My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (33 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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Her sheltered childhood, gladdened by visits to the tomato frogs at the Steinhart Aquarium. Wearing a bouclé suit for an interview for a cooking post at the Sea Wolf restaurant; after not getting the job, she learned to wear clogs and bring her set of knives. Her vacations with her elderly parents consisted of trips down the highway to a cabin in Santa Cruz owned by her aunt and uncle, who dived for abalone and spent the afternoons in raucous arguments while pounding the meat to tenderize it. Pried loose, abalone is a muscle, little else. The aunt and uncle lined their fence with the shells, the opalescent pans like baptismal fonts hot and gleaming from the beating of the sun.
 
He relished the illusion—knowing it to be that—of control. Stroking Eve’s flat stomach, her breasts riding her inhalations, he said, “That seemed . . . mean, somehow. To ask her out so you could study her.” “I wanted to make sure she’s fine.” “Should we tell her?” He repeated this and Eve frowned, her fingertips with their neon polish kneading his thigh. A reply would involve guessing if she and Ray would go the distance. “Come here,” she said. Eve had taught him the term “bed hair”; she twisted her dark-blond waves into a rope she tossed onto her back. Her skin was flawless, her eyes sapphire glass. She was porous, always ready to be entered. He kissed her deeply and she encircled his neck. The slats of shadow in her Market Street loft (her parents had paid for that, too, in full) plastered ripples over them as a tide refigures sand.
 
Meredith showed a novice pastry chef how strudel dough should be stretched: Under the sheet of it, slowly move the backs of your hands. Sudden motions will tear it; a sonorous composure is required. “Pretend you’re playing a harp that’s tipped onto its side,” Meredith said, gently, her knuckles small pink bumps under the buttered veil. A kind of quiet patience, that was what she and Ray had, and while that was not wild abandon and desperate gripping of each other and never had been, it evoked St. John to the Corinthians, those tender lines about love that vaunts not itself, does not struggle.
Back when they were just friends, Meredith taught him ballroom dancing. She was expert at it, once. She’d crossed over into better-fondness while he was dating someone else. She spent so many hours one week helping him rehearse to impress his new love that blood filled her shoes. Her womb happened to be bleeding, her fingers were bandaged from her classes at the Culinary Academy. Shy to the point of muteness, she waited and grew herbs in planters that quaked with the passing streetcar. She and her friends practiced Italian from language tapes: They fed their fixation with Rome, that grandly crumbling city doused in liquid sun.
 
Meredith and Ray played their breath-holding game when their schedules allowed. Alone one day, she plunged in and felt as limpid as those see-through shrimp that are visible only because of the filament of food moving in their gut. The sea: God’s bathtub, God’s bath toys. He dawdles there, puzzling out, via fish, a physical model to fix His original design of human love. Each male anglerfish bites an available female and hangs on, fusing to her forever, feeding off her wherever she goes. Bonds that made flesh seamless: Meredith’s mother had died in her sleep a few years back, and then her father followed, ten days later almost to the same hour. While floating and mulling, a bolt hit Meredith out of the lucid blue:
Eve
.
My God, my husband is sleeping with my friend Eve. I sent him to her when he wanted more than hiding in a kitchen.
Eve with that intoxicating mix of being sweet and commanding. Meredith trembled so much that night in bed that she and Ray turned to each other at some point lying in the dark, not making love, but she found his arms natural and warm and the curve of his long body as comfortable as a hammock set on its side.
She clicked into his e-mail and found the erotic pleadings, the breathless anticipation. Never would she have imagined violating his privacy so furiously.
 
He quit wearing bathing trunks in the tank. What was he—ninety? Hey, where’s the shuffleboard? He and Meredith were never naked anymore; they had not made love for two years. God forbid they talk about it. Without his glasses, the room outside the tank seemed to dissolve and suggest that the Impressionist painters were onto something: There’s beauty in slicing through outlines, boundaries. Today he’d bought radishes, eagerly showed the camera’s eye how, with a few easy, deep cuts, anyone could convert them into flowers.
 
