| |
A Kitchen Accident
Joyce Thompson
The first time she laid eyes on him he was in uniform, one of a bunch of homegrown warriors marching in triumph up the main street of the little Minnesota town. He was trim from exercise and scant rations, tan from being outside for months. He had seen Paris, drunk French wine, paid American dollars to sleep with French women. The soldiers were singing as they marched up Main Street. She, a fat girl with a crazy evangelist father and an eighth grade diploma, found him handsome and exotic. A flat doughboy hat shaded his eyes, so she could not detect the voidness of them.
The vision is thirty years old now and would have faded, but she keeps it alive by frequent conjurings, as a way to explain her mistake in marrying a stupid man. Now, in his after-work slack-jawed sprawl in the green upholstered rocker in front of the television set, he is the shape of a gigantic pear. His skin is the color of bruised fruit. When he gets home at night, he kicks off his workboots beside the door and pads around in thick wool socks, their shape distorted by the knobs of his bunions. He is vain about his fine silver hair and sleeps with other women every time the chance comes. Her anger over his betrayals is somewhat mitigated by the fact that she no longer wants to sleep with him herself. In fact, if he were considerate or subtle enough to hide his transgressions, she would hardly care about them at all. It is less the principle than the public nature of her humiliation that causes her pain.
Once, right after they moved from Minnesota to the West Coast to get jobs in the shipyards, a woman he'd messed around with came to her and asked her to divorce him. The woman said she was pregnant. Evie laughed in her face. Ralph had been gassed in the trenches in France and couldn't father babies no matter how much he tried. That, his infertility, is the one thing she might have left him for, but it seemed too cruel, so she stayed.
She cleans the apartment and balances the check book, gets them their apartment free by managing the building they live in, and cooks for him. She cooks the plain, rich food he loves, pot roasts, swiss steak, swedish meatballs, pork roasts crusted in pepper, juicy hamburgers that leave droppings of translucent onion behind them on the plate, meat loaves, sometimes, most often on Friday nights, a t-bone or a spencer steak. Several times a week, she bakes bread, bakes dinner rolls, bakes breakfast rolls, his favorite, strips of dough lined with cinnamon and sugar, rolled up like snails and set in a pan on top of sugar, butter, and chopped walnuts that caramelize as they bake into a gloriously gooey, dark brown topping. She bakes pies, too, and cookies, less often, cakes. The aroma of baking days masks the odor of stale cigarette smoke that clings to the curtains and lives in the carpet. Both of them smoke too much.
Potatoes are the pinnacle, the white gold of their diet. He will not eat a meal without them, huge quantities of them, and Evie must know two dozen different things to do to potatoes to keep herself from getting bored. As for him, he would eat mashed potatoes every night of the week, of the month, of the year, if she would make them for him. He piles his plate with mashed potatoes until it looks like a lunar landscape, and in the top of the highest mountain, he gouges out a crater that fills up with melted butter like a yellow alpine lake. Then he blankets the terrain with pepper until the white slopes turn almost black. Then he eats. The act of eating animates him more than anything else she has ever seen him do. She likes him better when he eats her food than at any other time.
Tonight is Friday night, is paycheck night, and Ralph watches wrestling on TV while she makes dinner. Ralph believes that professional wrestling is a legitimate sport, that the participants experience real pain.The A&P had lamb chops on sale, and she bought three, two his, one hers, and the potatoes are shredded and waiting while the Crisco in the deep fat fryer gets hot enough to make them into the golden shoetrings they both love. In the livingroom, in his excitement, Ralph pounds the floor with his feet.
Evie goes to the door of the kitchen. "Why are you making so damn much noise?"
"It's Gorgeous George," Ralph says. "He's going to strangle Frank the Skank."
"You live on the second floor," Evie reminds him. "Nobody's going to die."
Ralph points at the black and white tweed screen. Gorgeous George picks Frank the Skank up by his trunks, lifts him over his head and spins him round and round, the way Evie would have spun her son around over her head, if she had had one. Her son would have shrieked with happiness and fear. Gorgeous George hurls Frank the Skank to the floor of the ring. Half rising from his chair, Ralph makes a terrible sound that seems to express both Gorgeous George's elation and Frank the Skank's deep suffering. The sound is so loud that Joey the parakeet rises from his perch on Ralph's shoulder and flies a dizzy spiral in the middle of the living room.
Evie puckers and makes kissing sounds to parakeet. "Is Joey scared? Come here, baby." She makes a perch of her forefinger and the bird lands on it. When she lifts the perch, the parakeet darts forward to peck at Evie's lips. "Such sweet kisses," she says.
"When's dinner coming?" Ralph asks. "I could eat a horse."
"Soon as the shoetrings fry," she tells him. The bird rides on her shoulder back to the kitchen, which is hot and full of the smell of oil so hot it hisses and roars in the fryer. "One of these days," she tells the bird, "I'm going to cook him a horse and see what he does then." The minute talons tickle as the parakeet dances on her shoulder, as if he appreciates the joke. "Aren't you the smart one," she says.
After she cuts into the lamb chops with her sharp paring knife and finds their centers turning from pink to brown, Evie scoops up the shredded and rinsed potatoes and drops them into the boiling oil. It roars to receive them. Steam rises from the fryer as the heat drives out moisture, enveloping her face in a hot cloud, and she peers through it into the pot, watching the potatoes change from pallid vegetable to gold. She is so transfixed by the metamorphosis she hardly notices the parakeet take flight from her shoulder, is not tuned in as it corkscrews upward, fleeing the heat, maybe, all the way up to the ceiling, and then begins its swift descent.
The bird does not cry out, hitting, but the oil cries out to receive him, a hungry hissing sound, and Evie is too surprised to cry out as she watches the parakeet shrivel and turn black. He is crisp by the time she fishes him out of the deep fat fryer.
Three lampchops and a high gold haystack of shoestrings Evie sets at Ralph's place, and at her own, a plate empty except for a tiny misshapen lump, black as coal.
"Dinner's ready," she calls to Ralph, and he comes to the table, and sits and eats, still watching the herringbone shadows of the wrestlers in their combat dance. He eats without speaking until his plate is empty, and Evie sits there, too, staring out the second story window at the neighbor's roof and the nightly blanching of color from the sky, at the coming on of lights, at the cars of strangers driving up and down the street below, eating nothing, until long after Ralph has gone to bed.
|
|
