by Mike Wehner
It would have been less personal to search her vagina for a lost coin than to ask Erin for a knife. Knives are an extension of who you are in the kitchen. A cook spends so much will and energy cleaning and caring for their knives that they often have nothing left to give their own body. Erin motioned me to a knife block hidden behind the blender. The gnarled meat shears had the female end of a zip tie stuck between the blades, thankfully the plastic was white and not blue. I held up a crooked chef’s knife with a broken tip. Erin laughed.
“Those are for Emily, use mine.” Fear snuck up my leg and rung up my body like a spiral staircase ascending to hell. I looked at the handles and picked the one that was least worn.
The chili I’d eaten growing up was a Crock-Pot comfort food served to groups. I knew it came from Texas and wasn’t supposed to have beans but my mom didn’t know that and neither did anyone else until the Internet was invented. Home-style chili is a homogeneous mush where the kidney beans taste the same as the tomato chucks. Chili is simple and good. I don’t know where the delusion came from that for something to be good it had to be authentic. Slavery was authentic Americana but I sure as hell wouldn’t call that good. I think the constitution might be easier to amend than a recipe.
“Set the oven to three-fifty,” Erin said with the authority of someone who knew what they were going to put in it. Three hundred and fifty degrees is the bullshit temperature, the one you use for cut off recipes and bad memories. I was thankful we got the bottom oven so I didn’t have to witness to Jamie’s bent-over, ass crack plumped up like a push up bra in his too-tight jeans. I kept staring at his bottom half, there were places in his calves and thighs that the jeans seemed loose and I couldn’t reconcile how so thin a bottom could hold up such a thick top.
Erin propped herself up next to the sink asking me what I knew about chili. A spare pen was clipped up the sleeve of her T-shirt and she looked sincere about wanting my thoughts. I had a hot flash of rage, feet held to the fire and blood boiling upwards. The shears were within reach. The polka-dotted prime evil wrote my ideas in a large bubbly script that only made me more upset. I couldn’t stand how unburdened she looked, her actions a function of the now and uncolored by the tumultuous road she had taken to right there, right then. She relaxed her head into her palm and asked me how I’d refine chili.
The same way you refined people I guessed, even knife work and proper presentation. Cut the meat right and it’s tender. Slice the vegetables evenly to avoid an unpleasant raw crunch. Plating was like makeup, you know it’s an illusion but pretty is always better than honest. I told her to grill ribeye, rest it, and fan it over the top.
“Ribeye is too easy, think bigger,” she said. This shifted me into the competitive spirit of the game and my dark thoughts faded out. In all likelihood I’d be going to jail forever and I wasn’t about to spend the rest of my life reliving a loss to this stupid Jamie character.
I thought Erin was doing that chef thing where bigger meant replacing a common ingredient with something more expensive to call it better.
“Wagyu isn’t for burgers, tenderloin doesn’t go in chili,” I said.
“For someone from the farm you don’t know much about meat.” She was from a town that celebrated its history as the Confederate capital in the Civil War and I was the one who was uncultured.
“We’re going to do lamb shank and dry sausage, if you think ribeye has more flavor than shank then you probably shouldn’t be cooking,” she said and my eyes widened. It was playful and mean and ambitious.
I hunched over the spiral flip book with Erin and watched her hand turn the paper into a plan. She was always writing in these little books, if you told her about something interesting you ate or threw a word out she had never heard she would whip one of these little books out from her ass pocket and write it down. I never saw her read one but she constantly wrote in them.
“We only have an hour to cook,” I said.
“That means move your ass.”
“No, I mean, how do you cook six giant lamb shanks in an hour?”
“A pressure cooker you dumb shit.” The name calling made me more embarrassed than angry. Every time she pointed out some obvious flaw in my knowledge I wondered when she’d figure me out. When she’d lure me in and give me my own maroon puddle to writhe and gasp in while she waited to call the police.
“Please don’t tell me you’ve never used one,” she said. “It’ll melt the shanks and tomato together in no time.”
