Simple Recipes (6 page)

It’s the
why
of it that nobody understands. I tell my father’s version of the story, the frying pan as war
memorial, erected as a tribute to the women who stayed behind. Then I tell my mother’s version, the frying pan for the sake
of the frying pan, one monumental gesture. North Bend’s Eiffel Tower, the wooden handle visible for miles.

The Japanese tourists giggle, cupping their hands to their mouths. But the big East Coast men with Hawaiian shirts and baseball
caps tell me, “You can never have a thing too big. We’ve got the skyscrapers, you know.
Skyscrapers.
Unbelievable.” They tilt their heads back then, and focus on the air above.

Tom and Irene own a sporting-goods store in North Bend, selling things like scuba gear, flippers, and surfboards. In the mornings,
Tom takes a walk inland, just for the pleasure of turning around again and walking downhill to the ocean. Irene stands on
the front steps looking out for him. She has a longing for him. I could be standing right beside her and she wouldn’t even
know me.

I am thirty years old and I don’t know if I will ever leave this town. I should, of course, just to see the world. But I would
want to come back here. Some changes happen so slowly, you can’t know until it’s done — my parents aging, the beach washing
back from the water. Maybe when I am sixty, the town itself will have receded. All of us who stay here will creep backwards
too, watching and watching for change, then being surprised when it strikes us, out of the
blue. No reason but the fact that it is all different. In our house uphill from the ocean, Irene and Tom and I sit in the
kitchen reading books and magazines. From morning until night we can hear the water and the wind and the two mixing together.
At night, I can hear their voices through the walls, and the past finally seems right in its place. Not everything, not large,
but still present.

I
n my memory, I followed Paula to the end of the aisle, past the hair products, shampoos, the colored lights, through an empty
mall, a parking lot, Granville Street at night with kids and adults panhandling, to a bus all lit up, down a quiet street
to her house, where she closed the door behind her, smiling. I stood on the lawn outside. From there I could see everything:
the back shed, the porch with the rabbit hutch, her open window with the blue curtains billowing out. Before disappearing
she had said, “The rabbits are gone,” and I understood that as a sign.
Move on,
she was telling me.
I’m on my own now.
So I left her.

I remembered that last night. I had wanted a sign from Paula. Not everyone believes in signs. But the
more you need them, the more you see and the more you believe. I found a white hair today and pulled it out. I call that a
sign. After all, sixteen is young.

In school we’ve been learning about time. How human beings have hardly put a dent in it. If the history of the earth were
mapped against a single year, we would only show up on December 31, at 4:11 in the afternoon. I would have told Paula that,
and we would have mulled it over late at night. We would have laughed and said that, in the history of the earth, she and
I, her father and mother and Jonah, were nothing. They would fall away from us without a bruise or a scratch. We could blow
them off our bodies. We could say, with confidence, that in the grand scheme of things, in the long run, they meant as little
as dust. “Less,” Paula would say. And I would say, “Less.”

Paula’s mom worked downtown at the Hotel Vancouver. She was a housekeeper and smelled of fresh sheets and mild sweat. She
always came home first, hung her coat neatly in the closet, unbuttoned the first three buttons of her blouse, and started
cooking. Paula’s father was a gruff yet caring man. He fixed cars for a living, came home with grease under his fingernails
and the smell of oil on his skin.

I preferred Paula’s home to mine and so I stayed over at her house most nights. At dinner, Paula’s dad once said to me, “Do
you know how much it costs to keep an extra body, Miriam? Tell your parents to pay up.”

Her mom made a noise like, “Ssss, shush.” Paula stared at her plate, motionless. Her dad shook his head, apparently hurt,
and picked up his knife and fork. “Eh, Jesus. I’m kidding, okay? Can’t I do that in my own home? Any friend of Paula’s is
welcome here.” The four of us ate quietly. Paula’s mom brought out drinks, cola for me and Paula, Molson’s for her dad, water
for herself. She brought out dessert, a Boston cream pie, leftover from the hotel kitchen that day.

Afterwards, in the bathroom, I stood back while Paula threw up dinner. Her hair, bleached blond, stuck to her face. She rinsed
her mouth and said, “I only throw up dinners. You only have an eating disorder if you throw up everything.” Paula told me
that there were four kinds of bodies: the X, the A, the Y, and the O. “You’re an X,” she said, “small waist and evenly proportioned
chest and butt.” She turned sideways. “What do you think I am?”

“An X.”

“Wrong,” she smirked. “Nice try. I’m more of an A. Heavy on the bottom.” She picked up my wrist
and measured it with her fingers. Her thumb and index finger touched. “You’re lucky. Everyone wants to be an X.”

We stayed up late, talking about Jonah and how the halls were empty because the senior boys had gone away to play basketball
and about how our math teacher had hair growing on his back. If you stood behind him, you could see it push past his collar,
a hairy finger. Paula and I pressed our faces into the pillows and laughed. A breeze came and blew her curtains back into
the room, light from a passing car travelling down the wall, across our beds, and gone. She said, “Move in here. Why don’t
you just move into the spare bedroom? If you hate your family so much, you might as well, don’t you think?”

“I don’t hate them.”

“Well, whatever. You hardly go home anyway.”

“I’ll ask,” I said, though I knew I wouldn’t. In my home, we barely spoke. My parents had long since given up on their marriage.
They were busy working, making ends meet, and hardly noticed whether I was home or not.

“We could be sisters then.” Paula lay back on her pillow. “We’ll share everything.”

Paula wanted to be a veterinarian. That meant that, after dark, we’d slip out of her house and into the
backyard, where her mom kept hutch rabbits. Once a week, at supper time, her mom pulled one or two from the cage, broke their
necks, skinned their bodies, and drained the blood in the kitchen sink. She made rabbit stew, simmering the meat until it
was tender, and you could smell the potatoes and carrots and meat all through the house and down the street.

