Authors: Francine Prose
Smelling and tasting, squeezing and sampling, Louise never looks more beautiful and vibrant than when she’s buying food, nor does Vera ever love her so much. Vera wonders if Louise knows that and let her fridge get bare on purpose so they could start off here. It’s no accident that Vera’s memories of shopping with Louise are of tradesmen slipping free lamb chops and artichokes into Louise’s parcels and trying to pick her up; it’s why that lettuce diet seemed such a terrible waste.
Vera has to run to keep up with Louise as she tears through the Pike Street Market, past touristy croissant cafés, ersatz Nantucket seafood houses, stalls selling exquisite food. “Welcome to Seattle,” says Louise, pulling Vera into a fish shop with a wall of ice like those wall-of-water fountains, and more kinds of salmon than Vera knew existed. Salmon steaks, filets, salmon smoked and pickled, poached and dressed with parsley and lemon, whole fish—seventy pounds of fin and scale and baleful eye.
Meanwhile Louise is stroking the smooth, pink salmon flesh. Don’t, thinks Vera, that’s somebody’s dinner. Once, in a Madison Avenue gourmet shop, she watched Louise dip into a bowl of tortellini salad and pop the fattest pasta ring into her mouth. Vera can’t help tensing, bracing herself to hear someone yell, “Hands off!” But nobody ever does. The man coming toward them is smiling. Vera wonders why guys who sell fish are always so sweet and good-looking. Perhaps it’s universal: fisher-people all over the world. Now Vera imagines going on an all-fish diet and finding true love among the mussels and tuna and bass.
“Brought in this morning,” he says. “This salmon’s so fresh it just about walked off the boat.”
Vera’s staring at him, but what she’s thinking about is a Florida walking-catfish story she wrote for
This Week.
FISH EATS DOGGIE’S DINNER, THEN DOG
. She’s remembering Shaefer saying that walking-catfish stories were growing kind of stale. How about a walking-talking-catfish story? Then he and Esposito began swapping jokes about guys ordering fish in restaurants and the fish starting to talk. They each told two or three. How did they know so many talking-fish jokes? Now, wishing she knew just one, Vera realizes she’s still a little drunk and stares at the fish man’s smile to anchor herself.
Louise points out four thick steaks. “Three and a half pounds,” he reads off the scale. “But I’ll only charge you for three.” When Vera reaches for her purse, Louise grabs her wrist. “This one’s on Uncle Sam,” she says, paying with a booklet of food stamps. “I figure he owes us. If this were Japan, we’d be national treasures.”
“For what?” says Vera, wondering why Louise has food stamps. She’d thought she was teaching.
“For surviving,” says Louise, thanking the fish man with an astonishing smile and taking off at a run. Vera catches up with her at the vegetable stand. Louise roots among the ears of corn, shucking them, stuffing the ones with the smallest, whitest, most even kernels into a bag. “Too bad strawberries aren’t in season,” she says. “They’d be perfect.”
“Strawberries?” says Vera. “I can hardly remember what month it is. Let alone what’s in season.”
“August.” Does Louise think that Vera really doesn’t know?
“Corn. And melons.” Then she’s burrowing in the melon bin, smelling them, tapping them, shaking them near her ear. “Melons always remind me of Lowell,” she says.
Vera’s so unaccustomed to hearing anyone else say his name, she thinks, Lowell who? She has to remind herself, Louise met him first.
“Remember how he’d talk about the melons in Afghanistan, the shapes, the colors; he’d go on for hours. Fifty, sixty kinds of melons. I used to think he was making it up, except that he knew all the different names in whatever language it was they spoke over there—”
“Pashto,” says Vera. “And he
was
making it up, or anyway, the names. He never learned a word of Pashto, except he could say, Go fuck a crazy dog. Jig jig. Jig jig a something something.”
“Jig jig,” says Louise. “That’s right. I remember a story he used to tell, how he was traveling with some French hippie girl to some godforsaken place. This nomad chief kept trying to buy Lowell’s girlfriend, and Lowell kept refusing until the chief offered to throw in a dozen of his sweetest prize melons, and Lowell said, Well, maybe he could
rent
her for a while.”
