The School of Essential Ingredients (17 page)

She hadn’t expected the wine bubbles to reach her nose the way they did, like small, giggling children. Her children, two toddler girls, blond hair darkened almost to brown with water, in a bathtub only half full but still overflowing as they splashed, drenching her shirt and her stomach that held the third baby, their big, round laughter bouncing off the tile, letting out the day and leaving room for dreams. Edward arriving home, following the noise to the bathroom door, where he stood, adult and bemused, as she pushed the wet hair from her face and looked up at him. The girls later, dancing out of their towels and running through the living room, ripe-peach bums and big, proud bellies, until, finally imprisoned in pajamas, they settled on the couch, warm and sweet as new milk, while she read the story of the country bunny with the magic shoes until they quieted into sleep and she sat and thought about having golden slippers that would let her fly around the world and do extraordinary things and be back by morning.

Lillian set a plate of salad on Isabelle’s table.

“This is new,” she commented. “I wonder what you’ll think.”

Isabelle dutifully took up her fork, skewering the leaves of lettuce, bright and darker green, frilly magenta, the red of dried cranberries, and the pale moons of almonds and pears. The taste was the first day of spring, with the sharp bite of the cranberries quickly following the firm crunch of nuts, the softness of pear flesh. Each taste here, defined, gone, mellowed only slightly by the touch of champagne vinegar in the dressing.

Edward. In the doorway, again, jacket off but tie still on, watching her make dinner in the kitchen. In her memories, it seemed Edward was always in a doorway, not quite there. As if she were the doorframe and the world were on either side. He wasn’t leaving that time, although he would, later. When she was honest with herself, she would know he had always been on his way, either to or from her. Even after he left, he was on his way back, but by then she was gone, too, so light without the weight of his gaze upon her that she dreamed sometimes she was flying.

ISABELLE looked DOWN—the empty salad plate was gone without her noticing, replaced by a dinner plate with a pool of white cannellini beans, atop of which sat a perfect piece of salmon, garnished with strips of crisp fried green leaves. Isabelle picked up one of them experimentally and brought it to her nose. Dusty green, the smell of life made out of sun and little water, the driest of perfumes. Sage.

What she had wanted in the beginning was the desert, dry, hot miles of air burned clean by the sun, the blank canvas of it after Edward and then the children were gone and she was left holding nothing and everything. She had gotten in the lumbering, wood-paneled station wagon and driven south, the fan whirring until she had turned off the highway and driven through cacti and hawks, opening the windows while the world flooded in, silver-green with the smell of sage.

At the town where she stopped to buy gas she saw a gallery, a spare, light-filled room with three white stone sculptures—smooth, white, sensual as dunes. While the gas station attendant filled the tank, she walked across the street and into the gallery. She looked at the sculptures, her eyes following the curves that made the stone seem more liquid than solid. Time slowed; there was no need to hurry—hers was the only car at the gas station. And as she studied each sculpture, she saw something else. It wasn’t obvious—a line like an arm outstretched, a slope of a lower back, the hollow at the base of a neck where the collarbones meet—not a part of a person, rather the essence, the small vulnerable place where the soul lived.

“Stone poems,” she said quietly to herself.

“Yes,” said a voice, low and warm, and a hand touched her back, resting along the curve inside her shoulder blade.

His name was Isaac; he was younger than she, by years, his home far out in the desert, a red dirt house with faded blue shutters that held out the sun in the middle of the day, when Isaac worked with his eyes closed, smoothing the contours he had chiseled during the morning. A fountain murmured in the courtyard, under a tree, and Isabelle spent her first week sitting under its great branches, reading the books of poetry Isaac lent to her from the collection that meandered through his house, covering every available surface. They met each evening for dinner, pork stews that had simmered all afternoon, beans and rice. They talked over their meal, their conversations ranging like birds over the land around them. Isabelle slept in the second bedroom and woke each morning to the muffled sound of metal sliding through stone in the studio.

“What are we?” Isabelle asked Isaac one night, curious. They sat in the courtyard, smoke from the fire ring rising up between them, the stars huge and uncountable.

“Why do you ask?” he responded. A real question.

She had no sense of urgency; she felt like the desert, unending, sitting there in the dark. Still, she had felt she should ask the question, make sure she wasn’t somehow disappointing.

“I think,” he said contemplatively into the dark, “we are each a chair and a ladder for the other.” And somehow that made sense.

It was Isaac who cut her hair. She was sitting in the courtyard with her head covered in pink curlers. He came out, wiping stone dust off the legs of his jeans, and saw her. His laugh bounced off the branches of the tree.

“What?” she said. “I’m not using a hair dryer. You don’t have one.”

He went back into the house and came back with a pair of scissors and a straight-backed chair. “Come here,” he said, patting the seat.

She sat in front of him and felt the curlers leave her head, one pin at a time, the damp, shoulder-length curls cooling in the breeze. When all the curlers lay in a pile around her, he took her hair and lifted it, cutting quickly and decisively, the weight dropping to the floor with the hair. When he was done, he ruffled her curls back in with his fingers.

“Now,” he said, “just sit there in the sun and let them dry.”

Her face, when she looked in the mirror later, was tan and younger than she remembered, the cheekbones stronger framed by the softness of the curls. She couldn’t imagine the woman with that face having a cocktail party, wearing a blue wool dress cinched in at the waist. Handing her husband’s secretary a glass of sherry, wondering what those slim fingers had touched.

Isabelle walked into the studio. “Thank you,” she said simply.

He looked up. “Now,” he said, “I think it’s time for you to pose for me.”

