Simple Recipes

by Madeleine Thien

  In school, we’d been learning about species. We had to imagine billions of years, different species rising like bubbles to the surface, all this time passing. But I could not imagine ten years, fifteen, twenty. My sixteen years felt like eternity but I knew I wouldn’t be like this forever. In all my life, the total sum of it, I was a species rising and falling. One day I would wake up and all of it would be gone.

  At first, when Paula and I talked about Jonah, we were conspirators. Together, we laid out a course of action. She made sure I stood behind him at the line-up in the cafeteria, that I sat in front of him in French class, that we happened by his locker three times a day, every day. She planned out the life we might have and whispered it to me in the hallway, one hand excitedly grasping my elbow. He would take me into his confidence, slowly. He would unburden secrets he never shared with anyone. A long time in the future, he might kiss me.

  One day Jonah appeared in front of my locker and said, “Let me drive you home, Miriam.” Outside my parents’ apartment, below their window, he put his car into neutral and reached over, running his hand from my chin to my stomach. I leaned into him. He kissed me, and I felt like I was being pushed to the bottom of a swimming pool, everything distorted, unfocused yet clear as glass. I felt myself moving through years and years, coming up different all of a sudden.

  Once, in P.E. class, I watched Jonah running laps. He was falling behind, the other boys were far ahead of him, but he kept on, one hand grasping his chest then blurring down. He ran past me, breathing hard, but he blew me a kiss from the center of the palm of his hand. When I sat in front of him in French class, sometimes he whispered small requests, an eraser, an extra pen, and I passed them back without looking. But how I loved to look at him. He had dark hair and his eyes were round and dark and lovely. He had a soft body, not pounded immovable by sports, just regular and wide and comfortable.

  Paula smirked when I told her this. She said, “That isn’t any reason to love someone.”

  “It is for me.”

  She bent her head down. Now that Jonah had entered my life, she no longer approved of him. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. You don’t know what you’re getting into.”

  “Then tell me.”

  She looked at me, her face blank, then turned and left. I didn’t follow.

  Later on, when Jonah and I slept together in his bedroom, I imagined looking down on us from the ceiling, I pictured how dark and naked our bodies must be, how small the two of us were. Right then I wanted to tell Paula that there are some things you have to go through on your own. Some relationships withstand life, some are there for a moment, a stepping stone, and then you push away from them.

  But I never did because Paula said, “Don’t talk to me about Jonah. I don’t want to know.”

  “I won’t tell you anything then.”

  “I thought you were going to move in here. I thought you were unhappy at home and you wanted to live with me.” She lay down on her bed, yellow hair spreading in a circle. We had learned about Joan of Arc, and I imagined holding a match to Paula’s hair; it was so dry it would catch in an instant, sprout into a ball of flame. “Don’t lie to me any more,” she said. “Just say whether you will or not.”

  “I have my own family, Paula.”

  Some part of her seemed to give way. “But I need you here.”

  “Why?” I said, exasperated.

  She turned away. “Go home then. I don’t want to see you.”

  I wanted to tell Paula what was happening, how one thing leads to another. How a boy like Jonah feels like a necessary thing. He has a way about him, like a curved handle, so easy to hold, so easy to see. He can smile and something flares up in you, catches on your heart, opens you up to things you wanted but never asked for. He can change the way your mind forms words, shapes sentences, imagines their capacity. He has a heart you think you can drink from. I’ve heard that it’s common, there are lots of boys, and girls too, who are like this. Their faces have promise in them, but how can you be promised something you will never stop wanting?

  Once, after Jonah and I had sex, he said, “You really like it, don’t you? It scares me how much you like it.” He smiled at me knowingly, and I nodded. I never knew what to say.

  I slept at Paula’s house less and less. At school, she would corner me in the bathroom and ask me to come over. I never gave firm answers. I was waiting for Jonah to come by, sweep me into his car, forgive me. It seemed like I was always doing something wrong — I held him too tightly, told him I loved him. It never came out right. When I said it, the words sounded more like a plea.

