Elodie and Heloise (23 page)

On the first time they made ossobuco, Heloise was surprised to discover that Francis was adept at making Italian food as well. She was thirteen at the time and had been cooking regularly in the kitchen with him since she was at least eight years old, when her parents deemed her mature enough to learn how to hold a knife properly and not poke anyone’s eye out or chop off her own fingers. Heloise was daunted by the sheer amount of ingredients in the recipe as they sat on the counter waiting to be used. Rosemary, thyme, cloves, large one-pound veal shanks, vegetable oil, carrots, onions, celery, tomato paste, chicken stock, oh the list went on. Her eyes grew large just looking at the ingredients.

“And all of this is going together in ONE dish?” she had asked incredulously in French. “But how are we going to keep track of them? Are you sure we can do this? I’m only thirteen!”

“Ah yes, you may only be thirteen, ma fille,” her father began in French, sharpening his knives over the sink as Heloise walked over to the onions and began to peel them, “but I know you can do it. Besides, we are going to make it together. You forget that. And do not forget this. You have made ratatouille and coq au vin. And I think coq au vin is much harder than this. Which we will not do together until you are older.” He placed a knife on the clean cutting board in front of his daughter as she continued peeling onions, the odor reaching her nose and making her want to cry. 

“I thought you were French, Papa,” Heloise queried, picking up the knife and chopping the onion on the cutting board as her father began dicing a carrot into tiny cubes.

“Ah but I am not completely French,” he responded, thinly cutting the carrots on the other end of the cutting board, to the left of his daughter. They continued speaking in French to one another. “My mother was Italian. Papa was French of course, but Maman? No, she was Italian. You see, her family came from Milan in northern Italy. When I would visit my Italian grandparents, therefore your great-grandparents, we would have this with risotto every Sunday night. Magnifique, vraiment magnifique. Every visit was filled with absolutely delicious food. I might even like Italian food almost as much as French cuisine. But do not tell anyone I said that.” He punctuated that last thought with a wink, making his daughter giggle.

“It smells wonderful, Heloise.”

She looked over to see her sister standing against the counter to Heloise’s right, her arms crossed over her ribcage and lost in thought. Elodie had been unusually quiet since their father’s death, instead spending most of her time in the study room playing her guitar. Her sister’s music was often a soft accompaniment to Heloise’s cooking, light strums of dissonant and minor chords emanating through the walls between the study room and the kitchen as she sang along in her booming contralto voice.

“Of course, I wouldn’t expect anything less of you,” Elodie added with a small smile. “You always were the cook in the family, next to Papa of course.”

Heloise nodded in acknowledgment, continuing to stir the ingredients together in the pan. She was in the final stages of cooking the ratatouille for dinner. As soon as the tomatoes and other herbs were soft in the pan from cooking, she knew her cooking was done. 

“Hey, if you could do a favor for me....”

“Sure, what can I do?”

“If you could get out the fresh baguette I got at the store today and slice it up. Or you could just break it up with your fingers, it doesn’t really matter....”

“No problem.”

Elodie walked over to the long, wrapped bread sitting at the far end of the counter and began breaking the bread into pieces with her fingers, placing them in a small, clean bowl from the cabinet. A meal without bread is like a day without sun. So her father said. Heloise turned off the stove and gave the stew a few more stirs before tapping the wooden spoon on the side of the pan to get any excess stew off of it. She then turned off the stove and let the stew cool before consuming it.

“I don’t think I ever told you this, but I’m really proud of you, Heloise.”

Heloise placed the bowls she’d used for her produce into the sink to be cleaned  and glanced up at her sister. “Of what?”

“For all the cooking you’ve done for us with Papa. He’s really taught you well. I always liked that Papa was.... such a good cook. You know? He cooked such wonderful food for us. And I don’t think I’ve really ever appreciated that until now.”

Heloise felt herself tearing up a little at her sister’s statements.

