Kitchens of the Great Midwest

by J. Ryan Stradal

“Anywhere where two people can fit, they can have sex. It’s the law.”

  “So what the fuck you gonna do now?” Ken asked. Prager had known Ken for longer, and Ken was a little more invested in Prager’s emotional life journey.

  “I don’t know,” Prager said. “I already called her today and left her a message, and left her a text both last night and this morning.”

  “Maybe call her again, and apologize again.”

  Vik got up from his drum stool. “Ken, weren’t you listening? He got hugged at the end of a second date! Hugged! I wouldn’t wish that on anybody! Seriously, you’d rather get slapped in the face than hugged!”

  “Yeah, that’s true,” Ken said. “You can work with getting slapped in the face. There’s a lot of emotion there, you just have to flip the dime.”

  “Prager, here’s what you should do tomorrow. Flowers. Chocolate. And another gift, something personal, something only the two of you would know. And have you written her a song yet?”

  “Yeah, I started.”

  “Well, get on it tonight, master it, play it for her ASAP.”

  “What if I have to skip band practice again tomorrow?”

  Vik and Ken glanced at each other. “This is an alt-country band,” Vik said. “All this heartache is comme il faut. Jeff Tweedy would kill for a week like this. You might get a whole album of lyrics from just yesterday alone.”

  Ken nodded. “Go get ’em out there.”

  • • •

  Prager was in his bedroom practicing “Steamy Night on a Steamboat” when his dad knocked on the door. Prager had lost track of time; it was 4:56.

  “She’s here,” Eli said, smiling. “Come out and say hi.”

  • • •

  No way was this woman thirty-five. Maybe fifty-five. She had thick legs, wrinkles around her eyes, and gray hairs sprouting from her hairline. She was smiling, but Prager could totally tell it was a fake smile just to be polite. She had a large orange ceramic baking pan with her covered in cellophane, and there were two more unfamiliar dishes on the dining room table already.

  “What is all this?” Prager said.

  “Pat’s made a home-cooked meal for our entire family,” Eli said.

  It was disturbing enough to walk out into the living room on a Sunday afternoon in the fall and not hear a lurid NFL game chundering from the TV, much less to feel a cheerless, significant silence, and to see this strange woman, and all of her food, and all of its invasive smells, filling the empty spaces in their raw home.

  Pat Jorgenson extended her hand. “So nice to meet you, Will,” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “Yeah, OK,” Prager said.

  “Only the good things,” Eli said, patting his son on the back, which he pretty much never did ever. “Julie!” Eli shouted.

  “Just a minute, Dad, God!” came a girl’s voice from behind a closed bedroom door.

  Eli glanced at Pat as if to say, Teenagers. “Please, be seated. Pat, may I get you something to drink? I bought a bottle of Chardonnay.”

  “Just water for now, thank you.”

  “Will, if you want any white wine, help yourself. I hear it goes with seafood.”

  Prager had never heard his dad say anything close to those sentences in his entire life. “OK, where’s the seafood?”

  “Pat made tuna casserole. In the orange pan.”

  “You know I’m a vegetarian, Dad.”

  Pat looked at Eli, but avoided his eye contact. “Oh, I’m sorry, your father didn’t tell me.”

  “You just went fishing yesterday,” Eli said, “you can’t be that much of a vegetarian. Just pick out all the fish if you have to.”

  • • •

  Julie came out of her room wearing a Minnesota Vikings jacket zipped all the way up, pink hot pants, and a Lone Ranger mask.

  Eli shook his head. “Julie.”

  “This what I wanna wear.”

  “Nice jacket,” Pat said.

  “I don’t care what you think,” Julie said. “Why is she sitting in Mom’s chair?”

  Pat looked at Eli. “I should switch chairs with you.”

  Eli didn’t move, except to look Julie in the face. “At least take the mask off.”

  “If the mask goes, I go.”

  Pat touched Eli’s hand. “It’s fine.”

  Eli said, “We should say grace.”

  “We don’t say grace in this family, Dad,” Julie said.

  “It’s OK, Eli,” said Pat.

  Prager lifted his wineglass. “L’chaim,” he said.

  “So what is all this repugnant garbage?” Julie asked.

  “Julie,” Eli said. “Be nice.”

  “Why? I don’t want to be here.”

  “Remember what I said? No sports for a week?”

  “Sounds like a deal to me. Can I go now?”

  “No, just five minutes. Just tell Pat something about yourself. She’s heard a lot about you guys and wants to get to know you better.”

  “I just got my first period last month,” Julie said.

  Prager laughed; he couldn’t help it. Pat pursed her lips as she passed around the au gratin potatoes she had made.

  “Julie.”

  Julie twisted a slotted spoon around in a casserole dish.”What’s this?”

  “Au gratin potatoes,” Pat said.

  “Rotten potatoes? Looks like it.”

  Prager laughed again.

  Eli pounded his fist on the table. “Julie. Both of you.”

  Pat looked up. “She can leave if she wants.”

  Julie immediately got up from the table. “God, thank you.”

  Eli pointed to her. “Don’t leave your room.”

