Kitchens of the Great Midwest (32 page)

 • • • 

She took her credit card out of her purse and signed up herself, Cindy Reyna, and her husband, Reynaldo Reyna, separately on the priority waiting list, each with a +1. She figured with a waiting list that long, and maximum two lifetime slots per name or credit card number, she might as well double their slim chances now.

The e-mail receipt arrived instantly. Cindy Reyna, credit card charged $120, nonrefundable, for slots number 196 (Cindy Reyna +1) and 197 (Reynaldo Reyna +1).

Cindy couldn’t believe that two more slots had sold just in the
amount of time it took her to enter her credit card info. She also wasn’t sure how she’d explain all this to Reynaldo. Maybe it could wait.

 • • • 

It felt like a decade had passed before either of them heard anything.

 • • • 

In that time, Cindy turned fifty. Her second ex-husband, Daniel Anthony, died of a brain aneurysm while scuba diving on vacation in Thailand. One of the partners quit Tettegouche, and it failed, deeply in debt. But what pulled Cindy toward the second great course correction of her life was her husband, Reynaldo, turning fifty-two.

Every year on Reynaldo’s birthday, they ate dinner at a McDonald’s. Because they had money and no kids, they made it an adventure; year two of their marriage they ate at one in Paris; year three was the white colonial McDonald’s in Hyde Park, New York; year four was the one below the Museum of Communism in Prague; this year it would be the famous Rock N’ Roll McDonald’s in Chicago. They had already decided that on year six they’d hit the world’s largest McDonald’s in London.

 • • • 

As the eastbound flight reached cruising altitude, Cindy opened the latest issue of the
Economist
—she saved her smarter reading for public situations—when she saw Reynaldo look at his reflection in the dead black screen of his cell phone and pluck at the gray hair in his beard.

“Screw the yearly prostate exam,” she said. “Call the hearse.”

“Yeah, I know.” He nodded.

“I’m joking,” she said.

“Yeah.” He nodded again, staring at his reflection. He looked good for his age; he was bald, but trim, energetic, life still in his eyes. He worked in the neonatal intensive care unit at a hospital in Palo Alto and somehow he’d staved off the gray in his beard until that year.

Reynaldo felt that, since he was childless, his heart had sidestepped the empathy that would’ve broken it every time a neonate coded. Sometimes you could save a twenty-five-week-old through intubation, and sometimes you couldn’t. Work had to go on. He could come home from the OR and watch a Golden State Warriors game like nothing had happened—a day when three neonates coded was indistinguishable from a day when he saved three lives. The emotional regulation, he said, came with time.

 • • • 

On the plane to Chicago, in first class, on the morning of his birthday, her husband was now as sad as she’d ever seen him.

“What you thinking about?” she said at last.

“Seventy,” he said. “You know my dad died at seventy?”

“Seventy is pretty far away,” Cindy said.

“It is, and it isn’t,” he said. “It is and it isn’t.”

 • • • 

In the cab from the Drake Hotel to the Rock N’ Roll McDonald’s, it came up again.

“You know,” he said, looking out the rear passenger window at a darkened city park as they turned left onto Clark Street. “If I had a kid this year, I’d be seventy when he graduated from high school.”

“Well, you’re not having a kid this year, I can promise you.”

“I’m just saying. I don’t even know if I’d live to see him get his diploma.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about that. Which way is Navy Pier? Did we pass it already?”

“I’m just saying,” Reynaldo repeated.

“It’s behind us,” the cab driver said. “Way, way behind us.”

 • • • 

“I want to find a different job when we get back,” Cindy said after sex that night. “I’m thinking of being a sommelier again.” Since Tettegouche
went under, she’d been managing an in-town tasting room for a supermarket-level winery, which was the wine equivalent of working at a florist on Valentine’s Day, every day. As such, she’d become weary of the crowds, the unoriginality, and the predictable, cheap happiness on the faces of people who didn’t know any better and didn’t want to.

“You can do whatever you wanna do,” Reynaldo said, and turned his back to sleep on his side, facing the window.

 • • • 

The next morning, she was on the treadmill at the Drake’s gym, listening to her treadmill mix—“Kiss Me on the Bus,” by The Replacements, “Head over Heels,” by Tears for Fears, “Finest Worksong,” by R.E.M., “How Bizarre,” by OMC, and “True,” by Spandau Ballet, on repeat. Right during the chorus of “How Bizarre,” which is stupid and obvious and clichéd but that’s just the way life is sometimes, it hit her. She pressed
STOP
on the treadmill, got off, and stood for a while on the wooden floor, staring at the stupid TV mounted on the wall, her face burning.

