Something Red

by Jennifer Gilmore

  “Yes,” Sharon said. “We need to get an early start for Boston.”

  They all watched Benjamin lope down the hill, following Jon and the girls into an old magenta Pinto. Then they sped off, the tailpipe dragging down the empty street.

  Vanessa was swinging out back in the hammock, watching her mother through the window as she cleaned up in the kitchen, when she heard the singing of Jason’s tires halt as he stopped at the driveway, the sound of metal hitting brick as he leaned his bike carelessly against the walkway, then his muffled footfalls on the lawn. She could see his blond hair bobbing as he made his way out back, and she didn’t get up, but waited, watching him scan the yard for her in the glow of the kitchen light.

  Not until he turned to leave and tiptoe away did she call out, “Hey, there.”

  Jason put his hand to his forehead, as if to shield his eyes from the sun. “Hey. Where are you?”

  “Here.” Vanessa sat up and felt the thick, looped rope—handmade by the Amish or something, her mother had said when she bought it at the Torpedo Factory in Virginia—gripping her in all the wrong places. “Back here in the hammock.”

  “Can I sit?” he asked, coming closer and closer until he peered over her.

  “I’m getting up.” She placed her hands down to rise, and her fingers got caught awkwardly in the netting. She struggled to swing her feet to the ground.

  Jason pulled her up and hugged her to him, and she felt the dampness along his spine, and at that place below his shoulders where it seemed he should have wings, and at the back of his neck. His sweat smelled of french fries and evergreens. “Want to go for a ride?” he asked.

  Vanessa thought of her grandparents and her parents sitting in the living room, drinking coffee and agonizing over Ben’s departure. “Sure,” she said, heading toward the garage for the blue Schwinn she’d had since she was a kid. She and Heather and Bee and Jessica used to tie red, white, and blue streamers to the handlebars every Fourth of July and ride through the neighborhood, ringing their bells.

  This is what I’ve always wanted to feel, Vanessa thought as soon as she was sailing down beneath the trees of Thornapple Street behind Jason, heading toward Rock Creek Park. She could feel the moist air at her neck and shoulders as her hair flew out behind her. I am changing, she thought as she watched Jason rise in his seat and pitch his body forward, leaning on the handlebars. She wriggled her fingers, as if to feel if they were still her own. Everything will be different, she thought.

  “Vanessa?” Sharon called out back, wiping her hands on her apron. She flipped on the porch lights and bugs swarmed toward it, a swirling galactic spiral in the unremitting glow of the outdoor light. She squinted out into the dark. “You out there, Vanessa?” she called, but Vanessa was way too far from the house to hear, and she was light as air, and she was flying.

  CHAPTER 2

  Food Matters

  When Ben left for school, Sharon was in despair, and Marlene Edelstein, Sharon’s business partner, was the first to encourage her to get help. Marlene, who had married an attorney and lived off Chevy Chase Circle, had a far more state-of-the-art kitchen than the Goldsteins’ or even the kitchen at the Food Matters offices, and more often than not they’d try out new recipes there. The day Marlene gave her the LEAP! business card they were testing braised tofu in curry sauce, sesame broccoli, and also their traditional scones, to which they were adding walnuts, orange zest, currants, and cranberries in different combinations. The tofu they’d perfected, but Sharon was not totally convinced it should become a signature dish.

  Actually she had become unsure about soy in general. Hadn’t the government convinced them, after all, that corn had been such a great thing after the war? There’d been so much goddamn corn in this country they hadn’t known what to do with it, and so the campaigns for corn syrup and cornmeal and corn oil and corn chips, promoted as these healthy alternatives to wheat, had begun. Mickey Mantle was on television every two minutes proclaiming Karo syrup gave him energy (and tastes great!). Well, that had certainly paved the way for fattening Americans, hadn’t it?

  Sharon had picked up the Post just days after they’d returned from dropping Ben off at Brandeis, and buried on page 12 was an article about the negative aspects of corn. It was all a conspiracy! The country was probably just shit out of corn. She had folded down the paper with her index finger and peered over it to glare at Dennis.

