Authors: Francine Prose
By this time Vera’s read the gardening guide, the police report, the high and low temperatures in Prague. What galls her is the weather report—all those euphemisms for more of the same. S.O.S., as Lowell would say. The same could be said for her day. She’s read the whole paper, now what? When at last she remembers agreeing to have dinner with Solomon, she’s so elated she actually claps her hands. How could she ever have hesitated?
Vera decides to invite him to dinner. Shopping and cooking will give her something to focus on till then, and besides, it’s simpler. Lately her talks with Solomon have been pocked with so many silences, they don’t need the additional ones that seem always to come with the waiter. There’ll be no flurry over the bill nor that pressure she often feels in restaurants and that she imagines patients feel at their analysts’: the minutes are ticking away, and you’re paying. Say something. Anything. Talk.
When Solomon answers the phone, Vera thinks, There are two kinds of people. The first tries to sound chipper, to pretend you haven’t woken them. The second goes overboard to make sure you know you have. So groggy he can barely speak, Solomon’s of the second sort, but when he hears it’s Vera, becomes one of the first.
After a while Vera says, “Would you like me to call you back later and repeat this whole conversation?”
“No, no, not at all. I’ll be there at seven with the truckload of champagne and cocaine.”
“Heroin,” says Vera. “Heroin might hit the spot.”
“You’re joking, right?” Solomon sounds tired and a little confused, as if he can’t quite remember who he’s talking to.
“Only kidding,” says Vera. “Don’t bring anything. Just come.”
When she hangs up, Rosie is standing behind her. “Yuck,” she says. “Peg Leg Pete.”
The whole time she’s known Solomon, Vera’s feared that Rosie would call him that to his face. She finds it easier to worry about this than about the implications of having a daughter who’d say such a thing in the first place. The truth is that Rosie likes him. He pays attention, tells elephant jokes, brings her jewelled combs and tiny embroidered purses, geisha-girl presents from Chinatown. It was Solomon who bought her
Thriller
. It’s only the idea of him she objects to. For despite her sense of herself as a savvy single-parent child, Rosie’s still hoping that Vera and Lowell will get back together permanently.
Rosie was five when they split up. Vera remembers reading how children often seem unaffected and then take up bedwetting or refusing to eat. Not Rosie, who cried and screamed and argued against the separation until wet sheets and anorexia might have seemed healthy alternatives. Her best friend Kirsty’s parents went through a spectacular divorce; almost none of their friends have the same parents they started out with. They all drag their parents, separately, to the same movies: soap-operatic comedies that all end with some estranged Upper-West-Side or L.A. couple falling into each other’s arms. Vera suspects them of sharing inventive ways of tormenting new boyfriends: mentioning Daddy every fifth word, the silent treatment, and its opposite, the chatter torture.
Now Rosie says, “When’s he coming?”
“I’m calling him back later,” Vera lies, wondering how much Rosie’s overheard. “Maybe next weekend,” she adds vaguely. If Rosie knows he’s coming tonight, she’s not above cancelling any plans she may have and staying home to safeguard her future. Sometimes she reminds Vera of Dave, interrogating Vera’s high-school boyfriends to find out their class origins.
“I hope it’s tonight,” Rosie says. “I won’t be here. I’m staying over at Kirsty’s so we can practice for the recital tomorrow. Okay?”
Vera wishes that just once Rosie would reverse the order of her sentences and ask her before she tells her. She’d still agree to practically anything, but with the illusion of control. Maybe life will get smoother again after tomorrow’s recital. When Rosie was little, she always got cranky before big events: walking, talking, feeding herself with a spoon.
Now from the kitchen comes the noise of the blender churning Rosie’s breakfast mix, a concoction of yogurt, granola, and blackstrap molasses that, the one time Vera tried it, tasted pretty much like the center of a Baby Ruth, only colder. Watching from the doorway, Vera says, “I can’t stop thinking about that kid filling your water gun with pee.” She knows it’s a mistake, but it’s out before she can stop it.
Rosie says, “God!” in a stretched-out, Valley-Girl twang. “
I
don’t want to think about it at all.”
“What I mean is, it seems like something he’d have to
plan
.” Why can’t Vera control herself? Because she can’t resist making her daughter dig under the surfaces of things for their meaning. She remembers dragging baby Rosalie through the freezing March weather to see the first crocuses in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Missing the point completely, Rosie ignored the flowers and focused instead on the pebbles, the black crumbs of dirt. Or maybe she hadn’t missed the point at all. “I know it’s like Norma said, he likes you. But beyond that, why—?”
