While I’m standing in line at the drugstore, I notice that the Waterpik Dental Care System is a featured special, so at the last minute I throw that into the cart as well, thinking it’s been a while since I’ve had my teeth cleaned. Chloe hasn’t been to the pediatrician since before we left Manhattan either, and I’m hoping that these over the counter medicines will nip this cold in the bud because I’m not ready to transfer our medical and dental care to Pittsburgh. That would make it too much like we were living here, rather than just visiting.
When I get home, Chloe is sleeping in the playpen in the living room, and Dad and Fiona are playing Scrabble at the kitchen table. At least I think they are. The board is open in front of them, but Dad’s reading a novel and Fiona is poring over the Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary. They both look up as I enter.
“How long has Chloe been sleeping?”
“Just a few minutes. She’s tired, poor baby,” Fiona says, studying the dictionary.
“She fussed for a bit,” my father says, glancing up at me, “but Fi rocked her until she fell asleep.”
“Don’t forget, you read her a story, Grandpa,” Fiona says, looking up from the dictionary as she places her letters on the board. “Here we go. C-L-A-M, and this blank is P. That will be sixteen points. That makes the score”—she consults the score sheet—“um, two hundred fifty-six to ninety-nine.” She looks over her glasses at me. “Your father is winning. He even lets me use the dictionary, and he still wins.” She sighs.
My father immediately leans over and puts XI under the AM in CLAMP to make ax, xi, and mi. “The X is on a triple letter, counted twice makes forty-eight, so that will be fifty-four points altogether.”
He goes back to his book, a Robert B. Parker mystery.
Fiona lurches toward the dictionary, muttering under her breath.
“Xi is a Greek letter; mi is the third tone in the diatonic scale. And I presume you know what an ax is, Fi,” my father says, giving Fiona a look over his half-moon glasses. Not even a trace of a smile. How could it have escaped my notice for the last thirty-eight years that my father is an insufferable snob?
“Well, I didn’t know that, Mr. Smarty Pants. You use these silly two letter words all the time.” She turns to me. “Who ever heard of E-S being a word?”
“It is the spelling for the letter s,” my father says.
“I mean, really—you want to spell the letter, you just write it!”
They both sigh.
I take advantage of Chloe’s being asleep and cart all of our stuff upstairs. I think about hanging the Waterpik on the wall beside the sink, but looking at the directions, I see that it requires anchors and a drill. I tell myself I just don’t want to wake up Chloe, although she’s sleeping downstairs and I’m on the third floor. I put the Waterpik back in its box, stow the box on the back of the toilet, and lie down on the bed. The mere thought of hanging it has suddenly taxed me to the point of complete exhaustion.
Anchors and a drill imply commitment. I’ve been a renter long enough to realize that you just don’t go making holes in walls of places you won’t be staying. We’ve been here almost six weeks and, outside of registering for Gymboree class, I’ve done almost nothing else to settle in. I haven’t hung a single picture or unpacked a single box, and here I’m quaking at the thought of hanging a Waterpik in the bathroom. What am I waiting for? Some sign that our life here is about to begin?
Later, I make a halfhearted attempt to locate a drill and am surprised to find that someone, probably Fiona, has reorganized my father’s tool area in the basement. My father used to throw his motley collection of tools (a rusty hammer, a few loose screws and washers, a bunch of screwdrivers, and a drill with a fraying cord and a partial collection of drill bits that never seem to be the right size for anything you want to drill) into an orange crate by the washer. The rotting orange crate has been replaced by a red Craftsman tool chest filled with a small but impressive arsenal of brand new tools. Now, not only does my father own a drill that can be used without danger of electrocution, but he also has anchors, picture hooks, and two different kinds of wrenches—in short, every implement necessary to hang my Waterpik set. Well then, I think, closing the lid on the tool chest and giving it a small but determined kick, now that I have all of the necessary tools at my disposal, I can do it whenever I want.