The first time we snuck outside, Paula unlatched the door and poked her face up to the cage. “Be free,” she whispered. “Be
free or be stew.” The rabbits came and stood in the long grass, their noses twitching. We lay down, and they crawled timidly
on top of us, onto our heads. “They like our hair,” Paula told me. “They feel safe there.” She tried to coax them across the
backyard, crouching on her hands and knees, leading the way to the fence. But they were nervous and would only take a few
loping steps before something scared them, a bird overhead, a motorcycle on Knight Street. They scampered back to their hutch.

“What can we do?” Paula asked. “They’re not wild, after all.”

We stayed out on the back lawn listening to the traffic. At one point, a light came on in the kitchen and we froze. Paula’s
dad stood at the window, a glass of water in his hand. He took forever to drink it, staring straight at us through the glass,
but we trusted the dark and willed ourselves invisible. When
the light in the kitchen went off, we breathed easy again, felt the chill in the wind, came back to life.

The nights I slept over, I would wake up with my face in Paula’s hair. It leaped away from her, full of static. The smell
would wake me up, apples and dish soap and sweat. I wondered what it would be like to wake up beside someone night after night,
hair in your face, legs crossing heavily under the blankets. If the smell and feel would tire you out, like it had my mom
and dad. They slept in separate rooms, Mom on the couch and Dad in the bedroom. Sometimes they sat in the same room though
neither of them would acknowledge the other. They had perfected it, made it an art to see something but believe it wasn’t
there.

Once, when Paula and I were lying in bed, she asked me, “Are you a virgin still?”

“Of course,” I said, thinking of Jonah. I stared at her fingers on the top of the blanket, spread out and still. “Aren’t you?”

She lifted her hands, holding them over our heads like planets, constellations, something we’d never seen up close. “I’m not
sure,” she said.

We lay together quietly under the blankets. For a long time lying there, I wondered if I should say something more, but then
the moment passed. I could hear her breathing grow heavier. Before she fell
asleep, she turned over and held on to me. Her grip was so plaintive that I felt sorry for her and held on, too. I had the
sense that some things were impossible for her to say.

In school, we’d been learning about species. We had to imagine billions of years, different species rising like bubbles to
the surface, all this time passing. But I could not imagine ten years, fifteen, twenty. My sixteen years felt like eternity
but I knew I wouldn’t be like this forever. In all my life, the total sum of it, I was a species rising and falling. One day
I would wake up and all of it would be gone.

At first, when Paula and I talked about Jonah, we were conspirators. Together, we laid out a course of action. She made sure
I stood behind him at the line-up in the cafeteria, that I sat in front of him in French class, that we happened by his locker
three times a day, every day. She planned out the life we might have and whispered it to me in the hallway, one hand excitedly
grasping my elbow. He would take me into his confidence, slowly. He would unburden secrets he never shared with anyone. A
long time in the future, he might kiss me.

One day Jonah appeared in front of my locker and said, “Let me drive you home, Miriam.” Outside my parents’ apartment, below
their window, he put his car
into neutral and reached over, running his hand from my chin to my stomach. I leaned into him. He kissed me, and I felt like
I was being pushed to the bottom of a swimming pool, everything distorted, unfocused yet clear as glass. I felt myself moving
through years and years, coming up different all of a sudden.

Once, in P.E. class, I watched Jonah running laps. He was falling behind, the other boys were far ahead of him, but he kept
on, one hand grasping his chest then blurring down. He ran past me, breathing hard, but he blew me a kiss from the center
of the palm of his hand. When I sat in front of him in French class, sometimes he whispered small requests, an eraser, an
extra pen, and I passed them back without looking. But how I loved to look at him. He had dark hair and his eyes were round
and dark and lovely. He had a soft body, not pounded immovable by sports, just regular and wide and comfortable.

Paula smirked when I told her this. She said, “That isn’t any reason to love someone.”

“It is for me.”

She bent her head down. Now that Jonah had entered my life, she no longer approved of him. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. You
don’t know what you’re getting into.”

“Then tell me.”

She looked at me, her face blank, then turned and left. I didn’t follow.

Later on, when Jonah and I slept together in his bedroom, I imagined looking down on us from the ceiling, I pictured how dark
and naked our bodies must be, how small the two of us were. Right then I wanted to tell Paula that there are some things you
have to go through on your own. Some relationships withstand life, some are there for a moment, a stepping stone, and then
you push away from them.

But I never did because Paula said, “Don’t talk to me about Jonah. I don’t want to know.”

“I won’t tell you anything then.”

“I thought you were going to move in here. I thought you were unhappy at home and you wanted to live with me.” She lay down
on her bed, yellow hair spreading in a circle. We had learned about Joan of Arc, and I imagined holding a match to Paula’s
hair; it was so dry it would catch in an instant, sprout into a ball of flame. “Don’t lie to me any more,” she said. “Just
say whether you will or not.”

“I have my own family, Paula.”

Some part of her seemed to give way. “But I need you here.”

“Why?” I said, exasperated.

She turned away. “Go home then. I don’t want to see you.”

I wanted to tell Paula what was happening, how one thing leads to another. How a boy like Jonah feels like a necessary thing.
He has a way about him, like a
curved handle, so easy to hold, so easy to see. He can smile and something flares up in you, catches on your heart, opens
you up to things you wanted but never asked for. He can change the way your mind forms words, shapes sentences, imagines their
capacity. He has a heart you think you can drink from. I’ve heard that it’s common, there are lots of boys, and girls too,
who are like this. Their faces have promise in them, but how can you be promised something you will never stop wanting?