She blew at a wisp of hair in her eyes and I brushed it out of her face. “Just some errands,” she told me. She didn’t elaborate, so I got my hands beneath her arms and said: “Ready?” She nodded. As soon as I lifted her I knew by the pain across my back that I was in the wrong posture. Her head tapped the door frame.
“Shit,” I said.
“It was nothing,” she told me.
Back in the kitchen we looked at everything piled on the counter. I’d been an idiot not to go to the market every week. We had little buttons of white cheese floating in herb-speckled oil, sheaves of spinach, trout that was faintly rosy at the edges from the smoke. I thought of the bags of wet, pre-peeled carrots I ate most of the time.
“Would you believe this is the first time I got something besides pastry?” I asked her.
Kate was looking fondly at some radishes, their roots ice-white. “Are you a convert?” she asked.
I started to put the smoked trout and cheese away. “I think I am,” I called from inside the refrigerator. “What’s Evan going to do with all this?”
She didn’t answer, and so I stashed the food on a shelf in the fridge and turned to look at her. She was giving me a big smile. “We,” she said.
“ ‘We’?”
She nodded.
“I can’t cook,” I reminded her.
“Don’t worry. This is mainly assembling.”
I looked at all the food and back at her. I decided that as far as a day’s work went, making a meal might not be so bad. It all seemed terribly healthy, too. It occurred to me that my headache had been gone for a long time, possibly since the croissant. I’d have to remember that.
Before we cooked I followed her to the stereo and looked over her CDs. She was into folk, it seemed, the kind of thing that relied on a good voice and an acoustic guitar. There was a shelf full of jazz and classical. As we contemplated it, me crouched next to her chair, I said, “Do you two have similar taste in music? Or are some of these Evan’s and some yours?” I thought of Liam and his wife meeting at a concert. I couldn’t tell what he would have thought of her music, but I thought he might have liked it, if only because I knew none of the names, which was frequently a positive sign.
I turned to watch Kate answer. She was looking thoughtfully at the CD cases. “It’s hard to remember,” she said slowly. “I think our taste has merged.”
“That’s kind of nice,” I said. I put in the CDs she nodded at. “It’s romantic.”
She smiled faintly. “Yeah, I guess.”
She looked at me sideways, said something I missed. She repeated it for me: She was asking what I liked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I told her. We headed back to the kitchen. “I tend to really love a song I hear once on the radio, then I play it into
the ground and hate it in three weeks. I don’t think I actually have taste. I have flings.” Liam often brought me CDs, scratchy old recordings or bright Latin guitars. I’d fallen in love with one of them as soon as he played the first track. The band was a trio of saxophone, bass, and drum, with a singer whose voice was low and dark. His women were the sort who had daddies and drank whiskey and met in pool halls in the afternoon. “I like Morphine,” I told her. “Did you ever hear them?”
She shook her head. “Bring it next time,” she said. “I could use some new music.”
I sat down with Kate and we made a list of what to do. She was right; it wasn’t much actual cooking. Most likely she’d planned it that way on purpose.
I taped the list to a copper pot that hung over the island so I could glance at it as I worked. Kate sat with her book apparatus on, a magazine in front of her, but after a while she didn’t read at all, but watched me and told me what to do for each thing—to tear the stems from the big pieces of spinach, to scrub the radishes but leave the tops on. First I washed almost everything and spread it on towels to dry. Then I trimmed and peeled and chopped. Some vegetables I cooked in a big pot of salted water, and other things I just sliced. Kate listened to the music as I dumped things into boiling water and fished them out again, cooled them in a bath of ice water, and drained them and wrapped them in towels.
Everything was so bright in the kitchen, the gleaming copper, the skinny green beans, and the white dish of red berries. I fell into a rhythm of cutting and dipping and draining, sweeping the trimmings into the garbage as I worked to keep everything clean. I felt warm and bright and purposeful. I felt as if the things in my hands, the fruit and fish and cheese, had started off rough, but I was refining them. There was something elemental and simple about the piles of chopped vegetables in their dishes, the deep green hue of cooked things, the fat heft of the eggplant. I poured olive oil from a tin gallon with French writing on it and cracked peppercorns from a weathered wooden mill. Even the salt she told me to use was special: big sticky crystals spooned out of a linen bag.
