Kitchens of the Great Midwest

by J. Ryan Stradal

  • • •

  After she swiped her WildCARD student ID at the gym’s front desk, she noticed that everything at SPAC seemed doused in the citrusy alcohol-based cleaner they used to wipe down the equipment. People were so anal about each other’s sweat and germs, especially the weekend warriors and noncompetitive athletes. Braque was a softball player. That’s a life in the dirt, a life touching dirt, a life touching things that touch dirt. Did Dot Richardson sterilize everything she touched until she was handed a gold medal? As if. Braque waited until she knew people were looking at her, then spat in her hands and lifted a 17.5-pound kettlebell from the rack. Patricia Bernal, her workout partner and fellow Academic All-American award-winning softball player, would be here in thirty minutes to spot her, and she’d do k-bell swings and stairs until then.

  It was hardly more difficult to do swings with a 17.5-pounder as opposed to her usual 15, but today, ugh. It didn’t feel like abdominal tightening. It felt like a fist had broken through her intestinal wall and extended its fingers inside her. She felt the bile chuckling in her throat. The kettlebell clanked to the floor.

  • • •

  She stood facing the toilet, tasting the bile she spit into the water. She could hear another woman vomit a few stalls down, and another woman take a dump, and the goddamn smells of shit and bile were just too much. She covered her nose with the back of her left hand and let the vomit burst from her mouth. She puked so much, her eyes started to tear.

  • • •

  Afterward, she wiped off her face and washed her mouth out several times, so the stomach acid wouldn’t chew up her enamel. It sucked having to bail on her weights partner, but it also sucked having probable food poisoning. She wondered if Patricia had the same bug. They had eaten the same thing at least once yesterday—grilled chicken and vegetables, which had never made them sick before, but who knows. As her second baseman—her partner in the middle infield—they often thought and moved in tandem.

  8:51 A.M.

  Braque had never been at Whole Foods this time of morning before. It was way less slammed with rubes than at lunchtime. It sucked balls having to skip weight training, but after vomiting, she needed two bananas, reverse-osmosis water, and a protein shake to replenish, along with an extra protein shake for Patricia to make it up to her.

  While she was reading the ingredients on an N. W. Gratz brand Vegan Protein Smoothie, she saw something weird written amid the Nutritional Facts: the phrase SWET PEPER JELY, all caps, large type.

  Something about it made her shiver. As she set the protein smoothie back on its shelf, the three strange words leapt out at her; she turned the bottle around so the front faced out instead. This was some creepy-ass bullshit, for sure. Still, fear is a choice, she reminded herself, and why choose it? She made up her mind that the strange words on the bottle didn’t exist and never existed. It was just her nutrition-starved brain shorting out on her.

  After a moment, she picked up the bottle and looked at it again. The bold text was gone, replaced by the usual crap about soy protein isolate and organic cane sugar. Sure as shit, she was going hypoglycemic from the food poisoning and not having eaten. Her temples began to ache; she needed to get something in her system, stat.

  Then Braque saw someone down the aisle who she hated, and it gave her a huge sense of relief. There were Lolo McCaffrey’s thick braids and patchouli-oil smell, crouched down by the nutritional bars, her moon face staring at the label of a Clif Bar like someone who can’t read. Lolo was the strength and conditioning coach for the team who made everyone do hot yoga and meditation and was covertly seeing senior shortstop Tarah Sarrazin, the player who incoming first-year Braque Dragelski had beaten for a starting job. Seeing Lolo, right here, in the same store at the same time, Braque considered the possibility that either she or Tarah had somehow poisoned her dinner yesterday. She wouldn’t put it past that pair of jealous skanks, that’s for sure.

  “Lolo,” Braque said, looking down at Lolo. She was easy for Braque to intimidate, and Braque felt it was good for her soul to intimidate coaches who preached loving kindness and mindfulness; her headache and confusion instantly disappeared as she approached the shorter woman. “How’s it hangin’?”

