Secret Ingredients (73 page)

It’s Tuesday. It’s almost seven. Time to eat.

We said we’d get a cat but what I really want is a dog—dogs are better—but cats are less permanent. If we had to move, you could give the cat away, or leave it. No one would do that to a dog, and anyway it’s against the law. A dog would starve to death.

Our difficulties began one night three months ago. I know the exact night. Lynn came home from class and said, “I just got my period. It’s so early this month.” She said something cute like “You don’t have to worry about rubbers for a while.” I do worry about rubbers. They are my downfall. We did it that night, no rubber. There was an instant—I remember it—when I was deciding whether or not to actually go for it. I followed a certain line of reasoning, and remembered what she said, twinkled over the risks, and then blew my nuts out. It was great. I really enjoyed myself, oink oink, drowning in it. But then her period disappeared the next day. Or I should say it never came.

She was ovulating.

Let me lay this out again. She ovulated that night, thus the dot of blood. Then we did it. Bingo. You morons, you fucking biologists.

We were pregnant. It was April. I’d just turned twenty-four. I’d never been near an abortion clinic. And Colorado’s not the laid-back, liberal-Jew neck of the woods I come from. This here’s the American West. I work for a software designer, but I’ve seen guys in spurs all duded up like
Deliverance
on a Friday night.

I felt desperate and called my parents. My mom told me how in Florida a pro-life group stood outside a women’s clinic with a bullhorn, yelling, “If you come out now we’ll shoot you, but your unborn child will be spared!” Congress had just blocked the abortion pill for the eighty-second time. She told me that what we were doing was okay. Her voice made me homesick.

The thing about New York City is everything’s so jam-packed. It’s the crowds, there are so many bums, dead people practically lying on the street. In the winter you die from the cold wind, in the summer you die from the heat. The breeze stinks, the people smell like piss, there’s the traffic. It’s impossible to park. Everybody’s in a rotten mood. No place to hide.

In Colorado, the sun always shines. The sky is usually blue, and when we hang our clean clothes on the line in the backyard they dry in an hour. When you smell them they’re crisp and smell like air. The mountains are to the west of town. This is a new town, 120 years old. They shot indigenous peoples to settle this town. You drive up into the Rockies and see powdery snow on the side of the road. Toward the eastern part of Colorado, there are cornfields that go clear across the Midwest, I think. That yonder there is Kansas, I reckon. Anyway, it’s flat, and kind of stunning from inside a car, cows and fields and vistas slashing out in every direction, and the sky above you is a flawless ceiling. God, you think, this would be perfect, if only…If only I had more money, if only it were a couple of years from now, if only Lynn and I were married, or were ready to get married, if I had more friends here—but old friends—or decent places to hang out at, or more of a feeling of what’s next.

They wouldn’t let us come in to the clinic yet. She wasn’t far enough along. We had to wait almost two weeks to have it done. Seven and a half weeks is the magic number, for all you peckerheads taking notes. Anything less, it’s a speck of unremovable dust. Lynn ate saltines before she got out of bed every day, and I brought her a cold glass of club soda. Our friend Tina taught her that.

I’d walk in, hand her the saltines, and sit and look at this girl I’ve been sleeping next to for months and months—five months by then—and I hated her. She was sick now, and I was sick of her, I hated her little puffy knocked-up ass, she looked like a worried old hag, and out of nowhere I’m just not so sure of anything. Why I all of a sudden don’t love her. Because there’s something about her that I’m definitely not too sure about. What if she turns into her mother? Celia’s a joke.

They say a pregnant woman looks radiant. Lynn went around for two weeks, agitated and angry and with an upset stomach, but she really did look radiant—it was like a cosmetics expert had done something to her face. Her cheeks were flushed all day and her eyes were as bright as green candy. I can’t explain the difference. I kept catching myself staring. For those two weeks she was nauseous and pissed off. Added to that, I was still in training for my job, we were not married or engaged or anything, and Lynn really didn’t know, ha ha, was she maybe ready to be a mother? Maybe she wasn’t and maybe she was. Is twenty-two too young? She toyed with the idea while lolling around in the bath, conditioning her hair. Well, I knew. I’m sure. Please ask me.

