One Hundred Spaghetti Strings

by Jen Nails

  The more I made those recipes, the less mad at my dad and Nina I was. Working hard at cooking and baking was making the grudge break up into pieces and fall away. I just started to get really into Chefs of Tomorrow. My entry had to be the best thing I could make, so I was practicing a lot. I hadn’t yet figured out what my “common ingredient” would be, but I knew it would come to me. It had to.

  Me and Dad and Nina spent every night that winter eating a new dish I had prepared from Mom’s cookbook. One night Nina got invited to Denise’s, but she ended up inviting Denise over to our house instead so they could eat the turkey burgers I’d made. And Dad was coming home a little earlier than usual to see what was for dinner each night. Auntie Gina and Harry even started stopping over to test out a bite of my chicken and waffles (thumbs-up: fried chicken was perfect crispiness) or my barbecued pork chops (thumbs-down: pork chops were too tough). It was almost like a restaurant! Without waiters.

  I was determined to figure out my common ingredient before March first. So one Friday in February when we had a half day for teacher meetings, Lisa slept over. We said we’d definitely have the ingredient all set by the time she left on Saturday.

  After school, we got out my mom’s cookbook, and Lisa closed her eyes and pulled out a wrinkly index card. In my mom’s handwriting, it said, “Polenta—Italian cornmeal porridge.”

  “Oooh yes!” I said. “We have a big bag of this in our pantry.”

  “Let’s do it,” said Lisa.

  Just like the recipe said, we boiled water, added a dash of salt, and then poured in the polenta.

  Lisa read from the card: “‘Keep stirring for a few minutes until it thickens.’”

  We took turns stirring the whole time it was on the heat. After a little while, it started to look and feel like cookie dough.

  “Oh crap,” I said. “It’s too thick.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Lisa as she peeked into the big pot. “Should we start again?”

  “It’s so much food to waste.”

  “How much water did we put in?” she asked.

  “Four cups. Like it says.”

  “Let’s do five this time,” she said.

  I turned off the heat and slumped onto a chair. “I don’t even know my ingredient,” I said.

  “We’re gonna figure it out. We are,” she said. “Get off the chair and let’s make it again. I’ve never had polenta. And I want to try it.”

  Lisa made us try again, this time using more water. When we stirred the pot, the consistency was more like porridge, like how it was supposed to be.

  “See?” she said. “If at first you don’t succeed—”

  “Add water,” I said.

  With meat sauce on top, the polenta was just the right mix of the two flavors: salty sausage and sweet corn.

  Since Dad wasn’t home yet and Nina was having a peanut butter sandwich in front of the TV, it was just me and Lisa at the table.

  “What about something with chocolate?” she asked. “Can you do a chocolate dessert, and . . . chocolate pasta?”

  “Hmmm,” I said. “Too weird.”

  “But, I mean,” said Lisa, “what kind of dessert thing could you also put in a main course thing?”

  “Well, let’s think about vegetables,” I said. “Sometimes there’re vegetables that you could kind of put in a dessert. Like zucchini bread.”

  “Huh,” Lisa said. “How about carrot . . . cake. And carrot . . . casserole!”

  “I like it!” I said. “But . . . okay. I’ve never really done a casserole.”

  “Hmmm,” said Lisa.

  We sat there thinking for a second. Lisa closed her eyes and pulled out a folded piece of paper from my mom’s cookbook.

  She squinted at the page and read, “‘Jeannie . . . Berry . . .’?” She stopped and looked closer. “Oh. ‘Jeannie Beannie’s Lemon Bars.’ I love lemon bars.”

  “But what would be the main course?” I asked.

  “Lemon chicken! It’s on every Chinese restaurant menu!”

  “That actually sounds good. Lemon chicken has so many flavors in it. I mean, think about it. You have the sweet sauce plus the tartness of the acidy lemon plus the saltiness of the chicken. I like mixing flavors together that you wouldn’t normally think would be good together.”

  “Let’s think of more,” said Lisa.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s think of more that would involve pasta. I imagined myself making something pasta-ish.”

