Simple Recipes (5 page)

Tom cut in, “Look, it isn’t easy for any of us.”

“I don’t know,” Irene said.

“How come you can’t keep your promises?”

“Don’t talk to me that way.”

“You
lied
to us. You said we’d go home.”

“I didn’t say that. I said maybe. Maybe isn’t the same thing. And anyway it’s too late to go back now.”

“Why is it too late?”

“Because I’ve decided, okay?”

“You never asked us,” Joanne said. “Maybe we would have stayed with him. Maybe we wouldn’t have missed you. Do you understand?
I miss him, maybe we wouldn’t have missed you.”

Irene didn’t move. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen.”

She leaned towards Tom and then she half turned and her face was against his sleeve. We were waiting for her to lash out,
to bang her fist against the window or throw something, smash the cassette tapes on the floor. But she stayed where she was
and Tom patted her shoulder steadily. My sisters and I held still, as if we could change things by refusing to move.

The car hit eighty, ninety, one-twenty, and Tom looked sideways at Irene. He was nothing like our father. Tom’s face was handsome
and strong, and his hair, light blond, curled in tufts. Our father’s face was dark and sad. Our father combed his hair with
Brylcreem until it shone. He smelled of eucalyptus and cooking and warmth. But he and Tom looked at Irene with the same expression,
mixed-up sadness and love and strange devotion.

Our last night on the beach, we listened to them breathing, the heaviness of it like their bodies were emptying out. We listened
for animals, for a bear to
come crashing through the trees. It could hear that breathing, we thought, and it would be drawn to us.

They said words aloud, mumbled like they were whispering secrets. She said, “Tom,” and he started awake, put his arm around
her.

Joanne complained that her stomach hurt. She pressed it with her fingers, wondered aloud if she had cancer, or if she were
dying, slowly, in the middle of the woods and no one around. We heard other campers walking by, saw the finger-probe of their
flashlights sliding across the tent, heard the trudge-trudge of their feet on gravel. I lay with my forehead pressed against
Helen’s neck. Every so often she would loop one arm across my shoulders, as if to reassure me.

Still Irene and Tom slept. Even when the ocean sounded so loud it seemed like it was coming right at us, all the land pushed
under like a broken bowl, they slept, breathing heavily. We fell in and out of dreams, finally waking hours after they had
risen. Tom slid the metal poles smoothly through the loops and the tent came down, the orange fabric floating like a parachute
towards us.

On the fourth night, we arrived in North Bend. One by one, we climbed out of Tom’s car. I remember
Irene standing in the motel parking lot looking over us. Tom had gone into the office alone to sign for the keys. The wind
fanned Irene’s hair out around her face and she looked at us, then down at her shoes, then back at us again. Standing under
the motel lights, I thought none of this was real. Even then, I thought Irene would change her mind, she would take us home
again and all of this would end.

They were standing in the motel room, their coats still on, when Irene broke down. Tom was walking from room to room, testing
the light switches. “What will I do?” she said suddenly, raising her voice in desperation. “What have I done?”

Tom’s voice was muffled in the background. Irene screamed that he had tricked her, he had made her come with him.

“Irene,” he said. “Irene.”

My sisters and I crept out the motel door, into the concrete parking lot. We stood beside Tom’s car. Truthfully, I can’t say
that we were angry with her. Only that everything she was no longer surprised us. From where we stood we could see the ocean.
If we looked down, we could see where it met the sky in a thin white line. The air smelled salty and cold. Finally, our mother
came outside. “We’ll go home,” she was saying. “Tomorrow morning. We’ll pack everything up and go home.” She was looking past
us, as if directing her words to the lights across the courtyard,
to other people in other motel rooms. We didn’t even bother answering. Helen reached over and held our mother around the waist.
The top of her head was level with Irene’s elbow. Joanne and I kicked at the gravel with our sneakers, sending the little
rocks pinging off the cars. We heard the far-away whistle of a kettle going off and when we looked back, we saw Tom standing
there, an outdoor lamp lighting his face, drawing fireflies to the air above him.

In the morning we woke up and found Tom and Irene sprawled together on the motel couch, their arms and legs tangled, Irene’s
hair spread out against Tom’s hands.

