Secret Ingredients

by David Remnick

  Erica wore a swirly blue skirt and buttercup blouse that happened to match the colors of their Fairlane.

  Rick was still in the breezeway, running a shammy over the chrome-work. This was something, basically, he could do forever. He could look at himself in a strip of chrome, warp-eyed and hydrocephalic, and feel some of the power of the automobile, the horsepower, the decibel rumble of dual exhausts, the pedal tension of Ford-O-Matic drive. The sneaky thing about this car was that, yes, you drove it sensibly to the dentist and occasionally carpooled with the Andersons and took Eric to the science fair but beneath the routine family applications was the crouched power of the machine, top down, eating up the landscape.

  Danger. Contents under pressure.

  One of Erica’s favorite words in the language was “breezeway.” It spoke of ease and breeze and being contemporary and having something others did not. Another word she loved was “crisper.” The Kelvinator had a nice roomy crisper and she liked to tell the men that such-and-such was in the crisper. Not the refrigerator, the crisper. The carrots are in the crisper, Rick. There were people out there on the Old Farm Road, where the front porches sag badly and the grass goes un-mowed and the Duck River Baptists worship in a squat building that sits in the weeds on the way to the dump, who didn’t know what a crisper was, who had iceboxes instead of refrigerators, or who had refrigerators that lacked crispers, or who had crispers in their refrigerators but didn’t know what they were for or what they were called, who put tubs of butter in the crisper instead of lettuce, or eggs instead of carrots.

  He came in from the breezeway.

  “The carrots are in the crisper, Rick.”

  He liked to nibble on a raw carrot after he’d waxed and buffed the car.

  He stood looking at the strontium-white loaf that sat on a bed of lettuce inside a cake pan in the middle of the table.

  “Wuff, what is it?”

  “It’s my Jell-O chicken mousse.”

  “Hey, great,” he said.

  Sometimes she called it her Jell-O chicken mousse and sometimes she called it her chicken-mousse Jell-O. This was one of a thousand convenient things about Jell-O. The word went anywhere, front or back or in the middle. It was a push-button word, the way so many things were push-button now, the way the whole world opened behind a button that you pushed.

  May cause discoloration of urine or feces.

  Eric sidled along the wall and slipped into the bathroom, palming the sloppy condom. He washed it out in the sink and then fitted it over his middle finger and aimed the finger at his mouth so he could blow the condom dry. And in the movie version of his life he imagined how everything is projected on a CinemaScope screen, all the secret things he did alone over the years, and now that he is dead it’s all available for public viewing and all his dead relatives and friends and teachers and ministers can watch him with his finger in his mouth, more or less, and a condom on his finger, and he is panting rhythmically to dry it off.

  He heard his mother call his name.

  He had to wash it and reuse it because this was the only one he had, borrowed from another boy, Danny Anderson, who’d taken it from his father’s hiding place, under the balled socks, and who swore he’d never used it himself—a thing that wouldn’t be fully established until both boys were dead and Eric had a chance to see the footage.

  To avoid suffocation keep out of reach of small children.

  Eric hid the rubber in his room, pressed into a box of playing cards. He took a long look at Jayne Mansfield’s picture before he slipped it into the world atlas on his desk. He realized that Jayne’s breasts were not as real-looking as he’d thought in his emotionally vulnerable state, dick in hand. They reminded him of something, but what? And then he saw it. The bumper bullets on a Cadillac.

  He went into the kitchen and opened the fridge, just to see what was going on in there. The bright colors, the product names and logos, the array of familiar shapes, the tinsel glitter of things in foil wrap, the general sense of benevolent gleam, of eyeball surprise, the sense of a tiny holiday taking place on the shelves and in the slots, a world unspoiled and ever renewable. But there was something else as well, faintly unnerving. The throb, perhaps. Maybe it was the informational flow contained in that endless motorized throb. Open the great white vaultlike door and feel the cool breezelet of systems at work, converting current into power, talking to each other day and night across superhuman spaces, a thing he felt outside of, not yet attuned to, and it confused him just a bit.

