The School of Essential Ingredients (6 page)

“Who you are without them?” Helen offered with a gentle smile.

“Yes,” Claire said gratefully.

They walked back to the chopping block, Claire carrying the crab in her hands. Helen paused. “You know, I’d like to ask you something a friend asked me once, if you don’t think it’s too personal.”

“What is it?”

“What do you do that makes you happy? Just you.”

Claire looked at Helen for a moment and thought, the crab resting on the block beneath her hands.

“I was just wondering,” Helen continued. “No one ever asked me when I was your age, and I think it’s a good thing to think about.”

Claire nodded. Then she took the cleaver and cut the crab into ten pieces.

What did she do that made her happy? The question implied action, a conscious purpose. She did many things in a day, and many things made her happy, but that, Claire could tell, wasn’t the issue. Nor the only one, Claire realized. Because in order to consciously do something that made you happy, you’d have to know who you were. Trying to figure that out these days was like fishing on a lake on a moonless night—you had no idea what you would get.

On the morning she had gone into labor with Lucy, Claire had walked about their garden, holding the hose over the rose-bushes, one contraction per rosebush, ten minutes, five. The pains were slow and warm at first, like menstrual cramps. It was a gorgeous Sunday and all around her people were working on their yards, lawn mowers buzzing in preparation for backyard barbecues and pitchers of Sunday sangría. She felt completely and utterly herself, a woman about to give birth.

Over the hours, the labor pains had sharpened. When they arrived at the hospital, time changed and nurses moved with quick precision, strapping monitors onto her and plugging her into machines. Everything was gray and cold, except for the pain that began to grind into her, deeper and deeper, pulling her under. She kept thinking the waves would slow or break for a moment, but they didn’t, one after another until there was nowhere left to go but in, to dive down and hope for air on the other side, but there was no air, no way out, just a desperate reaching and grasping until finally she felt something deep inside her—not physical, not emotional, simply her—break into pieces. And into the arms of that cracked-apart person that had been Claire, they placed a baby and a love came out of her, through the pieces, that she didn’t even know was possible.

She remembered thinking later, as she held her newborn child in the cool darkness of her hospital room, that all she would need was one quiet moment and she would be able to find those pieces of herself and put them back the way they had been. It wouldn’t be too hard. But the quiet moment hadn’t happened, lost between feedings and laundry and a newfound belief that any need of hers fell naturally second to her daughter’s. Over time, the pieces had found new places, not where they had been but where they could be, until the person she became was someone she barely recognized. She didn’t necessarily like that person, and it stunned her that James either couldn’t or wouldn’t see, was willing to sleep with someone who wasn’t really her. It felt—but she didn’t know how she could ever explain this to him—as if he were cheating on her.

ONCE THE CRABS were cleaned, Lillian explained that they were going to be roasted in the oven. “We’ll make a sauce, and it will permeate into the meat through the cracks in the shell. The best way to eat it is with your hands.”

The class reassembled in their seats facing the wooden counter in the middle of the room. Lillian put out ingredients—sticks of butter, mounds of chopped onion and minced ginger and garlic, a bottle of white wine, pepper, lemons.

“We’ll melt the butter first,” she explained, “and then cook the onions until they become translucent.” The class could hear the small snaps as the onions met the hot surface. “Make sure the butter doesn’t brown, though,” Lillian cautioned, “or it will taste burned.”

When the pieces of onion began to disappear into the butter, Lillian quickly added the minced ginger, a new smell, part kiss, part playful slap. Garlic came next, a soft, warm cushion under the ginger, followed by salt and pepper.

“You can add some red pepper flakes, if you like,” Lillian said, “and more or less garlic or ginger or other ingredients, depending on the mood you’re in or the one you want to create. Now,” she continued, “we’ll coat the crab and roast it in the oven.

“Carl, could you help me out?” Lillian handed a bottle of white wine to Carl, who pulled the cork with the skill of years of celebrations and dinners. “White wine is perfect with crab.”

Lillian poured the wine into a set of glasses and motioned to Claire. “Could you pass these around?”

One by one Claire carried the glasses to the members of the class—Carl and Helen, Ian, the woman with the beautiful brown eyes, the sad young man, Chloe with the black eyeliner, the woman with the silver hair who smiled absently as if perhaps she knew Claire. Claire returned to her seat.

“Now,” Lillian said, “what I’d like you to do is relax. Listen. Be still. Smell the change in the air as the crab cooks. Don’t worry; I’ll give you time to get to know one another later, but for right now, I want you to concentrate on your senses.”

Claire closed her eyes. The room around her quieted as the students placed notepads on the floor and settled into comfortable positions. Claire’s breathing deepened, filling her lungs, slowing her heart. She felt her shoulder blades slide down the lines of her back and her chin rise, as if to bring the air more easily into her nose. The fragrance of the warming ingredients drifted across the room, seeping into her skin, scents both mellow and intriguing, like the lazy excitement of a finger running down the inside of your arm. When Claire lifted her glass to her lips, the white wine erased the other sensations in a clean, cool wave, only to allow them to return again.

“I’ve warmed some wine and fresh lemon juice,” Lillian noted, “to add at the last minute.” Claire felt the heat from the oven as the door opened and shut, heard the sizzling of the sauce on the crabs, sensed the flavors intensify and change as Lillian added the crisp, clear elements of white wine and lemon.

