Secret Ingredients (74 page)

She shakes her head, staring at me. “Now what?”

“I’m too hungry,” I say. “I can’t make any big decisions.”

“What the hell happened to your face?” she says.

Outside, I pick up the roasting pan out of a pile of leaves. Lynn comes up beside me and puts the chicken back in it, and we shovel up the vegetables and carry everything over to the garbage and throw it all away, even the cracked enamel pot. Whiskey is already there at the fence, meowing and sniffing around.

“Go on, Whiskey,” I say. “Not for you.”

“Make sure the lid’s on tight,” she says to me. “I don’t want to clean this up a second time from some raccoon.”

Let’s say, for the sake of something, that I never loved her, that what we have here is a housing arrangement, with scenes of nude touching, that we joined for a little comfort, that it’s missing some key element of normal love. It’s not normal, it’s more like high-school love, or freshman-year-in-college kind of love, the kind you’re glad to stick with as long as it’s great, as long as it doesn’t start ruining your life. The very, very flawed kind. That’s my idea of love, actually, the perfect first two weeks, early on, when all you care about is love.

We get a pizza. We pay the man. We eat the salad she picked and lie on the rug in the living room, eating pizza, watching TV, together on the floor. We have no furniture—we aren’t there yet. The vibe between us is two people very tired and in shock, but amiable. I put some cream on my face. The welt on my hand throbs. I’d rather have pizza anyway, chicken sucks. I love her. Who else would accept me in this condition?

I should say I’ll make dinner tomorrow night.

“I can make dinner tomorrow night.”

“You gonna make some chicken?” she says.

“White Christmas lasagna,” I say. “With spinach and salad and bread.”

“Sounds good,” she says. “Move over,” sliding toward me. She slings her leg over both of mine, sticking her face in my neck. “This way,” she says, and I move to accommodate her. I can feel Lynn’s warm, clean breath on my skin. What a feeling, from one person to another.

“I don’t understand anything,” she says. Her eyes close. Her breath slows.

Lynn gets up from beside me and takes the dinner plates with her. I must be insane. She gives me what I need, and I love her. Hollow but true. I have to remember these things, about her and about the chicken in the grass—is that how it works? Perfect. Stupid. Shared. Turn off the TV now. Turn off the lights.

1997

SPUTNIK

DON D
E
LILLO

T
he Demings were home this afternoon, busy at various tasks in their split-level house, a long low two-tone colonial with a picture window, a breezeway, and bright siding.

Erica was in the kitchen making Jell-O chicken mousse for dinner. Three cups chicken broth or three chicken-bouillon cubes dissolved in three cups boiling water. Two packages Jell-O lemon gelatine. One teaspoon salt. One-eighth teaspoon cayenne. Three tablespoons vinegar. One and a third cups whipped-topping mix. Two-thirds cup mayonnaise. Two cups finely diced cooked chicken. Two cups finely chopped celery. Two tablespoons chopped pimiento.

Then boil and pour and stir and blend. Fold spiced and chilled gelatine into chicken thing. Spoon into nine-by-five-inch loaf pan. Chill until firm. Unmold. Garnish with crisp lettuce and stuffed olives (if desired). Makes six entrée salads.

Do not reuse this bottle for storing liquids.

Erica did things with Jell-O that took people’s breath away. Even now, as she prepared the chicken mousse for final chilling, there were nine parfait glasses in the two-tone Kelvinator. This was dessert for the next three evenings. Each glass was tilted at a forty-five-degree angle either against the wall of the refrigerator or against another object. This tilting method, handed down from her grandmother and her mother, allowed Erica to do Jell-O desserts in a number of colorful diagonal stripes, working the combinations among half a dozen flavors. She might put black-raspberry Jell-O, slightly thickened, into a parfait glass. She puts the glass in the fridge, tilting it at forty-five degrees. After the gelatine chills and fully thickens she folds in a swath of lime Jell-O, and then maybe orange, and then strawberry or black cherry. At the end of the process she has nine multistriped desserts, all different, all so vividly attractive.

Doing things with Jell-O was just about the best way to improve her mood, which was oddly gloomy today—she couldn’t figure out why.

From the kitchen window she could see the lawn, neat and trimmed, low-hedged, open and approachable. The trees at the edge of the lawn were new, like everything else in the area. All up and down the curving streets there were young trees and small new box shrubs and a sense of openness, a sense of seeing everything there is to see at a single glance, with nothing shrouded or walled or protected from the glare.

Nothing shrouded or secret except for young Eric, who sat in his room, behind drawn fiberglass curtains, jerking off into a condom. He liked using a condom because it had a sleek metallic shimmer, like his favorite weapons system, the Honest John, a surface-to-surface missile with a warhead that carried yields of up to fifteen kilotons.

