Simple Recipes

by Madeleine Thien

  You’d never met Charlotte. You worry that it’s sick, this fascination with her life. But in the middle of the day, your hands poised over the keyboard, you have a vivid image of her in the passenger seat, asleep and dreaming. Something in you wants to reach your hand out, the way children lay their fingers on the television screen. When the car leaves the road, you want to nudge it back. Point it back on course. Let it not end like this.

  Really, you are just a bystander. It’s your husband who should be there, standing in the road. You in the background, curious. It’s your husband whose emotions run deep, who weeps the way he never did in real life. If this were a picture, you would be a blur in the background.

  Saskatchewan is a photo to you, a duotone of blue and gold. Wheat fields bent against the wind or motionless in the heat, a freeze frame. There’s a picture of Charlotte when she was sixteen, a lovely girl standing outside of a barn laughing, dark hair shaking against the blue sky. You have never been to Saskatchewan. Imagine a sky so huge it overwhelms you. Wheat vast as the desert. You picture Charlotte on a dirt road somewhere, a road that cuts through a field. This is the way that you remember her, because between you and your husband, she will always have a kind of immortality.

  For a long time you think of her as the kind of person you would like to be. She is a farmer’s daughter, a one-time schoolteacher, a bus driver. You think of her as a dreamer. People are drawn to her. They say, She really knows how to live. Even you, in your make-believe world, are drawn to her. You watch the way her hands move, not gingerly, not tentatively. You hear her voice. It booms through space.

  You play a game with her. The kind of game friends play to pass the time. If I was an animal, what kind of animal would I be? You tell her she is an elephant, a tiger, a gazelle. Your husband, she says, is a camel. He is a long-haul kind of man. But what are you? A tern, she says. You do not know what this is. A bird, she says. It flies over the sea. It is swift in flight. You imagine it is the kind of bird that could fly forever. Given the choice, it would never land. You say this is a fault and she laughs. She says you see the negative in everything. She has a smile that fills the room. What kind of person are you? There’s some part of you that’s glad she’s gone. Glad that all those qualities, that smile, that confidence, couldn’t save her.

  You make a list of all the things you’re afraid of: Nuclear catastrophe. Childbirth. War. A failed marriage. As if there is any equality between these things. You know that writing them out will not make them go away. But the list worries you. You don’t want to be selfish. Walking along your Vancouver street, you press a blueberry muffin into the hand of a young man sitting on the sidewalk beside his dog. There’s an apple in your coat pocket you’re saving for someone else.

  At home, you and your husband lie beside each other in bed, sunlight streaking through the blinds. You lie motionless like people in shock. A part of you knows that you’re doing everything wrong. You know it, but still, you’re sitting at the kitchen table each day, working hard. While researching Japanese glass floats, you come across the ama — divers in Japan’s coral reefs who, with neither wetsuits nor oxygen masks, search the water for abalone. For up to two minutes at a time, these women hold their breath underwater. Their lung capacity astonishes you. Some of the ama are as old as sixty. Imagine them dotting the water, chests bursting for air, going on about their daily work.

  One night, when neither of you can sleep, you take a late-night walk together. Through sidewalks coated with autumn leaves, you walk hand-in-hand. It is three in the morning and the streets are empty. A car turning the corner sweeps its lights across you, then disappears. You can hear it travelling away from you, you listen until the sound evaporates. At one point, in a gesture that reminds you of children, your husband swings your hand back and forth, and your joined arms move lightly between you.

  The road you are following goes uphill, ending in a circle of mansions. There is a small green park in the center and this is where you and your husband stop, turning slowly, examining the houses, trying to guess if the mansions are really abandoned as they appear. Nothing stirs. Out here, in this dark patch of land, it s easy to believe that only you and he exist. In the quiet, your husband hums softly, a tune you can’t identify. He catches your eye and stops abruptly. You look at him with so much grief and anger, it surprises you both, what you can no longer withhold.

