Eating Heaven (5 page)

Portland is known for shutting down at just the hint of snow, but I’m almost to Benny’s. I’ll drop off the dish quickly, run by the grocery store for tomorrow’s supplies, and then settle back in at home with a bowl of beef, no noodles, and fruit for dessert. I’ll call my mother. Somehow I have to make her remember that for most of her life, Benny was her best friend.

Uncle Benny’s house always felt like a home should, even when we first started making quick stops on our way to the shopping center with Mom, to see if he needed anything. They’d have a cup of coffee and smoke while my sisters and I explored the house, room by room, until it became familiar territory. I’d run my fingers over the spines of his books in the living room, hide from my sisters underneath his bed, eat butter-and-sugar sandwiches while perched on the stool in the kitchen, listening to Mom and Benny talk about nothing I could understand. I always felt a sense of calm there—a respite from the choppy waters we navigated at our house. No one got mad at Benny’s. He let us have the run of the house, and never made us feel that kids were an annoyance to be put up with. And Mom always smiled more, let us get away with more, when she was around Benny.

It felt possible, at those times, that she might have enough love for all of us: for Benny and for Dad. For Anne, who was the smartest, and Christine, who was the prettiest. And for me, who had no special talents
other than eating, a proclivity my mother tried to discourage. “You don’t want to be fat like your grandmother, now, do you?” she’d ask when I’d beg for one of Benny’s famous sugar sandwiches. I’d shake my head, feeling no connection whatever to the photos of her mother in a tent-shaped housedress at the age of fifty, just wanting that sweet, crunchy texture and flavor inside my mouth and knowing I shouldn’t.

One day at Benny’s, Anne and I were hiding from Christine under the bed. When we heard footsteps coming down the hall, we tucked ourselves together into a tight ball, trying not to giggle. We heard Benny’s voice and immediately fell silent.

“I don’t know why you worry so much, Bebe,” he said, coming closer. “She’ll grow into it. It’s just puppy fat.” We saw his grease-stained boots beneath the overhang of blanket, then my mother’s tan flats. They came toe to toe, then parted.

“Not in my family,” she said. “I have to starve myself to stay thin. And besides, Ellie’s the spitting image of my mother. It just makes me sick—”

I didn’t hear the rest because Anne clamped her hands over my ears and didn’t let go until Mom and Benny had gone back into the kitchen. I tried not to cry—Anne always accused me of being a crybaby as it was—but she pretended she didn’t notice when my jaw quivered.

“Don’t listen to her,” she whispered, kicking the underside of the box spring. “She’s the one who’s bad, you know, cheating with Benny.”

I didn’t know what she meant. To me, cheating had more to do with board games and tests at school. I didn’t think Mom was doing anything wrong by being friends with Benny, even though he was a man and it was a bit odd, but I liked the whole arrangement. I told Mom so on the car ride home, adding, “It’s not really cheating if you’re not breaking any rules, is it?”

Her face in the rearview told me I’d said the wrong thing when all I’d been trying to do was get on her good side. “Who told you we’re cheating?” she asked. I shook my head, mumbled that I didn’t know, and felt Anne relax beside me.

“You’re to go to your room when we get home, Eleanor,” Mom said. “You need to understand that it’s malicious to spread lies and rumors,
and I don’t want you ever repeating that one, do you hear me? Not to anyone. It’s shameful to talk like that.”

I nodded, felt the tears threaten again, and clenched my teeth to keep from making any sound. For a moment I thought Anne might confess, but silence filled the car for the rest of the ride home.

I turn in to Benny’s neighborhood and slide sideways in the untracked snow. “Come on,” I coax the car, downshifting into second, and fishtail the last two blocks to Benny’s house. The huge firs and hemlocks that line the street are laden with snow, and the magnolia limbs are bent, the buds destroyed. The small frame ranches look shuttered against the storm; there’s no sign of human life in sight. I pull up in front of Benny’s house, not daring to turn into his driveway, and leave my hazard lights blinking.

The door’s locked, so I ring the bell. After shivering there for a minute, I knock once, then twice. Something’s not right. Finally, Benny cracks the door an inch and peers out, looking bewildered and older, somehow, than he did just three days ago. He’s wearing his tattered bathrobe again, and I wonder if he’s gotten dressed at all this week.

“Are you okay?” I ask, stepping inside and stamping my boots in the entryway. “You remembered I was coming over, right?”

He nods and clutches his robe in front of his gut. A game-show host blathers from the TV in the living room. Benny’s blanket lies rumpled on the couch.

