Kitchens of the Great Midwest

by J. Ryan Stradal

  Jarl ignored her and sipped his beer. “So, can we stay here tonight, or should we take her back to our place?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “And, uh, I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Jarl said, standing up. “Maybe now’s not the best time to bring this up, but, I was actually wondering, because she sleeps in your room every night, and there’s that empty room—we could move in for a while, split the rent with you.”

  Fiona nodded. “It would really help.”

  At the time, Lars didn’t want to admit that he might have needed them even more, so in his classic Lars way, he just told them he’d think about it, and he walked to his room to get dressed for work. As he buttoned his white shirt, he was already thinking where he’d move furniture around, already thinking about the good and the bad and the deep human necessity of it all, and how anybody ever got anything done without family, and how someone could give that up in the amount of time it takes to seal an envelope, with the same saliva once used to seal a marriage.

  • • •

  Christmas is only exciting when there’s a child in the middle of it, and it’s lovely and sad how three adults with about one and a half jobs between them will pile presents under a tree for a six-month-old baby. Fiona was particularly intent on getting little Eva up to date with some modern fashions, such as baby leggings, a My Little Pony onesie, and some pink Stride Rite shoes.

  The adults didn’t have wish lists, but Lars was working on a surprise for Jarl. He absolutely didn’t want to make it himself, but he had a lead on a butcher down south of the Cities who apparently sold the freshest lutefisk in the metro area, at some old family-owned shop that had been in operation for eighty years. While he was at work, Lars would make the accompanying cream sauce—which softens lutefisk from being a hostile sensory assault to merely a disgusting one—and he would surprise Jarl with the whole shebang as a big practical joke on Christmas Eve night.

  • • •

  There was a lot to think about on Christmas Eve. The restaurant was closed, thank goodness, because Lars had planned a five-course meal for Eva, Lars, Jarl, Fiona, and the four people who would drive up from West Des Moines: Fiona’s sister Amy Jo, Amy Jo’s art professor husband, Wojtek, and their kids, Rothko and Braque. Wojtek and Amy Jo were really into food and culture, or so Lars was told. They were attracted to the idea of having their Christmas Eve dinner prepared by a professional chef; that seemed to be Fiona’s selling point. Lars hadn’t met them yet, but being that they were driving so far out of their way and staying the night in a hotel, he felt inspired to pull out all the stops—pork shoulder, winter squash, venison meatballs, wild rice salad, crème brûlée, and, of course, the surprise for Jarl.

  It was ten in the morning, and Lars was just about to make the drive to the old butcher shop to acquire the key ingredient for the surprise when Amy Jo and Wojtek Dragelski’s Mazda 626 pulled into a guest parking space outside. Lars watched from his living room window as the family, who must’ve left Iowa around 6:00 a.m. to arrive here so early, trudged through the snow toward the lobby of his building.

  “They’re here, Fiona,” Lars called out to his brother’s fiancée. Fiona and Jarl had gotten engaged a few weeks before, on Black Friday. Jarl thought they could get a better deal on rings that way.

  Fiona set down her magazine and leapt from the sofa; he’d never seen her move so quickly. “Let’s go down and greet them at the door,” she said, already putting her shoes on.

  The Dragelskis looked like one of those odd families where, but for some vague physical resemblances, no two people looked like they belonged together. Amy Jo, the mother, had the dress and demeanor of a museum docent; Fiona had described her older sister as “fancy” and “uptight”—surely she was the one to rouse a family before dawn for a four-hour drive in the dead of winter. Wojtek, the father, had a full black beard, wore a brown leather jacket over his thick torso, and the tired, glazed-over face of a man on autopilot. The thirteen-year-old son, Rothko, or “Randy,” as he apparently preferred to be called (and who could blame him), had curly rocker hair, a dangling silver earring, steel-toed boots, and a long-sleeved Guns N’ Roses Appetite for Destruction shirt. Braque, the eight-year-old daughter, was a tall, stunning blond child in an Iowa Hawkeyes Starter jacket and bright new Nikes.

