Eating Heaven (29 page)

M
om drives us through Benny’s neighborhood, skirting the tall forest that pervades these parts, scraped clean only where developers found the need to build. She takes twisty back roads that I’ve never known existed, heading deeper into the trees, and pulls off onto the shoulder at a small clearing above the banks of what must be the Tualatin River. Giant firs tower over us, surround us in all directions, and it looks familiar, though I could swear I’ve never been here before.

“Where are we?” I ask. “Is this a park?”

She nods distractedly, waves her hand. “Brown’s Ferry or River Run. I can never keep them straight.”

“Did you used to bring us here?” I crane my head to look around outside. Closer to the river there are a few picnic tables, a horseshoe pit.

“Oh, probably. I must have.” She sighs, slumping into her seat, staring straight in front of her. “I suppose he told you everything.”

“And which topic are you referring to?”

“Eleanor,” she says. “Don’t be smart.”

“I just want to know why you lied to me about Benny being Rosemary’s father.”

“Oh, for God’s sake. Did he tell you that?”

“He didn’t have to. He’s named as her father in the obituary.”

She flinches, and I wish I’d used a softer word, but what would it be? Death notice?

“Honey, believe me. I would know. Karl Milgrew was the father. Not that he ever took any responsibility.”

“Well, then, what didn’t you tell me the truth about?”
Aha,
I think.
Snared in her own trap.

“I didn’t mean it that way. Don’t put words in my mouth.”

I sigh, exasperated. “Mother. You just said, ‘I suppose he told you everything.’ You’re going to have to tell me what ‘everything’ means, or we’re never going to get anywhere.”

“Fine,” she says, sitting up in her seat and removing her sunglasses. She pulls the visor down to fix her smeared eye makeup in the mirror, then slaps it shut and puts her sunglasses back on. “But I mean it, Eleanor, when I say this is for your ears only.”

“Fine,” I say.

Mom repeats her story about falling in love with the now identified Karl Milgrew in college. She got pregnant. Karl decided to ignore the problem, moving on to the next pretty girl with mischievous eyes and a sassy walk. “He dumped me,” she says. “Benny was such a dear friend, one of the few good young men. He stood by me the whole time.” She stops, looks down at her hands in her lap. “I never told my mother, you know. She would have hated me. My sister knew, but I wouldn’t let her come.”

When she went into labor, she called Benny. He drove her to the hospital, and they told the admissions nurse that Benny was the father. They were clearly unmarried. She didn’t blink an eye, Mom said. Must have happened all the time.

The labor was troubled from the start, contractions boring through Mom’s body like cyclone after cyclone. The doctor gave her gas for the pain, but after eight hours, ten, twelve, the baby still wasn’t budging.

“The gas wore off,” Mom says. “I have never been so ill in all my life.” She writhed and retched for hours more, sweating, screaming, vomiting bile, and peeing the bed. She called for Benny, and the nurses let him come into the labor room.

Benny stayed with her, calming her, talking her out of her ill-conceived attempts to get up and leave, telling her the baby would be there soon, they just had to be patient. The nurses all said he was the
only father they’d ever seen who stayed for more than just a perfunctory visit. Most men returned to their seats in the waiting room and read the newspaper, or left and waited for a phone call. Most of them couldn’t stomach such a thing.

“They knew something was wrong, but they wouldn’t tell me,” she says. Her nostrils flare, and I see that it still saddens her to this day. “That baby never had a chance.”

Sometime in the eighteenth hour of labor, Mom’s doctor decided to deliver the baby by Caesarian section. “I was petrified; I didn’t want them to cut me,” she says. “I was so young. You should have seen my figure.” She shakes her head. And now I know why my mother never wore a two-piece, never wore sexy underwear. We all must have been delivered this way.

The baby was born with cerebral palsy and a long list of defects and conditions that neither Mom nor Benny could comprehend. The doctor didn’t think she’d live more than a few days. Benny sat with Mom through the first night in her hospital room, the second, the third. While she slept like the dead, he sat in the chair next to her, napping, watching her sleep.