The heady danger of pretending that all would work out, “all” being deliberately vague and tragically inclusive. Eve directed him to smile and fill the airspace by chatting about himself while washing his hands to demonstrate proper hygiene after handling chicken breasts. At her loft, he showed her how to score and cube a mango off its skin.
Like this?
she giggled, getting it wrong on purpose. Like
this
, he said.
Oh
(her kissing him),
like this?
Or how about
like this
, like this, love this, their limbs a tangle, him behind her directing her hand with the knife. Much later, he would replay that chicken episode on YouTube, because he’d invited her to join him on camera, but she’d gestured,
Oh, no, I couldn’t!
But her hand had entered the filming of the scene, and he couldn’t resist hitting PAUSE again and again to look at it, that five-pointed starfish scuttling over the shoreline separating the unseen from the seen.
 
At a low ebb, out with the girls, Meredith reported slaving over a wedding cake only to have a drunken guest punch his fist into it. Aghast, she’d asked why he’d done it. “Because I can,” he’d barked, lurching away. Lindsay said, “Wait,
wait
, Merry! You spent days on it, and he ruined it in a second?” “I’d be crazed,” said Beth Ann. Susan demanded to know if Meredith had quizzed her pal Eve at the TV studio about the girls Ray was bedding in the broom closet. Insert here much gaiety. “I’d be in orbit,” said Teresa, and it was unclear if she meant over Ray or over the cake despoiler. Meredith sipped her club soda and drifted back to the days when she and Ray decided to gamble their friendship and become engaged, and how giddy they were at their daring, strolling along China Beach, the waves ribbed vertically with foam so that they looked like king-sized hair combs, churned loose from the table-tops of the vanities of whales.
 
It would, in the time still to come, strike him as unfathomably, mercilessly cruel to have watched Meredith sautéing onions for a nothing-fancy dinner—cod and boiled potatoes—while he yakked about Eve’s idea for a brand-new show:
Grand Escapes.
She’d research menus from around the globe, and instead of risking the chopping block with his show’s good but not great ratings about cooking on the cheap, he could help viewers travel far without leaving their homes—
patatas bravas
,
pain perdu
, tandoori. (“I’ll do the research, you’re the talent,” Eve had practically shouted. “It’ll be unbelievable.”) For the love of God, his regaling Meredith with this reminded him of how he sounded when he burdened her with the plot of a movie she’d missed. Look at her holding a mask of placidity. He knew her well. How to justify that hidden pleasure of carving the line of decency so close, to speak Eve’s name aloud over and over so casually, innocently, just to hear it, to wallow in the presumed safety and thrill of it right then?
They sat reading magazines in their living room. The cherrywood buffet had such ancient panes that they rattled at the softest step on the wooden floor, and so the glass chattered when Meredith decided to get a drink of sparkling water from the kitchen, and she stopped and asked if he’d like her to get one for him, too. He was overcome with such a storm of love and regret that he bit his lip, and his eyes pooled with tears that he told himself he had no right to spring. Her chest rose and fell where she stood, watching him. And then came a moment they would both remember for the rest of their lives, because who can hope for another instance of such a divine connection? “Jesus Christ,” he blurted, “and I don’t know why I’m saying this, Merry. But is Beethoven’s Ninth running through your head?” He tapped his left temple. “Your mind gets so loud sometimes I think I can hear it, too.” She was startled; her palms flew to her mouth. She walked to him and he laid his head on her chest so her arms could circle him lightly, and his glasses slipped off and they rocked like that for a short while before she whispered, “Yes. I was at the part when the chorus goes insane, chanting
joy joy joy
.”
 
Annette Kellerman was born with a defect in her legs that required braces until she found that moving through water cured her. Her performances in a tank at the New York Hippodrome gave birth to synchronized swimming. Her one-piece skintight bathing suit got her arrested on a Boston beach, and though she didn’t understand the fuss, the world soon adopted her invention. She stayed married to a man she adored. Rich and famous in her lifetime and recognized as an artist, Annette reigned in a floating kingdom. Her hunger for water expanded into religion. Meredith, in the tank, told herself: If you can hold your breath for one second, you can endure a second longer. Her personal best was now 1:25.2; Ray’s was 52.7.
You wait with bated breath. You decline to accept that
bated
also means the violent anger and fury of a roused hawk.
She cornered Eve at the TV studio. Ray was in a corner, wearing a paper collar while a woman powdered the shine off his high forehead. Meredith lost her voice with Eve, then found it. “Is it true? What are you planning with Ray?” Eve hardly moved. That smooth veneer of the easeful childhood that alternated with a sheen of addiction. Eve showed Meredith the clipboard she was gripping and said, “We’re planning to show how to grind your own spices, Merry. You can stay and watch.” Meredith could scarcely control her limbs as she stormed out. Ray strode after her, and she broke into a run.
 