  “Hello, Dragelski.” Lolo nodded, not looking up from the Clif Bar.

  “So,” Braque said. “What do you and Tarah think you’re doing?”

  Lolo looked at the ground; she could never look Braque in the face. “I know what you’re going to say, and I don’t see how our wedding affects the team in the slightest,” she said, looking Braque in the face for the first time.

  “Wedding? Wow.” First Braque had heard of this. She’d only just heard a few weeks back that they were dating, not that she cared. “Don’t you have to go to Vermont or something?”

  “Well, that’s the plan,” said Lolo, who seemed to realize that she had just volunteered more information than she intended.

  “If you kids are planning to elope, why is Tarah on my dick all of a sudden?”

  “Tarah is in Wyoming right now, having a very important conversation with her family. I seriously doubt she has given one thought to anything you’re doing.”

  “Then why are you here, you stalking me?”

  “I didn’t even notice you there until you came over and initiated your unbalanced discourse about dicks—which has totally uncentered me, so thank you.”

  “Christ,” Braque said. These hippie yoga chicks were the goddamn worst, no matter who they fucked.

  “You should think on what you’re saying and doing,” Lolo said. “You’re putting negative energy into the world that’s cycling back. That’s what happens, it cycles back.”

  Yawn. Now that she was close to 100 percent sure that Lolo and probably Tarah had nothing to do with this, she wanted to wrap this shit up and get on with her day.

  “You would know,” she said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to replenish my GI tract.”

  “Morning sickness?”

  “Ha. Fuck you.”

  Lolo looked at Braque and smiled a little bit. “I’ve been a doula for five years. You seem pregnant to me. I’d guess five or six weeks.”

  “Bullshit,” Braque said, and walked to the checkout. Crunchy little moon-face bitch actually got under her skin. Braque almost admired her for it; it was the first time since she’d met Lolo that she’d felt in her gut that the woman had any authority. And now it scared her a little.

  9:39 A.M.

  Braque was in the ground-floor women’s bathroom at Chapin Hall with her pants to her knees, but her whole day wasn’t fucked yet. Yes, this was a substantial detour, but she still had an hour to make it to her last Micro 1 discussion group before the final. According to her schedule, it had been thirty-three days and sixteen hours since her last period, so a worst-case scenario was possible, and she needed to figure that out, stat.

  The bathroom was one of those white-on-white jobs with white tile on the floor and a frosted window that had been painted shut. The toilet paper was so cheap, you could read a magazine through it, and the place smelled like mildew because of the self-conscious dipshits who took a shower in there every day and trapped all the humidity inside a room where the window couldn’t open. But it was just the place for an operation as stupid as a secret pregnancy test.

  Patricia, of course, freaked out when Braque texted her about what was happening and insisted on skipping her own weight training just to help Braque with the lame-ass pee stick. This was unnecessary but fine. In the road games against Michigan and Purdue, Patricia had seen Braque do far more embarrassing things, like overthrow the catcher on a play at the plate and call off the left fielder on a fly ball that ended up going halfway to the warning track.

  “Wow, Tarah and Lolo are getting married,” Patricia said, watching Braque take the pregnancy test from Osco out of its box. “Sure didn’t see that coming.”

  �
��Who gives a shit?” Braque said. She held the white plastic stick under the light. “I’m gonna get pee all over my hand. Can I just pee in a cup and put it in the cup?”

  “You ever been to a lesbian wedding?”

  “Nope. I hate all weddings.”

  “I like the dancing part. Even the Chicken Dance. I will totally dance the Chicken Dance.”

  “Ugh. Get the gun.” Braque was down on her hands and knees, looking through the white cabinet under the sink, which was cluttered with waterlogged rolls of single-ply toilet paper and cheap, non-organic cleaning supplies. “I wonder if there’s like a paper cup somewhere in this bathroom I can pee in.”

  Patricia gently kicked the back of her friend’s shoe. “You’ll touch a bathroom floor, but you won’t pee on your hands? Urine is sterile, you know.”

