by Kelly Harms
I try to answer him, tell him I’m fine, but I can hardly get air in. My throat is burning now and I feel my head getting lighter. Yes, I’m actually choking on my own spit. Or not even spit. Drool from sitting in the same car as an attractive man. What the hell is wrong with me?
“I’ve got some water in the trunk,” Noah says. “I’ll pull over.” I nod frantically. I feel like I’m going to pass out. I keep rasping out a cough and start to wonder which will take me faster—death by choking or by embarrassment.
Noah pulls over and pops out of the car with vigor. I crane my head around to see the trunk pop up and notice for the first time that his backseat is littered with detritus. It looks like he’s ready for Armageddon, considering what he has back there. Blankets, pillows, two thermoses, and a bargain box of peanut butter crackers. Is he one of those lunatic survivalists like they have in Montana? Great. First man I’ve been attracted to in umpteen years and he’s preparing for the rapture. That figures.
While I’m taking inventory of the unholy mess, the trunk slams and I spin back to my door and open it, try to get out before I realize I’m still buckled in. Before I can unlatch myself, Noah comes to my side of the car and does it for me. Just reaches down right by my hip and feels around for the seat belt button and presses it. Though he never touches me, I feel the warmth of his hand, moving past my thigh, loosing the belt, and guiding it out of my way. While he’s doing this I freeze completely—even stop coughing, stop trying to breathe. Nothing moves and there is no sound.
But as soon as I’m free and he pulls his arm away, I’m back to the gasping wheeze, and he hands me out of the car and gives me a water bottle and starts whacking me on the back with vigor. I make him stop long enough for me to get a good drink of water in, and finally my throat relaxes and my lungs stop seizing. A few more shuddering coughs and slow sips of water and then I’m done, coughing fit over. My breathing goes heavy and panting, and I realize with some disappointment that I’m going to live and thus must face Noah again. My chest caves and I slouch my way over to an old rock wall on the side of the road and sit down, dropping my head between my legs to keep from passing out.
The view from down here is somewhat obstructed, but I still see Noah’s shoes moving toward me, then his legs lining up to sit on my left. I feel him put his hand gently on the small of my back and move it upward very softly, to the space between my shoulder blades, and then back down again. My breathing starts to return to normal. My heartbeat starts to slow to the rhythm of his hand.
We sit there like that for a very long time. I am wondering if I can stay still long enough to just die and decompose on the spot, without ever having to look at Noah—my savior from death by choking on nothing—in the face again. Noah is probably wondering what the hell is wrong with me. But he just keeps gently rubbing up and down, never going any lower or higher than the little pathway he’s marked out on my back. It feels really good. I wouldn’t mind dying right here, right now, I decide.
But Noah seems determined to make me live. He takes me by the shoulders at last and pulls me upright and says softly, “You okay?” And when I nod, he says, “you sure?” and I nod again. Then he looks me right in the face and I go red from forehead to shoulders and wish I could plunge my face in a bucket of cold water.
“You’re really shy, aren’t you?” he says.
I nod. Suddenly I feel like crying.
“Huh.” He scratches his beard and looks at me inquisitively. “Usually beautiful girls are too confident.”
To my horror, I lean over the back of the wall and throw up.
PART TWO
Simmer
NEAN
“Anyone can cook, and most everyone should.”
—MARK BITTMAN, How to Cook Everything
“So I heard you barfed on the mountain man.” It’s been a day and a half since Janey and Aunt Midge decided I could stay, and I’m starting to feel a little bolder. After all, I did help them move in yesterday and carried a metric ton of groceries into the house this morning. They’re getting their money’s worth out of me, that’s for sure.
Janey looks offended and embarrassed when I bring up Noah. But then, that’s her usual expression. “I didn’t barf on him,” she says, as if this is a crucial distinction.
“Whatevs. I’m just saying it’s probably not the sexiest thing you could have done in that situation.”
“I am not trying for sexy,” she huffs. Well, that’s a good thing. “Pass me the olive oil.”