“I’m afraid of them, there was accident when I was a kid.” She frowned, but didn’t apologize. Take that you insensitive twat.
“Did you get hurt?”
“I don’t like talking about it.”
Jamie and his sous grabbed and chopped while Erin and I stood in the corner, elbow to elbow and decided what and how to cook. She knew so much but still asked for my thoughts, treated me like an equal when I was so clearly inferior. Get this, chop that, no, over there. Erin blistered fresh chilies on the stove and steamed off their skin in a plastic sandwich bag. I nestled browned shanks and volcanic soil grown tomatoes into the cooker. She poured in a mysterious white powder. “So the sauce emulsifies with the fat and gets dark, like blood.”
Once we agreed on all the details our first dance began. Our hands and feet synced and we waltzed, one two three, chop, two three, taste. We squeezed limes and shook salt into beers and we sipped and we laughed, two three. Erin crumpled some browned chorizo, I zested lime skin into the crema, spin. I swiped cilantro fingers under her nose to see if she would gag but she laughed, and laughed, and we laughed and she sneezed and we danced.
The beat was the blade on the cutting board. The audience the medley of grease pops and aromatic winds that swirled from one side of the kitchen to the next. The violin solo of steam eking out from under pressure whistled our end was nigh. The cello was the bubbling on the stove, the bass hummed by the convection in the oven. Two, three.
The hypnotic tuts of the kitchen tempered my restless heart, sweating, we stood over our creation but I wasn’t relieved. I wasn’t happy. The finish line of the feast was the moment when I snapped back into my body and who I was and what I was doing. It wasn’t through a lens of disgust or hate that I saw Erin while she tugged at the back knot of her apron and shook down burnt paprika hair, it was pity. Not pity for what she had done, but pity for what I had to do to her.
Nine
Jamie’s assistant and I conga-lined the appetizers out to the group on clear plastic saucers while the chefs stood at the head of the table and over-explained their dishes. During the passing of the plates I watched a smarmy man in a sweater vest sniff and rotate his plate quarter turns, all the way around. I hate foodies, which I define as anyone who can eat something then complain even though they were perfectly happy with the way it tasted. The woman seated to his left had a different nasal ritual. She sniffed the plate front to back with rapid pulsating nostrils, I hoped a bit of her snot would fly out onto her plate. I’d have taken great joy in seeing her try to discreetly wipe it off or try eat around it.
Chef Jamie served a series of perfectly round, single-bite tostadas. Each piece had a different colored sauce, together they looked like a marketing tool Mexico City might use for an Olympic bid. Jamie brought his own bag of masa and stamped out each tortilla by hand even though there was a stack on the counter, made that morning by the hibiscus ladies of the Mexican market.
Our poblano peppers were stuffed with a chorizo and rice mixture and sprinkled with cotija cheese. The lime and honey gastrique spooned over the top added a nice sheen. Erin seeded and stemmed all the peppers after they were roasted and then smeared them out into sheets with a skillful wipe of her blade. Rolled up and sauced they looked nice and ate well. I had trouble with the concept of how something ate, Erin rejected a lot of my suggestions on account of clunk or mess. She reminded me all the time that food tasted good everywhere but in a real restaurant the whole menu goes from your fork to your mouth—not into
your lap.
With that in mind it was a struggle to serve our chili. In every bowl of chili there is one magical bite, a loving spoonful where the slow burn hits the right pitch and you pile in the perfect ratio of sauce and meat and as the sweat stacks on your brow, the sour cream washes back the hot current the whole way to your stomach. Then you get to chase that moment all week.
Erin and I bickered over the test bowl, towels clam-shelled around our waists like a dramatic moment right before the commercial break.
She wanted less liquid in the bowls because it looked messy. The molten runoff tasted too good to leave out, I argued. It was acidic and fatty and spicy and amazing. We compromised by dressing the twisted nest of braised lamb with a tiny scoop from the bottom of the pot. Our tangle of meat was peppered with green and red onion that Erin tempered in a mixture of lime juice, tequila and sugar. I piped an even swirl of crema on top from a sandwich bag clipped in the corner—a taco night trick stolen from my mom.
