by Jane Heller
“Nothing like country air, huh?” said Simon after a deep inhale. “Makes you think about moving out of the city, buying a house, and settling down.”
“Not me,” I said, smacking a mosquito that had landed on my neck. “Makes me think about catching the West Nile Virus.” If that was his idea of a marriage proposal, he could shove it.
“I think Chef Hill is a cokehead, by the way,” he said. “Did you notice how he kept ducking out of the kitchen and coming back with more energy?”
“Yes, I did notice. Is that what you dragged me back here to talk about?”
“Look, Slim. I know you’re still mad about your birthday dinner and I get it,” he said. “Did I ever tell you I was a late baby? My mother had to carry me in her womb for almost nine-and-a-half months, and even then I took twenty hours to greet the world. I was born with the late gene, I guess. I should go to the Mayo Clinic. They must have developed a vaccine for chronically late people by now, right?”
I stared at him in the soft, dimming light of the setting sun. He was so handsome and so clueless. “This is all one big joke to you.”
He shook his head, feigning remorse. “I shouldn’t have said that about the Mayo Clinic. It’s the Cleveland Clinic that probably has the vaccine.”
I grabbed the lumbar support pillow from behind my back and threw it at his head. I missed, naturally, and it landed in a thicket of hydrangeas.
“I’m not in the mood for jokes or games or whatever it is you need to do to protect yourself from genuine feelings, Simon,” I said. “I’m done with that. I’ve moved on, just like I’m sure you moved on with the Web Wench.”
“Mallory’s moved on with Go Here Now, the start-up travel site launched by the guys who founded Twitter. She’s leaving us next week and moving to Silicon Valley.”
As is probably obvious, I was delighted by this news. “But she’s only worked for you for—what—three months?”
“Six. She did a good job, but she jumps around a lot. I’m looking for a web person who’ll hang around.”
“Well, you’re free to hire anyone you want. Not my business anymore. You’re also free to show up late for important occasions, buy microwaves, do anything that—”
“The microwave.” He sighed. “I could kick myself.”
“Be my guest.”
“But it wasn’t the worst idea. Your old microwave died, and you can’t function without one,” he said. “I thought you’d appreciate it, I really did,”
“Your 1100-watt, stainless steel Cuisinart with its eight pre-programmed, time-based settings wasn’t the reason why I broke up with you.”
“My being late was the bigger sin?”
“Do I really need to spell it out for you, Simon? It was because of your months of buildup to what I thought was a proposal that never came. Period. End of story.”
“I knew that. I’m nervous because I want us back together, so I’m coming off like a dense jerk right now. Sorry.”
“I remain unmoved.”
“Doesn’t it say something that I drove up here to make things better? Jackie and Pat thought so.”
“My friends are pushovers, which, as you know, I am not.” I checked my watch. “In the five minutes you have left, tell me why you want us back together and how you think things would be different this time.”
Simon took a huge deep breath and several seconds before proclaiming: “I’m ready to make a commitment.”
I’m. Ready. To. Make. A. Commitment. That’s how he said it—very slowly and with an exaggerated gravitas, as if he were the President of the United States declaring the end of a long, drawn-out conflict with a hostile nation.
“What does that mean?” I asked. “You’ve said it before.”
“It means I don’t want us to be apart,” he said. “You’re my habibi.”
“Your what?”
“Habibi. It’s Arabic for ‘my beloved.’ One of our writers just turned in a piece about King Abdullah of Jordan. The king calls his wife that.”
“How nice for her.” I couldn’t keep my hands still. They were on my knees. They were in my hair. They were massaging the back of my neck. Why couldn’t he just say it, for Christ’s sake? What was so hard about spitting out, “Elaine, will you marry me?”
“We could have a schedule,” he said. “Instead of just, you know, you coming over to my place one weekend and me coming over to yours another weekend, with nights here and there during the week, we could formalize it more.”
