Corked (5 page)

“Don't be long! I'm making
ORZO!!!
” I yelled after him, as though the shape of the pasta would determine the length of his ride. My parents had spent the weekend at our home in the woods outside Quebec City. My father had nicknamed it the Camp, as if we were a family of monarchical pedigree, or a cult, like the Mansons. My father wanted silence, and a place to fish.

In the kitchen, I moved from fridge to stove to cabinets as if I were a robot. I accompanied the robot movements with a running internal monologue, done in the voice of a robot. OP-EN FRIDGE DRAW-ER. TAKE. THE. DILL. Finding this strange—I'm more of a mad stomper and a flailer—I flexed my neck and wiggled my shoulders to loosen them up. My heart felt like it was charley-horsed. Funny. I laughed a big laugh at myself to see if the sonic waves I was creating from my diaphragm and larynx would have a normalizing effect on the organ that lived between them.

There was a medicine ball on my chest, a big, heavy, invisible medicine ball plunked onto my chest by an imaginary personal trainer. Funny feeling.

Nico was going to die on his bicycle ride. I was going to cook this orzo and he'd be too dead to eat it. No. I wouldn't even get to the point of boiling the water for the orzo. My parents would come walking through the glass door and I'd explain that Nico had been in an accident and we had to drive to the hospital immediately. Had Nico ever indicated whether he'd want to be cremated or buried? Our family believed in cremations, generally. But he was only 16! Kids who are 16 have not yet made these decisions. Poor Nico, sideswiped by a pool-cleaning truck. His jaw hanging unhinged, his eyes wide open, frozen in a look of the most unwelcome of all surprises.

I breathed in acutely and focused more robotically than ever on the
mise en place
for the meal. My parents had called me hours before, wondering if I'd mind cooking dinner for the family. They'd be tired after the two-hour drive. “Lovey, we spent the afternoon varnishing the deck. Do you mind fixing something? We love your food,” my mother said over the phone in her moderate, lilting British accent. The deck was large; it zagged right around the entire structure. It was important that I cook this meal for them.

Meticulously, I shelled and deveined the shrimp, making sure there weren't any errant bits of disgusting shrimp legs in the bowl. I turned the blushing hothouse tomatoes into a smooth
concassé
. I pulled out pots and pans. YOU. ARE. TAKING. ONE. PAN. FROM. THE. OVEN. DRAW-ER. I diced shallots, crushed garlic to a paste using salt and the blade of my knife. I put those in a little bowl. A half lemon sat next to a small strainer I would use to catch the seeds; butter and oil, placed in a two-item row next to the stovetop; fresh dill weed, cut from its stalk.

I went round and round the kitchen, placing these bowls in order, adjusting the pan and pot handles so they were not hanging carelessly off the front of the stove. My muscles were that of a startled cat. When would they come home? Were they home yet? I bumped into an open drawer and backed into the stove, causing the large pot of water for the orzo to splash. “Fuck!” I exclaimed. “Fuck. Fuck.” They weren't going to make it home. There would be terrible smashings and crunchings of metal and bone. One of them would fly through the windshield. The other would die right away from shock and a broken heart. Ambulances would arrive, but it would be too late. Cars and emergency vehicles and startled passersby on mobile phones would form a blinking circle around the corpses and the glass shards and the pools of blood.

I stood very still and tried to focus on the strategy of the meal. First, heat the pan. Then add the oil until it shines and the butter until it foams. Drop in the shallots, and let them sweat. Next, the garlic. Be careful not to burn it, or it will become bitter and chewy and ruin the meal. Deglaze with white wine.

Checking in the fridge for wine, I found a half bottle of Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc lying on its side, next to the milk. Good. THERE. IS. WINE. THIS. WINE. IS. FROM. NEW. ZEALAND.

Deglaze with white wine. Add the tomatoes. Squeeze the lemon into the pan. Stir together. Season with salt and pepper.

What was the point of this? They would all be dead. I was cooking dinner for a family of ghosts.