  Except their Kelvinator wasn’t white, of course. Not on the outside, anyway. It was Bermuda pink and dawn gray.

  He looked inside. He saw the nine tilted parfait glasses and felt a little dizzy. He got disoriented sometimes by the tilted Jell-O desserts. It was as if a science-fiction force had entered the house and made some things askew while sparing others.

  They sat down to dinner and Rick carved the mousse and doled out portions. They drank iced tea with a slice of lemon wedged to the rim of each glass, one of Erica’s effortless extra touches.

  Rick said to Eric, “Whacha been up to all afternoon? Big homework day?”

  “Hey, Dad. Saw you simonizing the car.”

  “Got an idea. After dinner we’ll take the binoculars and drive out on the Old Farm Road and see if we can spot it.”

  “Spot what?” Erica said.

  “The baby moon. What else? The satellite they put up there. Supposed to be visible on clear nights.”

  It wasn’t until this moment that Erica understood why her day had felt shadowed and ominous from the time she opened her eyes and stared at the mikado-yellow walls with patina-green fleecing. Yes, that satellite they put into orbit a few days ago. Rick took a scientific interest and wanted Eric to do the same. Sure, Rick was surprised and upset, just as she was, but he was willing to stand in a meadow somewhere and try to spot the object as it floated over. Erica felt a twisted sort of disappointment. It was theirs, not ours. It flew at an amazing rate of speed over the North Pole, beep beep beep, passing just above us, evidently, at certain times. She could not understand how this could happen. Were there other surprises coming, things we haven’t been told about them? Did they have crispers and breezeways? It was not a simple matter, adjusting to the news.

  Rick said, “What about it, Eric? Want to drive on out?”

  “Hey, Dad. G-g-g-great.”

  A pall fell over the table, displacing Erica’s Sputnik funk. She thought Eric’s occasional stuttering had something to do with the time he spent alone in his room. Hitting the books too hard, Rick thought. He was hitting something too hard, but Erica tried not to form detailed images.

  Do not puncture or incinerate.

  The boy could sit in the family room and watch their super-console TV, which was compatible with the knotty-pine paneling, and he could anticipate the dialogue on every show. Newscasts, ball games, comedy hours. He did whatever voice the announcer or actor used, matching the words nearly seamlessly, and he never stuttered.

  All the other kids ate Oreo cookies. Eric ate Hydrox cookies, because the name sounded like rocket fuel.

  One of her kitchen gloves was missing—she had many pairs—and she wanted to believe Eric had borrowed it for one of his chemistry assignments. But she was afraid to ask. And she didn’t think she looked forward to getting it back.

  Yesterday he’d dunked a Hydrox cookie in milk, held it dripping over the glass, and said thickly, “Is verry gud we poot Roosian moon in U.S. sky.”

  Then he took a bite and swallowed.

  The men went out to find the orbiting satellite. Erica cleared the table, put on her rubberoid gloves, and began to do the dishes. Rick had kidded her about the gloves a number of times. The kitchen was equipped with an automatic dishwasher, of course. But she felt compelled as a homemaker to do a preliminary round of handwashing and scouring, because if you don’t get every smidge of organic murk off the fork tines and out of the pans before you run the dishwasher, it could come back to haunt yo
u in the morning.

  Flush eyes with water and call physician at once.

  And the gloves protected her from scalding water and the touch of food scraps. Erica loved her gloves. The gloves were indestructible, basically, made of the same kind of materials used in countertops and TV tubes, in the electrical insulation in the basement and the vulcanized tires on the car. The gloves were important to her despite the way they felt, clammy but also dry, a feeling that defied innate contradiction.

  All the things around her were important. Things and words. Words to believe in and live by.

  Breezeway

  Crisper

  Sectional

  Car pools

  Bridge parties

  Broadloom

  When she finished up in the kitchen she decided to vacuum the living-room rug but then realized this would make her bad mood worse. She’d recently bought a new satellite-shaped vacuum cleaner that she loved to push across the room because it hummed softly and seemed futuristic and hopeful, but she was forced to regard it ruefully now, after Sputnik, a clunky object filled with self-remorse.