Vera remembers him talking about Afghan melons, but not about that. She’s pretty sure he made that up, too. As much as Lowell likes melons, he’s too much of a romantic to have traded a girlfriend for one. Hearing Louise talk about Lowell makes Vera see him from a new perspective, or maybe from an old perspective she’s forgotten. Louise’s memories of Lowell verify his existence, just as Lowell’s memories verify the fact that Rosie was once a baby. Vera wishes she and Lowell and Louise could all live together. Then Lowell would never have to grocery shop; Louise would insist on doing it.
Now Louise says, “Let’s go,” but can’t tear herself away. Watching her by the baskets of cherry tomatoes is like watching lovers postponing goodbye. Finally she says, “What am I doing? I
grow
this stuff!” and puts the tomatoes down.
Back in the car, Vera shuts her eyes and lets Louise drive. She knows they’re leaving the thruway by the click of the turn signal and the fact that they’re taking more curves without going any slower. They stop briefly, and Vera looks around. They’re at some rural four corners, two gas pumps and a Seven Eleven. Louise tromps on the gas again and says, “Did I write you about Earl? I can’t remember.”
Vera can’t either. She does remember a story about a psychiatrist who fell in love with Louise and then terminated her therapy, but somehow Earl doesn’t sound like a therapist’s name.
“Maybe not,” says Louise. “I met him up in Wallaceville, in a bar. He’s the local hippie carpenter, except that now all these rich people are moving out from Seattle and fixing up places, he’s making a fortune. He did all the carpentry in my house. For free. He’s not real complicated. It’s easier. He’s really a very nice guy.”
“You lucky duck,” Vera says. Suddenly Louise begins grimacing horribly, and Vera thinks it’s in response to her answer, or to Earl, then realizes she’s braking. You’d think a tractor trailer was speeding straight at them, but in fact all that’s happening is they’ve turned off the black top and onto a narrow dirt road. The car bounces. Parts seem to be dropping off the chassis. Eventually Louise slows down enough for Vera to look around; they’re driving through a valley. Surrounded by rolling farmland, green hills, stone fences, barns, they could be in the Blue Ridge, the Adirondacks, Vermont with harsher mountains in the distance. At last they turn past a mailbox and into an overgrown driveway that seems longer than the distance from Seattle. As Vera looks back to see if the car’s in one piece, Louise says, “You really need a four-wheel-drive on this.”
When the driveway dead-ends, Louise puts the Saab in a fancy 360-degree spin. Vera feels as if they should be wearing helmets and overalls and climbing out of the top of the car. Her knees shake slightly as she stands there breathing the cool, fragrant air and looking for the house. Then Louise takes her suitcase and the grocery bags up a small hill toward a rambling, dilapidated chicken coop sided with ragged asphalt and dark, tarry spaces that remind Vera of how she and Louise used to dress up as Mammy Yokum by blacking their teeth with ballpoint.
Years ago, when Louise got released from the hospital, her parents gave her five thousand dollars provided she never went near the towelheads again. Then, surprised and hurt when Louise chose to live so far from anywhere, they took to calling up Vera to share their suspicions that Louise had spent their money on a secret towelhead retreat. If they’d seen this place, thinks Vera, they’d have stopped worrying—at least about that. Not even the most fanatical cult would house its converts in a dump like this.
By now Louise has reached the porch and turned before Vera can assume a properly appreciative expression. She’s afraid that Louise may have seen the disappointment on her face.
“Wait,” Louise says, meaning, Don’t make any judgments yet. “Come inside.” And Vera follows her into a gigantic room so beautiful her first thought is: What Earl’s built for Louise is nothing less than the counterculture Taj Mahal.
Every beam and board seems to have been specially chosen for richness of color and grain. The ceiling is high, and the sun shining down through the skylights bathes everything in golden light, like an illustration from some art-nouveau British children’s classic. One wall is nearly all glass. Those mountains are what Louise sees every night when she washes her dishes! Vera tries not to think about Montague Street, or that girl in the Chinese restaurant. You hope that your friend won’t be more successful or perfect or have a better view.
Vera’s edging the walls like a blind woman feeling her way. She’s pleased by how much of Louise’s stuff she recognizes: the Persian miniature of two lovers in a garden, the yarn painting done by Indians on some weird combination of drugs, the Mexican cross studded with silver
milagros
—arms, legs, eyes, farm animals—the postcard of San Ramón Nonato preaching while levitating three feet off the ground. The difference is, every place Louise lived before, you had to excavate these treasures from under mountains of junk. Here everything has its niche.