This is my most vivid memory of my father: he was leaning over the veranda, his white shirt brilliant in the sun. Something
about seeing him standing there, the neighborhood quiet in the background, made me want to confide in him. My father reached
his hand down to rest on my shoulder. I held up the badminton birdie we had buried in mud. “Guess who gave this to me,” I
said.

My father raised his eyebrows.

“I got it from Tom.”

“Tom who?” He took his handkerchief out and folded it once, then again.

“Tom from Sports and Leisure,” I said. I explained that Tom came to visit all the time. And he brought us presents. Badminton
rackets and bouncy balls. He and Irene sat up here in the afternoons, drinking and doing nothing. But I was sure that she
liked him. The way she laughed all afternoon.

“Is that right?” my father said, after a moment. “And what do you think of Tom?”

I shrugged. “He’s nice.”

We stood quietly then, admiring the backyard. My father said he had always disliked the fence. It was made of cinder blocks
stacked up one by one but he would much prefer a wooden gate. Then he turned and walked into the house. I stood looking at
the yard. My sisters were playing on the tire swing, sitting spider, face-to-face, their arms and legs entwined. They swung
back and forth and finally they looked up at me as if they knew what I had said, but they just kept swinging, the yellow rope
extending out, my sisters hugging each other. I stood by myself, scared suddenly by what I had done.

When my father came home the next afternoon, and Irene forced us upstairs, I should have said then that I’d made a mistake,
but I didn’t. Irene started packing. She took the hot dogs from the freezer and threw them in with our T-shirts and sweaters.
Tom had to do everything all over again. My sisters and I
just sat and watched, nodding silently or shaking our heads, rejecting the extra sweater, accepting the crayons. Staring dumbly
at Tom while he combed our hair and gave us grilled cheese sandwiches. I thought my father would return and everything would
reverse itself. When Tom pushed the suitcase closed I started to cry. “I didn’t mean it,” I told Tom, hitting his chest with
my fists. “I said I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.” He picked me up and I kicked at him but it did no good. Irene kept bringing
things out to the car, one box after another. Tom held on to me, though I was awkward, my arms and legs shooting out. I cried
so hard his shirt was soaked. He whispered into my ear so that no one would hear, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry,”
until I was finally quiet.

In the car, Tom took me with him into the front seat. When the car stopped at the intersections, he would look over at me
without speaking. He would rest his hand on my knee, a moment of consolation, until the car began moving once more.

Eventually, it was Tom my sisters went to, instead of Irene. They told him about their boyfriends, the girls in school, the
nights they crept out of the house and slept on the beach. They saw his sympathy, I think. When Irene had her breakdowns,
they saw how he comforted her and didn’t let go until she was well again.

My father had never been so patient with her, but even so, I yearned for him. I would try to get Irene to talk about him but
she would shake her head, say, “Why do you ask me these things?” Once she asked me if I was trying, really trying to make
her crazy, and another time, if I still had not forgiven her.

“This is the way things worked out,” she said. “It does no good trying to imagine it differently.”

From the time I was seven, I wrote to my father. His letters, though few and far between, were caring though restrained. After
years of writing to him, I found it difficult to get past the first few sentences.
Dear Dad,
I’d write.
I hope you are keeping well.
I’d write about North Bend, or respond to the questions he asked about school.
Dear Dad,
I wrote once.
I am very sorry for everything that has happened,
but I never sent this letter. It was like writing a confession to someone from a dream. My father, himself, gave only the
most general details of his life, and never asked for more from me. I can’t blame him really. He probably still imagined me
as a six-year-old child; he did not know me otherwise.

Not long ago, I said to Irene, “Did you ever know that I was the one who told? I was the one who gave everything away.”

“If it wasn’t you, it would have been one of the others.” She shrugged. “It’s over, in any case, and I’m not sorry.”

I should have asked Irene why everyone else could pick up and go on, when that was the thing I found most difficult. Who left
who, I often wondered. In the end, who walked away with the least resistance.

