Eating Heaven (17 page)

I drive up the highway, across the Marquam Bridge to the east side of the Willamette, the working-class side, the funky-in-a-not-quite-comfortable-way side, not nearly as innocuous as the more gentrified west that I’ve always lived in. Somehow, the Northeast’s inner neighborhoods retain their blue-collar or hippie or ethnic roots even with the addition of coffeehouses and cafés, gift shops and bookstores. And the old bungalows and English cottages are seriously cute. If I ever bought a house, it would probably have to be over here, though many of these neighborhoods are getting almost as pricey as the west side.

At the exit for Hollywood, I turn off the highway. Britney didn’t mention the Hollywood Freddy’s, but it’s worth a try. I turn up Broadway, past Ethiopian restaurants and tattoo shops, naturopathic doctors and heating-oil contractors. At the light I swing into the parking lot, park near the requisite companion Starbucks, and head into the spacious fluorescent glow, the store layout as familiar as my own apartment. A Fred’s is a Fred’s is a Fred’s. Just like McDonald’s or Home Depot or Holiday Inn: Once you know one, you know ’em all—an unadventurous consumer’s dream, and one that is slowly putting every mom-and-pop out of business.

I head for the back, thinking the dairy section would be a good place to find lard, it being a multitudinous collection of animal fats. Weaving
through slow-motion elderly shoppers and stock clerks with boxes spilling at their feet, my mind goes into work mode. While I’m here, I should pick up supplies for my latest
American Family
article: “Beyond Con Carne: 7 Bold New Chili Recipes.”

At the wide rear aisle that runs the length of the store, I glide past milk, yogurt, and cottage cheese to butter and butterlike products. I don’t remember the last time I saw a package of lard, but I remember waxy translucent paper with blue writing wrapped around a large rectangular white chunk. “Lard, lard,” I mumble, scanning all the way to cheese, then back. Would Crisco work? I just want to get this right. Maybe I should ask the butcher while I check out the pork chops.

At the meat section, I head instinctively toward the premium case. Beautiful butterflied chops lie next to thick tenderloins and mounds of pork-apple sausage. Benny’s mother would have butchered the pig herself, I suppose, or his dad would have. They’d have cut meager portions by today’s standards, thin triangular slabs to make Porky’s sacrifice last longer.

“Can I help you?” says a squat Latino man with a drooping mustache. His white coat, like a doctor’s, is smeared with blood.

“I need some pork chops, but I need them less . . . I don’t know. Just not quite so thick and wonderful looking.”

“Thin sliced?”

“Like when we were kids, you know?”

He nods. “I can cut some of these down for you, but maybe you should try my uncle’s
carniceria
on Belmont. They do all that thin-sliced meat, all fresh, good stuff.”

“Oh, my God,” I say, “I think I used to go there with my aunt, years ago. What was it called, Chuy’s?”

“Chucho’s.” He winks. “Not that I don’t like to give Uncle Fred the business, but Uncle Chucho has just what you’re looking for.”

“Hey, do you think he has lard?”

“You bet. The real stuff, too. Not that processed crap.”

“Pork cracklings?” It would be too much to ask for.

“
Chicharrones?
Of course.” He waves a thick hand in the air and walks toward a young mom eyeing the fresh bay shrimp. “
Chicharrones,
lard, pork chops. The dude has it all.”

“Thanks,” I call after him, and turn to go.

“Eleanor Samuels.” The voice behind me is pleasantly familiar, yet I’m so stuck in my pork-fat reverie I’m not quick enough to realize it is Henry’s until I’ve turned to stare him square in the face.

“Oh!” is all I can manage to say.

“Indeed,” he says, smiling.

Somehow, Henry suckers me into having coffee at Starbucks. Well, he invites me and I say yes, feeling like a home wrecker.

We squeeze into chairs tucked around a small table in back. Behind Henry a triptych of framed child art hangs on the wall. Crudely lettered on the top of one drawing are the words I
AM
K
ARA
. I
AM HAPPY
.

Determined to keep the conversation to small talk, I ask how the restaurant’s doing. Henry says fine, fine. He tried to call; I say I know, I just got busy. The article turned out great. Nods all around.