It made sense to stand naked in the studio room, her back to the open wall where the sun came in and ran down the length of her spine, the soft, rounded flesh below, the backs of her knees. She, who had never even stood naked alone in her own bathroom, welcomed the warmth, felt it center between her legs, at the base of her neck. She watched Isaac’s strong brown eyes as they moved slowly and with a deepening understanding over her body, the softened angles of her collarbones, the slope of her waist rounding into her hips, the after-baby softness of her stomach, watched his hands as they moved across the stone, over the hours carving a curve that spiraled endlessly out into the world. The sex, when it happened late in the afternoon, was something both wanted but neither needed, as long and slow as the sun moving outside the shutters of the cool, dark room.

When she left, a week later, he stood at the door, watching her put her things in the car. She looked up and saw him and they smiled, long and slow, at each other.

He walked up to her. “For you,” he said, and handed her a smooth oval of white marble that slipped into the hollow of her hand.

Salmon, thick, dense against her teeth, a beach of smooth white beans underneath. Isabelle at six years old, throwing thin, flat rocks sideways, watching them sink and disappear while her father’s floated across the surface, dipping then spinning up, like birds looking for food. The air cold and full of moisture on her face, even on a July morning, early, early, her mother and brothers still asleep, with just her and her father on the beach where she had found him, looking down the bay as if he could see what she couldn’t at the other end. She had wanted to hold his hand, but her father wasn’t like that, so she had picked up a rock and tried to throw it the way she had seen him do with her brothers.

“You’ll kill the fish that way,” he had said, as her rock plunged into the water like a lead ball, but his laugh wasn’t rough.

“Show me?” she had asked, in a burst of bravery. And they had stayed on the beach while he showed her how to position the rock in her hand and snap her wrist and she threw rock after rock, until one of hers finally skipped, dancing on the water like a child.

“Time for breakfast?” her father had said then, and they had turned and walked back up to the cabin that waited where the rock beach met the big green trees behind.

It was only later, after her father was dead and she had children herself, that Isabelle realized that parents most often know when their children are stalling to hold off the end of something they want to hold on to. When she realized that there are many kinds of love and not all of them are obvious, that some wait, like presents in the back of a closet, until you are able to open them.

It Was the CABIN Isabelle headed to after she left the desert. It wasn’t a straight line—she stopped in Los Angeles and sold the family home; she spent time with each of her children as she moved her way north. The girls didn’t understand. Grown now, one with a baby, the other in graduate school, they contemplated her from the cool remove of their new, adult selves.

“Mom, this is crazy. No one’s been to the cabin in years. It’s probably a wreck. And what are you going to do there all by yourself?”

They stood facing her like twin pillars of sensibility. Isabelle thought that if Isaac were to make a sculpture of them right now, it would hold the shape of an admonishing finger.

“Mom? What are you thinking?” Her daughters were looking at her expectantly.

“I’m thinking then you’ll have to come and visit me.” Knowing they would not.

Isabelle reached her son’s house later the next day, as dinner-time was approaching. Rory lived in a big house in Berkeley, full of college roommates, who cooked together and laughingly muscled a capacious living room chair into the dining room so she could have a place at the table. She sat, distinctly lower in height, as they placed generous servings on her plate, insisting on mothering her, because, they all teased, she looked like a girl herself, with that short hair and tan skin, like she had been out climbing trees and needed a good dinner to fatten her up. Isabelle sat back in her deep, cushioned chair and listened to their good-natured voices, feeling both distinctly at home and ready to move on to her own.

Isabelle told her son her plan after dinner, sitting in the same chair, now back in its proper place. Her son considered her for a long time, and then smiled.

“I’ve got summer break coming up,” he noted, “you might need help with that roof.”

THE CABIN WAS worse than even she had thought. Windows broken, the roof barely protecting the squirrels that had set up lodging inside. The first thing she did, after spending a good week cleaning, was to build a shed for tools, but also for the squirrels, who eagerly vacated their former abode for one a little more private. The lines of the shed were hardly straight; Isabelle spent a lot of time asking questions at the local hardware store and trying to remember the lessons she had overheard her father teaching her brothers. But in the end, it had four walls, a roof, and a door that shut, with a shove, and the squirrels didn’t seem like picky tenants in any case.

The cabin was nothing like the solid, square-cornered house she had shared with Edward and her children, but she discovered that was just fine, too. She cooked stews on the ancient white-enameled stove and baked brilliantly yellow cornbread in the oven. She found old glass, the kind that made the world outside appear as if it were underwater, and she fixed the broken windows. She went to the not-quite-antique stores that peppered the side of the road leading to the national park nearby, and found an old bed quilt, blue and white, with stitches made by a hand she didn’t know but trusted all the same, and laid it across the black metal bedstead. She discovered she liked the heft of an axe in her hand, the satisfying thud as it sunk into the log in front of her, the glistening white of the exposed wood as she stacked it on the pile.

On the night she got the phone line installed she called Rory down in California. She told him of her progress, made plans for his visit the next month.

“I think the roof will hold out until then.” She laughed.

“Where did you learn to do these things?” Rory sounded amused. “I don’t remember you fixing any windows at our house.”

“You also don’t remember that I didn’t know how to cook when I married your father, or drive a car, or get a colicky baby to sleep. People learn, Rory. I’d hate to think there is an age when we have to stop.”

On evenings when the air was warm, Isabelle would put on one of her father’s old jazz records, open the door to the cabin, and walk down to the rocky beach. As the sun slid behind the top of the mountains, the sad, sensual sound of a trumpet, the low, deep voice of a woman in love, flowed out of the cabin like light from windows, and she would sit on a drift log, her toes playing among the stones, while the seals came up to the surface of the water and listened, their eyes dark and intelligent above the water line.