Out the window now the sun is setting. It’s the summer of 1995. I see Lynn is crouched between the vegetables, picking peas and pulling up weeds.

This garden is a pretty thought—it’s the nicest thing I’ve ever done. We have snap peas growing along one row. I read in the paper that they like to climb so I built a trellis beside the row, criss-cross lattice-wood slats, about two feet tall. I painted it white. We have eggplants, squash, tomatoes, and yellow flowers, and next year we’ll plant tubers. When I hate Lynn, or when I can’t stand to look at her or be near her, when I feel disgusting, when I wish God would just erase me, I look at the garden. When she gets angry or yells about something terrible I did and we’re fighting, I look out the window at that thing we made, the garden, at the lawn when it’s been mowed and raked and looks like a putting green, cool and flat and smells sweet. You want to lie down on it and tear the grass up with your hands. Sometimes I think I’m just about ready to kill her.

How come I never do what I’m supposed to do? How come everything I do is such a fucking disaster? Doesn’t anybody get what they want? And that line of hers about how she might want to have it. She came out of the bathtub with a towel on her head, fluffing her hair. “Honey,” she said. She never called me “honey” before in her life. “Honey, I’ve been thinking about our child.” I could feel all the blood draining from my head. White flecks on the edges of my vision. There was a narrow window of opportunity there, before I calmed myself, where different pictures whizzed into my mind. Space travel, that sort of thing. I told her, You have it alone, honey darling, in your little purple dreamworld—I’ll be in Australia by the time the thing comes out.

There’s the great Colorado sky, there’s the grass, there’s the clothes on the line, fruit hanging ripe in the trees, the smell of wet cut grass. The land ripping out flat to the Mississippi with the sun leering on top in every direction. And you’re standing above it, a million miles from bumper-to-bumper commuter-nightmare New York. You’re not there anymore, though, you’re here, at the foot of the Rockies, cow-town college town on the American prairie. Great American steer farm. Steroid-fat cows. Transistor radios in barns, cows chewing all night long.

There were five of us in the room during the procedure: the doctor, her assistant, the hand-holder, me, and, of course, Lynn. She was the star. This was her show. Then it would finally be over. The hand-holder was a therapist, trained in female personal crisis. She was never more than a foot from Lynn all day that long day.

The staff was ready to go. A stainless-steel machine is used by the doctor to vacuum it out, and the doctor needed Lynn’s okay to begin. The whole thing was supposed to take five minutes.

Lynn got weepy from nerves, and we all waited while she collected herself. Everyone was anxious to get on with it. I bet Lynn was, too. I held her hand and kissed it, she wasn’t even looking at me, she stared up at some poster on the ceiling. The sound, the way she cried, choking a little, the way you do when you’re sobbing lying on your back, so the spit runs down your throat, swallowing, laughing underneath the crying for how absurd the scene was—even Lynn could see it—lying there with her legs propped up in the air, all these fucking people around her holding her hands and her knees and her privates, watching her like she was—ha ha!—about to give birth (sorry). Boo-hoo. But in my mind I keep coming back to that sound, not loud, not shrill, that crying, it was almost a noise an animal would make. How much trouble Lynn was having even crying right then, without strangling on her own spit. Is there a way to describe how much I wanted to get the fuck out of there? I wanted to shout, God of New York, turn off that sound, get me out of this room before I’m seared and split open, before I develop breasts myself. The other half of my brain, though, recorded her voice for all time.

“You’re okay,” Lynn said to nobody, to herself. “You’re okay.” She’d planned to get through it without tears.

Then it was quiet and she told the doctor to go ahead, and the doctor nodded to her assistant. The assistant turned on the machine, and the machine made a sound like any vacuum.

Lynn is outside, bent over the row of peas. The chicken is sitting over there in the pan. I guess it’s ready to bake. She put garlic, butter, lime juice, chili powder, chopped nuts, oranges, cloves, parsley, coriander, half a banana, and paprika on it. What’s left? Jean Naté? A cigar up the butt? The rice is cooking away in a pot. The chicken sits there like a drag queen, waiting to get roasted.

When it was over Lynn went into another room and fell asleep. The therapist came over and said, “You were so good today. Guys aren’t usually so good.”