Perfect
, I thought. This was, in fact, perfect.
If they are all dead, no one will care if I kill myself then
. Wait.
Peter might care
. I stopped thinking of suitable methods of suicide for the sake of my loving boyfriend, who loved me dearly. He'd lost his father in a car accident the year before he rode shotgun for mine. I felt guiltier about this than anything else. Anything else in life.

I will fill my vein with a large dose of heroin. I am not steely enough to slit my wrists or jump off a building. Maybe vodka and many, many lorazepams
. I nodded silently to myself.

Peter would definitely care.
But he'll get over it
, I told myself. There would be a mass funeral for all the Borels, and that would be our sad story. My father was an important player in the city, a quasi-celebrity, really. We'd probably make the front page of a few of the province's French newspapers at least. Peter could report on it because he was a CBC reporter. That'd be nice—fitting, reverent, in a civic sort of way. The Borels are all dead. The end.
Fin
. Peter Armstrong, signing off for CBC News in Quebec City.

Nico came home first, sweating and misted with park dust.

“Hey, Toots,” he yelled, bumping his bike over the track of the sliding door and scooting it into the front hallway. He turned the corner into the bathroom and I heard the lock go
click
.

Everyone told me to drive. In my last month at school, my radio skills professor implored me to see her shrink. She had been through a divorce, and he had “really saved her life.” When I sat down across from his potted fern and questionably patterned sweater, he said, “One thing is for sure. You feel bad. You feel bad for long periods of time, then you don't feel bad for a short period of time. Little by little, those periods of time when you feel bad will start to contract, and the time between them when you feel okay will begin to expand. And then one day, the bad periods will disappear altogether.” He paused and then asked, “You're still driving, right? You should drive.” I told him I had driven to my mom's embroidery studio right after I had completed the police report at the site of the accident. She and Peter and I had gone to a coffee shop and talked about the scene, the blood, the man, my head. She made small sympathetic noises and covered my hand with her hand and gave me lots of squeezes, like little heartbeats. She asked if I was stable enough to drive back to the house. I said yes. I said, “Yes, YES!” to all these concerned citizens who didn't know what to ask and so they asked about my driving skills (terrific!), about where I wanted to drive (everywhere!), about how much I loved driving (so much!), about why driving was important (oh, you know!).

“Good!” the shrink said. “Keep it up.”

I was not afraid of handling a car. My driving skills had become tack-sharp. Since February, I had undergone a metamorphosis. Behind the wheel, I was like one of those insects with compound eyes that could see everything at once, no matter how fast it was coming. A dragonfly or a bee, an all-seeing insect who could perceive even the polarization of light.

I pictured my parents' old human eyes, dopey and heavy-lidded, weightily drooping with fatigue and glazed with varnish fumes. Maybe no one would even be around to see the accident. One of them would misjudge a turn in the road—one of the smaller, less traveled roads—and sail off the side of it. The car would land upside down on the side of a blossoming potato field, crushing them both like a stick of gum at the bottom of an old lady's purse.

I made the sauce with assiduous attention to the heat of the pan, the smell of the ingredients, the timing of the solid and liquid additions. After tasting it, I added a bit of dried thyme and two large pinches of sugar to remove some of the bitterness from the tomatoes.

And finally, there was a clattering outside. I peered below the cupboards and through the galley area of the kitchen. They were home. They made it. They were alive and home and they had made it.

“Hi, Toots,” my dad said.

“Hi, my love,” my mom said.

“Hi,” I croaked, my body limp as wet tissue paper.

“We have fresh trout for dinner!” my dad announced cavalierly. My mom dropped a load of things she was carrying and went back to the car to pick up another load.

“You have what for dinner?” I whispered.

“Trout,” he said, lifting up a red-and-white Coleman's cooler.

“YOU HAVE
WHAT
FOR DINNER?” I screamed. I glared at him, then back at the sauce, as though the sauce were in on this sick gag. I began to sob. I flung cuss words at him. He came toward me and I beat his chest with open palms, eventually slouching into his alarmed embrace.