“Oh, please. You sound like a divorced father arranging custody of the kids with his ex-wife.” Part of me felt sorry for him the way he was struggling. The other part felt like ripping out his larynx.
“Let me try again.” He cleared his throat. “I love you. I love your mind. I love your sense of humor. I love your face and your body and your smell. I—”
“You love my smell? Which one?”
“All of them, but especially the one after you’ve just been to the blow dry place.”
“Must be my stylist’s vanilla-scented dry shampoo. She uses it at the root to give me more volume.”
“I love how you tell me things like that. Most men would hate hearing about the minutiae of a woman’s hair appointment, but I don’t hate it because it’s you.”
I have to admit I was rather touched by that and therefore had no snappy comeback.
“Let me cut to the chase,” he said. “I just told you I’m almost ready to make a commitment and I meant—”
“Almost? You’re almost ready?” Unbelievable. He was backtracking already.
“Yeah, and the reason I’m stuck at ‘almost’ is because of the last time I was ready to walk down the aisle.”
“So this is about Jillian?”
“She and I would be married right now if I’d been able to save her.” His tone was no longer teasing, and his eyes reflected the pain he still felt about the sailing accident that took the life of his fiancée.
“Her death was terribly, terribly tragic,” I said softly, “and what happened to you would leave anyone emotionally damaged.” He and Jillian had set a date for their wedding. He’d been assigned a story for the magazine on the British Virgin Islands and she’d gone along on the trip—a honeymoon before the wedding. They’d chartered a sailboat, a storm had blown up, and she’d fallen overboard, lost at sea. She was dead and he blamed himself.
“Right, exactly. So give me more time to come around.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Self-preservation. I don’t know if you’ll ever get over her, and you don’t know if you’ll ever get over her, and truthfully, I don’t know if your grief and guilt are the real problem. Either way, it’s not fair to keep me in limbo forever.”
I got up from the Adirondack chair, which wasn’t easy because I had slid back into the curved seat and was sort of trapped there. “It’s been ten minutes,” I said, weary of his chronic vacillating. “I think you should go back to New York.”
“Nope,” he said. “I can’t take a chance of suddenly realizing I’m ready to move forward and having the realization hit me while I’m in the city instead of here with you. I should stay for the rest of the week just in case I have my aha moment sooner rather than later.”
“Your aha moment? What are you, Oprah?” So he was back to being the smart-ass. “I’m sick of the jokes, sick of this whole roller coaster, sick of you. Just go, Simon. Now.”
“You’re right. Big day tomorrow.” He rose from his chair, stretched, and yawned. “Just to be clear, I love you, Slim.”
“Good luck with that,” I said, went inside and slammed the door behind me.
Day Three:
Wednesday, July 17
8
“Who wants to go first?” asked the heavily bearded Wes, Whitley’s head farmer, whose black rubber boots presumably kept him from slipping and sliding in manure.
“I will,” said Lake. “I need to feel a kinship with the cow, to be in harmony with he
r, to let her know how grateful I am for the bounty she provides.”
This woman was making me ill. Or was it the fact that I hadn’t eaten breakfast? Not that there would have been time. We’d had to get up at an ungodly hour to make it to Whitley’s 5:30 a.m. milking. It didn’t help my queasiness that the dairy barn, while fastidiously maintained and ventilated, smelled like a giant shit box.
“Come ahead then,” said Wes, waving Lake closer. We were all gathered around one of the stalls, observing a very large cow named Missy, who was positioned so that we could view her in all her glory. She was black and white—a Holstein, we were told—and she had affecting brown eyes along with this…this…thing hanging down from underneath her torso. It wasn’t exactly a belly, but it was so bloated and saggy it reminded me of mine after eating too much cauliflower. Wes began to massage it with a tenderness I found very appealing. “I’m relaxing Missy’s udder so the milk will drop right down to the bottom,” he explained. “See her face? She’s ready. She’s chewing her cud, which tells you it’s time.”