The lure of breath-holding is how it violates the laws of the gods. Fasting, meditation, and prior hyperbreathing can prolong submersion; uncanny how many souls risk blackout, bloody lungs, damaged tissue, burst veins. Death. Legend has it that the ama divers of Japan brought up pearls, but the truth is more workaday; mostly they brought up abalones to sell the nacre interiors.
She screamed at some apprentices at Bridle who thought it would be hilarious to use beef stock for the vegetarian special. In the middle of the night, with Ray sleeping, she drank a bottle of wine, seized his ID card, and swiped her way into the Culinary Channel’s studio. He’d told her that the subject of the next day’s filming would be lamb stew, and it took more than an hour for her to march the vats of it, and the pans filled with the breakdown of the stages of preparation, out to her car. She took the food to St. Vincent’s shelter. Ha, look at tomorrow’s neat little script, turned into nothing.
So much energy squandered on being foolish. Ray almost got fired for having no idea how to improvise. Eve saved the day by defrosting some trout, taking center stage, and showing how to fillet and grill fish, skinning and boning it with a surgical skill that won her applause. She did not have to ponder much to figure out who had sabotaged
Everyday Triumphs
, and she phoned Bridle and told the Young Chef. Meredith’s work had been suffering; she burned orders, she was a sleepwalker. While chiding Meredith, the Young Chef smirked and said, “If you’re going to steal hundreds of dollars’ worth of lamb, at least bring it here.” At first she was desperate to be fired, anything but his jollity at her distress. But when he wondered out loud if the kitchen’s fumes had steam-cooked her brain, she absorbed in an instant the truth that genuine adulthood comes when one does not run off because of shame, when one stays and demands a home.
 
She roamed among the cosmetics counters at Macy’s, seeking potions, wrinkle creams, hydrating salves. Skeletal women in tight black dresses held atomizers and spritzed her with rose and lilac mists. Their tuberous fingers waved like polypi, motioning her closer to the pots of coral paste, the shallow pans of shadows.
 
A trickling sound issued from their walls; they suspected brocade patches of mold and split pipes too expensive to get to. Meredith wondered if a crack had sprung in the Plexiglas. In homage to Annette, she put items in the water, a battered teakettle, a dial telephone, a broken lock from her gym bag, the shipwrecked items of ordinary existence.
Midway through their ten-year marriage, Meredith had had a fling—the word evoked a stick thrown as far as possible—that Ray, so far as she knew, was ignorant of. Marcus was a principal dancer with the San Francisco Ballet, and she still winced to recall the final meeting, their twenty-seventh in the span of three months, the afternoon at the Fairmont segueing into a grindingly awful finish in the parking lot of Muir Woods, the breezes ripping tufts of furry bark off the red-woods and pelting Marcus’s Cadillac. He was announcing he’d found someone new. When she asked what she’d done, he said, “Nothing. It’s the end we expected.” They’d gone to concerts, and Lord, to go dancing with him. He’d clutched her once and moaned how much he needed her. “I could fall in love with you, you know.” He’d said that. She’d said it back.
Could.
At the Cable Car Museum, over the earassaulting whine of the gears as the frayed cables were getting soldered to a safer thickness, he’d asked if she could see herself ever living in London.
His native city.
She started breaking down in his car at Muir Woods, stopped mercifully short of pleading, but when she said she was shocked and ready to cry, he shouted, “Shocked?” A straight ballet dancer could have his pick of women—why, it was a fucking parade. Air refused to enter her lungs; she pushed against the passenger’s door but it was as if she were drowning in a car. The utter shame of her fantasies, the gentle but firm phrasing she’d rehearsed to tell Ray she was leaving him; her heady mirages of soaring in that stratosphere where Marcus traveled, in the ether of the talented and famous; her sharply outlined mental pictures of gadding about London; the girlish rush of seeing a star leaping onstage after he’d sidled up to her at a charity fund-raiser and invited her to spend the night. When Ray had asked her why she was so sad, she’d replied, “Because how can I feel so old without having grown up.”

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