Kitchens of the Great Midwest

by J. Ryan Stradal

  By now, the entire back half of the bus was transfixed, and the driver, a no-nonsense middle-aged lady, figured something was up. “What’s going on back there? In your seats, face front!”

  • • •

  The kids leaning against the backs of their seats, watching the action, were shielding Eva and Chadd from the bus driver’s mirror. The driver couldn’t see Chadd grab Eva’s head in his hands, turn it around to face his, lick the front of her closed mouth like a popsicle, and vigorously spit out the window afterward.

  “Sit down back there!” the driver yelled. Amid the jeering and the laughs, the kids obeyed.

  Eva’s tall spine rattled in her body and her hands shook as she put her earbud back into her empty left ear. She felt the mean hardness of Chadd’s hands linger against her skull, and tears welled up in her eyes. Still, she held them back, rubbing his touch off the sides of her head, wiping her lips, taking deep, shaky breaths.

  “So where’s my ten bucks?” Chadd asked Dylan.

  “Pysch, dude,” Dylan said. “I just wanted to see if you’d kiss her.”

  Chadd left the seat he shared with Eva to climb over to Dylan, attempting to put him in a headlock, and the driver yelled at them.

  That, as she would remember it, was Eva Thorvald’s first kiss with a boy.

  • • •

  Eva’s mom didn’t know this, but Randy often picked her up after school in his cool black Volkswagen Jetta. He’d roll up to the white curb five minutes before the final bell, blasting Nick Cave or Nine Inch Nails or Tool out of the open windows. He had long dyed black hair, and always wore black T-shirts and ripped jeans and sunglasses, making him look like a scarier Trent Reznor. To Eva and the kids her age, it was a look that spelled cool and no one messed with Eva within five hundred feet of this guy.

  The first time Chadd and Brant and Dylan followed her out of the school, Randy just flicked his cigarette to the ground and took a hard step toward them and those little pricks scattered like dropped gumballs. Now they didn’t even leave by the same exit anymore. To Eva, Cousin Randy was an untouchable demigod—an angel’s wing broken from an ancient statue, sent here to help her hover above all things insipid and heartbreaking.

  • • •

  One morning, after seven years of excessive hydroponic indica intake—and he’d never told Eva why, exactly—he had dumped his final three pounds of weed into the Des Moines River. For her birthday that year, against Fiona’s and Jarl’s initial resistance, he’d bestowed on her his expensive grow lights and gardening hardware. He went to a place called Hazelden, a word Eva remembered from when people suggested her dad should go there after he was fired from the law office back in Minnesota. That kind of place was for people like Randy, people with real serious issues, Eva overheard Jarl say to Fiona once, not for “functional guys” like himself. Eva wondered if that was why Jarl didn’t want to have anything to do with Randy; maybe people who drink look down on people who use drugs, just because drugs are illegal. To Eva, it was like a one-legged person being mean to a no-legged person, and she didn’t understand it.

  In the intervening years, however, with the help of Randy’s gift, Eva had evolved from a slightly tall eight-year-old struggling to grow her first jalapeños in her bedroom window box to a giant almost-eleven-year-old who supplied the city’s most popular Mexican restaurant with the exotic peppers for its signature dishes. She didn’t need her parents to be proud of all this if Randy was, and when she was with him she felt part of something adult and sophisticated. His love for her made her feel like she was wearing sunglasses even when she wasn’t.

  Eva threw her arms around Cousin Randy when she saw him leaning against his car, and she hit him so hard with her embrace that he dropped his unfiltered Marlboro Red on the sidewalk.

  “Oh, shit, dog,” he said, laughing. “Get in, we’re going to Lulu’s.”

  “Yeah,” Eva said, smiling for the first time that day since she was alone in her room that morning.

  In the car, speeding out of the school grounds to the music of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Cousin Randy asked whether she had her dried ground peppers with her.

  “Just wanted to make sure that we had a legitimate reason to stop by,” he said. “I told Aracely the last time I saw her that you’d have something for her.”

