The Kitchen Daughter (28 page)

The chicken isn’t cool enough to shred yet when I peel the eggs, running them under cold water to separate the shell from the smooth, glassy cooked white. Their sulfur smell rises up while I move on to the
olives, laying them flat on the cutting board and smacking them with the side of a knife, then working the long pit free with my fingertips, stung by salty brine. Then I tug the peel off the potatoes carefully, in long strips, with my bare fingers. Their warmth makes them feel as if they’re somehow alive. Then finally the chicken is ready, and I pull it apart with my hands, stripping flesh from bone, my fingers slick with fat. Twist off each drumstick at the socket, detach the wings, strip away the long fibers of the thigh with their thick fat pockets. I pop the oysters out of the chicken back with the back of my thumbnail and have one halfway to my mouth before I remember none of this is for me. None. I set it with the rest of the meat.

The work at this stage is the work of separation. I’m surprised to find that I am also separate, in a way. As absorbed as I am in the process, a small part of me is thinking, watching, worrying. Have I done it right? Will Elena be drawn by the smell? Will she appear?

The heap of discarded things grows: the chicken skin and bones, the pits of olives, potato peels, eggshells, everything left over.

As each component finishes, the peeled eggs, the peeled potatoes, the pitted olives, the shredded chicken, I dome each of them up on a separate plate. Last, I make the sauce. I chop onion and garlic and start them frying in the oil, then I spoon out the right amount of
aji amarillo
paste and put the jar back in the fridge. I pinch wads of white bread from the loaf and soak them in milk. Once the contents of the pan are browned to golden, I build the sauce with the soaked bread, the nuts, and the cheese, then pour in the evaporated milk slowly, until the gold liquid and the white liquid blend to a consistent color.

Consulting the recipe, I move into the last stage, and begin to assemble all the separate pieces together. I lower shredded chicken into the sauce, and stir gently, keeping the pieces somewhat whole.

On the plate I heap a cup’s worth of white rice, its grains tumbling over each other as they slip out of form. On top of that, a ladleful of
the thick yellow sauce, smothering the rice underneath a creamy rich layer, the soft striped texture of the chicken showing through. On one side of the plate I arrange the clean white ovals of skinless potatoes, and on the other, I mirror them with the white ovals of hard-boiled eggs cut in half, their yolks bright yellow and perfect, circles inside ovals, yellow on white on yellow on white. Then the last touch. A row of deep black olives. The recipe doesn’t specify exactly where they go so I put them down the center. Like punctuation in a sentence, the pupil of an eye. A perfect blackness.

It’s done.

David and I both stare at the step stool in the corner, looking for her shape. Elena should be there, looking back at us.

Instead we stare at emptiness.

He whispers, “Shouldn’t she … be here?”

“Yes.”

“Why isn’t she?”

“I don’t know.”

Louder, David says, “You told me you could bring her.”

“I can,” I say, “I mean, I could, I thought, I thought she’d be here. I thought I did everything right.”

I grab the copied version of the recipe and hold it next to the original version. Everything’s the same. The ingredients, the timing, the order. I pick up the plate and look at it, examining every detail, it’s right, it has to be right, I did it exactly.

David says, louder again, “Then what’s wrong? Why isn’t she here? Where’s Elena?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I mean I don’t know, that’s what I mean!”

David moves so quickly I flinch, but it’s not me he’s reaching for. He scoops up a clump of aji de gallina in his outstretched palm, curling
his fingers around it. The heavy plate tips in my hands, I struggle to right it. Yellow sauce drips onto my arm. A skinless potato rolls off the plate and hits the floor, landing with a soft but audible thump.

David crams the food into his mouth, and works his jaw, chewing fiercely. Rice spatters down across his shirt, trailing yellow stains. I assume he thinks it will make a difference to eat it. Maybe the smell isn’t enough and the taste is essential. I have no idea. I don’t know if he’s desperate, or right.

Still nothing.

“Fuck!” screams David. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know!”

“What did you do wrong?”

“I don’t know! I tried!”

David rips the plate out of my grip and flings it hard with both hands.

It smashes straight into the cabinet full of my family’s cookbooks. Glass shatters with a crackling boom. Thick yellow paste streaks down the broken glass. Over the cookbooks. Toward the recipes.