  “OK, fuck it,” Braque said, pulling her underwear to her ankles and sitting on the toilet. “Hand me the goddamn stick.”

  • • •

  There was a knock on the door. It was the only private bathroom in the entire building, so it had its regulars.

  “It’ll be a little while!” Braque called out.

  “It’s OK, I’ll wait,” the tiny female voice answered. It was Braque’s roommate Katelyn Pickett. She only ever used this bathroom.

  “Wouldn’t if I were you,” Braque said, but she could see from the shadow in the opaque door glass that Katelyn hadn’t moved.

  Braque thought she heard a burst of music from the pocket of her balled-up sports pants just as she began to pee.

  “I think it’s my phone,” she said.

  Patricia looked surprised. “Is it that French guy?”

  “Tuna Can? I doubt it.”

  “Let me pick it up,” Patricia said, reaching for Braque’s pants at her feet.

  “No, don’t,” Braque said. She stood up and leaned forward as she was peeing, getting urine all over her hand, the stick, and the toilet seat. “Goddamn it! I told you not to touch that,” she shouted as she stood, set the stick down on the sink, pulled up her underwear, and grabbed the phone from Patricia.

  The phone buzzed in Braque’s hand. It read INCOMING CALL: AMY JO DRAGELSKI.

  “Not a good time, Mom,” Braque said as she answered.

  “Your niece is missing,” her mom said.

  “Sure she is.”

  Braque was used to this kind of crap; her mom had been a master choreographer of anxious micromanagement since Braque could remember. When Braque and her brother Randy were kids, their mom used to wake them up at 5:30 in the morning for family road trips, to avoid traffic; there were safety latches around the house until she was eleven; there was no TV and sure as shit no candy, pop, alcohol, or smoking; she ironed bedsheets and bleached underwear and cleaned the bathrooms at least twice a day. The menace of her manic perfection made it impossible to relax—and fucking forget having friends over, unless they enjoyed being bum-rushed by a Sears vacuum. Braque was sure that was why their art professor dad Wojtek cheated on their mom once when they were little (who wouldn’t!) and ultimately went on an indefinite sabbatical to Malta, why Randy escaped into music and drugs, and maybe even why Braque signed up for every sport and pointedly excelled at the dirtiest one. Braque was, by careful design, nothing like her mom.

  But with her mom’s own family out of her grasp, she now meddled with her relatives instead, and the struggling little Thorvald clan was less than two miles away, helpless against the force of her help.

  “Eva ran away last night. Nobody knows where she is. Fiona and Jarl are losing their shit.”

  “How do you know she ran away?”

  “Because Fiona threw away all of her habanero plants.”

  “Holy Christ.”

  “I guess she made some kind of oil out of them that she was using as a weapon at school. She sent two boys to the hospital.”

  “Do you know what happens to her at that school, Mom? Those little shits probably had it coming.”

  “She got suspended by the principal. Well anyway, Randy thinks that there’s a chance that she might be coming out your way, so maybe you should go out and put some signs up or something.”

  “I kinda got my hands full right now.”

  “But your cousin is missing!”

  “Kids do this kinda shit all the time, I’m sure she’s fine.”

  A small fist pounded on the bathroom door. “Are you just talking on the phone in there?”

  “Ahh, shaddup!” Braque said. Patricia got up from the floor and returned a volley of slaps on their side of the door.

  Braque returned the phone to her ear. “Sorry, not you, Mom.”

  “I think you’re being selfish and lazy,” Braque’s mom said. “When I get a hold of your dad in Malta I’ll tell him that you’re not helping the family.”

  “Look, I’ll help as soon as finals week is over. OK? I can’t fail spring quarter and lose my scholarship because my cousin ran away from home for a couple hours.”

  “I can’t believe I raised such a selfish daughter.”

  “Keep me posted, Mom. Love you.” Braque pressed her phone’s keypad, ending the call, and shook her head. “Christ. Neediest goddamn chick in the world.”

