The Kitchen Daughter

by Jael McHenry

  David says, louder again, “Then what’s wrong? Why isn’t she here? Where’s Elena?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “I mean I don’t know, that’s what I mean!”

  David moves so quickly I flinch, but it’s not me he’s reaching for. He scoops up a clump of aji de gallina in his outstretched palm, curling his fingers around it. The heavy plate tips in my hands, I struggle to right it. Yellow sauce drips onto my arm. A skinless potato rolls off the plate and hits the floor, landing with a soft but audible thump.

  David crams the food into his mouth, and works his jaw, chewing fiercely. Rice spatters down across his shirt, trailing yellow stains. I assume he thinks it will make a difference to eat it. Maybe the smell isn’t enough and the taste is essential. I have no idea. I don’t know if he’s desperate, or right.

  Still nothing.

  “Fuck!” screams David. “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “What did you do wrong?”

  “I don’t know! I tried!”

  David rips the plate out of my grip and flings it hard with both hands.

  It smashes straight into the cabinet full of my family’s cookbooks. Glass shatters with a crackling boom. Thick yellow paste streaks down the broken glass. Over the cookbooks. Toward the recipes.

  My fist strikes David high on the cheekbone, almost square in the eye. I feel the impact in the bones of my knuckles, the sound becoming vibration becoming sound. David staggers back and I turn away.

  I kneel down and yank the door open and grab for the Japanese tea box of recipes, everyone’s handwritten scraps, everything so important and so irreplaceable. I’m so startled and disoriented it takes me a few seconds to register that the things I want are safe and dry in my hand, the box would have protected them anyway, and it takes me another few seconds after that to see that I’ve knelt down in the broken glass.

  It doesn’t hurt yet, but it will.

  On the way out of the room I catch a glimpse of David hunched over on the tile. His arms and head are draped over the empty step stool. There is a noise coming from him. Crying, but not a soft, private crying. Sobs that come from all the way down in his gut. He sounds like a wolf.

  I lock the door of the bathroom and crouch down in the bathtub, picking the glass out of my knee with a set of tweezers Ma used to use to pluck her eyebrows.

  They say the best way to treat yourself when you’re injured is to pretend the body is not your body. I am barely pretending. I lift the shards of glass as if they were bay leaves I needed to retrieve from a finished tomato sauce, nothing more. Lift them off, set them aside. The shards of glass pile up on the edge of the white tub. When I don’t see any more glass against the bleeding skin, I turn on the faucet and run the water over my knee, letting it run until the tub is half full.

  There is a knock on the door of the bathroom and I don’t answer. It’s locked. There’s nothing to say.

  Eventually, the bleeding stops. The water goes from lukewarm to cool, then cold. I sit on the edge of the tub, wrapped in a towel. There isn’t another knock. I hear the front door close. That doesn’t mean anything, really. He has a key and could come back in, but I doubt he will. He doesn’t want to be here any more than I want him here. We’ve failed. I’ve failed. I made a promise that I couldn’t, didn’t, keep.

  From the cabinet in the bathroom I fish out a roll of gauze. I wrap the knee up tight. There isn’t anything to secure the loose end with. I go back into the kitchen, stepping carefully around the broken glass and ruined food with my bare feet. I sew the trailing end of the gauze to itself with kitchen twine and a larding needle. Dad was the one who taught me to sew. I couldn’t match his surgical precision, but I learned by imitating the technique. Imitation is as close as I can get.

  Thinking of him, I reach for the bottle in the back of the cabinet. I leave the mess in the kitchen for tomorrow, and take the scotch upstairs to bed.

  ….