My fist strikes David high on the cheekbone, almost square in the eye. I feel the impact in the bones of my knuckles, the sound becoming vibration becoming sound. David staggers back and I turn away.

I kneel down and yank the door open and grab for the Japanese tea box of recipes, everyone’s handwritten scraps, everything so important and so irreplaceable. I’m so startled and disoriented it takes me a few seconds to register that the things I want are safe and dry in my hand, the box would have protected them anyway, and it takes me another few seconds after that to see that I’ve knelt down in the broken glass.

It doesn’t hurt yet, but it will.

On the way out of the room I catch a glimpse of David hunched over on the tile. His arms and head are draped over the empty step
stool. There is a noise coming from him. Crying, but not a soft, private crying. Sobs that come from all the way down in his gut. He sounds like a wolf.

I lock the door of the bathroom and crouch down in the bathtub, picking the glass out of my knee with a set of tweezers Ma used to use to pluck her eyebrows.

They say the best way to treat yourself when you’re injured is to pretend the body is not your body. I am barely pretending. I lift the shards of glass as if they were bay leaves I needed to retrieve from a finished tomato sauce, nothing more. Lift them off, set them aside. The shards of glass pile up on the edge of the white tub. When I don’t see any more glass against the bleeding skin, I turn on the faucet and run the water over my knee, letting it run until the tub is half full.

There is a knock on the door of the bathroom and I don’t answer. It’s locked. There’s nothing to say.

Eventually, the bleeding stops. The water goes from lukewarm to cool, then cold. I sit on the edge of the tub, wrapped in a towel. There isn’t another knock. I hear the front door close. That doesn’t mean anything, really. He has a key and could come back in, but I doubt he will. He doesn’t want to be here any more than I want him here. We’ve failed. I’ve failed. I made a promise that I couldn’t, didn’t, keep.

From the cabinet in the bathroom I fish out a roll of gauze. I wrap the knee up tight. There isn’t anything to secure the loose end with. I go back into the kitchen, stepping carefully around the broken glass and ruined food with my bare feet. I sew the trailing end of the gauze to itself with kitchen twine and a larding needle. Dad was the one who taught me to sew. I couldn’t match his surgical precision, but I learned by imitating the technique. Imitation is as close as I can get.

Thinking of him, I reach for the bottle in the back of the cabinet. I leave the mess in the kitchen for tomorrow, and take the scotch upstairs to bed.

….

I
T’S LATE IN
the morning when I wake up, dry-mouthed and disoriented. A shot of the Lagavulin was enough to seal my eyelids for longer than I thought. I’m startled awake by the thought that Midnight could be injured by the glass in the kitchen, but she is sleeping peacefully on both my feet, so I go down to take care of the mess first thing. The creamy smell has gone stale and unpleasant. I open the kitchen windows and let the cold fresh air in. I sweep up the glass and carefully scoop it all into several layers of paper bags. Everything is still on the kitchen counter, the eggshells, the chicken bones, olive pits. All that waste. It goes in the trash. I twist the neck of the bag tight shut. The cold wind is blasting now, so I close the windows. I pour Midnight a bowl of food, close the sliding doors to the kitchen, and set it outside them, in case I missed any glass. Then I put my coat on and haul the mess away.

When I go home I’ll be just as uncertain, so instead when I leave the alley I walk south, heading down through Society Hill and Queen Village, going the long way around. When I was little Dad used to take me down to the Italian Market, until Ma made him stop. Now that I know what I know about him, it must have been hard for him too. Crowds on both sides of the street, loud voices, constant motion. But he dealt with it somehow. Maybe he just got used to it, or maybe he did what Dr. Stewart was talking about, some kind of technique to help himself tune it out without having to withdraw completely. Hospitals are loud and hectic too. But he handled it. He got through.

What could I get through, if I tried? Anything? Everything?

I turn left off Christian down Ninth and walk up to the first produce stand in the market. In winter there isn’t much variety, but here I see onions, root vegetables, kale. The rusty orange of gnarled carrots next to tiny white onions like eyeballs next to dark greens that feather out in wavy patterns like the fins of some deep ocean fish.