When the green-haired barista calls out “Tall mocha, double breve,” Henry jumps up to retrieve our drinks, then places mine to the right of where a plate would be if this were a meal, along with a napkin, sugar, and stir stick all precisely squared to the table.

“So,” I say, “what are you doing across the river? This is not the first place I would have imagined bumping into you.” I try to smile, feeling like I’m stretching a hide over bones, and take a searing sip of my mocha.

“I live a few blocks from here,” he says. “Fifteenth and Siskiyou.”

“Really? I thought you lived in the Pearl.”

“I work in the Pearl. I can’t afford to live there.”

“I just thought . . . you know. I didn’t know.”

“How would you?” he says, raising his eyebrows, taking a delicate sip of his espresso and steamed half-and-half. Why didn’t I order one of those? His face is pinker than usual, his hair even rowdier. My feelings for him haven’t budged an inch.

“And how’s your wife?” I say, then clamp my mouth shut. I don’t ask these kinds of questions. I don’t dig for dirt. I’m too apt to find it where I don’t want to.

He raises his eyebrows. “I imagine she’s fine. I don’t really know. She lives with her parents.”

I get it. Separated. Not divorced. Tenuous filaments still stretching between them like Benny and Yolanda. I nod, bite my tongue. I’m not saying another thing.

“I’d like to explain the situation,” Henry says, and his face turns serious, bottom lip jutting, fingers tapping the paper coffee cup. “It’s not what you think.”

“You know, it’s none of my business. Don’t worry about it.” I take a gulp of my drink, feel the long, sliding burn from tongue to gullet, and stand. “Thanks for the coffee. I’ve got to get going.”

“Wait, Eleanor. Please. Let’s talk.”

“Why?” I’m fumbling through my purse for keys. All I wanted was some lard, for crying out loud. The last thing I need in my life is someone else with secrets.

“Because . . . you know. I thought we had some kind of . . . God, you know what I mean, don’t you?”

I look back at him, trying not to notice the sincerity in his eyes. “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.” I wince, wondering if he saw it. “You’re married.”

“But I don’t love her. If you’d just let me expla—”

“No,” I interrupt. How typical. How shameless. “I don’t care. You’re married.”

“I’m helping Namhla and her family stay in the U.S.,” he blurts, and I squint at him. I look at him, in fact, for the longest moment I’ve ever looked at someone without speaking or moving in for something more amorous.

“She’s from Tibet?”

He nods. I almost fall for it, but then it hits me: I wonder how Namhla feels about it.

“You know what?” I say. “The bottom line is you’re married, for whatever reason.”

He purses his lips, nods, then stands and offers his hand to shake. “You’re right, Eleanor. You’re an honorable and moral woman, and you are absolutely right.”

I take his hand, feel it close over mine, let it linger there too long.

“Well, then,” I say, finally pulling away. “Be sure to look in next Tuesday’s paper. It’s a pretty good piece.”

“Good-bye, Eleanor Samuels,” Henry says. He sits back down, glum.

As I turn to go, I glance at his left hand.

No ring, and no white strip.

Benny cuts a bite-size piece of pork, turns the fork this way and that in his hand, examining the crispy fried exterior while checking for my reaction in glances he thinks are sneaky.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I say to appease him. “Eat the damn thing.”

He sops up some extra gravy and gently slides the fork in and out of his mouth. As he chews, his face loses the playful grin. He swallows and looks down at the table.

“What? Is it too chewy?” I saw at my own chop, the smallest of the bunch, to taste it. “Too much salt or something? Too overdone?”

Benny looks up and his eyes are soft and liquid. “No, honey. It’s perfect.” Tentatively, he cuts another piece, chews it slowly, then another. By the end of the meal, he’s eaten his entire pork chop and fried potatoes and sopped up the extra drippings with a thick slice of homemade bread, made with, of course, lard. When I offer him apple crisp for dessert, he finally puts his hands in the air.

“Gawd, I couldn’t eat another bite. Maybe after my stomach settles some,” he says, and I get this weird vision of Benny as bulimic, throwing up so he can power down more food. The way I’ve successfully cut and scooted my food around on my plate, though, is a clear indicator of who has the real food issues in this house. At some point I know I have to start eating again or I’ll end up like Karen Carpenter.