“Go back and lie down, Ben. I’ll put this stuff away and bring you some supper, okay?”

He follows me into the kitchen instead. “Supper,” he says.

“Patience, patience,” I say, settling the dish on the counter and opening the fridge door. “What, are you starving to death? You should have plenty to snack on in here.” The leftovers from Monday are untouched, and the casserole from the previous week has grown moldy.

“Ben?” I turn to look at him. “What exactly have you been eating?”

He looks like hell, now that I can see him in the light. The skin around his eyes looks tender and dark, and the fake tan I accused him of is now the yellow of mustard. My heart starts to beat rapidly in my chest.

“Uncle Benny?”

His eyes look confused. “Sup, sup, sup,” he says, brow furrowing.

“Oh, Jesus, Benny. Oh, God.” A surge of something—panic, fear—is pushing into my throat. I swallow hard against it and say, “Okay. First thing we’re going to do is get you back on the couch, okay, Uncle Benny?” I take his arm, walk him slowly back into the living room. Like a docile child, he settles back into his spot, and I pull the blanket over him. “Okay, I’ll be right back,” I say, but he doesn’t respond.

I race back to the phone in the kitchen, dial 911.

A young female voice asks, “Is this an emergency?”

“I-I think so. My uncle has been really sick and he looks jaundiced. And, God, he’s kind of, I don’t know. Babbling.” I try to talk quietly so he won’t hear me.

“You’ll have to speak up. I can barely hear you. Is he there with you now?”

“Yes,” I say loudly.

“The address?”

I give it to her and ask, “Are you going to send someone, or . . . I don’t know, should I try to bring him in?” All I can think of is the snow piling higher around my car, covering the windows, the tire tracks.

“An ambulance has been dispatched, but it might take a few extra minutes with the weather, okay? Stay with me on the line, though, until they get there. What’s your name?”

“Ellie,” I say, then correct myself. “Eleanor. Eleanor Samuels.”

“Okay, Ellie,” she says, “and how about your uncle’s name?”

She’s nice. She asks me question after question, things I can answer, things I can’t, until finally blue and red lights flash through the front window.

Through it all, Benny has fallen asleep.

It takes forever to get my car unstuck, rocking back and forth with tires spinning and screaming, but one of Benny’s neighbors finally comes out with a bag of kitty litter. She throws some under my tires and enlists her stout son to help push me free.

The ambulance is long gone, Benny warmly bundled in the back,
and a female paramedic at his side, which makes me feel better about not riding with him. If I leave my car here, it will be days before I can get it out.

The drive to the hospital is eerie, the twilight deepened by low cloud cover and the omnipresent snow. It’s falling in triplicate, gangs of flakes clinging together, covering the windshield as my skinny wipers struggle to keep up. I stretch my eyes wide, wondering if I’m stuck in a nightmare. There’s no way this is all really happening. The snow, the ambulance. Benny’s yellow skin and hollow eyes.

A battered pickup truck slides sideways through the intersection in front of me, my car skidding slightly before the tires grab at the crunchy slush. An inch-thick layer of accumulated snow slides from my roof and veils the windshield. For a moment I’m afraid I’ll suffocate. I can’t see, I don’t know what’s out there, what’s coming at me. I jump from the car to brush off the snow with my coat sleeve, looking out behind for approaching traffic. There’s no one out on the road but me and the truck’s driver, a swarthy-looking man who is cursing and gunning his engine, spinning his tires as he careens sideways down Boones Ferry into the darkness.

It feels like hours until I get to the ER. I hurry in and look around, then head for the only sign of life: a beehived woman reading a newspaper at the reception desk.

“They just brought in Benny Sloan,” I say. “I’m his niece. Where can I find him?”

She checks a log, then makes an indecipherable page; it sounds like she’s calling for Dr. Scary. The lobby is empty except for me, a surprise given the road conditions. I stand at the desk, trying not to tap my foot, my fingers, trying to relax to the strains of unidentifiable Muzak from somewhere overhead.

After a few moments, a kid who looks like a college student in a lab coat walks up and introduces himself as Dr. Terry. His breath smells of Altoids. I shake his hand, although it seems idiotic in an emergency. “I’m Benny Sloan’s niece,” I say. “How is he? What’s going on?”

“He was complaining of severe stomach pain, so we’ve sent him for
a scan that should give us a better look at what’s happening in his belly.”

“He was coherent?” I ask. “He was completely out of it at home.”

He nods. “Yeah, I noticed some confusion. Could be any number of things either associated with the other symptoms or not.”