She woke in the predawn hours of the fourth day to see him sitting with the baby bundled in his arms. “You have to name her, Bebe,” he said. “She needs to be somebody.”

“I can’t,” she said, weeping. “I just can’t.” So Benny named her.

“Why Rosemary?” I interrupt.

“For my mother,” she says. “Katherine Rosemary.”

Benny wanted to marry Mom, to give the baby a father, to give her a husband. “I was tired, I was confused, and I was in so much pain. I should have said no.”

“You? You’re the first wife? You always said he was a widower!”

“Widowed, divorced. There’s not that much difference when you’ve lost someone you love.” The corners of her mouth pull down, and she drops her forehead into her hand. She’s been lying her whole life, and she’s lying now.

“Are you trying to tell me you didn’t love him back?”

Her shoulders heave; she wails a thin high sob. “Of course I loved him. Don’t you see?” She screeches the words like some jungle bird in danger of predation. “That’s the whole problem. I did love him, goddamn it!”

And then she is sobbing words in a rush, the history of our family flying apart in a tangled, ugly mess.

“I left him because I was depressed. I didn’t know about postpartum, I didn’t know it wasn’t him. I married your father because I thought he’d make everything better. He was so different from Benny and me, so solid and practical. You don’t realize this, but your father was a catch; he was smart and handsome. He was all set to start a good job out here, and he wanted me to come with him. It was so far away; it was perfect.”

She sniffs, then shakes her head. “But I couldn’t stand being without Benny. He wouldn’t move here, not at first, but I begged him to. I wore him down. He’d already left college to go to work to support Rosemary, but he never complained, even though the only job he could find was fixing cars. And he always spent every penny on her, always finding her the best home, the best doctors.”

“And Dad didn’t know any of this?” I sound angry, childish, and I’m not even sure why I care so much about Dad, except that I remember the anguished, wounded sound in his voice that night, so many years ago, in our kitchen.

“He knew I’d had a child out of wedlock and married hastily. I told him she’d died. The rest he guessed.” She turns to look at me, and my face is reflected in each lens of her sunglasses; I look away. “Not many men would have married me with my, let’s just say
history,
Eleanor. I’m not sure I deserved him in the first place. Why on earth would I tell him anything more?”

It’s all too much. My mother is too much. I fold my arms over my chest, lean my head against the seat to look out the window. The trees, the way they’re spaced, the background brush. I know this place.

“This is the place where you took that photo of Benny,” I say, sitting upright. “The one you gave him when he married Yolanda.”

“Yes,” she says, looking out the window. She sighs, then says, “I took
that on the day I told him I’d decided to leave your father. I wanted to capture the look on his face when he realized we could finally be together, but . . .” She trails off, shrugs her shoulders.

“Oh, my God. You did?” I turn to her. What would our lives have been like? Broken by divorce, or blessed by a loving father? “He said no?”

“He’s a . . . he
was
 . . . a very moral man. He wouldn’t break up our family.”

“But that time I was sick, and you two were in the car—”

“I said he was moral, not saintly. After that he married Yolanda, of course, and it was over between us.”

I nod. I can still see his look of revulsion at my catching them together that day.

“Did you want to get together after Dad died?”

“He wouldn’t.”

“Then why’d Yolanda leave him?”

She closes her eyes. “Because I finally decided to tell her everything about Benny and me, all the parts he’d never have told her. He protected her so much from . . . all of that. He told her about Rosemary but not me. He stuck to that same old ‘girl back in Missouri’ story he always told. I knew she’d hate him for lying to her all those years.”

“God, that’s . . . that’s so horrible. They were so happy.”

She turns to me again, takes off her sunglasses. Her eyes are dark hollows, her skin red and blotchy. “You think I don’t know that?” she sobs, then starts the car. “It only made him hate me more.”

We drive in silence back to Benny’s house. Before I get out, I say, “There’s just one more thing I have to know.”

She looks at me wearily.

“Who’s my father?”