I nodded. The woman looked at me sweetly. I guess I was good. So what. Maybe it wasn’t the norm for her. Or was she just looking for a tip? My voice, though, was so much deeper than everybody else’s in the room. Whatever I said that day came out sounding like a frog croak. Like a belch. My voice was unnaturally deep. I nodded as much as possible. Other than an arrest for drunk driving in college, it was the most nodding I’d ever done in one five-hour stretch.

“What are you doing?” I yell to Lynn out the window. She’s bent over the rosebush. Her head is down and her shoulders are rounded, as though she’s concentrating on something small.

Lynn says, “There are beetles on the roses.”

I look over at the roasting pan again. “Do we cook this thing or what? I’m getting hungry. What temperature do you set it at?” No answer. She’s busy with the roses.

“Lynn, you didn’t turn the oven on. I’m going to come out there and pull you in by your hair.”

Her hair is hanging around her face. She’s looking down. “Relax,” she says. “The oven is on. What time is it?” I can feel myself getting annoyed so I take ten deep breaths, counting the numbers slowly, saying the word “relax” as I breathe out.

“Damn it, Lynn, I can’t hear you.” She looks up finally.

“It has to cook for an hour,” she says. “And you have to move the rack.”

The pan is heavier than I thought. She said move the rack. What does that mean, up or down? I grab it and then drop it, hot rack, and then the roasting pan, too, onto the oven door.

“Fuck it.”

“What’s going on?” she says.

“The rack is on fire.”

“Of course it is, Jack, it’s three hundred and fifty degrees in there. Did you burn yourself? Better put cold water on it.”

I stand over the sink and let the water run on my fingers. There’s a welt on my palm. I am a moron. She says, “Didn’t you ever hear of an oven mitt?”

Man. My fucking hand. Did I ever hear of an oven mitt? What is that, sarcasm?

She says, “Do you want to try something weird?” Out the window I see her looking up toward me, her face flushed from leaning over for so long. “Should we put dandelions in the salad? Look at this,” she says, holding up a bunch of dandelions from our lawn in a little bouquet. “Mexicans kill for these, the little leaves,” she says. “And they fry the flowers.” I never ate dandelions before. And who cares.

“Is that too weird?” she says.

“Hey, yeah,” I say, drying my burned hand gingerly on my T-shirt. “Momma had a baby and the head popped off.” When I was a kid, we used to pick a dandelion and say this when we flicked the head off the stem. The water in the rice pot foams over the sides.

“Excuse me, Momma didn’t have a baby and the head popped off,” I say, correcting myself.

I walk over and grab a towel, move the rack down, push the chicken in, and close the oven. The door goes
sping
against the metal. It’s 7:02. Nothing comes to mind. Outside she looks up at the window.

“Is that a joke?” she says.

At this angle the sun cuts right through the house. It’s orange, purple, rose-colored light, blasting right through the house and spilling against everything.

“Fuck you,” she says.

It’s about time somebody said it. I can hear the familiar sound of it ringing in the background.

“You can never keep anything to yourself,” she says.

“What?” I say.

“In your head,” she says, standing at the doorway. “Forget it.” Over in the rice pot, there isn’t any water left. So the bottom is cooking way too fast. It’s, like, black. I use a coffee cup and dump some water in. It sizzles, a cloud of steam comes up. One more cup of water. The rice starts cooking again. My eyes are tearing. In a few seconds the whole wet mess is bubbling away. I feel like I scorched my face.

Lynn’s basket is overflowing with greenery and edible dandelions.

“Get out of my way,” she says. “You are an animal.”

“I’m sorry. Why did I say that? Is it too late to take it back?”

“What’s wrong with you?” she says.

Lynn goes over to the oven with a dish towel and slides the roasting pan out. She carries it past me, not even hot yet, out the back door and I hear it go
gong
against the metal basement doors. I step up to the window. The chicken’s in the grass, onions, carrots, sliced oranges—the whole thing.

Lynn is standing in front of me now. The dish towel is wound around her hand.

“Cool,” I say. “How symbolic.”

She says, “I think we need therapists.”

“What can I say? I’m sorry,” I tell her.

“Why don’t you get down on your knees.”

I say, “I will if you want.” No one moves.

“You’re mad at me,” she says. “How can you be mad at me?”

“I’m sorry. Jesus Christ. It’s my fault.”