She opened the refrigerator and lifted the lids of the two green boxes delivered that afternoon by Tina. She needn’t have checked on how their contents had made the trip—Tina never failed her—but Greenie wanted the reassurance of their solid perfection, a reminder of why she was here.
“Have to confess I had a peek myself.” Mary Bliss stood in the doorway. “I’ve got a bad old sweet tooth too.”
“There’s plenty to go around,” said Greenie.
“He does have a whale of an appetite. Just warnin’ you, in case you decide to join us. Triple the recipe—that’s sort of a motto I have when it comes to makin’ Ray happy, and I’m not just talking foodwise. Though, mind you, triple’s what you get in return if he likes the job you do.”
Greenie put on her apron. “The two of you talk as if there’s something I don’t know, as if I’m about to be plucked off the ground by the hand of fate—I just haven’t noticed the shadow over my head.”
Mary Bliss laughed. “Something like that. But please excuse me.” She let the door swing shut behind her, summoned by another ringing phone.
Greenie placed her own rack on the roasting pan Mary Bliss had found. She poured the soup into a heavy pot and spooned the chutneys into two tiny dishes—intended for butter, but they would do. She unwrapped the cakes of cheese: Vermont feta and Humboldt Fog, a goat cheese from California striped with ash. She laid paper oak leaves on a china plate and put the cheeses there to soften. She filled a steel tray with the pale, pulpy liquid she would stir into an ice to cleanse the gubernatorial palate. She placed it in the freezer.
“Do fancy food,” Mary Bliss had said when Greenie asked what sort of a meal she should make. “Fancy but not pretentious, know what I mean?” So Greenie fantasized that she was cooking for dignitaries from abroad, showing off wholesome American plenty—and showing off to Ray McCrae that she could hold her own with more indigenous chefs. She felt pride along with a familiar unease. The opulence of the meal—counting ingredients, she stopped at sixty-three—was shameful in a way, but this was a fact of modern life at its most inequitable. When you made only desserts—when what you squandered, if anything, was chocolate, not corn (you wouldn’t think about the flour)—you could fool yourself into believing that your professional dealings were in fantasy and art, removing you from the workaday morality of food, of excess here and hunger there.
Whether because of her personality or the lessons learned by her generation, Greenie’s mother had been a thrifty woman. She had washed out plastic Baggies and polished her windows with yesterday’s news. Beside her kitchen sink she’d kept a basin for all remotely edible waste, from tea bags and onion skins to leftover rice on the verge of fermenting and the fat trimmed from a roast. Every night before going to bed, Greenie had carried the basin across their backyard and dumped it over a stone wall into a plot of forest owned by the town. And every morning, were you to have checked, you’d have found not a single trace of what had been discarded (what, in most households back then, was pulverized in a sink disposal and swept away, sight unseen, as sewage). “I can’t feed the orphans of Southeast Asia, but I can feed the wildlife,” Greenie’s mother had boasted.
Living in the city, Greenie often wished for that basin, for its prudent circling of the food chain—but here, what would you feed if you tossed your leftovers into the night? Rats and roaches? Though, really, could you convince yourself they were much different from foxes, rabbits, and owls? Were their souls any smaller? Earnest little George would have argued their case.
Not long after George turned two, Greenie’s parents took an anniversary trip to England and Scotland. As her father drove them along a coastal cliff in the Highlands, along a mere ribbon of road with a famously grand view, he missed a curve, sending their rental car to the rocks far below. This was what the chief inspector of the small Scottish town told Greenie in an awkwardly tinny phone conversation (the day after she had been notified, confusingly, by the chief of police in the town where she had grown up). “We warn the tourists how treacherous the roads are hereabouts,” said the Scottish chief inspector mournfully, “but there’s no other way to see these views without taking a little risk. I’m sorry as can be, miss, but I hope you don’t find it disrespectful if I say, ’twasn’t a bad way to go.”
