Eating Heaven (6 page)

“Has Reid decided whether or not he’s going to go back to teaching?” I ask. Apparently, environmental documentaries don’t quite pay the rent.

She sighs. “No, but I’m not going to teach summer school this year, so I’ll get a break.”

“No way,” I kid her. “You? Get a break?”

“Well, actually, I probably won’t go back to teaching or work for a while,” Christine says, then stops. “I messed up, El. I’m pregnant.”

“What do you mean, messed up? That’s fantastic, Christine. You’ve always wanted a baby.”

“I know,” she says.

“Reid will get used to it. He’ll discover his paternal instinct as soon as he sees Reid Junior’s tiny little squished-up face.”

She’s quiet.

“God, I’m sorry. I mean, I just assumed you were having it or—”

“Oh, I’m having it,” she says. “I am definitely having it.”

“That’s wonderful. Congratulate me. I’m going to be an aunt.”

“I’m glad somebody’s happy about it.”

“Have you told Mom?”

“Not yet,” she says. “You’re the first to know besides Reid. I was waiting for the second trimester to tell people.”

“I cannot wait to hear how she’ll react to being a grandmother.”

“Don’t you think she’ll be happy?” She sounds so worried that I tell her of course she will, I’m just kidding about Mom’s extreme case of vanity.

After we’ve hung up, I stand and gather my coat and purse. Pins and needles wage war on my butt as I walk to Benny’s room.

At the doorway to Room 623, I stop. It’s dark except for a small light over an empty bed at the opposite side of the room. Benny is still asleep in the bed closest to the door, an IV tube taped to the crook of his arm. He breathes in two three, out two three, without faltering. I watch for a moment longer, then turn to go home.

Back in my apartment, I turn up the heat and put my wet boots, jeans, and coat in the bathtub to dry. My car is stuck two blocks away, even after a couple of sweatshirt-hooded guys tried to help me push it free. I pull on my robe and thick socks and wrap my hair in a towel, then settle in front of the TV with the clicker and a bowl of
boeuf bourguignon,
topping just a small portion of noodles, no butter. It tastes better than I’d hoped, and I know Stefan, my editor at
Cooking for Life,
will be pleased. As much as I complain about my job, I live to please Stefan.

When I first felt the pangs of lust for him, I cut his handsome, laughing photo from the letter from the editor page and signed it
XOXO, Stefan,
then slipped it inside a red-jeweled frame. It sits on the top shelf of the bookcase, which also includes a red pomegranate-scented candle, a tri-folded piece of cardboard covered with heart stickers and magazine cutouts of sexy photos and the words “love,” “boyfriend,” “sex,” and now “Stefan.”

Christine introduced me to the idea of creating an altar of love to attract the object of my desire, and I thought,
why not?
Who besides me will ever see it? No one comes to visit, so I won’t have to explain that,
yes, middle-age women can act like thirteen-year-olds, given enough time without a man. If nothing else, he makes great fantasy material when I take my pathetic sex life into my own hands.

Thinking about him now makes me wander over to the computer by the window to check my e-mail. Nothing but the usual forward from Christine, this one titled “More Happy Thoughts to Live By,” which I automatically delete out of habit. Even though I succumbed to the vitamins and the love altar, she’s become more Californian than I can deal with, living in a New Age haze that seems to be a cross between Zen Buddhism and Wayne Dyer platitudes.

I still haven’t heard from Anne, which isn’t unusual. I rarely do. Last year she made partner at her law firm in Boston and bought a new condo on the waterfront. She’s permanently too busy to do anything like make phone calls or visit Portland, except when someone dies, and I’m too broke to do anything like go back East.

I return to the TV, click through a few channels. I pick up the empty bowl and swirl my finger around the edge, lick it off. I’m starving.

“No, you’re not,” I say aloud, trying to believe it.

What I should be doing is working on ideas for my new
American Family
article: “Back to School: Packing Smart Lunches Your Little Einsteins Will Eat.” Magazine writers have to think six months ahead of everyone else. My whole life is like Christmas in July. Without the presents.

