Aftertaste (17 page)

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Authors: Meredith Mileti

BOOK: Aftertaste
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Later, Ruth leaves me a voice mail message on my cell phone. “Hi, Mira. Listen, I've been meaning to call you, to thank you for, wow, all this wonderful food. Everything's been great and, jeez, what a help! Anyway, Carlos and I missed you guys at class today. Oh, hey, big news. A guy showed up at Gymboree today. An actual dad—cute and no ring,” Ruth whispers giddily into the phone. “Give me a call, and I'll fill you in. Better come back next week, or I'm staking claim.”
Actually, I was right here when Ruth called but didn't answer the phone. I was back in bed, still feeling tired, despite the fact that I'd slept while Chloe napped. Immune to Ruth's enthusiasm over the sudden presence of a man at Gymboree, I lay there listening to her message and staring at the crack in the ceiling, all the while wondering what Jake was serving for lunch at Grappa.
Suddenly, I sit up in bed. I can't remember if I fed Chloe lunch. I look over where she's playing on the rug by the television, studying her for signs of malnutrition. Had I fed her? Or, was it breakfast I was remembering? I looked at the clock by the bedside table. Four fifteen. Had we been in this room all day?
 
That evening I'm in the kitchen heating up a can of soup for Chloe's dinner when Fiona breezes in. “Lookie, lookie, who's got a cookie?” she says, pulling a small, wax paper bag from her purse.
Chloe squeals delightedly as Fiona unwraps a large, iced cookie with a blue smiley face and hands it to her. Without asking me.
“Don't you think Eat'n Park makes the best cookies? When was the last time you had one, Mira?” Fiona asks, digging in her purse. “I got one for you, too,” she says, handing me another small bag. Mine is red, a hastily iced cookie with a crooked gash of a grin.
“I had dinner there tonight with a girlfriend,” Fiona tells me. “I just love their chicken potpie.” Fiona sits down at the table, and Chloe brightens instantly; she even abandons her assault on the cookie to smile at her.
Fiona says that, as long as she's here, she might as well stick around to see my father, whose class should be over soon. She knows it's his night to teach, and I have the distinct feeling that she's come to spy on me, as if she thinks my recent bout of flu has rendered me permanently incapable of taking decent care of Chloe. When she volunteers to read Chloe a story while I finish cleaning up, I don't argue with her. “She fell right to sleep in my arms, sweet thing. I put her in the porta-crib in your father's bedroom,” Fiona reports when she comes downstairs a while later. I want to protest that I wanted to put Chloe to bed myself, but it seems petty to complain to someone who's just done you a favor. So even though it's only eight thirty, I go to bed. What else is there to do?
I'm hardly surprised then, to find myself awake at three fifteen in the morning, alone in the attic bedroom. I lie there for quite a while thinking of Chloe, wondering if she misses me as much as I miss her, or if it's possible I've disappeared from her life unnoticed. It's a morose thought, and deep down one I know is irrational, but over the last few weeks and months I've been working up to this notion that I could disappear and no one would spend very much time looking for me or missing me.
I throw on an oversized sweatshirt, pull on a pair of woolen socks, and pad over to the corner where weeks ago I had stacked some boxes under the eaves, remnants of my past life, evidence that I had at one time done something that mattered. The first box is filled with magazine clippings, recipes, multiple copies of the
Gourmet
article on Grappa, and a dozen or so journals filled with notes and menu ideas written in Italian. These are from my apprenticeship in Italy, where I had met Jake. I pick one up and leaf through it, stopping at a page where I'd written his name over and over, filling the entire page. I toss the journal back into the box and fold the lid closed, thinking that it would be an important step to throw the rest of the boxes away unopened, something I know I could never do. I won't be satisfied until I've opened each box, touched each scrap of paper, pored over every photograph. Even then I will not be done with them.
