Kitchens of the Great Midwest

by J. Ryan Stradal

  Still, he had been a charismatic, talented scoundrel who almost certainly was on to a new woman after a week in Japan; there was nothing to long for or feel sorry for. Wherever Jeremy was in the world, she was sure he was fine.

  • • •

  “Of the seven you’re visiting today, what’s the highlight?” Cindy asked.

  “Besides Tettegouche?” the woman asked, pronouncing it tet-goosh-AY.

  “Tet-uh-goosh,” Cindy said.

  The man leaned forward. “Well, the main reason we’re up here is to pick up an order from Saxum.”

  “Oh, very nice,” Cindy said. “How did you hear about them?”

  “Eva Thorvald just served Saxum’s Terry Hoage GSM at one of her pop-up supper clubs up in Minnesota.”

  “We read about it in the New Yorker,” the woman said.

  “Oh,” Cindy said, and felt herself back away from the counter.

  The young woman kept talking.

  • • •

  That name.

  • • •

  She hadn’t heard that name in twenty-four years.

  • • •

  It would’ve been nice to say that Cindy never went a day without thinking of her daughter, but the truth was, most days, she just didn’t.

  • • •

  Still, sometimes an otherwise calm afternoon would be accosted by a song from the late 1980s, a menu item at some luckless bistro, the sight of a bald man pushing a stroller, or something as brutally common as the faces of girls, and later women, who would have been her daughter’s age.

  • • •

  Now that the name had been actually spoken to her, she felt herself freeze in place, immobilized by the feeling that any movement at all would somehow give her away.

  The man and the young woman stared at her, smiling mildly, like they were just waiting for her to respond, but she sensed that they knew everything, just from the way she was standing.

  “You don’t know her?” the man asked. “She runs a pop-up supper club called The Dinner.”

  Cindy’s palms were sweating; she moved her hands behind her back and gripped her left wrist. “Have you been there?” she asked.

  The woman shook her head. “We wish. We’ve already spent a year on the waiting list.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, she only does it four or five times a year. Always in a different place. One time it was on the edge of a cliff, and the guests had to rappel down the side for the main course. Once, it was in a boat that was rigged in place at the edge of a waterfall.”

  The man smirked. “Our friend Kermit was going to live-tweet that one but they didn’t let him.”

  “Yeah. They take away everyone’s phones and don’t give them back until they leave.”

  “How’s the food?” Cindy asked.

  “I hear it’s indescribable,” the woman said.

  “Everyone says it’s the best meal they’ve ever had,” the man said. “Our only hope is that she picks randomly across both her priority and regular waiting lists.”

  The woman frowned. “It’s not random. She tries for variety.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” the man said. “She doesn’t want, like, twelve investment bankers.”

  The woman pointed to the Merlot bottle. “Is that next? We have to keep moving here.”

  “Oh, yes, sorry,” Cindy said, pouring three ounces in each of their glasses.

  In ten minutes, the man and woman zipped through the rest of the tasting, and then left without buying anything.

  • • •

  She never saw them again, never got their names or learned where they were from. Before they had even reached their car, a white BMW, Cindy had turned the sign in the window to CLOSED, locked the door, dashed to the desktop PC in the office, and, for the first time in her life, entered “Eva Thorvald” into Google.

  Her memory of her daughter’s face, from a time when she still went by Cynthia, had been thickly bundled for its quiet passage through unmarked time. Without a photograph, Cindy’s image of Eva was that of an increasingly vague, featureless infant, and she had no apprehension of how that baby might have matured. She set her shaking fingers on the keyboard, pressed a button, and in a bright, savage instant split all of this open.

  Eva had her dad’s broad shoulders and big smile. And her mom’s eyes, nose, and cheekbones. That was her, that was her baby, all grown up, fierce and beautiful and unknown.

  She didn’t know this person, she told herself, but while staring at her image, Cindy’s eyes fattened with tears. This was why she had avoided ever doing this before; she was deeply afraid it would upset her, even though she never regretted leaving for a moment, not once. She hadn’t even cried on the day she left, she was so confident that she and her daughter would be better off without each other.

  • • •

  And Cindy still honestly believed there was no way she could’ve been a good mother. She was thrilled, not nostalgic, never to have to go down the diaper aisle again or purée food every day or deal with literal piles of shit in clothes, on bedsheets, on carpeted floors. And frankly, the idea of even living with a teenage girl made Cindy want to jump in front of a wine tour Humvee. Teenagers were her least favorite people on the face of the earth, and she never could’ve lived with a bratty teen princess without appalling amounts of Xanax and fat bowls of Northern Lights. But looking at Eva, the adult, she felt something grappling with her insides.

  She wiped her face and stared at the blue and black words on the white screen: “Eva Thorvald, America’s bad-girl chef.” “Controversial chef Eva Thorvald keeps diners guessing.” “Thorvald’s table the toughest to get in USA.”

  The reviews of Eva’s food were astonishing: “Thorvald’s five-thousand-dollar dinner a total-body experience.” “A once-in-a-lifetime necessity for serious and adventurous diners.” Cindy couldn’t tell if the critics were trying to justify the ridiculous price—five thousand dollars for five courses—or if all this, at last, was true.