“I mean, if you think about it, I don’t think any of the kids we went to school with knew what ratatouille or what a croque monsieur even were. But guess what we would have for our school lunches.” She suddenly threw her head back and smiled. “Do you know how many times my friends would ask to swap lunches with me because they wanted my lunch instead?”

Heloise chuckled. She too had similar experiences with her friends. She glanced over at her sister and couldn’t help but smile a little. 

“You know, I can’t even remember the last time that we ever talked like this. Without fighting or simply ignoring each other.”

“I told you a while ago that people can change. And I’ve been through a lot of changes this year that have transformed me for the better. While I’m standing here in front of you.... I just want to say that I’m sorry for the way I treated you. For telling you I was tired of being ugly and nerdy like you, for telling you that you ought to change, and most of all.... for telling you I was ashamed to have you as a sister. Especially since we were such best friends growing up. You didn’t deserve the way I treated you. Yeah I got popular like I wanted, but look at all the people I stepped on to get there. And I couldn’t be myself either. I wasn’t really happy. And I finally realized that this year. I’m not expecting us to be best friends again, or even friends for that matter, but I just wanted you to know that. And if you don’t want to forgive me, then I’d understand. I was a total bitch after all.”

Without another word, Heloise ran to her sister and wrapped her arms around Elodie. In the arms of her sister, Heloise let out her pent-up rage and sadness, sometimes forming her hands into fists to punch the air as she soaked her sister’s shoulders. It was the culmination of dealing with her father’s death and then finally getting an apology for the way Elodie had treated her. Even Elodie started crying in her arms.

Eventually, they let go and regarded one another quietly, their faces streaked with tears. Elodie broke the ice and said, “Here, why don't you go take a seat at the dining room table while I bring the food over? I'll take care of it."

"You don't have to do that.”

"No no, Heloise. I want to help you. You're very upset and.... I want to help." She gazed into her sister's eye with a look of gratitude and walked up to the kitchen counter. 

"Th-thank you."

Elodie looked back at her sister and turned the corners of her mouth up into a small smile that showed Heloise that her sister was being genuine. 

Elodie opened the cabinets, placed three marbled Mikasa bowls on the counter and with a large spoon from a drawer, became spooning out ratatouille for everyone. She then put a few slices of bread on the side of each bowl.

All Heloise could do was stumble over to the dining room table. She pulled back a chair and sat down with a sigh, tears still coming out of her eyes. She'd been holding everything in and knew it would have to come out eventually. She buried her face in her hands and hoped to God that the headache she'd gotten from crying so hard would go away soon.

"À table!" Elodie called from the kitchen to their mother. Heloise lifted her head up and saw her sister walking toward the dining room with one bowl of ratatouille and bread in each hand. Shannon walked into the kitchen and grabbed the other bowl as Elodie placed a bowl in front of Heloise.

"Oh I forgot the spoons!" 

Shannon sat down at the head of the table as Elodie rushed back to the kitchen for cutlery. Their mother's face was still stony and unmoving and Heloise was sure that she saw dried tears on her mother's face.

Elodie came back to the table and took a seat next to her sister on Heloise's right. As she sat down, the two of them locked eyes.

The three women at first ate in complete silence. No one was really sure of what to say. Finally, Elodie broke the silence. Ever since Francis died, Heloise had grown accustomed to this kind of quiet in the house.

"This was always my favorite meal that Papa would cook. I love how he was always so passionate about food and life in general."

Shannon nodded as she took a large spoonful of stew into her mouth. "That's part of why I fell in love with him. He knew what he wanted and he would go for it."

"I wouldn't be such an accomplished cook if it weren’t for him," Heloise interjected. "He was the one who always encouraged us to go for what we loved."

"I always remember his stories," Elodie continued. "I loved his stories about France and going to see his father's family. I want to go there someday." She broke one of her bread pieces in half.

"I think you will. If you keep going with your music, you'll get there. You'll play all the football stadiums and theaters."

"That's my goal."

"Well, you’ll definitely get there with the amount of time you’ve spent playing your guitar lately. I don't think I've seen you but a few times a day for the last few days. Are you busy writing some new songs?"