  Lars watched while Fiona hugged them all, some reciprocating more willingly than others. Lars knew by now that Fiona loved her older sister and viewed Amy Jo’s family as a paragon of sophistication. As Lars was introduced to them, he felt as if he was being shown off as an example of how Fiona could be sophisticated as well.

  “I need to take a piss,” Randy said, looking down at the skulls on his shirt.

  “Randy!” said his mom.

  “Well, I do,” Randy said, as if the facts and not the language had been called into question.

  The elevator door opened, and Jarl walked out holding Eva with one hand and a Grain Belt Premium in the other. Although she was fast asleep, she cast a spell over the six people in the lobby, in the manner of most infants.

  Fiona frowned at the beer bottle in Jarl’s hand. “You sure you’re OK with her?”

  Jarl frowned back at the dumb question. Everyone knew that he was great with the baby, so far, and everyone knew that the baby just loved him; even when Eva was bawling her head off, for some reason she quit crying instantly whenever he picked her up. It was one of those things.

  “Can I hold her?” Braque shouted, lunging toward Eva, not even waiting for confirmation. Dang, she was an assertive little thing.

  Lars noted that Jarl easily managed to hand the baby over to Braque without setting his beer down. He was a little concerned about his baby in the arms of that brash little girl, but decided not to make a big deal out of it; he had somewhere to be.

  “Hey,” he said. “I gotta run an errand south of the Cities. I’ll be back in about an hour or so. Fiona, you give ’em the tour. Got coffee and venison meatballs up there.”

  As the Dragelski family followed Fiona and Jarl to the elevator, Lars glanced at Randy. “Oh, and no one’s in the bathroom, last I checked.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Randy said, which was not what Lars had expected to hear, for some reason, and on the way to his car he felt reassured about his strange new guests.

  • • •

  The man behind the counter at the old small-town butcher shop had a handlebar mustache and signs on his walls that read things like BUTCHERS DON’T GET OLD—THEY JUST LOSE THEIR PRIME. When Lars explained that he wanted only a pound of lutefisk, the guy acted like it would be a waste of his time to get off his ass for that small a sale.

  “That’ll hardly feed a family,” the butcher said.

  No one else was in the shop to help counter this argument. “Frankly, it’s excessive,” Lars said. “It’s kind of an inside joke. I can’t in good conscience make people actually eat it.”

  “Yeah you can,” the butcher said. “Who’s in charge at your house?”

  Somewhere, somehow, Lars thought, this man is a blood relative of Gustaf Thorvald. “Just a pound,” he said. The butcher shook his head and sliced off a chunk of snot-colored whitefish about the size of a hardcover book. The smell was nearly giving Lars PTSD, but it was worth it; he couldn’t wait to see the look on Jarl’s face.

  “Have a good day,” Lars said as he left the shop.

  “If I have to,” the old butcher said, sitting down again, relieved to be rid of a city-slicker lutefisk tourist.

  • • •

  As Lars drove back to St. Paul, it began to snow, and on the radio he heard reports of “glare ice” and an accident on westbound Crosstown between Minneapolis and St. Paul. He thought about Cynthia in Australia or New Zealand and how it was summer in that part of the world. Jarl and Fiona were so incensed that Cynthia didn’t send Eva a present for Christmas that they were threatening to hire a private investiga
tor to find out where in Australia she was.

  But Lars didn’t want that. He’d viewed Cynthia neglecting Eva’s first Christmas as a litmus test, confirmation that she was serious, that she was forever done with being a mother and would never come back. On the drive, he thought of a story that he’d maybe tell on Christmas: that he’d gotten a call from the police in Sydney and they’d told him that Cynthia had died alone in a one-car accident, and they were going to just bury her out there. Cynthia wasn’t close to her own mom, and her dad had died when she was a teenager, so it was perfectly feasible that no one would blow the lid off of this story; he couldn’t think of anyone left in the United States who would hear the news and buy tickets to Australia for the funeral.

  As he climbed the stairs to his apartment—he always took the stairs now—he wondered about Cynthia’s friends at the restaurant. Did she still keep in touch with any of them? With Allie, Cayla, Amber, Amy, or Sarah? He hardly spoke with them anyway. Maybe he wouldn’t tell them.

