Lost Art of Mixing (9781101609187) (8 page)

Lillian knew that time was the only real solution for grief, but the loss of her mother had also taught her that unlimited lengths of time were nothing to be counted on. She had spent her childhood waiting for her father to come back, for her mother to stop reading. As an adult, she had waited for someone who could break through her carefully constructed persona of chef and teacher—the culinary generosity that allowed her always to be the giver, the perceptivity that kept her safe from the insights of others. She was so tired of waiting. And by the night of the last cooking class, when Tom had shown up at her back kitchen door, she had begun to suspect that in order to live, sometimes you simply had to leap into the gap left by sorrow, the only hope that you would feel the solid ledge of the other side under your feet as you fell.

Yet in all the scenarios that Lillian had played out in her head, all the ways that things with Tom could go right or wrong, a baby was never part of the landing she had imagined.

•   •   •

LILLIAN'S CELL PHONE RANG,
loud in Tom's empty house. She jumped, startled, and picked it up.

“Lillian?” Al said. “Did you forget our appointment?”

It came back to her—the meeting to go over the figures that Chloe had dropped off weeks before. “Oh Al, I'm so sorry; I'll be there in a flash.”

“Okay.” She could hear the slight edge of disappointment in his voice.

“I'll bring you something to eat. I promise.”

“All right.” His voice childlike in its happiness.

•   •   •

LILLIAN HURRIED UP
the wooden stairs toward Al's office, carrying a brown to-go box with “Lillian's” written in curling white letters across the top.

“I couldn't do anything fancy,” she apologized as she came through the door.

Al lifted the lid off the box, uncovering a turkey and chipotle mayo sandwich with thin-sliced red onions, the crust of the bread dusted with seeds, the top lofting above a garden of fresh lettuce.

“And a pickle,” he added, with a smile. “Homemade?”

Lillian nodded.

“Well, then, I accept your apology.” He took a white ceramic plate out of a lower desk drawer and arranged the food on it carefully as Lillian settled into the chair across from him. Over the years, they had developed a comfortable routine: for the first twenty minutes of their meeting, they ate and talked about anything but money. After that, they got down to business.

“Not eating today?” Al asked.

“I already did.”

Al took a bite.

“Hmmmm . . .” he said. “You're missing a good sandwich.” He chewed thoughtfully. “So, what do you think of the idea for Isabelle's party?”

A week or so before, Chloe had told Lillian about Al's interest in rituals, saying she wanted to do one for Isabelle and asking for Lillian's help with the food.

“It won't be a lot of people,” Chloe had said. “Just a few friends and family. There's a great ritual honoring elders that we could do for her birthday in March.”

Chloe had been moody recently, although honestly, Chloe wasn't the only person in the kitchen with that problem, Lillian thought with chagrin. She was in favor of anything that would shift both their thoughts in a positive direction.

“I like the idea,” Lillian told Al as he ate his sandwich.

“There's the food, of course,” Al said, “but that throne is going to take some creativity and effort. Do you think we can count on Tom to help out?” He picked up the pickle and the smell jittered across the desk, vinegar and dill and garlic. Lillian leapt for the bathroom.

Al looked at her closely when she returned.

“Pickles,” he said reflectively. “When I was a kid, my neighbor Mrs. Cohen used to say you could always tell by how a woman reacted to pickles. If she either couldn't keep her hands off them, or threw up at the smell of them, that's when you knew.” He reached into his desk drawer. “Want a mint?”

Lillian took one and chewed.

“So, when are you and Tom getting married?” Al's eyes were dancing. “I bet we could find you a wonderful ceremony.” He eagerly reached for the book of rituals on his desk and started thumbing through the pages.

“Here we go,” he crowed. “Marriage. There's a whole section.”

“Al,” Lillian said, “could we just go over the finances?”

“All right. But I'll do a little research for you later, I promise.” He marked the section before closing the book.

“In the meantime, could you not say anything to anybody?” Lillian asked. “Even Chloe? Tom doesn't know yet.”

Al sent her a quick look. “Of course,” he said. “But I know he'll be happy about it. How could he not be? A beautiful woman—who can cook? And a baby? What a perfect life.”

•   •   •

LILLIAN SHUT
the heavy door of Al's office behind her and started down the wooden stairs, her cook's clogs making a familiar clatter against their hard surface. It had been a good meeting, once they focused on the numbers. The restaurant was doing well; taxes would be about what she had anticipated. Her decision to take on Chloe as a sous-chef had been a smart one and had really saved her in the past few weeks—although she hadn't mentioned that to Al, who had seemed so delighted at the thought of her pregnancy that keeping him on track during their meeting had been like walking a small puppy.

