Eating Heaven (4 page)

How can I tell her anything she’d understand? Has she ever eaten a pan of brownies in one sitting? A half dozen salad-bar baked potatoes? A baker’s dozen?

What is it about slippery-sweet ice cream, about half-melted chocolate chips or moist homemade birthday cake, juicy steak seared on the grill, creamy potato salad, watermelon freshly cut and dripping with juice? It’s too easy to say that if I close my eyes while eating any of these things, I can almost feel the summer sun warming my skin, smell charcoal smoke and freshly cut grass, hear swings creaking across the yard and my sisters’ singsong chatter, the adults’ steady murmur of conversation, matches striking matchbooks, ring tabs escaping beer cans and the effervescent sigh that follows. I can almost feel people around me, my mother and Uncle Benny smoking cigarettes in green webbed lawn chairs, my father poking at the coals on the grill, the curve of Aunt Yolanda’s waist, into which I am tucked, her warm arm embracing me, and the pleasant rhythm of her laughing.

It doesn’t take a shrink to figure it out and yet here I am, asking her to without telling her any of these things. If I talk about them, then even these memories will desert me.

O
n Thursday, it’s as dark as twilight instead of the soupy dove gray it should be by ten a.m. Outside my apartment window, drizzle gives way to rain. Large drops fall randomly at first, then in waves, pelting the bushy azaleas and parked cars, bending the spring-green grass, the daffodils. Portland’s springs are always wet, but this year it’s frightening how much moisture we’re getting. The earth is saturated, the rivers rising, and the sky perpetually low and heavy.

From my second-floor vantage point I can see Irina Ivanova across the street. She’s balancing baby Tatiana on her hip while she struggles to right a broken umbrella before dashing to her rusty Impala at the end of the block. I’ve seen her at Fred Meyer, picking over day-old bread, rummaging through the free dog bones in the meat section for a good soup bone. She probably can’t afford a luxury like a new umbrella, even if it is from Freddy’s.

I tried once to take her a pot of clam chowder I’d made for an article, but the embarrassed indignation in her eyes coupled with the language barrier made it impossible to explain that I always have extra food, and I always give it away. Next door in my building, the Nguyens both work and have three kids, so I take them a casserole or dessert whenever I can. Old Mrs. Wittsler on the ground floor loves anything made with potatoes, so I make her potato-sausage soup or potatoes au gratin or plain old mashed potatoes, and pretend I’m working on yet another potato recipe article.

Turning back to my stainless steel Viking range, I stir wine-and-garlic-marinated sirloin cubes, feeling ostentatious and lucky. The stove is my only indulgence in this hopelessly outdated apartment, but I never have to worry about being hungry or out of work, as I know Irina is. How do you work, anyway, with a small child to take care of and no husband in the picture? I sigh, absently poking the lean meat, which pops and sizzles like the bacon I can’t use.

Cooking for Life
shuns all things caloric and fatty, so this version of
boeuf bourguignon
will not include bacon or pancetta as it should, nor will I use even half as much olive oil as I’d like to. I will increase the wine, and it’ll be pretty good beef stew without the potatoes, essentially, which will delight Uncle Benny when I take him his casserole dish tonight.
It certainly won’t hurt me to eat gourmet lite for dinner,
I think, then shake my head to clear it. It’s amazing how one five-minute conversation with my mother can undo every affirmation I’ve ever taped to my bathroom mirror.

After giving the beef another poke or two, I scrub the cutting board in the dish-crowded sink, then chop and stir in carrots, celery, and onions. I mince fresh thyme and Italian parsley for flavor and color, pour in defatted beef stock, then leave it to simmer for a while, the individual aromas already commingling and filling the apartment.

I look to the window again, but condensation has glazed it over. On the notepad I keep by the stove I write:

I chew the pen a moment, then write:

Disgusted, I cross out the last three items and write,
Buy umbrella.

Sometimes when I’m trying to fall asleep at night, listening to my neighbors laugh, fight, watch TV, have sex, when I’m smelling their curry and garlic and Spam, their cigarette and marijuana smoke, I wonder,
Whose life is this?
It can’t be mine.