  “What do you make of this?” She’d thrust the article at him. “Now they’re telling us corn is bad.”

  “Hmmm,” Dennis said after taking the paper and quickly looking over the piece; too quickly if you asked Sharon. “Maybe they’ve found that it’s just not healthy for us. It’s a tiny piece, Sharon.”

  Sharon’s eyes had followed his hands as they returned the mug to the table. They’d bought the large mugs at the Torpedo Factory several years ago. An image of the kids drinking cocoa from these mugs, she and Dennis their morning coffee, had made Sharon run back to the potter’s space to purchase four of them when they’d already been halfway to the car. The cups were chipped now, and one of them no longer had a handle, but still they were everyone’s favorite mugs, just as she’d known they would be. She shook her head. “Does there have to be something rotting in this country for anything to be done about it?”

  “Or maybe it’s just damage control for now not having enough corn left.” Dennis sat back in his chair and folded his arms. “Who can you trust?”

  “Ummm, the government? Can’t we trust the fucking government?”

  Dennis snorted. “I think we both know better than that, Sharon.”

  He took a swig of coffee, and Sharon continued to watch him for clues. All she knew was that somewhere in the heartland of this country soy had to be growing from the Mississippi River to the horizon in absurd quantities. Perhaps Dennis and his Agriculture cronies were in on it, starting to perpetrate the use of soy because they knew that soy futures were dropping and the government would soon be left with barrels of the stuff, rotting in some silo next to the corn and the winter wheat.

  “There is always too little or too much, isn’t there?”

  Dennis nodded.

  “All I’m saying is we’re being tricked into buying what there is too much of and somehow we no longer want what there’s not enough of. How is that?” She thought of the year the Soviets purchased enough wheat and corn and soy to make it look as if the feared global food shortage had begun in earnest. There had been panic—even the price of rice at the grocery store rose dramatically. That was 1973; Sharon remembered because Ben had his sixth-grade science fair—Dennis had been away—and he and Jon Ratner had created a lung from a bell jar and a balloon to demonstrate how scuba worked, a stark contrast to the other kids’ drab papier-mâché volcanoes and prosaic shoe-box dioramas. For weeks she’d watched Benjamin slap around the house in flippers, cutting out photos of sharks and dreaming of becoming a deep-sea diver.

  As her father-in-law would say, What are you eating your heart out for, Sharon? That’s capitalism for you.

  How could they—and who was they anyway, the government?—play around so much with what we, as a country, eat, what we, as individuals, put in our bodies when her son had his dreams to fulfill?

  We are being tricked, Sharon thought as she poured chopped walnuts into Marlene’s gleaming white KitchenAid. “Do you think we can inject the braised tofu with minerals and vitamins the way farmers shoot meat through with hormones?” she asked Marlene, who was pulling the dish from the oven. A rush of curry filled the room.

  “Farmers inject live animals though, don’t they?” Marlene closed the oven door and pushed her straight black hair from her face with her free hand.

  “Oh,” Sharon said.

  Marlene absentmindedly jotted something down on the recipe card.

  “Well, maybe we could grow our own soy.”

  “No,” Marlene said. “We couldn’t. We’re caterers, not farmers.”

  Sharon nodded. But she would h
ave liked her own chickens. Fresh eggs for the baked goods would be divine. She’d recently been reading cookbooks that championed fresh, seasonal ingredients from local farms and markets, and this would be about as close to home as you could get.

  Sharon peered into the mixer, watching the nuts get lost as they were churned into the folds of the scone ingredients. She imagined her tears, falling silently now, bringing her own story into her baking, as in a fairy tale. Would the scones go hard from grief, or would suffering make them as light as air?