  Stacking chairs

  Scatter cushions

  Storage walls

  Room divider

  Fruit juicer

  Cookie sheet

  She thought she’d lift her spirits by doing something for the church social on Saturday to pep up the event a little.

  Do not use in enclosed space.

  She would prepare half a dozen serving bowls of her Jell-O antipasto salad. Six packages of Jell-O lemon gelatine. Six teaspoons salt. Six cups boiling water. Six tablespoons vinegar. Twelve cups ice cubes. Three cups finely cut salami. Two cups finely cut Swiss cheese. One and a half cups chopped celery. One and a half cups chopped onion. Twelve tablespoons sliced ripe olive.

  She remembered coming home one day about six months ago and finding Eric with his head in a bowl of her antipasto salad. He said he was trying to eat it from the inside out to test a scientific theory of his. The explanation was so crazy and unconvincing that it was weirdly believable. But she didn’t believe it. She didn’t know what to believe. Was this a form of sexual curiosity? Was he pretending the Jell-O was a sort of lickable female body part? And was he engaged in an act of unnatural oral stimulation? He had jellified gunk all over his mouth and tongue. She looked at him. She had people skills. Erica was a person who related to people. But she had to put on gloves just to talk to him.

  She set to work in the kitchen now, listening all the while for the reassuring sound of her men coming home, car doors closing in the breezeway, the solid clunk of well-made parts swinging firmly shut.

  1997

  “Enough yin. More yang.”

  ENOUGH

  ALICE MCDERMOTT

  Begin, then, with the ice-cream dishes, carried from the dining room into the narrow kitchen on a Sunday night, the rest of the family still sitting contented around the lace-covered table, her father’s cigarette smoke just beginning to drift into the air that was still rich from the smell of the roast, and the roasted potatoes, the turnips and carrots and green beans, the biscuits and the Sunday-only perfume of her mother and sisters. Carried just two dishes at a time because this was the good set, cabbage roses with gold trim. Two bowls at a time, silver spoons inside, carried carefully and carefully placed on the drainboard beside the soapy water where the dinner plates were already soaking, her mother being a great believer in soaking, whether children or dishes or clothes, or souls. Let it soak: the stained blouse, the bruised knee, the sin—sending them into their rooms with a whole rosary to pray, on their knees, and a full hour in which to do it.

  She was the youngest child, the third girl, with three brothers, and since the boys were excused and the kitchen too small, their mother said, to hold a pair of sisters in it together, this final task, the clearing of the ice-cream dishes, was hers alone. Two at a time, she gathered the plates while the others sat, contented, limp, stupefied with food, while she herself felt her stomach straining against the now tight waist of her good dress, felt her legs grown heavy from all she had eaten. Sunday dinner was the only meal they had with their father, who worked two jobs to keep them all fed (that was the way it was put by Mother and Father both, without variance), and the bounty of the spread seemed to be their parents’ defiant proof of the man’s long week of labor. They always ate too much at Sunday dinner and they always had dessert. Pie on the first Sunday of the month, then cake, ice cream, stewed fruit—one Sunday after the other and always in that same rotation. Ice cream being the pinnacle for her, stewed fruit the depths from which she would have to rise, through pie (if mincemeat, hardly a step in the right direction, if blueberry, more encouraging), then cake—always yellow with eggs and dusted with powdered sugar—and then at last, again, ice cream, store-bought or homemade, it hardly made a difference to she who was told once a month that a lady takes a small spoonful, swallows it, and then takes another. She does not load the spoon up and then run the stuff in and out of her mouth, studying each time the shape her lips have made (“Look how cross-eyed she gets when she’s gazing at it”). A lady doesn’t want to show her tongue at the dinner table.

