by Sarah Laing
‘I think I would like to teach you, Klara.’
‘Really?’ Klara felt excited. Without music to play there was a hole in her life. And if you added that hole to the one her parents had made, she felt as though she was all skin, as hollow as Herr Weiss’s false leg.
‘What about me? Klara can’t come here alone. I want to learn with her!’ said Esther.
‘But I only have one cello; that would be difficult.’
Herr Weiss stood up, gathering his crutches, moving to the high window where disembodied boots trooped past.
He turned. ‘I know — I will make you both a cello. It would be good for me. I need to experiment with more woods before I can start building instruments for the Americans. A friend was telling me I should try the cedar that is grown up north in the snow. My boss sometimes gets it in so I will ask him to sell me some.’
‘But we can’t afford to pay you. Tante Dagmar is poor, she says there are not so many rich ladies about these days.’
‘Everyone is poor. Your Tante Dagmar saved my life when the Spanish flu came. She brought me soup, she changed my sheets. I am sorry for her that I survived and Thomas and Sigi did not — sometimes I think my very existence is salt in her wounds. But I want to repay her, I can never repay her enough.’
Klara was filled with excitement as she ran up the stairs. ‘A cello, my very own cello!’
‘My very own cello too!’ said Esther, taking two steps at a time, leaving Klara behind.
Klara didn’t believe Esther felt as excited as she. For Esther it was more of an object to covet, as she had once loved her dolls, sewing clothing for them, making a chuppah out of four sticks and Mama’s handkerchief, and performing weddings in her room that Klara wasn’t allowed to take part in.
‘But two dolls can’t marry,’ Klara had said, eager to break the spell. ‘There needs to be a man and a woman.’
So Esther tailored her doll a morning suit, chopping off her long black hair and pinning the yarmulke to her crown. Mama had been very angry, telling Esther that although it was human hair, it would never grow back. But Esther didn’t mind.
Klara would have a cello, a cello! And she would play it until she was as good as Papa; she would surprise him when he got off the boat. When he arrived with Mama, all their possessions in trunks, she would sit at the wharf, playing him welcoming music. Maybe when they got home, they could do a duet together, like Papa used to with his friend. He would find them a small stage to perform on, Mama accompanying on the piano. Klara didn’t imagine Esther up there with them. She would be in the audience, sitting alongside her illegally married dolls.
CHAPTER 7
New York, 2003
‘When did you last clean the fish vase, Wendy?’ I say. The water is green and viscous, and Iggy veers drunkenly from one glass bulge to the other.
Wendy bought the vase the day she sold the chaise longue to two women who hosted a stitch-and-bitch circle. They told her it was going to be the crafty queen’s throne, and that they would be crocheting vagina peggy-squares to upholster it. Wendy pocketed their hundred dollars in cash (who would have thought!) and took the first bus to Carroll Gardens. On her way home, she stopped at the pet store and picked up a zebra fish, which she called Ziggy. A couple of days later, he was flushed down the toilet to feed the crocodiles, and she bought Iggy. Iggy’s fared a little better, but I don’t like his chances. Wendy won’t buy him a castle or plants, as it would ruin the aesthetic purity of the vase.
‘Maybe I should change the water. I don’t think I have since I bought it.’
So three weeks then. ‘You’ve got to clean it,’ I say. ‘It’ll be filled with ammonia. He’ll lose his stripes.’ I’ve learned to speak up: the beautiful speckled Asian pear developed liver spots, collapsing when Wendy picked it up. In the meantime, Wendy’s also sold sixteen stackable elementary school chairs, and a chrome drinks trolley.
Wendy takes the vase to the sink and pours the fish into a saucepan. She turns on the hot tap and gets out her bottle brush. ‘I hope I don’t damage the glass.’ She tips the water out, then holds it up to the light. No scratches. She quarter-fills it with cold water.
‘I think the fish would like more to swim around in,’ I say. ‘Don’t you think he’s getting a little oxygen-starved?’
‘Then it’ll be too heavy for me to carry and I might drop it. My wrists aren’t very strong. I suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome.’
Wendy is always complaining about her carpal tunnel syndrome, but that’s because she fuses herself to the computer for hours on end, updating her blog. We pay for two-thirds of the DSL, and yet we get a quarter-share access. Toby is frustrated, feeling like he isn’t getting enough chance to research new companies, cracking his knuckles in a way that sets my teeth on edge.