She clung to the odd false comfort in the chief inspector’s lyrical r’s, in the quaint, pretty way he pronounced “tourist”: teeyoorist. “Ther-abouts,” perhaps the people were exceptionally courteous and charming, by American standards at least, their cobbled hamlets genteel and safe. But in America, the roads would have been safer, too. Along an American road of the kind this man described, there would have been heavy concrete barriers, like the ones placed around embassies to thwart car bombs, because an accident of this type would have set off a chain of lawsuits. The barriers would have marred the view, but never mind. If anyone was to blame, Greenie knew it was her father. Behind the wheel, Professor Duquette had been affably devil-may-care, casual with speed. Everyone made mistakes, thought Greenie, but why did his have to be fatal?
There would be an inquest, the policeman was quick to tell her, but that was a formality. Would she be coming over? She could hear through his well-mannered tone that he hoped she would not. Some bereaved children would have been impatient to catch the next plane, to see the exact spot where their parents’ lives had ended, to ask futile questions, perhaps to see the bodies if time allowed; but Greenie found the prospect of such futile scenarios deeply depressing—especially as they would have to take place in a corner of the world renowned for its beauty. She chose, with guilty relief, to make the “arrangements” long-distance. She took a bus to Massachusetts and, along with the funeral director from her parents’ town, went into Boston to claim the caskets and see that they were taken safely home—if the graveyard a mile from their house could be called “home.”
Throughout the transactions and the filling out of forms, Greenie felt as if she were drugged, separated from her grief by a gauzy scrim, a tissue of incredulity. One of her Boston cousins had insisted on driving her and helping her accomplish the formalities. Greenie, in turn, had insisted that Alan stay in New York with George, at least until the day before the funeral.
After the caskets were unloaded at the funeral home and she had filled out yet more forms, Greenie asked the cousin to leave her—alone—at her parents’ house. She had her own set of keys, and she knew where they kept the keys to their cars. It was a hot, sunny evening in early June, and when she let herself in, the rooms were unbearably close, the air thick as wool. She went about unlocking and opening windows, turning on the ceiling fans her mother had had installed the year before (no air-conditioning; what a wanton luxury!). She tried to glide blindly from room to room, focusing on none of the familiar things around her.
And then she went—as she had always done when she arrived home, ever since their move to this house when she was five—to the kitchen. Her mother’s kitchen was a minor utopia, camellia white from ceiling to floor, smooth and clean and free of clutter. There was nothing on the counter by the window but the quavering cutwork of shadows cast by the leaves of the maple tree out back.
Without thinking, Greenie went to the refrigerator—for ice, she told herself, though she had not yet bothered to take a glass from the cupboard. It was a large refrigerator, its double doors neatly quilted with notices and lists, each held down with a magnet bearing a silly motto or advertising local commerce. IF I WERE ORGANIZED, I’D BE DANGEROUS held down the schedule of seasonal events at the Museum of Fine Arts. Her mother had circled an upcoming lecture on the portraits of John Singer Sargent. A handwritten list of twelve friends (a planned dinner party? people to thank?) lay pinned beneath a flat red cow emblazoned in white ANGELO’S FINE CUTS—EUROPEAN VIANDS—GAME IN SEASON. And the schedule for her father’s academic year, the year just ended, was clamped down by a magnetized business card from the family dentist. (The man who filled all of Greenie’s cavities had seemed so ancient whe
n she was small; how could he not have retired by now?)
Greenie found herself mesmerized—and briefly, falsely reassured—by the bric-a-brac of her parents’ lives as of the moment they had left this house and, knowing her mother, as of the moment they were to have returned. It felt as if the entire house were poised for that moment, still unaware of the terrible news.
Reflexively, Greenie opened the right-hand door and found that, efficient as ever, her mother had nearly emptied this part of her refrigerator. There were a dozen well-preserved condiments in jars, but no eggs, milk, or juice to spoil, certainly no leftovers sprouting gray fuzz.
But then she opened the left side, the freezer, and this was when she found her true sorrow. Predictably, the freezer was full, stocked with carefully labeled foil packets (chicken breasts, turkey sausages, homemade raspberry muffins, chestnut purée), containers of chicken and shellfish stock. A dozen red velvet cupcakes, unfrosted: probably awaiting a visit from George. There was even a large plastic tub filled with blueberries picked in Maine the previous summer—destined for pies and preserves and a special pancake sauce that George had just learned to adore the way Greenie always had. Looking into the smoky hum of the freezer, Greenie saw in its generous cargo all the mothering that had belonged, every moment of her life till then, to her and her alone, along with the grandmothering that would henceforth become the sole domain of Alan’s well-meaning but mostly hapless mother.