“But you asked me to fix dinner,” I cried weakly. It was obvious that nothing could be fixed.

My menu was out the window.

The end.

I had killed someone's father.

The end.

The end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end the end.

Clamping his hands on my shoulders, he unglued me from his shirt. He looked at me hard, concerned. His voice was grave.

“Tou Tou, please remember. Your life is no longer your own once you are loved.”

I put the sauce in a Tupperware container for another night. He fried the trout, and it was surprisingly delicious.

Eventually, it all became less important—the old man, the orzo, my pain, all of it. Until my dad, in a way, became the butt of his own joke, when I saw that he too would die. One day.

 

“T
his is not good.” My father's brown eyes, heavy-lidded, stared down at his hands with an expression that said, “Oh, hands. I have hands.” His jaw hung open. Salvador Dali had painted him in the same manner as his droopy watches. The night, for him, had been sleepless and explosive. “It's 11 already? This is not good.” My father never slept in.

I inspected him hard with my one open eye. Only one eye opened. The other was puffed shut. We forgot to shut the window before falling asleep, and had allowed a swarm of robust, northern French mosquitoes to enter and do their wicked bidding. As the jet lag delivered its last blow to the back of my skull like a cast-iron frying pan, I'd heard their kamikaze swoops around my ears. In a silent prayer to the insect gods, I'd whispered, “Anywhere but the cold sore, you guys.” They'd obeyed, and indulged me by stinging the shit out of my eyelid.

“It'll get better, Dad!” I cheered. My voice was that of a pubescent boy, crackling with uncertainty. On this morning, our little boat was one wave short of a shipwreck, plus I can't swim very well. I really can't. I had trained for a triathlon once and gave myself two black eyes and a concussion after affixing my goggles too tightly to my face and slamming into the pool wall.

“Toots, if this continues, we'll have to cancel.”

“Tomorrow's tastings? That's not a huge deal, Dad. Don't worry.”

“No.
Everytheeng
.”

“The trip?”

“Mmhmm.”

“Oh come on.” I tossed aside his comment, but bile sizzled somewhere in me. Yes. I knew he was prone to melodrama. In any other circumstance, on any other trip, I would humor him. In this context, however, it felt flippant and disrespectful.
Does he even know why I wanted to come here with him? Share this with him? He's not going to die now—he has plane food poisoning. He is going to die later of death, of REAL DEATH! Has he not read into the symbolism of his damn cellar being his damn story and if I don't feel what he feels about what's in his damn cellar, I'll never feel his damn story?
I allowed myself to wallow for a moment in the tacit betrayal that was his utter inability to understand what seemed, to me, at least, like
very simple metaphorical links
.

He'd seen my face turn shadowy and glum.

“I'm sorry—”

“For what? Oh, don't be sorry. We'll get you better.”
Good. Okay. He's responding
. I manically began clawing through my satchel to locate the Spasfon brand nausea medicine we bought at the airport. I wanted to dump it all out, grind it up on the mirror, roll up a 50 Euro bill, attach it to his nose, and slam his face down on the glassy desk while screaming, “Hoover that shit, Dad! HOOVER IT!” To cancel the trip would be nonsensical. It would prove that God exists, and he is a cruel and vengeful God who loathes daughters and indulges men with abdominal problems. It would prove that he has an egregious inability to prioritize tasks and a sense of humor reminiscent of Dante's Inferno. I don't believe in him, but I would nevertheless write a strongly worded letter, a letter with the strongest words I know. A complaint letter to his ombudsman, including all the much more pressing chores he should be undertaking, such as:

1. Fix Africa.

2. Fix the Middle East.

3. Give us teleportation already!

4. Pick up dry cleaning.

Once he has completed these tasks,
then
he can ironically punish me for ignoring my father while he was trying to share with me pieces of his history through wine. Only then.

