We All Need To Eat

by Alex Leslie

  Nobody had spoon-fed us. We were greedy but self-

  sufficient. Hard with want. When I was about fourteen, my father started going away on business trips for two days, three days. Longer and longer. Another kid’s mother dropped Josiah off from his after-school daycare. I bought us Ruffles, Cheezies, cheddar Bavarian smokies, bacon, tubs of frozen cookie dough that we ate raw with spoons from the bucket. Food we never ate in front of other people’s mothers. I rented the old Disney family movies. Candleshoe, Escape to Witch Mountain. Boxes of frozen mini sausage rolls. We were a trashy cocktail party. Mini quiches. Root-beer floats clanked together. We slept on the thick dirty carpet in front of the TV. Bellies painfully hard, pressed together. Conspiracies of sugar and loneliness. We ate and we ate and we ate and we ate and it was never enough.

  I was around sixteen when I got my first job. I considered myself as an expert cook, a home chef, and assumed it would be easy to get a job as a “line cook” (a term I picked up quickly on Craigslist). I fantasized about telling friends casually that I was a sous chef. I didn’t consider any other kind of job. Kids from school worked shelving books at the public library, coaching kids at weekend soccer camps, tutoring third-graders in English as a second language, but I had to cook. Writing a resumé for the first time was a humiliating process—under Qualifications I put “knowledgeable about foreign cuisines,” deleted that, and replaced it with “well-read in world cookery.” It didn’t occur to me that I would need basic training in food hygiene or technique. I already knew everything I needed to know. I dropped my one-page resumé off at local restaurants and waited, spending my afternoons watching the same talk shows I’d always watched, but now I glared at the adult participants with impatient contempt. Why didn’t any of them have jobs? I was suddenly intent on everyone in the world pulling their own weight. It was clearly the only solution. What did they do all day?

  After a month of job searching, nobody had called back. Subway left a stack of leaflets in my school cafeteria asking for applicants. Somehow, the job title of Sandwich Artist appealed to my adolescent amateur vanity. The call came from Subway the day after I clicked Apply. The interview doubled as a tour. This is where we keep the bread, this is where we keep the cheese.

  My Subway was on the corner of a strip mall, a small precipice of chipped cement steps hanging from the end of the sidewalk that dropped off beside its door. People frequently fell down the steps—opened the glass door; turned left biting into their foot-longs; and tumbled out of sight. It was an everyday scene from my position at the counter, where I performed my sandwich artistry. Countless complaints were made about the steps, but nothing was ever done. People fell down the steps and came back the next week for more. Once I looked up and witnessed a man trip gracefully, his meatball sub soaring from his fingers as he dove. He reached for it as he went down.

  Every component of every sandwich was regulated. Cheese slices, pickles, ounces of meat, those sheaths of processed pink rounds clinging to paper. I’d fantasize about a job where I’d feed people, but here I merely stuffed them methodically. Many of the customers were regulars, many ate alone. I memorized their preferences but still asked every time, because it was policy. A Sandwich Artist always encouraged all options and add-ons. I learned to go through the motions, not expect anything. I rolled each sandwich neatly, identically.

  My tag read SOMA—SANDWICH ARTIST. I wore it with soul-scalded shame. “What kind of name is Soma?” a surprising number of Subway customers asked me.

  I stared blankly into the demanding eyes and closed mouths of the hungry.

  Hunger filled the parking lot, stuffed the banana-

  yellow seats. Soccer teams, graduate students wiping mustard drips off textbook pages, silent broke couples. I was shocked by how many adults dated at Subway. Obvious internet encounters against the backdrop of Top 40 hits and the dark groans of the industrial dishwasher. Its door slid down, side handle pulled as if guiding the descent of a guillotine blade, the light on, signalling its work. Inferno noise. For the first few weeks I slammed the door and rapidly backed away. When the light changed, I released the door upward, the steam billowing and scalding water showering down. I avoided the edges of the door, gathering the scorched pans. A co-worker in her fifties who’d worked there for eight years muttered disdainfully at me, “Don’t be so afraid—it’s not alive.” We never spoke. She knew I was just a kid, passing through. Years after I quit, I passed the window one night and saw her in there, wrapping a sandwich in the antiseptic light.