  • • •

  Julie slammed her bedroom door and put on the song “My Neck, My Back” by Khia, and turned it up real loud. Prager started to laugh again. Eli almost got up from the table, but Pat restrained him.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Just ignore it.”

  “Will, tell Pat about your country music band,” Eli said.

  “I’m actually really busy writing a song tonight,” Prager said. “For a girl.”

  “Well, you should get to it after dinner.”

  “Mind if I go and just work on it right now? I’m kinda in the zone.”

  “Sure,” Pat said. “I’ll make you a plate.”

  Prager was going to say, That’s OK, but she seemed so eager to get Eli’s unpleasant children out of the dining room, she had piled up the tuna casserole, boiled string beans, and potatoes au gratin on his plate before he could object.

  Prager didn’t look at his dad when he took the plate and left the dining room. Pat said something like “Nice to meet you,” which he didn’t respond to, and the first thing he did when he got to his room was dump the plate in the garbage.

  It was actually real hard to write a song on the acoustic guitar with that dirty hardcore rap song playing in the background, but Prager wasn’t about to declaw his sister’s protest. For a moment, he tried to think of a day when he’d felt closer to Julie, when he’d loved her more, and only the day of their parents’ accident came to mind.

  • • •

  An hour later, his dad was still somehow eating dinner with that woman, and Prager was starving, but he’d also finished “Steamy Night on a Steamboat,” and was at last ready to play it for Eva.

  Her cell phone went straight to voice mail. He took a deep breath and tried her house phone. It rang a long time. Finally, her dad answered. He sounded wasted.

  “Yeah?” Jarl said.

  “Hi, this is Will Prager. Is Eva home?”

  “Nope,” Jarl said. “She’s working that restaurant job.”

  Seemed weird, for that late on a Sunday evening. “OK, can you tell her to call me as soon as she gets h
ome?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Jarl said. “Are you the guy whose band plays Jimmy Buffett tunes?”

  Will was dismayed at Jarl’s memory of their brief interaction, but he wasn’t in the mood to have this particular conversation. “Yeah,” he found himself saying. “And I gotta go, I gotta get to practice.”

  “Next time you play, make me a VHS tape of it so I can see you guys,” Eva’s dad said.

  “We will,” Prager said for some reason, realizing that he had no idea how he could make that happen, even if he wanted to.

  “I’ll tell her Jimmy called,” Jarl said, and laughed before he hung up.

  • • •

  Prager stopped her in the hall before fifth period. Her hair was up, she wasn’t wearing any makeup, and she looked tired. Even the white T-shirt she was wearing, which read LARK MANAGED SERVICES and looked like a promotional giveaway shirt from a company picnic or something, seemed out of character.

  “How come you haven’t returned any of my texts or my calls?” he asked her.

  “I was going to, I’ve just been super busy.”

  “Too busy to even return a text? What’s up with that?”

  “So, what do you want to tell me?”

  “I want to play you the song I wrote you.”

  “I don’t know if I have the time for that today,” she said, leaning against the lockers in the hallway. “I gotta work at the store after school every day this week.”

  “Well, maybe after you get off work, then. What time is that?”

  “Seven,” she said.

  “I’ll call you at seven-fifteen. Why do you have to work every day? Are you trying to avoid me or something?”

  “My dad got fired from his job,” she said. “So I gotta pick up all the shifts I can. It’s not about you at all.” She glanced at the doorway to their history classroom. “I guess we’d better get to class.”

  • • •

  He sat in the front row for an hour, watching Killer Keeley talk about the French and Indian War, and tried to think of his next move. Vik Gupta would know exactly what he should do, but he couldn’t talk to Vik until after school. She was obviously not so excited to see him, like she used to be, but one thing was still certain. If he could just figure out a way to play “Steamy Night on a Steamboat” for her today, she’d fall in love with him in a second. By the end of class, he’d decided that this was the only plan that would work.

  • • •

  At 7:15 p.m. and nine seconds, Prager called Eva’s cell, and once again it went straight to VM. He tried her apartment, and no one answered; a machine didn’t even pick up. He tried again, three minutes later, and got the same result. He tried one more time at 7:25, and nothing had changed. It rang and rang, eleven, twelve, thirteen times.

  He threw his guitar in his dad’s car and drove south toward Prescott. The Built to Spill tape was still in the tape deck, and he just let it keep going; it might as well be the damn soundtrack to everything.

  • • •

  He didn’t know where the Steamboat Inn’s kitchen was, so he went inside and asked the headwaiter, a young fat blonde woman with a ponytail, who said that he could either get there through the EMPLOYEES ONLY door by the bathroom or through the door on the side of the building by the employee parking lot. He said thanks, and while he was standing there he noticed the waitress from his date standing by the bar, putting cocktails on a tray, and he went up to her and put a ten-dollar bill between the drinks.

  “Sorry about last time,” he said.

  From the look on her face it didn’t seem like she even recognized him.