  Eva was an amazingly successful chef; that was clear. Lars must be so proud. His love alone must’ve cultivated her skills and inspired the confidence needed for this level of achievement. Cindy read no mention of him, but certainly he was there, behind the scenes, perhaps running her hot line or at least plating dishes. It’d be like him to stay out of the spotlight.

  Maybe if she’d been a foodie, Cindy would have heard of her daughter much earlier. She’d tried cooking around the time she met Lars, but making a great meal was too much work, and when she got into wine, it was game over for everything else. Food was best if it was easy, and with Reynaldo, her current husband, she finally had a guy who loved so-called guilty pleasure food as much as she did. She went to the gym every day, so there was nothing to feel guilty about anyway.

  • • •

  Cindy spent another twenty minutes entering various search queries into Google. She found no bio, no address, no interviews, no mention of a husband or children, no Facebook page; just private Instagram and Twitter accounts, several fan sites, and, of course, the reservations page for The Dinner.

  The text on the Web site was stark: sixty dollars nonrefundable for priority VIP list, twenty dollars nonrefundable for nonpriority list. Cindy checked the regular list first. The next slot was number 2364, estimated wait time: 295 years.

  The priority VIP list was taken through slot number 194, estimated wait time: four years. Not that she really had a choice, but if she was ever going to see her daughter, she wanted to do it from a distance, as part of a public, professional relationship, before there might be a personal one. Four years seemed like a long time to wait, but it had already been twenty-four. And in a way, it was good, because she needed time to prepare mentally. Whatever uncertainties afflicted the intervening years, one monumental event now seemed likely. She would, one day, see her daughter again.


  • • •

  She took her credit card out of her purse and signed up herself, Cindy Reyna, and her husband, Reynaldo Reyna, separately on the priority waiting list, each with a +1. She figured with a waiting list that long, and maximum two lifetime slots per name or credit card number, she might as well double their slim chances now.

  The e-mail receipt arrived instantly. Cindy Reyna, credit card charged $120, nonrefundable, for slots number 196 (Cindy Reyna +1) and 197 (Reynaldo Reyna +1).

  Cindy couldn’t believe that two more slots had sold just in the amount of time it took her to enter her credit card info. She also wasn’t sure how she’d explain all this to Reynaldo. Maybe it could wait.

  • • •

  It felt like a decade had passed before either of them heard anything.

  • • •

  In that time, Cindy turned fifty. Her second ex-husband, Daniel Anthony, died of a brain aneurysm while scuba diving on vacation in Thailand. One of the partners quit Tettegouche, and it failed, deeply in debt. But what pulled Cindy toward the second great course correction of her life was her husband, Reynaldo, turning fifty-two.

  Every year on Reynaldo’s birthday, they ate dinner at a McDonald’s. Because they had money and no kids, they made it an adventure; year two of their marriage they ate at one in Paris; year three was the white colonial McDonald’s in Hyde Park, New York; year four was the one below the Museum of Communism in Prague; this year it would be the famous Rock N’ Roll McDonald’s in Chicago. They had already decided that on year six they’d hit the world’s largest McDonald’s in London.

  • • •

  As the eastbound flight reached cruising altitude, Cindy opened the latest issue of the Economist—she saved her smarter reading for public situations—when she saw Reynaldo look at his reflection in the dead black screen of his cell phone and pluck at the gray hair in his beard.

  “Screw the yearly prostate exam,” she said. “Call the hearse.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He nodded.

  “I’m joking,” she said.

  “Yeah.” He nodded again, staring at his reflection. He looked good for his age; he was bald, but trim, energetic, life still in his eyes. He worked in the neonatal intensive care unit at a hospital in Palo Alto and somehow he’d staved off the gray in his beard until that year.

  Reynaldo felt that, since he was childless, his heart had sidestepped the empathy that would’ve broken it every time a neonate coded. Sometimes you could save a twenty-five-week-old through intubation, and sometimes you couldn’t. Work had to go on. He could come home from the OR and watch a Golden State Warriors game like nothing had happened—a day when three neonates coded was indistinguishable from a day when he saved three lives. The emotional regulation, he said, came with time.

  • • •

  On the plane to Chicago, in first class, on the morning of his birthday, her husband was now as sad as she’d ever seen him.

  “What you thinking about?” she said at last.

  “Seventy,” he said. “You know my dad died at seventy?”

  “Seventy is pretty far away,” Cindy said.

  “It is, and it isn’t,” he said. “It is and it isn’t.”

  • • •

  In the cab from the Drake Hotel to the Rock N’ Roll McDonald’s, it came up again.

  “You know,” he said, looking out the rear passenger window at a darkened city park as they turned left onto Clark Street. “If I had a kid this year, I’d be seventy when he graduated from high school.”

  “Well, you’re not having a kid this year, I can promise you.”

  “I’m just saying. I don’t even know if I’d live to see him get his diploma.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about that. Which way is Navy Pier? Did we pass it already?”

  “I’m just saying,” Reynaldo repeated.

  “It’s behind us,” the cab driver said. “Way, way behind us.”