I should be married with kids in junior high by now, arranging flowers from the back garden of our old Portland foursquare with a remodeled kitchen, not living alone in a one-bedroom apartment that masquerades as a condo. I was supposed to be writing sumptuous cookbooks, throwing lavish dinner parties for intellectual friends, not churning out lighten-up-your-favorite-dish-until-it-tastes-like-cardboard recipes and eating family-size chocolate bars while watching
Cooking with Caprial
on OPB.

Our family has disintegrated. My sisters never came home after college. Mom sold our house in Lake Grove when she remarried last year. She and John moved to the bucolic wine country of the Dundee Hills, an hour southwest of the city, full of empty nesters in McMansions, telling themselves that this is living, all right. No kids, no neighbors, no messes to contend with—just the rolling vineyard hills, echoing rooms, and Mount Hood framed perfectly in the picture window.

Lying in the dark, more alone than I know how to cope with, I feel a shrinking sensation I remember from childhood fevers. I have to open my eyes and draw a deep breath to keep from disappearing, touch my skin to make sure I experience sensation.

Then I conjure a man in my bed, one who can comfort me with kind eyes and a body large enough to cover mine, and creep my hand into my flannel boxers to make sure I won’t forget pleasure.

Early in the afternoon, my eyes blur with fatigue from staring at the computer screen for three hours straight. I stand to stretch and look out the window, gasping to see the steady rain has turned to snow, covering the grass and bending the daffodils. It figures. We’ve made it all the way through winter without one flake, but now nature has decided that spring is just out of the question.

I sigh and gather my frizz of hair in two handfuls to tie a knot on top
of my head. Then I take a deep breath and pick up the phone to call my editor at
Cooking for Life
to explain there is no such thing as fat-free Brie. I dial, but nothing happens. “Hello?” I say.

“Beep, de-goddamn beep. I thought you’d never quit punching those buttons,” Benny says cheerfully.

“But I didn’t call you, I—”

“I called you.”

“Ah. That would explain it.” I settle back. “What are you doing?”

“Watching it snow. It’s something, isn’t it? I don’t believe it’s ever even sleeted here after the first week of March.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty strange. Maybe it’s the new Ice Age. Maybe they have that whole global warming thing backwards.”

“Say, Miss Roosevelt, do you know where I put my reading glasses? I’ve been looking all over for them.”

Like I’m in the same room instead of a good twenty-minute drive up I-5. “How would I know? Did you look on top of your head?”

He chuckles. I shake my head. It’s become another of our routines, these phone calls to discuss the minutiae of life. The weather. His neighbors. Local gossip. The weather. These days, my closest relationship is with him, and as much as he means to me, this thought does little to make me feel better about my life. The lack thereof.

“Heard from your mother?” He slips it into the conversation so neatly that I almost miss the shift in his voice. He hasn’t asked about her in months.

“Um, no, not in a while,” I lie. It would hurt him even more than me that she’s been sneaking into town. “She’s busy decorating their place. You know how she is—always up to something.”

I never say the new husband’s name to Benny. The vague “they” and “their” seem kinder somehow. “She’s into that whole French-country thing now, florals and chickens everywhere. God, remember when she made our house all yellow and green?”

“It was cheerful,” he says, defending her as he always does.

“Dad hated it.”

“Yeah, well . . .” Benny says. “May he rest in peace.”

Or not,
I don’t say. I’m not nearly as generous as Benny is.

“Sure you want to come over today?” he asks. “The roads could get pretty slick.”

“Of course I’m coming. It’s just a little snow.” He sounds lonely, and I resolve to spend more time with him, make Mom call him. It wouldn’t kill her.

When I first saw my father at the funeral home two years ago, I was amazed that the clichés about death were true. Without his energy, his body was no longer him. His face had gone flaccid, losing the tension between his eyes, along his jaw. His sandy gray hair had apparently been washed as he lay on his back, drying perpendicular to the floor. Days later, at the funeral, someone had styled it like a newscaster’s.

