by J. L. Salter
“Acorns? Do I look like a chipmunk?” As he said it, his bearded cheeks puffed out and for that moment, he actually did resemble a larger version of those tree creatures — though not quite as furry.
“Ersatz coffee. They’ve made it from just about anything you can grind up — bark, leaves, whatever. But acorns give it more of the body you’re looking for with coffee.” Amanda pulled a frying pan from the cupboard and placed it on the range.
“This was Christine’s idea, wasn’t it?”
“We’ve both gone to a lot of trouble to locate this special diet, including ersatz coffee. A lot of expense and time to collect all these healthy food items for you, to help you through this illness. I’d think you could show a little appreciation.”
He just shook his head. “Acorns.” Jason sniffed the still-brewing concoction and wrinkled his nose. “Look, I’m going along with most of this stuff while I’m sick — you know, putting up with Christine’s craziness — but you’ve got to promise me one thing. It’s important.”
There was a loud sizzle as Amanda poured the contents of the mixing bowl into the hot frying pan. She stirred briefly and then faced him. “Promise what?”
“Not to tell anyone I know, or anyone who knows me, that I ate and drank any of this junk Christine has been trying to feed me from her cauldron.”
“Okay, I promise I won’t tell a soul about your healthy diet. My lips are sealed.” She returned her attention to the pan.
Jason spent the next five minutes watching her every movement. He was fearful the meal would disappear if he didn’t monitor it constantly.
“Okay, hold out your plate.”
“At least we’ve got scrambled eggs.” Drool had formed at the corners of his mouth.
She plopped a large spoonful on his plate. “I guess I should explain these aren’t actual eggs. Think of them as egg cousins.”
“Cousins again! Don’t tell me you scrambled some ground acorns.”
She chuckled. “Good grief, no. You can’t scramble acorns.”
“Whew! You had me worried for a minute.” It looked okay… kind of. Though slightly pale and thin. No matter. His intense hunger outweighed his normal investigatory precautions. “So what kind of egg cousin is this? The kind with no yolk?” He put a large forkful into his mouth.
She paused long enough for his mouth to comprehend that inaugural sample. “Tofu.”
The spray from his immediate expulsion occupied a radius of six feet or more. Some of the tofu fragments made it as far as the couch. Jason rushed to the kitchen sink and shoveled water into his mouth. His reaction was much like the aspirin sounds: gerrh… kahh. With a paper towel, he rubbed the surface of his tongue for about thirty seconds. Then he rinsed and gargled. He began sputtering before he’d finished spitting out the remaining water. “Scrambled tofu! Are you kidding me? It tastes like fried phlegm. You think some grease that comes from a pig’s hoof is a cousin to eggs?”
“Tofu has nothing to do with pig’s feet, or any other animal. It’s a by-product of soybeans. People use tofu in lots of ways — it’s very amenable to whatever it’s cooked with. It mimics the flavor of the other stuff in the pan.”
Jason tried to extend his tongue far enough to examine it. He couldn’t. “Well, I guess soybeans can mimic bird vomit, but that doesn’t mean I want to eat any.”
Amanda still held the pan and the scooping spoon. “So you’re saying you don’t want any breakfast?”
He shook his head sadly and rubbed his stomach. “No. I think I’ll just go brush my teeth a few times.”
“Well, first you’ve got to clean up all that tofu you spit into my living room.” She put down the frying pan and reached under the counter for moist towel wipes and a spray bottle. “I don’t want to find a single speck of tofu except on your plate and in this pan.”
“Look, I’m too weak to clean up soybean fragments.” Jason paused to add his hangdog expression. “Besides—” cough, cough “—I’m sick.”
She shook the large plastic spoon as she moved toward him. “You may think you’re sick now, but if you don’t clean up that mess you just made, you’re going to wish you were in the hospital.” Sometimes Amanda sounded like somebody’s stern mother.
