by Kelly Harms
“Probably for the best, considering we are only ever together in public places.”
Nean’s eyebrows pop up. “No shit? Like, never alone together? Not even a walk down the shoreline together hand in hand?”
“Never. Nothing after sundown, either. It’s lunches only. He’s like a reverse vampire.”
“Huh.”
“Exactly.” I look at her expectantly. Here is the part where she tells me what to do to get Noah’s blood racing. What to say, how to wear my hair. Anything.
Nean sighs deeply. “Let me guess, you want me to tell you what to do to get him to make a move. I see how it is. You didn’t want my help for weeks, but now it’s all, ‘Help me, Obi-Nean Kenobi. You’re my only hope.’”
“Who is Obi-Nean Kenobi? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Seriously?”
I nod.
“For the love of GOD,” she says, exasperated. “Didn’t you have a childhood? I spent my teen years living with foster parents who didn’t believe in electricity, and I still have more pop culture knowledge than you.”
This tiny unexpected confession makes me forget my love life altogether. “You were in foster care?” I say, trying to disguise the wash of sympathy that’s come over me. Life with just me and my mom was sometimes lonely, but it was a real, permanent home.
Nean rumples her face. “From ten to fourteen,” she says. “Those people were nuts. But stop trying to get me off the subject at hand: your womanly needs.”
“Where did you go when you turned fourteen?” I ask, wondering if ten years ago Nean looked as skinny and rough as she did when I first laid eyes on her at twenty-four.
“That was when I got a gig singing and dancing in the Tomorrowland Chorus in Disney World. Thirty kids from all over the U.S., doing two shows a day. It was a quite a thrill. But a lot of hard work, too.”
“Really?”
She sighs loudly and tips her head to the ceiling. “Not really.” She collects the now-empty champagne flute from my hands. “Stupid J.J. and his big campaign for truth. He’s ruined all the fun of lying,” she grumbles. “When I was fourteen my mom came back. We moved into her boyfriend’s trailer. It wasn’t exactly Disney World, but he had a TV.” She turns to leave, saying, “If we’re going to be talking about this shit, I’m going to need more booze,” clinking the flutes together in one hand as she goes.
While she is refilling our drinks, I begin to think about Nean’s life before she came to Maine. I realize that over the last months I have invented my own history for her based on the shorthand stereotypes used in one-hour police procedurals. In my imagination, she fell madly in love with the football hero in high school, they were together for years happily, then one day he started drinking and got more and more possessive, until finally the abuse started …
I am embarrassed now to discover that this isn’t actually Nean’s life history, but the plot of a 1993 TV movie starring that girl from The Wonder Years. When Nean returns, glasses full, I fight the urge to apologize to her out of the blue.
“Did he beat you up?” I hear myself ask instead. “Your mom’s boyfriend, I mean?” I can’t believe I’m being this intrusive. I want to shut up, but I also want to know.
“Why? Did you read somewhere that women who stay with abusive guys were usually abused in their childhoods?” she asks, her voice sharp.
“Uh, well, yeah.”
She tilts her head, letting her shoulders fall. “Yeah, I’ve read that too.” She takes a swig of her champagne. “I guess it’s sort of true. He was touchy-feely, but I wasn’t there long enough for anything truly dramatic to happen. My mom did a runner about four months after that. He offered to let me stay, but he was kind of a handsy douche so…” her voice drifts off.
“So then what?”
“Eh, I’ll let you fill in the blanks,” she says. “But here’s a hint—I stole that TV.” I look at her, and she’s grinning—not even a shadow of self-pity or regret crosses her face. “Anyway, we were talking about Noah vis-à-vis your vagina, remember? Stay on topic.”
I have, for the first time in six weeks, completely forgotten Noah. I look at the wooden floorboards for a moment trying to regain my train of thought, then back up at Nean. “You’re actually kind of an amazing person, you know that?”
Nean scowls. “Are you going to kiss me now?”
“Also, you’re kind of a bitch.”
Nean laughs and gives a little curtsy in response. “You’ve summed me up in so few words,” she says, still grinning.