He’s entirely too young, with ski-jump hair and chewed-to-the-quick fingernails, but he seems to be in charge, even though he’s holding a clipboard that has a S
HRED TO LIVE
, M
AX
R
USH
S
NOWBOARDS
sticker on the back.

“How long has your uncle been jaundiced?”

“I think I first noticed it a couple of days ago, but I didn’t know what it was. Do you think he has hepatitis?”

“And the time you saw him before that?” He looks up at me.

“I, um, I don’t know. It was last week. I think he looked okay.”

“And how long has he been sick?”

I shrug, helpless. “I don’t know. A long time. He doesn’t admit to feeling bad unless he’s dying.” I clamp my mouth shut to take back that word.

“A guess?”

I think back and back, without the filters of Benny’s excuses, his cheery assertions that he’s feeling much better. “Four weeks, maybe? Five?”

He writes something down and I feel better, having supplied this tidbit.

“Does he have any immediate family?”

“Not really,” I say, biting my lip. I’ve flunked the good-niece test.

“No wife? Kids?”

“Well, yes, a wife, but they’re separated.”

“But she’ll know his medical history?” he prompts.

“I don’t know her new number, but her name’s Yolanda Sloan. Unless she’s gone back to Duran, her maiden name.” I pause. “Just how sick do you think he is?”

He looks up from his clipboard. “You’re close to your uncle?”

Whatever’s wrong with Benny, I have to know, so I confess. “He’s not
technically my uncle. But, he’s . . . you know.” I shrug, chew my lip. “My family.”

It works. He says, “We’re looking at a few possibilities here. The best outcome would be something like pancreatitis, which we could treat with antibiotics. It could also be hepatitis, as you mentioned, which, depending on the type, might not be too bad to deal with.”

“And the not-so-good outcome?”

“Probably what you’re thinking. Liver failure. Cancer. His liver didn’t feel enlarged when I palpated it, but it’s still a possibility.”

“Would he be able to get a transplant or something?”

“Let’s take it one step at a time,” he says. “We’ll get the results of the tests and then we’ll have a better idea of what’s going on, okay?”

“Oh. Right.” He’s just a kid, but he’s clearly used to these kinds of things, people with serious illnesses, family members with stupid questions. Somehow, I’m almost forty and I don’t have a clue how to do this.

“I’ll go track down his wife,” he says, tucking his pen inside his shirt pocket. “When I know more, I’ll let you know.”

He walks away, high-top sneakers squeaking as they hit the linoleum of the hallway. I take a seat in the middle of a row of hard gray plastic chairs and say, “Tell her Ellie says hi,” although he doesn’t hear me. Suddenly, I miss her more fiercely than if she’d died.

W
hen I was a child, I didn’t know it was unusual for a mechanic to take photography classes and read books and listen to classical music and jazz singers, to cry at school plays even though he had no children of his own. He seemed normal to me; he was just Uncle Benny.

I borrowed his books all the time—I discovered brand-new copies of Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Harper Lee, John Steinbeck, Louisa May Alcott lurking on Benny’s shelves between the potboilers and old Zane Grays, the Ford and Chrysler specifications manuals, and kitschy joke books. Sometimes in school I’d find that I’d already read the required book for a class and I’d be surprised that other people knew about Benny’s and my secret.

I decided to be a writer in sixth grade; someday I’d write beautiful, heartfelt stories about important things, like the starving children in Biafra or maybe poems like Rod McKuen’s. Sometimes now, as I shift in my chair at the computer, searching for a new way to say “sauté onions until translucent,” I try to conjure the old fantasies, but it gets harder every year. I am a writer, I tell myself,
I get paid to do it,
but somehow I can never recapture my childhood enthusiasm.

It seems now that we always knew her, but Yolanda didn’t come into our lives until the summer before I entered junior high and developed my own breasts. One muggy July day when a Pacific storm was brewing, Mom came home from the grocery store, looking dazed. She unloaded
just two bags from the car instead of the usual eight or ten, setting them on the counter before hurrying to her room, leaving the perishables to spoil.

Alarmed, I went to her door. She lay flat across her bed, hand over her eyes.

“Are you all right?”

“I just have a headache,” she said quietly, but I saw the spasmodic movement of her chest. She was crying.

“Mom? What’s wrong?”

She took a deep breath, then smiled at the ceiling. “Guess what. I just saw Uncle Benny at the store, and he’s getting married.” Her breath caught and she made an embarrassing snorting sound, then laughed. “To a Mexican girl, from that restaurant he likes, El Something-or-other. Isn’t that wonderful?”

