sometimes thought she could have walked into the apartment with some boy, taken him back to her room, had loud sex with him, and shown him the door naked, and her mother would have continued with the second movement of the Pathétique Sonata. If there had been such a boy. If she had been such a girl. Instead she did her algebra or American history as the plaster and lath of her bedroom walls hummed.

  “My mother has dementia,” Rebecca said to Amanda. “We don’t know exactly what she sees or knows.”

  “Really, Mom? Really?”

  “Didn’t Pop Pop ask if you’d seen her?”

  “Sure. I said I had. I said she was asking for him.” Rebecca can almost hear Sonya’s grunt as he says it. Ben is like his father; he can lie fluently, but unlike his father he almost always does it in a good cause. He does not lie to these young women when he leaves them. He tells them the truth, unsparingly. Which she supposes is also a bit like his father.

  “This is such good pie,” Amanda says later. “Can I have your recipe?” Ah, the girlfriends. So transparent. And of course Rebecca had been a girlfriend once, too, telling Peter’s stepmother that she hoped to learn how to make summer pudding. “Perhaps our housekeeper can help you with that,” the woman had said. Frosty, it had been, and at the time Rebecca had put it down to being English, later to the fact that Peter’s stepmother apparently had never prepared so much as a cup of tea, later still to the idea that Rebecca was the second wife and perhaps Peter’s family had quite liked the first one. Or did now that the first wife was wife no longer.

  “It’s the recipe on the pie filling can,” said Rebecca, who already sensed she would not be seeing Amanda again.

  “It’s great,” Ben said, and he put his arm around Rebecca’s shoulder and kissed the top of her head. “Everything was great. As always.”

  LEFTOVER TURKEY