“Oh, Eleanor,” she says. “Just be happy you were born whole and healthy, okay? The rest of it doesn’t matter.”

“You don’t know, do you?”

“Not a word to your sisters,” she says, patting her hair, shaking her head as though she can shake off her past. “You promised.”

“Actually, I didn’t,” I say, and get out of the car. “And for the
record, Benny didn’t tell me anything. He protected you, just like he always did.”

The crowd has thinned. The bowls and platters on the dining room table are bare, and I’m starving. Aunt Yolanda is in the kitchen with her back to me, washing dishes, bracelets jangling. She turns her head when I come in.

“Honey?” she says. “You missed all the food. I saved you a plate—it’s in the fridge.” Her brow furrows in concern. “Is everything okay?”

I walk over to her, put my arms around her shoulders from behind, and lay my head against hers. She smells like cloves and soap. She smells like garlic and onions and chocolate chip cookies and watermelon and barbecue smoke on a hot summer night.

“Yes,” I say, not wanting to let go, and she turns and wraps her arms around me, not asking any more questions, just letting me sink into the soft, full sweetness of her.

“Yes,” I say again.

I
’ve always thought of summer as my favorite time of year, but now I prefer autumn, which arrives at the end of the month, along with Christine’s baby, if all goes according to plan. The scorch of summer is starting to dissipate, and all I can think of are deliciously cool cloudy mornings giving way to crisp sunny afternoons. Maples and oaks and ginkgoes and redbuds in every warm hue of the color spectrum, tenacious leaves clinging to branches, waiting for the big eastern wind that will bring them down, and the return of the rain. The warm, sweet-smelling presence of a baby that will help us forget what’s missing. The ever lengthening span of time since the day Benny died late in June, spooling out across the seasons, and then, mercifully, the years.

I moved my food processor, my KitchenAid, my pots and pans and spices back home the week after Benny died. I cleaned out my closet and cupboards, mopped the floors, scrubbed every surface until I couldn’t clean anymore. Buddy watched me from the windowsill. She’d never seen me that way before, and she appeared concerned for my sanity, but eventually she got used to it and found a stripe of sunlight to sleep in.

When I felt completely cleaned out, resettled, and ready, I called Henry.

“Hi,” I said when he picked up.

“Hi,” he said. Like we’d been talking to each other every day.
“Wanna come over for dinner Monday? I’m making my famous meat loaf.”

I laughed. “Famous, huh? Who else is coming?”

“Just you,” he said.

As I pulled up to the curb in front of his house the following Monday, the daylight was already in its descending shimmer, and I sat in the car without moving, watching the rosy light seep through a big-leaf maple in his yard, moving so quickly I could almost see the shadows lengthening. The eerie quiet spooked me, and I was relieved when I heard the front door open, saw Henry step out, barefooted in jeans and a white button-down shirt.

I got out of the car, embarrassed. “I was just about to come in.”

“Whenever you’re ready,” he said. He looked good. Really good.

I grabbed the bottle of Australian shiraz I’d brought, swung the door closed, and walked up the drive, past alternating shrub-size lavender and rosemary, touching them, rubbing their scent into my fingertips, and then along the stone footpath toward him, brushing my hand over a stand of lemon balm. I brought my hand to my face to smell the heady combination of scents, breathed them in deeply, and Henry smiled.

It felt like we’d been doing this forever, like I’d been coming to his house, embracing him at the door, setting my purse and wine on the old oak table in the entry. Inhaling the savory incense of home-cooked food and embracing him again, rubbing my face against the soft fabric on his chest, feeling his broad back beneath my hands. I knew we’d walk past the comfortably wide couch in the living room, over the worn Oriental rug. I knew the table in the dining room would be set with flowers and candles and cloth napkins, and that it would always be this way, whether for meat loaf Mondays or Thanksgiving.

And I knew dinner would be late.

We walked silently past the table, holding hands, Henry leading, and I peeked into the kitchen as we headed for the small staircase at the back of the house.

“Will anything burn?” I asked, knowing already that he’d laugh, thinking I’d made some clever double entendre, and that when we kissed, I’d whisper, “I’m burning.”