“Okay, you can open your eyes. Come and eat.” Claire stood up and moved toward the counter with the other students. They stood one another, shoulders gently jostling, and reached into the pan, gingerly taking out pieces of crab and dropping them onto the small plates Lillian had waiting.

“This is incredible, Carl,” Claire heard Helen exclaim softly next to her. “Try a piece.” Helen raised her dripping fingers to Carl’s mouth and fed him a bite. She turned to Claire.

“Have you tried any yet?”

Claire shook her head. “It’s awfully hot, still.”

Helen deftly pulled a piece of meat from the shell. She smiled when she saw Claire’s amazement.

“Asbestos fingers, dear. From years of taking fish sticks from the oven. There are a few benefits. Now, forget all that and eat.”

“Hmmm,” Claire responded, and lifted the crab to her mouth, closing her eyes one more time, shutting out the room around her. The meat touched her tongue and the taste ran through her, full and rich and complicated, dense as a long, deep kiss. She took another bite and felt her feet settle into the floor and the rest of her flow into a river of ginger and garlic and lemon and wine. She stood, even when that bite, and the next and the next were gone, feeling the river wind its way to her fingers, her toes, her belly, the base of her spine, melting all the pieces of her into something warm and golden. She breathed in, and in that one, quiet moment felt herself come back together again.

Slowly, Claire opened her eyes.

Carl

Carl and Helen came to the cooking class together. They were one of those couples that seemed to have been born within close proximity to each other, twins of a nonbiological origin. Nothing physical substantiated the thought; he was tall and tended toward thin, with astonishingly white hair and clear blue eyes, while Helen was shorter, rounder, smiling easily with the other students in the class, pulling out pictures of her grandchildren, with the natural understanding that ice must be broken and babies do it better than most things. And yet, even when Carl and Helen were separated by the width of the room, you thought of them as standing next to each other, both heads nodding intently in response to whatever was being said or done.

It was unusual to see a couple at Lillian’s cooking school; the classes were expensive enough that most couples sent a designated representative—Marco Polo-like explorers on a marital mission to bring back new spices, tricks to change meals or lives. As elected delegates, they usually arrived with clearly defined goals—one-pot dinners for busy families, a never-miss pasta sauce—occasionally undermined by the lush solidity of fresh goat cheese lingering on the tongue, a red-wine marinade left for days to insinuate itself into a flank of steak. Life at home was rarely the same afterward.

When a couple came to class together, it meant something else entirely—food as a solution, a diversion, or, occasionally, a playground. Lillian was always curious. Would they divide their functions or pass tasks back and forth? Did they touch each other as they did the food? Lillian sometimes wondered why psychologists focused so much on a couple’s life in their bedroom. You could learn everything about a couple just watching the kitchen choreography as they prepared dinner.

In the swirl of before-class socializing, Carl and Helen stood together at one side of the room, watching those around them, their hands gently linked. Her face was smooth, in marked contrast to her white hair; he stood taller for being next to her, his eyes kind behind wire-rimmed glasses. There was no sense of remove to their position, no seeming desire for isolation; they seemed to exist in an eddy of calm that drew others, women first, toward them.

“Oh, no”—Helen laughed, talking to the young woman with olive skin and large brown eyes who had approached them—“we’ve never taken a cooking course before. It just looked like fun.”

Lillian called the class to take their seats then, and Carl and Helen chose two in the second row, against the windows. Helen took out a notepad and a slim blue pen.

“No need for me to take notes when Helen is here,” Carl said quietly to the young woman, who had tentatively followed them to their seats. “My wife is the writer in the family.”

Helen had Been Writing when Carl first met her, fifty years before, sitting in the central quadrangle of their college, surrounded by cherry trees dropping petals in great, snowy drifts. Actually, Carl always said when he told the story, Helen had not been writing, but thinking about it, chewing on her lip as if daring the words to make it past her teeth.

“Are you a writer, then?” he had said, sitting down on the concrete bench next to her, hoping that his opening line was a step beyond the horrifying “What’s your major?” She gave him a long, considering look, during which time he decided he was getting no points for originality. The girl was a writer, after all, if being a writer meant watching the world from the cool remove of the mind. He swallowed and waited, unwilling to leave, yet determined not to make any further attempts at eloquence.

She clicked her pen shut and looked in his eyes. “Actually,” she said, “I think I’d rather be a book.”

And when he had nodded, as if hers was the most logical statement in the world, she smiled, and Carl realized he would be sitting in that moment for the rest of his life.

“What’s on for tonight?” asked Claire from the front row of the class. Carl noticed that Claire was leaning forward eagerly; there was something different about her tonight—a haircut? Clothes? Helen would know, if he asked her, but Helen was focused on Lillian.

The counter Lillian stood behind was free of ingredients; a mixer, a rubber spatula, and several mixing bowls were all that the class could see reflected in the mirror that hung above the counter.

“So”—Lillian’s eyes were playful—“I started you off with a pretty dramatic beginning last time, and you should be rewarded for being such good sports. Besides, fall is starting to make itself known and it seems like a good time for indulgence. Now, I want you all to tell me what you think about when I say cake.”