“Actually yes,” she responded as she took another bite of her bread. "As to why you haven’t seen much of me, well, think of it this way. You have your cooking. I have my music. We all deal with it differently. Speaking of which, I started working on a new song today that’s not about boys or love.”

Elodie continued. “Anyway, I started..... writing something about Papa. It’s only a really rough draft, but I dunno. It really feels..... it makes me feel relieved to write something about him. It’s not to say I didn’t enjoy writing songs about love but, well, let’s face it. Most songs out there are all about that already. What new thing can I really even say about it? And writing about Papa..... it feels different. In a really good way. It feels so much more meaningful. Not just because it was him who showed me some chords to start with when I first got my guitar a few years ago and encouraged me to play.”

“Well, even if it’s a work in progress, would you mind playing your song for me later? I’d really like to hear it.”

Elodie looked a little wary of her sister’s request, but finally her face brightened and she said, “Sure. I’ll warn you that the melody is not quite there, but I really like the words at least.” She looked off into space for a moment before continuing. “Writing has really given me such a great creative outlet and more than ever, I’m eager to share it with people. I was so caught up in trying to be Miss Popular and I didn’t want people to think I was a brain, so I kept it to myself. In my world, you can’t be really smart and pretty. It has to be one or the other.”

“Look at me, Elodie. I’m both pretty and smart. I know I wouldn’t have said that a while ago, but there you go..... And I even have someone who loves that I’m smart and can do math problems in circles around him with my eyes closed.”

Elodie smiled. “It’s wonderful to hear you with so much more confidence. And yes, every time Kyle comes to visit, I can just tell that he really loves you, Heloise. And... you deserve that.”

Heloise’s face immediately flushed at the mention of Kyle. She broke off a piece of bread, taking a break from her stew for a few moments of contemplation. Her mother was almost finished as was her sister, despite all the talking they’d done.

“I’m serious, Heloise. I’m going to try and not get all mushy here, but you know something I’ve always admired about you? How dedicated you are to the things you love like cooking and reading and how you can practically roll out of bed and not do anything to your hair or face and you still look pretty.”

“All right since we’re on the subject, you have no idea how much I’d like to be more extroverted like you sometimes. I mean, I’m getting there, but I still have a long way to go. I can’t do it. I can’t just go up to random people and start talking to them like I’ve known them for ages like you seem to do. That’s why I don’t have many friends and why I keep to myself so often and why I devote so much of my time to reading and studying. I’m just... not a people kind of person. And I wish I was. It can get lonely at times.”

For a few minutes, the two girls looked at each other, taking in their conversation. Heloise had never told anyone except Kyle just how jealous she was of her sister sometimes, and she had no idea that her sister even felt any jealousy towards her either. She’d had this mostly perfect image of her sister as being bubbly and popular, if a pain in the ass at times when Elodie was selfish and wanted all the attention on her.

“I guess we’re more alike than we thought,” Elodie said at last, her words hanging like a curtain in front of them. “We both want something the other wants.”

Heloise pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows knowingly. Both of them had finished their ratatouille and were now sitting quietly at the table, occasionally looking at each other.

“We haven’t been like this with each other for a very long time,” Heloise finally said. “I think the last deep conversation we ever had was just before middle school, to be honest.”

Elodie nodded. “Before I became boy-crazy and wanted to be popular.”

“Pretty much.”

Elodie shook her head in disbelief. “Sometimes I wonder how you, Mom, and Papa ever put up with me.”

“We’ve all been through it, sweetie,” Shannon replied from the other end of the table. She got up from her chair and started taking the empty bowls into the kitchen. “Papa grew up with a sister himself, remember, so he understood everything.” At the mention of their father, her voice went soft, but she quickly turned away and walked to the kitchen. She looked like she was ready to say something else but couldn’t bring herself to do it.

The sisters glanced at each other before getting up from the table themselves. Elodie gestured for her sister to follow her, and so Heloise went with her sister to the study room.