The School of Essential Ingredients (5 page)

Lillian lifted the lid and drew out one of the creatures. Its shell was the color of dried blood, with black pea eyes perched on the front edge. Its antennae shivered, reaching out for input, and its front pincers waved, ludicrously out of proportion to both its body and the situation, as it searched for air in an ocean of oxygen.

“Are we going to kill them?” asked the black-eyeliner girl.

“Yes, we are, Chloe. It is the first, most essential lesson.” Lillian’s expression was quiet, calm. “If you think about it,” she went on, “every time we prepare food we interrupt a life cycle. We pull up a carrot or kill a crab—or maybe just stop the mold that’s growing on a wedge of cheese. We make meals with those ingredients and in doing so we give life to something else. It’s a basic equation, and if we pretend it doesn’t exist, we’re likely to miss the other important lesson, which is to give respect to both sides of the equation. So we start here.

“Have any of you caught your own crabs?” Lillian asked the group. In the back, Carl raised his hand.

“Then you know,” Lillian nodded toward him. “There are rules about which crabs we can keep. Here in the Northwest, your crab needs to measure at least six inches across the back of the shell and we only keep the males—you can tell which are the males because they have a skinny triangle on their abdomen, while the females have a wider one.”

“Why just the males?” said the young man with the sandy hair.

“The females are the breeders,” Lillian answered. “You always need to take care of the breeders.” Her smile landed, just for a flicker of time, on Claire. Claire surreptitiously checked her collar, which was clean.

“Now, when I’m deciding which ingredients to put together, I like to think about the central element in the dish. What flavors would it want? So I want you to think about crabs. Close your eyes. What comes to mind?”

Claire obediently lowered her eyelids, feeling her lashes brush against her skin. She thought of the fine hairs on the sides of a crab’s body, the way they moved in the water. She thought of the sharp edges of claws moving their way across the wavy sand bed of the sea, of water so pervasive it was air as well as liquid.

“Salt,” she said aloud, surprising herself.

“Good, now keep going,” Lillian prompted. “What might we do to contrast or bring out the flavor?”

“Garlic,” added Carl, “maybe some red pepper flakes.”

“And butter,” said Chloe, “lots of butter.”

There was a general murmur of appreciation.

“Okay, then,” Lillian said, “let’s break you into groups and have you learn with your hands.”

Claire’s group stood at one of the big metal sinks. Four crabs skittered about, their antennae quivering as they encountered the hard surface.

The man with the sandy hair came to stand next to Claire at the sink. She looked up and saw that he was watching her, smiling. She stopped, startled, recognizing an expression of casual male appraisal suddenly made visible because it had long been absent. When was the last time that had happened, Claire wondered.

It was all so very strange, she thought, being here. An hour earlier she had been with her children, the smell of their shampoo, their skin, mingling with hers until it became her own scent. She had sat in the big red chair in the living room, nursing her son and reading to her daughter, who had crawled in next to her and was playing with the buttons on her sleeve.

She had never been touched so much in her life, never felt so much skin against her own. And yet, since she had become a mother it was as if her body had become invisible to anyone but her children. When was the last time someone she didn’t know had looked at her as if she was ... what? A possibility.

She remembered being pregnant, holding the quivering secret of the baby inside her. Her sensuality lay upon her, sweet and heavy as tropical air. Her hips, widening to accommodate the growing baby, swung when she walked and her skin felt every texture, every touch, until she craved James’s home-coming each night.

But as the skin across her stomach tightened and expanded she developed a new identity. “Can I?” strangers would ask, reaching toward her, as if her stomach was a charm that would change their fortune, their lives. And yet—“You are asking if you can touch
me
,” she wanted to tell them. But she understood that that wasn’t what they were saying at all.

Then, after the children were born, it was as if no one could see further than the soft hair, the round cheeks of the babies she carried. She became the frame for the picture that was her son and daughter. Which was fine with her, Claire thought; the babies were beautiful and she was all too ready to forget her own body, which had ballooned and shrunk and which she had no time to do anything about anyway. When men did smile at her, it was with safe, benign smiles, filled with neither hope nor interest.

“You are out of circulation, honey,” Claire’s older sister had told her, “you might as well get used to it.”

James was the one person who still saw her in the old light; he wanted the love life they’d had before children, didn’t understand why, at the end of the day, she didn’t want him. When he’d reach for her, after she had finished nursing the baby to sleep and was finally, finally, on her way to shower off the day, all she could think was, “Not you, too?” She couldn’t tell him; it seemed too awful, but he seemed to sense it anyway and after a while he stopped trying.

Standing there by the chopping block, Claire realized that she was being looked at by a man she didn’t know, for the first time in years. It wasn’t an unqualified success of an experience, she thought wryly, as she realized that the sandy-haired man’s gaze had moved beyond her to halt, with an air of dumbstruck infatuation, on the woman with the olive skin and brown eyes—and yet it was exciting in its own way to be visible, Claire thought, to be tossed back with the other breeders. She had thought she was past all that, thought the needs of her children’s two small bodies fulfilled all of hers.

“HOW ARE WE DOING over here?” Lillian came up next to Carl at the sink.

“We’re ready for the boiling water,” said the man with the sandy hair.

“I know a lot of people use boiling water, but I do it differently,” Lillian explained. “It’s a little harder on you, but it’s easier for the crab, and the meat has a more elegant taste if it’s cleaned before it’s cooked.” Lillian reached into the sink and smoothly picked up one of the crustaceans from behind, its front pincers flailing like a drunk in slow motion. She laid the crab belly-side down on the chopping block.

