How to Fall (10 page)

In a seemingly leisurely fashion the five staff members cleared the plates.

A few minutes of repose.

The cheese course now: a bit of Roquefort, a bit of pimentoed chevre. Kazuki was whipping the cream.

Then another wait. How important the space between events, Marvin said.

Kazuki drew the trays of trifle out of the refrigerator. He threw the whipped cream onto the trays as if he were tossing a bucket of suds onto the sidewalk. Despite this offhandedness the cream settled in gentle peaks on one pan and then on the other until each looked like a Hokusai scene. He cut the dessert into squares. Fogg's wife, her shift over, slipped into the kitchen. Inez and Pinky and Fogg served trifle and Marvin went around with his coffeepot. “Yes, caffeinated,” he said without apology. And wasn't it amazing, it was always amazing, people drank the caffeinated coffee; and Pinky was sure that within an hour they'd all be asleep like the baby behind the bar, now blissfully snoozing on his mother's shoulder.

And she too—she who had needed three hundred milligrams of Trazodone when she was living at home—she too slept eight hours every night, unmedicated.

But tonight she was suddenly awake.

Plonk. Plonk. Rubber against brick; she knew that sound.

She went to her one window and surveyed, like a princess, the porched three-decker houses, and the gabled Victorians, and the few elms remaining: elms far apart enough not to have caught or transmitted the Dutch Disease. Necessary space, Marvin said. Moonlight turned the snow in their back yard into satin, like a wedding gown, like the two wedding gowns they wore the day they got married, she Pinky then four, the flower girl. . . And there, standing in the middle of that oblong of glistening white, his familiar face raised to hers, about to throw the tennis ball again, was the man in the picture.

Plonk.

Their eyes met.

Let me in?
he mouthed.

So she did.

 

“They changed the lock!” he said, throwing his coat deftly at the hook. It landed, it swung... “Who are you?”

A staff member, she said; his replacement, she supposed; of course he could have his old job back, she quickly added.

“Good Lord, no. I'm doing fine in Philadelphia. The lens business. That food we served gave me reflux. I was always trying new pills.”

“Oh.”

“I drove up on a whim; but I got here too late to wake up my sister.”

“Oh.”

“So I thought I'd crash at The Local. But the lock . . .” He rubbed his thick brows. “Could we have some coffee?”

Pinky warmed the pot and poured coffee into mugs. He got brandy from the bar and laced each mug. She took the last piece of trifle from the refrigerator and cut it in half and put it on two plates on the trestle table. He laid out two forks. They sat opposite each other. His hair had receded further.

“They changed the lock for my sake,” Pinky said. “To make me feel secure.”

“Oh. Hey, this goo's better than it used to be. Not quite loved, a foundling . . . Isn't that how he says it?”

“Pretty much.”

“How does she seem?”

Pinky considered. “Melancholy some of the time. Resigned the rest of the time. Happy on Thursdays.” She sipped, took courage. “I saw you in a photograph—I thought you were her . . . paramour.”

“Hell, no, just the kid brother.”

“And her chin—it wasn't you who cut it up?”

“Inez did that herself—no, don't look like that, it was an accident with a grapefruit knife.”

“I figured you'd been exiled.”

“Dramatic, aren't you. I walked out to live my own life. Our mother and father are dead. But Marvin and Inez kept acting like parents . . . Any more trifle?”

“No. How did Marvin and Inez act like parents? My mothers, they mostly march for causes and otherwise sit in armchairs . . .”

“They wanted me to tell them everything I did and thought. Hey. How many mothers have you got?”

“. . . in armchairs, talking.” Hardworking women, growing old. How jolly the red of this bathrobe. Her eyes stung.

There was a long silence; a peaceful lag.

“Two,” Pinky heard someone say. “I have two mothers.” Was that voice hers? “I had a father too, but none of us met him. He was necessary but incidental. Would you like to borrow my sleeping bag?”

“I'll spread it out behind the bar,” he said.

 

It was a month later. Kazuki had made the trifle this week. Pinky had made the okroshka. As always the reservation list was full. The meal was venison braised with raspberries. Fogg's brother had shot the deer.

Patrons were entering. One couple arrived on a motorcycle. A cab brought four others. The pair Pinky was watching for was coming by car. They were a little late. That would be Mary's doing—fussing about locks, about lights, while Paula stood at the door of the house twirling her keys and whistling. But they were not very late. Pinky was opening a bottle of champagne when she saw them come in. Marvin ushered them to the crescent table. Inez poured mineral water and bestowed her generous smile. In the kitchen archway, Kazuki bowed. Fogg's hand rested briefly on Pinky's shoulder. “Easy does it,” he said.

Carrying two golden glasses, Pinky walked forward to greet her parents.

T
o the Editor of
Cuisine:

Donna's Ladle is charmed to be asked to contribute a recipe to your forthcoming issue “Crowd Pleasing.” We are not
exactly
a restaurant; but we can certainly use your guest chef's fee of $250 to buy shopping carts and bras for our own guests and a sparker to light the burners on the stove. Josie's eyebrows are only now growing back.

To prepare vegetarian chili I soak beans the night before. The next morning, after opening the church basement door, yelling at the mice, turning on the stove, and welcoming the patrons who have huddled all night on the portico, I start cooking the beans. Then I follow these directions:

Sort donated vegetables. Reject those too moldy to be identified. Chop. Do not let Maryanne near knives.

Heat oil in pans; sauté veggies. Persuade Akisha's children not
to drown dolls in caldrons. Sit with Bridget, crying over the baby who died. Mix eggs, cornmeal and milk in likely ratio and set in oven. Do something about Gretel's raw feet. Combine veggies, beans, tomato juice, chili powder. Skimpy? Extend with yesterday's meatloaf; it's mostly vegetables, to tell the truth.