I am sitting on the countertop in the far corner of the kitchen, using my heels to push a lazy Susan cabinet below me back and forth, back and forth, while I watch Janey cook. The kitchen is luxe as hell, just miles and miles of granite and stainless steel as far as the eye can see. I like the way the pot rack dangles from the ceiling on thick brass chains, like a chandelier, only instead of lightbulbs and crystal, it’s sparkling with copper pots and pans. The TV in the fridge is tuned to the Food Network on mute, and on screen an impossibly thin middle-aged woman is pretending to enjoy a cannoli. The closed captioning marching across the bottom of the screen reads “Mmmm.” But the look in her eyes says “Cut away from me, dammit, before I accidentally swallow!”
“How many calories are in a cannoli?” I ask.
“What?” says Janey. I notice that when she is in the kitchen she only half listens to anyone. “In a cannoli? How would I know?”
“Well, you’re the food diva. Look at you,” I say, gesturing to the massive pile of flour she’s made into a little volcano on her wooden cutting board. “You’re making pasta from scratch.”
“How else would you make it?” she asks.
“Seriously?” I look at her to see if she’s joking. She smiles enigmatically, and I put my head in my hands in mock exasperation. “I’ll tell you what. If you’re very, very nice to me, I will show you how to make a little thing called Kraft macaroni and cheese. It’s my specialty.” I wiggle my fingers a little to show the specialness.
Janey raises an eyebrow. “I’ll pass. But if you like macaroni and cheese, I’ll make my grandmother’s recipe for you tomorrow night. Six kinds of cheese, and bacon too. It’s got tomatoes though, so you’re going to have to stomach some vegetables.”
Janey apparently thinks I’m a twelve-year-old boy. “I’ll survive,” I say, and go back to watching her work. She’s got this relaxed thing going on that I don’t usually see from people in the kitchen, like she could stand there all day playing with the flour and not care whether or not a meal ever got cooked. How different from her usual scared squirrel imitation.
There are three big brown eggs standing on the countertop, and she picks up one and walks over and hands it to me. “What do you feel?” she asks me.
“Nothing,” I say. “An egg.”
“What temperature is it?”
“It’s no temperature. I mean, it’s the same as the air.”
“Right. So it’s ready to be used.” She plucks the egg out of my hand and whacks the hell out of it on the granite countertop next to me. I’m thinking we’re having floor eggs now, but instead she somehow keeps the fractured shell shut tight until she’s right in the lava pit part of the flour volcano, where she opens the egg and lets it slink down like a drunken cowboy through swinging saloon doors. And of course she does all this with one hand. I haven’t seen someone cook this fancy since I washed dishes at the hibachi restaurant in Waterloo. Two more eggs go into the volcano, and then she whips out a fork and starts beating the yolks as if she were using a real bowl with hard sides. I watch the eggs turn golden yellow all over and then fade lighter and lighter as they start to gobble up the dry flour, until she has a pale dough exactly the color of a downy chick. She smudges it around her board a few times until it’s a respectable rectangle and then turns her back to the dough and leans back with her messy hands on the counter and looks at me. “It’s resting,” she tells me.
“Should we keep our voices down, then?” I ask her facetiously.
&
nbsp; She raises an eyebrow at me. “If you could refrain from speaking entirely, I think that would be best.”
I smile. In the three days I have known Janey Brown, she has been funny exactly twice and both times it has delighted me. I’m not an idiot—I know she can’t wait to see the back of me. For two women with the same name, we could not be more different. But there is something about her that makes me wish I could make her like me. I wish I knew what it was, so I could actively ignore it.
“Have you ever peeled a tomato before?” she asks me, her mind already on the next thing. I shake my head. “What about knife skills? Can you chop?” I shake my head again.
“Peel garlic?”
“Nope.”
“Have you ever cooked anything that didn’t come in cardboard?”
“Not a thing,” I say. She does that thing where she twists her lips around and juts her chin to the left. Her thoughtful face. I’m getting pretty good at reading her.
“Maybe…” She takes her apron off and begins tying it around my waist as I sit on the counter. “Hey!” I say. No one said anything about kitchen duty.