  IT’S LATE IN the morning when I wake up, dry-mouthed and disoriented. A shot of the Lagavulin was enough to seal my eyelids for longer than I thought. I’m startled awake by the thought that Midnight could be injured by the glass in the kitchen, but she is sleeping peacefully on both my feet, so I go down to take care of the mess first thing. The creamy smell has gone stale and unpleasant. I open the kitchen windows and let the cold fresh air in. I sweep up the glass and carefully scoop it all into several layers of paper bags. Everything is still on the kitchen counter, the eggshells, the chicken bones, olive pits. All that waste. It goes in the trash. I twist the neck of the bag tight shut. The cold wind is blasting now, so I close the windows. I pour Midnight a bowl of food, close the sliding doors to the kitchen, and set it outside them, in case I missed any glass. Then I put my coat on and haul the mess away.

  When I go home I’ll be just as uncertain, so instead when I leave the alley I walk south, heading down through Society Hill and Queen Village, going the long way around. When I was little Dad used to take me down to the Italian Market, until Ma made him stop. Now that I know what I know about him, it must have been hard for him too. Crowds on both sides of the street, loud voices, constant motion. But he dealt with it somehow. Maybe he just got used to it, or maybe he did what Dr. Stewart was talking about, some kind of technique to help himself tune it out without having to withdraw completely. Hospitals are loud and hectic too. But he handled it. He got through.

  What could I get through, if I tried? Anything? Everything?

  I turn left off Christian down Ninth and walk up to the first produce stand in the market. In winter there isn’t much variety, but here I see onions, root vegetables, kale. The rusty orange of gnarled carrots next to tiny white onions like eyeballs next to dark greens that feather out in wavy patterns like the fins of some deep ocean fish.

  “What you need, lady?” calls a voice.

  I reach into the pocket of my jeans and find a twenty-dollar bill, one I tucked there for the trip to Amanda’s. No, don’t think of that. Think of something else.

  “Onions,” I say.

  “This kind or this or this? How many?”

  I look at the variety on the stand, all these boxes spilling out onion after onion. Yellow ones, and white, and red, all here, all possible.

  “Lady, I ain’t got all day.”

  I breathe in and breathe out and think how lovely these onions will be, on my stove, transformed from biting sharpness to sweet brown jam. A short, simple thought to ground me.

  “Two pounds, these red ones,” I tell him. In a flash he scoops things up and makes change, and when he drops coins and bills onto my outstretched palm I just tell myself to think of the sweet smell of the onions and not the feel of his flesh brushing my flesh, and my hand trembles, and a few of the coins drop, but he doesn’t say anything else. I bend down to pick up the coins, and tuck them back in my pocket, and walk away.

  After that I walk over to the Whole Foods on South Street. The door slides open for me without a touch. It is bright and very nearly overwhelming. Pyramid after pyramid of vegetables and fruits. What do I want? I reach for the closest thing, a ten-pound bag of Yukon Gold potatoes. This will do. Feeling reckless with my success, I decide I can do more. The feeling is energizing. I’m almost giddy. I put more things in the basket. Humboldt Fog cheese. Marcona almonds. Honey tangerines. When the basket gets heavy I stop.

  I wait in line for a cashier, and set everything on the conveyor belt, and hand him my credit card. He’s already running it through the machine when I realize it probably won’t work. It didn’t last time, with the sunflower seeds. So I’m surprised when he hands me the slip to sign.

  “Oh—it worked?” I blurt.

  “Yep, they generally do,” he says. “Do you need a bag?”

  “No.”

  “Then just sign that and we’ll be golden.”

  “But … I …” I pretend he’s someone I already know, like Gert. Focus o
n his cheek. Speak to that. “Last time I used the card they wouldn’t take it.”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Works fine here. Some places have a minimum, like you need to buy ten dollars’ worth of stuff? Could be that?”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway.” His hand makes a flickering movement. “Could you just sign that?”

  I do, and I take my groceries, and I go home.

  I CLOSE THE front door behind me and hear a noise from inside. First I assume it’s Midnight, but then I look up and she is descending the stairs toward me. I must be rattled. I know the sound my cat makes on the stairs and it is not this sound.

  A tapping. From the kitchen, I think.

