“You got to get it to sweat out the poisons.” She sliced the big purple fruits as she talked. “Salt it up so the bitter stuff will come off.” She layered the salted slices between paper towels, changing the towels on the ones she’d cut up earlier. Some of her hair came loose and hung down past one ear. She looked like a mother in a Mary Cassatt painting, standing in her sunlit kitchen, sprinkling raw sea salt with one hand and pushing her hair back with the other.
I picked up an unsalted wedge of eggplant and sniffed it, rubbing the spongy mass between my thumbs. “Makes me think of what breadfruit must be like.” I squeezed it down, and the flesh slowly shaped up again. “Smells like bread and feels like it’s been baked. But after you salt it down, it’s more like fried okra, all soft and sharp-smelling.”
“Well, you like okra, don’t you?” Lee wiped her grill with peanut oil and started dusting the drained eggplant slices with flour. Sweat shone on her neck under the scarf that tied up her hair in back.
“Oh yeah. You put enough cornmeal on it and fry it in bacon fat and I’ll probably like most anything.” I took the wedge of eggplant and rubbed it on the back of her neck.
“What are you doing?”
“Salting the eggplant.” I followed the eggplant with my tongue, pulled up her T-shirt, and slowly ran the tough purple rind up to her small bare breasts. Lee started giggling, wiggling her ass, but not taking her hands out of the flour to stop me. I pulled down her shorts, picked up another dry slice and planted it against her navel, pressed with my fingers and slipped it down toward her pubic mound.
“Oh! Don’t do that. Don’t do that.” She was breathing through her open mouth and her right hand was a knotted fist in the flour bowl. I laughed softly into her ear, and rocked her back so that she was leaning against me, her ass pressing into my cunt.
“Oh. Oh!” Lee shuddered and reached with her right hand to turn off the grill. With her left she reached behind her and pulled up on my shirt. Flour smeared over my sweaty midriff and sifted down on the floor. “You. You!” She was tugging at my jeans, a couple of slices of eggplant in one hand.
“I’ll show you. Oh you!” We wrestled, eggplant breaking up between our navels. I got her shorts off. She got my jeans down. I dumped a whole plate of eggplant on her belly.
“You are just running salt, girl,” I teased, and pushed slices up between her legs, while I licked one of her nipples and pinched the other between a folded slice of eggplant. She was laughing, her belly bouncing under me.
“I’m gonna make you eat all this,” she yelled.
“Of course.” I pushed eggplant out of the way and slipped two fingers between her labia. She was slicker than peanut oil. “But first we got to get the poison out.”
“Oh you!” Her hips rose up into my hand. All her hair had come loose and was trailing in the flour. She wrapped one hand in my hair, the other around my left breast. “I’ll cook you . . . just you wait. I’ll cook you a meal to drive you crazy.”
“Oh, honey.” She tasted like fry bread—thick, smoked, and fat-rich on my tongue. We ran sweat in puddles, while above us the salted eggplant pearled up in great clear drops of poison. When we finished, we gathered up all the eggplant on the floor and fried it in flour and crushed garlic. Lee poured canned tomatoes with basil and lemon on the hot slices and then pushed big bites onto my tongue with her fingers. It was delicious. I licked her fingers and fed her with my own hands. We never did get our clothes back on.
In South Carolina, in the seventh grade, we had studied nutrition. “Vitamin D,” the teacher told us, “is paramount. Deny it to a young child and the result is the brain never develops properly.” She had a twangy midwestern accent, gray hair, and a small brown mole on her left cheek. Everybody knew she hated teaching, hated her students, especially those of us in badly fitting worn-out dresses sucking bacon rinds and cutting our names in the desks with our uncle’s old pocketknives. She would stand with a fingertip on her left ear, her thumb stroking that mole, while she looked at us with disgust she didn’t bother to conceal.
“The children of the poor,” she told us, “the children of the poor have a lack of brain tissue simply because they don’t get the necessary vitamins at the proper age. It is a deficiency that cannot be made up when they are older.” A stroke of her thumb and she turned her back.
I stood in the back of the room, my fingers wrapping my skull in horror. I imagined my soft brain slipping loosely in its cranial cavity shrunk by a lack of the necessary vitamins. How could I know if it wasn’t too late? Mama always said that smart was the only way out. I thought of my cousins, bigheaded, watery-eyed and stupid. Vitamin D! I became a compulsive consumer of vitamin D. Is it milk? We will drink milk, steal it if we must.
