Eat, Drink, and Be From Mississippi

by Nanci Kincaid

  “Maybe it seem like it to her,” Arnold said.

  “He doesn’t approve,” Courtney said to Arnold.

  “You mize well sign on, man,” Arnold told Truely. “I bet she got her reasons.”

  “Maybe I’m just afraid that Courtney is looking for excitement in all the wrong places. Wasn’t there a song about that?”

  “It’s not about excitement, for heaven’s sake, Truely. My life is changing whether I like it or not. It’s beyond my control. So maybe it’s time for me to make a change on my own terms — just because I want to. Improve something. A change for the better, you know.”

  “Change by scalpel, Courtney, is something different from enlightenment.”

  “Okay then,” Arnold said. “I’ll leave y’all to argue this out. It’s damn cold out here. And I would appreciate it if you two don’t come out here no more like this and close the door on me. I sort of panic when I think you out here whispering about me. Okay?”

  “We’ll remember that,” Truely said.

  “I’m getting back in the sack then,” Arnold said. “But Ima leave this door right here cracked open. I sleep better like that.”

  “Good night,” Courtney and Truely echoed.

  Before Arnold made his exit from the terrace he paused. “Courtney, if you decide you having this female surgery, tell us what day. I’ll take off from work. Me and Truely will go with you. Right, man? You can’t go to the hospital by yourself these days. Isn’t no telling what them doctors do to you if they know nobody’s there watching out for you. They about killed my grandmama when she went in there. I ain’t lying either.”

  “Good night, Arnold,” Truely said.

  “Night.” He vanished into the dark house in search of the sofa where he had set up camp.

  “WELL,” Courtney said, “small secrets among friends, I guess.”

  “It’d be a lie if I said all this surgery of yours didn’t worry me, Court.”

  “I know.”

  “Would you be doing this if Hastings hadn’t left?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You think you need to turn back the hand of time so you can catch another man or something?”

  “Catch? Is that what women do? Catch men?”

  “Bad choice of words. But you know what I mean.”

  “Would I like to turn back the hand of time? That’s your question? Yes, I think I would. Wouldn’t you?”

  “I know you want me to say yes, Court.”

  “But your answer is no? You don’t want a redo? Not even with Jesse?”

  “I’d say no. I don’t.”

  “Really? I’m not sure you’re telling the truth, but if you are — well, good for you.”

  “I have no desire to go backwards, Courtney. Not for all the Mulligans in the world. Damn. I have enough trouble just trying to move forward.”

  “Yes,” she said, “you do.” She leaned toward him and kissed his cheek.

  Eighteen

  THE NEXT MORNING, after Arnold headed off for a day of moving furniture, Courtney talked Truely into going to the market with her. “I’m in the mood to cook,” she explained. Since that seemed better than some of the moods she might have been in, Truely embraced it. He had actually never been a to-the-market sort of guy. Unlike some men in the city he didn’t roam fresh produce aisles with wonder or lust, he didn’t read ingredient lists in a state of euphoria, or marvel at culinary masterpieces behind glass, or long to sample the little morsels handed out on trembling toothpicks.

  No. He had rarely ever had the urge to cook anything himself either. He could make pretty good sloppy joes. Less than five minutes start to finish. He could reheat takeout. He could date women who claimed they loved cooking for him and let them go at it. But Courtney’s acquired notion that the market was as full of wonders as any notable museum was essentially lost on him. She made lists and went to the market like an adventurer. He was more of a grocery store guy. A quick run inside to grab something fast — preferably preprepared, maybe on occasion a couple of filets or some fresh Atlantic salmon. But more often a couple of Hungry Man prepackaged dinners he could nuke in the microwave and eat without pausing to notice.

  On this day they went first to Whole Foods. On Fridays there was often a certain zoolike quality to it, which was why he’d become more of a Safeway aficionado. But today Courtney was on a culinary mission and he was her trusty sidekick. While she selected cuts of meats — grass fed, free range, from this or that so-called-local organic farm, flown in fresh, not frozen, and on and on — he was assigned to dessert duty. This came naturally to him — selecting desserts. You might even say he had a gift for it.

