Emma's Table (7 page)

Emma wanted to find a different way—she
needed
to, really—but she hadn't the vaguest idea where to look.

She walked to her fancy Miele oven—a prototype model that wasn't even in production yet, its slippery blue enamel like a fresh coat of paint. She pushed a small silver button that illuminated the inside and peered in at her pork loin, roasting plump on a silvery wire rack, an enamel pan positioned beneath it to catch the fatty drippings.

Emma felt prickly heat at the nape of her neck.

“Old habits,” she grumbled, turning quickly from the oven.

She massaged the back of her neck and felt the tingling dissipate like a pat of butter in a warm sauté pan—all wavy edges at first, then spreading out wide.

I'm just being ridiculous now, she thought, knitting her lips together and turning back to her Sunday roast. These oven lights had been around forever, for twenty-five years at least, and turning them on didn't disturb the meat at all. Still, Emma had been down this road often enough to know that rational thinking didn't scratch the surface of the way she really felt.

“Leave the meat alone, Emmy.” That's what her mother always said, back in those far-flung days before oven lights, scolding her daughter for opening that heavy door once too often. “Let it cook already, will you?”

But somehow Emma could never leave a roasting pan alone, or a cake pan either, for that matter. Something in her needed to open the oven door wide, to supervise her handiwork in the light of day—on a minute-by-minute basis sometimes.

It wasn't so complicated really: nothing she cooked ever came out the same way twice, no matter how scrupulous she was about repeating the recipe—every step exactly like the last time, that last time precisely like the time before. Her results were phenomenal, of course; anyone would be thrilled to give a dinner like Emma Sutton—except for Emma Sutton, it turned out. She wanted things more dependably perfect than they ever turned out to be: the roast cooked to medium rare after precisely eighteen minutes a pound, the potatoes browned to golden after just so many minutes more. But cooking wasn't like that, she'd found, so she was obliged to look and look and look.

Of course, oven lights should have changed all that—letting her look all she liked without troubling the meat at all.

Well, they didn't, she thought, a little harshly.

She turned away from her roasting pork and took stock of her exquisite kitchen—as if to verify she really was a million miles and thirty years from her mother's little Cape in North Adams, Massachusetts—that squeaky old oven door.

She wasn't satisfied at all.

“That
blue
,” she groaned, the failure vibrating deep within her. Nothing she ever made, or built—no matter how wonderful to the rest of the world—ever seemed to satisfy her. She could never seem to make things turn out right.

Emma knew that oven lights weren't the problem.

Still it's all worked out, she thought—or mostly it had. She turned back to the oven again. Emma considered her husband, Bobby—her ex-husband, she reminded herself, for nearly fifteen years at this point. They'd married young, when she was just finishing at Smith College and he was a brand-new lawyer in town. They'd grown up together, really. They were married for twenty years, and no matter how troubled their marriage was—and it was troubled, of course, Emma knew that—she would no more have thought of divorcing him than she would have thought of divorcing her arms and legs, or breaking up her collection of stainless roasting pans—sized small, medium, and large.

They
went
together, and at a certain point, Emma just assumed that her marriage was forever.

But forever comes and goes, she knew now.

She'd been stunned when he walked out on her—all those years before—his clichéd little valise in hand. It hadn't even occurred to her that all their bickering could come to
such drastic ends. And how furious she was: she could have pulled every hair straight out of her head, like handfuls of weeds from a messy garden, her lustrous brown hanks in two clenched fists.

Such a long time ago, she thought, trying to settle herself down.

They'd been divorced by now for nearly as long as they'd been married—which made Bobby's recent reappearance even more surprising.

Emma looked back into the oven one more time, bending forward slightly at the waist, her knees straight inside soft flannel trousers. She brought her face down close to the oven door, her nose pressed up against the insulated glass. She felt the oven's heat against her smooth cheeks. She studied the pork loin that was shimmering in the oven's wavy heat—just two frosted lights, mounted onto the back wall, illuminating the scene. She scarcely saw the roast at first. It was all decor that caught her eye: the coarse peppercorns scattered around the meat, glinting like sequins on a black evening dress, the satiny shards of garlic that peeked out from all the tiny slits she'd cut into the roast. She looked practically starstruck in the reflection of the glass, like a teenage girl with a movie magazine in her lap.