Mama, make salmon stew. It’s cheap and full of vitamin D.
If we can’t afford cream, then evaporated milk will do. One is as thick as the other. Sweet is expensive, but thick builds muscles in the brain. Feed me milk, feed me cream, feed me what I need to fight them.
Twenty years later the doctor sat me down to tell me the secrets of my body. He had, oddly, that identical gesture, one finger on the ear and the others curled to the cheek as if he were thinking all the time.
“Milk,” he announced, “that’s the problem, a mild allergy. Nothing to worry about. You’ll take calcium and vitamin D supplements and stay away from milk products. No cream, no butterfat, stay away from cheese.”
I started to grin, but he didn’t notice. The finger on his ear was pointing to the brain. He had no sense of irony, and I didn’t tell him why I laughed so much. I should have known. Milk or cornbread or black-eyed peas, there had to be a secret, something we would never understand until it was too late. My brain is fat and strong, ripe with years of vitamin D, but my belly is tender and hurts me in the night. I grinned into his confusion and chewed the pink-and-gray pills he gave me to help me recover from the damage milk had done me. What would I have to do, I wondered, to be able to eat pan gravy again?
When my stomach began to turn on me the last time, I made desperate attempts to compromise—wheat germ, brown rice, fresh vegetables and tamari. Whole wheat became a symbol for purity of intent, but hard brown bread does not pass easily. It sat in my stomach and clung to the honey deposits that seemed to be collecting between my tongue and breastbone. Lee told me I could be healthy if I drank a glass of hot water and lemon juice every morning. She chewed sunflower seeds and sesame-seed candy made with molasses. I drank the hot water, but then I went up on the roof of the apartment building to read Carson Mc-Cullers, to eat Snickers bars and drink Dr Pepper, imagining myself back in Uncle Lucius’s Pontiac inhaling Moon Pies and RC cola.
“Swallow it,” Jay said. Her fingers were in my mouth, thick with the juice from between her legs. She was leaning forward, her full weight pressing me down. I swallowed, sucked between each knuckle, and swallowed again. Her other hand worked between us, pinching me but forcing the thick cream out of my cunt. She brought it up and pushed it into my mouth, took the hand I’d cleaned and smeared it again with her own musky gravy.
“Swallow it,” she kept saying. “Swallow it all, suck my fingers, lick my palm.” Her hips ground into me. She smeared it on my face until I closed my eyes under the sticky, strong-smelling mixture of her juice and mine. With my eyes closed, I licked and sucked until I was drunk on it, gasping until my lungs hurt with my hands digging into the muscles of her back. I was moaning and whining, shaking like a newborn puppy trying to get to its mama’s tit.
Jay lifted a little off me. I opened stinging eyes to see her face, her intent and startling expression. I held my breath, waiting. I felt it before I understood it, and when I did understand I went on lying still under her, barely breathing. It burned me, ran all over my belly and legs. She put both hands down, brought them up, poured bitter yellow piss into my eyes, my ears, my shuddering mouth.
“Swallow it,” she said again, but I held it in my mouth, pushed up against her and clawed her back with my nails. She whistled between her teeth. My hips jerked and rocked against her, making a wet sucking sound. I pushed my face to hers, my lips to hers, and forced my tongue into her mouth. I gripped her hard and rolled her over, my tongue sliding across her teeth, the taste of all her juices between us. I bit her lips and shoved her legs apart with my knee.
“Taste it,” I hissed at her. “Swallow it.” I ran my hands over her body. My skin burned. She licked my face, growling deep in her throat. I pushed both hands between her legs, my fingertips opened her and my thumbs caught her clit under the soft sheath of its hood.
“Go on, go on,” I insisted. Tears were running down her face. I licked them. Her mouth was at my ear, her tongue trailing through the sweat at my hairline. When she came her teeth clamped down on my earlobe. I pulled but could not free myself. She was a thousand miles away, rocking back and forth on my hand, and the stink of her all over us both. When her teeth freed my ear, I slumped. It felt as if I had come with her. My thighs shook and my teeth ached. She was mumbling with her eyes closed.
“Gonna bathe you,” she whispered, “put you in a tub of hot lemonade. Drink it off you. Eat you for dinner.” Her hands dug into my shoulders, rolled me onto my back. She drew a long, deep breath with her head back and then looked down at me, put one hand into my cunt, and brought it up slick with my juice.
“Swallow it,” Jay said. “Swallow it.”
