Emma's Table

by Philip Galanes

  Emma knew that oven lights weren’t the problem.

  Still it’s all worked out, she thought—or mostly it had. She turned back to the oven again. Emma considered her husband, Bobby—her ex-husband, she reminded herself, for nearly fifteen years at this point. They’d married young, when she was just finishing at Smith College and he was a brand-new lawyer in town. They’d grown up together, really. They were married for twenty years, and no matter how troubled their marriage was—and it was troubled, of course, Emma knew that—she would no more have thought of divorcing him than she would have thought of divorcing her arms and legs, or breaking up her collection of stainless roasting pans—sized small, medium, and large.

  They went together, and at a certain point, Emma just assumed that her marriage was forever.

  But forever comes and goes, she knew now.

  She’d been stunned when he walked out on her—all those years before—his clichéd little valise in hand. It hadn’t even occurred to her that all their bickering could come to such drastic ends. And how furious she was: she could have pulled every hair straight out of her head, like handfuls of weeds from a messy garden, her lustrous brown hanks in two clenched fists.

  Such a long time ago, she thought, trying to settle herself down.

  They’d been divorced by now for nearly as long as they’d been married—which made Bobby’s recent reappearance even more surprising.

  Emma looked back into the oven one more time, bending forward slightly at the waist, her knees straight inside soft flannel trousers. She brought her face down close to the oven door, her nose pressed up against the insulated glass. She felt the oven’s heat against her smooth cheeks. She studied the pork loin that was shimmering in the oven’s wavy heat—just two frosted lights, mounted onto the back wall, illuminating the scene. She scarcely saw the roast at first. It was all decor that caught her eye: the coarse peppercorns scattered around the meat, glinting like sequins on a black evening dress, the satiny shards of garlic that peeked out from all the tiny slits she’d cut into the roast. She looked practically starstruck in the reflection of the glass, like a teenage girl with a movie magazine in her lap.

  “So beautiful,” she marveled—only to second-guess herself a moment later: Or does it look a little dry?

  Emma pulled the oven door open and slid the roasting pan forward on its silvery wire rack. She looked and looked, for such a long, long time that she seemed to lose her place entirely—that meat may as well have been an ancient artifact under museum glass, or a bumpy rock from the surface of the moon.

  Who knows? she admitted, finally. What wouldn’t look dry roasting in four hundred degrees of heat?

  So she basted the pork with a long-handled spoon, and saw, once it was moistened like that, that it was browning right on schedule, its skin just beginning to bubble up and crisp. Thank God, she thought, so gratefully—the timing of her roast some kind of heavenly mystery.

  When they first sent Emma up to Rochester, New York, to the federal prison there, she was stunned when Bobby turned up—that very first week. “Just to visit,” he told her. She hadn’t seen him in years. And she was suspicious, of course—assumed that he’d only come to gloat.

  Emma was powerfully ashamed of herself.

  It was an awkward visit—not half an hour long, filled more with pauses than with talk. But he turned up again the very next week, and the week after that too; and little by little, they found a kind of easiness again—the rancor of their terrible split seemed nearly clownish, fighting for so long over quite so little.

  It didn’t take many more weeks of visiting for Emma to see that Bobby didn’t want her brought low.

  God knows what he did want, she thought—but it wasn’t that.

  There weren’t many other visitors either, she had to admit. But every week brought another visit from Bobby, all through her prison stretch and the home confinement too; and on his very last visit, on the very last day, Bobby asked her to marry him again.

  Such a fool, she thought—shaking her head at the memory of it, but not quite keeping a smile from her lips either. She took the proposal itself as a vindication of sorts: an admission that he’d been wrong to leave her all those years before. Emma felt relieved at her exoneration—on that count at least. She could use the opportunity to rewrite history, and she had to admit, she loved her husband still.

  She suggested that he move back in with her instead—which he did, nearly six months before, right into the new apartment on Park and Seventy-first.

  Emma gazed down into the roasting pan.