Kate moved her chair over when it was time to make vinaigrette.
“Didn’t people used to have their own secret vinaigrette recipes?” I asked. “I think that that used to be a special thing.” I mashed garlic ponderously. “Or maybe it was just an old commercial.”
Kate laughed and I watched her answer. “I know what you mean,” she said, nodding. I repeated it to be sure I had it and she nodded again. “Like pie crust,” she went on. “Classic kitchen skills.”
I mashed a little harder. My wrist was getting sore. “Yeah. Aren’t French women all supposed to know some special vinaigrette recipe?”
Kate looked bemused. “French women are supposed to know everything.”
“I know. Sex secrets and how to tie a scarf, right?”
Kate laughed. “Are you up on those?”
I flushed. “Hardly. I just read it somewhere. Something about a tea that, uh . . .” I trailed off. Why had I brought this up? Kate was looking at me expectantly. “It supposedly perfumes . . . how to put this? The nether regions.”
She chuckled. “Very delicately put. What attention to detail,” she said. “You know what it is about French women?” I watched her speak, nodding and repeating. “The stereotype, anyway.
Competence
. At everything. You’d think it’d be more mysterious than that.”
At Kate’s suggestion I dipped a green bean in the olive oil before I whisked it into the vinaigrette. It seemed to me I tasted the olive oil all through my head: I felt its sheen on my lower lip and a peppery hit in the back of my throat and my nostrils. It tasted rich and warm and dark, dark green.
At the end of the afternoon, shortly before people were supposed to arrive, she told me to arrange everything on big enameled plates. I had nothing like them at home, where all our dishes were secondhand china painted with tiny chive blossoms and petrified ducks. These were rich, saturated colors, and just to amuse myself I arranged by contrast: radishes and carrots on a blue plate, roasted eggplant and basil on a platter the color of a sunflower, the goat cheese in a bright cherry bowl. I put out wineglasses I’d found in the cupboard in the dining room. I heard myself humming.
“What else do you need?” I asked, looking around the kitchen. “What about drinks?”
She thought for a second and then slumped in exasperation. “I forgot ice.”
“Oh, well, no big deal. I can just run out and get it, unless you want to come along.”
I got the keys from their polished wooden bowl on the table near the front door. The bowl sat at the feet of the naked girl, who was still where Evan had moved her, far enough away from the spider plant that a tendril only curled over her shoulder. She looked rather nice, for such a Barbie doll. I flicked the vine off her shoulder and went out for ice.
When I came back Evan’s car was in the garage and Kate wasn’t in the kitchen. As I loaded the bags of ice into a big copper tub near the door to the deck I heard his voice from the back of the house. I couldn’t hear Kate from here and didn’t expect to—I had been unable to hear her from a foot away in the crowded market—but I could hear Evan laughing, the fast tempo of his words. The music we’d put on had been turned up, the food on the table glistening in the late afternoon sun. I ate another green bean dipped in olive oil and headed back toward the bedroom, wiping my mouth and then calling hello as I went.
They were in the bathroom, the makeup kit spread out on the counter next to two glasses of cold pink wine. Evan was leaning back against the counter, Kate facing him so I could see her profile in the mirror. She’d been laughing about something hard enough that Evan was wiping a tear away from the corner of each of her eyes. They were still grinning about something as I came in.
“Hey, Bec,” Evan said. “Sorry, we got a little slap-happy for a second.” Kate, still grinning, cast her eyes meaningfully at the wine.
“For me?” I asked. In the mirror I caught a glimpse of myself, face pale and shiny, my dark hair diffused by the light from the window, a hand laid coquettishly to my breast. In the course of the day I’d forgotten how bad off I’d been that morning. I felt a lot better, but I wasn’t looking very good. My eyes peered, tiny and rabbity, out of a white face, circles beneath them.
“Thanks. You know, I can give the makeup a shot if you want to relax, Evan.” Evan had moved behind Kate and was twisting her hair into a ponytail.
“That’s okay,” he said. “I’m strangely in the mood to do it tonight.”
As he spoke his hand traced the curve of Kate’s neck and up her jawline to her ear. She leaned her head slightly into the cup of his palm, her eyes closing slowly and luxuriously, like a cat’s.
