Part 9 (1/2)
”What, getting ready for college?” Sarcasm curled up like a cat in his voice.
”A cooking cla.s.s.”
Jake's face closed so fast Chloe could hear the snap in the air. ”I'm the cook,” he said.
Chloe leaned against the doorframe, feeling the line of its wood along her spine. In her hand, she carried the tomato Lillian had given her, its weight solid and comforting.
”I think I might be, too.”
”There's only one chef in a kitchen, Chloe.”
Chloe pondered his statement for a moment.
”You know,” she said, ”I've been thinking that, too.” She put the tomato carefully on the counter, then moved past Jake into the bedroom and started putting her clothes into brown paper bags. Jake didn't move. When she reached the front door again, bags in hand, she turned to him, nodding toward the kitchen counter.
”That's a good tomato-you don't need to mix it with anything.”
She walked out, shut the apartment door behind her, and leaned against the jamb.
”Oh s.h.i.+t,” she said, and giggled. ”What am I going to do now?”
Isabelle
Isabelle entered through the kitchen door of Lillian's restaurant and halted, puzzled. There was so much activity, so much food already sprawled across the counters. Was she late for cla.s.s? But even if so, who was the young lady spinning between the stove and the sink where Isabelle always washed her hands before the lesson started? Who was the man going into the dining room with plates lined up his arm like pearls on a necklace?
Isabelle stood in confusion. This was not the first time such a thing had happened, as if life had suddenly put a different reel in the movie projector midway through a screening. People and images floating toward her, around her, leaving her hoping for a recognizable moment, a familiar voice or face upon which she could anchor the rest and thus herself. At times like these, Isabelle reverted to lessons from childhood. Her mother had always said if you are lost, just stand still until someone finds you.
”Isabelle.” Lillian was coming up to her. Then it was all right, after all; if the cooking teacher was there, it must be time for the lesson.
”Isabelle,” said Lillian, and her voice was sun on the gra.s.s. ”Now, isn't that lucky. I wanted you to try our new menu, and here you are.” Lillian's fingers touched Isabelle's shoulder, her smile wide and delighted. ”I have the perfect table for you; we can sneak through the kitchen, like food spies.”
Lillian gently took Isabelle's elbow and threaded her through the flying cooks and waiters, the celery tops and egg sh.e.l.ls and tubs of clams and mussels, the smells of peppers in a hot pan and dishwasher steam, to the door that led to the dining room and sweet, soft candlelight, the clink of silverware against china, and the hush of heavy napkins dropping into waiting laps.
”Will this do?” asked Lillian, as Isabelle sank gratefully into a thickly upholstered chair. The table was small and round, set in an alcove looking over the garden. Isabelle could see there were people in the dining room; she wondered if the cla.s.s was having a party.
”Is it Monday?” asked Isabelle.
”No, darling, Sunday. But you'll stay all the same, won't you? It would make me happy.”
ISABELLE HAD ALWAYS thought of her mind as a garden, a magical place to play as a child, when the grown-ups were having conversations and she was expected to listen politely-and even, although she hated to admit this, later with Edward, her husband, when listening to the particularities of his carpet salesmans.h.i.+p wore her thin. Every year the garden grew larger, the paths longer and more complicated. Meadows of memories. thought of her mind as a garden, a magical place to play as a child, when the grown-ups were having conversations and she was expected to listen politely-and even, although she hated to admit this, later with Edward, her husband, when listening to the particularities of his carpet salesmans.h.i.+p wore her thin. Every year the garden grew larger, the paths longer and more complicated. Meadows of memories.
Of course, her mental garden hadn't always been well tended. There were the years when the children were young, fast-moving periods when life flew by without time for the roots of deep reflection, and yet she knew memories were created whether one pondered them or not. She had always considered that one of the luxuries of growing older would be the chance to wander through the garden that had grown while she wasn't looking. She would sit on a bench and let her mind take every path, tend every moment she hadn't paid attention to, appreciate the juxtaposition of one memory against another.