  Subway closed at eleven. Around ten-forty, there was the final surge. Everybody who’d missed their dinner, who never ate dinner, who worked through dinner, who had nobody to eat dinner with. It was the sad, late-night adult version of a bagged lunch, but packed by a teenager in a tunic and name tag.

  I had all the combinations memorized—my fingers knew the coordinates of the trays of jalapenos, shredded lettuce, wet pickles, brittle onion hoops. Mustard and mayonnaise in gooey cross-hatch. I composed each sandwich perfectly.

  When I locked the door before cleanup there was always one last person, fifteen minutes or half an hour later, outside the glass, tapping hopefully. I held up my mop in apology, shook my head, and they slid back into the darkness.

  My father and I are watching the History Channel when Josiah comes up the stairs. His curly hair tarred with sweat. I look over at my father, expecting knowing eye contact, at least a smile. Nothing. My father is the same with Josiah as he is with me: he never criticizes. Once when Josiah and I were entrenched in a fight, my father sent me an email comprised of a single sentence—Just stop it because you will always have each other—and never brought it up in person. My father doesn’t give in; he gives up.

  “Hi, Josiah!” he says, as if Josiah has just arrived from France. My father holds up a bag of no-name potato chips. “Soma’s making chicken!”

  “Thank you so much, Soma.”

  “You are welcome, Josiah.”

  When he’d called yesterday, my father had said, “Josiah’s been up to less lately.” I squeezed him with questions until he admitted that Josiah had stopped leaving the house. He had no idea why—well, there was that girl. What girl? The girl from the store. What store? Oh, you know, those stores Josiah goes to for his games. What happened with the girl? Well, he didn’t quite know about that but he thought I should come over.

  Josiah gazes at the History Channel. Men in white leggings and boat-shaped hats. He fills his mouth with chips. Chews, holding an expression of disgust. Ruining his appetite for my dinner, I think angrily.

  “Smells good,” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  “You do the thing with the lemon.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You make my potatoes.”

  “If you want.”

  He shrugs. He has my flatness when he’s down and has taken a kick in the gut. His eyes on the screen, jaws and shoulders slackened.

  I go into the kitchen and make Josiah’s favourite potatoes. Fist-sized cool russets from the bottom of the cupboard. The peels spool onto the cutting board, smelling of turned dirt. I quarter them, parboil them, dry the chunks with a dishtowel so the oil will stick, peel and crush the garlic, roll the potatoes in the oil and garlic and rock salt and cracked black pepper. The oven pours its familiar baptismal heat at me, and I toss handfuls of the potatoes around the bird. Its skin a caramel glaze. I baste it, dripping fat on the potatoes. Hot fog of lemon and skin smoke. I tent the chicken with foil and lower the oven temperature to 350. Shut the oven. When I was a kid I loved this moment. Locking the flavours in with the heat, the beginning of alchemy.

  Commercial break. My father mutes the TV and waits.

  “Why do people feel entitled to rip each other’s lives to shreds with their bare fucking hands?” Josiah says to no one.

  The chip bag crackles. Hands reach for salt, for deep-fry, for the next taste.

&nbs
p; My father’s slow sigh, sensible as wind: “They get upset.”

  Quietly, I descend the stairs.

  Pass through the silent hall to Josiah’s room, test the door. Enter.

  The way I remember it. His bedroom since childhood, layered with selves. Posters from his gamer conventions, a miniature gumball machine, a poster of a character from a show I’ve never watched—a svelte woman in a tunic carrying a galactic Uzi, her soft-porn intergalactic thighs tensed, her secretive smile. I scan the desk and night table for a photo of the girl from the store who has banished my brother. He would never be so careless.

  Josiah visited me at Subway all the time. My fellow Sandwich Artists got to know him, would shout out, “Your twin is here!” and laugh, because there was barely any sibling resemblance. His towering curls; my clipped-short cut. His long body stretched on the rack of adolescence; my compact build, shoulders like a boxer’s without any effort. In the photographs, my mother looked most like Josiah, their mouths never quite closed, their matched chins with wishbone clefts.