  “Yeah,” she said. We thought for a second.

  “Tomato pie for dessert and then . . . pasta with tomato sauce?” she said.

  “Huh,” I said. “Tomato pie . . . I don’t know if that’s a thing.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You know what we should do? We should start a dessert business.”

  “We should so start a dessert business,” I said.

  “Astronaut desserts,” said Lisa.

  “Yes! Even astronauts need dessert in space!”

  “They eat these little packets of food that’s all freeze-dried,” she said. “My uncle who worked for NASA got us ice-cream-flavored ones once. They’re the texture of Smarties, but even more chalky. They still taste like ice cream though.”

  “Hey,” I said. “I have an idea. We’re making cupcake balls.”

  “Yes!” said Lisa. “What’s a cupcake ball?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “I just thought of it right now.”

  We started with a Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix. We did twenty-four cupcakes. Once they cooled off, we decided we’d eat a little hole at the bottom of each one and then fill it with frosting. Then we thought we’d ball them up, frosting in the center, and put them in the freezer overnight. Then we could package them up in Baggies and sell them.

  But what happened was, when we started to ball up the first one, the frosting splurted right out and we both screamed. Lisa went to try and catch it, and it got all over her arm. And then she took the arm and she wiped chocolate frosting on my cheek. I gasped, and we stood there with our mouths open.

  “Oooh,” I said, “you are so in trouble.” And I was smearing it in her hair, and she put more on my cheeks, and we were screaming and lunging at each other with handfuls of cupcake and frosting. The chocolate on my forehead and ears made me laugh nonstop. . . . There was a big blob on Lisa’s nose.

  Nina came into the kitchen and said, “Oh. My. God.”

  Dad got home from work when we were wiping chocolate off the fridge and the microwave. He stood there by the key dish for a second.

  I squeezed my wet dishrag hard, remembering the one evening that he came home late, the evening he told Nina to shut up. But this night he walked right in, normal, even laughing at our chocolate war.

  “Nice to see you, Lisa,” said Dad. “That is you, underneath the chocolate?”

  Lisa and I giggled. “Yeah,” she said, wiping her chin with a paper towel.

  “How’s your dad?” he asked. “Still riding that motorcycle?”

  “No,” she said, “my mom just made him sell it.”

  “Aw, well. It’s about time,” Dad said. “He’s had that thing since high school. Tell him I said hi. Speaking of cars,” he said, pulling out his phone and flipping it open, “what do you guys think of this?”

  It was a small red car. $5200 was written in white on the driver’s-side window. Nina leaned in and squinted at the small screen.

  “Dad,” she said, “you so need to upgrade your cell. Whose car is that?”

  “Maybe ours,” said Dad. “A friend of a friend is selling.”

  “Really?” Nina said.

  Right then Denise got there, and all us girls headed upstairs. Nina closed her door behind her and Denise. In my room, me and Lisa made up a business plan for ourselves where we would cook space foods. We thought we could do a Space Chefs of Tomorrow kind of thing where the contestants had to think of one giant meal that astronauts could eat on the way to space, then once they got into space, then on the way back from
space. Then we got bored with that and started acting out a cooking show we made up called Baking for Bucks.

  I would never have been able to play something like that with Nina, and we had the best time ever. Lisa was making all these funny voices for each contestant on the cooking show. It was that kind of laughing where you are crying and you can’t stop and it just fills up your whole stomach and throat and it feels like your face is going to burst. Because the more Lisa giggled, the more I giggled, but then the more I did, the more she did. Once Nina and Denise knocked on the door and told us to shush.

  Getting My Hands in a Recipe

  On Saturday morning, while me and Lisa were at the table eating waffles, that lady Carol came over, and she and Dad went outside together. They didn’t go anywhere—they just were outside at the card table.

  “What are they doing out there?” whispered Lisa.

  “I’m not sure,” I whispered back. We put down our forks, crept close to the window, and kind of crouched down. They were laughing at something. Then it got really quiet, but you could hear their voices a little bit.