  I call out, “Gert?” before I realize that isn’t possible. She came yesterday. She wouldn’t be here.

  A man’s voice calls my name and I stiffen. Then he says, “It’s only me, David, don’t be afraid,” and I’m not once he says it.

  I stand in the doorway of the kitchen and look in at him. He’s on his knees in front of the glass cabinet. Near him on the floor are stacks of small glass squares, and lots of tools I don’t know the names for. Knifelike things, razorlike things, gluelike things. And an open bottle of wine.

  David says, “Don’t be mad, okay?”

  “Okay.” I look at the cabinet. He is replacing all the broken panes, and is almost done. There is only one empty rectangle left, one last gap.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Me too.”

  I look down at his upturned face. My fist left a solid bruise on it. The purple of a Concord grape. I’m not good at reading emotions on faces but the bruise changes his. He doesn’t look as angry as he has before. There is more sadness. Maybe it isn’t the bruise.

  “It wasn’t fair to you,” he says. “To bring you into it. Nothing’s permanently damaged, right? Your recipes are okay?”

  “Yes.” My knee is still bandaged with gauze under my jeans, but he can’t see that. Besides, it’s healing.

  “Good, I’m really glad to hear that.”

  “Thank you for fixing the glass.”

  “I’m just trying to make things right,” he says, his voice heavy like coffee grounds and wet sand and earth.

  I heave the bag off my shoulder and onto the butcher block, out of the way. Then I watch David finish the work, slipping the pane into a waiting sill, and then the glass-front cabinet is whole again. He taps and presses and reassembles. He folds up his leftover supplies in newspaper and pushes them across the floor toward the garbage can. He gets up and washes his hands in the sink, dries them on the towel, and sits back down on the floor. He looks up at me, so I sit down with him, not too close.

  Sitting on his right, I have a closer look at his bruise. From the grape center it fades to green at the edges. The color changes a little over the contours of his face. It’s a deeper purple near the bone. From the core of the bruise, without meaning to, I look to the eye. It is a warm brown, with a little bit of dark gold in it. Milk chocolate, dappled with dulce de leche.

  He grabs the wine bottle by the neck and drinks. When he sets it down I can see it’s half empty. “Unseemly, I know,” he says. “Middle of the day and everything. It’s just, I’m, you have no idea, I’m falling apart.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry she didn’t come. I don’t know what I did wrong.”

  “Maybe nothing,” he says. “Maybe she didn’t want to come. I don’t know. Maybe it’s better this way. If I got that angry—Ginny, I’ve never been that angry before. I’m so sorry. If I’d hurt you—I’m just so sorry, I can’t even tell you.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything,” I say. “We both got very upset. You’re sorry and so am I.”

  “Is it that simple?”

  “Maybe it’s not really,” I say, “but let’s make it that way.”

  The corner of the eye crinkles up, everything on the face shifts, it’s almost a smile. David says, “Let me pour you a glass, huh?”

  “Just one.”

  He looks around and says, “But one of us will have to get up for a glass.”

  I reach out for the bottle. He hands it to me and I drink. The wine is much easier to drink than scotch. It has a pleasing bitterness, an interesting balance of sharp bite and sweet fruit.

  David says, “Don’t fall in love, Ginny.”

  “Why not?”

  “It hurts too much. Honestly.”

  “But there’s the good along with the bad.” I’m thinking of my parents, who loved each other, no matter what.

  “I don’t know if the good was good enough,” he says. “I’ve had a year of bad. A year where I can’t even get my head above water. You think I’m depressed because Elena’s ghost didn’t come, but honestly, it’s made me realize that I don’t know what I would have done if she had come. I wasn’t totally truthful with you, Ginny. It wasn’t just because I loved her that I wanted to see her. I had a question I wanted to ask her.”

  “What question?”

  “I wanted to know if she was cheating on me. Before. I mean, we’re both jealous people, I mean, we were, you know?”