“I know you are going to be leaving soon.” Gulp. “But until then, you will bake,” she announces. “That is what people who cannot cook must do. Hop down.”
For a moment I hang there, resistant to the idea that I should have to do anything at Janey’s request. But I have to do something useful if I want to win her over. Something besides help Aunt Midge cheat at crossword puzzles. I jump down.
“Bakers start with cookies,” she tells me when I’m standing in front of her. “Go into the pantry and find a bag of Toll House chocolate chips. The bag will tell you what to do. When it comes to chocolate chip cookies, the bag is always right.”
That night, I belly up to the dinner table like I’m part of the family, setting myself a place and helping myself to a generous serving of wine. Eyebrows raised, Janey serves a ridiculously good meal of fresh pasta, which tastes like regular pasta only more so, and a plate of tomatoes and mozzarella drizzled with something tangy. I notice she eats hardly at all, maybe three or four bites, and when I say something to her about it, she tells me she is saving room for my cookies.
I love cookies, don’t get me wrong, but I am stuffing myself to the gills now and worrying about them later. Long after Janey and Aunt Midge have set down their forks I am still going. There is a salty, almost meaty cheese dusted down over the top of the pasta that I could eat by the bushel and strings of very thin sliced ham running through the noodles that tastes like some kind of super-bacon. When it starts hurting to swallow, I push back from the table and groan a little bit.
“I take it you were hungry,” says Janey drily, but I can tell she’s pleased. “If you like it that much, I can put a little away for you to snack on tomorrow.”
I look at the big blue pasta bowl in the middle of the table, still heaped with enough food for at least two more people. “What else would you do with it? There’s tons left.”
Aunt Midge laughs, and it’s kind of a weird barking sound. “Same thing she always does. Tosses it out so she can start from scratch tomorrow.”
I look back and forth at both of them to see if they’re joking. “Seriously?”
Janey nods. “I hate leftovers,” she says.
“But that’s crazy. There’s tons of food left. Delicious food. And it took so much work.”
Janey shrugs.
“Come on,” I say. “I watched you actually shell the freaking peas. Peas that you can buy frozen for a buck ninety-nine, you shelled by hand instead. It took you hours. I’m pretty sure people stopped shelling peas at home around the time of suffrage.” Aunt Midge laughs at this. She’s such a good audience, for a bitchy old broad. “You can’t just throw away all your hard work.”
“Well, it won’t keep forever, and besides, I’ve already planned out tomorrow night’s dinner.”
“And the night after that,” adds Aunt Midge.
“Maybe I have,” says Janey. “I like to cook,” she tells me. “I like shelling peas.” She stands up and starts clearing our plates.
“Aunt Midge, is this true?”
Aunt Midge nods her head, clearly long resigned to her niece’s bizarre behavior. “She cooks like this all the time. Everything from scratch, big elaborate dinners. Sometimes she feeds me, but most nights she just eats what she wants and tosses the rest.”
“That’s not true,” interjects Janey, and I am relieved for a moment, until she goes on. “In Iowa, I didn’t have time to cook every night, because of my job. It was maybe one night a week, two, tops.”
“That’s two nights a week too many,” I say.
“That’s what I told her,” says Aunt Midge.
“Think of the waste! Why don’t you just make smaller quantities?” I ask.
Janey stops loading the dishwasher and gives me a hard look. “Because I don’t.”
Whoa. Guess I won’t go there. She straightens up from the dishwasher and returns to the table for more dirties. Absentmindedly I’ve been scraping and stacking bowls and plates and silverware in neat piles while we talk, and I hand her a stack now and she smiles at me. “Thanks.”
“You’re batshit,” I tell her in response. “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Coming from you, that means a lot,” says Janey. She comes back from the sink and moves to pick up the serving bowl of pasta. Before she can, my hand shoots out and grabs the rim tightly.
“Don’t touch that,” I snap at her. I yank it closer to me on the big wooden table and wrap both arms around the bowl like I’m cradling a baby. This close to the food, my nose fills up with the smells of cheese and sharp ham and butter again and I find myself wondering if I can eat the entire rest of the bowl myself. “You’ll throw away this food over my dead body.”