“Why?” Vera’s shocked by the anger in Rosie’s voice. Of course the water gun episode was disgusting. But it’s more than that. It’s as if this has given Rosie some intimation of what men and women can and will do to each other. Vera knows it can’t be helped, but still it seems wrong that Rosie should blame
her
, the person who most wants to shield her. “Because his friend Elijah dared him to. The same reason Carl does
everything
.” Her tone gets chattier, confidential. “Kirsty says Carl’s gay.”
“Honey,” says Vera. “Ten’s a little young.”
“Mom,” says Rosie. “Don’t be naïve. Dick and Kenny told me they knew it the day they were born. Dick had his first crush on the male nurse in the newborn ward.” This seems to cheer Rosie up, and she says, “Guess what happened last night. Lady Velvetina rolled her way out of the Haunted Thicket and wound up smack in the Swamp of Desolation.”
“The Swamp of Desolation,” Vera repeats. “That sounds about right.” It saddens her that Rosie will be Dungeon Master all weekend and first thing Monday morning go in and be held hostage to Carl and his friend Elijah. “When are you going to Kirsty’s?”
“I’m already gone,” says Rosie, licking the blender jar. “Kirsty’s Mom’s downstairs.” Vera’s nearly blocking the door but Rosie squeezes past without touching her. From the living room Rosie says, “Hey, you know what I saw on TV? They’ve got this new stuff called Pour-A-Pie. It’s lemon meringue in a milk carton. One side’s the filling, the other’s meringue, pour it into a readymade pie crust, bake ten minutes, and bingo! What do you think of that?”
What is Vera supposed to think, except to wonder what they put in the meringue to keep it permanently whipped? Vera would never serve Pour-A-Pie, and Rosie knows it. So why does she act as if Vera invented it, another chemical horror visited by her generation on an unsuspecting world? Who
would
buy it? Lowell. Lowell would buy Pour-A-Pie in two seconds flat. She considers the possibility that the attraction to products like Pour-A-Pie may be hereditary, and that’s why Rosie is fighting it so hard.
“What time should I pick you up tomorrow?” Vera asks. But Rosie’s right, she’s already gone. The door clicks shut behind her.
The Pour-A-Pie discussion has started Vera thinking about food. Shutting her eyes, she lies back on the couch and meditates on what to serve Solomon. The day promises to get hotter, so anything requiring long cooking will suffocate them before they can eat. Seviche needs no cooking at all but should have started marinating yesterday. Recipes demanding more time than she has depress her; it’s as if she’s reached the end of her life and discovered the one essential thing left undone. Maybe some kind of pasta. Sesame noodles with scallions, or pasta primavera with its bright flecks of cut-up vegetables. The problem is all those upwardly mobiles eating pasta salad tonight in smart little eateries from the Heights to the Upper West Side. Food chic makes Vera want to serve strips of lunch meat wrapped around Velveeta cubes and stuck with frilly toothpicks, then chicken baked with orange marmalade and onion-soup mix, frozen Japanese vegetables on the side. And for dessert? Pour-A-Pie. But why would she do that to Solomon, who’s anything but a food snob and would probably be satisfied with meatballs and spaghetti?
Finally she decides on curried chicken salad with walnuts and grapes. It’s just as stylish, she knows; it’s what Kirsty’s Mom, Lynda, calls Soho Chicken Salad. The difference is, she’s always made chicken salad this way and feels about it the way others claim to feel about vacation spots they went to as children and later saw ruined by fashion. Besides, she likes chopping celery, walnuts, green onions; halving grapes; peeling chicken breasts off the bone; seeing it all cohere with mayonnaise and then turn golden with curry. The prospect fires her with energy. She’ll make chocolate mousse for dessert!
En route to the supermarket, she’s almost always optimistic. It’s as if she expects to find something there beyond food, to pick up the
People
at the checkout counter and read all the answers to her deepest unspoken questions. Suddenly Vera feels very close to Lowell. This must be what quickens Lowell’s step on the way to the store: the pull of the serendipitous and hopeful.
Vera’s good cheer deserts her in the poultry section of the SaveMart. Recently she read an article on how to recognize fresh chicken. It’s supposed to be very yellow or not yellow at all, she can’t remember which. And even if she could, what then? All the chicken on display looks to be having a long, hot weekend. She recalls a documentary about water-witching: one old man never went to the store without his forked stick, which dove for the extra water in overripe vegetables. Vera wishes she had a forked stick and the faith to use it. She throws the nearest chicken into her basket—by the time she’s boiled and shredded it, color won’t matter.