Chef Jamie’s chili wasn’t served in a bowl but on a plate and fuck him and everyone like him for that. His plate had slices of brisket atop black bean pancakes and deep fried peppers, it was the aching Hieronymus Bosch version of food. The empty spots on the plate were filled with artful flings of sauce and smears of jellied whatever. Edible overcompensation. There were two dozen ingredients on his plate and not one of them tomato, or restraint.
The guests began eating (sniffing, wafting, eyeballing) and I grabbed a handful of Mexican beers from the garage to share with my new friend Mike. Mexican beer was really German beer made with shitty ingredients, I told him.
When I returned to the table a chef seated down the bench explained the mechanism by which deconstruction changes the form of a dish but not the basic essence or some such nonsense. Someone else interjected, questioning whether Jamie’s food was a true deconstruction or a renovation of the original notion of chili. When I was done with Erin I thought I might go after him next.
Erin sat down and dug into her food without looking at anyone. While she had her hand cupped under her spoon Emily offered a crisp twenty to the plate sniffing man if he would do a line of chili. Then she stood up and said, “I’ll get a straw.” That’s when the first bite was almost to Erin’s lips and a huge guffaw sent a hunk of tomato rolling down the middle of the table, leaving a thick red swipe in its wake.
◆◆◆
Face down on the living room couch, I peered over Mike’s shoulder at his phone. My starboard and port flanks throbbed from laughing. Mike and I got bad-dogged into the living room for misbehaving after dinner and he sat below me on the floor, legs crossed, flipping through the pictures he’d taken.
After the guests were served the cooks retired to the kitchen to clean up. Erin opened another bottle of wine and the four of us huddled around the island to pick at and complement each other’s work. Jamie picked up the cork and gave it a long, hard sniff.
The dishes scrubbed, boxes of pastry were passed around. Jamie lightened up, it’s hard to be a jerk with an éclair in your mouth. Erin shuffled the score cards together and tabulated the results while overfed diners patted their bellies and leaned back in sweet discomfort.
One after the other the cards said that Erin’s plate worked best. Only one person preferred Jamie’s artsy smears and glops to the unsophisticated lamb and tomato knot we’d made together. Each tabulation scaled up the contrast of Jamie’s face, by the time the pile was finished I could see every stray hair in his beard.
“This is absolute bullshit,” Jamie began, “I am glad you have the approval of your gutter-palette friends. I should have left when I saw instant ramen cups in the pantry.” Emily stuck her tongue out at him and wagged her head. Everyone laughed a bit and I hoped the mood would settle but he snapped his gaze back to Emily.
“What makes you qualified to judge my food?”
Emily took a few moments to put together the right words.
“You ask people to do that every day at your restaurant, don’t you? We don’t have to take a test to make a reservation, people judge you by coming back or not. And that’s a lot harder than here because when you go to a restaurant you aren’t being compared to one chef, but everywhere that person has ever eaten.”
Emily folded her hands on the table knowing she’d given a thoughtful and measured response. After an uncomfortable silence she said, “Those noodle cups are mine, it is cheap and easy and I like them you goofy footed prick.” A small laugh buckled out of the back of my throat and Erin shot me a look so intense I felt my penis retreat into my body. I rubbed at the scars on my right ear. The sisters might have been very different outside, but inside they were full of hydrogen and all they needed was a hot enough spark to ignite. Jamie was warming them up.
“Plebian, I should have guessed,” Jamie said. Mike shot up from his chair fighting with a napkin stuck to his cheek.
“Watch it mother fucker,” he pointed the cannolo in his hand and a bit of cream flew out and splashed into a glass of wine.
Mother fucker is a magical expression when it’s said with such authority. It sounded thin and meaningless when I said it. Mike’s soft voice morphed into a pointed double bass that struck like a hand on a cheek, the whip-crack of the third and fourth syllables pushed Jamie back a step.