  His favorite desserts were the cobblers his mother used to make with fresh blackberries he picked himself as a child — and later peaches from his daddy’s own trees. She’d made them with Bisquick, he remembered that. Along with what might now be considered illegal amounts of butter and sugar. She also made a ferocious banana pudding with the Jell-O pudding packets, ripe bananas about to go bad as she used to say, and a box of humidity-impaired vanilla wafers. To this day he actually believed that banana pudding had medicinal powers. In all the years since, in which he’d had any number of elaborate, artistic desserts, at many of the finest restaurants in this and other cities, he had never had anything that measured up in his mind to those early love-inspired desserts served on his mother’s mismatched, chipped dishes. Nothing had been as satisfying since — either to the palate or to his soul.

  He wandered through the upscale-slash-alternative crowd to the bakery section of the market. He always had the feeling he was among a sea of people who had started out as hippies rebelling against their upscale families but ended up rich in spite of themselves — and Whole Foods was where they went to reconcile both conditions. It required some degree of schizophrenia to pay six dollars for twenty-three organically grown blackberries, didn’t it? No lie. It was all very pseudointellectual to Truely — who was as guilty as anyone of overpaying for something that wasn’t worth it, just because he could.

  Maybe Courtney was right. Maybe it was almost as good as going to a museum. From the looks of things they had some version of nearly everything sweet. After studying the offerings in search of the familiar he made his thoughtful selections — a flourless chocolate tart, to his way of thinking just a more hip version of a huge brownie (Courtney loved chocolate. Jesse used to love it too. And so did Shauna. It seemed a guy couldn’t go too far wrong with chocolate); a three-layer carrot cake with nuts and cream cheese icing (They had never eaten carrot cake when he was growing up. He didn’t think it had ever occurred to his mother to make a cake out of a garden vegetable).

  Lastly he selected a tasty-looking cherry cobbler in an aluminum tray. (They didn’t have peach or blackberry.) The cherry cobbler claimed to contain freshly picked, locally grown cherries and probably had most of the same ingredients as the cobblers his mother used to make — sans the love. Warm it up, sling a little vanilla ice cream on top and you could almost transport yourself back to the age of innocence.

  Truely presented his selections to Courtney, who not only approved, but expressed enthusiasm. “Yummy,” was her exact word. Truely loaded the bakery items into the cart, which by now contained an assortment of fresh greens, fruits, raw vegetables, sacks of organic flour and brown rice, couscous, lamb, beef, fish and fowl wrapped in white papers, freshly baked whole-grain breads, olive oil, and bottles of good wine, along with all kinds of stuff he didn’t really recognize, just Lord knows what all that Courtney had hand-selected.

  What was it about being with a happy woman in a grocery store that was so satisfying? It was a feeling he vaguely recalled. He flashed back to Mississippi and the days of Saturday trips into Jackson, where he had wandered around the aisles of the worn and weary Winn-Dixie or Piggly Wiggly, trailing his mother, who took her own sweet time, thumping the watermelons, sampling the seedless grapes to be sure, handling the pole beans, green beans, butter beans, opening the car
tons of eggs, checking for cracks or worse, often pausing to chat with other women who were also shopping in slow motion with their own ragged children trailing them. On those early occasions of accompanying his mother to do her grocery shopping he had had the feeling, oddly, that overall this was a pretty decent world to live in. Maybe he felt a little bit that way now.

  After he and Courtney hauled the groceries out to the car Courtney wanted to make a quick stop at the Safeway for “a few staples.” That was what their mother used to say, “Anybody want to run to the store with me? I got to pick up a few staples.” When they were little they always loved to go to the grocery store in hopes of putting a penny in the gumball machine, or getting a quarter ride on the bouncing horse out front.

