Kitchens of the Great Midwest

by J. Ryan Stradal

  “Hey,” Sam said. “Sorry that everyone thinks I’m the cook.”

  “Well, it’s OK with me,” Pat said. “I think I’m fishing in the wrong pond here.”

  “I don’t know, I think you’re gonna kill. You’re the only person that’s made anything that anybody knows. Do you wanna go try those people’s chocolate cake thing?”

  “I don’t know. You can.”

  Pat heard a voice say, “Excuse me,” and turned to see the woman in cargo pants standing next to them. She was much taller up close, and her clothes, while casual, seemed brand-new.

  “I’m Eva,” the woman said. “Are you the people who made the bars on table number 49?”

  “Yeah,” Sam said. He seemed to have gotten used to speaking for them.

  “I just wanted to confirm that. And you are?”

  “Sam Jorgenson. And this is my mom, Pat Prager. She actually made them. I’m just here hangin’ out.”

  “Cool beans,” Eva said, and looked at Pat in a strange but warm way, as if Pat were a letter from home with money inside. “Pat, I haven’t had bars like those since I was a kid in Iowa.”

  “Thank you,” Pat said. “I don’t know how old you are, but I know I haven’t changed the recipe since then.”

  Before Eva could respond, a young bearded man in a vest put his arm around her shoulder, muttered something in her ear, and briskly led her to a table of young people nearby. As she was pulled away, Eva looked back at Pat and shrugged sadly, as if to say, What can you do?

  As they watched Eva become enveloped in a new conversation, Pat whispered to her son, “That was one of the judges.”

  • • •

  To pass the time, they joined a small crowd assembled around platter number 8, the Raw No Bake Chocolate Torte. Pat looked at the instructions:

  Prep time: 30 minutes

  Freezer time: 2 hours

  • • •

  She started to read the ingredients but stopped when she got to “avocado.”

  “What is this?” she said. “How the heck can you make a cake like this?”

  She felt all of the young people crowded around the table start to vanish, and quickly, like a bunch of parents leaving a pool that somebody’s kid had pooped in.

  “And what does raw mean?” Pat asked. “Raw cake, what does that mean?”

  “It means that none of the ingredients were ever cooked,” said a bearded older man, his sandy hair thinning, pink polo shirt buttoned to the top. “Sometimes the kitchens that make raw food don’t even have hot water.”

  “Hey!” a female voice called out, and Pat, Sam, and the bearded man all turned to see Oona and Dylan waving at them from platter number 49. “Come over here!”

  Pat and Sam made their way across the room to platter number 49, where Oona had a big smile on her face.

  “Wow, guys!” she said. “What’s in these? They’re amazing!”

  “They totally taste like the real thing,” Dylan said, and glanced at Oona. “What’s in ’em?”

  Sam looked at his mom.

  “Butter,” Pat said. “Powdered sugar, peanut butter, milk chocolate chips. Graham crackers.”

  Dylan and Oona stared back.

  “Butter?” Oona said. “What kind? Almond butter?”

  “No, regular milk butter. Like from cows.”

  “Hormone-free cows?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just Land O’ Lakes butter. It was what was on sale.”

  “Oh,” Dylan said.

  “Does their milk have bovine growth hormone?” Oona asked Dylan.

  “I don’t know, but I think they’re on the list,” Dylan said. “Are you thinking about the baby?”

  “I don’t know, do you think I should go vomit it up?”

  “I don’t know, is that worse? The bile and stomach acids?”

  Pat couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She felt like a pilot flying through clouds who couldn’t see anything. “On purpose you’re going to vomit up my bars?”

  Oona, face pinched, glared at Pat and Sam. “You trying to trick people or something? By not having an ingredients card? It’s not funny. People have serious allergies and dietary preferences and things.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Pat said. “I didn’t know you were carrying.” It’s true, she didn’t appear to be showing at all.

  “Cow’s milk is really bad, especially for children,” Dylan said.

  “It’s full of a bunch of hormones and toxins,” Oona said.