Avoid contact with eyes, open cuts, or running sores.

He sat sprawled in a butterfly chair and thought nobody could ever guess what he was doing, especially the condom part. Nobody could ever guess it, know it, imagine it, or associate him with it. But what happens, he thought, if you die someday and it turns out that everything you’ve ever done in private becomes general knowledge in the hereafter? Everybody automatically knows everything you ever did when you thought you were totally and sneakily and safely unseen.

Prolonged exposure to sun may cause bursting.

They put thermal pads on the Honest John to heat the solid fuel in preparation for firing. Then they remove the pads and launch the missile from a girderlike launch rail in a grassy field somewhere in the Free World. And the missile’s infallible flight, the way it sweeps out precise volumes of mathematical space, it’s so saintly and sun-tipped, swinging out of its apex to dive to earth, and the way the fireball halos out above its column of smoke and roar, like some nameless faceless whatever. It made him want to be a Catholic.

Plus she’d have three chicken-mousse salads for leftovers later in the week.

Out in the breezeway husband Rick was simonizing their two-tone Ford Fairlane convertible, brand-new, like the houses and the trees, with whitewall tires and stripes of jet-streak chrome that fairly crackled when the car was in motion.

Erica kept her Jell-O molds in the seashell-beige cabinet over the range. She had fluted molds, ring molds, crown molds in a number of sizes, she had notes and diagrams, mold techniques, offer forms for special decorative molds that she intended to fill out and mail at her earliest convenience.

If swallowed, induce vomiting at once.

Eric stroked his dick in a conscientious manner, somber and methodical. The condom was feely in a way he’d had to get used to, rubbery dumb and disaffecting. On the floor between his feet was a photo of Jayne Mansfield with her knockers coming out a sequined gown. He wanted to sandwich his dick between her breasts until it went
whee.
But he wouldn’t just walk out the door when it was over. He would talk to her breasts. Be tender and lovey. Tell them what his longings were, his hopes and dreams.

There was one mold Erica had never used, sort of guided-missile-like, because it made her feel uneasy somehow.

The face in the picture was all painted mouth and smudgy lashes, and at a certain point in the furtherance of his business Eric deflected his attention from the swooping breasts and focused on the facial Jayne, on her eyebrows and lashes and puckered lips. The breasts were real, the face was put together out of a thousand thermoplastic things. And in the evolving scan of his eros, it was the masking waxes, liners, glosses, and creams that became the soft moist mechanisms of release.

Intentional misuse by deliberately inhaling contents can be harmful or fatal.

Erica wore a swirly blue skirt and buttercup blouse that happened to match the colors of their Fairlane.

Rick was still in the breezeway, running a shammy over the chrome-work. This was something, basically, he could do forever. He could look at himself in a strip of chrome, warp-eyed and hydrocephalic, and feel some of the power of the automobile, the horsepower, the decibel rumble of dual exhausts, the pedal tension of Ford-O-Matic drive. The sneaky thing about this car was that, yes, you drove it sensibly to the dentist and occasionally carpooled with the Andersons and took Eric to the science fair but beneath the routine family applications was the crouched power of the machine, top down, eating up the landscape.

Danger. Contents under pressure.

One of Erica’s favorite words in the language was “breezeway.” It spoke of ease and breeze and being contemporary and having something others did not. Another word she loved was “crisper.” The Kelvinator had a nice roomy crisper and she liked to tell the men that such-and-such was in the crisper. Not the refrigerator, the crisper. The carrots are in the crisper, Rick. There were people out there on the Old Farm Road, where the front porches sag badly and the grass goes un-mowed and the Duck River Baptists worship in a squat building that sits in the weeds on the way to the dump, who didn’t know what a crisper was, who had iceboxes instead of refrigerators, or who had refrigerators that lacked crispers, or who had crispers in their refrigerators but didn’t know what they were for or what they were called, who put tubs of butter in the crisper instead of lettuce, or eggs instead of carrots.

He came in from the breezeway.

“The carrots are in the crisper, Rick.”

He liked to nibble on a raw carrot after he’d waxed and buffed the car.

He stood looking at the strontium-white loaf that sat on a bed of lettuce inside a cake pan in the middle of the table.

“Wuff, what is it?”

“It’s my Jell-O chicken mousse.”

“Hey, great,” he said.

Sometimes she called it her Jell-O chicken mousse and sometimes she called it her chicken-mousse Jell-O. This was one of a thousand convenient things about Jell-O. The word went anywhere, front or back or in the middle. It was a push-button word, the way so many things were push-button now, the way the whole world opened behind a button that you pushed.

