I was grateful to have had a reason to absent myself, to do the food shopping. And now I planned to hide out in the kitchen making dinner until—until I didn’t know what. Until night came and I could no longer delay speaking honestly. I was filled with apprehension.
Then I saw Jessica’s face at the door, and instead of the joy I had flown and driven all this way to take hold of, I felt my stomach disappearing into my feet.
“You’re okay on timing?” she said. “We’re about to do showers. I’m afraid to ask what you think of all this.”
“Why are the counselors so weird with me?” I blurted out.
“Weird? No. Everyone’s just, you know. It’s crazy.”
“Honestly, I don’t think anything,” I said wearily, answering her previous question. She gazed at me, puzzled. I tried to correct the course: “I get it about the kids. I get why you come here.”
“Thank you,” she said cautiously. “It means a lot you see that.”
“I’m not here for the kids,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “I was just—”
“I’m not explaining myself clearly.” I breathed out heavily. It was like listening to someone else speak. “This was the next step in the seduction,” I said. “A romantic grand gesture. No one else would do such a thing. It would play well. Et cetera.”
“Oh,” she said, her face changing. “I see.”
“I try in the wrong way,” I said. “It’s hard to explain. I should have waited till you came home. You’re married. I bet he has no idea you’re not here alone.” I looked at her. “Right.” Then I said those fateful words: “I think I made a mistake.” I hated myself in that moment. Two years after Yvonne, six months after Amy, nothing had changed. I was beyond remedy. I was ashamed.
“I see,” she said again, but coldly this time. There was a very long silence. “Are you going to make dinner or should I tell the kids they need to wash themselves?”
“It’s okay for you to be confused,” I said defensively, “but not me.”
“I’m married,” she said.
“Well, I’m fucked up. It’s just as strong a commitment, trust me.”
We laughed at that, a little. Then I got it. “You told me to come even though the counselors hadn’t decided. Or decided against it. You didn’t tell them I was coming. That’s why they’re weird. That’s why I don’t have a bed.” I had been told I would have to continue sleeping in a tent somewhere on campus while everyone else slept in a dorm room.
She examined the floor. “I have a hard time being direct sometimes. I really wanted you to come.”
I laughed mirthlessly. “You can see it through their eyes, though, right? It’s nuts. Desperate. Two crazy, desperate people.”
“I guess you’ve found somebody as hungry as you are,” she said. She took out her phone, and I listened to her book me a room at the nice hotel in town. She hung up. “You’re not the only one who can do romantic grand gestures.”
“That was—really generous,” I said. “I’ll make dinner, yes—of course.”
“I’ll go wash dirt out of ears,” she said, smiled mournfully, and disappeared.
I was grateful to have to cook. I could count on my head going still for as long as it took. Maybe not still enough, though. Forty-five minutes later, the roasters in the oven and little bodies with wet hair beginning to fill the hallway outside the kitchen, it occurred to me that the high temp should have by now filled the room with a smoky haze. Overcome by a feeling I did not wish to be having, I checked the heat. I exhaled—the dial was at 450. But when I ran my hand near the oven door, which should have been conducting a wall of heat, I felt . . . nothing. Carefully, I opened the door. It was probably about 250 inside.
I tried the front right stove burner. Nothing. The rear right. Nothing. The front left. Nothing. I was saying “no” over and over when the rear left clicked, clicked, clicked, and sputtered on. Fifteen minutes before the time I said dinner would be ready, I had six raw chickens, an oven that seemed to go no higher than 250, and one functioning burner.
I waved Jessica down in the hallway. “Can you bring me a frying pan from the van?”
“What’s the matter?” she said.
“Nothing!”
She looked at me with an expression that made clear she didn’t believe me and vanished.
Several minutes later, the kitchen door opened and a frying pan was flung at me—showers were a particular nightmare this evening, which I, for one, was thrilled to hear. I maxed out the heat on the functioning burner. Then I wedged two roasters into the pan. The kitchen was like a home without beds—there wasn’t even a fork in the utensil drawers; as soon as the sizzle sounded like too much, I turned the roasters with my hands. I had to get the first two chickens 70 percent done. Then I would put them back in the oven to ploddingly finish. The next two I would fry to 80 percent done. The last two almost all the way. While they were finishing in the oven, I would boil water for the egg noodles. Somehow, all this would be ready at roughly the same time and before the group of heads starting to peer through the kitchen window reached critical mass.
At some point, Jessica materialized at my elbow. Then she left and returned with two spatulas, for more awkward but less painful chicken turning. The number of heads at the window grew. The frying was going too slowly. I had an idea. When it was time to fry the next pair, I took the chickens out of the oven, set the tray on the prep table, closed my eyes, and butterflied them open with my hands. A cloudful of steam burst out, and I nearly wailed in pain. The two butterflied halves didn’t quite fit on the pan, but after I weighed them down with a precarious pot full of water, I had something approximating my grandmother’s chicken-under-a-brick.