 • • • 

Reynaldo was brushing his teeth in his boxer shorts when she returned to the room, sweaty in her tight yoga-style gym clothes.

“How was the gym here?” he asked.

“You want to have kids, don’t you?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You want to be a dad. And you want to have your own kids too, I bet, not adopt them.”

He nodded. “Yeah, maybe.”

“So what does that mean?” she asked. Neither had moved; they were on opposite sides of the room with the bed between them. The reflected morning gleam off of downtown Chicago’s buildings glowed behind him, as he stood, puffy and bald and hairy and heartbreaking, a toothbrush sticking out of his face.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Oh, God,” Cindy said, and she fell on the bed. She buried her face in a pillow and pounded the mattress with her fists. It didn’t matter what else was said now, her brain already knew how all this shit was going to pan out.

Reynaldo started crying and sat next to her. “I still love you,” he said. “I love you, so much.”

He placed his hand on her back, and although it felt like daggers of ice, she didn’t shake it off. She let him think that he was comforting her, because at that moment there was no comforting her at all.

 • • • 

On the westbound flight home, the
People
and
InTouch
magazines Cindy bought at the airport went unread on her lap.

“And do you know what the biggest thing, the number one thing is?” she asked Reynaldo, who was slumped in his seat, drinking his second Bloody Mary. “You always said you loved this lifestyle. You always said that. You said it was your goal in life to be able to travel whenever you want.”

“I do love this lifestyle,” he said. “But I also want something else. As well.”

“It doesn’t work like that. You get one or the other. You can fly around the world and live it up like an adult or you can shack up and squirt out some kids. You don’t get both.”

Reynaldo looked at her. “
You
get one or the other. Because that’s what you chose for yourself. And you know, that’s fair. Just don’t tell me how to live.”

“I didn’t fucking choose,” Cindy said, struggling to keep her voice at a conversational tone. “Biology fucking chooses. Maybe you’d agree with me if your balls fell off at age forty.”

The steward came by and Reynaldo held his empty Bloody Mary in the air. “Another, please.”

The steward looked at Cindy. “Another sparkling water for you?”

“No, I’m good,” she said, watching as the steward passed Reynaldo a
bottle of Grey Goose and a bottle of N. W. Gratz’s Artisanal Bloody Mary Mix. Cindy saw the label, emblazoned with
OREGON TILTH CERTIFIED ORGANIC, GMO FREE, CRUELTY FREE,
and shook her head.

“Jesus.”

“It’s the direction that food is heading,” Reynaldo said. “You want to argue about this too?”

“No. Forget it. Where were we?”

Reynaldo sighed. “You said I’d understand you better if my balls fell off at forty and was thereby denied the choice of having children.”

“Yeah. I think you’d be a lot more compassionate.”

“But you never had kids and you never wanted kids. It’s not like some lifelong dream was stolen from you by menopause.”

“You never wanted kids either, that’s what you said when you lied to me five years ago.”

“I wasn’t lying. It was true then.”

“Oh, that’s such bullshit.”

“No it is not,” Reynaldo said, mixing his drink. “But it’d be easier if it was.”

“It’s not easy either way,” she said. “Not for me.”

 • • • 

Under California law, a divorce could be finalized in six months, but Cindy couldn’t wait that long to get on with her damn life. After looking exclusively at jobs out of state, because California was saturated by know-it-all kids with sommelier certifications anyway, she took an opening in the Great Lakes resort area of Charlevoix County, Michigan.

This time, she was the fancy overqualified West Coast wine expert moving to the Midwest to take a job away from a young local. The restaurant’s general manager, a woman of Chinese descent Cindy’s age with the intriguingly un-Chinese name of Molly Greenberg, hired her at the end of a Skype interview, and two weeks later, Cindy was uncorking fifty-seven-degree bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape for middle-aged
couples sunburned from a day on their boat. She never met the twenty-six-year-old Level II sommelier she’d beat out for the job; he’d left town in protest, ending perhaps the best chance for Cindy to play out the balance of her adulthood as a beautiful inverse of its beginning.