  • • •

  Prager picked up his guitar from the backseat and walked around back to the employee lot and saw that the black wooden door to the kitchen was swung all the way open; between Prager and the kitchen, there was just a heavy-looking black metal screen door, and even from a distance he could see a lot of what was happening inside. It was really bright in there, a stark, hospital white from above, and way less fancy than he would’ve guessed a kitchen like that would look. There were big silver basins and spigot heads on long snakes and black rubber mats on the floor with holes in them. There were maybe six or seven people in there, all wearing white, all terribly busy cutting meat, tossing salad, peeling fruit.

  He saw Eva in there, in her new style of a white T-shirt and pants with a lot of pockets, standing next to a woman he didn’t recognize who was dressed exactly the same way—maybe that Maureen O’Brien person—and they were peeling something over a silver bowl and laughing. It was too bright in there for them to see clearly outside, and no one so much as looked in his direction.

  • • •

  He walked to his car, put the guitar in the backseat, and got the Sexy Gran’pa beer koozie out of the glove box where he’d left it for good luck. He came back to the screen door, and quietly crammed the beer koozie in around eye level, in the space between the frame and the screen.

  • • •

  She found him the next morning, before school, by the vending machines.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” she said.

  “How did you know to find me here?” he asked her.

  “Your friends told me this is where you hang out,” she said.

  They walked outside, past where all the heavy metal dudes smoked cigarettes, all the way to the highway, almost.

  “Well, I got your message of sorts, last night.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So is that it, are you done with me?”

  “I’m assuming you’re done with me. You tell me you’re gonna be home at seven-fifteen and you’re not. That’s totally shitty.”

  “The restaurant called me and wanted me to come in.”

  “You could at least call me and tell me that your plans have changed.”

  “I admit, that was careless of me. And I’m sorry. But part of it is that I just don’t know if I can handle you right now.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t think you’re ready for what you want,” she said.

  “How would you know?”

  “You know, maybe I don’t. But either way, you’re like the most intense guy of all time, really. It’s a lot, OK? I’m just saying, take it easy. I’ll be here.”

  “You’ll be here?”

  “But in the meantime, let’s just be friends.”

  Prager had heard that one before, and pretty much learned to turn off what a girl said after she said that, because it was all bullshit.

  • • •

  He didn’t talk to her before fifth period or sit next to her during seventh period anymore, but they still said hi when they passed each other in the halls, out of politeness, he guessed, but that was it. To other people in class, no one could probably tell they’d ever kissed, that he wrote a song for her, and that she’d been the last thought on his mind every night.

  At home, meanwhile, Eli, Julie, and even that awful Pat who was around all the time now, they all knew what was up, and he didn’t try to hide it from them either, mostly because it made it easier for him to be curt and disagreeable without being hassled. He had to quit listening to Built to Spill, Neutral Milk Hotel, Annie Lennox, Mazzy Star, Soul Coughing, and all of the other bands that reminded him of her even a little bit, but his own band got more of his time, and they even scheduled a gig for December, at the Rec Center where he used to see Smarmy Kitten shows.

  Alone in his bedroom, he helplessly ruminated on what she said, specifically the phrases “not ready” and “I’ll be here.” As the weeks passed, with this in mind, he remained calm and respectful and not intense. By mid-November, he and Eva were even in the same eight-person group in history class, pretending to be delegates from the four southern colonies. And the day before Thanksgiving, she even touched him on the arm twice. He talked to Vik Gupta about it over Than
ksgiving break and the first Monday back in school he went in twenty minutes before the first bell to wait by her locker. He couldn’t wait another second.

  He’d only been there a few minutes when Eva, surprised to see him, smiled and said, “Hey.” She was wearing her winter outfit of a thrift-store duster and floppy black stocking cap, no makeup, no painted fingernails.

  “Hey,” Prager said. “I just want you to know I’m ready now.”

  Eva looked at him, a little puzzled. “OK. Ready for what?”

  “You want to go on another culinary adventure this Friday?”

  She looked at him for what felt like thirty seconds, and then down at the floor, and then back at him.

  “I’m moving,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said. With each second that her words, and everything they meant, were hanging in the air, threatening to be true, he started to feel like she was taking the school apart brick by brick and throwing the bricks at his heart. “When?”

  “This weekend.”

  Prager could feel he was losing all ability to remain composed in the face of these words, but his mouth kept trying. “Where?” he asked.

  She looked at the ground and continued talking. “Maureen moved to a restaurant in the Cities and she can get me a full-time job there.”

  “Full-time job,” was all he could say.

  “Well, my dad lost his job here and can’t find a new one, so it’s kind of my family’s best option.”

  “So what high school are you going to?” He surprised himself at summoning such a long, coherent sentence.

  “I figure I’ll get a GED. I don’t need to waste my time in high school anyway, it’s not like I want to go to college or something. No offense if you do.”

  “Oh,” he said. It sounded nuts to him. Who didn’t go to college? The nonsense of this idea emboldened him a little. “So you’re just going to be a chef in a restaurant.”

  She didn’t seem to respond. He noticed just then that she wasn’t taking out her books and materials for one class, but rather was emptying out her entire locker into her backpack.

  “It was illuminating, Will Prager,” she said, looking at him. “I think of our steamy night on a steamboat often.”

  “You do?” he asked. She nodded.