Even as he cowered, he wondered why. Because he was so weak from hunger? It was partly because he’d never seen Amanda that severe before. Jason took the cleaning items and spent fifteen minutes collecting every shred of tofu he could find. He began to imagine he could smell it, even though the wily tofu was obviously mimicking the odor of couch cushions and draperies.
———
Amanda monitored Jason’s cleanup carefully. While Jason was occupied with that endeavor, she got a clean fork and sampled the scrambled tofu. She rolled it in her mouth a bit, chewed slightly, and then decided it needed more of a sluice action than a chew. So she sluiced down a little. “Ack!” She turned quickly and spit the remainder into her hand.
“What’d you say?”
“Back. I said back. Back behind you is some more tofu to clean up.”
“Oh.” Jason returned to his duties like a prisoner forced to mop his cell before his own execution.
Amanda discreetly dumped the remaining contents of the pan into the trash and covered it with two paper towels. She found herself making the kahh sound, though much quieter than Jason’s rendition.
She grabbed her purse. An egg sandwich would be nice this morning on the way to work. Maybe with a fried potato patty. And freshly brewed coffee. Ha.
* * * *
When Amanda got to work, she phoned Christine and reported on her enterprising breakfast.
“Where’d you find acorns? And how on earth did you grind them?”
“I took a page from your plan — I made it up. It was just weak tea with a little salt added.”
“Well, necessity caused mothers to invent things. I’m in traffic. Gotta go. Bye.”
The call ended before Amanda could correct her friend’s mangled quote. All of a sudden, she didn’t remember how it really went. Sheesh. Not enough sleep.
In the middle of Amanda’s lioness yawn, Louis walked in, plopped down, and started talking about how far behind he was because he didn’t have her evaluations.
The pressure at her office was intense. The other workers — all female except the boss — were civil, but not really friendly. No one was assigned to assist her and nobody voluntarily helped. Some, including her Yankee supervisor, actually hampered Amanda’s productivity. His frequent drop-ins were very distracting and nearly 90 per cent were pointless. During most of the usual year she could cope with these typical circumstances, but during Hell Weeks everything bothered her. Especially King Louie.
“Well, Louis, I’d be farther along if you could carve out a couple hours of clerical help for me during these grant reviews. Gayle or Joan probably wouldn’t mind helping if you’d let them. Or one of the other ladies.”
He was already shaking his head. Sometimes when he shook his head with particular vigor, Amanda thought she could see his toupee shift slightly.
“And I could get more done without all the interruptions.”
“You mean like phone calls to and from your darkly tanned friend?”
Amanda yawned again. It was either that or scream at King Louie.
Later, during an afternoon break, Amanda quickly checked the blog and scanned Christine’s update — very little posted. There were more comments, however, from blog readers. Most were excited and optimistic that someone was finally undertaking a cure for the uncommon man-cold. A few predicted the project’s total failure. As one blogger — presumably female — wrote, rather pithily: ‘A man’s a man. You can thump ’em, but you never really know what you’re getting. When a melon goes sour on you, only thing to do is toss it out.’
One comment, presumably from a male, in a different vein: ‘What you two are doing to that guy is hateful. Somebody ought to slap you silly!’
She clicked on the link to Kick-Marty, the
adjunct blog discovered yesterday. The new tally was Kick Marty Out — 15… an overnight increase of only four.
Back to work.
* * * *
Possibly worse than her office stress was that which waited in Amanda’s apartment. Since Jason’s invasion, she’d lost all her solitude and was getting hardly any rest during the night. Until Monday evening, he had been her sweet and comfortable — but not always remarkable — lover. Now he was her noisy, uninvited leech. That image bothered her, but it was accurate: Jason stuck to her, sucked out her resources, and wouldn’t let go.
Amanda was near complete exhaustion as she dragged herself into the apartment. She stood in front of her couch and dropped like a rag doll. Her purse remained in her hand and she stared straight ahead without speaking.
Jason wandered in from the bathroom with a tube of toothpaste in his hand. It was 5:30… he was cheating. He waved lamely and coughed just to remind her how sick he was.