Lately, I've begun to doubt my past, my feelings and memories, to which I no longer feel entitled, and the result is a disconcerting mix of confusion, exhilaration, and ennui. Apart from several cartons containing my cookbook collection, the rest of the boxes are all filled with the same sorts of things, little things really, most of them neither important nor useful. The last box is shoved so deeply under the eaves that I almost don't see it. The packing tape is cracked and yellowed, which has made the seal loose. When I flip open the flaps, I'm bathed in a thin cloud of dust.
Inside is my mother's dog-eared copy of
Larousse Gastronomique
. This book had fascinated me as a child, mostly because it is written in French, a language I didn't understand. I can remember my mother poring over it, whispering the recipes like incantations in her beautiful, honeyed French. Thrust in between its pages, rendering its spine loose and broken in many places, was a catalogue of her life: wine labels, notes in French from friends, letters from my father, menus she had particularly enjoyed. As a child I often leafed through its pages searching for something of mine, a birth announcement, a picture, handwritten documentation of my first real meal, but the collection stopped the year she moved to Pittsburgh.
The sight of my mother's handwriting on the slips of paper and in the margins of the book causes me to inhale sharply, and for a moment I smell licorice, as if the mere sight of her heavily styled penmanship has produced an olfactory hallucination. It's a delicate smell, more like anise or fresh tarragon than the sugary smell of a licorice pastille.
Smell, I remember my mother once telling me, is the most powerful of the senses. Without it, there is no taste. Long ago I lost the memory of her face, the sound of her voice, the touch of her fingers. But I can still remember her smell, in the aroma of a sherry reduction, the perfume, delicate and faint, that lingers on your hands after you've run them through a hedge of rosemary, the pungent assault of a Gauloises cigarette. Any of a thousand smells are enough to conjure her memory.
I shut the box and return to bed, wondering why it had been so hard for two people who'd shared a love of cooking to connect. Over the years there had been so many opportunities lost or deliberately avoided, when we had so much in common. Even after all this time, I was surprised to find it still hurt.
The next morning when I open my eyes, Chloe has my cheeks sandwiched in between her chubby palms and is peering earnestly into my face. She grins at me, a full-fledged smile followed by a little giggle. Her breath is warm, sweet, and smells of banana. “She's already had her breakfast,” my father says, a peevish note seeping into his voice. “Fiona fed her.”
I know I've been a wretch, barely being civil to Fiona, and my father has every right to be annoyed.
“Don't wait dinner for me,” my dad says, leaning over me to kiss Chloe good-bye. “Brian Greene is lecturing tonight. Fiona and I have tickets.” Clearly, my father has assumed that I will be making dinner tonight, an only slightly less outlandish assumption than that Fiona will enjoy a lecture about the origin of the cosmos.
“Okay,” I tell him, pushing myself up on one arm and encircling Chloe with the other, pulling her in close to me and waiting to see if my father will kiss me, too. He does, a perfunctory peck on the top of my head. I know I'm behaving like a petulant child, holding unreasonable and wholly unsupported opinions about the woman my father is dating, a woman who has been nothing but kind to me. And to my daughter. Which, of course, is part of the problem.
Throughout the morning I catch Chloe watching me, sneaking little sidelong glances and venturing closer to me whenever she senses she's lost my attention. It's amazing, the uncanny ability of babies to gauge the moods of adults, to monitor our every move, almost without seeming to. I suppose it's evidence of their capacity for adaptation, for survival, this vested interest in keeping close tabs on our mental states, taking stock of us, making sure we don't forget them—or, just as bad—forget ourselves. It might be my imagination, but Chloe plays with her toys listlessly, as if, having spent the morning watching my dull expression, she too has decided that there's nothing worth getting too excited about.
I've gotten as far as rereading my mother's recipes, desultorily thumbing through the pages of handwritten notes, and morosely reflecting on how much time the French have wasted over the centuries by uniformly dicing their vegetables and carefully fanning slices of potato and apple into complicated tarts. I've been hoping to summon up a little enthusiasm for a trip to the grocery store, but when I catch sight of myself in the bathroom mirror, I'm so shocked by my appearance that it dashes any hopes of venturing outside, at least until cover of darkness.