“Hungry?” says Louise. Her kitchen is in the darkest and coziest corner, its showpiece a huge 1930s wood cookstove gleaming with chrome and sea green enamel. Its round wood table, Windsor chairs, checked tablecloth, and green glass hanging lamp look like a set from one of those new-style Westerns in which the real star of the film is the art director. Yet it doesn’t seem stagy or false country chic, but functional, broken-in.
On the table is a bowl of enormous dark cherries, a loaf of crusty bread, a jar of honey without even a speck of butter in it, and a hunk of crumbly white cheese the size of a shoe box. It’s all so lovely, Vera can’t imagine doing a vulgar, disruptive thing like eating. But Louise breaks off the heels from both ends of the bread, spraying the table with crumbs, then cuts a slab of cheese and hands it to Vera, saying, “Goat cheese. I remember, you love it.”
“You must be getting a truckload of food stamps,” says Vera.
“Don’t laugh,” says Louise. “But I make the cheese myself. I’ve got goats. And the honey. We keep bees.”
“What is this?” says Vera. “
The Mother Earth News
?”
“I knew you’d laugh,” Louise says. “Just don’t get the wrong idea. Don’t think I’ve turned into one of those New Age survivalists, hurricane lamps run on chicken shit, wiping my butt on pages from an old
Whole Earth Catalogue
hung up in the composting toilet. Or, worse, one of those screaming cancerophobes inspecting every label in the health-food store. It just tastes better this way, and you’re right, I
can’t
afford it on food stamps. The school pays so little I’m actually eligible for government assistance. Anyway, doing the work to eat like this keeps me in shape so I can keep eating and…” Louise breaks off in midsentence. “Earl’s here,” she says, though it’s a good while before Vera hears a truck pull up.
First the door opens, admitting two enormous German Shepherds, Rin Tin Tin on steroids. They sniff Vera’s crotch, nearly knocking her down, then run around wagging and barking, doing every territorial thing they can do but piss in the corners. Then Earl comes in, so tall he has to stoop under the doorway he built himself, a posture that makes Vera think of the giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk,” especially when Earl announces his arrival by stomping several times on the floor. Vera wonders if maybe Earl isn’t a country boy at all but a city kid gone so overboard in country ways he’s still stomping snow off his boots in August.
Earl’s blond beard and ponytail remind Vera of C.D. ten years ago, except that Earl’s much handsomer. He’s wearing faded, tight blue jeans and no shirt. Pressed under a round of glass on his belt buckle is what appears to be a dead scorpion. At least Vera thinks it’s dead. She’d like to make sure, but is embarrassed to stare at the place where his belt meets his suntanned flesh; that part of a man’s body’s always moved her.
Earl comes up behind Louise, winds his arms around her and kisses the back of her neck. Louise stretches against him like a cat. It’s not exactly lascivious, and yet it’s clear that what’s between Earl and Louise is more than his lack of complication and his fine carpentry skills.
“When’d you get in?” says Earl, and Vera says, “This afternoon.”
Fidgeting, Earl lifts the plate on the cookstove and looks down the well as if expecting to see live coals there. Then he sits down at the kitchen table and says to Vera, “Well, now. Welcome. Have a seat.” He means nothing but friendliness, Vera knows, but it irks her that he’s welcoming her to Louise’s home. She’s been sitting so long in the plane and the car, she’d really rather keep standing; yet she surprises herself by doing what Earl says. Maybe she just wants a closer look.
Earl’s eyes are round and gray and vacant. Knock, knock; nobody home. They hardly even blink. It occurs to Vera that Louise’s saying he was uncomplicated was putting it mildly. One thing’s for sure: this guy isn’t likely to drag Louise to airports to watch spies reporting into their candy bars, or to wake up at five
A.M.
scared to death of her. He’s not scared of anything. It’s his main virtue, thinks Vera. It’s his main flaw.
“How was work?” says Louise.
“Okay,” says Earl. “I figure another week on the flooring, then I’ll get to those kitchen cabinets.”
“You just gettin’ home from workin’ now?” says Vera, appalled to hear herself sound like some parody Loretta Lynn. What’s happened to her normal voice, and where are her g’s? That’s the power of the male, she thinks, the draw of the belt buckle and bare chest.
Earl seems slightly taken aback by her question. Does he think she’s implying he skipped out early, or has social life reverted to what it was in California in the sixties, when it was considered such grievous bad taste to ask people what they did?
“Yeah,” says Earl.
“Louise told me you built this place,” says Vera, a little desperately. “It’s beautiful.”