  Pat looked at Sam. “Well. I ate these same bars almost every month I was pregnant with him, and he turned out OK.”

  “But that was your choice,” Oona said. “It’s not mine. You have to care what other people put in their bodies.”

  “I’m sorry,” Pat said, her voice wavering. She was not raised to confront people or defend herself in a confrontation; she was raised to appease, to mollify, to calm, to tuck little monsters in at night, to apologize for things she screwed up without realizing, to forgive, to sweeten, and her bars, her bars did that for the world, they were her I’m Sorry, they were her Like Me, they were her Love Freely Given.

  “You can’t just blindly feed these to pregnant people,” Oona said.

  “I’ve been making these bars my whole life,” Pat said, almost pleading. “My whole entire life.”

  “Maybe it’s time to stop,” Oona said. “And take a look at what you’re putting in there, maybe.” She looked at Dylan, said, “Come on,” and the two walked away.

  Everyone near them at the Petite Noisette affair, having either overheard Pat’s devastating confrontation with Dylan and Oona or been made aware of it, quickly created a pocket of isolation for Pat and Sam and platter number 49.

  Gone was the hope of five thousand dollars; gone was the job in the Cities and the dance lessons with Rodrigo. Pat had overreached; she had fallen prey to temptation, and her greed and selfishness had led to desires that had brought her to this sinful place. Her family, God was telling her, was all that mattered. Not the judgment of these people and their awful food. She suddenly felt sorry for these people, for perverting the food of their childhood, the food of their mothers and grandmothers, and rejecting its unconditional love in favor of what? What? Pat did not understand.

  • • •

  She stepped forward, moving toward platter number 8, parting the crowd where she walked. “How can you eat these raw cakes and things?” she said, loud enough to be heard clearly over the music. “You weren’t raised on these things, none of you were. You were raised on good desserts, not on this crap!”

  “Mom, can we go?” Sam said.

  Pat looked around at the crowd. Most were too embarrassed to look directly back. “Tell me,” she said. “Who doesn’t like bars?”

  Two burly men in dark clothes walked toward Pat and Sam. They had an expression on their faces that said, Please make this easy for yourself.

  “Mom,” Sam said.

  “Who doesn’t like bars?” Pat said. “Who doesn’t like bars?”

  • • •

  Pat never felt like getting a strong drink. Other than communion wine she maybe had white wine a few times a year, with an anniversary dinner or out with the ladies. But boy, she felt like a strong drink after leaving that ballroom. They’d only asked her to leave the event, after all, not the building itself, and how often did she make it to the Cities? And certainly she never got to have a fancy drink at a fancy hotel bar, which she only remembered ever doing twice, one time on a date with her first husband, Jerry Jorgenson, and another time after a wedding where the hosts didn’t supply alcohol. That was only a month before Jerry died. This would be a reward for surviving this ordeal.

  • • •

  Sam had told her he was a little bugged out after what happened upstairs and had to find somewhere to chill for a bit.
She knew what that meant. She figured her son was an expert at being covert about his habits by now.

  When her margarita arrived, Pat took a long pull from the red straw and cursed Celeste in her heart. She imagined that horrid woman, even in her troubled marriage, sitting in her beautiful home, delighting at the troubles she caused for others. Celeste had set Pat up to fail and she knew it. She was furious and jealous that her bars had lost and Pat’s won and had sent Pat on this awful fool’s errand for revenge.

  But maybe Celeste wasn’t a Jezebel, Pat realized. Maybe she, Pat, was the Jezebel. The thoughts and hopes that led her here, to this place, defied and threatened her marriage, her family, her home. Yes, they were often ungrateful, difficult, and even unloving, but this escape, this escape she sought here in this building, had taught her a lesson. She had reached beyond her loved ones, beyond her duty as a wife and mother, and she was being punished for the unfaithful harlot she was in her heart. She was Jezebel, and she had just been thrown from the tower to the courtyard below.

  She prayed, right at the table—let them look, she had nothing to be ashamed of—and begged for forgiveness.