The next day I don’t get out of bed. It’s a chilly February morning, the sky the murky color of dishwater, and it looks as if it might snow. I’d gone to bed early the night before, just after Chloe, and had then awakened in the early hours of the morning to fiddle with the space heater to fight the chill in the room, only having to rouse myself later when the temperature felt too high, not quite understanding it was my own personal thermostat that needed the adjustment. Since then I’ve hardly slept, tossing and turning in a fitful, uneasy doze.
My father climbs the attic stairs when I’m unable to even drag myself from bed to attend to Chloe’s cries. He’s already dressed, which means it must be late. He comes in with Chloe, but after taking one look at me, immediately deposits her back into her bed. He returns a minute later with the thermometer, which he puts in my mouth, telling me that I need to keep it under my tongue, like I’m five years old. I can hear him in the next room dressing Chloe. The thermometer beeps, but I don’t even have the energy to take it out. Instead, I let it slide out of my mouth, where it makes a little moist spot on the pillow. When I open my eyes, my father is picking up the thermometer, Chloe in his arms.
“Hmm,” is all he says. He brings me a cool glass of water and a couple of Tylenol and tells me I need to rest.
I drift in and out of consciousness for most of the day, losing track of the time. When I next see my father hovering over me, the room is dark. When I ask for Chloe, he tells me that she is already asleep.
It is two days later, Tuesday, when I finally and fully awaken. Fiona has moved in downstairs, ostensibly to take care of Chloe, although I can’t help but think she was just waiting for a convenient opportunity to tighten her grip on my father. Now, here she is, balancing a tray on one hand and wearing some sort of frilly apron over a pair of spandex pants.
“Don’t be silly. I have a zillion vacation days I haven’t used,” Fiona says when I manage to thank her for helping take care of Chloe. “It’s fun, kind of like a tag team,” she says, looking at her watch. “Your father should be home in a few minutes to watch the baby, and then I’m off to my exercise class. Don’t worry, dear, Chloe’s just fine,” she tells me. When I ask to see her, Fiona replies that she’s happily playing downstairs in the playpen, and besides, she’s worried that I might still be contagious. Then she pulls from her apron pocket the large, rectangular baby monitor, which she plugs in beside the bed. “Here you go. You can listen to her at least.” After the initial burp of static I can hear Chloe’s small voice. I resent Fiona’s proprietary tone, but the thought of protesting seems infinitely more exhausting, and so I sink back into the pillows, my forehead damp with exertion.
“Look,” she says, depositing a small stack of magazines onto the bed, along with a tray of soup and some ginger ale. “I brought you these, in case you feel like reading.”
Along with Pittsburgh Magazine, Fiona has brought me the most recent issue of Cosmo, which features an article on the current sex toy craze, and a magazine called Channel that has as its lead article an interview with Genghis Khan as told to medium John Edward.
Fiona lays the back of her hand on my forehead. The gesture is at once maternal and self-conscious and speaks of a certain intimacy, the desire for which, at least on Fiona’s part, I can only guess at. For some reason, I’m reminded all at once of my mother, who was not in the least the maternal sort. When I look up at Fiona, I see that her eyes are soft and kind and that she has meant the gesture to be comforting and is now looking to me for some sign that it was welcome. Instead, I shut my eyes and turn my face into the pillow, searching for a cool spot on which to rest my aching head.
Later, Ruth leaves me a voice mail message on my cell phone. “Hi, Mira. Listen, I’ve been meaning to call you, to thank you for, wow, all this wonderful food. Everything’s been great and, jeez, what a help! Anyway, Carlos and I missed you guys at class today. Oh, hey, big news. A guy showed up at Gymboree today. An actual dad—cute and no ring,” Ruth whispers giddily into the phone. “Give me a call, and I’ll fill you in. Better come back next week, or I’m staking claim.”