  Carefully, she collected the bowls and carried them two by two into the narrow kitchen. She placed one on the drainboard and then lifted the spoon out of the other and, always, with a glance over her shoulder, licked the spoon, front and back, and then raised the delicate bowl to her chin and licked that, too, licked the cabbage roses and the pale spaces in between, long strokes of the tongue from gold-edged rim to gold-edged rim and then another tour around the middle. Place it down softly and pick up the next. The creamy dregs spotting her nose and her cheeks, vanilla or chocolate, peach or strawberry—strawberry the best because her brothers and a sister always left behind any big pieces of the fruit. Heel of her hand to the sticky tip of her nose (lick that, too) and then back into the dining room again for the next two bowls. Oh, it was good, as good as the whole heaping bowl that had been filled by her father at the head of the table, passed hand to hand by her sisters and brothers, and set before her.

  Extrapolate, then, from the girlhood ritual (not to say, of course, that it ended with her girlhood) to what came to be known as her trouble with the couch. Trouble on the couch would have been more accurate, she understood later, when she had a sense of humor about these things that at the time had no humor in them at all. But such precision was the last thing her family would have sought, not in these matters. Her trouble with the couch, it was called. Mother walking into what should have been the empty apartment except that the boiler at the school had broken and the pastor had sent them all home and here she was with the boy from upstairs, side by side on the couch, her two cheeks flushed fever pink and her mouth a bleary, full-blown rose, and her mother would have her know (once the boy had slipped out the door) that she wasn’t born yesterday and Glory Be to God fourteen years old was a fine age to be starting this nonsense and wasn’t it a good thing that tomorrow was Saturday and the confessionals at church would be fully manned. She’d had a good soaking in recriminations all that evening and well into Saturday afternoon, when she finished the rosary the priest himself had prescribed, the end coming only after she returned from the Communion rail on Sunday morning and her mother caught and held her eye. A stewed-fruit Sunday no doubt.

  Her oldest sister found her next, on the couch with her high-school sweetheart, midafternoon once again—their mother, widowed now, off working in an office—and the first four buttons of her dress undone, the lace bodice of her pale-pink slip all exposed. And then not a month or two later that same sister found her there with another boy, his head in her lap and his hand brushing up and down from her ankle to her knees.

  Then there was that Saturday night during the war when her oldest brother, too drunk to go home to his new wife on the next block, let himself in and found her stretched out on the couch in the embrace of some midshipman who, it was clear, despite their quick rearranging of clothes, had his fin
gers tangled up in her garter. There were buttons undone that time, too, and yet again when she was spied on by the second sister, who never did marry herself but who had an eyeful, let me tell you—a marine, this time, his mouth, to put it delicately, where her corsage should have been and her own hands twisted into his hair as if to hold him there—which led to such a harangue about her trouble with the couch that, finally, even her old mother was moved to say that there was a war on, after all.

  Later, her best girlfriend joked that maybe she would want to bring that couch along with her on her wedding night. And joked again, nine months to the week later, when her first son was born, that she didn’t seem to need that old couch after all.

  There were seven children born altogether, the first followed and each of the others preceded by a miscarriage, so that there were thirteen pregnancies in all, every loss mourned so ferociously that both her husband and her mother advised, each time, not to try again, each birth celebrated with a christening party that packed the small house—made smaller by the oversize floral couch and high-backed chairs and elaborate lamps she had chosen—and spilled out into the narrow yard and breezeway, where there would be dancing, if the weather allowed. A phonograph placed behind the screen in the kitchen window and the records going all through the long afternoon, and on into the evening. You’d see her there after the last guest had gone, the baby on her shoulder and maybe another child on her hip, dancing to something slow and reluctant and melancholy (“One for my baby, and one more for the road”). Lipstick and face powder on the white christening gown that night, as well as the scent of the party itself, cigarette smoke and perfume and the cocktails on her breath.

  She was a mother forever rubbing a licked finger to her children’s cheeks, scrubbing at the pink traces of her own kisses, forever swelling up again with the next birth. Kids in her lap and her arms wrapped around them even after their limbs had grown longer than her own. The boys, before she knew it, lifting her off her feet when she took them in her arms.