  I craned my neck forward and heard my dad say, “. . . I think . . . only person who wasn’t waiting for me to fail . . .”

  Me and Lisa looked at each other. We didn’t hear any more talking for a minute, so we went back to our waffles.

  “We need my lunar-talkies,” she said.

  “Oh my gosh, yes,” I said. Lisa was joking but I wasn’t. If I could hear what they were saying, maybe I could find out what was going on with them.

  “Carol is nice,” Lisa said once we were sitting down again. She sprinkled a handful of blueberries on her second waffle.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but I don’t get it.”

  “I know. It’s like, what is it?” she asked. “Are they having a romance or something?” she whispered.

  “I have no idea,” I said. I didn’t say that I was scared that maybe my dad and Carol were actually more than just friends. I didn’t say the words that were buried somewhere in my gut—that maybe my dad didn’t love my mom anymore. I felt stupid that I had never really thought about it before. But now that he was back at home and there was this lady around, it made me wonder. I didn’t say the thing about them being in the St. Theresa’s choir together. It was just too bizarre. First of all, was there a St. Theresa’s choir? I’d never heard them sing at church.

  We finished breakfast, and Lisa helped me put all the dishes in the sink and we soaked them. Then we noticed there were chocolate smears on the fridge still and wiped them off.

  We went back and forth about the common ingredient and finally agreed that it would have to be a vegetable.

  “We’ll figure it out, don’t worry. You have plenty of time,” she said. I knew she was right, and anyway, my mind was on other stuff.

  A little while later, when Lisa’s mom honked, I walked her to her car to say bye. Dad and Carol were still outside, sitting at the card table. Dad stood and waved to Lisa’s mom, who waved back from their car. After they drove away, Dad said that he and Carol were probably going out for a little bit and they’d be back soon, and to lock the door when I went inside.

  I did, but after turning the deadbolt, I didn’t just go about my business normally. I crouched down again by the window, where I had listened with Lisa earlier. I put my head up as close to the window as possible without being seen and squinted so hard to somehow get their words into better focus in my ears.

  Laughing. Then quiet. The flicky sound of Carol’s cigarette lighter.

  “No,” said Dad. “I don’t know how to deal with it yet,” he was saying, but then he was too quiet to hear. I didn’t believe I was doing this, but I climbed up on the counter so I could be closer to the window. My face was so close to the faucet that I had to be careful not to accidentally turn it on with my chin.

  “Coming back to Greensboro, there are eyes all over me,” he said, “so many eyes. Too many eyes, waiting for me to mess up again.”

  It sounded like he was a voice on the phone or something, and the connection was kind of bad. Then he said something I couldn’t hear.

  There was quiet for a few seconds and then Carol said how one of her kids called her last night. And then she was talking for a minute and then they got up from the table, and their voices got fainter and fainter. Their shoes crunching the leaves on the grass told me they were walking away. Thank goodness, because I was getting a cramp in my neck.

  I hopped down from the counter. I had to hear more. Ever since he told me they were going out for a while, I was kind of making a plan. Nina and Denise had gone to an early dance class, so I didn’t have to tell her about it. Dad was gone, so he couldn’t say no. I just didn’t want to be alone in the house, so I made my own plan. And that was that.

  I raced to St. Theresa’s on my bike with all sorts of questions floating around inside. All the eyes on Dad of people waiting for him to mess up—did he think my eyes and Nina’s eyes were part of those eyes? And that time when Dad was telling us about that one night, about the loud waves on the beach when he was alone—did he still feel alone like that, after coming back to Greensboro?

  I also thought about how when Auntie Gina lived with us, we would have never gotten to just go off on our own. Maybe we were old enough now. Maybe not. But it sure felt good. Something about being out, just as me, with no one telling me what to do, swelled me up with pride. I felt like this when I had my hands in some recipe, and I was shaping it and kneading it or breaking up meat. That feeling when you are throwing yourself into something, even if you don’t know exactly how it’s going to turn out in the end.