  He tells you that it is unforgivable, what he has done. But he cannot go back and he does not know how to change it.

  Something in your body collapses. It just gives way. Maybe it is the expression on your husband’s face, telling you that there is no longer any way out. You tell your husband youVe been seeing strange things, imagining cities youVe never visited, people youVe never met. You say, “I cannot go on like this any more,” and your own words surprise you, the sad certainty of them.

  He paces behind you, nodding his head, then begins walking the perimeter of the park. As he walks away from you, your husband raises his voice, as if he believes that no one can hear him. Perhaps he no longer cares if anyone does. He tells you more than you can bear to hear. He says that when he read Charlotte s letter, he was devastated. He wished her so far away that he would never see her again. He talks and he cannot stop. He says he is afraid of being alone, afraid of making terrible mistakes. He is ashamed of being afraid.

  This is what you wanted, finally. Here is his private grief, laid out in view of the world. But your chest is bursting with sadness. You are not the only ones affected. There is still that woman who haunts you. What will she think of all your efforts, your tossing, your fear and guilt? How long will she remain with you?

  Out front, the houses are still. You stand on your side of the park, watching for signs of movement, expecting the lights to come on, expecting people to come hurrying into the road.

  In the end, you know that the two of you will pick yourselves up, you will walk home together not because it is expected or even because it is right. But because you are both asking to do this, in your own ways, because you have come this far together.

  For a long time you stand this way, the two of you hunched in the grass. In your mind’s eye there are people all around the world turning, diving, coming up for air. Your husband and you in this quiet circle. He crouches down to the ground, face in his hands. There is Charlotte, asleep and dreaming in a car moving through the Prairies. Your husband comes to his feet and looks for you, through the dark and the trees. One perilous crossing after another.

  House

  It is Kathleen’s idea to go back to the house. She knows the bus route, a number 16 up to 49th Avenue, then east to the dividing line where Vancouver rolls into suburb. Lorraine, who is ten years old, is only following along, keeping her older sister company.

  At the bus stop, Kathleen fishes coins from her purse. When the bus pulls up and swings its doors open, they hurry up the stairs. Outside, the city blurs by until the neighborhood changes, the streets and shops suddenly familiar. Passing the flower shop on Knight Street, Lorraine has a sudden vision of her mother standing, on the sidewalk there, her hands roaming the plants, her face lit up by the bloom of color. Kathleen rings the bell for the stop and they climb down. Half a block away from the main road, their old house comes into view.

  Lorraine barely recognizes it. She stops on the grass out front and tries to imagine herself sitting in the front window. She can almost see her mother there, sitting on the steps, straight hair blowing loose across her face. She imagines her father’s white pickup turning in the driveway, her father running up the stairs and disappearing into the house. Lorraine watches the windows for signs of movement, but there is none. It is the third Friday in September, and they have come all the way across the city to visit their old house and mark their mother’s birthday.

  The two girls pace the sidewalk out front. More than a year has passed since they lived here. Kathleen pauses, admiring the flowers. The lawn is cropped nice and short and they’re careful not to walk on
it.

  “Let’s wait over there,” Kathleen says, “and see if she comes.” They walk across the street. While Lorraine sits heavily down on the curb, Kathleen kicks her sandals off. She hops up and down on the dry grass, glowing with anticipation.

  Lorraine tries not to think about school, or about what Liza, their Foster Mom, will say. Instead, she examines every house in turn to pass the time. Red-shingled roof over here and, next door, deep-green curtains pulled tight. Lorraine knows now what her mother meant when she told their father, “Without you, I fall apart.” She knows what the words would mean, I miss you. The word miss encapsulates everything.

  Her mother has three pale circles on her left arm, scars from an inoculation she’d had as a child. Lorraine once lifted the sleeve of her father’s shirt and found the same three exact markings. She pictured her mother and father as long-lost twins, sailing down the birth canal joined at the upper arm, pulled apart, the marks ballooning inward like buttonholes. Lately all Lorraine thinks about is her mother: her shoes on the sidewalk clipping along, her muddy-blond hair cut short and left to grow out slowly over months and months until it feathered up against her shoulder blades. When she was little, Lorraine thought her mother’s hair was directly related to the passing of time, short in the summer, long in winter, in-between in all the other seasons.