  It was then she noticed the vegetables that were scattered around the meat—the carrots and potatoes and leeks—all hapless and thoroughly uncooked. She sighed through slightly parted lips, tamping down the fire of culinary pride. Her vegetables were greasy with olive oil and littered with spices—like sticky skin at a public beach. Not done at all, she saw, excavating deep into the roasting pan with her long-handled spoon, praying for brown edges on the underside: no such luck.

  She checked the temperature knob and then her wristwatch: same cooking time, same heat—but definitely not the same. She didn’t need her mother to tell her that she wasn’t helping matters, keeping the oven door open like that, staring down into the open roaster while the oven’s precious heat tumbled all around the room. But she couldn’t bear to close the oven door either. Not yet, she thought—not until she’d worked out some kind of salvage plan for her meal.

  She stood stock-still for a moment.

  “Damn that Melora,” she spat.

  She felt her body sizzling with heat, as if she were roasting too—hissing like a snake on desert sand. Emma had made her diagnosis. There were too many vegetables. She’d nearly doubled the number she put in the roaster, trying to accommodate Benjamin’s girlfriend and her ridiculous vegan diet.

  That’s got to be it, she thought, gazing down at her failure-in-progress, simmering in the juices of her own annoyance.

  Emma pushed the roaster back into the oven. She felt like slamming the door behind it. I suppose I can take the pork out first, she thought—exhaling long—and let the vegetables cook a little longer.

  She felt her neck relaxing.

  That might work, she thought.

  She shook her head at Melora’s foolishness, at the strange piety of refusing her lovely pork roast. “Damn hippie,” she grumbled, picturing the girl in the long gypsy skirt she’d been wearing when they met on the street—but Emma didn’t care about Melora. She barely knew her. She was only savoring the taste of her anger—like a tasty dripping from her succulent roast, falling safely onto the enameled pan beneath.

  GRACIE BREEZED INTO HER BEDROOM LIKE A DIMPLY child actress, all sweet and fake, excited at the prospect of “dressing up” later. She swung the door closed behind her, jaunty head lifted high—but the little girl’s shirt was inside out, and her gait all stop-and-start, every step another jerky hitch, as if she were losing her nerve midway through. And when the door slammed louder than she’d ever intended, the dam broke wide: her eyes hopping, panicked, from place to place, and her mouth twitching a little, on the verge of tears.

  She’d been having such a nice time too.

  She’d tiptoed into her mother’s room, as careful as an Indian scout, pressing her ear against the bedroom wall. Mommy’s sleeping still, she decided—as good a guess as any. She’d left her mother napping on the living room sofa, not five minutes before.

  Gracie made a beeline for her mother’s chest of drawers.

  Her Valentine project had inspired her. She was looking for finery—a silky scarf or an old piece of lace—something more to cut up and paste to her handmade cards.

  To make them extra nice, she thought.

  She found a couple of embroidered hankies that she thought would do the trick. From there, it was just a skip and a jump to her mother’s closet. She headed for the frilliest dresses, the ones her mother never wore—all frothy skirts and silky fabrics. She pulled them on, ri
ght over her head, in front of the mirror on the closet door, twirling and posing and making slinky faces.

  Nothing fit, not one single thing, but Gracie didn’t care. She just hitched up the skirts with a satiny blue sash and gave them a flick with her chubby wrists.

  So pretty, she thought—like a ballroom dancer—that extra little flourish, just for effect.

  If she had to do it over again, she might not have tried the pink swimsuit. It was at once too big and ferociously small, with its strappy straps hanging down, and leg holes drooping to the middle of her thighs, yet dangerously tight over her big, round belly. She looked like a sausage link in pretty pink casing.

  Gracie studied herself in the mirror—hard.

  The suit looked on the verge of ripping.

  Just needs a belt, she decided, nodding at her reflection in the full-length mirror. She tied the blue sash around her middle, concealing as much of her tummy as she could. She only wanted some high heels then, fishing through an old box on the closet floor, where her mother had packed the really high ones away. Gracie slipped a pair of white shoes on her feet—like a Miss America with a mistied sash.