I pick up my notebook, start a list:

I really am hungry.

I try to ignore the insistent messages being sent to my brain by Pauncho, my stomach and lifelong companion. Suzanne Long called it “inner
hunger,” hunger that has nothing to do with food. “Ha!” I snort. Tell that to Pauncho.

Chocolate. I want chocolate. And now that I’ve let that thought enter my head, it won’t go away until Pauncho is satisfied.

In the bathroom I pull on my soggy coat and pants and carry my boots to the front door. Mini-Mart is just a few blocks away. Maybe the exercise will counteract the calories.

T
he day after what the media is now calling the Spring Snow Surprise, Portland is effectively shut down under seven inches of the stuff. It’s never snowed this much this late in March in recorded history, according to StormCenter 5 and every other local channel. You’d think the world had spun out of its orbit. It’s weather twenty-four hours a day, reporters standing in snowdrifts, wearing silly hats, throwing snowballs at the camera. Reporting every millimeter of accumulation from every remote spot in town.

I can’t drive to the hospital; my car is still stuck out on Everett, marooned like hundreds of other cars around town. Every time I call Benny’s room, I’m told he’s sleeping or otherwise unavailable. “But is he okay?” I ask the nurse on his floor, and she assures me he’s stable. The doctor will call when he knows anything further.

I am fidgety and sick to death of TV news. The snow stopped sometime in the middle of the night and the temperature is well above freezing now that it’s afternoon, so I decide to walk to Fred Meyer for groceries, only a half mile or so away and surely open, even with the weather. The
Cooking for Life
article is due tomorrow. I’ve talked my way out of the
Brie en croute,
but I wasted all my eggs this morning trying to make a decent low-fat crème caramel.

Out in the hallway, Mr. Nguyen says, “Act of God,” shaking his head when I ask how he and his family are holding up. It’s probably the most
snow they’ve ever seen; they only arrived in the United States last summer. His kids cower behind their red front door, looking at me in my parka like I’m a Martian.

“Snow is good,” I tell them. “It’s fun! Snowballs! Snow angels!” I mimic these things, but they run away when I swoop my arms up and down to make an angel. “I’m going to the store. Do you need anything?” I ask Mr. Nguyen.

He shrugs, looking worried. “Work,” he says. “I need bus to run.”

I knock on Mrs. Wittsler’s door. “It’s Eleanor, from upstairs,” I say loudly. She won’t open the door unless she knows it’s not a criminal. “I’m going to the grocery store. Do you need anything?”

The myriad security devices on her door
click
and
tock
open. She looks at me through smudged eyeglasses, pink scalp tender-looking behind wisps of white hair. “I could use more potato flakes,” she says, reaching into her housedress and extracting two rumpled dollar bills. “Store brand, like always.”

I have no idea how she can choke down that stuff, especially when real potatoes are so cheap. “Of course,” I say, taking the money, and she closes the door and clangs the locks back into place.

Outside, a few intrepid souls have shoveled their walks, but most haven’t. I’m glad for my knee-high rubber rain boots and the distraction of an adventure as I plow slowly up Everett through the slushy snow.

Past our building, tall Victorian homes sit quietly beneath the weight of all this white: gingerbread houses with fondant frosting. Some of the old homes are in disrepair, gray and sagging from years of weather and gravity, but others have been beautifully restored, ornate detail painted in plums, golds, trendy new shades of green. I like to imagine who lives in them: urban families, artsy and alternative types. Our Fred Meyer is known for its colorful clientele. Where else in Portland will you find drag queens doing their weekly shopping at three in the morning after a show, thumping cantaloupes and squeezing lemons alongside the shift workers and people like me who get cravings for frozen chocolate éclairs in the middle of the night?

The store is buzzing with shoppers from the neighborhood, all frenzied and harried, and too many of them toting manic kids with cabin fever. An
inch of slippery muck has been tracked across the industrial gray-spotted floor. One look toward the back and I can tell the shelves are stripped. I stand there shaking my head, and one of my favorite baggers, an older man with Down’s syndrome, tells me there’s no milk, no meat, no bread.

