Mile Zero (35 page)

Suzy made Lila what she was, though Suzy remained less than what Lila became. Suzy appealed to the hallowed hominy-grit reality of Southern homilies, aiming her television show into torpid afternoons of housewives and brides-to-be seeking to spice up predictable home lives with retooled recipes for all things Southern, from chicken to chitlin. The afternoon Lila stumbled onto Suzy, Suzy was administering the final flourishes to Bayou Crawdaddy Jambalaya, but there was something about the way Suzy set about her task, a way in which her smooth white hands never seemed to touch the foods she prepared. Suzy’s honey-colored hair swirled up in a coil above her forehead, where never a bead of sweat nor the slightest frowned wrinkle appeared. Suzy glided about the grandiose pillared TV studio set cool as Scarlett O’Hara preparing to single-handedly entertain an appreciative regiment of wounded Confederate soldiers. Suzy flirted and flittered, chattering away in intimate drawling syllables which conjured from thin air visions of Dixie Fried Catfish and Alabama Soda Cracker Shortbread. Suzy was having a party. Suzy never talked down to her food, it was as if someone else were preparing it and she was delighted to have been invited over to discover it. Suzy never mussed nor fussed, popping from the oven Tennessee Hush Puppies deftly as rabbits slipped from a magician’s hat. Suzy ran a swell sorority of culinary gals. She never let them forget they were all in on it together, in on the secret of how simple it was to slay men at the dinner table. Yes
Ma’am, simple as Shoo-Fly Pie. If you did not know you were in Okra Gumbo country then you had no God-given Southern rights to be eyeballing Suzy’s show at all, for it was certain you could not tell Florida Squid Casserole from Texas Tomatoes Stuffed with Succotash.

Suzy brought Lila along slow and easy, for Lila had caught the first part of the twelfth rerun of Suzy’s twenty-part show. It was simple enough for Lila in the beginning to tackle the Ham Slice with Cranberries; from there she graduated straight up the ladder to the true purpose of Suzy’s show, pride in Southern sisterhood. Until Suzy, Lila never thought much about anything other than the ordinary passing of the days. It took someone on television, who could not see Lila, to talk to her like she was a regular person. Lila listened. For some people, monks on a lonely mountaintop throw light into the dark canyons of life. For Lila, the sound of Suzy’s spoon in a bowl whipping up a Natchez Rutabaga Surprise rang clear as a calling bell in the wilderness. Lila loved to cook, she just needed someone to cook for.

Roger dined on Suzy’s Southern fare, prepared by Lila, for twenty-two fridays in a row, and popped one hundred bottles of California wine before he ever popped the question. It never occurred to Lila to get married, any more than before Suzy it ever occurred to learn how to well-grease an eight-inch baking pan when making Louisiana Walnut Fingers, but once encouraged in that direction Lila was not about to let the potential recipe for life’s happiness slip through her fingers. Margaret-Lynn held her peace when Roger popped the question, figuring that maybe she got beat up because she was not the young and beautiful one who canned Red Pepper Jam, besides, there was a certain pride Margaret-Lynn had in her youngest when she tucked an apron around her waist, displaying her wisdom ways about a tidy kitchen. Margaret-Lynn cried at the thought of her youngest being married away, partially because she knew there would be no more Griddlecakes With Buttermilk Gravy dinners, but mostly because she could still see those bloodhounds snarling around Roger’s trailer. Even so, in a county where most girls marry boys who go off into the service and take their new wives to foreign northern cities, Margaret-Lynn was glad Lila would be close, unlike her other daughters who divorced and then had to travel a goodly ways back home. At least Lila would not have such a long car ride when she wanted to return.

What Lila brought out in Roger was not his best, for Roger was
not filled with a best or a less than best. Roger was filled with Roger, which was a steady way of life which had been going on in the county from moonshine bootleggers to Bible-thumping preachers to marijuana farmers. All that really changed over the generations was the brand of truck a man drove, or the breed of dog he fed his table scraps to every night. For some reason Roger’s breed of bloodhounds never growled at Lila, he ventured the reason was they liked her Blueberry Ice Box Pie. Things went well for Roger and Lila in the trailer that first winter, straight through spring and summer, into fall when Suzy’s television show went off the air. The problem was not that Suzy’s show was canceled, the problem was what it was replaced by.

