Poison

by Galt Niederhoffer

  FOUR

  By all accounts, that first year was a good year for the Connors. The move came with new jobs for both parents, Cass’s as a professor in the journalism department at USM, Ryan in a snazzy architecture firm, an industry with as much business in Portland as the prior decade’s lobstermen. Whereas Cass’s previous work required an enormous amount of travel, she quickly found that the new job required an enormous amount of staying in the same position, standing at the front of a classroom of big-eyed aspiring journalists, defending the viability of print to the post-digital revolution, debating the best way to get their blogs in front of the “right person,” and then, after class, sitting at a desk in a basement office, fielding students’ questions of what was it like and how did you get your start working at a real-life city paper?

  The job, if a slight demotion from legal reporter at The Times and frequent contributor to Mother Jones, was, in truth, the perfect graduation, allowing Cass to balance the hustle of work with the hush of home for the first time since giving birth to Alice. It offered a long-overdue respite from the working mother’s juggle—the one that leaves mothers breathless from the first waking gasp to the first moment of sleeping relaxation. It was, for Cass, nothing less than a long-overdue vacation. As rewarding as her career had been, as impressive as her advances within it, so was the fact that her hard work now enabled her to coast for a few years in Portland while focusing on her kids and husband.

  For Ryan, the move was the culmination of the work of a decade, a long-coveted career change after working in a city design firm, suffering the Pharaoh-style exploitation of its younger generation. The way he talked about leaving his firm, he may as well have been released from prison. The slaves of New York, he liked to say, were used up until they were no longer useful, whipped and scourged by their superiors, their best ideas snatched without credit, held captive in marble offices, forced to eat greasy takeout until their meticulous blueprints etched red lines into their faces. It was, for Ryan, a welcome relief to leave behind this culture. And so the move was characterized by all sorts of reverent chatter, phrases like “quality of life,” and “making up for lost time,” dreamy plans to cook more, hike more, read more, buy a kayak.

  Cass’s family was less enthusiastic about the move to Portland. They opposed the idea of Cass moving the kids hundreds of miles away. At first Cass was taken aback by their reaction, but she had come to learn that grief brings out the best or the worst in people, not much in between bottomless generosity or callous judgment. Her own family was not immune to the polarities of human nature. Her father, Marty, suffered from some of the more unappealing isms—egotism, narcissism, solipsism, and good old-fashioned chauvinism. He was born of a generation that tolerated, as opposed to respected, women, charging women with the crime of original sin and, after the malice of temptation, for adding insult to injury with their irascible, emotional natures. Three wives and several affairs provided ample proof of his theory, and a trail of increasingly bitter wives, each with more naked financial goals and more recent college graduations.

  Cass’s mother, Dale, though well meaning, was similarly challenged, as reverential of social norms as her ex-husband was oblivious to them. And the disparity between her hopes and dreams created an angst quelled only by the right daily dosage. She was consumed with a set of expectations that Cass had always maddeningly flouted, starting with her choice to use the name Cass instead of Cassandra, followed by her favoring combat boots and red lipstick in high school, followed by her decision to embed herself in Croatia and write about the refugee crisis. The mother-daughter relationship had always teetered between tortured and tattered. The death of Cass’s first husband was no less an insult to Dale than Cass’s decision to marry Ryan years later.

  When Cass fell in love with Ryan, her mother did not hide her aversion. This grew to equal opportunity animosity directed at both Cass and Ryan.

  “What specifically don’t you like,” Cass had asked, “other than the fact that he’s not Jason?”

  “I don’t know,” her mother had quipped. “There’s just something about him. And frankly, I think it reflects poorly on you that you’re so quick to get back on the saddle.”