“Eggs?” I ask, and he shrugs, then takes his station at checkout stand number 3, where a huge order is piling up at the end of the conveyor.

I weave through the desperate crowd, consulting my list, making substitutions, picking up nonfat cream cheese, evaporated skim milk, egg substitute. Things no one else wants. I’ve never succumbed to fake eggs before, and I have no idea if they will set up like real eggs, but I don’t have much choice now.

Back outside, it’s warm in my parka, and my bags are unexpectedly heavy. I trudge steadily along for a while, occasionally trading the heavy bag of dairy products in one hand for the other equally heavy bag, which contains a large box of potato flakes and a half dozen Yukon gold potatoes for Mrs. Wittsler, a bag of Oreos for the Nguyens’ kids if I don’t eat them first, and a fold-up umbrella for Irina Ivanova.

My mother may not have been a great cook, but what she lacked in quality she made up for in quantity. We loved to help her unpack the grocery sacks each week, finding Little Debbie boxes beneath the dinner rolls, six-packs of Pepsi and Fanta ripping the brown paper bags under their steely weight. Our friends were envious of our well-stocked refrigerator, our junk food–laden pantry. We always had ice cream in the freezer and chocolate syrup and whipped cream in the fridge door. Oreos in the cookie jar. M&M’s in the candy dish. Count Chocula cereal one week, Cap’n Crunch the next.

Mom said a full refrigerator made a house a home, even though she cast disparaging looks my way whenever I’d try to enjoy the bounty. Dad said we should just be happy we had a home, for Christ’s sake. Why on God’s green earth did we need chocolate cereal? Cheerios were good enough for him—they were good enough for his brother Lewis’s children. They should be good enough for us.

I hated it when they fought, and my sisters and I never spoke during their arguments. We ate our canned peas if it was dinnertime, stuck our
noses in books if we were driving to the coast for a picnic. Turned up the television if we were lucky enough to be in the family room and they were in the kitchen, Dad running the long strip of receipt through his fingers, complaining about each item that was not one of the four basic food groups.

Then, when no one was looking, I’d sneak handfuls of candy into my pockets, or line the waistband of my pants with cookies to enjoy in the privacy of the bathroom. When it was all gone, I’d want more, licking my finger to dab the crumbs from my skin, searching for bits of M&M shell in the lint of my pockets.

That evening, with six ramekins of faux crème caramel in the oven, I dial Benny’s room at the hospital again. It’s black and frigid outside, moonless and no cloud cover to reflect the city lights. There’s no answer, not even a nurse. A sliver of fear zaps through me. I call again, in case I misdialed, but nothing.

The timer dings on the oven. I peek inside, jiggle the rack. The custard hasn’t set up, so I set the timer for another five minutes, dial Benny’s room. Nothing.

I wait a few minutes, then call Benny’s room one more time, let it ring seven, eight times. Finally, there’s a click, and a sleepy-sounding Benny.

“Mm . . . myello?”

“Geez, Ben. You had me scared half to death,” I say, sounding angrier than I mean to. It’s the first time I’ve talked to him since last night at his house, so I soften my tone. “I’m sorry, I’ve just been worried. Are you okay?”

“Bebe?”

My heart rips inside my chest. “No, Ben, it’s me, Ellie.”

“Yolie?”

Jesus. That’s what he used to call Aunt Yolanda.

“It’s Eleanor, Benny. El-uh-nor. What’s going on? Are you all right? Is there a nurse anywhere?”

The phone clicks dead, so I dial the nurses’ station on his floor. There’s no answer.

He’s been alone in there for nearly twenty-four hours.

I pull on my wet boots and coat, find my keys and purse. I’m halfway down the stairs when I remember the crème caramel and run back up to turn off the oven. There goes my article, and Stefan’s appreciation of me as his best freelancer right along with it.