  “Hi,” he’d say, as if we’d just met. He refused to learn to cook for himself. When I was working, he would either turn up at Subway or eat bowls of instant noodles.

  At first he ordered sandwiches off the menu. Meatball subs and cold cuts. Most of the time I gave him his sandwiches for free. Everybody gave their friends free food. The longer I worked there, the more he customized his sandwiches.

  “Your twin is here!” one of my fellow sandwich artists would yell. It was understood that I was the one who would always prepare his sandwich. He had a talent for coming during quiet times. Sometimes I wondered if he circled the block, watching.

  “What kind of bread?”

  “Cheese bread.”

  “Six-inch or foot-long?”

  “Foot long.”

  I reached for the cold cuts. “What kind of sandwich?”

  “I’ll have three of the macadamia white-chocolate

  cookies.”

  “Sure. What kind of sandwich?”

  “Could you put the cookies in the sandwich?”

  The Subway was empty except for a guy in the corner who’d been drinking Pepsi refills for an hour. I nodded and lined up the cookies on the bread.

  “And?”

  “Honey mustard.”

  I painted over the cookies slowly. He frowned at me

  seriously.

  “That it?”

  “Could I get that broiled?”

  Under the broiler the cookies melted with surprising rapidity, like a shape-shifting alien life form. The honey mustard sank into the molten dough and the bread crisped, then burned.

  I dusted the thing with garlic salt, wrapped it in paper, and handed it to him.

  I saw him take a bite as he crossed the parking lot. He turned and raised the sandwich above his head, and the three of us standing behind the counter raised our arms in answer, we laughed, we cheered.

  I sort through the stack of computer language manuals on his desk. He did one year of community college, then dropped out. Fast to learn, fast to bore. He earned twenty grand last year from his games, he’d told me, proud. He never bought anything major. Once he told me he saved most of it, but never told me what for. I didn’t ask. I hoped that one day he’d move out without any warning.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  When I turn to him, he looks resigned, as if I’m a character in one of his games, making a predictably futile move.

  “Sorry.”

  “Dad tell you to do this.”

  “No.”

  “Find what you were looking for?”

  His Levis spur-thin. His wrists angled gently outward. He could never throw a ball straight, came home from try-outs dry-gulping rejection. Lay down in the parking lot and refused to get into the car.

  “Soma. What the hell are you doing, going through my stuff?”

  “Dad told me. A girl?”

  His laughter grills my cheeks.

  “He said that?”

  “Yeah. At the store?”

  “The store.”

  “Yeah. The gamer store?”

  “Oh god. You know he just makes stuff up, right, Soma?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  He crosses his arms.

  “He’s trying.”

  “I just can’t do anything anymore,” he says.

  “What?”

  “There’s something wrong with me.”

  “No.”

  “I’m not like other people. Other people—they do things. They just do them. My friends, they move to other cities. Just go. Greg moved to Chicago. Lev moved to Edmonton. They don’t even think. They just go. Like it’s not even that big. Like just life. There’s just something wrong with me. I can never be like people. Just thinking thinking thinking thinking thinking. You know. What the fuck is wrong with me? There’s something wrong with us. We’re not like other people. We’re like her.”

  The things I should say: You’re my brother. You’re the person I know best.

  But I was raised by Sally Jessy Raphael and Rosie O’Donnell with her Koosh balls firing soft meteors into my thirteen-year-old belly. By lists of ingredients, steps of preparation, recipes that guided me through.

  So I say, “I think the chicken’s ready.”

  He follows me upstairs.

  My chicken is perfect, like always.

  I run the knife through it silkily. Divide the wings and drumsticks between us, spoon jus over the potatoes. Copper skin, twist of bone, shards of grease.

  We eat. We never speak while we eat. Rituals so old we never learned them. Later, I’ll put the bones in a plastic bag and leave them in the freezer for broth.

  So when I speak, they look up at me like startled children.

  “Dad,” I say. “Josiah’s going to come live with me. Until he feels better.”