 • • • 

She’d rented a small house in Petosky, outside the town of Charlevoix, made her own meals at home, spent mornings reading on the porch, and biked to work when the weather was nice. Every day after waking up, she’d check the Eva Thorvald blogs to see if a dinner had been held, and if so, which slot numbers were invited. Days in which numbers were called were good days, even if they were never hers; the other days she just had to get through.

 • • • 

One afternoon before the dinner shift, as Cindy was behind the bar putting aerators on the wines they sold by the glass, her boss, Molly, came up behind her and put her hand on Cindy’s shoulder.

Cindy shuddered; it was the first time she’d been touched since she’d had her hair done the week before, and the proximity of Molly’s Chanel No. 5 and the feel of her cold, bony hands freaked her out. Molly was one of those women who were both tiny and about twenty pounds too skinny; Cindy wasn’t the tallest woman she knew, and kept herself in decent shape, but next to Molly she felt like a hockey player.

“Whoa, sorry to startle you,” Molly said. “Just wanted to see if you’re feeling OK.”

“Yeah,” Cindy said. “I’m fine.”

“You just looked a little preoccupied, is all. Do you have a long-distance boyfriend?”

Cindy laughed. “Nope, way too old for that.”

Molly leaned in to Cindy’s shoulder and got quiet. “Having an affair?”

“God, no,” Cindy said.

“You just seemed like you were thinking about somebody.”

“Nope, just zoning out.”

“Whatever’s going on in your life, it won’t stay secret in this town—just to warn you,” Molly said, and returned to her office.

 • • • 

A few days later, Cindy was washing her one plate in the sink when she heard a knock on the door. Drying her hands, she gazed through the peephole and saw Molly standing there.

“Hey!” Molly said when Cindy opened the door. “I was in the neighborhood and I thought I’d drop by. Did I catch you at a bad time?”

“Not really,” Cindy said, and the two women stared at each other for a moment before Cindy apologized and asked her boss to come on in.

Molly was the first person to enter Cindy’s rented house; Cindy watched as Molly took in the one chair in the living room, the one chair by the little Formica dining table, and the dish rack with one plate, one glass, and one set of silverware drying.

“Wow, you sure packed light,” Molly said. “Can I sit? I don’t want to take your only chair.”

“Uh, sure,” Cindy said, coming to terms with the weird fact that her boss had just invited herself over. “It’s a nice night, why don’t we sit out on the porch?”

“OK. Got anything to drink?”

“Well, got some Grenache Rosé in the fridge.”

“Sounds divine,” Molly said. Cindy saw her stand up and walk around the living room, looking at who knows what. There was no TV to turn on, no framed photos, no art on the walls, just a couple of books and a dozen or so magazines on a small coffee table.

Why was this woman here? They would have a glass of wine and then Cindy would say that she had a 7:00 a.m. yoga class (which was true) and boy, was she tired.

 • • • 

Cindy came out to the porch with a bottle of Santa Ynez Valley–area Grenache Rosé and two Syrah glasses. Molly was already on the swing, so Cindy set the wine down and dragged the living room chair out.

Across the street, a little girl in a pink dress wailed as she was being pulled from the backseat of an old Dodge minivan.

“I hate you!” the little girl screamed between sobs.

“Come on, time for bed,” the exhausted mother said, dragging her child up the driveway toward the front door. She shoved her daughter inside and closed the door behind them.

Molly shook her head. “You ever have any of those?”

“Nope,” Cindy said.

“Me neither. Let’s fuckin’ drink to that.”

 • • • 

After only a year in Michigan, Cindy started seeing reports of priority VIP numbers in the high 100s receiving invitations; they were getting close. It had been just over three years since she put down the $120 reservation; maybe there were more dinners, or more dropouts, or both. You weren’t able to choose the date—if Eva Thorvald invited you to the dinner next Thursday and you weren’t able to make it, well, that was it, you lost your space, no refunds. She’d also read about folks who’d lost their jobs in the interim and now couldn’t afford the ten grand cost for two people. All of these circumstances helped her chances.

It was strange to think about her daughter every day in this way, after so many years of hardly thinking of her at all. Without an intense job, social calendar, or relationship to distract her, as they had all of her life, Cindy started to feel that her time in Michigan was a kind of exile or retreat, and this retrenchment, whether intentional or not, lent her a potent focus. The thought of seeing her daughter again pruned every competing impulse, and the priorities of what now felt like a former life, once so
bright and heavy, had fallen away. This commingling of obsession and simplicity was a surprisingly satisfying way to get by.