I walk as quickly as I can to my car; it’s been buried in dirty slush and ice by a snowplow. “Oh, for God’s sake,” I mutter, digging my cell phone out of my purse to call a cab. At least the major streets are passable. The taxi takes forever to show up, during which time I realize I could have given them my address and been waiting in the comfort of my living room. Instead I pace and shiver on the corner and try not to imagine the worst.

After a painfully slow ride with a chatty Somalian driver, I rush through the hospital to Benny’s room, only to find him sleeping as peacefully as a child, curled on his side, hands splayed expressively in front of him as if he fell asleep while telling a story.

I settle into a chair near his bed and close my eyes.

I was not quite twelve in the late-summer days just before Benny married Yolanda. Mom regained her composure and decided to throw them a party. “They have no family here,” she said by way of explanation to Dad, who always looked grim when she announced party plans, especially if her plans included Benny. If only he would have said no to her, but he’d grimace and make some comment like, “So Freddy the Freeloader’s invited?” She always got her way, though, as she did this time. “We’re their family now,” she stated in a way that sounded like she had just arrived at this decision for all of us, and that was that.

It wasn’t true, of course. Yolanda had family by the carload in Northeast Portland, but we knew Mom was talking about Benny. He’d moved here years before from somewhere in the Midwest to be with his first wife, leaving behind a family he never talked about and never returned to after his wife died.

We weren’t invited to the wedding—it was just to be a simple ceremony at the courthouse downtown, with Yolanda’s unhappy Catholic parents as secular witnesses—and Mom didn’t trust that they’d throw
themselves a decent party afterward. We’d heard rumors of cake and coffee at two in the afternoon.

“What, no booze?” Dad said, getting on board with the idea. It must have hit him that Benny would soon no longer be single.

In the week or so between her decision to have the party and the Friday night of the event, Mom threw together the swankiest backyard affair we’d ever seen. Twenty people were coming, she said, and I couldn’t imagine what our backyard would look like with so many people in it. She’d called the guys at the auto shop where Benny worked, told them to bring their wives, invited the photography-class couples and a neighbor of Benny’s she knew he liked. She told Benny to have Yolanda invite her parents.

We helped Mom sew lace to the edges of white squares of cotton for tablecloths, arranged white roses in bud vases, set up the buffet tables and chairs she’d rented. “Why can’t they all just bring lawn chairs?” Dad asked, but Mom shut him down with one of her favorite lines: “That may be the way things are done out here, but where I come from we’ve got a little more class than that.”

She set out to prove it by buying a case of champagne along with the Blitz beer and RC Cola. She looked up recipes in her Betty Crocker Cookbook, and after studying for a while with a cigarette at the kitchen table, she looked up and announced, “Finger foods.”

My sisters and I helped make miniature quiches in muffin pans. Mom stirred grape jelly and tomato sauce into a Dutch oven full of meatballs, wrapped crescent roll dough around chunks of hot dog, and shoved a cookie sheet full of bacon-wrapped pineapple into the oven. She set out blocks of Swiss and Tillamook cheddar cheese surrounded by Ritz crackers, and chips and two large bowls of dip, one onion and one clam, Benny’s favorite.

Yolanda had called and offered to bring something, but Mom told her in a saccharine voice, “Oh, no, not at your own party. No, dear, you just leave it to us.” After she’d hung up the phone, she said, “The poor girl doesn’t realize not everyone likes such spicy food.” I noticed the lines forming around her mouth then, the way she held her lips tight sometimes, making her look more stern than pretty.

The guests all arrived promptly and began devouring food in lieu of making conversation with people they didn’t know. Mom fretted and replenished platters, wanting everything to look perfect for Benny and Yolanda’s arrival, which took another twenty minutes. I knew what Mom was thinking: Benny had never been late before.

When he finally slid the screen door across its tracks, all eyes turned to watch as Yolanda stepped out in front of him, laughing at something he’d just whispered into her ear, her orange peasant dress bright against her brown skin, her dark hair escaping its barrette. Benny looked different. His face was fuller, his clothes newer, but it was more that the sadness had left his smile.