“Cooking French with Carl” was what Roger figured ruined his marriage at such an early stage, so he took to leaving the trailer early in the day for the Ace in the Hole until late at night, rather than hang around and see what that fruit Frog was turning his wife into. “Cooking French with Carl” was unlike anything Lila had ever seen. At first Lila resented the fact that Suzy’s Southern sisterhood of lofty scents and basic aromas had been snagged from the heart of weekday afternoons. Carl anticipated Lila’s misguided loyalty, he did not plead or beg for her attention, did not placate nor attempt to enjoin her in any new conspiracy. What Carl did was what Suzy did not. Where Suzy developed her intrepid troops through working the vein of vainglorious Southern smugness amongst the pillared antebellum splendor of her phony TV kitchen, Carl dared and challenged his nubile culinary novitiates to be something they never thought of being, open-minded. Open-mindedness to Carl was Continental cuisine, and on
the
Continent there was only one religion, French food. Carl made food, but he preached an implicit attitude of life. He wore a suit and striped tie on the TV set of his stainless steel kitchen, and he was not only ready, but insisted on, taking Lila places she had never dreamed of going. Carl used the stove and its blue-flaming gas burners as a magic carpet. He invited his “ladies” to blast off from the torpor of their Southern afternoons and join him, not as lover or sister, rather as coexplorers of realms both magical and historical. At the conclusion of each journey served up by Carl, one could sit down and eat dreams.

It started going bad for Roger with the
Sauté de Lapin Vin Blanc
. Roger liked it, but what he did not like was what it was called. Roger figured food was food, up until now he had been a good sport. He
figured Lila learned stuff from Suzy that as a man he was not cut out for, sisterhood of the cooking Confederacy stuff, handed down from generation to generation to television station. Roger was an uncomplicated meatloaf-and-yams man who slurped his way through Lila’s fancy Southern fare mainly because he wanted to devour Lila, whose body he had lusted after ever since the first night she gave herself over to him in the trailer as bloodhounds outside howled for more Blueberry Ice Box Pie. Roger could not believe something so perfect as Lila’s body could exist outside the colorful centerfold pages of the magazines that cluttered his trailer before Lila threw them all out. What did Roger care if she threw them out? Nothing, he had the real thing. Now Carl the Frog was trying to steal the real thing in broad daylight of the television’s afternoon glare. Roger wanted to drive to Atlanta and blow the Frog’s pink guts all over the stainless steel kitchen, but he knew the Frog was too clever for that, the Frog had prerecorded his afternoon stunts. As Roger drank his beery brew and scowled his way through long afternoons down at the Ace, he burped in remembrance of whatever trick Lila had adorned his plate with the night before. Roger came to hate
Noisettes de Porc aux Pruneaux
, he especially despised
Rognons en Casserole
. The Frog food was fuzzing up Roger’s capacity to do business as usual, the bloodhounds didn’t bark anymore, his last marijuana crop got the leafy mold and smoked up acrid. He thought about where he had gone wrong, where he had softened. His mistake was he let Lila get away with any damn thing she wanted. He should have taught her early, should have slapped her gorgeous ass up red, then no TV Frog would have messed with her mind and jerked his chain.

While Lila whiled away her afternoons with Carl, patting pork chops dry with paper towels and arranging layers of leeks with a spatula into a buttered baking dish, she never dreamed Roger was unhappy with her, for Roger was always raw around the edges, scowled at the rough men who worked his fields at night, snarled at his bloodhounds when they did not challenge intruders, and glowered at any man in the Ace who so much as glanced at her over his can of beer. Roger was normally ill-mooded, his business was none of her business, her business was to be a faithful wife and keep the artichokes boiling. It came as no surprise when one night Roger drove up in the pick-up and slammed to a stop in front of the trailer, stomped past the silent bloodhounds, sat at the kitchen table and demanded to be served. Lila was not quite ready for him, he was early for dinner, but
she was happy to have him there. She had spent one hour with Carl that afternoon learning all about
Boeuf à la Mode en Gelée
, a pot roast of beef in aspic dish requiring fancy footwork, combining a lineup of beef stock, gelatin, peppercorns, Madeira, seeded tomatoes, chopped parsley and garlic. It was a showboat concoction, one of Carl’s favorites, loaded with history as to how it was served to French royalty seated for grand picnic luncheons on the vast lawns of Versailles. Lila presented her triumph to Roger.