And so it goes. Henry loves to cook for me. I’ve discovered that I love to be cooked for. My sharp edges have rounded again, and I can’t say I’m not relieved. Thin may be in, but it’s not me. I’m most comfortable with a little padding to absorb the bumps and knocks of life, to fill in and round the architecture so that a cat can nap comfortably in my lap and a man can always find something soft to hold on to.

So far, eating is just eating. I haven’t binged, and while I’d like to say I haven’t worried about it, I have. When it happens again—and Suzanne said it most likely will—I’ll try not to sink into that hole I could never name before.

“It’s called shame,” Suzanne said. “Just close your eyes and watch yourself climb out, shake the dirt and muck off, and move on.”

“Maybe I should fill it in,” I said. “So no one else falls in.”

She laughed and shook her head. I knew what she was thinking: Will I ever stop taking care of everyone else?

Call me eternally neurotic, but I hope not.

Yolanda invited my sisters to stay at the house as long as they’d like, and I know Christine would like to stay there permanently. For now, until the baby comes, she’s working at Powell’s, the biggest bookstore on the planet, as far as Portlanders are concerned. When we were cleaning out Benny’s things, we had her take most of Benny’s books there to resell, but I kept my favorites:
Little Women, To Kill a Mockingbird, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Old Man and the Sea, Travels with Charley.

I left my computer at Benny’s. It gives me a good excuse to drop by, and it’s not like I have that many articles to work on these days. I still get the occasional assignment from a smattering of smaller magazines, but
Cooking for Life, American Family,
and
Healthy Fit
were my bread and butter. I haven’t tried to replace them.

Even though Anne has a nifty little laptop, she uses my big rig to troll the Web for jobs. She’s already flown to interviews in Memphis and Dallas, but she thinks they only agreed to see her to avoid trouble. She
doesn’t believe she’ll be hired by anyone. She’s put her Boston apartment on the market and is looking at the far less expensive condos on Portland’s waterfront. “Even if I don’t end up living here, it would be an investment,” she says, but I know what she’s really doing. The sewing room was always intended as a nursery.

Christine’s been feeding Anne and me ideas about small businesses we could start together with our modest inheritances from Benny: coffeehouses, bookstores, gift shops, the usual things women who are dissatisfied with their lives dream of. Anne tolerates this with only a slight roll of her eyes, and I try to remind Christine that the biggest project of her life is about to arrive—how on earth could she handle a business, too?

Today, though, as we sit at Benny’s kitchen table drinking coffee, putting off taking the last of his clothes to Goodwill, Christine draws a deep breath that scares the hell out of Anne and me, seeing as babies don’t always agree with doctors about their due dates. She says: “I’ve got it! Shecret Shauce! We can bottle it and sell it at farmers’ markets or on the Internet!”

We both laugh at her, but then Anne’s face grows thoughtful. “It was pretty good stuff,” she says. “Hey, Eleanor, what would happen if we blended it, so no one knew it was fruit cocktail? Then we wouldn’t even have to give away the shecret.”

I get up and walk to Benny’s cupboard, pull out ingredients: vegetable oil, soy sauce, garlic powder, salt, pepper, and one can of fruit cocktail. The only thing I can blend it in is Benny’s old Osterizer, which actually works better than any appliance I’ve got. The finished product is a beautiful peach color, silky in texture, and tastes almost perfect.

“All it needs is a bit of sweet chili sauce to perk it up,” I say. “Here, taste.”

Who knows? A family dynasty might have been born from the ashes of our fathers.

I leave Anne and Christine to talk sauce, and retreat to the sewing room, now being kept neat as a pin by Anne. I’ve been ignoring a
particular e-mail for months, the reply from Stefan when I told him I couldn’t do the article. I sit down and turn on the computer.

I’ve read it only once before:

I’ve been thinking about my answer for weeks, writing and rewriting it in my head. I hit
REPLY
and type:

Then I attach the following article, and hit
SEND
.