  My father turns to me, then turns to Josiah. Josiah bites down on a drumstick. Cartilage breaks.

  “Where’ll he sleep? Your place is a cubbyhole.” There’s something I didn’t expect in his face: the relief.

  “It’s just for a few months. Until he can find something else.” I can’t fix you, but I can take you with me.

  “Well, then I guess that’s that. Are there some more of these potatoes?” My father carries his plate to the stove and faces it for a long time. The scraping of the spoon in the pan, pushing around the caramelized spuds, the charred rosemary bundles and lemons swollen with juices.

  I chew my feast, avoid my brother’s eyes. Careful not to consume the bulk of his gratitude all at once. There are things that take years to eat. This is what we are. We can feed only on each other, salted and cured. It is hardest to be left behind.

  Stargazer

  at night, your strained vocal cords form a glowing band around the moon. You do not know what you are asking for this time. Shapes assemble at the perimeter and call themselves fingertips, cheeks, inkblot torsos. They have been here before. People you love are recycling names the way the world recycles seasons. Bees with frequency, voices turn on spokes, slow in the days, adrenal dive through the green substrata, decade roulette, but what is the true indicator of new life? The future sits across from you in the greasy spoon, saws into pancakes with ketchup on top, wields a steak knife, lectures you about making better choices, the long hall of unintended consequences. And if you can. If you looked harder, it would come to you, if you could just focus for once, this wouldn’t be so hard, clavicle and tracery of eyes would make themselves present, no diagnostic mist this time. Shutters tumble around your fingers, rising in the darkness. You understand something about tone, about how to lie down in a throat and fall asleep like you own the place. You have always excelled at Rorschach tests, can read suggestion in the shift of shoulders, some air seeping from a mouth at a specific tilt, a th
read you can grab and twist. You learned this from growing up in a city that floats in a cloud chamber. A mimic fish spreading over eyes, cheeks, collarbones. Every face, a display plate on a simple white stand. Stargazer. When you were small, a big kid taught you how to cut a slit down the belly of a green blade of grass, break open with your breath, and make music, and it was the first weapon you ever made. You aimed it at the sky, blasted an escape hatch. But now there is a shift, a settling. It’s dark. Portrait game. Voices turn on spokes, more slowly now. The faces carousel around the small warm pyramid created by your hands. Milky light seeps through the seams in commuter traffic. When you narrow your eyes, your fatigue blurs into the tactile future. Halos, overexposures cast into the deep pools of other minds. Butterflies pressed behind eyelids. Drape all the mirrors. Learn how to pray.

  Who You Start With Is Who You Finish With

  Charna

  If you asked me where we are from, I would tell you it doesn’t matter. It only matters where you are going. Where are you going? Wherever you can, and sometimes you have no choice in the matter. That ship everyone’s talking about at shul after services, all those poor people crowded at the edges, looking out at the water, hopeful fools, turned away everywhere, and they keep going looking for a place that will take them in. Not here—that much is obvious now. Sorry. You have to go. The Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King is a Jew-hater, my father, my tateleh, says. What a monster. I wish I could burn his house down. Starting with his fake smile. You learn how to read a smile. There’s all the stuff that’s happening on the outside of people and then everything that’s happening inside. Those are completely different things. It’s important not to get them confused. They can have nothing to do with each other, the outside and the inside. You just never know about people. I bet those people on the ship know that. I hope they do. Where will they go now? The Arctic Circle? How many Jews are up there? We’re all hiding from something. No, that’s not true. Some aren’t hiding at all. Some people just sit there, watching others suffer. You can call me bitter, but I know a thing or two about people. My sister said to me: Charna, you’re only twenty-four, too young to be so bitter! Bitter, me? Nu? You don’t need to be bitter, you just need to listen to the stories of what’s happening now. You just need to think about that ship with its dining rooms and blankets on beds and children, stuck up on an iceberg like an ornament on a cake with buttercream frosting. You know they’re sending that ship back to Germany and those people will probably die, and don’t call me bitter, instead look at their faces, look at the faces of the people who know. Those who are already on their way.