“If you’re going to do it this way, it’s better for both you and the crab if you are decisive.” She placed two fingers on the back of the crab for a quiet moment, then gripped her long, slim fingers under the back end of the crab’s upper shell and gave a quick jerk, like a carpenter ripping a wooden shingle from a roof. The armored covering came off in her hand and the crab lay open on the block, the exposed interior a mixture of gray and dark yellow.

“Now,” she said, “you take a sharp knife.” She picked up a heavy, square-shaped cleaver, “and you do this.” The cleaver came down with a sharp thump, and the crab’s body lay in two symmetrical pieces, legs moving feebly. Claire stared.

“It’s okay,” Lillian said, as she carefully picked up the body and walked to the sink, “the crab is dead now.”

“Perhaps we should tell that to its legs,” Carl commented, smiling sympathetically at Claire’s expression.

Lillian gently ran water over the crab’s interior, her fingers working through the yellow and gray.

“What . . . ?” said Claire, pointing at the gray sickle shapes that were falling into the sink.

“Lungs,” replied Lillian. “They’re beautiful, in a way. They feel a little like magnolia petals.

“If you want the sauce to seep into the meat, you’ll need to crack the shells of the legs,” Lillian added. “It’ll work better if you do this.” She brought the crab back to the chopping block and took the cleaver once again; she made a quick, decisive cut between each of the legs, leaving the crab in ten pieces, then took the side of the cleaver and cracked each piece with a solid, rocking motion.

“I know,” Lillian said, “it’s a lot to take in. But what we are doing has the virtue of being honest—you aren’t just opening a can and pretending the crabmeat came from nowhere. And when you’re honest about what you are doing, I find care and respect follow more easily.

“Now I’ll leave you to try.”

The man with the sandy hair looked at Claire. “My name’s Ian,” he volunteered. “If you want to clean, I can do this part. I mean, if it makes you nervous.”

Claire looked past Ian and saw that Carl’s wife had picked up a crab and was putting it on the chopping block. The two women looked at each other. Carl’s wife nodded, then resolutely reached down, scooped the underside of the shell, and pulled it off the body. She looked at Claire.

“You can do it,” she said.

Claire turned to Ian. “No, thank you,” she replied, “I’m going to try this myself.” She walked over to the sink and picked up a crab. It was lighter than she had imagined, the underside of the shell oddly soft and fragile. She took a breath and put the crab down on the butcher block, facing away from her. Closing her eyes she slid her fingers under the side of the shell. The edges were knobby, cool against her skin. She gripped the shell and pulled. Nothing happened. She clenched her teeth against the thought of what she was doing and yanked again. With a wrenching sound, the shell came off in her hand.

“Give me the cleaver,” she said to Ian. With a sharp whack, she cut the crab in two. She walked over to the sink, her hands shaking.

THE LEATHERY PETALS of the crab’s lungs came loose between Claire’s fingers and flowed away with the cold water. As she stood at the sink, Claire’s body was shivering and yet—and this ran counter to everything she thought about herself—deeply stirred. It was like jumping off the high diving board when you believed you couldn’t, hitting the cold water and feeling it fly over your hot skin. Claire the bank teller, Claire the mother, would never have killed a crab. But then again, Claire thought, these days she was a lot of things she didn’t recognize.

When exactly had she become the human bundling board in her own bed, Claire wondered. She didn’t know. Well, no, that wasn’t true—she did know. The first time she held her daughter and their bodies curled into each other. The forty-fifth time she read
Goodnight Moon
; the morning James touched her breast and teasingly told their nursing son, “Remember, those are mine,” and she wondered when those breasts, whose firm and luxurious weight she had loved to hold in her own hands, had ceased in any way to be hers.

How could she explain to James what it was like—he who left the house every morning and cut the physical tie with his children with the apparent ease of someone slipping off a pair of shoes? He was still separate—a condition she viewed with anger or jealousy, depending on the day—and she was not.

When they were in bed at night and she felt James turn away in resignation, a movement as heavy as the flipping of a stone slab, she wanted to yell that she did remember, she did. She remembered watching James’s mouth long before she knew his name, imagining her finger along the smooth upper curve of his ears, her tongue traveling the hills and valleys of his knuckles. She remembered the shock of their first kiss, although they had known it was coming for days, moving toward each other slowly until it seemed there was no space left and yet still it was a surprise, how suddenly her life shifted, how certain she was that she would do anything as long as it meant she didn’t have to move her lips, her tongue, her body away from James’s, whose curves and rhythms matched her own until it didn’t matter that they were right outside her apartment and the keys were in her hand, thirty seconds was too long to stop.

She remembered his long fingers slipping lower on her waist as they danced at her younger sister’s wedding. The backyard as the sprinklers ran and the neighbors had a party next door and she had rolled on top of him while the water fell on her hair. The endless winter mornings in bed as the gray light slowly brightened and James caressed her bulging belly and assured her she was the sexiest woman he had ever seen. She remembered, she did. They were the memories she played in her head these days as she soothed herself to sleep, long after his breathing told her it was safe.

It wasn’t just that she was a mother now, or in need of some good lingerie, as her younger sister had recommended. She realized, standing there at the sink, that when she replayed those scenes in her head, she was trying to find someone she had lost, and it wasn’t James. James was still the same.

“That’s PROBABLY CLEAN NOW.” Carl’s wife was standing next to her. “My name is Helen, by the way.”

“Mine’s Claire.”

“Carl tells me you’re a mother.”

“Yes—I have a three-year-old and a baby.” Claire, lost for the moment in her thoughts of James, remembered her children with a start.

“That’s an interesting time,” Helen replied carefully.

“It is,” Claire responded, then paused. Something in Helen’s expression, an openness, a sense of listening, made Claire feel bolder. “I love them,” she said. “Sometimes, though, I wonder . . .”