  Aracely Pimentel’s cooking attracted regular customers from as far away as Fort Dodge and Ottumwa, and recently even two people who drove all the way from Minneapolis. This was amazing to Eva, to have people drive that far to eat something you made! She couldn’t imagine it. Eva liked to fantasize that Randy and Aracely would get married and she could move in with them and grow ingredients for the restaurant all day. Anything, to be a part of it all. She told that to Randy once and he said, “One step at a time.”

  • • •

  As they drove from West Des Moines into Des Moines, Randy asked how her day was, and Eva told him the story of what had happened on the bus. Randy swore and pounded the steering wheel and said he wished he were in sixth grade again so he could shove a fist up their asses. This was the kind of thing that her parents would never say in a million billion years, and it was exactly what Eva wanted to hear.

  Driving with just his left hand, Randy put his right arm around her shoulder. When his hand touched her back, the strength that had willed back her emotions for the last seven hours blew away, and tears welled up in her eyes. As she repeated what the boys on the bus had called her, she sobbed, and she wasn’t even sure why she was crying. She hated those boys and knew that they were stupid and hence their opinions were baseless and the impact of their lives on the planet would be measured only in undifferentiated emissions of methane and nitrates . . . but still. It hurt, and it hurt that it hurt, and she covered her eyes and buried her face over her chest and her body shook under Randy’s warm, steady hand.

  “Dude,” he said, “you’re gonna get snot all over the eagles!” At a stoplight, he looked around his car for a tissue, which of course he didn’t have, so he leaned over and wiped her face with his black T-shirt. “There,” he said. “You gotta keep the eagles snot-free, or they’re gonna fly somewhere else.” This made Eva laugh a little bit.

  “You know what?” Randy said. “I got an idea for those boys.”

  “What is it?”

  “Gotta make sure they have something in stock first. Just don’t sell Aracely all of your stuff.”

  • • •

  At 3:10 p.m., the restaurant was still about two hours from opening, which was how Randy liked it for their visits. As they passed by the wooden benches and coat racks in the lobby, Eva liked to stop and look at a sepia-toned portrait of the owners, Jack Daugherty and Ishmael Mendoza, and a framed “Story of Lulu’s” that was meant to help pass the time for customers willing to tolerate a substantial wait.

  When she owned a restaurant, Eva decided, she was going to have the same thing in her lobby, and in her story, she was going to mention Cousin Randy and Aracely and her cousin Braque, who got a softball scholarship to Northwestern and said that Eva could visit Chicago anytime. But probably nobody else. It wasn’t that she hated her parents or anything—they meant well, she knew that. But Eva just belonged somewhere else, somewhere with real important chefs like Aracely Pimentel, who didn’t make time for stupid friends or stupid social events, and didn’t view those choices as compromises that would ruin your life, like Eva’s mom did.

  • • •

  Aracely was sitting at the bar in her chef whites and striped pants, drinking coffee and reading a magazine, her gray-streaked black hair pulled back into a tight, kitchen-ready bun. Her beautiful makeup-free face emanated the kind of don’t-mess-with-me aura of Secret Service agents and British rock stars, but she was always happy to see Eva.

  “Hey!” Aracely said with a wide smile, shoving the magazine into her bag and slapping the barstool next to her for Eva to slide onto. Randy wen
t in for a hug but realized that he had snot all over his shirt just as he saw Aracely’s eyes fall on it.

  “Allergies?” Aracely asked him.

  “Aw, crap. I’ll be right back,” Randy said, already on his way to the men’s room.

  • • •

  “Let me show you something we had to do because of you,” Aracely said, rising from her stool and walking around the corner to the maître d’s station. Eva was fascinated by the empty bar, with its exotically shaped colored bottles with names like Galliano and Cynar and Midori. Randy had told her that these bottles were full of poison that ruined lives, but they looked so gorgeous, they couldn’t only be evil.