After the ritual of TV, dessert, more TV, and Benny trundling off to bed, I walk over to the bookshelves, take down as many photo albums as I can carry back to the couch. It’s time I got to know Benny better. Maybe he’d like to talk about his life, his old friends and family.

I open the book on top of the pile, a rectangular brown and gilt pressboard cover with black pages. Square black-and-white photos of people I don’t know have tiny dates imprinted along one curlicued edge: O
CT
.
1959, A
PR
. 1960. Five years before I was born, before Mom and Dad were even married.

Young men in suits and skinny ties, girlish women in skirts and sweaters. They look like friends, hanging out in someone’s sparse Danish-modern living room holding highballs, cans of beer. Smoking, always smoking. Looking far more sophisticated than my generation did at that age.

I wonder if these are from Benny’s bachelor days in Missouri, or his first marriage, his social circle before she died. I look closer to see if I can pick out Benny as a young guy with hair, turning the pages to scan the different people. Which young woman would be his wife? The one with freckles and pearls, or the buxom one who’s vamping in every photo? Then my heart jumps. A close-up shot of my mother stares back at me, her curly raven hair coiffed short and neat, lips dark, eyes bright as she laughs and points at the camera, cigarette in one hand. She is so young and fresh-faced I want to tell her to be careful.

How did Benny get ahold of Mom’s pictures from her single days? I’ve never seen them before; maybe she doesn’t even know he stole them. I can’t imagine Benny doing anything so underhanded and creepy.

I turn the pages quickly now, looking for more shots of Mom, impatient at all the other people laughing and clowning in the photos. Then I see it and stop dead, the book vibrating now in my tight grasp.

It’s a picture of a man and woman standing in a kitchen doorway, their profiles as they lean against opposite doorjambs, unaware of the camera. They hold hands across the space between them. The woman is pregnant.

I slam the book shut. Adrenaline pumps full force through my body. I have to talk to someone, but who? I have to do something, but first I have to know:

What were my pregnant mother and Benny doing together in 1960, two years before she married Dad and three years before she had her oldest daughter?

A
ll of the best secrets used to be stored in Mom’s underwear drawer. Anne was the one who’d sneak into my parents’ bedroom in the middle of the day, when Mom was having coffee next door with Mrs. Brainard, or in the kitchen on the phone with her sister. Anne, stealthy and courageous, would pilfer rare, exotic finds and bring them to our room under her shirt, dramatically dropping to her knees in the middle of the fluffy white carpet and producing the booty.

One time it was a blue diary, like a child’s, with a lock but no key. We tried bowing open the cover to peek inside at the pages, and creased the cheap cardboard. Mortified, Anne sneaked it back into Mom’s drawer posthaste. We thought for sure we’d be in trouble, but we never heard a peep about it.

Other times it might be a letter from Mom’s sister, filled with cusswords and gems like, “You have no idea how lucky you are, married to a hardworking man with those gorgeous little girls. If I have to listen to one more goddamn man lie about his job, his income, or his marital status, I think I’ll have to shoot myself.” We didn’t understand what all the drama was about, but the mystery of it was delicious.

Once it was a pair of lacy black underpants with just a thin strip of crotch, not the kind of underpants our mother wore. Hers were full-size, a rayon-cotton blend in pastel shades only. We knew she had mint green and butter yellow, pink, blue, beige, and lilac—not to mention a few
pairs of white—but we had never seen these dark see-through things before. My stomach churned at the sight of them, but Anne said maybe our aunt had given them to her as a present. Anne decided to keep the underpants, stuffing them deep between her mattress and box spring, for what purpose I had no idea. It was another mystery about our mother’s life, to be sure, but this one didn’t feel quite so thrilling.

The phone is in my hand. Benny is asleep in his room. I have lain awake listening to Buddy purr wetly in my ear all night, trying to sort a spiraling conflagration of thoughts into some useful plan. What do I do about this? Who do I tell? Who dare I ask? I keep wondering who that person turned out to be, that lump beneath Mom’s maternity blouse with the Peter Pan collar. My half sister? Half brother? Where is she now? What’s his name? Did my father know?