  “I’ll see,” I told Paula.

  She nodded her head. Her hair was a different shade. Clairol “Stardust,” she told me. She was losing weight, too, and it made her face thin and freakish.

  I did go over, and that night we lay outside on the back porch, the stars muted by the city lights. She said, “I’ve been thinking about running away.” She had her eyes closed as if she were imagining it right then, some new place farther inland, a new city identical to this one, but different in all the right ways.

  Sometime after midnight, she stood up and walked slowly down the back steps. When she returned, she was carrying the cage of hutch rabbits. We lay on the deck watching them, then Paula undid the latch. Reaching in, she lifted the rabbits out one by one until all five sat shivering on the deck. “Go,” she said, waving towards the stairs. “This might be your last chance.” They stayed where they were, frozen by the traffic sounds and the half moon. Paula leaned down and blew on each of them gently. They crept forward. “Go on.” They froze.

  She gathered the nearest one in her arms. Then she stood and walked across the veranda, the rabbit bundled against her chest. At the railing she stopped, stretched her arms out, and held it straight in front of her. There was laundry on the line, shirts pinned up like paper cut-outs. A light came on in her parents’ bedroom. Paula opened her arms. I saw the rabbit falling slowly.

  The traffic on Knight Street kept going by and going by. She ran down the back stairs. I heard her say, “Oh no,” in a flat voice. I didn’t look. I gathered the other four and put them back in the hutch. Paula laid a piece of newspaper on the concrete walkway, overtop of the one she had dropped. She looked up at me and said, “My fingers slipped.”

  I said, “It’s okay. There are lots of others.”

  That night, in the middle of sleep, I heard voices, a man and a woman. They were whispering, and he was impatient with her. I thought I felt Paula get up and leave me but when I woke up in the night I was confused because it was only the two of us in her bedroom. Paula had one arm across my waist; she had her face buried against my arm.

  Jonah came over to my house twice a week and I helped him with his science homework. We memorized the periods of the geologic time scale, traded them back and forth as if they were codes. “Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Tertiary, Quaternary,” he giggled. I laughed with him.

  We sat with our legs dangling out the window, and I said again, “I love you.” He looked at me, his face confused. “How do you know?” he asked.

  “I just do.”

  He said, “You’re crazy.”

  When he lay on top of me I looked up at him and willed myself to feel joyous, exuberant, but it was like something on the other side of the world. He caught my eye for a moment and I saw an expression pass across his face. Afterwards, I tried to name what I saw. Pity, perhaps, more pity than love.

  When Jonah left, I walked to Paula’s house. At Knight Street, I stood on the curb. My mom said this was the most dangerous street in the city, all the semis, four-by-fours, speed demons. I thought of walking into the street. But I wasn’t brave enough to do a thing like that. Standing on the sidewalk, the traffic whipping my hair from my face, I felt the sensation of flight.

  Paula’s house was just around the corner. I walked across her front lawn, then rapped on the window. When she opened the door and saw me, she didn’t look at all surprised.
She poured two glasses of brandy and we watched Mask, a movie with Cher and a boy who had the elephant-man disease. The sun went down through the window behind the television set; it filled the glass and steeped the room in sunlight. In the movie, Cher fights for her son because she loves him so deeply it cuts her open. Paula filled our glasses again and again. The bottle shone like a coin in the room.

  Paula turned to face me. She said, “I’ve got the other bedroom all set up.”

  I could feel the brandy slipping down my throat, holding in my chest, and pumping warmth like a spare heart. “I told you, Paula. I have my own home.”

  She looked taken aback, then she nodded. “We’re best friends. Even best friends don’t tell each other everything.”