Amanda studied him as though he were a pesky ghost after an unsuccessful exorcism attempt by a seminary student intern. “So how was the patient’s day?”
“Some kid tried to sell me a magazine subscription so he can go to Paris or something.”
“You buy any?”
“Thought about subscribing to Maxim, but he said it’d be at least ten weeks before the first issue arrives. I figure I’ll be gone from here by then.”
Amanda figured ten days of live-in Jason would kill her.
He changed the subject. “You think I could have a normal breakfast tomorrow?” Jason briefly scraped his tongue with two fingernails. “I can’t handle scrambled tofu again.”
Amanda sighed very heavily and put down her purse finally. “Well, it depends. What would the patient like?”
“The Shuney’s mega-breakfast buffet.” Shuney’s was locally owned by an investor who’d bought the facility and property from a former holder of a well-known national franchise. To keep existing customers and save money on remodeling and decor, the new owner simply altered one letter in the name. “But, if that’s out, I’d settle for some ordinary, normal cereal. Lucky Charms, Froot Loops… any of the standards.”
“Cereal might be possible. I’ll call Christine and have her bring some when she comes over.”
“No!” His voice was shrill. “I mean, not Christine. She’ll just find some rat poison in a box. Can’t you call somebody else?” He paused. “Wait, who’s coming over?”
“Some girlfriends.” Amanda wasn’t really up for any kind of event that night, but this was all part of Christine’s elaborate plan to render the apartment inhospitable for a man. “We’re having a crop.”
“A what?”
“Crop.” Amanda rolled her eyes. Where has he been?
“Crop what?” Still standing, he trembled slightly. “Not… me?”
Amanda touched his arm reassuringly. “Crop you? Of course not. Why would you think that?”
“Well, after that witch yanked out half my chest hair, I thought maybe she was going to practice some more black arts or something, with some of my body parts.”
“Which body parts were you thinking about?”
“Uh, never mind.” Apparently without realizing it, he pressed his legs together tightly. “So what are you going to crop, and when?”
“It’s for scrapbooking. We crop pictures, photos, artwork, headlines… stuff like that. I guarantee there’s no bodily harm for you.”
“When?”
Amanda looked at her watch. “About half an hour. I’d better call somebody about that cereal. Sunny lives near the Verde Grocery. She probably won’t mind.”
———
Jason’s brain had already shifted to the crop party. He knew whenever women gathered to talk and conduct some kind of activity, there was always food. Usually, good food. Of course, in this case — as desperate as his stomach was — even bad real food would be better than the health diet items he’d been nibbling on. He thought of something else. “Uh, can you ask Sunny to bring me another tube of toothpaste? Maybe something with spearmint flavor.”
Slightly less than ten minutes later, Christine arrived at the apartment with a flourish and a large canvas tote bag. She motioned for Amanda to remove the slightly gaudy floral tablecloth and then plunked her bag on the table. Amanda folded the material and draped it over the back of a dining chair.
“Amanda says you’re starving.” Christine looked at Jason. “You’re in luck. I downloaded this diet from a website I got from my nephew who’s on staff at Johns Hopkins Medical School. He’s a nutritionologist…”
Amanda interrupted. “Uh, I believe that’s nutritionist.”
Christine waved her hand. Small details didn’t typically concern her. “Anyway, he highly recommends this. Perfect balance, all natural. Zero carbs. Astronauts use this during their training phase. It’s truly the right stuff.”
Jason was already drooling. He’d been without real food for parts of four days. After the doctor visit on Monday, he’d grabbed a burger, fries, and shake. For the time, so far, at Amanda’s apartment, the staple had been dry, unsalted crackers. What’s in those crackers? They tasted like dog biscuits going down but had the aftertaste of the earliest supplemental fiber liquids. Added to the crackers had been small mugs of bland, thin consommé, tiny glasses of unsweetened prune juice, a soy hotdog with no bun, and some of the nastiest sardines ever caught in a mildewed net. He was not counting the tofu since he’d so thoroughly excoriated the inside of his mouth afterwards. He’d barely tasted the acorn coffee brew. Had it not been for his hourly — and sometimes half-hourly — inch of toothpaste, he was certain he would have expired at least 24 hours ago. He was starving… and had to restrain himself from diving into the canvas bag.