“So beautiful,” she marveled—only to second-guess herself a moment later: Or does it look a little dry?

Emma pulled the oven door open and slid the roasting pan forward on its silvery wire rack. She looked and looked, for such a long, long time that she seemed to lose her place entirely—that meat may as well have been an ancient artifact under museum glass, or a bumpy rock from the surface of the moon.

Who knows? she admitted, finally. What wouldn't look dry roasting in four hundred degrees of heat?

So she basted the pork with a long-handled spoon, and saw, once it was moistened like that, that it was browning right on schedule, its skin just beginning to bubble up and crisp. Thank God, she thought, so gratefully—the timing of her roast some kind of heavenly mystery.

 

When they first sent Emma up to Rochester, New York, to the federal prison there, she was stunned when Bobby turned up—that very first week. “Just to visit,” he told her. She hadn't seen him in years. And she was suspicious, of course—assumed that he'd only come to gloat.

Emma was powerfully ashamed of herself.

It was an awkward visit—not half an hour long, filled more with pauses than with talk. But he turned up again the very next week, and the week after that too; and little by little, they found a kind of easiness again—the rancor of their terrible split seemed nearly clownish, fighting for so long over quite so little.

It didn't take many more weeks of visiting for Emma to see that Bobby didn't want her brought low.

God knows what he
did
want, she thought—but it wasn't that.

There weren't many other visitors either, she had to admit. But every week brought another visit from Bobby, all through her prison stretch and the home confinement too; and on his very last visit, on the very last day, Bobby asked her to marry him again.

Such a fool, she thought—shaking her head at the memory of it, but not quite keeping a smile from her lips either.
She took the proposal itself as a vindication of sorts: an admission that he'd been wrong to leave her all those years before. Emma felt relieved at her exoneration—on that count at least. She could use the opportunity to rewrite history, and she had to admit, she loved her husband still.

She suggested that he move back in with her instead—which he did, nearly six months before, right into the new apartment on Park and Seventy-first.

Emma gazed down into the roasting pan.

It was then she noticed the vegetables that were scattered around the meat—the carrots and potatoes and leeks—all hapless and thoroughly uncooked. She sighed through slightly parted lips, tamping down the fire of culinary pride. Her vegetables were greasy with olive oil and littered with spices—like sticky skin at a public beach. Not done at all, she saw, excavating deep into the roasting pan with her long-handled spoon, praying for brown edges on the underside: no such luck.

She checked the temperature knob and then her wristwatch: same cooking time, same heat—but definitely not the same. She didn't need her mother to tell her that she wasn't helping matters, keeping the oven door open like that, staring down into the open roaster while the oven's precious heat tumbled all around the room. But she couldn't bear to close the oven door either. Not yet, she thought—not until she'd worked out some kind of salvage plan for her meal.

She stood stock-still for a moment.

“Damn that Melora,” she spat.

She felt her body sizzling with heat, as if she were roasting too—hissing like a snake on desert sand. Emma had made her diagnosis. There were too many vegetables. She'd nearly doubled the number she put in the roaster, trying to accom
modate Benjamin's girlfriend and her ridiculous vegan diet.

That's got to be it, she thought, gazing down at her failure-in-progress, simmering in the juices of her own annoyance.

Emma pushed the roaster back into the oven. She felt like slamming the door behind it. I suppose I can take the pork out first, she thought—exhaling long—and let the vegetables cook a little longer.

She felt her neck relaxing.

That might work, she thought.

She shook her head at Melora's foolishness, at the strange piety of refusing her lovely pork roast. “Damn hippie,” she grumbled, picturing the girl in the long gypsy skirt she'd been wearing when they met on the street—but Emma didn't care about Melora. She barely knew her. She was only savoring the taste of her anger—like a tasty dripping from her succulent roast, falling safely onto the enameled pan beneath.