Lillian wondered about Al's own private life. Al's face would grow a little tight whenever he talked about his wife, the elusive Louise, who had never come to the restaurant. Lillian hoped Al was happy, although she didn't really think so. It was one of the reasons she liked to be creative with the lunches she brought, to see the way his face would open as the smells filled his office. She always tried to think of the clients who came after her as well, and fit the lunches to the financial season—more calming scents during tax preparation months, a little more exciting in the summer, when most clients were off on vacation, spending the money Al helped them save the rest of the year. The pickle today might have been a miscalculation, she thought, a bit too much picnic atmosphere just when people should be working hard to meet that April deadline.

Perhaps she should go back up and encourage Al to open a window for a few minutes, she thought. She started to turn and the heel of her clog caught on the tread, throwing her off-balance. She reached out for the handrail, but it was missing, removed by the painters who were coming the next day. She remembered, too late, Al's warning as she left, his reminder that she needed to take good care of herself, his voice full of implied, delighted meaning.

Lillian's arms flailed, catching at nothing, and she slammed down on her tailbone, the air punched out of her lungs in one sharp exhalation. The stairway around her reverberated, stunned into silence. Lillian sat, not breathing, ears straining to hear something that had no sound.

Into that airless moment came a sudden memory of Abuelita, placing her infant grandson in sixteen-year-old Lillian's arms. It was only a few months after Lillian's mother's death and the world was still a raggedly painful place. No matter how comforting Abuelita's kitchen, no matter how many tamales Lillian made, she couldn't get past the feeling that her life was a hole she kept falling into.

“This will help,
niña
,” Abuelita had said, and Lillian had felt the baby filling the empty space of her arms, felt its warmth melt something cold and desperate within her. She'd walked about the kitchen for hours, one hand securing the sleeping infant against her chest, the other stirring a soup on the stove or hanging a clean pot on its hook. The rhythms of the kitchen flowed into the sway of her step as she kept the baby sleeping, and she had felt a capacity, a desire to give, rise up and take over loss.

Sitting on Al's hard wooden steps, Lillian held on to her belly with both hands, fingers spread wide across the mound she could barely feel.

“Don't go,” she said, with the first, great gulp of air that came into her lungs. “Please please please don't go.”

•   •   •

TEN MINUTES LATER,
Lillian cautiously stood up. Her tailbone ached; she would most likely have a heck of a bruise the next day. But it seemed, improbably, miraculously, as if that might be the only repercussion of her fall. She took a slow breath, put a hand on each side of the narrow stairway, and descended one step at a time, placing a clog carefully in the center of each tread.

At the bottom, she opened the door to the street. Out on the sidewalk, the afternoon bustled by. The rain had disappeared and the number of passersby had increased accordingly. A trio of schoolgirls walked in front of the doorway in an uneven line, conversation running up and down between them.

Lillian paused, waiting until they passed.

If she was going to do this, she'd need a little more room on the sidewalk, she thought. And then she stepped forward.

L
ouise had been an only child, reluctant to arrive, yanked from her mother's body, leaving behind a footpath of wreckage. Her parents had viewed their new offspring warily. She was an unknown who had entered their lives; they had opened a door expecting a guest and encountered a robber. Even as a baby, Louise could sense the way their eyes skittered off her face, their smell would grow sharp at the edges as they came near her. As she got older, her parents became more adept at covering their feelings, cheering her heartily during kindergarten theatrical performances, posting her report cards, riddled with A's, on the refrigerator, but she knew. Even in kindergarten she could act better than that.

As an adolescent, she discovered a deep reservoir of resentment that the blame had been laid so unreflectively upon her own infant head. She had not, after all, made herself. It was not her fault that her father had lost his sexual playground and would look elsewhere, not her fault that her mother felt compelled to fill her life with anything that didn't have to do with child-rearing, running off in her nylon stockings and Jackie Kennedy hat to one committee or another. It was perhaps more a sign of the disunion of her parents' marriage that the combination of the two of them would create something that would get stuck, she thought as she lay on her bed, planning how to make her entry into the world of grown-ups something graceful and effortless.

And so she studied those about her, both her peers and those older than she, the ones who already had attained the goal of self-sufficiency and social acceptance. She slept with her hair tightly wound around coffee cans, to straighten the waves that got in one's way in high school hallways. She learned the tilted head-cock of a listener, the silent, nodding encouragement that warmed people into volubility and left them with the impression that she was the most interesting person in the room. She learned not to love science, even though her heart danced in the classrooms where they would watch a mercurial blue dye wind its way up a celery stalk, or a seemingly innocuous white powder mix with a clear liquid to produce a frothing, ecstatic mess. She kept herself slim, shiny, no hard angles that would catch and stall her delivery into the realm of boyfriends, all the while reciting the lines that were like passwords in the secret club of girls—I'm so fat; my parents are driving me crazy; I can't wait to get out of here.