Janey tilts her head at me like I’ve gone mad and shrugs. “Okay. Suit yourself. Eat until you explode if you want to. Just don’t clutter up my fridge with leftovers that are just going to go to waste. Need I remind you that your stay here is temporary?”
I roll my eyes. “How could I forget?” But I’m not thinking about my tenuous housing situation for once. I’m thinking about the food. Cooking up a plan, if you will.
Janey pulls out a pair of thick rubber gloves from the pantry and grabs the bucket of pea shells and then fishes around in the fridge for a few moments and pulls out a large tub with opaque plastic sides and a tight-fitting lid.
“What’s that?” I ask her.
“A little something from the bait shop,” she answers, and then turns the tub around until the words WORMS LARGE written in black Magic Marker face forward. “I’m going to go try to get that composter going. Wanna help?”
Well. Clearly she wants to be alone. “Um, no thanks. Knock yourself out.”
She disappears with her slimy friends through the kitchen door, saying, “Oh, and don’t let me forget we need to get a deadbolt on this door,” as it closes behind her.
“We wouldn’t want any more unexpected visitors, would we?” Aunt Midge turns to me, watching as I eyeball the huge bowl of pasta warily. “So, are you planning to eat until you die of gluttony?”
I laugh. “Hardly, although I can think of worse ways to go. I’m thinking.… There’s got to be a little shelter around here somewhere that would take in a few extra hot meals every night. Maine must have homeless people. We’ll just divide everything she cooks into two portions: one to eat and one to deliver.” I pause, wondering over the logistics of this idea. “What we’ve got to do is find out if they’d rather have leftovers the next morning or if they want the food the same night, in which case we’ll have to persuade Janey to get the meals ready a little earlier so we can deliver the extra before we eat.”
She looks at me, a shocked expression on her face. “Of course! Why didn’t I ever think of this?”
Maybe because you’ve never eaten shelter food, I think. “Because I’m a genius. We’ll figure out the details tomorr
ow. For now what the hell am I going to do about all this pasta?” I ask.
Aunt Midge looks from the bowl to me with a new light in her eyes. Is it possible I’ve earned her respect with just one totally obvious suggestion?
“I’ll finish whatever you can’t eat. I’ve been ruining my figure on Janey’s leftovers for years.”
* * *
It turns out Maine has lots of homeless people, or at least enough hungry people to snarf up whatever deliciousness Janey feels like cooking on any given day. The next morning Aunt Midge gets on the horn—her turn of phrase, not mine, I assure you—and strikes up a deal with a place called Hopeful Helpers. The name makes me vomit a little in my mouth, but other than that it sounds like a decent outfit. They run out of a shut-down YMCA twenty minutes from here, providing temporary shelter for men and emergency meals for all comers, plus a food bank. They have some community classes too, vocational and GED-type stuff, and I can tell Aunt Midge is into it because she starts pestering Janey to let her borrow the car they’ve been renting while waiting to hear about the deed.
When I offer to drive her myself, the two of them look at me like I’m speaking that clicky language from Africa. Bantu. Whatever. They don’t want me to drive, I won’t drive. I’ll just hang out here and watch the grass grow.
While the two of them bicker about what would happen if Aunt Midge got caught driving without a license (I know I would like to find out), I go out to the backyard and start investigating the property. In the high late-morning light, the ocean is a lighter color blue than usual, and it’s doing that diamond sparkle thing through the scattered birch trees. I gotta hand it to the Home Sweet Home Network, they’ve got great taste. If I wasn’t so jaded, I could spend hours gazing out on this view.
But I am very jaded, and therefore instantly bored. I survey my options. When I stand with my back to the house, I’ve got the hedges that conceal the endless pool on my left and the burgeoning compost pile on my right, and in front of me is nothing but the kind of dark, shiny cliffs that one would go to if one wanted to commit suicide in a really exciting and messy sort of way. The kind of cliffs that sailors would be lured by sirens to sail too close to, only to reduce their ships to splinters and drown in the churning seas.