Actually, I was right here when Ruth called but didn’t answer the phone. I was back in bed, still feeling tired, despite the fact that I’d slept while Chloe napped. Immune to Ruth’s enthusiasm over the sudden presence of a man at Gymboree, I lay there listening to her message and staring at the crack in the ceiling, all the while wondering what Jake was serving for lunch at Grappa.
Suddenly, I sit up in bed. I can’t remember if I fed Chloe lunch. I look over where she’s playing on the rug by the television, studying her for signs of malnutrition. Had I fed her? Or, was it breakfast I was remembering? I looked at the clock by the bedside table. Four fifteen. Had we been in this room all day?
That evening I’m in the kitchen heating up a can of soup for Chloe’s dinner when Fiona breezes in. “Lookie, lookie, who’s got a cookie?” she says, pulling a small, wax paper bag from her purse.
Chloe squeals delightedly as Fiona unwraps a large, iced cookie with a blue smiley face and hands it to her. Without asking me.
“Don’t you think Eat’n Park makes the best cookies? When was the last time you had one, Mira?” Fiona asks, digging in her purse. “I got one for you, too,” she says, handing me another small bag. Mine is red, a hastily iced cookie with a crooked gash of a grin.
“I had dinner there tonight with a girlfriend,” Fiona tells me. “I just love their chicken potpie.” Fiona sits down at the table, and Chloe brightens instantly; she even abandons her assault on the cookie to smile at her.
Fiona says that, as long as she’s here, she might as well stick around to see my father, whose class should be over soon. She knows it’s his night to teach, and I have the distinct feeling that she’s come to spy on me, as if she thinks my recent bout of flu has rendered me permanently incapable of taking decent care of Chloe. When she volunteers to read Chloe a story while I finish cleaning up, I don’t argue with her. “She fell right to sleep in my arms, sweet thing. I put her in the porta-crib in your father’s bedroom,” Fiona reports when she comes downstairs a while later. I want to protest that I wanted to put Chloe to bed myself, but it seems petty to complain to someone who’s just done you a favor. So even though it’s only eight thirty, I go to bed. What else is there to do?
I’m hardly surprised then, to find myself awake at three fifteen in the morning, alone in the attic bedroom. I lie there for quite a while thinking of Chloe, wondering if she misses me as much as I miss her, or if it’s possible I’ve disappeared from her life unnoticed. It’s a morose thought, and deep down one I know is irrational, but over the last few weeks and months I’ve been working up to this notion that I could disappear and no one would spend very much time looking for me or missing me.
I throw on an oversized sweatshirt, pull on a pair of woolen socks, and pad over to the corner where weeks ago I had stacked some boxes under the eaves, remnants of my past life, evidence that I had at one time done something that mattered. The first box is filled with magazine clippings, recipes, multiple copies of the Gourmet article on Grappa, and a dozen or so journals filled with notes and menu ideas written in Italian. These are from my apprenticeship in Italy, where I had met Jake. I pick one up and leaf through it, stopping at a page where I’d written his name over and over, filling the entire page. I toss the journal back into the box and fold the lid closed, thinking that it would be an important step to throw the rest of the boxes away unopened, something I know I could never do. I won’t be satisfied until I’ve opened each box, touched each scrap of paper, pored over every photograph. Even then I will not be done with them.
Lately, I’ve begun to doubt my past, my feelings and memories, to which I no longer feel entitled, and the result is a disconcerting mix of confusion, exhilaration, and ennui. Apart from several cartons containing my cookbook collection, the rest of the boxes are all filled with the same sorts of things, little things really, most of them neither important nor useful. The last box is shoved so deeply under the eaves that I almost don’t see it. The packing tape is cracked and yellowed, which has made the seal loose. When I flip open the flaps, I’m bathed in a thin cloud of dust.
Inside is my mother’s dog-eared copy of Larousse Gastronomique . This book had fascinated me as a child, mostly because it is written in French, a language I didn’t understand. I can remember my mother poring over it, whispering the recipes like incantations in her beautiful, honeyed French. Thrust in between its pages, rendering its spine loose and broken in many places, was a catalogue of her life: wine labels, notes in French from friends, letters from my father, menus she had particularly enjoyed. As a child I often leafed through its pages searching for something of mine, a birth announcement, a picture, handwritten documentation of my first real meal, but the collection stopped the year she moved to Pittsburgh.