“What you need, lady?” calls a voice.

I reach into the pocket of my jeans and find a twenty-dollar bill, one I tucked there for the trip to Amanda’s. No, don’t think of that. Think of something else.

“Onions,” I say.

“This kind or this or this? How many?”

I look at the variety on the stand, all these boxes spilling out onion after onion. Yellow ones, and white, and red, all here, all possible.

“Lady, I ain’t got all day.”

I breathe in and breathe out and think how lovely these onions will be, on my stove, transformed from biting sharpness to sweet brown jam. A short, simple thought to ground me.

“Two pounds, these red ones,” I tell him. In a flash he scoops things up and makes change, and when he drops coins and bills onto my outstretched palm I just tell myself to think of the sweet smell of the onions and not the feel of his flesh brushing my flesh, and my hand trembles, and a few of the coins drop, but he doesn’t say anything else. I bend down to pick up the coins, and tuck them back in my pocket, and walk away.

After that I walk over to the Whole Foods on South Street. The door slides open for me without a touch. It is bright and very nearly overwhelming. Pyramid after pyramid of vegetables and fruits. What do I want? I reach for the closest thing, a ten-pound bag of Yukon Gold potatoes. This will do. Feeling reckless with my success, I decide I can do more. The feeling is energizing. I’m almost giddy. I put more things in the basket. Humboldt Fog cheese. Marcona almonds. Honey tangerines. When the basket gets heavy I stop.

I wait in line for a cashier, and set everything on the conveyor belt, and hand him my credit card. He’s already running it through the machine when I realize it probably won’t work. It didn’t last time, with the sunflower seeds. So I’m surprised when he hands me the slip to sign.

“Oh—it worked?” I blurt.

“Yep, they generally do,” he says. “Do you need a bag?”

“No.”

“Then just sign that and we’ll be golden.”

“But … I …” I pretend he’s someone I already know, like Gert. Focus on his cheek. Speak to that. “Last time I used the card they wouldn’t take it.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Works fine here. Some places have a minimum, like you need to buy ten dollars’ worth of stuff? Could be that?”

“Oh.”

“Anyway.” His hand makes a flickering movement. “Could you just sign that?”

I do, and I take my groceries, and I go home.

I
CLOSE THE
front door behind me and hear a noise from inside. First I assume it’s Midnight, but then I look up and she is descending the stairs toward me. I must be rattled. I know the sound my cat makes on the stairs and it is not this sound.

A tapping. From the kitchen, I think.

I call out, “Gert?” before I realize that isn’t possible. She came yesterday. She wouldn’t be here.

A man’s voice calls my name and I stiffen. Then he says, “It’s only me, David, don’t be afraid,” and I’m not once he says it.

I stand in the doorway of the kitchen and look in at him. He’s on his knees in front of the glass cabinet. Near him on the floor are stacks of small glass squares, and lots of tools I don’t know the names for. Knifelike things, razorlike things, gluelike things. And an open bottle of wine.

David says, “Don’t be mad, okay?”

“Okay.” I look at the cabinet. He is replacing all the broken panes, and is almost done. There is only one empty rectangle left, one last gap.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Me too.”

I look down at his upturned face. My fist left a solid bruise on it. The purple of a Concord grape. I’m not good at reading emotions on faces but the bruise changes his. He doesn’t look as angry as he has before. There is more sadness. Maybe it isn’t the bruise.

“It wasn’t fair to you,” he says. “To bring you into it. Nothing’s permanently damaged, right? Your recipes are okay?”

“Yes.” My knee is still bandaged with gauze under my jeans, but he can’t see that. Besides, it’s healing.

“Good, I’m really glad to hear that.”

“Thank you for fixing the glass.”

“I’m just trying to make things right,” he says, his voice heavy like coffee grounds and wet sand and earth.

I heave the bag off my shoulder and onto the butcher block, out of the way. Then I watch David finish the work, slipping the pane into a waiting sill, and then the glass-front cabinet is whole again. He taps and presses and reassembles. He folds up his leftover supplies in newspaper and pushes them across the floor toward the garbage can. He gets up and washes his hands in the sink, dries them on the towel, and sits back down on the floor. He looks up at me, so I sit down with him, not too close.