Over time, it was easy to love North Bend. That first year, we spent countless afternoons on the boulevard, watching the tourists.
They moved in great, wide groups, clutching ice-cream cones and cameras. At the tourist office, they posed beside the World’s
Largest Frying Pan — the town’s main attraction. The frying pan is sixty feet high and stands upright, wooden handle pointing
to the sky. Tom told us it was given to the town in 1919, as a tribute to the women who stayed behind during the First World
War.

Irene laughed and nodded her head. “It’s big,” she said, peering up along the carved wood handle. “A great big pan.”

Come winter, the tourists disappeared and half the shops boarded up for the off-season. One afternoon, Tom ushered my sisters
and me up to the frying pan and sat us down on the lip. The chill wind blew our hair all messy and Tom snapped a picture,
the three of us hugging each other, laughing into the cold. Then we all started off along the waterfront, Tom closing his
eyes and walking blindly across the sand. He let a gust of wind push him forward, his feet stumbling through
the foam and water. We laughed, holding our arms out too, tossing about like dizzy birds, the wind tripping us up. Tom pretended
to lose his balance, falling sideways on the ground, the freezing tide pouring over him. He sat up, laughing and spitting
while we stood over his body, pretending to stomp him.

“No, no,” Irene said. “You’ll catch your death of cold.”

We pretended to kick Tom in the stomach. “Enough!” he roared, leaping up, shaking foam and water from his head. My sisters
and I scattered along the beach while he ran after us, Irene’s voice barely audible in the background. “No! Stop it! Jesus
Christ, be careful!”

That afternoon, he snapped close-ups of us, the lens of his camera inches from our faces, our hair tangling in front. Days
later, he put a picture of Irene and the three of us up on the wall, my sisters and I transformed into bold sea creatures,
the clouds and the sky brimming behind us. “What about you?” Helen asked, when we stood admiring the photograph. “Why didn’t
you put up one of you?”

“Me?” he said, laughing. “I’m just the photographer, nothing more.”

Irene stared hard at the picture, her expression sad all of a sudden. She looked from Tom to us, as if from a great distance,
then she turned and left the room. Tom did what my father had never done — he
followed her, down the front steps, into the street. From inside, we could see the two of them standing together, heads touching,
a moment of stillness, before they started back to the house.

One night, when Joanne was seventeen, she came home drunk and sick. She and Tom sat on the front steps all night. Her boyfriend,
she wept, was sleeping with someone named Elsa, and had been for months. Joanne stomped up and down the stairs in frustration,
then collapsed on the bottom step. “I don’t even like him anyway,” she sobbed, “so why does it hurt so much?”

Irene and I sat at the kitchen table, eavesdropping. There was no response from Tom.

Joanne told him she was sick of North Bend, sick of living by the water, the floods in winter. Listening to her, I thought
of the groups of old men leaning their fishing lines out the back of their pickups, reeling fish in from the highway, how
Joanne and I used to drive by and watch them. She told Tom she didn’t know what to do next, thought alternately of running
away, of drowning herself. There was no way she was going back to school.

“Why don’t you run away, then?”

She started crying again. “Why do you want me to leave?”

Tom’s voice was tired. “It’s not a lack of love. I don’t want you drowning. That’s all.” He gave her five hundred dollars
right there. Irene didn’t interfere. She sat at the kitchen table, letting Tom do what he thought was right. In the morning
Joanne packed her things and left, caught a bus straight out of Oregon and headed north. My sister Helen moved out not long
after. She’d met a bio-technologist from Vancouver and married him. We threw a big party for her at the house, then they drove
away to Canada.

These days, our town is visited by many tourists. They come from far and wide. On a Saturday during the busy season, the cars
hail from every state, from Alaska to New Jersey, and from all across Canada.

I am in charge of the walking tours, the 9:30, 12:15, and 3:00 groups. We start at the town hall and head east along the boulevard,
past Flotsam & Jetsam, the Whale’s Tail, and Circus World, with its natural and unnatural artifacts — fish dishes, glass buoys,
bone fossils. Circus World boasts the skeleton of a half-goat, half-human boy, mounted in a glass case. For one dollar, you
can buy a snapshot of him and send it, postage paid, anywhere in the country. The tour ends at the big frying pan.