  Paula took another drink and looked at me thoughtfully. Then she pointed through the window at the back shed. “See that? I used to fix cars in there with my dad. I’d lie on my back on one of those trolleys, and he’d roll me under. It’s lonely under there, and dark. And then one day I just stopped going. My mom said to me, ‘What’s the matter with you? Don’t be so lazy. Your father needs your help,’ I told her that I didn’t want to go to the shed, I didn’t want to be with him. I was too old to go there.”

  I looked down at the carpet, shaking my head. The alcohol faded through me in a slow wash. “Paula,” I said. “Stop talking.”

  “My mom told me, ‘This is how families fall apart,’ I didn’t want to believe her, but I did. So I kept going back. I can’t stop it. I think maybe I’m the one who’s sick. Sometimes I go into the shed and roll myself underneath the car and I pretend I’ve been hit and I’m lying in the road, almost dead. Just in case, just so I know beforehand what it might feel like.”

  I knew what was coming next and I didn’t want to hear it. I shook my head to block her out.

  “Listen to me. It doesn’t matter who you fuck or how you do it. It’s all the same, it always hurts. Why won’t you just stay here? If you were here, this wouldn’t happen.”

  I hit her across the mouth to stop her. A loose hit, palm flat, the smack high-pitched. Her mouth fell open.

  She shook her head, hysterical. “I’m not lying.”

  “You shouldn’t let him.” I couldn’t look at her when I said it. “Why do you let him do it?” Then I stood and walked stiffly across the living room, down the hallway, to the front door. Paula’s mother came awkwardly to the top of the stairs, her weight pulling her side to side. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Who’s crying?”

  I shook my head and pulled on my shoes. Paula’s voice rose higher and higher. Her mom said, “Paula?” and ran down the stairs, one hand pressed to the opening in her nightgown. When I opened the front door to leave I could hear Paula sobbing, “Leave me alone. Please, just leave me alone.”

  I started walking, past Kingsway and onto Slocan where the traffic lights disappeared and the street was soft in darkness. I slowed down, paid attention to each car sliding by, the lights settling on me for half a second.

  A man in a car drove up beside me. He pushed his head out the window, whistling. “Beautiful,” he said. I turned and stared at him. He smiled, motioning me towards him.

  I went towards his car, all the feeling in me lost. I opened the passenger door and thought, this is what it all comes to. I’d seen pictures of girls like me, here one moment then gone the next. When I climbed into the car, I thought of Paula sitting on the floor in her living room, face in her hands, her mom’s arms wrapped around her. Paula’s expression when I turned away from her. We eased away from the curb and he said, “Where are you going?”

  I told him I was going home.

  “Do you want to go there?”

  I nodded.

  He smiled knowingly. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  He turned the radio on and let one hand drift over to rest on my thigh. I thought, everything has led to this. This is what it comes to.

  But he drove me home. He let his car idle behind my parents’ apartment building. When I put my hand on the door handle, he said, “Let me kiss you.”

  I looked him full in the face and saw he was older, so much older than me. He leaned towards me, and I remembered what Paula said. It doesn’t matter who or how. I turned my face to him, the street empty and the car warm. He kissed me, and I felt his moustache on my skin, a passing touch. Then I got out of the car and walked home.

  The next morning, Paula ran away. She left her house as usual, carrying only her school bag, and didn’t come home. I learned later, from Paula’s mother, that she had left a note in the kitchen, telling her mother that she would take care of herself and not to worry.

  In the spring, once or twice, I walked by Paula’s house. From the outside it looked the same, the windows in her bedroom open and the blue curtains moving gently in the breeze. We had picked the material for the curtains at Fanny’s Fabrics and Paula’s mom had sewn them exactly as Paula had wanted. I stood on the sidewalk out front hoping that wherever Paula was, they would never find her and make her go home again.

  Once, Jonah lay his hand against my neck, and I was startled. He said, “Sometimes I look at you and you are very beautiful.” I wondered if he meant to be terrible or if there were some truth in this, a tiny piece, but too little to buy happiness, security, love. I held on to him and felt my mind, my heart, and my body separating. Wherever Paula was, I wondered if she had come across the formula that would keep these parts intact, if the act of leaving had taught her some truth I still could not grasp. After Jonah left, I sorted through the mail but nothing came.