“The point is, living with you is, well, it’s not as bad as I thought it would be.”
She looks at me hard for a moment. Like maybe she’s trying for a flippant retort. Then her features soften. “I think you and I might be friends or something, you know?”
“We might be,” I agree. Fancy that.
For a moment we look out over the water. It’s dark as night over the ocean, but some sun still manages to backlight the clouds closer inland.
“Too bad Noah’s not on his way over right now,” Nean says. “This would be the perfect weather to make love. Rain pounding on the roof, nothing to do but lie around in bed…”
“My great-aunt watching TV in the room next door…”
“Oh, you’ll get over that, trust me. Call him—see if he wants to come over for a game of Scrabble.” She puts Scrabble in air quotes.
“I can’t. I don’t even have his phone number.”
Nean looks taken aback. “Seriously? Not even his cell?”
“He doesn’t have a cell, as far as I can see,” I tell her. “And I have no idea where he even lives. He never talks about his house, or his life outside the work he does at the shelter.”
Nean absentmindedly plays with her hair as she thinks this over. I know what she is thinking: there is something fishy about the whole Noah thing. I am thinking this too. But what could it be?
“Is he married?” Nean asks out of the blue.
“No way,” I say, but now that she says it, it does make some sense. “I mean, I don’t think he is.… But then, on the other hand, how would I know?”
“Exactly. They don’t tell you until you’re hooked, you know.”
I look at her sideways. “You seem like an authority on this subject. Was he married?”
“Who?”
“Him,” I say with feeling. “The guy who … died.”
“Oh, him,” Nean says. “Look, about him.”
Suddenly Nean looks very serious, and I fill with dread. What if he was married, and his wife is still out there wondering what happened to her husband? Why he never came home one day? What if they had children together? “Oh my God,” I say. “You killed a married man?”
Nean shakes her head violently. “No, no!” she says quickly. “He wasn’t married. It was just him and me. Nobody else was involved.”
I heave a huge sigh of relief. “Thank God. Oh, Nean,” I reach out and grab her hand before she can jerk it away, hold it for a moment before giving it a squeeze and letting go. “I’m sorry I jumped to that conclusion. It’s bad enough what you had to go through, without me always thinking the worst about you. I’ve got to stop doing that.”
Nean is looking into her lap, and I see that she is sniffling a little. She smushes up her face, closing her eyes tightly for a moment. When they open again, she looks up, and her eyes are bright and wet, but the tears have stopped. “No problem,” she says thickly.
“I am sorry,” I say again, trying and failing to hold eye contact.
She coughs. “Noah’s not married,” she says, forcing a change in the subject. “He’s too annoyingly decent to be cheating. You’re just looking for any excuse to avoid putting the moves on him.”
“Nean!”
“Well,” she shrugs. “I’m just laying everything out there.”
“What would you have me do? Jump him in the middle of the lunch rush at the Drunken Sailor?”
Nean thinks on this for a moment but before she c
an answer we hear a familiar voice from the living room shout, “OH FOR THE LOVE OF PETE. IT’S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE.”
“Aunt Midge?” I stand up and go into the living room, Nean following not far behind. “You’re awake?”
“It’s hard to nap through such utter stupidity,” she says, sitting up and fluffing her curls. “You two are such amateurs. Here is what you do. Tell him you have been wanting to try out a new such-and-such recipe. Does he like such-and-such? He does? Oh, well, you could bring it in to lunch the next day. But it’s really so much better hot. I suppose … well, I mean, if he’d be interested in coming to see the house now that we’re all moved in … he would? That’s great. No, he doesn’t need to bring anything but himself. Okay, well, great. Until tomorrow!”
She puts out her hands as if to say, “Ta-da!” and looks at me superiorly. “Got it?”
Why, considering it came from Aunt Midge, it’s actually a perfect idea. It’s so easy even I can do it. “I got it!” I chirp, springing up from my seat to give her a quick hug. “You’re a genius. I’ve got to go get some cookbooks.”