  Eva also loved the painted WALL OF FAME banner opposite the bar, meant for the “survivors” of the “Caliente Combo.” The deal was, if you spent a lot of money, like forty dollars, and ate everything on the Caliente Combo plate—which was a chicken burrito, a cheese enchilada, a chile relleno, two carne asada tacos, and rice and beans, all infused with scant amounts of Eva’s hot peppers—you got a T-shirt and your picture on the Wall of Fame. Eva was told that that Caliente Combo would not exist without her chocolate habaneros. It must’ve been a tough plate for adults to finish because it had been on the menu since her last chile harvest and there were only nine pictures on the wall. The newest one was of a guy named Edgar Caquill, who came all the way from St. Paul, Minnesota. Eva had finished the plate twice—it was a challenge to eat only because of the amount of food, not the spiciness quotient—but the owners hadn’t gotten around to putting her picture on the wall or even giving her a T-shirt yet.

  • • •

  When Aracely returned to the bar, Eva opened a menu and pointed to Abuelito Matias’s Chimole—PELIGRO! MÁS CALIENTE!

  “Why did you add the warnings?”

  “People were sending it back,” Aracely said. “Only about one in five customers can finish it. That many Scoville units is really tough on most people.”

  Eva’s last batch of chocolate habs was just over 500,000 Scoville heat units, according to Aracely’s friends at the Iowa State Food Science Lab, and that number was unbearable for most people. This new crop Eva estimated at close to double that, giving her chiles a heat index almost halfway to Mace.

  “I can do better than five hundred thousand.”

  “It’s a lot. I don’t let my cooks handle them without gloves on.”

  Eva dug around in her backpack. “I’ve stressed them out even more this year. Why don’t you bring Iowa State some of this stuff?” She held up a glass pint jar a little more than halfway full of a dark brown powder, and a four-ounce bottle filled to its cap with a tannish liquid. “I have more oil at home,” she said. “I just wanted you to give me notes, because it’s the first time I’ve made it through hot infusion, like you told me to.”

  Aracely studied the jar. “So what you’re saying is, this stuff is stronger than what we currently use in the chimole?”

  “Oh, unequivocally.”

  “How much can you sell me?”

  “Whoa,” Randy said. “Don’t sell all of it.”

  “Why not?” Eva asked. “I have lots of overhead costs. I don’t exactly plant my habaneros in dirt from the backyard, you know. Plus I have to buy my own distilled water and special kinds of nutrients and stuff.”

  “I had an idea. Aracely, those churro bites you make, do you have like thirty of ’em I can buy?”

  Aracely seemed wary. “What are you going to do?”

  “It’s a birthday surprise,” Randy said, with confidence, and then he noticed that Eva had opened the bottle of chocolate habanero chile oil and was applying it to her lips with an eyedropper. “Whoa, hey!” he shouted.

  “Hey, I’m fine,” Eva said, the chile oil dripping from her mouth.

  “Oh, Christ, no!” Aracely said, and grabbed Eva by the arm.

  “I’m fine,” Eva said.

  “We gotta get you some dairy,” Aracely said, yanking Eva in the direction of the kitchen. “Oh no, oh no.”

  “I’m fine,” Eva repeated, as she disappeared around a corner.

  • • •

  Twenty minutes later, after the adults were calmed down from shock into mere amazement, and even asked Eva to do it again, Randy reminded everyone they had to get her home before her parents got off work.

  First, Eva and Randy sat in his Jetta in Lulu’s parking lot with the box of churro bites, the pint jar of chocolate habanero chile powder, and the eyedropper. For ten minutes, they tried to inject a few flecks of the corrosive powder into a piece of churro the size of a Tater Tot without the latter falling apart or leaving an obvious wound. In that amount of time, they got one done decently well and screwed up two beyond repair.

  “Recognizing that this was my idea, I raise a practical question at this point,” Randy said. “Do sixth graders even like churro bites?”

  “Sure,” Eva said. “Bethany Messerschmidt brought them once. They were as popular as anything that’s basically sugar and fat.”

  Randy looked at his dashboard clock. “Crap. Can you finish the other twenty-nine of these at home tonight?”

  Eva could see that he felt guilty about leaving her with all of the work. She loved that about him. They were each outcasts in their own way, and even though he was way more fearless and tough than she’d ever be, he looked after her, and she knew nothing bad would ever happen to her if he was around.