She stood there a long time, clinging to the freezer door and sobbing, letting the cloudy chill bleed out into the room, flow heedlessly around her body. She heard the inner workings of the refrigerator grind in protest, but still she felt incapable of closing the door, as if that act would be too unbearably final.
The indignant call of a crow startled her; she turned to the window and released the freezer door. She went to another door, the one that led to the backyard, unlocked it, and walked out. The swing her father had hung from the elm tree was still there—a swing that George, at two, was still too cautious to trust, even in a grown-up’s lap—and as Greenie stood there, listlessly gazing, she realized that she would have to give it all up, literally dismantle her past. This house, where she had grown up, belonged not to her parents but to the university where her father taught (oh, had taught). Where would all her parents’ belongings go? Still crying, she left the house, called Alan from a pay phone in the village, and told him to come at once. She had finally understood the monstrosity of her loss, which, each succeeding time she looked at it, compounded itself, sprouting head after head, cruel as a hydra.
Ultimately, from among her mother’s things, she took a few pieces of jewelry and a white cashmere sweater wonderfully preserved from the fifties (which, though she loved it, Greenie would never bring herself to wear—perhaps, she came to suspect, because the label bragged that it had been made in Scotland). Most of the rest of her parents’ incidental belongings she set aside for the church thrift shop; she was grateful when Alan insisted on packing and taking them over himself. The furnishings that she thought they might want in the future, if they ever moved to a larger apartment, she arranged to store at a warehouse in the middle of nowhere in western Massachusetts.
When all was said and done and paid for, she inherited just enough money to cover her business loan and George’s nursery school tuition, along with a real but unquantifiable—and regrettably undisposable—share of a family cabin on an island in Maine. There were also her father’s boats, a Whaler and a small, much-loved sailboat, but they had already been put in the water that year. Greenie called the Boston cousin and told him he could keep both on indefinite loan. Perhaps they were worth a lot of money; Greenie had no idea. She knew only that she could not imagine going to the island without her father picking her up at the marina and her mother, swanlike and stylish, serving her perfect meals. Gently, Alan told Greenie that she would probably change her mind, but this time she was the one with the dark, doubtful perspective. No, she said; no, never.
MORE SERENELY THAN SHE HAD EXPECTED, Greenie went to work on the governor’s dinner; the suite’s kitchen, though small by her mother’s suburban standards, was royal compared with the cubbyhole in Greenie’s apartment downtown. She measured the cornmeal. She held the roast above the marinade, allowing it to drain. She trussed it, painted it, laid it on the rack. She oiled two ramekins. She cracked eggs into a bowl. She grated nutmeg. She measured cream and salt and the garlic she had minced that afternoon. Half an hour before the governor was due back—the roast crackling in the oven, cakes and cheeses all plated and waiting to be devoured—she set the table and propped a handwritten menu against the hotel’s vase of synthetic-smelling roses. Ordinarily, whenever she had to write something to show, she’d ask Alan to check her spelling, but this time she did not ask, not after the ghastly argument they had had when she told him about this adventure. Instead, she’d spent half an hour cross-checking her words in various cookbooks. She paused to read the menu one more time:
SWEET POTATO BISQUE WITH CRABMEAT
•
GRAPEFRUIT ICE IN A SWEET TORTILLA CRISP
•
LAMB SEARED IN ANCHO CHILI PASTE ON POLENTA TWO CHUTNEYS: PEAR & MINT ASPARAGUS FLAN
•
AMERICAN GOAT CHEESE, EAST & WEST, WITH RED-WINE BISCUITS
•
AVOCADO KEY LIME PIE PIÑON TORTA DE CIELO & CHOCOLATE MOCHA SHERBET
She’d invented the cake just for tonight; the sherbet came from Julia Child, a remarkably simple confection made with sour cream. Torta de cielo was a traditional wedding cake from the Yucatán, slim and sublime, light but chewy, where pulverized almonds stood in for flour. This time, instead of almonds, Greenie used the fat, velvety pignoli she ordered from an importer on Grand Street, mincing them by hand to keep them from turning to paste. She did not know whether you could tell the best Italian pine nuts from those grown in New Mexico, but, she caught herself thinking, and not without a touch of spite, she might soon find out.