This isn’t something to talk about on the phone, I decide, and dress in the semidarkness of predawn. I leave Benny a note on the kitchen table:

I drive west through suburbs and shopping centers, turn south on the Pacific Highway, and drink in the sudden green of forest punctuated by occasional small towns, orchards, Christmas tree farms. It’s nearly seven thirty when I arrive in the elegant orderliness of vineyards and wine country. At the tiny berg of Dundee, I take a right, head up a steep hill, winding through fields of Pinot Gris, Chardonnay, and Riesling, and then fields of preternatural minimansions. I find Mom and John’s—a stucco French-country monolith—and park in front. She’s lived here nearly a year, yet I’ve only been inside once. She must feel like a princess in a fortress, like she finally won the lottery.

Someone moves through the house, turning a light on, then another. It could only be John. When my mother finally got to stop getting little girls ready for school, she became an avid late-morning sleeper. Left to her own devices, she probably wouldn’t get up before ten.

I’m not feeling that patient.

Armed with the photo album, I walk up the winding slate path, neatly bordered by trim green grass, not a blade out of place. At the ornate iron door, I push the doorbell and hear chimes inside, like in a church.

I yawn from sleep deprivation and nervousness and realize I haven’t brushed my teeth. If my surprise attack doesn’t kill her, my breath surely will. Do I have mints in my purse, gum? I hug the book to my chest and decide not to care.

A curious head appears in the entryway window and then the door swings open. John stands holding a dainty toile-pattern coffee cup, wearing jeans and a Mariners sweatshirt, his silver hair neatly combed. His feet are bare upon the hard wood of the entryway, toenails yellow and far too long. I quickly look away.

“Why, Eleanor,” he says, “what a pleasant surprise. Come in.” As if it isn’t bizarre that I’m standing at his doorway early on a Thursday morning with no forewarning or precedent for a visit.

“I need to talk to my mother,” I say, stepping inside. “I don’t imagine she’s up yet.”

“No.” He chuckles pleasantly—I’m almost sure of it—and says, “How about some coffee? Bebe brought home one of those French press pots, and I can’t get enough of the stuff. Have you tried it?” He leads me through the formal dining room, which looks as if it seats twenty, into their granite-and-cherrywood kitchen that I secretly covet. If I told Mom I liked it, though, the corners of her mouth would curl into that smug smile, the one most people think is cute because it shows her dimples. I have learned to avoid doing anything that elicits that smile.

Motioning for me to take a seat at the granite breakfast bar, John pulls another toile cup from the cupboard and pours from the press pot. “Cream, sugar?”

“Listen, I didn’t come here to be a pain, but I really need to talk to Mom.”

He nods, setting the coffee in front of me, along with a matching sugar bowl and creamer. “Certainly, Eleanor,” he says. “But I think your mother might be more responsive if we don’t interrupt her beauty sleep.”

Even though I’m starting to like the guy, I say, “If you don’t go wake her up now, I will, and she probably won’t like the way I do it.” I pull my lips into a grimace of a fake smile and take a sip of coffee. “You’re right about the coffee, though. It’s fabulous.”

He nods, sets his cup on the counter. “Okeydoke,” he says, and strolls gracefully from the room. He’s unflappable, probably a good quality in a salesman.

After a few moments, he returns, smiles, and takes a seat at the other end of the counter to drink his coffee.

“She’s coming?”

“Of course,” he says. “It will be just a moment. I’m sure you understand.”

I swallow, take a deep breath through my nose, the way Suzanne taught me, blow it out my mouth. Why did I never go back to see her? She would have talked me out of this, had I given her the chance. Had I thought about it in the sensible light of day, not under the crazy-making cover of darkness.

After I’ve finished my coffee, I stand and walk my cup to the sink. “This is nuts,” I say to John. “I’m going up there.”

“I understand,” he says, and I see it in his eyes. He does understand. He’s the one who lives with her now. Surely he’s felt the sting of her mercurial love by now.

I climb the wool-carpeted steps and arrive on a wide landing, tall windows in front of me glowing orange with early-morning sun. Several doors surround me.

“Mom?” I call out. The photo album is damp on the side I hold against myself. I wish I’d eaten something.

“In here, honey,” she says, voice coming from a double doorway on my left. “Just putting on my face.”

I close my eyes, not moving. She will never change.

“Honey?”