  When I got to St. Theresa’s, I couldn’t lock up my bike fast enough. I slipped into the church as quiet as I could. It was calm in there—only a couple people and old ladies were in the pews here and there, sitting or kneeling, fingering rosary beads.

  Then I did it. I tiptoed downstairs to the basement.

  There was a coffee smell, and cigarette smoke. A long table with silver pots and milk cartons and Styrofoam cups and plates. Boxes of doughnuts and stacks of napkins. People sitting in rows toward the far end of the room. Dad and Carol were in the last row, talking quietly. I felt all smart that I guessed where they were that morning. I wished I could hear what they were saying.

  But . . . choir practice? I imagined at a choir practice there would maybe be music stands or a piano, or someone with a guitar or something. There was none of that. And did they all know the songs by heart? A guy with a ponytail at the front of the group said, “We’ll start in about fifteen minutes.”

  What were they going to start in about fifteen minutes?

  People stretched their arms above their heads, and some stood from their chairs. Dad was one of them, and he started to turn around. Toward the stairwell. The smoke got in my throat, and there was a cough wanting to come out. I rushed up the stairs and out the door. I didn’t think he saw me. I jumped on my bike and pedaled toward home so hard I had to adjust my gears.

  The wind whipped past my cheeks as I flew down the sidewalk. There were a million questions flashing through my head. First, there was the basement stuff: what were they doing down there, exactly? And why wouldn’t Dad just say where he was going? And then there was the Dad and Carol stuff: did they like each other like that? And what about Mom? I couldn’t understand it. If you once loved someone, how could you just turn love off, like a faucet?

  When She Wrote the Recipes Down

  The smell of cold polenta hit me as I swung the fridge door open. It was late—my clock said 11:49 p.m. when I had gotten out of bed. I wasn’t that hungry for a middle-of-the-night snack, but string cheese seemed kind of good. I ate it like a candy bar, not bothering to pull down little sections.

  One car passed down a street nearby. The dogs next door barked. The refrigerator hummed. I crumpled up the cheese wrapper and threw it away. Then I got out my mom’s cookbook and pulled out a photocopied sheet of paper from under the front cover.

  “
Yam-Pecan Pie,” it said. “One cup mashed-up yams, one-third cup brown sugar, one-quarter teaspoon cinnamon.”

  I wondered if my mom was ever a get-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night person. I read all the pie ingredients and wondered how she came to have this recipe, if she’d asked for someone to copy it for her. I wondered if she’d ever made it for my dad.

  I wondered if my dad had made any of these recipes for her. I never used to wonder so many things about him. Somehow, when he lived in California, I felt like it was easier to understand who he was: my dad, he lives in California, that’s it.

  But now that he was back in Greensboro and I saw him every day, he was harder to get: my dad, he goes out and doesn’t say where he’s going or when he’ll be back. And because I was finding out I didn’t understand him after all, I was determined to know him better.

  I took out another recipe of my mom’s. She watched me from her senior picture as I sat with the cookbook in my lap.

  “Pizza Frittas—Italian Doughnuts.” I remembered those. Auntie Gina had made them before. You fried up little pieces of pizza dough and then popped them in a bag with sugar in it and shook the bag around.

  Then I took out the card that said “Polenta—Italian Cornmeal Porridge.” I slid my finger along the words that she had written so many years ago and followed the writing all the way through the whole recipe.

  “I’m like you,” I said out loud to my mom’s picture. My voice was hoarse because it was late and I hadn’t talked in hours. “I’m like you, but you don’t know it.”

  I was wanting something so bad, something I knew I couldn’t have. I was wanting my mom to just come out of that picture on the wall, just be how she was, come back to me and be my mom.

  Wait a minute.

  Mom. Polenta.

  Being as quiet as I could, I got down a Tupperware from the cabinet over the sink. Then from the fridge, I took out the leftover polenta from last night. I spooned a good portion into the Tupperware, sealed up the container, and put it back in the fridge. There was this current running through me that I had started to feel yesterday when I rode to the church.