May cause discoloration of urine or feces.

Eric sidled along the wall and slipped into the bathroom, palming the sloppy condom. He washed it out in the sink and then fitted it over his middle finger and aimed the finger at his mouth so he could blow the condom dry. And in the movie version of his life he imagined how everything is projected on a CinemaScope screen, all the secret things he did alone over the years, and now that he is dead it’s all available for public viewing and all his dead relatives and friends and teachers and ministers can watch him with his finger in his mouth, more or less, and a condom on his finger, and he is panting rhythmically to dry it off.

He heard his mother call his name.

He had to wash it and reuse it because this was the only one he had, borrowed from another boy, Danny Anderson, who’d taken it from his father’s hiding place, under the balled socks, and who swore he’d never used it himself—a thing that wouldn’t be fully established until both boys were dead and Eric had a chance to see the footage.

To avoid suffocation keep out of reach of small children.

Eric hid the rubber in his room, pressed into a box of playing cards. He took a long look at Jayne Mansfield’s picture before he slipped it into the world atlas on his desk. He realized that Jayne’s breasts were not as real-looking as he’d thought in his emotionally vulnerable state, dick in hand. They reminded him of something, but what? And then he saw it. The bumper bullets on a Cadillac.

He went into the kitchen and opened the fridge, just to see what was going on in there. The bright colors, the product names and logos, the array of familiar shapes, the tinsel glitter of things in foil wrap, the general sense of benevolent gleam, of eyeball surprise, the sense of a tiny holiday taking place on the shelves and in the slots, a world unspoiled and ever renewable. But there was something else as well, faintly unnerving. The throb, perhaps. Maybe it was the informational flow contained in that endless motorized throb. Open the great white vaultlike door and feel the cool breezelet of systems at work, converting current into power, talking to each other day and night across superhuman spaces, a thing he felt outside of, not yet attuned to, and it confused him just a bit.

Except their Kelvinator wasn’t white, of course. Not on the outside, anyway. It was Bermuda pink and dawn gray.

He looked inside. He saw the nine tilted parfait glasses and felt a little dizzy. He got disoriented sometimes by the tilted Jell-O desserts. It was as if a science-fiction force had entered the house and made some things askew while sparing others.

They sat down to dinner and Rick carved the mousse and doled out portions. They drank iced tea with a slice of lemon wedged to the rim of each glass, one of Erica’s effortless extra touches.

Rick said to Eric, “Whacha been up to all afternoon? Big homework day?”

“Hey, Dad. Saw you simonizing the car.”

“Got an idea. After dinner we’ll take the binoculars and drive out on the Old Farm Road and see if we can spot it.”

“Spot what?” Erica said.

“The baby moon. What else? The satellite they put up there. Supposed to be visible on clear nights.”

It wasn’t until this moment that Erica understood why her day had felt shadowed and ominous from the time she opened her eyes and stared at the mikado-yellow walls with patina-green fleecing. Yes, that satellite they put into orbit a few days ago. Rick took a scientific interest and wanted Eric to do the same. Sure, Rick was surprised and upset, just as she was, but he was willing to stand in a meadow somewhere and try to spot the object as it floated over. Erica felt a twisted sort of disappointment. It was theirs, not ours. It flew at an amazing rate of speed over the North Pole,
beep beep beep,
passing just above us, evidently, at certain times. She could not understand how this could happen. Were there other surprises coming, things we haven’t been told about them? Did they have crispers and breezeways? It was not a simple matter, adjusting to the news.

Rick said, “What about it, Eric? Want to drive on out?”

“Hey, Dad. G-g-g-great.”

A pall fell over the table, displacing Erica’s Sputnik funk. She thought Eric’s occasional stuttering had something to do with the time he spent alone in his room. Hitting the books too hard, Rick thought. He was hitting something too hard, but Erica tried not to form detailed images.

Do not puncture or incinerate.

The boy could sit in the family room and watch their super-console TV, which was compatible with the knotty-pine paneling, and he could anticipate the dialogue on every show. Newscasts, ball games, comedy hours. He did whatever voice the announcer or actor used, matching the words nearly seamlessly, and he never stuttered.

All the other kids ate Oreo cookies. Eric ate Hydrox cookies, because the name sounded like rocket fuel.

One of her kitchen gloves was missing—she had many pairs—and she wanted to believe Eric had borrowed it for one of his chemistry assignments. But she was afraid to ask. And she didn’t think she looked forward to getting it back.

Yesterday he’d dunked a Hydrox cookie in milk, held it dripping over the glass, and said thickly, “Is verry gud we poot Roosian moon in U.S. sky.”