  She looked at Patricia, who was standing by the sink with a sad, scared look on her face.

  “What is it?”

  Patricia handed Braque the pregnancy test. Braque stared at the two pink lines in the result window.

  “Well, fuckin’ A, Patty.”

  Patricia put her hand on Braque’s shoulder. Braque leaned against her friend’s waist and let her friend cradle her head.

  “Holy fucking shit,” she repeated, as Patricia held her and squeezed her shoulder.

  A limp, tiny hand slapped the bathroom door. The small shadow at the foot of the doorframe was now joined by a larger one. “I got the RA with me!” Katelyn said.

  10:01 A.M.

  Goddamn cataclysmic devastation, pretty much.

  • • •

  Braque threw the pregnancy kit and the box it came in into the trash of the dorm across the street from Chapin. Her head was absolute pudding; she could hardly remember where her Micro class was, or what day the final was on, or anything else imminent and relevant. She tried to recall her schedule and where she was supposed to be at that moment, but her thoughts separated and vanished like April snowflakes.

  She would terminate her pregnancy. No question. She didn’t have time for this. She was a scholarship Division I athlete and a 4.0 student. Her job was to lead Northwestern to the Big Ten title, qualify for the 2004 Olympic team in four years, and then go to the Kellogg School of Management for a business degree. That was the plan. No time for serious boyfriends, and no interest.

  Which didn’t mean that she didn’t have the scorching desire for a halfway decent fuck every once in a while. But for starters, she couldn’t even remember which of her two spring quarter sex partners could’ve been the father. Luc-Richard, the French tennis player whose junk was wider than it was long? He went back to France and who cares. Or was it Yuniesky Cespedes, the shortstop for the Kane County Cougars, who just got promoted to Daytona in the Florida State League? It’s not like she wanted to call either of these dudes and be like, hey, are you sitting down? They didn’t sign up for this. And neither did she.

  Did a condom break? She couldn’t be on the pill because it messed with her system too much, so she compensated in other ways. Once she made a guy wear two condoms. Of course he hated it, but give a male animal a choice between wearing two condoms and going home with blue balls, and imagine what they do. Could a guy not notice when a condom breaks? Could she? There were times she took the Plan B pill just because she thought one might have broken. That Yuniesky dude always flushed his condoms afterward. Was it him?

  • • •

  As she entered the lobby of Chapin, where s
ome lame-ass freshman boys were setting up a beer pong table, her phone buzzed.

  It was a text message.

  SWET PEPER JELY, the screen seemed to read.

  Braque stopped walking and took a deep breath. She glanced away from her phone and looked back. The words were gone.

  Some oaf in a Star Wars shirt was trying to get past her with stacks of blue plastic cups. “Excuse me,” he said.

  “No,” she replied, not getting out of his way. She looked at her phone again. A brand-new Nokia 3210. Almost everyone on the team had one; text messaging was way easier than calling. It couldn’t be busted already.

  She looked through the message history. No SWET PEPER JELY. Whatever that was about. As the big nerd with the plastic cups finally tried to squeeze past her, she put away her phone and shoved past him toward her dorm room.

  10:10 A.M.

  To Braque, the Humanities dorm was like an icicle up the glory hole. She’d put it down as her fifth choice of five. Only after getting to school did she learn that anyone who’d put it down as any choice got stuck there. Some had it as their first choice. Every one of those dorks was as big a rube as Katelyn, who was wearing a stupid combo of a pink Chicago Bears T-shirt (she probably couldn’t name even one player on the Bears) and white high-waisted shorts. She was lying on her bed reading some dumb piece of Victorian literature.

  “Just to give you a heads-up,” Katelyn said, not looking up from her book. “My sister Elodie’s coming here in two days, and I told her she could have your bed.”

  “Fuck that,” Braque said, tossing her Micro notes into her old JanSport bag. “Your sister’s not staying in our room, and sure as hell not in my bed, end of discussion.”