It had been a relief to meet Al, in some ways. That day in the college cafeteria, he had been like a child holding out a broken bowl and asking her to fix it, his eyes so earnest as he explained to her about his fascination with numbers when, in fact, their conversation had had nothing to do with numbers at all. She understood, better than he, what he was asking for. A place to stand still. She could do that; she had been born doing that.

•   •   •

MARRIAGE HAD BEEN
a perfectly manageable proposition. Al was a good provider, as he had promised. Accounting was something everyone needed, if not constantly, at least annually, as predictable and obligatory as New Year's resolutions. Between January and late April, she almost never saw him, buried as he was under the stacks of other people's lives.

While the ramifications of the feminist movement exploded and were assimilated around them, Louise was cocooned in the financial security of numbers. There were no children—she and Al had agreed upon that—and she had been left with whole days on her hands, although there was plenty to do, she would explain to her mother, her working friends, the clerk at the grocery store. At first, she had enjoyed learning and performing the multitudinous tasks that made a house and marriage flow smoothly. She had been told more than once that she had a marvelous brain, and she loved to train its laser focus on the questions of which car insurance covered their needs for the least money, or what was the best way to clean the Oriental rugs it had taken her months to find. Her memory was a quick-access storage vault for all the things that would save them money, and she could tell you almost to the hour when the frequent-flyer miles or grocery-store coupons would expire. She was an expert in all things domestic.

Al wasn't any help when it came to these issues. He took an annoyingly blasé attitude to anything that wasn't his own work. He had no idea how much all the small details that she took care of affected the quality of his life, the security of his own finances. He might keep track of the numbers in their bank account, but she was the one who kept the dollars there. She was the one who made sure he had clean shirts in his closet and toilet paper in the bathroom, who stocked the refrigerator with his lactose-free milk, who stood over him while he signed the lines she had highlighted on documents and then made sure they got to the mailbox afterward.

It made her laugh, sometimes, when those telemarketers called in the evening just as she was cooking dinner, and asked for the “head of the household,” meaning Al. Louise was willing to bet that in the vast majority of cases, the person who wore the pants in the family had no idea what size they were. Al was a 34/32.

It could make you rigid. She could see it—the crease between her eyebrows, the contraction at the corner of her eyes and mouth, as if the skin itself was straining to hold in all those details. She wasn't sure why there were so many, but every time she had convinced herself not to worry, Al would go and forget something. Never anything major—she had learned better than to ask that of him, but surely, it wasn't so hard to remember to pick up lightbulbs on the way home from work. He would blink his eyes and tell her it wasn't worth getting worked up about; what was one lightbulb more or less?

She wasn't asking him to do anything momentous, she would fume to herself—it was just a favor, the very smallness of it a chance to notice and acknowledge all the big things that she took care of for him. But he didn't or wouldn't see it, and each time he forgot, she felt the weight of the to-do lists coming down again onto her shoulders. No wonder women got osteoporosis, she would joke with her book-club friends.

But sometimes, when the sunlight came in sideways across her desk in the late afternoon as she sorted through that day's bills, or a slightly opened window brought in the smell of a neighbor's freshly mown lawn, she would stop and simply sit, her mind beautifully, extravagantly empty. And she would wonder what it would be like to have no rugs, no grocery coupons, and fresh, whole milk in a tiny refrigerator.

•   •   •

SHE KNEW AL
was having an affair, of course. She had suspected before—the way he would come home smelling of exotic foods that were nothing like the lunches she packed for him, made of carefully chosen ingredients that wouldn't leave those tacky lingering smells in his office. But the suspicions had always been as fleeting as the scents, easily laundered.

This time, however, she knew. She could even point to the day it started—that Saturday morning she had sent him off to the bookstore. He had come back different, delighted in some secret and personal way, and over the weeks she had watched his face widen with satisfaction, had smelled cigarette smoke clinging to his clothes, seen the books he was bringing home. Contemporary fiction, something he had never read before. He even tried to cover his tracks by buying the books from different stores, as if trees could distract her from the forest.

