The School of Essential Ingredients (13 page)

He had pulled himself up even closer to her, his lips against the line of her jaw. He took her hand and led her fingers to the lump. Then he drew his head back and fell into the look in her eyes.

“That’s enough,” Lillian said, taking the fork from Tom’s hand. “Now we work the dough. Think of your hands as waves moving in and out of the ocean. You fold the dough over, then push it gently with the heel of your hand, then fold again and push again, for as long as it takes until the dough feels as if it is part of you. You could use a dough hook on your mixer if you wanted, but you’d miss out on something. Kneading dough is like swimming or walking—it keeps part of your mind busy and allows the rest of your mind to go where it wants or needs to.”

TWO Weeks after he found the lump, Tom came home from work early and heard laughter at the back of the house—Charlie’s and a man’s he didn’t recognize. He walked into the kitchen and saw Charlie sitting at the table, her shirt open, breasts falling forward unrestrained. Her head was tipped back, laughter floating up from her like flowers. At her feet knelt a man he hadn’t seen before.

“What . . .” Tom stood unmoving, not understanding.

“Tom,” said Charlie, smiling up at him, “meet Remy. He’s helping me with a little project.”

She looked at Tom’s expression and laughed softly. “Remy blows glass, Tom. We’re taking a mold of my breasts. Remy’s going to blow me a pair of wineglasses. One for me and one for you—we never had quite such an equal distribution before.” She was still laughing, but her eyes were on his, waiting for understanding.

Tom looked at his wife and the man on the floor, his hands cupped around her breasts. Charlie’s words fell about him, and he realized he had no way to make sense of the information he was being given.

Charlie watched him, took a breath, and the laughter swept off her face like dust in front of a broom. “Tom, we both know what the doctors are going to say tomorrow. They’re going to take my breasts. I don’t care, they can have them, but I want something.” She shook her head. “Something I can hold in my hand. Do you understand?”

Tom looked at the woman he loved and the man kneeling on the floor. He walked over and put his hand softly on Remy’s shoulder. Then he bent over and kissed his wife.

Over the FOLLOWING months, the world turned into something small and terrifying, with its own language of terminology and statistics, prognoses and theories made from the very stuff of reality—although Tom often thought that Charlie’s beliefs about yeast or spices were more worth putting your faith in. He found himself yearning for days of grocery lists and difficult clients, things you could complain about because you knew they would eventually go away.

One night he came home from work to find the kitchen empty, the door to the backyard open. Tom couldn’t see Charlie at first, but then he spotted the gentle motion of the hammock, the slightest of movements under the apple trees. As he went down the stairs he could see Charlie’s profile, her cheekbones, sharp in the light, the inch or so of hair that was beginning to grow back along her skull. She had been worried about her looks, she who had been the object of so many appreciative glances, and yet her beauty had not so much changed with the loss of her hair and breasts and all the weight, but distilled, intensified—so pure and personal he sometimes felt as if he should ask permission to look at her.

“You know,” Charlie said, without turning her head, “one of the unanticipated benefits of big breasts is that they make very large wineglasses.” She raised her glass, one of the pair Remy had made.

“Charlie, should you be . . . ?” Charlie turned toward him, and the expression in her eyes stopped his words.

“It’s a nice evening, don’t you think?” Charlie said. “It deserves a good red.”

“Charlie ... ?” He waited, holding on to the air in his lungs, knowing that with the next breath everything would be different.

“New nurse,” Charlie replied, taking a long, reflective sip of wine, “wanted to make sure she was doing her job well—thought I’d appreciate those lab results today, not wait until the doctor’s appointment.”

“But I thought ...”

“Apparently not,” she said, shaking her head slightly. “Want some wine? I saved some for you.”

She shifted position, making space in the hammock next to her. Tom climbed in, Charlie holding the glass high above her head to minimize the motion of the wine. They lay, looking across the length of the hammock at each other. It was quiet in the yard, the noise of the traffic out on the street and the sounds of their neighbors arriving home enclosing the space like a blanket.

“You know,” she said after a time, leaning her face against his leg, “every night, people used to come into my restaurant and I would watch them as they ate my food. They’d relax, they’d talk, they’d remember who they were. Maybe they went home and made love. All I know is I was part of that. I was a part of them.

“A very quiet part.” She smiled. “But I’m starting to think there are advantages to quiet.”

He looked at her across the hammock. She was already leaving, a bit at a time. He longed to reach for her, pull her across the length of the hammock to him, but the still, quiet look in her eyes stopped him.

“They aren’t taking any more of you,” he said. “I’m not going to let it happen.”

“My sweet lawyer,” she said, her voice deep and slow as the bottom of a river, “I don’t think you have a choice.” She paused, and took another sip of wine. “We’re all just ingredients, Tom. What matters is the grace with which you cook the meal.”

“When the dough is READY,” Lillian said, “we roll it out and cut it, into long, thin strips. There are machines that do this—try them if you’d like. Or find yourself a long wooden rolling pin, a sharp knife, and a good, tall chair to hang the strips over. They won’t all look the same, and that’s all right. It’s your hands that matter.”

Over the Weeks, Charlie disappeared, as steadily as water evaporating from a boiling kettle. Watched pots, Tom thought, and took a leave from his work to sit with her, his eyes never leaving the ever-deepening curves of her face, the tips of his fingers resting next to hers when her skin could no longer tolerate touch.

“Isn’t that a bitch,” she said, with her slow, steady smile, “just when you most wanted to jump my bones.”

