Cooking as Fast as I Can (6 page)

I don't remember who went after whom, but suddenly, just like that, we started kissing. In a minute, we were a tangle of arms, hair, mouth, and tongue. We started grinding to the music. Her taste was Crest toothpaste, her smell Coppertone. Her hair was heavy in my hands.

I felt like a human sparkler, every inch of me bright and crackling. My ears rang, the room spun. I thought kissing Jordan just might kill me.
This
was what it was supposed to be like. This was what all the love songs were about.

The rest of the summer we were inseparable. To the world it looked as if we'd just
struck up one of those intense friendships teenage girls are famous for. No one questioned that I wanted to be with her every spare moment. I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep. Every song on the radio described our desperate love.

Johnny hadn't been around much anyhow. He'd graduated from Wingfield the year before and started working for Lowe's Home Improvement. I broke up with him, offering the usual lame it's-me-not-you, I-think-we-should-see-other-people nonsense, but it was to be with Jordan.

Jordan and I cruised up and down McDowell Boulevard in my Fiat with the top down, radio blaring, hair snarling in the wind. We'd stop at Pizza Hut to fix ourselves in the mirror, hang out in the air-conditioning, and nurse Diet Dr Peppers. We'd go on what I thought of as proper dates, mostly to the movies, but of course there was no hand holding in public, even in the dark.

My brother Mike, who'd served his time at the penal farm, was living in a trailer on the outskirts of town. I told him Jordan and I were double dating and needed a place to make out with our guys. A lie, of course.

When we drove up to the empty trailer I was sweating every place a person can sweat. It was easy to blame the nonstop sauna that is a Mississippi summer, but the truth was that I was nervous. Jordan chattered away, hiding her nerves with bright banter. I'd never made love to a woman and neither had she. Now, the thing we had been waiting for seemed all but impossible to accomplish. As I imagined going down on her, I kept thinking about a conversation between Mike and his friends, about how bad their hands smelled after they'd finger-fucked their girlfriends. I could not get that thought out of my mind. What if this thing I'd been waiting for seemingly
forever was funky and gross? What if, when I got down there, I actually gagged?

My hands shook a little as I threaded Mike's key into the lock. He had thoughtfully left some windows open, but there was no air-conditioning and the metal siding creaked in the heat. The trailer was like a very large tin can roasting in the sun. I looked at Jordan and she took a deep breath and reached over for my hand. It was clear that this would be our only shot in the foreseeable future. A little heat was nothing.

We fumbled around, me trying to unhook her bra, her grabbing my ass. Somehow we got our clothes off. Jordan's taste was the opposite of funky and gross. She was a little salty and musky. It reminded me of oysters. I'd tried my first one when I was ten years old, at Felix's Restaurant and Oyster Bar in New Orleans. I'd resisted at first, then was surprised with joy at its slick, briny goodness.

I just about gave myself heatstroke trying to satisfy Jordan, but eventually we both came. Finally I knew what it was to make love.

Jordan and I lasted all summer, and two months into the school year. In hindsight our association had summer romance written all over it, but I was as stubborn then as I am now, and was determined to make it last as long as I could. I leveraged my power as her chauffeur, picking her up in the mornings and delivering her to her front door at the end of the day. If cheerleading practice went longer than drill team practice, I waited.

Then one day I heard some gossip I pretended to ignore: Jordan had a crush on a guy whose name I can't recall, who everyone agreed was superhot. To make matters more awkward, my brother Chris, who was also a cheerleader, told me one night after we did the dishes that he was thinking about asking Jordan out.

“She's not really your type,” I
said, stooping to put the Tupperware in a low cupboard, the better to hide my expression. “She doesn't treat guys very well. I don't think she'd be good for you.” I was a little proud of myself for telling him the truth without revealing anything.

The rumors about Jordan and the hot guy persisted, and one afternoon after school I confronted her. It was deep into fall. I remember the hazy bronze sky, the smoke smell from people burning their leaves.

“We're just friends,” she said.

A lie, of course. In my heart I knew immediately.

I went home, threw myself onto my bed, and sobbed. I cried daily for what seemed like weeks on end. Chris was busy with his own life, and just assumed, I think, that I was one more inexplicable girl. Grandmom Alma thought a boy might be to blame. My dad was perplexed, but he was Greek, and understood in his DNA that even though he was soft-spoken, passionate outbursts were nothing to get too excited over. My friends at school were mystified, concerned, and finally just sort of thought I'd lost my mind.

In the South, people say “bless her heart” for a number of reasons, none of which has anything to do with praying that God bestows his grace upon your cardiovascular system. Bless her heart is the preamble when you're about to say something disapproving about someone, and also when someone's behavior is so peculiar that some form of undiagnosed mental illness is the only explanation. I have no doubt that a lot of bless your hearts were said behind my back the autumn of my senior year.

I threw myself back into my extracurriculars, and also tried out for Gayfer Girls. Gayfers was a department store across the South (it eventually was bought out by Dillard's), and
Gayfer Girls were the teen advisory board whose job it was to give advice to customers on the latest fashions, produce fashion shows, and serve as Gayfer ambassadors in various charity events around Mississippi. Because it is impossible to be a member of something in the Deep South without there being a special outfit involved, Gayfer Girls were issued a red blazer and hat, and a red, orange, gray, and cream–patterned scarf. I didn't appreciate the rich aptness of the name
Gay
fer Girl at the time, which was just as well.