I draw a bath for myself and Chloe, gather up her rubber duckies and tub toys, and add several capfuls of bubble bath to the tub. Chloe giggles as I lower us both into the warm water and offer her a palm full of bubbles in the shape of a frosted cupcake. I put her on my lap facing me, and she delights in playing with the bubbles, dotting my hair with little fistfuls of them. I wet her hair and twist what little there is into an upward spiral and put the hand mirror in front of her so she can see. Then I do mine, fashioning myself several long, soapy dreadlocks.
I've left the door to the bathroom wide open, and suddenly the baby monitor jumps to life, picking up the static of a slammed door and the rumble of steps in the back hall. It must be my father, coming home at lunchtime to check on us. Sure enough, I hear his heavy step on the stairs, whistling a bluesy tune I don't know.
“Dad?” I call. “I'm in the tub with Chloe.” No answer. I pull Chloe onto my lap and sink lower in the tub, hoping to avoid shocking my father. “Dad?”
But the man who rounds the corner isn't my father.
My scream startles him, and immediately Chloe begins to cry. I reach for the hand mirror, which I hurl at him. He barely manages to sidestep it as it crashes against the doorframe, scattering shards of glass and plastic all over the bathroom floor.
He yanks the earplugs from his ears. “Jeez! Oh, my God, I'm so sorry. I didn't think anyone was home,” he says, covering his eyes and backing out the door.
“Who are you? How did you get in?” I scream.
I put an arm protectively around Chloe, who is still screaming, and sink lower into the tub, noticing with renewed horror that the bubbles seem to have totally dissipated.
“I'm sorry! I didn't mean to scare you. I'm Ben, Ben Stemple. Fi's nephew. See? I have a key,” he says, still standing behind the door, but holding his key ring at arm's length so I can see it from the tub.
“Who?”
“Fiona? I'm her nephew—I'm a plumber. She called me about the leak under your sink.”
“What leak?”
“You must be Mira, right? And that must be Chloe. Fiona's always talking about her. She's a cutie.”
“Do you mind?” I ask, incredulous that this man who has just barged into my bathroom unannounced is now making clear that he got a good look at us in the tub. I yell at him, “The door. Do you mind shutting the door?”
“Wait a minute,” he says. “There's glass all over the floor. If you get out of the tub, you'll step on it. I'll get a broom, okay?”
I crouch in the tub, Chloe still whimpering in my arms, and grab a towel, which I wrap around the two of us. A minute later, Ben is back with a broom. “I swear I'm not looking. I'll just clean up the floor, okay?” he says, as he proceeds to sweep the glass into the dustpan while Chloe and I huddle together in the too small towel.
While he sweeps, I study him, wondering if he really is Fiona's nephew or if he's going to ax murder the two of us as soon as he's finished sweeping our floor. He appears to be in his thirties, with sandy hair and a scraggly beard. He's wearing greasy coveralls, a heavy tool belt slung low around his hips, and an iPod on an armband, from which I can hear Warren Zevon playing. He's also got a cut across his cheek, where a piece of flying glass must have caught him.
“You're bleeding,” I tell him. Ben looks at me, then remembering the skimpy bath towel I'm wearing, looks quickly away. “There, on your cheek,” I say, pointing.
He reaches up to touch his face and then examines the blood on his fingertips. “You got me,” he says, with a trace of a smile. “I'll just wait downstairs until you're ready for me to fix the leak, okay?” he says. He waits a second for me to answer, but when I don't, he leaves, shutting the bathroom door behind him.
As I pull Chloe and myself out of the tub, I catch sight of our reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. Both my hair and Chloe's are still encrusted in bubbles, twisted into stiff strands sticking out like porcupine's thorns from our heads. I stand there staring at our ridiculous reflection, dripping tiny bubbles onto the freshly swept floor.
 
“You shouldn't let leaks go, even tiny ones like this one,” Ben says a while later, tightening something with his wrench. “Didn't you notice the puddle of water under the sink cabinet?”

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