I hated the strange tone in her voice. “But why are you crying?” I asked.

“Because I’m just so happy for him, honey,” she said. “He’s my dearest friend.”

I knew nothing then of adult friendships, nothing of adult love or heartbreak, but I knew enough to leave her lying there and pull the door closed. I felt protective of her somehow, and I didn’t say a word to Anne or Christine, who were in the family room watching cartoons and doing homework. I went out to the kitchen, unpacked the groceries, and put on water to boil spaghetti for dinner.

The hospital waiting room has a
C
ELL
P
HONE
Z
ONE
sign on the wall. I pull out my phone, search the directory for Anne’s number, then hit
CALL
, even though it’s nearly eleven o’clock in Boston. “You’ve reached Anne Samuels-Richardson,” her professional voice message tells me, wisely omitting husband number one’s name. “Please leave a message.”

“It’s me,” I say. “Benny’s in the hospital, and I think it’s bad. Call me as soon as you can.” Next I dial Christine in California and leave a message on her machine.

It feels as though there should be someone else I could call, as though someone’s missing from our family. It’s not that Dad’s gone.

I dial once again.

“John Weinert,” a smooth male voice answers.

I don’t know what to say to him; he’s a species I’ve never had to deal with before, outside of buying a used car or encyclopedia set. “Could I speak with my mother, please?”

“And this is?” he says pleasantly.

“Eleanor. It’s kind of an emergency.”

“One moment,” he says, and puts me on hold. Mantovani oozes from the earpiece for a moment, and then my mother comes on the line.

“Hello? Ellie? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Mom, but—”

“Oh, thank God. I thought maybe something had happened, with the snowstorm and all. I’d say we have a good five, six inches out there, wouldn’t you, John? At least, he says, and the news says we could get another couple of inches by morning.”

Breathe,
I think, not sure who I’m talking to, her or myself.

“Mom?” I interrupt. “Benny’s in the hospital. Something’s really wrong. He’s jaundiced, so they’re doing tests on his liver.”

“Oh. Oh, no.” She sighs. “Dear God.”

“I’m the only one here,” I say, sounding like a kid. What do I want, for her to drive through this blizzard to sit with me? To be here when Benny is through with his tests? For her to come to her senses and move back to our old house, our old life?

“I just thought I’d let you know,” I finally say.

“Well, you’ll give him my best, won’t you, dear?” she says, but there’s something else there, something old and aching and deep, and it comforts me.

I shared my love of books with Benny, but Aunt Yolanda opened my eyes to the world of food as art, cooking without cans. She introduced me to the magic of spices, the exotic perfume of fresh herbs crushed between fingers. Younger than my mother, she was rounded in just the right spots from her love of good food, and when we talked she looked right at me and listened, nodding and laughing loudly when I’d tell jokes, holding my hand when we’d walk, as if we were best friends or sisters.

She liked Anne and Christine, too, but I could tell I was her favorite. She took me with her on shopping trips, to the fish market near the waterfront and the farm stands out west. Sometimes she’d journey to the Asian grocers in Northeast Portland or the hippie vegetarian markets on Hawthorne to find something special. We’d come home laden with ingredients that I knew my mother had never heard of, and the resulting feasts would fill me with a yearning to go different places, to try new things.

After Dad died, Anne predicted everything would change between Yolanda and Benny. She was right about everything but the particulars.

“You just wait. Benny’ll dump Aunt Yolanda now to be with Mom,” she said the night after the funeral, when she and I had finally left Christine at Mom’s house and gone for dinner at Chanterelle, my favorite Trendy-third Avenue restaurant until Mom discovered it.

Anne and I were imbibing our second dirty martinis, and she’d ordered hazelnut-encrusted salmon and goat cheese salad while I’d asked for the macaroni with three cheeses and Dungeness crab, comfort food for the well heeled, or those with a paying sister.

“Oh, Anne,” I moaned, annoyed at the subject matter after the grueling day. Anne always had a way of picking at sore spots, scratching off scabs. It must be what made her a good lawyer. Besides, she’d already gone through two husbands herself; she was no expert on love. I said, “Mom and Benny have been friends for so long now, they’re like brother and sister.”

She shook her close-cropped head, let her long jaw drop in exaggerated incredulity. “You are the most amazing person,” she said, though I knew she did not mean it kindly. “You will defend them until the day you die.”

“I’m not defending anyone,” I said, taking a long, hard drink to feel the burn in my throat. “I’m just saying.” I looked around for our waiter, but it seemed he’d deserted us in favor of a long midshift break. “I’m starving. Aren’t you?”