  Mom and Dad, sometimes together, sometimes apart, are lodged in Lorraine’s head. Try as she might, Lorraine can’t make them leave. She thinks she shouldn’t try. If they disappear, she doesn’t trust herself to bring them back again.

  Before she left, her mother used to sing in the church choir. Sometimes she brought them upstairs with her and they’d sit behind the pipe organ. The adult voices folded and hung in the alcove. Her mother’s voice rang out, blissful. After church, they’d walk to the car and, if her dad was in the city, they’d pile into his white pickup and go for brunch at Mother Tucker’s. In summer, the strawberries on the fruit buffet were bigger than Lorraine’s fist. Once, her mother took a strawberry and sunk it in her beer glass, laughing. When she lifted it out, it spun gold and sharp. Her mother laughed so hard she knocked the glass over and ruined everything, her father’s omelette, Kathleen’s French toast. Lorraine couldn’t stop laughing. The way her mother’s face scrunched up and her eyes watered and her hair came down tangled from its elastic band, Lorraine laughed along with her. Even when she saw her father’s face, she couldn’t stop. In the car on the way home, her father drove so fast everything blurred, her mother singing out the car window, into the hot breeze.

  The morning her mother left, Lorraine climbed into her parents’ bed and sniffed their scents on the pillows. Eyes shut, she walked into their closet, dresses and shirts waving together as she moved from side to side. She thought about sleeping there, folded among the clothes, waking in a hundred years when her parents beat the door down and kissed her awake and told her what she knew all along, that this was the bad dream.

  Instead, her older sister Kathleen came and flung the closet doors open and pulled her out. Pulled her right into her arms and kept her there. Kathleen, who used to take care of their mother, turned all her love on Lorraine. She kissed her hair and Lorraine felt it all come together, what was real and what was not. As if she had been plunged up into the cold air, clear as day.

  Lorraine remembers lying face-down in the middle of an intersection last year. She was nine years old and screaming hysterically. Her mother gripped Lorraine’s hands, begging and crying, and tried to drag her up, but Lorraine pawed at the ground. Cars swerved around them, horns blaring. Lorraine had the sensation that she was dying. She was blind and everything was wet. The world was ending here in the road, red leaves muddied on the concrete, people striding past, exhaust thick in her mouth. Her mother, webs of blood vessels bursting in her cheeks, kneeling on the concrete. Then, somehow, the two of them were standing on the curb, Lorraine tipped over against her mother, the two of them sobbing uncontrollably.

  At home, her mom drank until her eyes were bulging. She lay down in bed and Lorraine watched the sheet float up, float down with her breath. Lorraine climbed into bed beside her and held on, one arm circling her mother’s rib cage.

  “We’re a pair,” her mother said, words running together. “How do you like that? The pair of us.”

  Lorraine stared at her mother’s slender hands, the nails soft and ragged. “I like it that we are a pair,” she whispered.

  Her mom shook her head. “No,” she said. “Wrong answer.”

  Late that night, her father called from Port Hardy where he was logging the Island. He always called her mother darling’s cajoling her until she blushed and giggled. “Jesus, I miss you,” she said, half crying into the receiver. “I can’t hold it together without you.” Then she went up to bed, her face wrecked.

  “I hear you threw a tantrum,” he said, when it was Lorraine’s turn to talk to him.

  She nodded her head against the phone. “I did.” Lorraine didn’t know how to explain her actions. She only knew that once she had laid herself down on the concrete, she no longer wanted to stand up again.

  Her father waited. Lorraine imagined the phone cord tangling away into nighttime, her father’s big shoulders curved forward. “Don’t we have enough money?” she asked.