And he couldn’t tell her that he did, he would, that he would take whatever of her was left. Instead he commandeered every part of her care that required touch, washing her by hand when she could no longer stand in the shower, massaging lotion into her feet and legs and hands when the medications sucked the moisture from her skin, buzz-cutting her hair when it grew past her self-imposed one-inch limit.

“Bloody hell, Tom,” she said, “at least I shouldn’t have to worry about my hair. You think people really won’t know I’m sick?”

And he learned to cook, whatever she could eat, adding the subtle and gentle spices that gave flavor without attacking her decimated stomach lining, the greens and yellows and reds that brought the outside world to her.

“Promise me you’ll keep cooking when I’m gone.” Charlie’s voice was insistent.

“I’ll eat,” he said, frustrated. “Don’t worry about me.”

“Not just eat,” Charlie corrected him. “Cook.”

Finally, even food was no longer a topic. The house lost the smells of cooking and Charlie lived only on air and water, diving deep into her mind for longer and longer periods of time, coming back only to look into him, as if her eyes could tell him everything she had seen while she was gone. Then one day she met his eyes, dove, and simply disappeared. Tom was left behind in a stunning vacuum, surrounded by stacks of useless medications and bandages, holding only a feeling, deeply lodged in his bones, his brain, his heart, that even though Charlie had told him again and again that it wasn’t about winning, he had lost.

After the weeks and months of watching, of life suspended in the bottomless well of Charlie’s illness, the world seemed absurdly practical. There were bills to pay, a lawn to mow, laundry that smelled only of sweat and last night’s microwaved dinner. Incoming phone calls reverted to casual check-ins from friends; no longer was he the source of grim updates. The hand-delivered meals from helpful neighbors slowed and then disappeared. He went to the grocery store without wondering if she would be there when he returned, the churning in his stomach replaced by a more certain and deeper ache. She was nowhere and everywhere, and he couldn’t stop looking.

The only people who really wanted to talk about Charlie’s death were the service providers and government agencies, who all wanted proof, in hard copy. He became the dispenser of death certificates, sending forth missives of mortality to phone service providers, credit card companies, life and health insurance, the Department of Motor Vehicles and Social Security. It was amazing, he thought, how many people cared to know, for sure, that you were dead.

Charlie had been clear that she didn’t want to be buried. “Not unless you can turn me into compost,” she told him firmly, then explained to him what she wanted. So one night a group of friends gathered and ate dinner on the beach that Charlie loved—slices of dripping cantaloupe from the old fruit vendor who cried when he heard the news, fresh fish marinated in olive oil and tarragon and grilled over a beachfront fire, chunks of thick-crusted bread from her favorite bakery in town, a spice cake Tom made from Charlie’s own recipe. Afterward, they threw her ashes in great arcs out to the water. What only Tom knew was that each of them carried a tiny bit of her home with them that night, baked into the cake they had eaten.

After that, Tom stopped talking. It was as if all those conversations, the hard ones while she was alive and the prosaic ones after her death, had used up anything he would ever want to say. It was simply too much trouble to open his mouth, to think about what someone else might want or need to hear. His mind was busy, although he couldn’t have told anyone with what.

Almost nine months later, on what would have been Charlie’s birthday, a friend had taken him to Lillian’s restaurant for dinner. “Charlie would want you to be around food on her birthday, buddy,” he had said, “and Lillian’s will make even you want to eat.”

It was August, the leaves on the cherry trees in the restaurant garden green and full when they walked up the path to Lillian’s. They sat on the porch in the large Adirondack chairs with glasses of red wine as they waited for a table, listening to the hum of conversation about them, the clink of silverware coming through the open windows of the dining room inside. Tom felt his mind slowing, coming to rest in the serenity of the garden surrounding them.

When they were finally seated in the wood-paneled dining room, a waitress came up to their table and greeted them.

“We have a wonderful seafood special tonight,” she announced. “Lillian found beautiful fresh clams and mussels at the seafood market today and she is serving them over homemade angel hair pasta in a sauce of butter, garlic, and wine, with just a bit of red pepper flakes and . . .” The waitress stopped, flustered at her lack of memory.

“Oregano,” Tom said quietly.

“Yes,” the waitress responded, relieved. “Thank you. How did you know?”

“Lucky guess,” Tom said, raising his glass in a silent toast. He looked down at the table in front of him, concentrating on the weave of the linen cloth, the curve of the handle of his fork, the cut-glass lines of the small, round bowl filled with sea salt and fennel.

Then Tom noticed a folded chocolate-colored placard, almost hidden behind the bowl of salt. He picked up the small sign and read the cream-colored script flowing across the surface.

Announcing:
The new session of
The School of Essential Ingredients

“Class, I think we are ready,” Lillian called over her shoulder, as she emptied the pasta from the huge pot into a colander. “Now all we need are plates.”

As Lillian transferred the steaming spaghetti noodles from the colander to a heavy ceramic bowl, the students stood up obediently and went to the shelves, passing white pasta plates from one person to the next like a fireman’s brigade. They lined up in front of the counter, jokingly jostling each other. Lillian carried over the big blue bowl and began placing a serving of pasta on each plate.

“Tom,” she said, turning to him, “you do the honors with the sauce. It’s yours, after all.” She watched as he ladled the first fragrant red spoonful onto a waiting bed of creamy-yellow pasta. When everyone was served, the class settled into groups in the chairs, talking companionably before taking their first bites, after which the room dissolved into a silence interrupted only by the sounds of forks against plates and the occasional sigh of satisfaction.

“Look at what you did,” Lillian remarked quietly, standing next to Tom at the counter.

“They’ll eat it,” he said, “and then it’ll be gone.”

“That’s what makes it a gift,” Lillian replied.