  He holds the bottle out and I take another drink.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Tell me.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” he says. “You get so tuned in to another person, you notice even the slightest change. If she starts coming home at a different time than she used to. And she says she’s going for a bike ride but she doesn’t take her helmet. And she mentions this guy, this one particular guy, almost every day for a while and then never again all of a sudden. It might not be anything at all. But it might. And if you let that thought in, you can’t ever get it back out of your head again. You understand?”

  I admit, “Not really,” and drink the wine.

  He leans his head against the wall and says, “Hold on to that. I love that about you. You can still think the best of people. I wish I could be that way, I really do. But once you lose that, you can’t ever get it back.”

  “How did you lose it?”

  He says, “Innocence isn’t a set of house keys. You don’t just up and lose it one day. It’s a process.”

  “What was your process?”

  “Over time, I just stopped trusting people,” he says. “I got hurt too many times and I started to anticipate it. Expect it. And that applied to Elena too. I didn’t trust my own wife. What kind of person does that make me?”

  “Normal.”

  “That’s nice to think,” he says, and drinks again. “I thought you could save me from myself, but that’s not your responsibility. I shouldn’t have put it on you.”

  “I could try again. With the aji, I mean.”

  He shakes his head. “No, don’t. I have my answer. If she was faithful to me, I’m a horrible person for suspecting her. If she wasn’t, I was an idiot to trust her. And either way, I killed her. I killed her! Not on purpose, but that doesn’t matter, if it weren’t for me she wouldn’t be dead. Regardless, I still have to live the rest of my life without her. I can’t stand it, I can’t.”

  He is crying now. He grabs my hand, the one with the scar, and holds it in a firm grip. It isn’t an unpleasant feeling. He starts talking and the words spill out of him. He murmurs them into the palm of my hand.

  He tells me about Elena. Little things. Important things. The smell of her skin, almost currylike. The beaten-up shoes she refused to get rid of because of all the places they’d touched earth. When they went shopping for a new bike the week before she died, the way she ran her fingers across the handlebars of every single one, in a caress. Her favorite Spanish word, desafortunadamente. The sound she made when the back of her neck was kissed. After he tells me that one he is silent for a full minute, maybe a little longer. It is not the pleasant kind of silence.

  He says, “She deserved better than me.”

  I tell him the only thing I can think to tell him, which is what he said to me after I left Amanda’s house. “Easy, eas
y. It’ll be okay.”

  “It won’t be okay.”

  “It might.”

  David says, “It might not.”

  I say, “No promises.”

  He presses his face into the palm of my hand again and says, “I thought the problem was her. But the problem was me.”

  I say, “Everyone thinks that. Everyone thinks they’re messed up. Everyone struggles. You’re normal.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are. Come on, come upstairs, I’ll prove it.”

  I pull on his hand to bring him upstairs after me. We climb.

  In my parents’ room, he watches me while I move the red geraniums out of the fireplace and reach up into the chimney.

  “What’s that?”

  I say, “It’s called the Normal Book. I read it when I need to know that I’m normal. Because I am. You are too.”

  I show him the window seat and gesture for him to sit down. I sit down next to him, book in hand. His head is down and everything about his body shows his sadness, so I reach out. Without thinking or weighing or planning. I reach out and stroke his hair, to soothe him, the way I always find most soothing. Fingertips at the hairline, smoothing the hair back over the top of the head, all the way down to the bare skin at the nape of the neck, in a long, unbroken movement. And I read to him from the Normal Book, telling him all the broad and wide and far-reaching definitions of the word normal, the way people use it as a placeholder, a code word, a Band-Aid. The way it means nothing, and everything.

  raised in a normal home, I probably

  would be a much healthier person

  to a point where I felt like it was normal

  to exercise three hours each day, on the

  think it’s normal to obey rules, like

  RSVPing for a wedding by the date

  no problem with the gays as long as

  they act like normal people the rest of

  what I consider a normal amount of