  Since Benjamin had gone, Sharon found herself crying often, which she was not usually prone to, and she had also become terrified of her changed and sullen daughter. They’d had dinner alone together for the first time in quite a while this past September. Vanessa no longer ate meat, though Sharon wasn’t sure if this was related to her newfound interest in hard-rock concerts or not, and so Sharon had made brown rice and tempura-style eggplant, which she’d rolled in wheat germ, combined with the panko bread crumbs she’d gotten at the new Asian specialty store by the health club. She’d even offered Vanessa a glass of wine. This was when Vanessa had looked at her mother’s Chablis as if it were the reason for the atomic bomb and explained—for the fiftieth time—that drugs and alcohol were just another way for the government to keep the people down. And she’d told her about PMA, a positive mental attitude, which, if it had any effect on her daughter whatsoever, was fine with her. She had liked the sound of it: positive mental attitude.

  Sharon had said it over and over to herself as she watched her daughter scrape the fried coating from the eggplant and take a few bites of the naked vegetable. Sharon guessed she’d been about Vanessa’s age when she’d stopped believing in government. That’s just when the HUAC had come to town, when her father and Dick Yates of Republic, the studio where her father produced westerns for most of the blacklist, smoked cigars on the back deck and laughed at the shit-faced communists who clearly no longer wanted to work in this town. Sharon hated westerns! They seemed even less real than other films. But how, at sixteen, does one convey, I am not my father? She’d been so busy trying not to be her mother, she had not known then she would want to escape him as well.

  What about sex? she had wanted to ask Vanessa. And she had wanted to reach across the table then and grab her daughter by the collar, or just hold her tight enough to ask her, What on earth is happening to you? But she did neither of those things.

  “That has wheat germ in it,” Sharon had said instead. “For strength!” She balled her right hand into a fist and shook it, she knew, not with power of protest as she’d intended, but with the wan wave of apathy.

  “I don’t do fried,” Vanessa had said.

  Sharon noted this for the future, not mentioning that fried was once all Vanessa would eat: french fries, fried cheese, fish sticks, and heavily breaded chicken tenders. Sharon had tried to make these as healthily as possible when she cooked, but there was no stopping Dennis’s taking Vanessa to McDonald’s just as soon as she’d won a soccer game or received an A anywhere on a report card, even in handwriting. How could Vanessa not learn that food was reward, that it was tied to love? And with all her new dietary restrictions, where was her daughter getting that love now?

  Sharon turned the mixer off, went over to the sink, and leaned into the faucet. She could not control her weeping.

  “What is it, Sharon?” Marlene asked, rubbing Sharon’s back in soft, round circles, just as Sharon had when her children were sick. She was ashamed to admit, she loved them best when they were ill, their resistance down.

  “I feel like everything’s just gone,” Sharon told Marlene. She was experiencing a sort of hopelessness that seemed momentarily worse to her than the depression she’d felt after Vanessa was born. It was a time when women were making such variegated choices, and she had thought she’d gone crazy. They’d had to get a nanny to come in while Dennis was at work. All she could remember about it was the dreadful sensation that she had lost touch with the earth, with the actual ground of this planet, with her home and the people in her home, and that she floated, wholly untethered, unsure as to what her role in the world now was and how she would ever get back down to realize it.

  She’d not experienced that with Ben or she mightn’t have had another child. She was two weeks early with Vanessa, which was why Dennis hadn’t been there, despite her warnings that he was cutting it pretty damn close, and in the few days before she’d gone into labor Sharon started having terrible dreams of Ben falling off railings and tumbling down stairs. She’d wake with the profound wish that she not have another child and she’d rush to Ben’s brand-new big-boy bed, panicked by the impending transformation of her family. Never would it be the three of them snuggled in bed together against the cold, the three of them marching on the Mall, Ben secure against Dennis’s chest. Nor would it be just the two of them, she waiting for Ben across the room as he slowly made his way to her, one delicious little-boy step at a time. Now they would always be at least three, she’d thought, not realizing that one day, as today, it would be only she and a grown Vanessa. Sharon had wondered lately if Vanessa had sensed even in the womb that her presence had been feared.

  “Ben’s just the first in the line of it. Dennis has also all but disappeared,” Sharon said. She thought of reaching out to her husband in the middle of the night and the way he had turned away from her, even in sleep. “And I’m scared stiff of my own daughter.” Sharon wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “I dread talking to her, that I’ll either make her angry or, even worse, find out what’s actually going on in that head of hers.”