  She flipped through a photo album she found in the box, studying herself in the mirror as she did, dipping her left shoulder low—just a little kittenish—alternating looks between her reflection and the pictures in the album.

  The photographs were arranged chronologically, as if the subject—a little girl—were growing up before her eyes: just a baby, first, and then a little older. She knew it wasn’t her, studying the toddler on the next set of pages. She’d seen plenty of photos of herself. She was sturdier than this, and rounder too. There were pictures of the girl at Gracie’s age, and then a little older still.

  I think it’s Mommy, she decided finally.

  It didn’t take much longer—or many more pages—for Gracie to think that she might die. She ripped off the swimsuit and kicked the heels back into their box, tossing the photo album in right after it.

  Her mother had been beautiful, she saw, even as a girl. Slim and pretty, with large brown eyes.

  I’m not getting a single Valentine, she thought, tossing the frilly hankies into the back of her mother’s closet.

  She felt betrayal burning up and down her naked body.

  Her mother had always had long, straight hair.

  She put her own clothes back on fast.

  Gracie had thought her mother was like her when she was little. Fat, she meant, without going so far as actually thinking the word. And the girl had simply assumed that, one day, she’d grow into her mother, as her mother was now—all slim and lovely, stretched out long on the living room sofa.

  She walked down the hall with a fluttering in her chest.

  Gracie knew she wasn’t like her mother at all.

  “I get to dress up later,” she said out loud, walking into her bedroom—all sitcom happy. She was determined to put that photo album right out of her head, but the image of herself in a tight pink swimsuit, so fat and ugly, as she gazed at pictures of her mother as a pretty little girl, stretched wide as Lycra before her eyes.

  “I think I’ll wear my yellow dress,” she added, sounding la-di-da, but her fear grew sharper with every additional lap she walked around her little room. “You know,” she said, “the one with the pretty flowers sewn right on.”

  She only had the one dress.

  Gracie looked all around, searching for something to light on. She was determined to pretend the whole thing never happened. She spotted a lumpy stuffed horse on top of her toy chest, all mismatched eyes and dingy white fur, the eldest of her toy companions, and the only one that could supply an ounce of comfort to her still, on those rare occasions when she thought to look to stuffed animals for comfort at all. She seized on it.

  “Oatsy!” she cried, as if she were meeting a long-lost lover on a snowy train platform. She hugged the horsey close, and carried it with her to her perch on the bed.

  But one stuffed horse was not going to do the trick.

  She knew that as soon as she sat down.

  So she frisked back to the toy chest and flung open its hinged top, surveying all her options. Gracie looked down deep, like a fireman to the bottom of a deep, deep well, searching for the little boy trapped at the bottom. She saw them in a jumble then, all the dolls and velvety animals that had meant something to her once, if only for an afternoon. She pulled them out, one by one—three or four of them, and then some more; she arranged them carefully in a semicircle on the floor, a platoon of campfire girls sitting around half of a crackling bright flame: Gracie, herself, its center point, leaning back against the foot of her bed.

  She smiled at the warmth of so much attention.

  She felt the pleasure of her kindness too—liberating all those forgotten dollies, bringing them back into the light of day—like throwing another log on the campfire, so warm and crackling bright.

  “I get to wear my shiny shoes,” she said, addressing the assembly. She was careful not to brag, but those shoes did go with her yellow party dress. Gracie saw them as her just deserts, and not merely for her kindness to half a dozen stuffed animals. She knew enough to know that a reward was in order—for soldiering on, marching straight past that photo album and the pretty little girl inside.

  She imagined the pleasure of slipping into those shiny shoes—all stiff and black. She closed her eyes and lifted her chin, picturing the silky bows at their toes. Gracie ran to the shoe bin and touched the patent leather with just the tip of her finger. She didn’t want to leave a smudge. Then she frisked to the closet and took the yellow party dress down from its place of honor on the far left side, the very first item on her closet rod.

  It was the prettiest shade of yellow she could imagine. Like a stick of butter, she thought.