  At first Cass took the criticism with a measure of understanding, but she never forgot the comment. Her relationship with her mother worsened as her relationship with Ryan developed. Over time, she stopped confiding in her mother altogether, whether commiserating over a minor quibble or consulting on a major life decision. Negative reinforcement is a powerful force. She stopped calling to avoid hearing four words (“I told you so”) more than any explicit conversation. Little by little, the rift between mother and daughter widened into a chasm. When Sam was born, Cass’s mother sent a note and a present, but to this day, she had yet to visit their new home in Portland or to meet her youngest grandson. Perhaps because of these tenuous bonds and a toxic family upbringing, Cass was particularly open to the idea of starting fresh in a different part of the country.

  The choice had proven a good one.

  Two years after moving to Portland, the kids were settled in their school, laying sturdy roots with friends, digging into their schoolwork, and buttressing these foundations with their own interests—soccer, dance, music. The house finally looked like a home, the floors collaged with faded rugs, walls adorned with mosaics of children’s paintings, rooms sprouting with houseplants, musical instruments, and a sofa that transformed the living room into a den fit for hibernation. The house still needed work—the inspection revealed some kinks in the basement foundation, a leak in the roof, and a burgeoning termite problem—which was not ideal given all the other flux. But the defects of the house made it more affordable, and so they took their lumps—taking on a mortgage that was cramped, if not crippling, with the hope that real estate values would appreciate faster than their cost of living. They bet the farm on the farm, draining their savings into an asset that would either set them up for life, or sink them.

  Occasionally, they checked in with each other, assessing the choice to move as they lay in bed, the house finally quiet.

  “Do you still think we’re doomed?” Ryan asked.

  Cass smiled and ignored him, continued reading.

  He ignored her attempt to ignore him. “Do you still think we’re doomed?” he repeated.

  She shook her head. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  He stared at her, smiling, flirting, then frowned at her disinterest. He leaned in suddenly, grabbed her book, dislodging her reading glasses in the process.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” she said. She stared at him, defiant.

  “Do you or don’t you?” he repeated.

  “Do I or don’t I what?”

  “Do you or don’t you think we’re doomed?”

  She stared at him, eyes narrowed. It was this ability to turn from interested to intense, from asking to demanding in a moment that made Ryan so endearing—and occasionally unsettling. “Doomed to live in paradise,” she said, ending the face-off, thereby inviting his lips onto hers and quashing any doubts that they had made the right decision.

  Their house was built in the classic Victorian construction, two stories, four bedrooms, a dormer attic made for hiding, ornate, if tired, trim on the roof that looked like a storybook cottage or, when decked with Halloween garb, decidedly haunted. There was plenty of room for a sizable family to burrow in without rubbing elbows, and a trim backyard for everyone to spill into in the summer. The house was built into a hill, two stories in the front and three in the back, with a grade so steep as to make room for a third floor below. The “hidden” half-underground floor made it feel a bit like a home for a family of elves, as did the abundance of children spilling into the backyard in the summer. It was painted a pleasing dusty blue with black trim that matched its slate roof. It was, in every way, the embodiment of the Connor family—apparently perfect on the outside with hidden depth and complexity. Both sides of the house boasted a different point of view; a window t
hat opened inches above the ground, putting the viewer at eye level with grass. Or, if you stood on your toes on the top floor, a view of the vast bay in the distance.

  A house without a view of the bay would have sufficed, but Ryan was persuasive. His argument was simple: if they were going to live their dream, they might as well do it in their dream house. It was time, he told Cass, to “start living their best life.” She knew him well enough to understand his true meaning. Not so much financial ambition as growing up, as he described it, the poor kid in a world of privilege. Nonetheless, she wanted this for him, wanted to help him achieve success on his terms, and so she agreed when he asked her to dip into her savings for the down payment. In fact, it was more of a dive than a dip into the money left to her by her husband, but better to put it in a solid asset than leave it vulnerable to spending. The deed named Ryan and Cass as joint tenants with rights of survivorship. God forbid something happen to one, his or her half of the house would automatically transfer to the one still standing.