  At the Safeway, he and Courtney split up and hurried through the store with separate buggies (as they are called in Mississippi) grabbing such staples as Doritos, Cheez Whiz, Ritz crackers, onion soup mix, low-fat sour cream, fat-free cream cheese, frozen cookie dough, containers of fluorescent pimento cheese, Diet Coke, beer, Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, Velveeta, frozen hash browns, instant grits, chunky peanut butter and whatever else called to them of an essential or alluring nature.

  When they got back to Truely’s place he carried the bounty up to the loft and attempted to help Courtney put it away, but she shooed him off, waving her hand, saying, “You’ve helped enough. I’ll put things away myself. That way I’ll know where things are.” He didn’t argue with her. Instead he went to the area of the loft that had, by default, become his pseudo-office space. He had some calls to return. Some contract proposals to fax. A few notes to write by hand. He turned the TV on. He liked the twenty-four-hour news as a backdrop for his labors.

  He had no trouble busying himself with work-related tasks, but his eye kept wandering to the kitchen, where Courtney was happily arranging food in the cabinets and the refrigerator. He watched her wash fresh vegetables and stack canned goods, sorted by category, all labels facing forward. He saw her sniffing the meager contents of his refrigerator and tossing most of it into the trash. If he wasn’t crazy she was actually humming.

  By midafternoon Courtney had floured and browned a rump roast, the sizzling pan steaming up the kitchen, searing in the juices of the meat — and releasing his repressed hunger. Truely watched her put the roast in the oven to slow cook. The aroma was familiar and totally intoxicating. He imagined himself drunk from simply breathing the air. He watched as she washed and chopped a pot of greens, chopped an onion, grated some cheese and was busy stirring some dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl. She moved from task to task with confidence and grace. She was quiet mostly, busy with her kitchen revelry, lost in her own thoughts. Just her presence alone brought Truely a long-absent sense of peace.

  BY THE TIME ARNOLD GOT HOME from work that afternoon, Courtney had set the table, put out a vase of cut flowers and lit some small candles. When he walked in Arnold looked momentarily lost. He actually glanced around with an expression of concern. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Dinner,” Courtney said. “You like roast beef, don’t you?”

  “Court got the urge to cook,” Truely explained. “Can’t fight an urge like that.”

  “Look like Thanksgiving or something in here,” he said, walking over toward the kitchen, dropping his backpack on a chair. “Man,” he said. “Is that them little red potatoes?”

  “It is,” Courtney said.

  He lifted the lid on a pot, the steamy vapor escaping in a fragrant cloud. “No way,” he said. “Collards?”

  “With fatback,” she said. “And pepper sauce if you want it.”

  “What you got in here?” He opened the oven.

  “Hot cornbread,” she said. “Just like mama used to make.”

  “Whose mama?” he asked.

  “Good point.” She laughed.

  “Man,” he said. “This look good.”

  “It’s ready,” Courtney said. “Wash up and we’ll eat early. I know you come home from work half starved. Thought it would be nice if you walked in to supper on the table.”

  “You got any grape jelly?” Arnold called as he took off his jacket and made his way to the back to wash his hands. “For that cornbread?”

  Courtney went to the pantry which she had earlier arranged like a display case and grabbed a small jar of jelly, but the lid was stuck. “Can you open this?” She handed it off to Truely.

  While Courtney poured iced tea, Truely muscled off the lid to the jelly. When Arnold returned he had put on a clean T-shirt and maybe even splashed water on his face.

  “You guys sit down,” Courtney said. “I’ll put the food on.”

  “This got anything to do with you getting that surgery?” Arnold asked as he pulled out his chair.

  “Nothing whatsoever,” she said.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m positive.”

  “Then what brought this on?” he asked, sitting down.

  “I just wanted to do it,” Courtney said.

  “Anybody ever tell you you ask a lot of questions?” Truely said.

  “Got to,” he said. “If you the kind that got the need to know.”

  “Truely is not that kind,” Courtney volunteered, kissing the top of his head.