She imagined a young thing—chippies, her mother had called them. Standing behind the bookstore counter, breasts full under a black turtleneck, come-hither eyes waiting behind dark-rimmed glasses. Or maybe thin, anorexic, needy, looking for a father figure. Damaged, in any case—she'd have to be. Louise imagined the two of them lying in bed, reading passages aloud as a prelude to sex. Al could be quite athletic, she acknowledged to herself, when he was in the mood, although he had seemed increasingly to lack inspiration in the past ten years. She couldn't remember the last time he had touched her in a way that could be deemed romantic or creative. She would wait, her body tightening over the course of a day, hoping for something as simple as his hand on her lower back guiding her through a crowd, a feeling of connection that would allow the coils of her life to unwind, but it never came and by nighttime her frustration was burning so strongly she could only lie on her side and close herself around it, warming herself on its heat.

And now here he had gone and found someone else, after almost thirty years of marriage. It fried her, it really did. It wasn't, she realized, that it broke her heart. It was the ungratefulness of it, the lack of respect for her. Why didn't he just tell her? But Al had never been very good at firing people—the woman who cleaned his office was completely useless, but Al felt sorry for her and so kept her on.

Well, she didn't want a sympathy marriage. In her mind, she practiced saying words she had always cringed at before. Bastard. Son of a bitch. Honestly, none of them made much sense, she thought, particularly when it came to Al, whose paternity was well documented—still, the words felt good, the way they filled your mouth, solid as a bite of steak between her teeth. She practiced, waiting for him to come home and tell her he was leaving.

•   •   •

SHE SAW THE BIG BOOK
on the seat of his old blue Cadillac when she went out to get the paper one Friday morning in March, almost a year after she had first sent him to the bookstore.
The Book of Rituals and Traditions.
Impossible to disguise, sitting on the passenger seat of the car like a dog waiting for its owner. What was Al doing with a book like that? Louise opened the car door and eased herself inside, putting the tome on her lap. There was a bookmark midway through, and Louise opened to the page.
Marriage,
it said at the top of the section.

So that was it, then, she thought. He was actually going to marry the chippie, someone so special that the usual traditions of white dresses and yellow roses, the procession down the aisle, the rice and the relatives you hated and invited anyway, all those customs she had so unquestioningly accepted twenty-nine years before, were not enough. The chippie needed something new and different. She probably had a name like Morning Glory. Or maybe she was from one of those other-religion countries where they would put a red dot on your forehead or something.

Al was still in the shower and the coffeepot was already started; she had a few minutes. Louise leafed through the pages, looking for clues as to which ceremony they might have chosen, who this girl might be, but there were no indicators.

And then, at the end of the section, her eyes caught on a new heading—
Mayan 52nd Year Ritual
. Her fifty-second birthday was in a few months, adding another year like a brick on an already loaded cart. After fifty, a milepost that had garnered her congratulations laced with both jubilation and trepidation—you made it! oh dear—it seemed the possibilities for celebration defaulted to decades, a series of signs that you were lasting, then lingering.

So, what was special about fifty-two? She'd never heard anything. She held the book at a slight remove in order to read the smaller print of the description.

•   •   •

THE EXPLANATION
of the ritual was brief—all the entries were. It was from Mexico, a chance to restart the clock, as it were. Dishes were broken; lives were changed. She had an image of brightly colored crockery sailing through the air, landing in loud, spectacular pieces, yellow and red and green and blue. She wondered what it would feel like, the cool smooth surface of her plates beneath her fingertips before she sent them flying.

Louise looked down at her watch. Al would be coming downstairs for breakfast: she was out of time. She quickly opened the glove compartment, pulling out the first-aid kit she made sure was always in the car. Never opened—the cellophane wrapping as taut and shiny as when she had purchased it. She dug her finger under the glued-down flaps, cursing the time it took, and finally got to the white plastic box and the tiny set of scissors inside, good for cutting gauze—and, as it turned out, paper. Opening the scissors flat, she sliced her way along the inside of the page, pulling it cleanly away from the book.

Take that, she thought, as she put away the scissors and closed the book again. He wouldn't want that page, anyway. It was unlikely that the new girl would be fifty-two. They never were.

•   •   •

IT WAS JUST A PIECE OF PAPER
, folded in the pocket of her bathrobe, but it rustled as she ran back up to the house, the almost-forgotten newspaper in her hand. She was flushed, breathing a bit hard from her quick trip up the driveway. Al looked over at her, one eyebrow cocked.

“Hi,” she said quickly. Too quickly, she thought.

“Here's your coffee,” she said, pouring a cup and setting it in front of him. The paper made her pocket stick out at a sharp angle; it almost poked him. She walked back to the counter and, with her back to him, pulled the page from her robe and slid it next to a box of Raisin Bran as she pulled the oatmeal tin from the cupboard.