  The house grew increasingly incomplete as you walked up the stairs, creating the sense that you were traveling back in time as you ascended. The first floor housed the kitchen, the living room, and a dining room table. The kitchen was an amalgam of appliances bought on Craigslist: cabinets salvaged from the prior owners and a large refrigerator that intermittently buzzed and vibrated. The floor itself looked something like a quilt of wooden patchwork because of all the places walls had been removed and flooring replaced with plywood. Cass yearned to sand the floors or at least paint them white, but Ryan opposed the idea, insisting that he liked it as is. She suspected he opposed the idea simply because he hadn’t thought of it himself.

  The second floor was more of a mess, as it contained one empty room, not only empty of furniture but empty of flooring. Ryan’s first demolition project had been to remove a spiral staircase that rose from the first to second floor, the removal of which he began on a Friday night at ten with a pickax. For a week, the family lived with a ten-by-ten-foot hole in the ceiling, joking about how lucky they were that the hole wasn’t in the roof and how the placement of a pole would turn their home into a firehouse. Eventually, Ryan enlisted a team of local workers to close up the hole and haul out the staircase.

  But Ryan had only begun his endeavors in home improvement. The wall between the living room and kitchen was his next target.

  “One day, I’m just gonna take it down. I’m gonna do it with a hammer.” And, as Ryan tended to do, he made good on his promise.

  On a Sunday morning, Cass, Alice, and Sam returned from the grocery store to find the house in a state of chaos. Walls that were there when she left two hours before were no longer. Electrical wires swung from the ceiling like exotic jungle branches. Flurries of white drywall dust coated the kitchen appliances. Metal framing spiked from tufts of insulation. Ryan stood in the middle of this mess, wild with exhilaration, grunting as he hacked at a wall with an ax, a one-man demolition. It was as though a hurricane had blown through the house, except the hurricane was her husband.

  “What are you doing?” Cass said. She instinctively stepped in front of the kids, backing them into the hall behind her.

  Ryan beamed, like a hunter with his fallen target, his face white from the drywall dust, his UC–Berkeley sweatshirt soaked with perspiration. “This wall was driving me nuts,” he said.

  “So you took the whole room down?”

  “I got a little carried away.”

  Cass surveyed the room, imagined their children playing in this hazardous death zone. “Ryan, the kids can’t be in here. Everything in here is dangerous. The kitchen isn’t functional anymore. The air in here is toxic.”

  “Yeah,” he said, still holding the ax. “I thought of that.”

  “Are you sure this wasn’t a structural wall?” She eyed a tenuous pillar that no longer reached the ceiling, the wires swaying beside it.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Certain.” And then, approaching the pillar, he said, “If it was, better we know that now. This thing looks like it needs a replacement.”

  Cass surveyed the scene, moved by the cold comfort. “Where are we going to sleep?” she said. “I’m picking Pete up from soccer in twenty minutes.”

  He stood in silence, fixed on her like a drunk man trying to regain balance. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll clean it up, I promise. Take ’em to the park for a little while. I’ll have it fixed by dinner.” He scurried away to find a broom and began sweeping like a possessed beaver.

  Cass watched him begin in total indignation. She might as well have stumbled into the house and found her husband in her dress and heels, dancing in front of the mirror. But something shifted in her as she watched his frantic cleaning: sympathy and begrudging respect for his ambition. He wanted, needed a happy home so badly he would stop at nothing. Here he was, using the tools that men use, the few at a man’s disposal for construction, instead of destruction. And so he should be forgiven, she decided, for passionate effort. God bless him for taking this on. Most men expected others to do their work for them.

  “If you want a piece of pie, you gotta pick the apples.”

  She shook her head, resigned, but the sight of him made her laugh.

  “Keep them out of the house a few hours. I’ll have it back to normal. By dinnertime, I’ll have the kitchen totally up and running.”

  Months passed before the walls were sealed up, framed, dry-walled, and plastered, this time by a professional team under an engineer’s guidance. In the meantime, Ryan fashioned a temporary kitchen, turning the house into his own architecture school for the children and teaching the family the pleasures of in-home camping. He taped garbage bags to the walls, forming a crude insulation, and reconfigured the kitchen appliances in the newly open space so that the entire living room was oriented around a central kitchen island. While the neighbors covered their kitchen counters in slabs of slate and granite, Ryan borrowed from the subfloor and laid a plank of plywood.