Though he did not like her or trust her, right now Jason viewed Christine as a buxom Red Cross worker visiting his refugee camp. “You know, this starve a cold thing is pretty austere. I’m so weak from hunger I can’t even take a dump.”
“Too much information, Jason.” Christine held out her vertical palm. “Anyway, I’m on duty… to the rescue. This stash here will keep you going for at least four more days… unless you decide to go home, of course. By then I’ll have located the second stage of this special NASA diet. That’s important, because it prepares your intestines for the colonic bath next week.”
“The what!” Jason’s voice cracked like a fourteen-year-old boy’s.
“The solution bathes the insides of your colon for forty-five soothing minutes of purification. The pure natural extracting herbs literally suck all the impurities from your colon.” Christine acted like she sold the procedure door to door.
“I don’t want my colon sucked! And I’m not getting an enema from some fat-fingered lab technician.” Jason looked at both women. “You’re nuts!”
———
Amanda had predicted a reaction like that. “Now, that’s no way to speak to the lady who just brought your meals for the next four days.” Amanda nodded deferentially toward her older friend.
Jason’s drool seemingly overtook his sensibilities about the threatened colonic procedure. “Okay, sorry, I guess. I’m light-headed from no food. Anyway, you can cancel that enema thing. I’m positive I’ll be up and around by… uh, when did you say it was?”
Christine waved her hand. “Apology accepted. I understand how a sliver of fever can affect your brain. They say half a degree is the worst kind. Most doctors miss it and it can go untreated for who knows how long.”
“Right. So, let’s see what’s in the bag.” Jason actually rubbed his hands together.
Amanda had to step back slightly because she already knew some of the contents and didn’t want Jason to see the grin she was trying to control.
Christine continued her introduction. “Now, there can be some variation on the order of these meals… you know, in case you want to swap tonight’s supper for tomorrow’s lunch. And so on.”
Jason rolled his hand sideways. Hurry up.
Christine reached in and pulled out some celery stalks. “These are wonderful dipped in hummus.” With a minor flourish, she produced a small plastic tub.
“Hummus!” Jason looked like he’d been poleaxed. “That’s, uh, that’s…”
“Correct.” Christine could have been a game show hostess. “It’s ground-up chickpeas, made into a paste. But this is a special brand that takes out some of the gritty texture. Some people think it feels a little slimy, but they say you don’t notice the consistency as much if you spread it on a rice cake.”
“Hummus? Chickpea paste? Gritty? Slimy?” Jason sputtered for a moment. More syllables slipped out occasionally but no recognizable words. “Why, that’s practically poison! I can’t eat crud like that.”
Christine put the celery and hummus back in her bag. “Very well, you may be right. Sometimes an out-and-out fast might be better for you anyway. As sick as you are.” She turned like she was about to leave.
“Wait. Uh, hold on.” Jason sounded pitiful. “Let’s see what else is in there. Maybe I can eat that celery if I douse it with sugar and microwave it for a minute.”
Christine looked toward Amanda. “Absolutely no sugar for this patient. Nothing that’s been processed. I thought you knew that.”
Amanda pretended to be chastened. “Sorry, I thought I removed all the sweeteners.”
“Not all of them.” Jason spilled his sweet secret before he could stop himself. “This afternoon, I found several little packets — pink, blue, and yellow… I think. Had ’em for a snack.”
“You did what?” It was not easy to shock Christine.
Jason looked a little sheepish. “Little packets of pretend sugar. I found them in the back of a drawer. My head was pounding from sugar withdrawal. I figured, what the heck.”
Amanda was equally startled. “You swallowed a packet of sweetener? Dry?”
“Well, that’s the thing. I took one and just poured it into my mouth at first. Some melted, but a bit of it clotted and formed a lump. So I took a sip of water and swished it around. That pretty much chased it down.”