“Why do you always change the subject? God, Eleanor.”

She’d always seemed cynical and mean-spirited when it came to this topic, but seeing her at that moment, the way her eyes looked into mine
for a moment, then away, the way she traced the rim of her glass over and over, made me realize I’d missed something.

“What?” I asked. “What do you want to talk about?”

She widened her eyes and I said, “I know, I know. But you can’t think they’re still at it, after all these years. I mean, why wouldn’t they just have run off together years ago if they were that in love?”

She tipped her glass into her mouth, closing her eyes at the sear of the vodka, then set her glass down and looked at me. “Maybe they were protecting us.”

“Why not after we’d all left home, then?” I asked, trying to find the chink in her logic.

She shrugged and smoothed a hand down the arm of her suit jacket. “I don’t know.”

“Then why didn’t Dad leave?”

Anne looked at me. “Eleanor. Come on.”

“What?”

“He did.”

“He took business trips.”

“He lived in a motel out on the Sunset Highway.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Jesus, Eleanor. I give up.”

We sat silently for a moment, the murmur of conversation and clink of silverware suddenly loud around us. “Damn, where’s that waiter?” I said, half rising to go look for him.

“He’s right behind you with our plates, Eleanor,” Anne said. “Don’t worry, you get to eat now.”

It stung like she knew it would. She rarely used my weight against me, only when she was out of other options. To the waiter she said, “Could we have another round, please? And you might as well bring out the dessert menu now so my sister can start studying it.”

Had my macaroni and cheese not been exquisite, I might have only picked at it, just to show her—and the waiter—that I had some self-control. Failing that, I tried to leave a few bites on the plate, and when that failed, I said no to dessert, only to eat half of Anne’s poached pear in caramel sauce.

As it turned out, Benny didn’t leave Yolanda; she left him. Last summer, six months after Dad died. Even then, though, Benny and my mother did not become a couple. Instead, she surprised us last September by coming home from a trip we’d thought she’d taken alone to San Francisco with a new husband at her side. Before we had time to digest that, they’d sold our old house and everything in it my sisters and I didn’t want. They moved into the five-thousand-square-foot house John was almost finished building on a prime view lot in the Dundee Hills. My mother cut all ties with Benny, and it pisses me off that she’d do that for this man she barely knew. She never did it for our father.

I’m still sitting in the hard plastic chair two hours later, my posterior as numb as my brain, when my cell phone rings. It’s Christine. “I just got in and picked up your message,” she says. “Are you okay?”

It is so like my younger sister to ask after my well-being, even when I’m not the one who’s sick, that I have to take a deep breath before replying.

I tell her about the results of the CT scan, that it shows something going on with Benny’s pancreas, which to me sounds better than the liver. Dr. Terry didn’t share my optimism. They’ve scheduled Benny for a procedure where they stick a tube down his throat, look around with a little camera, take a biopsy of the pancreas, and insert a stent to stop the jaundice. He’s staying in the hospital until he’s stabilized and the results are in, which could be a few days.

“How’s he doing?” she asks.

“I don’t know. He’s been asleep every time I’ve looked in on him.”

“Why are you still sitting there? It’s late. Go home.”

“I will,” I say. “In a while.”

“Take care of yourself, okay? Are you still taking your B vitamins and essential fatty acids?”

I mumble something about trying to and she says, “They don’t do any good in the cupboard, Eleanor. Now go home. I’ll call Benny in the morning.”

“He’ll love that,” I tell her. I may have been Yolanda’s favorite, but Christine was Benny’s. He treated us all as if we were his own, but he
always smiled at Christine’s impassioned lisp, not quite drilled out of her in second grade, and her dainty girl ways. She was the one like Mom, not me.

“How are you, anyway?” I ask.

“Oh, you know,” she says, sounding tired. “The same. Too busy.”

For the past five years, Christine has worked evenings at the local library while teaching eighth grade so that her husband can pursue his dream of filmmaking. They’ve moved to a smaller house in a worse neighborhood, and they never go anywhere except on “scouting” missions in his 1972 Honda, camping amid the towering redwoods of northern California.

Reid’s documentaries tend toward subject matter like the plight of three-toed tree frogs and people who live in sequoias and call themselves Rainbow. Christine fell for him when she took his environmental sciences class at UC Berkeley, and has stuck by him ever since, even though he’s fifteen years older than she is and refuses to use Kleenex when he has a cold, opting instead to blow his nose on towels.
Love is strange,
I tell myself, as I always do when I think about Christine and Reid.