  • • •

  The first thing Eva did every day when she got home was go to her closet and make sure that the grow light was still on. Once or twice a year one of the bulbs would go out, which was devastating. Every morning at 6:30, to simulate the long, hot days of tropical climates, Eva turned on the two-foot Hydrofarm fluorescent lamp over her plants, and kept it on until ten at night. Her parents didn’t like the effect on the electricity bills, but usually only complained, and rarely threatened.

  By the time her parents got home from their jobs, Eva was sitting at the dining room table, doing vocabulary homework—the one where they teach you a new word and you have to use it in a sentence. She was writing all of her sentences in iambic pentameter to make it more interesting for herself.

  These people didn’t know what to do with someone like her. Her teacher, Mr. Ramazzotti, was a sweetheart, but spent 90 percent of class time managing the five stupidest little bastards in class, who chose to create a battle out of everything, making even something as rote as taking attendance twice as long as it ought to be. Where does that leave someone who wants to have the largest pepper garden in Iowa? Did she really have to wait out seven more soul-shredding years? It was like being told you can run free one day—in June several years from now—but during every second of the intervening time, you’ll be getting run over by the world’s slowest steamroller, and every day it cracks a bone, and recracks it, and recracks it, and when you’re eighteen all you’re going to have is a body full of dust, lifted and carried into the future like a flag loose from its mast.

  • • •

  Eva beat her parents home, thankfully, and even had a birthday package come in the mail from her cousin Braque at Northwestern—a T-shirt of something called “Bikini Kill.” She didn’t know what it was—probably a band? But it was from Braque, so it definitely was cool.

  She was finishing the second-to-last sentence of her homework when her mom came home and walked into the dining room, green pantsuit and Hillary hair disheveled from a day doing who knows what at the temp agency, lugging two heavy grocery sacks, dropping them on the floor of the kitchen.

  Eva glanced up. “How was work, Mom?”

  Fiona was moving milk, butter, and ice cream from the grocery bags to the refrigerator and freezer. “Good, now that it’s over. Here, I picked up some chocolate chip ice cream, and some little pink cups and spoons at the gas station.”

  A frosted plastic tub of Blue Bunny ice cream thudded onto the k
itchen tile. At least it was a local brand. “Sounds fine, Mom.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t get you that organic stuff for your class,” Fiona said. “I know it’s your birthday.”

  Eva knew that her mom hadn’t gotten the vegan sorbet because it was too expensive. In their home, cost was the main reason why something good didn’t happen.

  Fiona set a small white paper carton of N. W. Gratz brand Vegan Blue-berry Sorbet in front of Eva. “So I just got a little one, just for you.”

  Eva couldn’t believe it. Her mom had driven into the city just to get it for her. She sometimes forgot that her parents were actually capable of doing nice things. Too often she could focus only on the horrifyingly unjust occasions when they prevented her from doing stuff, like when they told her that she couldn’t go to the downtown farmers’ market alone until she was ten, and even then didn’t let her go until she was ten and two months. Or their stupid rules regarding Randy.

  She reached for the carton, but her mom grabbed it back.

  “Tomorrow,” Fiona said. “Save it for your birthday.”

  • • •

  Her dad, Jarl, still in his collared shirt and necktie after his day of work in the mailroom at Pioneer Seeds, grabbed a Busch Light from the door of the fridge.

  “Hey, Dad,” Eva said, and Jarl opened his beer as he sat down at the dining room table.

  “Blueberry sorbet,” Jarl said to no one in particular. “Is that something you could make at home?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Eva said. “I hadn’t thought of it.”

  “How was school?” her mom asked. She was reheating the leftover morning coffee in the microwave; she always did that instead of making a new batch.

  “Fine,” Eva said.

  “What’d you do after school?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did Randy pick you up?”

  “Yeah, but he just brought me straight home.”

  “Look, I can’t stop you from going to Lulu’s if you want. I personally don’t see what’s so damn special about Randy and that Mexican chef, but I know they’re your favorite people in the world. Not that they buy your food or put a roof over your head or anything.”