  WHEN THEY WERE ALL THREE SEATED AROUND the table there was a palpable sense of good-food anticipation, like a holiday excitement in the air. “This looks great,” Truely said maybe three or four times in a row. This was one of those occasions when he thought to himself, Yes, of course, food is love. How had he managed to forget that? Courtney insisted they all join hands and bow their heads and ask grace. She wanted each of them to take a turn — aloud. Neither Truely nor Arnold was necessarily inclined to do this, but under the circumstances they did their best to oblige Courtney. She began by squeezing both their hands, saying, “Dear Lord, my life is a mess as you know, but I also have an abundance of things to be grateful for — and two of them are sitting right here now. I thank you for my good brother, Truely, and my good friend Arnold. We all ask that you help us use our strength to your service.”

  Arnold went next. “We thank you for all this good food right here. We wish everybody could get a chance to eat like this. We thank Courtney for cooking all this too.”

  And Truely chimed in afterward. “Lord, make us ever mindful of our many blessings.”

  Within minutes dishes and utensils were clanking in that naturally choreographed, musical sort of way. Ice was rattling in the glasses, wine was being poured for Courtney and Truely, roast was being sliced, gravy was being ladled, butter was being passed, vegetables were being peppered and the aroma of plenty was wafting throughout the room like an anesthetic.

  “I didn’t know you could cook,” Arnold said to Courtney. “You never did tell me your sister could cook,” he echoed to Truely.

  “Now you know.” Truely was dishing himself a helping of collard greens.

  “You talented,” he told Courtney. “My grandmama the only other woman I know who can cook like this. But she’s getting old now. She ain’t like to cook that much anymore. Plus she say groceries too high nowadays — she says it make you lose your appetite.”

  THEY WERE MIDWAY into second helpings when Arnold’s cell phone rang. It had the effect of a fire alarm going off, not just because it was loud, but because it was so rare. Usually Arnold kept it on vibrate and went about conducting his cell phone life under the radar. Arnold fished in his pocket, silenced his phone and checked to see who was calling. No specific expression crossed his face. “Got to get this,” was all he said. “Y’all go on and finish without me.”

  “Can’t you call back later?” Truely asked, sounding oddly parental.

  “This can’t wait.” He stood up and began walking toward the back of the loft and the small bathroom he had claimed as his own. He went inside and closed the door.

  “Who do you think is calling him?” Courtney asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  “You su
re he hasn’t got a girlfriend?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “You’ve never asked him?”

  “We try to operate on don’t ask, don’t tell around here.”

  “I bet,” she said sarcastically.

  “It’s just a phone call, Court. Some nights he stays locked up in that bathroom talking on his cell phone until all hours.”

  “Really? The same guy that goes nuts if we close the terrace door to talk privately? The same guy who says, ‘No secrets among friends’?”

  “One and the same.”

  “You’re not the least bit curious, True?”

  “He’ll tell me if he wants me to know.”

  “Maybe he would appreciate being asked,” she said. “That ever occur to you?”

  “Not really,” he said. “But I’m sure you’d be happy to oblige him, right?”

  “You might be surprised to know that I’m not a card-carrying member of the don’t ask, don’t tell club, True.”

  “Yeah,” Truely teased. “I’m pretty sure they don’t let girls in.”

  THEY FINISHED THEIR MEAL, had second glasses of red wine and relaxed, thinking that Arnold might return to finish his supper. When it seemed he wouldn’t, Courtney made him a second plate of food and asked Truely to take it to him, which he did, tapping on the bathroom door, then jiggling the knob and looking inside. Arnold was sitting on the side of the tub, his head in his hands. It was like he hadn’t heard Truely knock. When Truely spoke his name, Arnold jumped. He turned to face Truely and Truely saw that he was upset, maybe even close to breaking down. “Here.” He handed him the plate of food. “Courtney sent this.”

  Arnold took the plate and mouthed, “Thanks, man.”

  “Everything okay?” Truely asked.

  Arnold didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

  IT WAS LATE when Arnold finally came out of the bathroom. By then Truely and Courtney had put the food away, cleaned the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher. Truely was propped up in front of the TV in his nightly pose. Courtney was lining up and counting out her various medicines on the kitchen counter. This seemed to instantly annoy Arnold. “You still taking all them pills?” He sounded more than disapproving.