“You’re on till about six, right?” Evan said.
“Do you need me later?” I asked. I had been planning to go home and sleep in penance for the night before. “Because I can stay if you want; it’s no problem.”
“You could meet some of our friends,” Kate said. “You’ll see a lot of them, so . . .”
I drank some of the wine, expecting it to be sweet and fizzy. At the Italian restaurant we had served white zinfandel with a spritz of soda. But the wine was stony and light and there was no sweetness in it. It was such a surprise that I stood there, holding a pool of it on my tongue, and didn’t answer. When I looked back up Evan was doing Kate’s eyebrows.
“Like it?” he asked, smiling at me. “It’s nice with tomatoes.”
“It’s really good,” I said. “And I can stay awhile.” I settled myself on the bathroom counter and watched them finish up the makeup. When it was done Kate’s eyes were darkened again, her mouth red and shiny. Evan removed the band from her hair. As she let her head fall back, Kate said, “Bec, would you mind grabbing the silver beaded hoops?”
Her jewelry box was on top of the dresser, with diamond studs and gold and silver hoops in compartments on the top, and below it a clutch of small velvet drawstring bags. I found the hoops and went back toward the bathroom, my wine in one hand and the earrings clicking in my palms, and caught a glimpse of Evan bending down to kiss her, one hand splayed against the pale skin of her neck, the top of his head showing the thinness of his light hair. How had I ever searched for Liam in Evan’s face and gestures? Evan straightened up, glancing over at me and smiling as easily as if I’d seen him shaking someone’s hand. How odd that I knew as much as I did about him—how he’d kiss, where he’d touch you. I flushed, imagining a hand on my neck, the laundered smell of a clean white shirt.
WHEN PEOPLE BEGAN ARRIVING
, I stayed out on the deck with Kate. I loitered just behind and to the right of her until she told me she
found it difficult to talk to me from there. I stepped beside her. At least I knew I looked better than I had that morning. I had borrowed Kate’s lipstick and taken my hair down, using some of her serum to smooth it.
She introduced me to each couple as they came through the kitchen and out onto the deck, exclaiming over the food. They must have been familiar with the caregiver routine—they introduced themselves to me right after kissing Kate on the cheek. A tall, black-haired woman with big silver earrings nodded toward the laden table and said, “That’s you, right?” The wine I had had while we were getting ready must have had an effect; I found myself blushing when I agreed. The table did look beautiful. It had a look of vivid, cheerful excess. The whole deck seemed pretty and crowded, the light the syrupy yellow that falls at the end of the afternoon in summertime.
I forgot the names of most of their friends as soon as they were introduced, suspecting it might be weeks before I could get them straight. They were mostly couples in their thirties and early forties, wearing jeans or khakis. The women wore bright knit tops that showed their gleaming shoulders, except for one redhead in a crisp linen blouse and a chunky turquoise necklace.
I stayed near Kate. The redhead in the linen shirt bent down to kiss her cheek. I glanced at Kate, who flicked her eyes toward the bar we’d set up on one table.
“Would you like a drink?” I asked the woman. “There’s beer and wine on the picnic table.” She turned to look at me, lifting her eyebrows until she figured out who I might be. “I’m Bec,” I added. “I’m helping Kate.”
She held out a hand. “Nancy.” She brushed her bangs off her face and glanced down at Kate and then back at me. “I think I will. Anyone else?” We shook our heads. Kate said something to me, glancing at Nancy to show it concerned her.
“Oh. She says to try the goat cheese,” I added. “It’s that herby kind I guess you like.” Nancy smiled and headed off to the bar. Kate and I spoke to the next couple to arrive, and again I acted as a sort of shadow hostess, glancing at her for cues.
Some of the friends could understand her better than I could, and
others glanced at me for help. Even the ones who understood her must have realized that translating was part of what I had to practice, and they waited, sipping their drinks or chewing salad, as Kate spoke and I watched and repeated it. It was a little like reading aloud. They watched Kate, then me as I repeated her words. I tried to match the tone she used, so I didn’t sound monotonous, but that felt odder still. I was reminded of my one acting experience, when I’d had a single line (“Yes! Truly, Lucy, what must Senator Gladwell think?”) that had rung out of me like a proclamation instead of welling up naturally the way the better actors’ lines did.