  “Look,” Marlene said. “This is all normal. We’re at that age.”

  “Don’t,” Sharon said, straightening. “Just don’t.” She shook her head and cleared her throat.

  “You know what helped me when Gus and Lindsey left home?”

  Sharon interrupted, “Vanessa is still here, for two more years. What kind of a mother does that make me?” She thought of her daughter, locked in the den bathroom after dinner. She knew what she was doing in there. Sharon had known women in college who all herded to the bathroom together to vomit up those butter-cream cakes and sugary fruit pies they served at afternoon teas. They were dieting, they told the group, as they laughingly returned, falling back onto the couch, their full skirts flying above their knees until they rocked back up to seated and indulged in more pastries. They were slim as pencils, these girls, each with a waist cinched tight. Was this a silly phase Vanessa was going through, or some kind of obsessive neurotic behavior, something of more concern?

  “Irregardless,” Marlene said. “Remember what a mess I was last year? Don’t laugh, but I started getting more involved in synagogue, like when they were kids. At Sinai, off the park.”

  “I know, we used to belong, when the kids were young.” Sharon shook her head.

  Marlene nodded.

  “Does Frank go with you?” Sharon went over to the mixer and examined the contents of the bowl again. She leaned on the counter—marble, she thought with envy, even in her distraught state—and looked at her friend. Marlene might have a fabulous kitchen, and those Bvlgari earrings Frank brought her from Italy, but she had put on weight. Marlene’s face was pudgy now; her whole body had acquired an extra layer since they’d started this business together five years ago. Marlene might be getting fat, but she seemed happier than ever, thought Sharon, imagining Marlene frying up a mushroom omelet and bringing it to bed with champagne after she and Frank had made love.

  “He comes to services with me sometimes,” Marlene said. “But it’s more my thing. He started going when his mother died. He said kaddish and so on, but it was really more for her.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s not for me anymore,” Sharon said. “That’s over.” Dennis had gotten to her in the end. Before they’d had children, Sharon and Dennis had decided to give them the tools to make an educated choice. One must know one’s past to diverge from it, they’d agreed. But once the kids had showed up,
bright and shiny and yet somehow unexpected, Dennis fought Sharon at every turn. Hebrew school was prosaic; bar mitzvahs were gauche. He refused to help carpool; he wouldn’t assist with any planning; and on Yom Kippur he made a point of eating bacon cheeseburgers.

  Marlene shrugged and looked at her, mouth cocked exaggeratedly to the side, her eyes large. “But maybe it is for you is what I’m saying. Maybe it’s perfect for you. Life got so busy, maybe we just forgot. I know I did.” Marlene brought her left hand over her heart.

  “Not me. I didn’t forget. Dennis drove it out of me.”

  How many Passovers had she cooked matzo-ball soup and made her own gefilte fish and forced them all to sit there and go through the Haggadah, in which she herself was not the least bit competent? It hadn’t seemed natural. She thought of her father, showered and shaved, his white hair still beaded with water beneath his yarmulke, his navy tie, his prayer book—the one he’d had when he was a boy on Hester Street—held tight to his side. But where had that prayer book been for all these years?

  “So you think you know what you need.” Marlene turned her palms skyward and shrugged. “Who am I to say? But you need something. Or you will go mad, I can tell, Sharon, I know you.”

  “How does a drink sound then?” Sharon headed over to Marlene’s fridge, where there was always an open bottle of California Chardonnay.

  “See what I’m saying?” Marlene glanced at her watch. “It’s not even two o’clock. Look.” She went around her kitchen counter and over to the sitting area, flipped down her desk, and began to sift through a box filled with business cards. When she found what she’d been looking for, she brought it over to Sharon.

  “Emma Osher, from the health club, married to Morty? From the drug lobby? She passed this on to me when I was going through the same thing.” Marlene handed the blue card to Sharon, who took it and held it with the tips of her fingers and thumb. It said, LEAP!: An invitation for you to leap from here to exactly where you want to be.