  • • •

  “I want to find a different job when we get back,” Cindy said after sex that night. “I’m thinking of being a sommelier again.” Since Tettegouche went under, she’d been managing an in-town tasting room for a supermarket-level winery, which was the wine equivalent of working at a florist on Valentine’s Day, every day. As such, she’d become weary of the crowds, the unoriginality, and the predictable, cheap happiness on the faces of people who didn’t know any better and didn’t want to.

  “You can do whatever you wanna do,” Reynaldo said, and turned his back to sleep on his side, facing the window.

  • • •

  The next morning, she was on the treadmill at the Drake’s gym, listening to her treadmill mix—“Kiss Me on the Bus,” by The Replacements, “Head over Heels,” by Tears for Fears, “Finest Worksong,” by R.E.M., “How Bizarre,” by OMC, and “True,” by Spandau Ballet, on repeat. Right during the chorus of “How Bizarre,” which is stupid and obvious and clichéd but that’s just the way life is sometimes, it hit her. She pressed STOP on the treadmill, got off, and stood for a while on the wooden floor, staring at the stupid TV mounted on the wall, her face burning.

  • • •

  Reynaldo was brushing his teeth in his boxer shorts when she returned to the room, sweaty in her tight yoga-style gym clothes.

  “How was the gym here?” he asked.

  “You want to have kids, don’t you?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You want to be a dad. And you want to have your own kids too, I bet, not adopt them.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, maybe.”

  “So what does that mean?” she asked. Neither had moved; they were on opposite sides of the room with the bed between them. The reflected morning gleam off of downtown Chicago’s buildings glowed behind him, as he stood, puffy and bald and hairy and heartbreaking, a toothbrush sticking out of his face.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Oh, God,” Cindy said, and she fell on the bed. She buried her face in a pillow and pounded the mattress with her fists. It didn’t matter what else was said now, her brain already knew how all this shit was going to pan out.

  Reynaldo started crying and sat next to her. “I still love you,” he said. “I love you, so much.”

  He placed his hand on her back, and although it felt like daggers of ice, she didn’t shake it off. She let him think that he was comforting her, because at that moment there was no comforting her at all.

  • • •

  On the westbound flight home, the People and InTouch magazines Cindy bought at the airport went unread on her lap.

  “And do you know what the biggest thing, the number one thing is?” she asked Reynaldo, who was slumped in his seat, drinking his second Bloody Mary. “You always said you loved this lifestyle. You always said that. You said it was your goal in life to be able to travel whenever you want.”

  “I do love this lifestyle,” he said. “But I also want something else. As well.”

  “It doesn’t work like that. You get one or the other. You can fly around the world and live it up like an adult or you can shack up and squirt out some kids. You don’t get both.”

  Reynaldo looked at her. “You get one or the other. Because that’s what you chose for yourself. And you know, that’s fair. Just don’t tell me how to live.”

  “I didn’t fucking choose,” Cindy said, struggling to keep her voice at a conversational tone. “Biology fucking chooses. Maybe you’d agree with me if your balls fell off at age forty.”

  The steward came by and Reynaldo held his empty Bloody Mary in the air. “Another, please.”

  The steward looked at Cindy. “Another sparkling water for you?”

  “No, I’m good,” she said, watching as the steward passed Reynaldo a bottle of Grey Goose and a bottle of N. W. Gratz’s Artisanal Bloody Mary Mix. Cindy saw the label, emblazon
ed with OREGON TILTH CERTIFIED ORGANIC, GMO FREE, CRUELTY FREE, and shook her head.

  “Jesus.”

  “It’s the direction that food is heading,” Reynaldo said. “You want to argue about this too?”

  “No. Forget it. Where were we?”

  Reynaldo sighed. “You said I’d understand you better if my balls fell off at forty and was thereby denied the choice of having children.”

  “Yeah. I think you’d be a lot more compassionate.”

  “But you never had kids and you never wanted kids. It’s not like some lifelong dream was stolen from you by menopause.”

  “You never wanted kids either, that’s what you said when you lied to me five years ago.”

  “I wasn’t lying. It was true then.”

  “Oh, that’s such bullshit.”

  “No it is not,” Reynaldo said, mixing his drink. “But it’d be easier if it was.”

  “It’s not easy either way,” she said. “Not for me.”

  • • •

  Under California law, a divorce could be finalized in six months, but Cindy couldn’t wait that long to get on with her damn life. After looking exclusively at jobs out of state, because California was saturated by know-it-all kids with sommelier certifications anyway, she took an opening in the Great Lakes resort area of Charlevoix County, Michigan.

  This time, she was the fancy overqualified West Coast wine expert moving to the Midwest to take a job away from a young local. The restaurant’s general manager, a woman of Chinese descent Cindy’s age with the intriguingly un-Chinese name of Molly Greenberg, hired her at the end of a Skype interview, and two weeks later, Cindy was uncorking fifty-seven-degree bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape for middle-aged couples sunburned from a day on their boat. She never met the twenty-six-year-old Level II sommelier she’d beat out for the job; he’d left town in protest, ending perhaps the best chance for Cindy to play out the balance of her adulthood as a beautiful inverse of its beginning.