“Before you start,” said Gabriel, his hawkish face contorted with dread, “I’m confirming that the cows here are not—I repeat not—fed some corn-grain mixture, because I wouldn’t be okay with that, and neither would my wife. We eat only grass-fed meats, which are lower in calories and contain healthier, omega-3 fats, more vitamins A and E, and higher levels of antioxidants. No antibiotics or hormones in their bodies either, right?”
Wes nodded patiently, as if he’d fielded plenty of similar questions from other city folk who spent too much time at Whole Foods. “Only grass-fed at Whitley,” he said, in a delightful “yup” and “nope” monotone I vowed to adopt so as to seem more composed, impervious to life’s every irritant. “No need for antibiotics or hormones, because our cows don’t get sick. The average lifespan of a cow in America is three to four years. Missy, the gal you’ll be milking today, is fourteen.”
“She’s almost old enough for Medicare,” said Simon, Mr. Laugh-a-Minute. I’d told my friends about our ten-minute conversation the previous night and, predictably, they thought I’d been too hard on him, that “almost ready” was pretty damn close to being ready and that I shouldn’t write him off.
“You know, some of us depend on Medicare,” Beatrice snapped at Simon. “Particularly if we can’t depend on our children in our time of need.”
“Oh come on, Mother,” Jonathan said with a tolerant smile. “It’s okay to take a day off from the harangue.”
“You see how he speaks to me?” she said, looking to the rest of us for affirmation. Nobody gave it to her.
“Do cows really have four stomachs?” Jackie asked Wes.
“Yup,” he said. “We feed ’em, and then each stomach breaks the food down a little more and a little more. After it gets to the first stomach, they regurgitate it and chew it again.”
“Now that’s one way to get the most bang for your buck,” said Ronnie with a chuckle.
“Could we please get back to milking the cow?” said Lake, who was probably dying to rush into the kitchen to cook with Chef Hill again. I’d noticed the day before that she was absorbing every pearl of his wisdom about food and the planet and the farmer and that she stood next to him at every opportunity with the sort of worshipful look you’d afford the Pope.
“Step on over,” Wes invited her. “Crouch down here next to me, and we’ll give Missy a run.”
Lake kneeled beside Wes. He pointed to the four pink appendages that protruded from Missy’s udder. If I tell you the pink appendages looked like penises, you’ll remember that I told you the pork tenderloins looked like penises and you’ll think I have a penis fetish. I just don’t know how else to describe them.
“These are her teats,” said Wes. He took Lake’s hand. “Wrap your forefinger around first, then the middle finger, then the ring finger, and close them around the teat to seal it. Now squeeze it.”
No sooner did she squeeze than milk squirted out. It was a miracle—completely mesmerizing!
“Who’s next?” asked Wes. “Once we’re done with the show-and-tell, I’ll hook Missy up to the pump and tank, and milk her that way. Much faster.”
Before I knew what had gotten into me, my hand shot up. Wes beckoned me over. I crouched down beside him, right underneath Missy’s udder. Apparently, I crouched down too low, because my hair got tangled in her teats and it took me a minute to extricate myself.
“First the forefinger, then the middle finger, then the ring finger, then close ’em up and squeeze,” he coached.
The contact of my fingers around Missy’s warm, baby-soft teat was exquisitely satisfying for some reason, and I was enchanted. I squeezed the teat, timidly at first and then more confidently, and when the milk came out, I heard myself sigh with pleasure. It felt so natural, so organic, so… spiritual, as if I were nursing a baby or something. I know, I know. I sound like Lake, but it was very rewarding.
Reluctantly, I stood up and let the next person have their turn. Everybody except Beatrice milked Missy, who was such a good sport that she never kicked, never budged, not even when Simon decided to hum You Are the Sunshine of My Life while he milked, the song they’d played over and over on the cruise ship, the song that had become an inside joke with us during the trip and then had become our special song, perversely. I pretended I didn’t notice.