Aunt Midge sighs and I catch a sarcastic look bounce between her and Nean. “Of course you do, dear. You’ve got to cook exactly the right thing if you want to win his love.”
I pause for a moment and shake my head at both of them. “I know you are being sarcastic,” I call as I walk to the kitchen, “but I don’t care. I’ll show you doubters the power of the perfect meal. I’ll have him eating out of my hand before I’ve even served dessert.” Can that be true? Has the answer been in my kitchen all along?
“That’s the idea,” calls Nean. “Except it’s not your hand you’re after, exactly…”
Aunt Midge and Nean break into depraved laughter. I tune them out as I pull down cookbook after cookbook, but a half an hour later, when I’ve flagged at least thirty recipes, I notice my cheeks are achy. I’ve been grinning all this time.
NEAN
“Opening an oyster is strictly a matter of leverage.”
—JASPER WHITE, Cooking from New England
The next week is a blur of tastings. Every time I pass the kitchen I see Janey in there, covered in food splatters, muttering to herself. The timing couldn’t be better for me. She’s made J.J. promise to eat at our house every night until the Big Date, so she gets more palates to judge her food. So, without even having to plot or scheme, I’ve got the object of my affection within arm’s reach constantly. Which is perfect because I’m a J.J. junkie. I love kissing him and talking to him and doing nothing with him. And the sex is so easy and relaxed and cool. No head games, no pretending I want to when I don’t, no doing that fake snore thing so he thinks I’m already asleep. It’s heaven. Somehow I have hit the jackpot. Well, the John-Junior-pot. I totally don’t deserve a guy like him, and it’s not just my low self-esteem talking here. I may not have actually won this damn house, but I am still America’s Luckiest Person.
Except. It is one of life’s few sureties that about five minutes after you announce you are America’s Luckiest Person, something will go wrong and make you feel much less lucky.
I am in the kitchen, helping Janey make a watercress salad with goat cheese and thinly sliced peaches when I hear the doorbell ring. I don’t even look up. If Aunt Midge doesn’t answer the door sooner or later, J.J. will just walk on in—we only lock the front door at night now, or when nobody’s home. But Aunt Midge is nearby, and I hear her greet J.J. and say, “My, my, you look awfully spiffy tonight!” and that makes me arch my head back and try to get a look at him coming in, without being obvious about it, of course. I can’t see him, so I give up and after about three seconds I’ve forgotten the whole thing anyway. I’m too busy watching Janey try to open up oysters. This is clearly a first for her, and I enjoy watching her try to figure out how to do it from the hand-drawn illustration in her copy of Joy. To me, oysters look exactly like a blond version of a mussel, but clearly they are very different. She keeps muttering to herself as she works and she’s gleaming with sweat, like a prizefighter.
“I thought you were only supposed to eat oysters in months that end in ‘-ber.’ Since when does August end in ‘-ber’?” I ask her, and she murmurs something intelligible under her breath and sets down the funny little knife she’s wielding.
“That’s only for raw oysters,” she says, sounding annoyed. “And I’m frying these, in case you didn’t notice.” She points her knife and the oyster she’s holding at the bubbling cauldron of oil on the stove with what I now recognize as a breading station next to them. “If I can ever get them open. Can you check the thermometer and tell me how hot the oil is?”
“It looks pretty hot,” I say, just so I can watch her get pissy. After she huffs a little I lean in and take a real gander. “Almost four hundred degrees, it says,”
“Shit!” she cries, and I think it’s the first time I’ve ever heard her curse in the kitchen. “It’s supposed to be no higher than three seventy-five. How was I supposed to know these fricking things would take so long to get open?” I look at the pile of oysters she’s wrestling with—about three are open in their shells and the rest are closed tightly, so tightly that even after she jams her knife into them and wiggles it up and down like mad they stay closed.
“Let me try,” I say, and hold out my hands.