PERHAPS WHAT UPSET HER MOST about the current state of her marriage was how often she guessed wrong, dead wrong, when it came to predicting Alan’s reactions to just about anything she might say. Commenting on the weather now made her nervous. Last week, she’d complained, as she wiped up tracks on the floor from George’s boots, that she was tired of sleet and snow. Alan snapped, “Ever notice the headlines all fall about drought? Ever stop to think of the farmers? The food we eat, the showers we take?”
Yesterday, Greenie had gone home for her typical midmorning break, after putting Tina to work on Walter’s white rolls and sending Sherwin out with the day’s deliveries. Knowing that Alan was free as well, on his own break between appointments, she took along a box of apricot scones. And there he was, at the table, reading the op-ed pages of the Times. She kissed his right ear and placed the box beside him. “Your favorites.”
He pulled the box toward him and opened it. “Ooh, still warm.” He looked up with widened eyes, just as George would have responded to a treat. “Can I have both?”
“Help yourself. I’ve been nibbling on pie all morning.” She poured herself the last of the coffee, turned off the machine, and sat down.
“Ecstasy—the legal kind,” he said as he took the first bite.
“Honeylamb, we aim to please,” drawled Greenie, channeling Mary Bliss.
“Authentic pleasure, that’s something you do sell to your clients,” said Alan. “That much I don’t deny.”
Before she could stop herself, she said, “But…?”
He shrugged. “But nothing.” His attention returned to the paper: an article about diplomatic relations with China, hardly anything urgent.
“I heard the implied ‘but.’ Like there’s something you do deny,” she said.
“I was going to say, but the pleasure is ephemeral. I was thinking how it’s too bad the joy of sugar can’t last.” Perhaps his smile was apologetic; Greenie saw it as condescending.
“You, on the other hand, you sell your client
s lasting pleasure, pleasure that makes it past the tongue. Pleasure of the soul.”
“Pleasure that doesn’t make you fat, that much at least. Or guilty. Well, the last I can’t guarantee.” When she did not laugh, he said, “I’m only joking. You take me too literally, Greenie.”
“I suppose.” She sighed. “I came back because I had a tale to tell you.”
“A tale? I never tire of tales.”
She closed her eyes briefly, to suppress her irritation. “This should amuse you.” Alan smiled when she mentioned Walter. He laughed when she mimicked Mary Bliss again, the bit about the daw-see-ay. Greenie relaxed.
“You are pulling my leg,” said Alan.
“No, wait!” said Greenie. She told him how Ray McCrae had come on the phone, calling her “girl.”
“The environmental fascist in that High Noon getup?”
When she told him what the governor had in mind, he said, “Man, what a nerve the guy’s got. Like the life you have here must be some flimsy rag you’d toss aside to run away and join his frontier circus!”
Greenie had been pleased at Alan’s amusement, but now she paused. “Well,” she said quickly, “so I said I’d make the guy dinner. Tomorrow night.”
Alan had just polished off the first scone. He wiped the crumbs from his lips with a napkin. “Now you are joking.”
“I am not.”
He stared at her for an instant before he said, “You really are. You are cooking for him. You’re what, maybe planning to poison the guy? You know, you’d be the heroine of Greenpeace, the Nature Conservancy, and the purist holdouts of the Sierra Club they haven’t managed to bribe into silence out there.”
Greenie said, “I thought you’d see this, at the very least, as an opportunity for me to make connections.”
He stared at her again, this time as if she were crazy (the way he would surely never look at any of his patients, even if he thought the same of them). “Connections to…what…the Republican restaurateurs of the Southwest? If you’re planning an expansion, that’s great, but Long Island or New Jersey might be a more realistic place to start.”