As we were all leaving the barn, Pat agreed that the milking experience reminded her of breast-feeding her children while Jackie said it reminded her of giving her ex-husband Peter a hand job because his penis was as tiny as one of Missy’s teats. Alex confided that her fiancé preferred blow jobs to hand jobs and that she was becoming quite proficient at them, which might have explained why he was so ready and willing to make a commitment to her and which forced me to consider whether I should have been more proactive with Simon in that regard.
“How often do you do it to your fiancé?” I asked her as the four of us walked over to Whitley’s kitchen.
“Elaine,” Pat groaned with embarrassment.
“Elaine wasn’t the one who brought it up,” Jackie reminded Pat before turning back to Alex. “So how often do you do it to him?”
“Whenever and wherever he wants me to,” Alex said with a naughty smile before trotting off to join the others.
“Why do guys love blow jobs so much?” said Jackie as we Three Blonde Mice linked arms and strolled on. “I can’t figure it out. Is it the tongue action?”
Pat blushed furiously, but managed to say, “Bill thinks it’s because men don’t have to worry about getting the woman pregnant like they do with intercourse.”
“Yeah, but the three of us aren’t getting pregnant any time soon,” Jackie pointed out. “Neither is Alex.”
“I think it’s because men are lazy,” I said. “When they’re getting a blow job, they don’t have to do any of the work.”
“I think it’s because they’re pervy,” said Jackie. “They can sit up and watch during it, and it turns them on even more.”
“I wonder if I’m any good at it,” I mused. “Simon didn’t say I wasn’t, but you never know.”
“The only thing I know for sure is you can’t let your teeth near a man’s penis,” said Pat. “It happened once with Bill, and he called me a cheese grater.”
Jackie and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. Pat’s line was not only a highly personal admission for her but also the perfect segue into our next activity: learning how to make cheese.
9
Chef Hill kicked off the class with an impassioned speech about the necessity of using fresh dairy products in the food we make for our families. As we sat in our folding chairs like well-behaved students, he told us about his farm in Sharon, Connecticut, where his wife cultured butter from the milk from their cows. “She cultures it with our yogurt and a touch of sea salt, so it’s light and airy and spreadable,” he said between sniffs of his leaky nose. “She’s a dream, my wife. She made a blue cheese the other day and it was so
good I nearly cried. And her ricotta? Oh, man. Well, you’ll be making it today, so you can tell me what a great mouthfeel it has.”
Mouthfeel. Please. While his assistants busied themselves gathering the ingredients for us, I noticed that Lake stepped up to the center island to have a word with him.
“I just wanted to tell you I enjoyed our class yesterday, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the week,” she said with a look of awe and wonder. “My life partner and I hold you and your values in the highest esteem, and we try to honor them in our own kitchen and lifestyle. You really have changed the way we look at food and we thank you for your contribution to saving the planet.” She nodded and then backed away with a slight bow.
Right behind her was Alex. “It’s so much fun learning to cook with you,” she said to Chef Hill in a silky, melodic voice that matched her flowing locks and wardrobe. She was one of those women who glided, floated, sashayed in their airy skirts and pants and tops and bandanas. I wondered if she was gentle when she blasted away at her patients’ plaque, or whether she was one of those rip-you-to-shreds hygienists. I also wondered whether she talked your ear off while you were sitting in that chair, a captive audience, or whether she went about her business silently, dreaming up screenplay ideas. And, of course, I wondered if she’d met her fiancé while she was cleaning his teeth and, if so, whether it was love at first debridement.
The chef looked pleased by Alex’s compliment. No, scratch that, he looked pleased by Alex. The self-proclaimed family man’s eyes roamed over her body with such a complete lack of subtlety it was embarrassing. “What’s your name again, hon?” he asked, having trouble keeping his tongue in his mouth. “I don’t remember it, sorry, but I definitely remember you.”
“It’s Alex. Alex Langer,” she said, in a more businesslike tone than she’d used initially, perhaps sensing he was coming on to her. “If you have time at the end of the week, I’d like to interview you for a screenplay I’m writing. I’d only need fifteen or twenty minutes, max.”