 

GRACIE BREEZED INTO HER BEDROOM LIKE A DIMPLY
child actress, all sweet and fake, excited at the prospect of “dressing up” later. She swung the door closed behind her, jaunty head lifted high—but the little girl's shirt was inside out, and her gait all stop-and-start, every step another jerky hitch, as if she were losing her nerve midway through. And when the door slammed louder than she'd ever intended, the dam broke wide: her eyes hopping, panicked, from place to place, and her mouth twitching a little, on the verge of tears.

She'd been having such a nice time too.

She'd tiptoed into her mother's room, as careful as an Indian scout, pressing her ear against the bedroom wall. Mommy's sleeping still, she decided—as good a guess as any.
She'd left her mother napping on the living room sofa, not five minutes before.

Gracie made a beeline for her mother's chest of drawers.

Her Valentine project had inspired her. She was looking for finery—a silky scarf or an old piece of lace—something more to cut up and paste to her handmade cards.

To make them extra nice, she thought.

She found a couple of embroidered hankies that she thought would do the trick. From there, it was just a skip and a jump to her mother's closet. She headed for the frilliest dresses, the ones her mother never wore—all frothy skirts and silky fabrics. She pulled them on, right over her head, in front of the mirror on the closet door, twirling and posing and making slinky faces.

Nothing fit, not one single thing, but Gracie didn't care. She just hitched up the skirts with a satiny blue sash and gave them a flick with her chubby wrists.

So pretty, she thought—like a ballroom dancer—that extra little flourish, just for effect.

If she had to do it over again, she might not have tried the pink swimsuit. It was at once too big and ferociously small, with its strappy straps hanging down, and leg holes drooping to the middle of her thighs, yet dangerously tight over her big, round belly. She looked like a sausage link in pretty pink casing.

Gracie studied herself in the mirror—hard.

The suit looked on the verge of ripping.

Just needs a belt, she decided, nodding at her reflection in the full-length mirror. She tied the blue sash around her middle, concealing as much of her tummy as she could. She only wanted some high heels then, fishing through an old box
on the closet floor, where her mother had packed the really high ones away. Gracie slipped a pair of white shoes on her feet—like a Miss America with a mistied sash.

She flipped through a photo album she found in the box, studying herself in the mirror as she did, dipping her left shoulder low—just a little kittenish—alternating looks between her reflection and the pictures in the album.

The photographs were arranged chronologically, as if the subject—a little girl—were growing up before her eyes: just a baby, first, and then a little older. She knew it wasn't her, studying the toddler on the next set of pages. She'd seen plenty of photos of herself. She was sturdier than this, and rounder too. There were pictures of the girl at Gracie's age, and then a little older still.

I think it's Mommy, she decided finally.

It didn't take much longer—or many more pages—for Gracie to think that she might die. She ripped off the swimsuit and kicked the heels back into their box, tossing the photo album in right after it.

Her mother had been beautiful, she saw, even as a girl. Slim and pretty, with large brown eyes.

I'm not getting a single Valentine, she thought, tossing the frilly hankies into the back of her mother's closet.

She felt betrayal burning up and down her naked body.

Her mother had always had long, straight hair.

She put her own clothes back on fast.

Gracie had thought her mother was like her when she was little. Fat, she meant, without going so far as actually thinking the word. And the girl had simply assumed that, one day, she'd grow into her mother, as her mother was now—all slim and lovely, stretched out long on the living room sofa.

She walked down the hall with a fluttering in her chest.

Gracie knew she wasn't like her mother at all.

“I get to dress up later,” she said out loud, walking into her bedroom—all sitcom happy. She was determined to put that photo album right out of her head, but the image of herself in a tight pink swimsuit, so fat and ugly, as she gazed at pictures of her mother as a pretty little girl, stretched wide as Lycra before her eyes.