Coworkers found him at his desk at the Clackamas County offices on a Monday morning, slumped over his Day-Timer, coffee pooling under his elbow. The autopsy showed cardiac damage and scars from previous incidents that had gone unnoticed. We had a simple service on a gray but dry winter afternoon, and it puzzled me how genuinely saddened the people from his office seemed to be.

“He was such a good man,” said a bird-faced woman, a geologist like Dad. I fought the urge to say, “Really?” and nodded instead. To me he was the Invisible Man, nothing but a ghost in the basement, a dent on the couch, a disembodied memory when he’d take one of his long business trips. Mom told us he loved us, but I didn’t buy it. How could he love us if he never talked to us about anything other than grades and chores, and later, when we were adults, jobs and money?

The last thing I remembered him saying to me, a month before he died, was, “Are you making any money yet? Why you ever quit that cushy PR job is beyond me.” I wanted to say, “And why you ever had children is beyond me,” but even as an adult I could never bring myself to talk back to him.

The funeral was over in half an hour. It was more like a perfunctory church visit, like the ones we’d made each Christmas Eve and Easter, than mourning the passing of a human life. Mom was quiet most of the day, and Christine had blubbered like a baby at the service, but Anne and I remained steadfastly dry-eyed.

Mom had a reception after the service, putting out clam dip and tiny cheese-filled sausages, carrot and celery sticks, Ritz crackers and canned olives. Her former idea of gourmet. The only clue that she wasn’t truly enjoying the opportunity to entertain was the grip she kept on her glass of vodka and tonic, and the frequency with which she refilled it. My mother rarely drank more than half a beer.

Late in the day, as people began to filter out and Aunt Yolanda helped my sisters and me clean up, Mom headed for the basement. We looked at each other, shaking our heads, figuring she was going to sit in Dad’s den, commune with the spirit of the man who’d sat alone there so often, unencumbered by human interaction.

Moments later, Mom appeared at the top of the stairs, face bright, eyes shining. “It’s perfect,” she said. Even at sixty-four, she had the exuberance of a schoolgirl.

Not quite knowing how to respond, we all just stared at her. Benny, deep in a discussion with one of the neighbors, looked over at the sound of my mother’s voice, and then excused himself to walk to her side.

“Bebe?” he said, and we all waited.

“The den will make a perfect darkroom,” she said.

Benny tipped his head and frowned at her. “You sure you should be making those kinds of decisions right now? I mean, it’s only been—”

“Of course I’m sure.” She laughed, looking around the room. “My God. Richard would have wanted me to have a darkroom, wouldn’t he? And Benny,” she said, hooking a conspiratorial arm through his, “I’ll even let you use it. It will be like old times.”

The platter Yolanda was drying dropped to the floor, smashed against the tile, scattering pink and blue flowers across the room and bringing all conversation to a halt.

“Oh, my, and your good china, too,” Yolanda murmured, and my sisters and I kneeled down with her on the floor to gather the pieces.

At four o’clock, I’ve spooned beef over buttered noodles in a lidded casserole dish, pulled on my rubber boots and parka, and made it down the narrow hall and stairs without slipping on puddles of melting snow. When I push backward through the front door into the cold, I realize
this is no ordinary storm. Where not shoveled, the snow buries my feet, and the wind is whipping pellets of ice into my face. I try to shove my hair under my hood while juggling the casserole and my purse, then walk as quickly as I can to my car parked at the curb.

Plenty of traffic sloshes by out on Everett, so if I can make it the half-block there, I should have no problem with the cross-town drive south to Benny’s. Once on the main roads, I take it slow, ignore the maniacal pickups and SUVs whizzing by and sending up dirty spray on I-405, I-5, then Boones Ferry Road. The usual afternoon rush hour seems to have been canceled, though; what does everyone else know that I don’t? Did they tune to StormCenter 5 or KNUZ instead of burying themselves in drivel about low-carb croissants and
pommes frites
without the
frites
?