“I'm not saying we must cancel the trip. I just want you to get used to the idea. Consider
eet
as an option,” my father said woefully.

He'd gone back to being the emperor of defeatism.

“Don't you
start again
.”

“Start what again?” he asked, full of innocence.

“Thaaaaat's the game! Thaaat's the gaaaaame!”
I raised my voice, taunting him to remember what kind of spectator he was at my tennis matches when I'd first started playing competitively.

When we lived in Dallas, my father's job was based in the Loews Anatole, a behemoth of a hotel with 1,000 rooms, three pools, four restaurants, a koi pond, and hissing peacocks that roamed the elaborately manicured grounds. My parents put me in private tennis lessons. The hotel was on a freeway, so we had no neighbors. The only children who were immediately accessible were those who were staying in the hotel with their parents, and they would always leave me after a few days. The tennis lessons helped with the sort of surreal solitary confinement. I'd been playing since I was small, and the pro at the health club said he saw potential in me. (Looking back, I believe he actually saw potential in my mother, who is a babe, and to whom he likely wanted to give a good rogering. His name was Randy Beaver.) By the time we moved to France, I was competing in regional tournaments against girls three and four years older than me. My father would come to the games, not to cheer me on, but to act as a grim commentator when I was losing. He was famous for his prescience, especially when I was down four games in the second set thanks to being matched against hulking girl-women whose serves might as well have been fired from rocket launchers. “That's the game!” he'd say, with a long, watery emphasis on the first syllable. “Thaaaat's the game!”

All at once angry with me, or maybe just ashamed, he marched over to the bathroom and locked himself in it. He might not have been admitting it in words, but the horrid sounds that emanated said, “
Thaaaat's the game
.”

That's not the game, you melodramatic senior citizen. Not on my watch
.

A few minutes later, my pallid Jesus-on-the-cross emerged. He looked calmer. I recalibrated.

“Let's go get some food into you, mmmkay?” I would baby him. When my father becomes ill, he must be babied. He finds it helpful to have a little antique bell around so that he can summon members of the family without having to use his voice. A little bell!

As a gesture of solidarity and care, I joined him in a Spartan breakfast of plain toast and bottles of Contrexéville's famed mineral water. We were sitting in a corner of the Cosmos's bright, 1920s-style communal breakfast area, surrounded by sleek businesspeople and suave older travelers, leafing calmly through
Le Monde
, fitting their lips around their glazed and creamy and fruity and meaty breakfasts. We did not look like these people; we were dressed functionally for driving. I felt deeply unattractive with my cold sore and fat eye, while my dad slouched and sighed through his audible cramps. He worked his way into a piece of baguette, chewing meekly, tentatively, like a child who's forced to eat food that is obviously wholesome, like beets or anything not made entirely of sugar. A constellation of rogue crumbs had adhered themselves to his clammy, glistening cheek. He didn't notice as he was staring openly at a man with a regrettably large, Gorbachevesque birthmark on his bald head. I reached over the table and wiped the crumbs off Dadbaby's face with a kindly slapping gesture and resumed my mission to nibble the flat sliced middle of my own baguette into the shape of France. It was easy to do: just five clean diagonal bites around the square of bread and
voilà
, buttered France. I inspected it for topographical accuracy and showed it to my father.

“Look, Dad, it's France,” I said.

“Very good, Tootsen.” He sighed again. His eyes were on me, then down at his own dry bread, then at my little buttered-toast France, which I was about to nibble down to an even smaller France. I am an engaged eater; he knows this. He knows I have always placed a high value on the last bite of food. Carrots, I eat backward, beginning with the fat end that's close to the root, so that I can save the sweet tip for last. I will spend a half-hour on a slice of cake, making sure the final tiny portion has the most delectable sponge-to-icing ratio.

My father continued to stare at toast France.

“Mrrrrughhhh.” Groaning through the motion, he lunged toward my outstretched hand, grabbed the pentagonal piece in his teeth, and swallowed it. France was lost.