Chili and cornbread will serve seventy-five generously, fifty very generously. Usually serves 100, who are more or less pleased.

 

Sincerely,

Donna Crowninshield, Chef

O
ne autumn Donna's Ladle—a soup kitchen for women operating out of the basement of Godolphin Unitarian Church—became all at once everybody's favorite cause. “There are fashions in charity just as in bedslippers,” sniffed Josie, who had been working as a volunteer since the Ladle's beginning six years earlier. “Don't count on this popularity to last, Donna.”

Donna never counted on anything to last. But she was grateful for the new help. A group from a local synagogue undertook to deliver cooked delicacies. The members of the Godolphin Helping Hands raked each other's closets for clothing contributions. Maeve, a nearby Catholic Women's College, posted the Ladle's flier on its bulletin board. As a result, a few eager students appeared almost every day. Some needed firsthand material for term papers on poverty. The others showed up out of simple good-heartedness.

“Mother Theresas in designer jeans,” said Josie privately to Donna. But to the Maeve students Josie was a model of patience,
repairing the Cuisinart whenever they broke it, and demonstrating a restrained kindness toward the guests that the girls meant to emulate, really they did. They just couldn't help overreacting to the tragic tales they heard. They were frequently in tears. Their eyes, even when red with weeping, were large and lovely.

“Those kids are prettier at that age than I ever thought of being,” Donna remarked at a staff meeting. “Is it their faith?”

Beth said, “It's their smiles. All those buckteeth bursting out at you.” And she smiled her own small sweet crescent. “Orthodontia can be a cruel mistake.”

Pam went further, grinning like a schoolboy. “Orthodontia is child abuse.”

Her colleagues laughed at this distortion. They were not caseworkers, not sociologists, not child advocates—they were just the staff of the Ladle, three overworked young women—but they had seen children who had been abused. They had broken bread with the abusers. They had witnessed—and put a stop to—beatings by enraged mothers. “You can't hit anybody here,” they each knew how to say in a voice both authoritative and uncensuring. A few weeks ago, Pam, turning white with fury hours after the event, reported to the others that she had interrupted Concepta peppering her grandson, a niño of eighteen months.

“Peppering him?” asked Donna. “Peppering him with what?”

“Peppering him with pepper. She had him on her lap and she was shaking the pepper jar over him as if he were a pizza. I don't think any got into his eyes. But I wanted to strangle the bitch.” Pam bit her lip and bent her curly head.

“What happened next?” Donna mildly inquired.

“I said, ‘Please stop that, Concepta. You can't hurt people here.'
And I sat down beside her and she handed the kid over with a giggle. ‘We were only having fun,' she told me. I dandled him and he stopped crying and after awhile I handed him back. What else could I do?”

“Not a thing,” said Beth softly, her plump little hands stirring in her lap.

“Not a damned thing,” said Donna.

Reporting incidents to the authorities was out of the question. Donna's Ladle rarely knew the last names of its guests, nor even their real first names if they chose to glide in under a
nom de guerre.
Their addresses, if they had any, were their own business. This peppering was thus far an isolated event. Concepta usually came in alone, drunk but not drinking. (“You can't drink here” was another rule. Shouting and doping were also forbidden. All four rules were frequently broken.)

“Did you suggest the Children's Room?” Donna asked Pam.

Pam lifted her narrow shoulders. “I'd suggested that earlier, before she decided to season him. But Concepta didn't want her niño anywhere near Ricky Mendozo, and Ricky was in the Children's Room that morning. ‘Might catch it,' Concepta said.”

Ricky Mendozo's mother had AIDS. Ricky himself was a sickly child, often hospitalized. Donna and Pam and Beth understood Concepta's reluctance to let her grandchild play with the runnynosed, frequently soiled Ricky. As far as the staff knew Ricky did not have AIDS. But the staff didn't know very much.

Some things they did know. They knew that the little kids who came in liked stuffed animals and trucks and toys you could ride and toys you could climb into. They liked crayons and paint. They didn't like to put things away. They liked to hurl things around; and
to hurl themselves around; and to sit on laps. They enjoyed ice cream, though they were fearful of getting themselves dirty. They were loud and possessive and self-centered; but they had learned somewhere that when you grabbed a toy from another child you had to shout “Share!”

But when their mothers or aunts or grandmothers or father's girlfriends retrieved them after lunch, something frightened could be felt to uncoil within certain of these stained, smelly little persons. The children did their part in the rough ceremony of reunion—“Where the fuck's your cap?” “Did you make a mess like always?”—by producing an article of clothing or feinting at mopping some milk. But the staff felt their hearts sink, and the Maeves claimed that theirs broke in two, at the premonition of outrage that might follow, back in the welfare motel, or the scabby apartment, or the room grudgingly loaned by a sister-in-law, places where even the bare-bones rules of Donna's Ladle did not prevail. “He had such a nice morning,” shuddered a Maeve one mild November afternoon, as the voice of Nathaniel's mother shot through an open basement window from the sidewalk: “You do what I say, hear? Or else!”

“‘Or else' may mean no more than a slap,” said Donna to the worried girl. “And he did have a nice morning. That's important.”

It was important to keep the Children's Room open, even though maintaining the play area meant that there were fewer hands making lunch in the kitchen. Some children had become regulars—Nathaniel, Cassandra, Africa, Elijah. Others visited from time to time. These days—because of the Helping Hands' clothing drive—the Ladle's youngest guests wore outfits that had originated in Neiman-Marcus and Bloomingdale's.