  In the weeks after Paula ran away, a counselor and a youth officer at our school called us to their office one by one. They pulled me out of Geography class, and my stomach filled up with dread. In their tiny room, I sat as still as possible, staring at the floor. The police officer was at the back. Paula’s mom was there too, foreign-looking in her work clothes, blouse and pleated blue skirt, nylons and black moccasins. She touched me gently, one hand against my back, then she went and sat in the corner.

  The counselor smiled at me. She said, “We want to help Paula just as much as you do, Miriam.”

  “I haven’t heard from her.”

  “Do you know where she might have gone?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any idea why she left?”

  I shook my head.

  The counselor poured coffee into a styrofoam cup, then stood and circled the room, offering the pot to the officer and then Paula’s mom. They both covered their cups with their hands and shook their heads and everyone sat in silence. Paula’s mom whispered, “Surely you know something. Can’t you guess where she is?”

  The school counselor caught my eye. “Her parents are very worried. We’re all very worried about her safety.”

  I said, “I don’t know.”

  Paula’s mom said, “But she told you everything.”

  This startled me. I looked down at my hands, thinking of Paula, the two of us stretched out on her living-room floor, the brandy flooding us with warmth. How when I left her house that night, that warmth evaporated. I thought we had both known the truth, but Paula was the only one brave enough to say it then, and not me. “A few months ago,” I said, “I slept over at Paula’s house. I woke up in the night and her father was standing beside our bed. He was touching her hair. He had his hand over her face. She turned away from him and held me and later on I woke up and she was crying, but I pretended I was asleep.”

  I folded my hands in my lap and looked up. “What do you think it meant?” No one answered me. I said, “I know that in her own house, Paula was always afraid to sleep alone.”

  I looked up at the woman because I was afraid she wouldn’t believe me. I held her gaze and felt a humming in my chest like a burst note.

  When I left the office Paula’s mom followed me out into the hallway. Her face was coming apart and she said, “What are you trying to do?” I stared at her hair, curly brown and wisping to gray. She said, “How ca
n you do this? How dare you lie like that?” and I felt blank, an opening inside where the humming was, dead air.

  I turned and walked down the hallway, leaving her standing there alone. I didn’t know what difference I made — if the truth would be of any use to Paula now, or if it was too late. But I believed her. I had believed her from the start and this was the only thing I knew how to do.

  I remembered Paula buying hair color in the drugstore. She couldn’t decide between one and the other, Clairol “Brash” or Nice & Easy “Natural Light.” I was impatient and said, “Let’s go, Paula. They’re all the same.” She balanced them, one in each hand, as if she could tell by the weight. She glared at me. I thought, if you could change your life with a shade of color, if it had ever been that easy, we would not be standing here in the first place.

  I waited for Paula to write me. I kept in my head a list of things I would tell her. How her house was the same as ever but they left her bedroom window open, as if hoping one morning she would climb back in again. That grade eleven was the same as grade ten. That things got a lot worse before they got any better. We had learned the history of gold. How people had rushed up the coast, panning for it, because they believed that the nuggets might be as abundant as the fish. And long ago, people tried to make something out of nothing, filling beakers with coins and the seven metals made from seven planets, how they hung their hopes on this, like a coat rack.

  Then, I only hoped. Because Paula did not write and I did not know where she was, I tried to dream it. I imagined a place of great abundance. Fish in the seas and terrible beauty.

  Dispatch

  The way you imagine it, the car is speeding on the highway. Over Confederation Bridge, streetlamps flashing by. It’s early spring and the water below, still partially frozen, shines like a clouded mirror. You saw this bridge on a postage stamp once. It is thirteen kilometers, made of concrete, and it is not straight. It curves right and left so that no one will fall asleep at the wheel. In the morning sunshine, the concrete is blindingly white.