She had died just after I met Alana, about whom my grandmother had had only one question: “Does she cook?” I said she was a very talented person, but she was in a hard business, so she worked a lot and—well, not often. My grandmother frowned and said something not very nice. As Alana’s schedule let up, she did cook more, and well, but it was too late to tell my grandmother. When I visited her at the cemetery, I mentioned it anyway. I never believed in cemeteries or silent monologues for the dead—a person gone is a person gone, and post-death rituals always felt like only a measure of their goneness. But I visited my grandmother for more years than I thought I would. For some reason, I’d decided that, even though others in the family didn’t understand, she did. Perhaps only because, when she was alive, when the matter concerned me, she was on board no matter what. So I imagined that, down there in the ground, she understood why my ex and I had held on for so long, how I could have ended up in the situation I had with Amy, why I was at a dysfunctional stove at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, roasting and frying chicken for forty. In truth, if my grandmother were alive, on board or not, probably she’d have understood no better than my grandfather or my parents. Her death had allowed me to imagine a kinship we might not have had in real life.
By the time the water went on for the noodles, it was an hour past the scheduled dinnertime. The kitchen was hot, the door was open, and they were hungry out there.
“So, like, what are you?” one of the popular girls, tall and thin, yelled at Loretta, half her height. “Are you a boy or a girl?”
“What do you care?” Loretta said in an even voice.
“Leave her alone,” a boy said.
“I want to do what boys do,” Loretta said.
The fallout from this gave us twenty minutes, but the noodle water remained still as death.
“Wait,” Jessica said. She ditched the noodle water and came back a minute later with water so hot that steam was coming off of it—the kitchen faucet let out tepid water, but the bathroom had scalding. I was so elated I kissed her, which sent a loud, hooting jeer up from the hallway. As I piled in the noodles, she set out the Black Forest cakes—the promise of these would buy another couple of minutes.
There weren’t proper cutting utensils, so I ripped the
chicken into pieces with my hands, and Jessica served using the spatula-tongs, adding noodles after she swished them around in chicken fat. The kids were skeptical of the chicken, but the promise of Black Forest cake afterward did its job. No one said thank you, though some did come for seconds. Earlier, I’d tried only bits of food to make sure it was done, and now I had a proper meal of the detritus. It wasn’t bad. It was quite all right, actually, all things considered. Or maybe the hunger that arrives after you’re done with something like that is large and indiscriminate. My restaurant work had nothing on it, though probably I would’ve melted down even more without that experience. I was melted down pretty good all the same—my hands were burned as red as if I’d laid them in a frying pan, which essentially I had. I sank to the floor and ran my finger along what was left on the trays of Black Forest cake. (These had come in for seconds and thirds.) Jessica slid down next to me. It was silent—the young ones had gorged and departed for bed.
“You saved it,” I said. “That was like a firefight. Trench warfare.”
“I don’t remember the last time I cooked,” she said.
“You don’t like to?” I said. Somehow, in seven nights of talking seven hours a night, we hadn’t discussed this. It was as if all that talk had happened to other people.
“No, I love to. Loved to. My husband has a sensitive stomach. It’s usually just noodles, or take-out broth.” She looked up. “Sorry to talk about him.”
“It’s okay. He’s your husband.”
Another long silence followed, but it was serene. Finally, I said, “Have you ever been with someone who’s—who’s—” I had never said the words out loud. The analyst had said them. The psychopharmacologist had said them. They threw around those poisonous words as if they weren’t poison at all. I got them out. “Depression. Clinically.”
She thought about it. “It scares me. But I’d be willing to try.”
I nodded and felt for the back of her neck. She leaned into my hand. The room ticked faintly around us. It was near midnight, and a mountain of dishes.
“How about, for dinner tomorrow, things that don’t need cooking?” she said. I laughed slightly. She looked up at me. “But I don’t know if you’re going to be here for dinner tomorrow.”
I said I would be.
I stayed till the end. We took the slow route back to Denver. In Hot Springs, we stayed with the lawyer who’d written me about my first novel. As she smoked long cigarettes on her flagstone patio, she set Jessica straight on some things about divorce. When we got to Laramie, where I had another friend—it’s the best thing about book touring, as good as having your books bought by strangers: you connect to people all over, a different kind of American map, and if you do it enough, it becomes so that you never have to drive very far before getting to a home where they know you—we went to the public computers at the university library, on which she wrote a final letter to her husband. Then she, my friend, and I took a long, hot walk to Kinko’s, where none of the clerks could understand why Jessica wanted so much damn insurance and guarantee of delivery on a one-page letter.
Along the way south, she told me about Loretta. Loretta was always scrambling up rocks or wrestling somebody or climbing around a tree. She was suited for survival. Loretta felt like a boy, not a girl—that was why she’d gone into the boys’ bathroom. Her mom had asked for that when she brought her to camp. The boys didn’t care. It was the girls who gave her a hard time.