Mike bugged his eyes then wiped the cream on his lips with the back of his arm like a five-year-old with the sniffles. His shoulder blades pulled together and pinched the hood of his sweatshirt, coiling to strike. Emily dismissed him to the living room in a maternal way that did little to hide her admiration that he stood up for her.
“Jamie, you might be right,” I said, “I liked your food a lot and this was fun but I’ll finish cleaning up so you can get out of here.” I didn’t care what happened, I wanted a gold star from Erin. She cocked her head and lowered her eyes at me, she wasn’t pleased with my diplomacy.
“I’d rather eat shit than cook for you bunch of savages,” Jamie said.
He walked into the kitchen to grab his things while Erin spouted apologies to the stunned room. Before he left through the garage he called back to Erin, “Only a grade-A cunt would let their sister be an impartial judge.” The more he piled it on the more aware I was of what she could do. If he didn’t stop heckling her I knew she was going to break.
While we watched Jamie walk through the kitchen the bottoms of our glasses began vibrating and thunder rolled as Mike flew across the dining room with his right hand stretched out. I thought he was holding a pastry when he bounded into the garage—arm hailed outward and leapt onto Jamie’s back. We saw them crash onto the front grass through the slats of the window.
All of us moved to the porch to leer. Mike pumped his heavy arms into Jamie’s face. From behind all I could see was Mike’s elbow move in and out like he was giving Jamie a well-deserved beating. Jamie groped and spat but sounded more enraged than hurt.
Erin chirped half-hearted calls to stop as she ran towards Mike. She grabbed him by both shoulders and tried to tip him backwards but his base was too wide and she was the one who ended up on the ground. Mike had Jamie’s shoulders pinned to the ground with his knees and he was layering Jamie’s face with a fistful of cat shit. He must have found the cat box during Jamie’s outburst and scooped up as much as he could. Mike was smearing it around while he heckled.
“You said you’d rather eat shit!” Jamie fluttered, turning his face from side to side. Mike mashed away and every time Jamie tried to yell some went into his mouth.
Erin picked a bit of grass off her face and took a few steps back then shot forward to bull rush Mike. She speared him in the ribs and again was bounced into the grass. Mike continued holding Jamie’s arms down with his shins and he snapped pictures with his phone. Stop squirming. Mike eventually let him up but continued to pound the capture button and followed him all the way to his car, dragging Erin along like a highlight reel running back if the tacklers were allowed to slap and swear.
“Damn, my phone smells terrible.�
� Mike said and offered it out for me to have a whiff.
The photos were grainy and dark, my nose over Mike’s shoulder as he thumbed through them. We took turns captioning each photo that rolled into view.
Now that’s a shit eating grin.
And we laughed.
Excuse me miss, do I have something on my face?
And we laughed.
I’m not sure what’s worse, all this shit or the black guy on top of me.
And we laughed.
Back and forth we went until our chests were so tired that we couldn’t speak. It felt so good to laugh again, to revel in instant karma.
Soon the house was dark and quiet, the girls asleep after calling us names and begging us to shut up for what felt like hours. The sound of Mike’s breath came from the love seat across from me, his legs folded over the arm like a spare blanket. Before Erin marched upstairs and went to bed she apologized for not being sober enough to drive me home and then came to her senses and told me I deserved the sore back the crappy couch was sure to give me.
I focused on the thrum of his breath and when it became constant I marched into the kitchen. Searching for one last drink, the double doors of the refrigerator cast a soap scum back-light which mixed with muted halogen bulbs from under the cabinets and made my feet glow radioactive blue against the flecked tile. The metal pot with the chili opened and before I knew what I was doing I had a spoon in one hand and a wine glass full of the spicy liquid in the other.
I left the doors open and shuffled otherworldly through the transom and onto the dining room carpet. The glass in front of me falling, falling. It bounced end over end, one, two, three. Bits of rust and red splattered then puddled where the glass settled on its side.