“Be my guest.” She makes me put on a thick leather glove first, but then lets me go to town, which is what I do, sliding the curved tip of the knife between the shells about a millimeter and feeling around inside the oyster for what, I don’t know. It seems like there’s no way in deeper. Eventually I try sheer force, and crank my hand hard in one direction to make the knife blade turn while it’s still in the oyster. It works—we hear the hinge of the oyster snap and the thing loosens up in my hands. Now the knife slips all the way through and I understand instantly the usefulness of the glove.
“You did it!” Janey cries, and immediately begins to back away from the oysters. “You keep doing what you’re doing and I’ll get the oil ready.”
“Oh no. Don’t leave me here with all of these!”
“I trust you,” Janey says, laughing.
“But what do I do when they’re all cracked open?”
“Run the knife along the top of the inside and then try lifting off the top shell. The oyster should stay in the bottom…”
I open the oyster like an Oreo, and sure enough, there’s a little nugget of meat lying slimily on top of the shell. “Eww. Looks like female parts.”
Janey winces and says, “I think that’s why they’re supposed to be aphrodisiacs.”
Eyes wide, I swing my face around to her. “Is that why you’re thinking of serving these to Noah? Because they look like your vagina?”
“What looks like Janey’s vagina?” asks J.J., choosing the perfect moment to saunter into the kitchen.
I watch Janey closely, a little worried she is going to attack us with a vat of boiling oil. She turns a dark, dark shade of red, but no tears, no hives, no attack. That girl is really mellowing. “I’m making fried oysters, and that is all I am going to say about that. J.J., would you open the wine?”
She gestures to a side counter, where three bottles are standing at the ready.
“Which one?” he asks.
“All of them.” She shoves up her sleeves and steals the six oysters I have ready for her. “We’re doing a tasting tonight so that I know which one goes best with dinner for Noah.”
“Wow. This is getting intense,” he says.
“Sure is,” I say. “And you should try being on shucking duty.”
“That sounds kind of dirty,” he says, and moves over to me for a kiss.
J.J. is not your average kisser. He does not introduce tongue too early or open his mouth a million miles wide like they do in the movies and leave a ring of slobber around my lips. He is into a kind of kiss that can only be described as a slow motion peck. Lean in, brush lips over mine, press them there for a millennium, drag them away. It takes abou
t twenty minutes of these kinds of soft, intense little smooches before he slips me the tongue, but hey, it is better than the opposite. I have learned that when he kisses me, I must be patient, and that’s incredibly sexy.
But today there isn’t time for the whole deal. The oysters are in the fat now, and I notice that Janey is standing as far away from the pot as she can while still staying within reach with her strainer spoon thingy, because the pot is hissing and spitting hot oil in every direction. I look up, and, sure enough, the ceiling is glistening with yellow specks of oil.
“Um, hey, is that supposed to happen?” I ask, pointing up.
“I thought they were dry enough,” Janey is muttering, but she looks very afraid of the pot. “I don’t know why anyone eats these stupid things. They don’t even look like food.”
“I’m sure they’ll be great,” J.J. says, carrying the wines to the table. “Noah will love them. He’ll love any of the things you’ve cooked so far.”
“But which one will he love best?” she asks. “The ceviche? The filet mignon? The crab cakes? The roast Cornish game hens?”
J.J. shrugs indifferently, but Janey doesn’t see. She’s fishing out the oysters with a pained look, holding one arm over her eyes as she leans closer to the angry pot.
I sigh. “Why don’t you just make everything, and let him decide.” Honestly, I am getting a little tired of these cooking marathons. She is so focused on food right now that she hardly listens when I try to tell her about J.J. And being head over heels in love is pretty much pointless without a girlfriend to share it with.
“I can’t do that. He’ll think I’m desperate.”
I say nothing in response to this, showing my great maturity and restraint. Janey flings another set of breaded oysters into the oil and then flees the area, arms waving. “Everyone, to the table. Get Aunt Midge. Dinner is on in five.”
When we are all seated and munching on salad, Janey asks J.J. what food he would want if he could have any meal at all.
“Pork chops,” he tells her around a mouthful of watercress.
“No, I mean, a food that would make you fall in love with the person who cooked it.”