  The concrete stairway was cold, but Jarl was right, getting into shape was important. He’d lost four pounds in two weeks and the stairs were a big part of that. If he was ever going to attract someone who could be a good mother to his daughter, he thought he should probably at least get below two-sixty. A person had to start somewhere.

  He was on the third-floor landing before he realized he’d forgotten the lutefisk in the trunk and had to go back down to get it. Well, it was an excuse to get a little bit more of a workout. Maybe he had even forgotten it subconsciously, knowing what a calorie explosion the holidays were. He jogged down the stairs, his breath clouding in his face, and kept jogging toward the rusty blue, salt-streaked Dodge Omni, where he retrieved his surprise for Jarl out of the back.

  Halfway up the third flight of stairs, he felt a pain in his shoulder, and he gasped for air in the cold, opening his mouth. He sat down in the middle of the staircase to take a rest and felt a stabbing pain so intense, he felt tired. He closed his eyes, dropping the lutefisk, leaned his head against the railing, and felt his body tumble down to the landing without him.

  CHOCOLATE HABANERO

  It was 7:00 a.m. on the day before her eleventh birthday, and Eva was on her knees in her favorite stretchy blue jeans, hard at work in her closet. She was checking the dryness of her hydroponic chile plants when her mom knocked on her door.

  “Come in.” Eva straightened her back and turned to look at her mom, Fiona, who was wearing a pantsuit the color of a serrano pepper with matching shoes and big silver hoop earrings. She looked like a shorter, wider Hillary Clinton, but with the posture and attitude of someone fifty-eight hours into a sixty-hour workweek.

  “What kind of treat do you want to bring your class for your birthday?” Fiona asked her daughter. “I’ll pick it up after work tonight if I have the energy.”

  According to Eva, the worst birthday tradition ever in world history was the one where you had to bring some treat to class when it was your birthday. Well, she figured, if she had to feed the entire sixth grade, she might as well feed them something she’d actually eat.

  “I was thinking, vegan blueberry sorbet from New City Market.”

  “Oh Christ. Really?”

  “Do you know what they put in ice cream—especially chocolate ice cream?”

  “You’ve told me.”

  “I’m adding years to their lives, which is more than those sewer rats deserve.”

  Fiona shook her head. “They can’t all be sewer rats. What about that nice Bethany Messerschmidt?”

  • • •

  When it came to Eva’s life, her mom had the awareness of a fifty-cent guppy; there were sad-eyed janitors at school who seemed to have more insight into Eva’s heart than her own parents did. At least her parents had moved the family down here to West Des Moines, Iowa, so they could be close to Eva’s cool uncle Wojtek Dragelski and aunt Amy Jo and her awesome older cousins Rothko (who everyone called Randy) and Braque (who everyone called Braque). Bethany Messerschmidt made fun of people behind their backs all the time, and had no interest in cool things like food or art or books or cool music, like Randy did, though she once said Randy was a “hottie,” which was super weird.

  Worst of all, however, Bethany had called Eva a “fucking sasquatch bitch” in front of everyone when Eva wouldn’t lend her five dollars after school at McDonald’s. Even though Eva drank coffee and two or three times had tried a cigarette and did other things that were supposed to stunt her growth, she was a not particularly skinny five foot seven, and there was nothing she could do about it. The kids at this new school already hated her for being younger and smarter, but since that day, she was only Sasquatch to them, and it hurt worse than anything. She didn’t cry about it anymore, but the word still stabbed her brain.

  “Bethany Messerschmidt is dead to me,” Eva said. She also didn’t want to tell her mom that even the smell of McDonald’s brought back this memory, because her parents loved fast food, especially McDonald’s. To announce its correlation with her trauma would only make them seem thoughtless every time they brought it home, and they loved it too much to ever give it up.

  “Well, you need some friends your own age for once. Randy and his Mexican chef friend don’t count.”

  “The kids my age are awful. They aren’t even human.”

  “Anyway, I want you to give Randy some space until he’s off probation.”

  “But nobody else in the whole family even talks to him.”