  She unclasped her hands and had drunk the rest of her margarita before she knew it and ended up ordering another, which was gone by the time Sam came back.

  • • •

  Pat had forgotten to eat dinner amid all of this; she had assumed she would eat at the event. The two margaritas hit her a little harder than she expected, but assuming her son was stoned on marijuana, she was still probably the safer driver, being that it was her car and she knew the ins and outs of it pretty darn well, at least better than he did.

  With the help of the map on his phone, they found the freeway and drove north in the direction of some place that made more sense, where people loved their children and fed them real food. They put on Pink Floyd again, and to Pat, it sounded far better at night, the artificial glow of Minneapolis fading behind them, like the bright fire of Gomorrah at Lot’s back, and the indigo summer sky extended the promise of darkness ahead.

  “I forgot to get my tray back,” Pat said, after a time.

  “Forget it, Mom,” Sam said.

  • • •

  A pair of flashing red and blue lights appeared in the rearview mirror, and the sound of a police siren followed.

  Pat looked at it in the mirror, and then returned her attention to the highway lines, which looked like blurry stripes of frosting, leading them home.

  “Is that for us?” Sam asked. “Oh shit.”

  Pat turned down the music. “What?” She looked around. No other cars were near them; the siren was for them, and only them. Pat felt her heart seize up. She felt the alcohol in her body, and behind her eyes, that slowness, that unaccustomed haze.

  She had no practice at getting out of a situation like this.

  “Were you speeding?” Sam asked her.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

  Pat steered her old car to the side of the road, and the police car came to a stop behind them.

  “Huh,” Sam said, looking behind him. “It’s a K-9 unit.”

  Pat closed her eyes and thought about praying—what to pray for in this situation? She knew the answer. A thought hit her. “How much marijuana do you have on you?” she asked her son.

  Sam sat up. “None,” he said.

  “Don’t lie to me, you smoked some tonight. How much do you have?”

  “Not much.”

  “More than one and a half ounces, total?”

  Sam stared back at her, evidently scared by the unfamiliar tone of his mom’s voice.

  Pat spoke louder. “More than one and a half ounces total?”

  “I don’t know, maybe.”

  “Give it to me,” Pat said. “All of it. Now, right now, before he gets here.”

  “Why?”

  “Now, right now.”

  Pat’s voice felt as serious as it had ever been, more than at either of her weddings, more than at Jerry’s funeral or her parents’ funerals, even. Sam rifled through his pockets and backpack, producing a little pipe, a small bag of weed, and a pot brownie. Pat took them and crammed them in her purse just as she heard the slam of the cop’s car door behind her. She resettled and took a deep breath, and felt the shadow of a man’s body and the harsh beam of a flashlight fall across her as he tapped a knuckle on her glass.

  Pat grabbed the handle with her left hand and took care to roll the window down calmly.

  “License and registration,” the cop said, his white teeth shining.

  “They’re right here in my purse,” she said, in acceptance of what was meant to be. She held the zipper in her fingers, opened her eyes against the white light, and felt herself, a wretch misshapen by desire, submit to the mercy of her Lord.

  THE DINNER

  About once a month in the tasting room, a customer would ask Cindy how to make wine out of supermarket grapes. Sometimes these people were misguided hands-on types, but more often they were cheapos who came in with coupons for two free tastings and left without buying anything. Either way, she had to correct them; wine is created when the sugar in a grape breaks down into alcohol, she’d say, and a supermarket grape has a fraction of the sugar required.

  If it was close to harvest and she liked the customers, she’d take them outside to the vineyard and let them eat a Merlot grape off the vine, watching their faces as they swirled the seed-plump sugar bomb in their mouths. Can’t buy that in a store, she’d say.