The year we held the great Southeastern Feminist Conference, I was still following around behind Lee. She volunteered us to handle the food for the two hundred women that were expected. Lee wanted us to serve “healthy food”—her vegetarian spaghetti sauce, whole-wheat pasta, and salad with cold fresh vegetables. Snacks would be granola, fresh fruit, and peanut butter on seven-grain bread. For breakfast she wanted me to cook grits in a twenty-quart pan, though she wasn’t sure margarine wouldn’t be healthier than butter, and maybe most people would just like granola anyway.
“They’ll want doughnuts and coffee,” I told her matter-of-factly. I had a vision of myself standing in front of a hundred angry lesbians crying out for coffee and white sugar. Lee soothed me with kisses and poppy-seed cake made with gluten flour, assured me that it would be fun to run the kitchen with her.
The week before the conference, Lee went from church to campus borrowing enormous pots, colanders, and baking trays. Ten flat baking trays convinced her that the second dinner we had to cook could be tofu lasagna with skim-milk mozzarella and lots of chopped carrots. I spent the week sitting in front of the pool table in Jay’s apartment, peeling and slicing carrots, potatoes, onions, green and red peppers, leeks, tomatoes, and squash. The slices were dumped in ten-gallon garbage bags and stored in Jay’s handy floor-model freezer. I put a tablecloth down on the pool table to protect the green felt and made mounds of vegetables over each pocket corner. Every mound cut down and transferred to a garbage bag was a victory. I was winning the war on vegetables until the committee Lee had scared up delivered another load.
I drank coffee and chopped carrots, ate a chicken pot pie and peeled potatoes, drank iced tea and sliced peppers. I peeled the onions but didn’t slice them, dropped them into a big vat of cold water to keep. I found a meat cleaver on the back porch and used it to chop the zucchini and squash, pretending I was doing karate and breaking boards.
“Bite-sized,” Lee told me as she ran through, “it should all be bite-sized.” I wanted to bite her. I drank cold coffee and dropped tomatoes one at a time into boiling water to loosen their skins. There were supposed to be other women helping me, but only one showed up, and she went home after she got a rash from the tomatoes. I got out a beer, put the radio on loud, switching it back and forth from rock and roll to the country-and-western station and sang along as I chopped.
I kept working. The only food left in the apartment was vegetables. I wanted to have a pizza delivered but had no money. When I got hungry, I ate carrots on white bread with mayonnaise, slices of tomatoes between slices of raw squash, and leeks I dipped in a jar of low-sodium peanut butter. I threw up three times but kept working. Four hours before the first women were to arrive I took the last bushel basket of carrots out in the backyard and hid it under a tarp with the lawn mower. I laughed to myself as I did, swaying on rubbery legs. Lee drove up in a borrowed pickup truck with two women who’d come in from Atlanta and volunteered to help. One of them kept talking about the no-mucus diet as she loaded the truck. I went in the bathroom, threw up again, and then just sat on the tailgate in the sun while they finished up.
“You getting lazy, girl?” Lee teased me. “Better rev it up, we got cooking to do.” I wiped my mouth and imagined burying her under a truckload of carrots. I felt like I had been drinking whiskey, but my stomach was empty and flat. The blacktop on the way out to the Girl Scout camp seemed to ripple and sway in the sunlight. Lee kept talking about the camp kitchen, the big black gas stove and the walk-in freezer.
“This is going to be fun.” I didn’t think so. The onions still had to be sliced. I got hysterical when someone picked up my knife. Lee was giggling with a woman I’d never seen before, the two of them talking about macrobiotic cooking while rinsing brown noodles. I got the meat cleaver and started chopping onions in big raw chunks. “Bite-sized,” Lee called to me, in a cheerful voice.
“You want ’em bite-sized, you cut them,” I told her, and went on chopping furiously.
It was late when we finally cleaned up. I hadn’t been able to eat anything. The smell of the sauce had made me dizzy, and the scum that rinsed off the noodles looked iridescent and dangerous. My stomach curled up into a knot inside me, and I glowered at the women who came in and wanted hot water for tea. There were women sitting on the steps out on the deck, women around a campfire over near the water pump, naked women swimming out to the raft in the lake, and skinny, muscled women dancing continuously in the rec room. Lee had gone off with her new friend, the macrobiotic cook. I found a loaf of Wonder Bread someone had left on the snack table, pulled out a slice, and ate it in tiny bites.