  The kitchen was command central for Ryan’s experiments, the ultimate realm for his transformation from Peter Pan to Pater. Long gone were the “medicinal” pot cookies Ryan made Cass during their courtship. Now, Ryan’s culinary feats were fit for a family of five, all manner of meats grilled in the backyard in the summer, hearty pastas and soups in the winter, and all year round, come Saturday morning, his famous pancake breakfast. Ryan was never happier than when he was barking orders at his family, transforming his stepkids into sous-chefs, enlisting the kids to crack an egg, to prep or peel vegetables, bossing them around like the chef of a three-star Michelin restaurant. Pete was usually tasked with cleaning while Alice took on more advanced work, chopping, or, much to Cass’s horror, transferring heated items. The kids rejoiced in the responsibility, the drama, and the magic. Cass reveled in their delight, usually from the sidelines, enjoying the reprieve to nurse the baby. The division of labor worked. Together they made elaborate meals for family dinners and Sunday breakfasts. The quality of these meals, which ranged from spotty to very good, was secondary to the process. In cooking, as with home improvement, Ryan walked a fine line between safety and hazard, between the outcome and the adventure.

  Pasta-making was perhaps their most successful project. Alice cleaned the work surface, wiping down the wooden counter. Pete prepped the ingredients, the perfect trifecta: flour, olive oil, water. Together they built a pyramid of flour, poured olive oil and water to form a lake in the center, and carefully mixed these disparate substances in a quiet meditation. When satisfied, they rolled the dough into sheets as thin as cotton fabric and fed them into a contraption with the patience of weavers. The least successful experiment was apple cider caramel. A molten drop of caramel erupted from the pot and landed on Pete’s cheek. The trip to the emergency room and the scar from the burn only slightly soured the sweetness of the candy-making chapter.

  As is true with any chef, Ryan’s attention to his tools verged on the obsessive. He had an enormous array of gadgets more sophi
sticated than a typical domestic kitchen—a terrifying collection of knives, a menacing sharpener, zesters, graters, basters, mandolines, a squadron of pots and pans, and a large vat called an immersion circulator that looked and sounded like an indoor aquarium. Those who carelessly handled or improperly cleaned these tools would suffer Ryan’s wrath, with Ryan reprimanding the offending borrower without mercy, or searching the house for the person who had placed a knife in the dishwasher instead of washing and drying it by hand.

  Sometimes Ryan’s passion for cooking unnerved Cass. Kitchen experiments could spin out of control, turning the kitchen into a postapocalyptic landscape. Though the kids loved the chaos, Cass sometimes found it disconcerting. It was this wild, manic, slightly unhinged side to her husband that sometimes made her feel she lived with a man in whom lurked a vaguely maniacal demon. When planning a pig roast, boiling molten sugar for caramel, or soaking cashews for homemade nut milk, he sometimes veered from charming chef to fanatical mad scientist. The pig he brought home from the local butcher looked alarmingly more like a fetus than a piglet. The nuts he soaked for almond milk reaped quarts of toxic liquid.

  The evolutionary attributes of such a man were not lost on Cass—a man who could build a fire and cook a good meal, make a decent living and even better pancakes, frame a wall and lay the foundation for a fort with the kids. What better partner could she dream up? What better role model for her sons and her daughter? Ryan was the ultimate modern man, a well-rounded composite of the often bifurcated male and female virtues, a man as comfortable in the kitchen as he was in the shed, as graceful on a bicycle as he was in the bedroom. And so Cass tried to be graceful too with the inevitable clunks of this role reversal. So what if he asserted control of domains she might have wanted to claim for herself—namely, the kitchen? So what if he seemed to be better at most anything he took on, from scrambled eggs to roast chicken? Competition was a healthy force in the kitchen, at least, and perhaps it could be similarly applied to parenting.