I open my eyes, and she is standing in the doorway, mascara wand in hand, head wrapped in toilet paper to preserve her coiffure, white satin gown snug against drooping breasts and a football-shaped mound of
old-lady stomach.
When did that happen,
I wonder? Her lily perfume wafts toward me.

“Are you all right?” She looks at me with concern, genuine and maternal, and I bite my lip, feel my nostrils flare, the back of my throat fill.

“Not really,” I say, and begin to bawl, the way I always have since I was a kid. “Crybaby!” I can hear Anne say.

“Come here, Ellie,” Mom says, holding out her free hand, but she makes no move toward me. “What’s the matter? What’s all this?”

For just a moment I am tempted to go to her, to feel her wrap her arms around me, which I think she would do if I let her. Maybe she would lead me into her room, sit with me on her bed, and we’d have a long talk about everything that’s ever gone wrong between us, and she’d prove to me that the dates on the photos were wrong, that Dad was indeed in one of the pictures, that Anne was lolling in her stomach, biding her time until her birthday arrived.

I can’t live her fairy tale lies any longer.

“You tell me,” I say, shoving the photo album at her. She looks at it as if she’s not sure she wants to touch it, but then she sighs and comes over to take it from me. When I’ve let go, I reach up to wipe my face dry. That’s the last damn time I’ll cry in front of her.

“What is this?” she asks.

“Open it.”

She pulls the cover open just long enough to scan the first page, then grimaces and closes the book.

“He gave these to you?”

“No. Of course not. I’m living there, Mother. What did you expect? It gets boring. I was looking through his old pictures.”

“Why on earth he keeps these around . . .”

“Jesus, Mom.” My voice is loud. “That’s not the point.”

“The point is that these are private, Eleanor, and you have no business—”

“Of course it’s my business. You think nobody noticed you and Benny and your special little friendship? All those years and we all had to pretend it wasn’t happening?”

The photo album and mascara wand drop to the floor, coal black brush skiffing a stain across the carpet. She covers her face with both hands, square-cut diamond on her ring finger winking in the now brilliant light from the window.

“You have to tell me,” I say.

She shakes her head, like if she doesn’t look at me, I’m not really here. I reach up and pull her hands from her face. They feel fragile and insubstantial in my grasp, and I realize that all that stuff about having big and small bones is true.

“You have to tell me,” I say again, and she opens her eyes but doesn’t look at me.

“I’d rather not.”

“I know,” I say, and let go of her. “But you have to.”

The baby wasn’t Benny’s, Mom says. She’d made a foolish mistake in her junior year at Northwestern and slept with the man she thought she’d marry. She looks down at her hands clenched around the photo album, and I look, too. Veins bulge through tissue-paper skin, and faded age spots persist even though I know she bleaches them. We are sitting on her bed, as I’d imagined, but this is not the talk I longed for.

“What about the baby?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I gave her up for adoption.”

Her. I have another sister.

“What were you doing with Benny? What . . . Jesus, Mom. You were with Benny. What the hell have you been hiding all your life?”

“It’s too much for me, Eleanor, all this . . . all this questioning. This is very upsetting for me.” She sits up straight and folds her arms across her chest, looks me in the eye for the first time. Her face is smeared and tear streaked. The toilet paper hangs raggedly from the left side of her head. And still she has this poise, this regal I’m-in-charge posture she always manages to find, even in her depths. If I wasn’t so angry, I’d leave her alone.

“Just two simple questions, then.”

She sighs, shakes her head.

“Appease me, Mother. I’m upset, too.”

She considers this, then shrugs. “But you’re to tell no one.”

“That’s not fair. Anne and Christine should know. John should know.”

“John knows. And I’ll tell your sisters in my own way, and in my own time.”

“Fine. Did Dad know?” My heartbeat quickens, as if I’m about to jump off a cliff. Why should this question scare me more than any of the others?

Mom draws a deep breath, exhales. “I didn’t want him to. It was all before I’d met him, but I think he figured it out.”

“You think? You never talked about it? You never explained or dealt with it?” No wonder I’m single, with this as a role model.

“We alluded to it, but no, we never directly spoke of it.”

I make an exasperated sound, and her eyes flame.

“It was your father’s choice as much as it was mine, Eleanor. You can’t possibly understand.”