“Goddamnit, don’t want no more fuckin Frog food!” Roger sent the grand slab of perfectly done beef just past Lila’s head, it thundered against the trailer’s aluminum wall, showering an aspic rain. “Fuckin fed up,” Roger screamed above howling bloodhounds set off by the thunderous crash. “Fed up and pissed off! Why can’t you make fuckin American burger food!”

Lila never had a chance to answer the question. Roger grabbed her by the hair and whirled her around, slamming her against the aluminum wall into the quivering aspic slime. His clenched fist rose, ready to drive home the full meaning of his disappointment with his new wife’s daily menu, when a crazy thought jumped in his mind, freezing his fist in midair. The serene beauty of Lila’s face dazzled him, it appeared to be cut from the densest piece of white marble. His crazy thought was, if he struck Lila he would be striking an unbreakable statue of stone with a fist of flesh and bone that would surely break. Roger dropped his fist and his crazy thought went away. “Get your coat!” He snarled his command with the same tone of brute arrogance he used when giving orders to truckers before they roared away from his fields with their baled loads in early fall. “We’re goin dancin at the Ace!”

Like her mama, Margaret-Lynn, Lila loved to dance. Dancing was the one thing Lila loved to do more than cook, it was what she had before she found Suzy in the afternoon. Lila was a natural dancer, self-taught, a graceful breeze of a being on the roughest of dance floors. The night of the quivering aspic Lila sat silently in the pick-up as Roger roared along the back roads in a fury to hit the Ace. She felt a new sense rising within, not fear, but a feeling she had suddenly been put in touch with something important, strange excitement. The excitement was not aroused by Roger wanting to pulp her like an overripe tomato, but by Carl. Lila understood now what Carl meant earlier that afternoon, when he confided with a wink across the aspic frothing to a rise in a large copper pan over a stiff blue flame, “
I didn’t
learn to cook because I like to eat.”
Lila was discovering just what the true nature of her suppressed hunger was. Roger’s quick turn to violence freed in her a pure daring newly born, for until now Lila never questioned her role in her own life. She was not going to stay with Roger; the surprise in herself was tonight she was determined to do something about it. When the flashing red glow of the neon arrow pointing from its roadside perch to the entrance of the Ace came into view around a snaking turn on the dark highway Lila knew what she was going to do.

Roger had one final act to play to exhibit to an uncaring world his wrath over the emasculating fact a sneaky prerecorded Frog had stolen his wife’s affections and filled her mind with unfit thoughts. The act was to drag Lila onto the Ace dance floor and dance living hell out of her. Usually, when Roger danced with Lila, the men along the crowded bar were silent with covetous jealousy, and the women bottled their catty irritation with comments about how Lila never wore any nail polish, lipstick or underthings, but tonight there was more whooping and hollering than normal at a new band just fired from a big motel up on the Interstate at the outskirts to Atlanta. The boys in the band were young and mean and still pissed at the motel manager, who had fired them for encouraging their fifteen-year-old groupies to gather around the motel swimming pool in the early a.m. and slip their colorful panties off to pee into chlorine-clear water as truckers roared by on the Interstate with appreciative horn blasts. The boys in the band up on the platform were playing music from the sixties, and the ladies and gentlemen at the bar could get behind that, to the tune of reordering each other tequila blasters and rum busters. When Roger dragged his wife out onto the dance floor and threw her around to a chaotic beat so sinister even the boys in the band could not follow, the crowd grew appreciative and restless with anticipation. Either Roger’s old lady was going to slap him in the face or run off with another man, it was clear, and people were taking bets on which was going to happen when.

What rubbed Roger raw, chafed away at him in even a worse way than Lila’s philandering with the cooking Frog, was how she danced. It was not that Lila was a better dancer than he was, because Roger was never certain a man should be out in public shaking his ass anyway, so he did not figure he had to be very good at it. What worked at Roger was how Lila drifted away from him the moment they hit a dance floor. She never looked at him while they danced.
He was always forced to gyrate around into unseemly compromised positions simply to steal a look into his own wife’s eyes. His gyrating was never of any use, Lila never noticed he was there. It made no difference what music was being played, Lila made her own, gliding away on it rhythmically into the deepening groove of a trance. It was then Roger could feel her cheating on him. He knew she was dancing with someone unseen in a far-off place. On the dance floor a spell was cast over his wife, falling thick as a blanket of fog between them. Roger never discussed this cheating with Lila, but it was always there, separating them, damp and impenetrable. Tonight Roger was determined she would have to notice him, if for no other reason than simply to plead for mercy.