Like everyone else, Johnny had assumed Jordan was just my new best friend. What I'd always liked about him I liked even more now: he could tell something was different about me, but he didn't pressure me to explain myself. I was grateful to him, but also miserable.

He was now a manager at Lowe's, traveling around the South training staff how to be managers. After Jordan broke up with me, Johnny and I got back together. He suggested we meet at El Chico, a Mexican chain restaurant popular in the South that we both liked. When I arrived he was holding a sign and had a bouquet of balloons, as if I'd come home from a long trip abroad. Over dessert he gave me a promise ring, which I accepted without hesitation.

My relationship with Jordan had been so painful. She was my first love. I saw how trying to love a woman would be too hard for me, too fraught. With men I could play the role, well aware that I wasn't being touched at my deepest level. With Johnny I could be the girlfriend and look happy. He was a sweet guy who would take care of me. I thought,
Well, this is it
. I was prepared to go quietly into that good night and accept my fate. I was ready to marry him, this sweet, honest guy who didn't deserve any of this.

five

N
o matter how terrible I felt—and I assure you, these were difficult times—when I walked into the kitchen and started opening the cupboards, everything inside me settled. I learned that if I put my head down and paid attention only to the food, peace would follow. When I had a free evening I liked to cook for my godparents, Taki and Maria. Taki had long since sold the Continental, but he knew his recipe for herb, lemon, and garlic chicken by heart, and delighted in tossing on an apron and giving me a few pointers.

Taki had learned his trade in Lyon, France, during World War II. Lyon, not Paris, was the true birthplace of French cuisine. So groundbreaking was Lyon, that in the sixteenth century the food of Lyonnais chefs was thought to rival that of their Florentine counterparts, and in the nineteenth century the female chefs of Lyon started opening their own restaurants (unheard of). Madame Brazier, a Lyon native, was the first woman to win three Michelin stars twice, and went on to train Lyon's most famous chef, and one of the most revered chefs on earth, Paul Bocuse.

Taki made his way across Europe from his native Greece and put himself through university working in restaurants, starting out washing dishes, then moving up to prep work. Lyon's white-tablecloth restaurants were not exempt from
the postwar food shortages. Often he would come to work at dawn, only to find they had run out of salt or flour, and the chef would send him out to scrounge some up, using his own money. Even though he spent long hours in the kitchen, he often went hungry. Some days his meals consisted of a piece of bread and a small wedge of cheese.

Taki taught me how to cure salmon and how to make the best lyonnaise dressing, with chopped shallots, Dijon mustard, red wine vinegar, and olive oil. Together we made beautifully roasted chicken, golden brown and succulent, the way they did in the bistros in Paris I had read about. He patiently demonstrated how to season, sauté, and flambé. Sometimes my dad would get into the act and bust out his sensational shrimp pilaf or stuffed bell peppers. Or we'd all work elbow-to-elbow, happily chopping and slicing to prepare a Greek country salad and stuffed grape leaves.

As I was cooking with Taki and my dad, my mom was away at the University of Alabama. She was a teaching assistant and also a research fellow, which meant she was expected to devote herself to her studies and forgo a regular paycheck while she was earning her degree. We couldn't afford such a luxury, so every other weekend when she drove back home from Birmingham, she picked up a few twelve-hour shifts at the rehab hospital. This remained her schedule for my entire high school career, and after the first bloom of having my dad and grandmom to myself, I found myself resenting her absence, which bled into resenting her in general for the sexual abuse I'd suffered at the hands of AH and how its aftermath was handled.

After the truth came to light on that humid summer afternoon not far from Texarkana, when I was perhaps ten or eleven, it was shoved into darkness again. Many of us who have been abused know this: even after the abuse ends, you
remain stuck in that time, that place, with all that shame. Your loved ones, relieved that the abuse has been exposed, hope and assume that your psychic wound will heal, like any other injury. The passage of time, combined with my mom's habit of always focusing on the positive and her determination to keep the peace at all costs, turned my abuse, which everyone had known about, talked about, and presumably accepted, back into a dark secret. My mom was a psychiatric nurse pursuing her PhD, and she never asked me whether I was still troubled by my experience. The irony was not lost on me.

By the time my mom finished her doctoral program, everyone was fed up with her absence. What had originally seemed like a good solution to the family's financial problems had begun to annoy my dad. His mother-in-law had effectively replaced his beloved life partner—which is not to say my dad didn't love and appreciate Alma, it just wasn't what he signed up for.

If there was an issue, my dad and Alma had to figure it out, or he had to wait until my mom was free to talk on the phone. It was a good decade before cell phones and computers were commonplace, and in any case my mom was in class much of the time. He dealt with teenagers all day long, then he had to come home and deal with us. No wonder he was losing his patience.

Sometimes when my mom was home I would hear them “having a discussion” in the next room, and it would evolve quickly into a full-blown argument. I never could hear enough to understand what exactly they were fighting about, but now that I have a spouse who stays home with the children while I spend a lot of time on the road, I understand what they must have been going through: they missed each other, and they were disconnected, and they were both depleted.