I slammed my fist down, causing the ice in our water glasses to jangle.

“Not cool, Dad,” I said.

I only had theories about what motivated his erratic habit of blind, unfeeling entitlement. Perhaps it was because he is a child of the war. And his father, because of his involvement with the Jewish organization, forced the family to move down the length of France, living in squalor and fear of being arrested by the Gestapo. Because he didn't have nice things for such a long time, like little tin cars and fresh oranges. Maybe it was because his father fell ill with emphysema after the family had moved to Canada for a brand new start, and my father, at 13, was obliged to support his parents and baby sister by working as a dish pig in a restaurant. Or because he suffered the psychic repercussions of his impulsive decisions, like getting married too early, at 19, to his first wife, who had a temper and threw his first humidor against their apartment wall, causing it to shatter and cigars to fly everywhere. Perhaps it was because he watched my two older half-brothers, Marc and Philou, slowly disengage from him, and maybe blame him, indirectly, for causing their mother such pain that she eventually died of cancer. I hadn't asked. Maybe it was all of the above, maybe it was none of it. Maybe children don't ask these questions of their parents. Whatever it was, I didn't believe it allowed him to eat the last bite of my toast without asking. As it didn't allow him to reach over the table when we were dining at a restaurant and begin eating my meal before I'd touched it, or he'd touched his own. Or distractedly grab
my
gym socks from the top of the laundry pile and wear them to work out and return them to me stretched as big as a wind sleeve.

We continued to pick at the breadbasket. I was trying not to be hurt, but I was hurt. The loss of toast-France had caused another little scroll to unfurl, this time with all the individual instances of his carelessness written upon it in tiny script.

“Hey, hey, Tootsie,” he whispered. “Steal some dry toasts for the trip today. Come on.”

There was a basket of plastic-wrapped, thick, French-style melba toasts sitting on the buffet table. If we were to purchase a package at the store, they would cost approximately $3.

“No,” I snapped.

“Please,” he whined.

“No way. If you want the toasts so badly,
you
steal them. You have bigger pockets. Or we could, oh, I don't know, buy some on our way out of town? So we don't look like vagabonds?”

“Please, Tou Tou. Come on. Be my
frieeeeend
. My stomach. It hurts so much.”

“No. I'm serious. You steal them your own damn self on your way out.”

He widened his eyes and moaned, “But Tootsie! I can't…I'm not fast enough. My knee! My poor knee!!”

My father had snapped the tendons in his knee a few years ago. He'd been transplanting a birch tree from one end of The Camp to another, thinking it would help during mosquito season. My mother and I are extremely susceptible to their bites—the marks will swell to the size of tangerines. He'd heard some Quebec lore about birches and their mosquito-repelling capabilities. Later, it turned out he'd been misinformed, but not before falling into the large hole he'd dug for the tree. After he'd been walking around using golf putters as canes for a few weeks, my mother suggested he see a doctor. He'd undergone two surgeries. Technically, his knee was fine, but the accident had revealed to him that he was capable of real, mortal deterioration. His walk became more delicate. He had begun to fall, sometimes down entire sets of stairs, especially the narrow staircase that led to his wine cellar. One day I found him at the bottom, his body as curved as a shrimp's, perfectly still save for the gentle rise and fall of his shoulder. I think it scared him. It definitely scared me.

But when my dad discovered he could pretty much get away with doing nothing physically strenuous for days on end, he began blaming his knee for all shortcomings, as a sort of sociological experiment to ascertain the relationship between people's blind goodwill and the point at which they're able to apply their skills of critical analysis to a raving cripple.

Sometimes I am convinced my father is a sociopath.

“Please, Tootsen.”

“Argh.
Fine
,” I huffed. I walked over to the buffet table.

“
No! Not now!
” he hissed.

I whipped around to face him. “Are you actually trying to micromanage my toast-stealing technique? Are you being serious?”

“Do it at
zee
end of the meal—on our way out, like you said.” He shook his head and motioned me back to the table.