But now that she was older and had time, she found more often than not that she was lost-words, names, her children's phone numbers arriving and departing from her mind like trains without a schedule. The other day she had spent five minutes trying to put the key in her car door, only to realize that the automobile in front of her was simply similar to one she had owned fifteen years previously. She wouldn't have ever figured it out if the owner of the car hadn't come out of the grocery store and helped her, pus.h.i.+ng that fancy little b.u.t.ton on Isabelle's key fob, turning on the lights of her car three spots south, which was silver, not green, small, not a station wagon.
LILLIAN APPROACHED Isabelle's table and poured a sparkling dry white wine in a tall fluted gla.s.s. The pale golden liquid gleamed in the candlelight, mysterious and playful. Isabelle's table and poured a sparkling dry white wine in a tall fluted gla.s.s. The pale golden liquid gleamed in the candlelight, mysterious and playful.
”Bubbles for your senses,” Lillian said. ”Enjoy.”
Isabelle looked around her. The room was filled mostly with couples, leaning toward each other across tables, enclosed in their own spheres of candlelit intimacy. Fingers reaching toward fingers, or flying through the air, drawing the shape of a story. It made Isabelle wonder if rhythms could hold stories within them, if movements could jog memories the way a smell or sight could. Perhaps there were pathways in the air, created by her hands over years of relating anecdotes, waiting to take her back to stories she no longer remembered. She started moving her hands experimentally, then stopped. That was what old people did. She reached for her gla.s.s and looked nonchalantly through the window to the darkened garden outside.
SHE HADN'T EXPECTED the wine bubbles to reach her nose the way they did, like small, giggling children. Her children, two toddler girls, blond hair darkened almost to brown with water, in a bathtub only half full but still overflowing as they splashed, drenching her s.h.i.+rt and her stomach that held the third baby, their big, round laughter bouncing off the tile, letting out the day and leaving room for dreams. Edward arriving home, following the noise to the bathroom door, where he stood, adult and bemused, as she pushed the wet hair from her face and looked up at him. The girls later, dancing out of their towels and running through the living room, ripe-peach b.u.ms and big, proud bellies, until, finally imprisoned in pajamas, they settled on the couch, warm and sweet as new milk, while she read the story of the country bunny with the magic shoes until they quieted into sleep and she sat and thought about having golden slippers that would let her fly around the world and do extraordinary things and be back by morning. the wine bubbles to reach her nose the way they did, like small, giggling children. Her children, two toddler girls, blond hair darkened almost to brown with water, in a bathtub only half full but still overflowing as they splashed, drenching her s.h.i.+rt and her stomach that held the third baby, their big, round laughter bouncing off the tile, letting out the day and leaving room for dreams. Edward arriving home, following the noise to the bathroom door, where he stood, adult and bemused, as she pushed the wet hair from her face and looked up at him. The girls later, dancing out of their towels and running through the living room, ripe-peach b.u.ms and big, proud bellies, until, finally imprisoned in pajamas, they settled on the couch, warm and sweet as new milk, while she read the story of the country bunny with the magic shoes until they quieted into sleep and she sat and thought about having golden slippers that would let her fly around the world and do extraordinary things and be back by morning.
LILLIAN SET a plate of salad on Isabelle's table. a plate of salad on Isabelle's table.
”This is new,” she commented. ”I wonder what you'll think.”
Isabelle dutifully took up her fork, skewering the leaves of lettuce, bright and darker green, frilly magenta, the red of dried cranberries, and the pale moons of almonds and pears. The taste was the first day of spring, with the sharp bite of the cranberries quickly following the firm crunch of nuts, the softness of pear flesh. Each taste here, defined, gone, mellowed only slightly by the touch of champagne vinegar in the dressing.