  Gracie felt calm again as her fingers brushed against the yellow taffeta skirt—just a little stiff. She marveled at the tiny white flowers and bright green stems that were embroidered all around the dress. She pressed her nose into the fabric, and smelled the sachet she’d made at school. Roses! she thought.

  The pretty dress even smelled pretty.

  She carried it back to the bed with her, and laid it down as carefully as she could, its neck up by her pillow and the bottom hem stretching down, as if the dress had agreed to a little nap. Her mother had told her they were going to a party that night—at a church, she’d said. And not their regular church either—some different one, for another religion—and even though she hadn’t asked specifically, Gracie was pretty sure that a nighttime party at a brand-new church would have to be considered a Special Occasion.

  And Special Occasions are what a dress-up dress is for. That’s what her mother always said.

  She couldn’t wait to slip it over her head, waiting patiently while her mother did up all the tiny buttons that ran down the back. Not to mention the pleasure of walking in those shiny black shoes she wished she could wear every day.

  “I know!” she said giddily, but natural too—child actress no more. “Who’d like a cookie?” she asked, addressing all the dollies that were laid out on the floor.

  She paused a moment, as if to hear.

  “Me too!” she said, skipping back to the closet one more time, digging out a brand-new box of gingersnaps that she’d hidden at the bottom of her special box. She’d stolen them from her grandfather’s cupboard while he was in another room, stashing them in her pink backpack.

  Gracie opened the box carefully, determined not to tear the cardboard tab that fit so neatly into the slit on the other side. She unfolded the waxy paper that lined the orange box and plucked a cookie out. She popped it into her mouth, chewing just enough to make a doughy paste, which she fingered all over her teeth and gums, coating them in brownish black, then she ran her tongue over the sweetness, with its sharp hint of spice just beneath.

  Gracie dealt out cookies to every dolly in the circle.

  Then she ate another one herself.

  She loved fe
eling so generous and good, including them all—a tasty cookie for every last one of them—even though she knew how this game ended, every single time.

  Chapter 4

  SUNDAY LUNCH:

  A (Secret) Turkey Sandwich

  IN A BUILDING ALMOST DIRECTLY ACROSS THE park from Emma’s, Bobby Sutton wrestled a key into a tight Yale lock. He pulled the door toward him, then lifted it up; he knew that only when he’d reached the perfect longitude of lifting and latitude of pulling would he be able to turn his key in that miserable lock.

  It always took him several tries.

  He was interrupted by the groaning machinery of the elevator, its metal doors opening at the end of the long corridor. He looked up fast, a little squirrelly; he was afraid it might be Emma.

  Of course it’s not, he thought—once he’d seen for himself that it wasn’t.

  Bobby was relieved, but every bit as guilty, peering down the beige hallway. It was just the girl from across the hall, with the beautiful figure and the homely face.

  Bobby went back to his lock.

  It was only his comings and goings from this secret place that gave him pause. He felt happy and relaxed when he was safely inside. He smiled at the girl as she approached, nodded—the way he did with their neighbors on Park Avenue. Friendly, he thought, but not too much.

  “Howdy,” the girl twanged, in a southern-sounding drawl, breezing right past him down the center of the corridor. She was moving fast—like a plane that had just touched down to land, bumpy and barely under control.

  Her voice was a little loud for the narrow hallway.

  “Well, hello, hello,” Bobby replied, all hearty exuberance then, as if he’d always meant to speak to her—trying to mask his unfamiliarity with the local customs. He was such a pleasant man, the last thing he wanted was to give offense. He made a mental note for next time: a smile and a nod won’t do over here.

  Bobby went back to his lock—to all his useless lifting and pulling.

  He heard the girl’s keys jangling on the other side of the corridor. He heard her key turn quickly in its lock. He’d forgotten all about her since the last time he’d seen her there—just coming in as he was leaving, or vice versa maybe. She looked fearless in that short red coat that hugged her breasts, those shiny black boots with their pointy heels. There was a wide swath of naked skin where the coat left off and the boots had yet to begin—a sexy white line down the center of a road.