Then Jessica told me about a pair of camp boys who had gone to rent a canoe at Custer State Park. The clerk told them the rental station was closed. On the way back, they saw a white family go up—for them, the rental station was open. Half the rangers were racist assholes, so the kids couldn’t make a fuss. The older kids pretended they didn’t care, but the younger kids—that was why Jessica was hugging them all the time. All they wanted was to melt in your arms.
She told me about the girl who wore long sleeves because her arms were covered with cuts. Her thighs were covered as well. The counselors had taken her penknife, but she must have had more. Many girls had cuts. Many of them had been raped, some by family members. Jessica had seen cuts on a girl as young as six, cigarette burns on the arms of a boy. Some had tried to commit suicide. There was no help for someone like that on the reservation, so they were sent to a special hospital in Rapid City, but it was like an asylum. The prospect of going there was sometimes the one thing that kept them from trying to kill themselves—or the thing that made them try extra hard. Jessica said this last part through tears. She was going to lose the science fiction bookshop in the divorce; she’d decided to apply for a master’s in social work so she could try to establish a mental health counseling center on the reservation.
The kids hardly ever got away from the rez. For all their trouble there, they felt an intense sense of belonging. The border-town whites, some of whom were viciously racist, did nothing to make it easier to imagine that good things awaited outside. Meanwhile, many parents, knowing too well what their kids could run into, on or off the rez, didn’t let them go anywhere on their own. They didn’t even want them to go to camp, and called every day.
For that—for a sense of belonging so fierce it withstood all of that—I envied them. As a teenager, I’d taken on a false name, ignored my native language, run from my family, pretended in the hope it would bring native feeling. The irony was that the native feeling began to show up only when I tried to retrieve what I’d been ignoring. That had seemed like the end of the story, but it turned out that, after accepting that which would always be Russian in me, I had to figure out what would be American, those early pretenses being wishful. New York is no less America than Pine Ridge. But at Pine Ridge, there were parents so worried that what had happened to them might happen to their children that they never let the children out of their sight. No matter where I went, I found my way to people whom trauma had made berserk about safety. I felt at home among them.
Jessica met my grandfather before she met my parents, because we drove to the hospital directly from the airport. Blood had appeared in his urine, and while we were flying home, an ambulance took him away. At the hospital, he muttered incoherently, then took my hand and smiled, half guileless love, half vacant searching. But no delirium could compete with his feeling for beauty, and when Jessica went to the bathroom, he lifted up a weak thumb and curled up his lips in a way that meant he was impressed.
I had sublet my apartment, and Jessica’s was occupied by her husband, so after the other classic stress tests of connection—cooking together and hours of alone time in a car—suddenly we ended up living together, too, at a friend’s place that was empty. (God bless these friends, without whose musical-chair largesse New York life wouldn’t be possible.) After my grandfather, more or less returned to his faculties, was discharged, I invited my parents to meet Jessica, at a café in Brooklyn. When they appeared, their brows were so knitted, they looked like one terrified line over their eyes. This turned to outright panic when they saw Jessica: a Viking, and given to the kind of close embrace, even with strangers, that makes a Russian person check his billfold. I wanted to tell them that it was our poisonous birthright to wish so badly for familiarity, for the security of stable information, that when it came to something new, we preferred rushing to the worst assumptions to having to manage inconclusiveness, with its possibility of kinder revelations. (Few utterances disoriented them more than “Let’s wait and see.”) My grandmother had gotten a cold welcome from my grandfather’s family, then passed it on to my father as he tried to join hers. How long would we keep doing to others the same things done to us? I could say all that, and perhaps they’d nod in a kind of understanding, or out of politeness, but none of it was durable enough to withstand the sense of things that would surge back as soon as I went away. I knew not to bother.
We were all so nervous that we drank a bottle of wine and forgot to order food. But we never really forget food. Self-conscious about meeting a new person or not, my parents ha
d brought a care package. Some people don’t leave home without umbrellas or condoms; mine, without food. When I was in my early twenties, they brought care packages like this all the time, until I threatened hell if they didn’t leave me to my independence, but lately they were chancing it again because lately I was accepting again, and because sometimes my father couldn’t resist showing off his Caesar salad with “home mad mayonesse” or his “mushrooms with feeling” (filling). Just now, the bag they withdrew as we said goodbye—you can’t let a loved one return from a trip to an empty fridge—was the most welcome thing I could imagine.
Jessica and I started unpacking our picnic right on the steps of a fancy brownstone near the café. There was a chicken stew, and syrniki, the patties of farmer cheese, dotted with raisins and spiked with vanilla, fried to a light crisp on both sides. Once, when I was little, my mother had cooked a batch while my father was, once again, repainting some part of our apartment at her behest. In my six-year-old brain, they became “housepainter syrniki,” and that is what I call them to this day.
Savage Feast Page 32