  • • •

  By Labor Day, the Merlot in the vineyard had a Brix of 23, and in her opinion was ready to be harvested. It was always the first harvest of the year—the Cabs, Zinfandels, and Petite Syrahs came much later—and Cindy loved it. Other vineyards waited on their Merlot, harvesting it at 26 or 27 to make big, jammy, alcoholic varietals, and although these were popular, to her they lacked the nuance and the restraint of a grape that leaves its vine a little early. She also felt that it was a little easier on the vine, not stressing itself out and yielding its vanishing October nutrients into desiccating grapes, even though stressed vines often lead to wonderful wines.

  • • •

  On September 5, the first day of the Merlot harvest at Tettegouche Vineyards that year, Cindy was stuck in the tasting room. Denisse Ramirez, the sales and wine club manager, who would normally handle the tasting room by herself during the harvest, was out sick, and the job fell to Cindy, the most recent hire. She had said when she came aboard as combination sales manager and associate winemaker that she would do her part to help make another unknown operation famous, just as she had with Daniel Anthony Vineyards and Solomon Creek Winery. Whatever that entailed.

  She wiped down the long black marble counter and set a single bronze spit bucket in the center, because she didn’t want to have to clean more than one. She removed the glasses from the dishwasher and fit wine aerators on the freshly opened bottles for today’s flight and set them in a row.

  The first customers of the day were a couple who arrived right when Tettegouche opened at eleven. The woman was a young hipster princess, with bangs, a patterned sundress, and cat-eye glasses. The man was an odd match for her; he looked like someone’s idea of a sportswriter, with an unshaven face, a blue baseball cap, blue jeans, and a long-sleeved checkered shirt rolled up to his elbows. He looked at least ten years older than his companion.

  “Two tastings,” the man said, removing a Two Free Tastings coupon from his back pocket. Even if new wineries needed these tacky things, Christ, she despised them.

  “IDs, please,” Cindy said, looking at the man. “Just hers, I don’t need yours.”

  • • •

  “We’ll start you off with the Sauvignon Blanc,” she said, getting straight to it, pouring one ounce each into two stemless Riedel glasses.

  “That’s OK,” the man said, waving Cindy off. “The Borde
aux whites around here have too much malo.” He was using winespeak for malolactic fermentation, a process by which tart malic acids in red wine (and some whites) become soft, sometimes buttery lactic acids.

  “Perfectly fine,” Cindy said, pouring his glass into the bucket on the counter. “Next up would be the Chardonnay.”

  Over the last two decades, Cindy had met thousands of male wine snobs trying to impress their girlfriends while on a sex trip to wine country. The polite thing in these cases was to be quiet and go ahead and let the guy play the expert to the woman; men really got off on that. But watching this couple now dump out most of her Chardonnay, Cindy didn’t feel polite.

  “Not a fan of our ninety-two-point Chardonnay, kids?” Cindy asked, to be mean. Not only had the Chardonnay not received ninety-two points from anyone, but none of their wines had received any score from any wine critic, anywhere.

  “No, I loved it,” the woman said. “It was delicious. It’s just we have six places to go to today and we gotta pace ourselves.”

  “Oh, live a little,” Cindy said.

  “Wish we could,” the woman said.

  It occurred to Cindy that when she was around this chick’s age, she was doing exactly the same thing, flitting into half a dozen wineries a day with a man ten years older, acting smarter than the wine pourers, but actually swallowing the wine, never spitting it out. What idiots they had been. It was a miracle they had survived, all the times they drove around absolutely shitfaced, windows down, screaming out the sunroof.

  • • •

  She’d left Jeremy St. George six weeks after they got to Australia in 1989. He was threatened by her burgeoning expertise; when she correctly guessed the year and vintner of a particular Australian Pinot one evening, and he didn’t, and his reaction was to call her a “stupid lucky bitch” in front of everyone—well, that was all she needed to hear.

  Months later, she turned down a chance to see him off when he moved to Tokyo. She figured that he would be sufficiently put off by the snub never to get in touch with her again, which was how things played out. Since then, he seldom came to mind; she’d thought of him only when she’d made certain mistakes with men in her unmarried years, and the Napa Cabs and Central Coast Pinots he introduced her to had their sentimental associations smudged away after years of repeated exposure.