The sight of my mother’s handwriting on the slips of paper and in the margins of the book causes me to inhale sharply, and for a moment I smell licorice, as if the mere sight of her heavily styled penmanship has produced an olfactory hallucination. It’s a delicate smell, more like anise or fresh tarragon than the sugary smell of a licorice pastille.
Smell, I remember my mother once telling me, is the most powerful of the senses. Without it, there is no taste. Long ago I lost the memory of her face, the sound of her voice, the touch of her fingers. But I can still remember her smell, in the aroma of a sherry reduction, the perfume, delicate and faint, that lingers on your hands after you’ve run them through a hedge of rosemary, the pungent assault of a Gauloises cigarette. Any of a thousand smells are enough to conjure her memory.
I shut the box and return to bed, wondering why it had been so hard for two people who’d shared a love of cooking to connect. Over the years there had been so many opportunities lost or deliberately avoided, when we had so much in common. Even after all this time, I was surprised to find it still hurt.
The next morning when I open my eyes, Chloe has my cheeks sandwiched in between her chubby palms and is peering earnestly into my face. She grins at me, a full-fledged smile followed by a little giggle. Her breath is warm, sweet, and smells of banana. “She’s already had her breakfast,” my father says, a peevish note seeping into his voice. “Fiona fed her.”
I know I’ve been a wretch, barely being civil to Fiona, and my father has every right to be annoyed.
“Don’t wait dinner for me,” my dad says, leaning over me to kiss Chloe good-bye. “Brian Greene is lecturing tonight. Fiona and I have tickets.” Clearly, my father has assumed that I will be making dinner tonight, an only slightly less outlandish assumption than that Fiona will enjoy a lecture about the origin of the cosmos.
“Okay,” I tell him, pushing myself up on one arm and encircling Chloe with the other, pulling her in close to me and waiting to see if my father will kiss me, too. He does, a perfunctory peck on the top of my head. I know I’m behaving like a petulant child, hold
ing unreasonable and wholly unsupported opinions about the woman my father is dating, a woman who has been nothing but kind to me. And to my daughter. Which, of course, is part of the problem.
Throughout the morning I catch Chloe watching me, sneaking little sidelong glances and venturing closer to me whenever she senses she’s lost my attention. It’s amazing, the uncanny ability of babies to gauge the moods of adults, to monitor our every move, almost without seeming to. I suppose it’s evidence of their capacity for adaptation, for survival, this vested interest in keeping close tabs on our mental states, taking stock of us, making sure we don’t forget them—or, just as bad—forget ourselves. It might be my imagination, but Chloe plays with her toys listlessly, as if, having spent the morning watching my dull expression, she too has decided that there’s nothing worth getting too excited about.
I’ve gotten as far as rereading my mother’s recipes, desultorily thumbing through the pages of handwritten notes, and morosely reflecting on how much time the French have wasted over the centuries by uniformly dicing their vegetables and carefully fanning slices of potato and apple into complicated tarts. I’ve been hoping to summon up a little enthusiasm for a trip to the grocery store, but when I catch sight of myself in the bathroom mirror, I’m so shocked by my appearance that it dashes any hopes of venturing outside, at least until cover of darkness.
I draw a bath for myself and Chloe, gather up her rubber duckies and tub toys, and add several capfuls of bubble bath to the tub. Chloe giggles as I lower us both into the warm water and offer her a palm full of bubbles in the shape of a frosted cupcake. I put her on my lap facing me, and she delights in playing with the bubbles, dotting my hair with little fistfuls of them. I wet her hair and twist what little there is into an upward spiral and put the hand mirror in front of her so she can see. Then I do mine, fashioning myself several long, soapy dreadlocks.
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