  “Of course we do.” Her father laughed cheerfully. “What do you want to buy?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Is that why you kicked up a fuss?” he teased.

  “If we have enough money, why do you have to live there?”

  He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I’ll be back soon enough. By Christmas, with so many presents you won’t know what to do with them.”

  She heard her dad smoking, the exhalation long into his throat. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t believe everything your mother says.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh well,” he sighed, “sometimes she flies off the handle.”

  Lorraine wanted to shake the phone. “She’s drunk all the time.”

  “All the time!” he hooted. “You should have seen her when she was young.”

  Summer was the longest season. It was the time when all the trees came down, felled by her father before the winter frost set in. They wouldn’t see him for months. He might call, homesick from the camps. He promised to bring them up there one day. They could watch the log lines, trees hoisted down the mountain, air full of sawdust. He promised he would get a job in the city next year. Those times when her mother believed him, she gathered them up and put Blue in the CD player. Her mother loved to dance. She danced with the girls, ice cubes clinking in her glass. Their mother, the fun-time girl, with her short summer hair. Her pale white arms gone soft.

  When she didn’t believe him, she’d lie in bed and sleep. She’d take her purse and say, ’Til be home in an hour,” and she wouldn’t be home again until the night of the second day.

  A weekday on a residential street is full of ritual. Sprinklers hum back and forth, pattering the sidewalk. Small children bask in wading pools, laughing their bubbling laughter; the occasional phone is ringing and ringing. Lorraine and Kathleen pace the sidewalk. Halfway down, there’s a sprinkler blocking their path, the water arcing over the concrete to hit road and a fringe of grass, Kathleen scowls, “See that? That shouldn’t be allowed. It’s waste!’ She walks around the arc of water, prim and proper, stepping out onto the silent baking street, Lorraine goes straight through, the water speckling her clothes and skin. She blinks in the coolness of it and keeps on along the sidewalk.

  The midday sun burns down relentlessly. They sit in the shade of a mailbox, heels bouncing up and down on the curb, Lorraine sits with Kathleen’s head cradled in her lap. She absently rolls a strand of her sister’s hair round and round her pinkie until Kathleen tells her it hurts. Lorraine lies back and watches the sky shift slowly above them, but her sister can’t sit still. She scans the street, excited, happier than Lorraine has seen her in a long time. She gets up and sprints to the corner
store, and when she comes back, her hands are full of goodies — a plastic bag of sour keys and two cans of pop. They eat the candy meticulously, one bite at a time, They work up a sweat chewing. When they’re done, they throw the cans and wrappers down, watch them roll off the curb.

  Kathleen lies back on the grass, legs tucked against her chest. “No one owns this grass,” she says suddenly. “All this stuff between the sidewalk and the curb? It’s no one’s. So it’s mine.” She gets comfortable on it, sprawls out luxuriously, her shorts riding high on her thighs.

  A young woman in pumps steps past them on the sidewalk. She dangles a letter from her fingers and Kathleen dutifully rolls over to let her pass. The woman drops her letter into the mail slot, then glances at them impatiently. “What are you girls doing sitting around on a school day?”

  “It’s none of your business,” Kathleen says, “but we’re waiting for our mom.”

  The woman frowns. “You shouldn’t be sitting in the sun,” she says, sternly. “Didn’t your mother teach you that?”

  Kathleen watches the woman walk away. “I said it was none of your business, anyway,” she mutters.

  But Lorraine is watching the house. A woman is in the window now, peering out at them as she talks on the phone. Her hand twirls the cord, reaches up to hold the bottom of the receiver, her head falling forward, nodding. Then she turns away from them, back to the room, and then she is gone.

  Kathleen stares at the empty window, then shifts closer to Lorraine. “I’d bet money on it,” she says, her face flushed. “Any minute now, Mom will come walking up the street.”

  Lorraine has no answer to this. She remembers something her dad said once. “It’s a kind of love,” he told them. “The way she drank. It was like being in love.”