  “You know, you only got a few years left of being a kid. You should enjoy it. You have the rest of your life to be on your hands and knees working like a slave. Now hop to it. The bus will be here in fifteen minutes.”

  One of the things that Eva hated the most about being a kid was how everyone always told her that childhood was the best time of their entire lives, and don’t grow up too fast, and enjoy these carefree days while you can. In those moments, her body felt like the world’s smallest prison, and she escaped in her mind to her chile plants, resting on rock wool substrate under a grow light in a bedroom closet, as much a prisoner of USDA hardiness zone 5b as she was.

  Unlike her, they were beautiful in a way that God intended. The tallest chocolate habanero plant came to her waist, and its firm green stalks held families of glistening, gorgeous brown chiles at the end of its growing cycle. Holding them, tracing her finger around their smooth circumference, she could feel their warmth, their life, and their willingness to give.

  To preserve her habs for the rest of the year, she made most of them into chile powder—her parents had learned to avoid the kitchen and order pizza when she did this—and with her first harvest this year, she made chile oil with this hot infusion recipe:

  1 cup dried chiles

  2 cups grapeseed oil

  Cut the dried whole chocolate habanero chiles into small pieces and put into a pan with grapeseed oil. Heat slowly over low heat until bubbles start to rise. Turn off the heat and allow the oil to cool to room temperature. Pour the chile and oil mixture into a glass bowl and cover. Store in the refrigerator for 10 days. Strain through a wine strainer into sterile bottles.

  • • •

  She couldn’t wait to try it in a recipe herself, but first wanted to bring it to her friend Aracely Pimentel, the co–executive chef at Lulu’s, the best Mexican restaurant in the greater Des Moines metro area and probably all of Iowa. But before then, she had to make it through another day.

  • • •

  The morning bus ride was the most excruciating part of every day. Not everyone left school at the same time—many of the worst boys stayed after to play sports—but everyone arrived at the same time, and other transportation options were scant. Just to set up her mom’s fashion advice for failure, Eva wore one of the two feminine outfits she had: a navy blue dress that had two bald eagles fighting on the front. Her cousin Randy had given it to her for her birthday last year, right be
fore he relapsed again, and she still just fit into it. Since the Bethany Messerschmidt incident at McDonald’s, some of the boys, and many of the girls, repeated that one awful noun whenever she walked down the center aisle. To cope with it, Eva put on her Walkman and played tapes made by Cousin Randy—that day it was Tom Waits, who sang about cool stuff like hookers in Minneapolis—and reminded herself that all of these boys would be changing her oil someday.

  • • •

  “Hey. Sasquatch. I’m talking to you,” said Chadd Grebeck, a beefy soccer dolt in her class. Eva turned her head and stared out the window, but he yanked the earbud out of her left ear and whispered into it. “Sas-quatch. Sas-quatch. Sas-quatch.”

  One of Chadd’s buddies, a tall zit-faced oaf named Brant Manus, the kind of boy who liked to pop his pimples at recess and rub the pus on other kids, said, “Hey dude, why don’t you just make out with her?”

  “You make out with her, ant-anus,” Chadd said.

  Dylan Sternwall, another friend of theirs, chimed in from behind Eva. “I’ll pay either one of you dick lickers five bucks to kiss her. On the lips.”

  “You kiss her, sperm-wall,” Chad said.

  “Give you five bucks.”

  “No fuckin’ way.”

  “Ten.”

  To the extent that this creature could think, Chadd seemed to consider this for a moment. “The money first, ass-munch.”

  “No, the money second. All fees paid for services rendered.”

  “Shit,” Chadd said. He leaned his face over Eva, who struggled to turn away from him. “She smells like dirt.” Chadd then moved in and briefly hit her cheek with his face. “There, now pay up.”

  “It’s gotta be on the lips.”

  “Hold still, Sasquatch,” Chadd told Eva. “I don’t like this any more than you do, trust me.” He smelled like cheap apple juice and was gross like mayo oozing out of the side of a free sandwich. But there was also a coldness—an almost adult male menace to him—and perhaps only the thin decorum of this public setting prevented him from doing much more, much worse.