Turning down the produce aisle, Vera sees bunches of collards and immediately starts wondering what she’ll say to the Greens. She notices her palms have started sweating. For comfort she thinks back to this morning’s dream and wishes she had those dinosaur fragments now. She’d hide them behind the gourmet items, the jars of baby corn and bad caviar that no one ever buys. She’d look for them at times like this—times when she realizes that there’s nothing new at the SaveMart, times she wishes she were Lowell and knew how to transcend familiarity, times when she knows beyond any doubt that whatever elusive thing she’s looking for just isn’t, never was, and never will be here.
B
Y SIX, WHEN SOLOMON
shows up, whatever small promises the day’s held out have all been broken. For starters, there’s no chocolate mousse, just a package of Orange Milanos that Vera’s run out to buy. At least the chicken salad’s done, chilling in the fridge. But the dream of harmonious chopping and mixing turned out to be something of a nightmare.
First Vera tried deboning the chicken before it had cooled and kept on till her fingers were puffy and burned. Grapes shot from under the knife and rolled beneath her feet. In keeping with everything else, the walnuts were rancid, a fact she didn’t discover till she’d stirred them in; she’d picked through the entire bowl, extracting nut fragments like shrapnel. Enough curry powder will cover anything, she’d thought. But not so, not so. For courage she reminded herself that Solomon claimed to have eaten dog meat in Vietnam. But this only irked her more. Why was she suffering to cook for a man who’d eat dog meat? And when at last he rang the bell, she thought: The dog-meat eater’s here.
Solomon’s wearing jeans and his best Hawaiian shirt, a masterpiece that has probably cost him half a week’s pay and should be in a museum. It’s hand painted, and—Solomon has taught her a thing or two about Hawaiian shirts—there’s no interruption in the design where the pocket’s stitched on. Painted over and over with light variations is a long canoe filled with half-smiling island Mona Lisas swooning over ukulele tunes strummed by brown young men. Once more Vera wishes that Solomon’s shirt were the physical world, that she could stow away on one of those boats and sail off, lulled by the rocking waves and the sweet strains of “Ukulele Lady.”
Smiling rather sheepishly, Solomon holds out a bunch of long green stalks with wrinkled orange dead things at the ends. Vera almost regrets not telling him to go ahead and bring the champagne and cocaine, tries not to let her disappointment show.
“I don’t know about these,” he says. “I drove upstate to take some pictures today. They were growing by the roadside. Free flowers. At least they were flowers when I picked them. I can’t figure out what went wrong. Unless they’re like the floral version of exploding cigars or those birthday candles you can’t blow out. Maybe if I stick them in some water it’ll help.”
“It won’t,” says Vera. “That’s why they call them daylilies. Each one lasts a day.” She sounds like a second-grade teacher. Suddenly she wants to start this whole scene over, wants Solomon to shut the door and ring the bell, and this time she’ll say, “Oh, what beautiful flowers!”
“You’re kidding,” he says. “One day? How come I never knew this? Like dragonflies or mayflies or whatever you—”
“Solomon,” Vera says. “Come in.”
When Solomon hugs her, it’s even clumsier than yesterday at work, belated and with some confusion on both sides about when to stop. Cameras clanking, he paces the living room. Then he says, “Do you mind?” and lights up one of his cheroots.
“Where’s the very lovely Miss R.?” he says.
“At Kirsty’s,” says Vera. “Practicing for the big recital.”
“That’s a shame,” says Solomon. “Look what I brought her.”
It’s a handpainted antique photograph of a ballerina. “Tinted with me own two hands,” he says. “Do you know what Joseph Cornell would have given for this?”
“She’ll love it,” says Vera, crossing her fingers. The possibility of Rosalie turning up her nose at Solomon’s generosity makes Vera want to put the daylilies in water and pray over them till they flower again. When she does take them, though, she throws them away. There’s nothing else to do.
“O ye of little faith,” says Solomon. As he waits politely to be offered something, Vera wishes she were living with Lowell or anyone with the range and domestic entitlement to get his own drink. Though she knows Solomon’s not to blame, she lets him stand there till he asks, “Should I run out and get some beer?” At which point she’s so ashamed she reaches back past the Budweisers for one of the dark Heinekens she’d been saving for something more special.