Edward. In the doorway, again, jacket off but tie still on, watching her make dinner in the kitchen. In her memories, it seemed Edward was always in a doorway, not quite there. As if she were the doorframe and the world were on either side. He wasn't leaving that time, although he would, later. When she was honest with herself, she would know he had always been on his way, either to or from her. Even after he left, he was on his way back, but by then she was gone, too, so light without the weight of his gaze upon her that she dreamed sometimes she was flying.
ISABELLE LOOKED DOWN-the empty salad plate was gone without her noticing, replaced by a dinner plate with a pool of white cannellini beans, atop of which sat a perfect piece of salmon, garnished with strips of crisp fried green leaves. Isabelle picked up one of them experimentally and brought it to her nose. Dusty green, the smell of life made out of sun and little water, the driest of perfumes. Sage.
What she had wanted in the beginning was the desert, dry, hot miles of air burned clean by the sun, the blank canvas of it after Edward and then the children were gone and she was left holding nothing and everything. She had gotten in the lumbering, wood-paneled station wagon and driven south, the fan whirring until she had turned off the highway and driven through cacti and hawks, opening the windows while the world flooded in, silver-green with the smell of sage.
At the town where she stopped to buy gas she saw a gallery, a spare, light-filled room with three white stone sculptures-smooth, white, sensual as dunes. While the gas station attendant filled the tank, she walked across the street and into the gallery. She looked at the sculptures, her eyes following the curves that made the stone seem more liquid than solid. Time slowed; there was no need to hurry-hers was the only car at the gas station. And as she studied each sculpture, she saw something else. It wasn't obvious-a line like an arm outstretched, a slope of a lower back, the hollow at the base of a neck where the collarbones meet-not a part of a person, rather the essence, the small vulnerable place where the soul lived.
”Stone poems,” she said quietly to herself.
”Yes,” said a voice, low and warm, and a hand touched her back, resting along the curve inside her shoulder blade.
His name was Isaac; he was younger than she, by years, his home far out in the desert, a red dirt house with faded blue shutters that held out the sun in the middle of the day, when Isaac worked with his eyes closed, smoothing the contours he had chiseled during the morning. A fountain murmured in the courtyard, under a tree, and Isabelle spent her first week sitting under its great branches, reading the books of poetry Isaac lent to her from the collection that meandered through his house, covering every available surface. They met each evening for dinner, pork stews that had simmered all afternoon, beans and rice. They talked over their meal, their conversations ranging like birds over the land around them. Isabelle slept in the second bedroom and woke each morning to the m.u.f.fled sound of metal sliding through stone in the studio.
”What are we?” Isabelle asked Isaac one night, curious. They sat in the courtyard, smoke from the fire ring rising up between them, the stars huge and uncountable.
”Why do you ask?” he responded. A real question.
She had no sense of urgency; she felt like the desert, unending, sitting there in the dark. Still, she had felt she should ask the question, make sure she wasn't somehow disappointing.
”I think,” he said contemplatively into the dark, ”we are each a chair and a ladder for the other.” And somehow that made sense.
It was Isaac who cut her hair. She was sitting in the courtyard with her head covered in pink curlers. He came out, wiping stone dust off the legs of his jeans, and saw her. His laugh bounced off the branches of the tree.
”What?” she said. ”I'm not using a hair dryer. You don't have one.”
He went back into the house and came back with a pair of scissors and a straight-backed chair. ”Come here,” he said, patting the seat.
She sat in front of him and felt the curlers leave her head, one pin at a time, the damp, shoulder-length curls cooling in the breeze. When all the curlers lay in a pile around her, he took her hair and lifted it, cutting quickly and decisively, the weight dropping to the floor with the hair. When he was done, he ruffled her curls back in with his fingers.
”Now,” he said, ”just sit there in the sun and let them dry.”
Her face, when she looked in the mirror later, was tan and younger than she remembered, the cheekbones stronger framed by the softness of the curls. She couldn't imagine the woman with that face having a c.o.c.ktail party, wearing a blue wool dress cinched in at the waist. Handing her husband's secretary a gla.s.s of sherry, wondering what those slim fingers had touched.