‘We could fill up a jug, bring it over to the vase on the bookshelf.’
‘I suppose.’ Wendy looks uncertain.
Click-scrunch-snip. The sound of the door unlocking.
Marcella takes off her hat, gloves, shawl and coat, and unzips her boots. It’s very hot in this apartment; I open my window and let the below-freezing wind blow in to counteract the central heating.
‘You’d never guess who I served this morning,’ says Marcella.
‘Who?’ says Wendy.
‘Okay, small, peroxide hair, big glasses, Italian, dead famous brother.’
I hate it when people do this: my brain turns to concrete.
‘Donnatella Versace?’ says Wendy.
‘Yes!’ Marcella looks more excited that I’ve seen her in a long time. ‘She wanted Marmite toast, y’know, that weird shit the English eat, and for her chihuahua she ordered a rare venison steak and steamed okra. We didn’t even have okra on the menu. They had to ring some in from Chinatown.’
‘Did she take her sunglasses off?’
‘Are you crazy? She did for a minute, to check out the menu, but then she pushed them back up her nose again. Anyone would think she had a glass eye. Then she did this strange thing, where she put the fat end of the okra in between her teeth and waggled it in front of the dog. The dog started to snarl, I swear, I thought it would bite her face, then it grabbed the end and started chewing. By the time it was done, they were kissing. It was so gross.’
‘I got some okra from the co-op today,’ I say. Persuaded by Wendy, Toby and I have just joined, and we went to our induction session last night. We were seated in a small room above the supermarket among other earnest Brooklynites, some bouncing children on their laps. An Aran jersey-wearing Englishman gave us a talk about organic versus minimal treatment, about the 1970s Brooklyn utopian dream (he was in Birmingham at the time). We could choose a work slot: wrapping cheese in cling-film, working in the office, lining up the cereal boxes and filling bulk bins with black beans and tamari almonds, looking after the kids, or checkout. If we were particularly trustworthy and good with numbers, we could take the money at the end. I chose checkout; that way I might meet the locals. Toby thought he would like to wrap cheese in the refrigerator room, maybe due to an overexposure to central heating. He grew up in Dunedin; cold is his natural milieu. This morning, armed with my temporary pass, I went to get my photo taken for my ID card. I also perused the fresh produce aisles, checking out the aloe leaf and the broccoli rabe, acting outraged at the ‘Kiwi (Italy) $1 each’ sign. ‘Don’t they know that kiwi is the bird?’ I muttered to no one in particular.
‘I love okra. Are you cooking tonight?’ says Wendy hopefully.
‘I was. Do you want some?’ I can’t help but offer; I feel uncomfortable eating without sharing.
‘I was going to get takeout … only if you’ve got enough.’
Wendy getting takeout is almost like her cooking. I hear her on the phone: ‘So could I have number twelve, except with broccoli instead of choy sum, and could you steam the vegetables instead of frying them and I’d like ginger instead of garlic and could you please substitute brown rice for white?’ I’m amazed that she gets what she
asks for. ‘What about you, Marcella?’ I say.
‘Oh, sure. Only no wheat for me.’ Marcella has already explained to us how bloated, depressed and farty she used to be when she ate bread, and how she is now charged with energy. She must have been almost dead before.
‘I was going to do quinoa.’ It’s one of my discoveries from the co-op. Wendy likes the organic mushroom burritos and the instant mac and cheese. I thought the point of the co-op was whole foods. I pull out my plastic bag of okra; I haven’t transcended to muslin yet.
For someone who only ever reheats things, Wendy has the most spectacular array of cooking gear. She has two mushroom cleaning brushes. Her knives are beautifully weighted and Japanese. Her pots hang on hooks from a cast-iron rack. They are expensive. She bought them from the place Julia Child used to shop at, when Wendy had her fancy creative director job and could also afford to buy heat-and-eats from Dean and Delucca. The owner is notoriously grumpy, yelling at customers when they head towards the marked-down items. This is apparently a selling point. Wendy is proud that she convinced his young apprentice, a handsome gay Polish boy, that she was at chef school and therefore deserved the fifteen per cent discount. She bought a limonata maker, a zester, a ginger and a parmesan grater, a spice grinder and an olive pipper. She bought a roux and a preserving pot. She bought a tortilla press. She hauled her sacks home on the subway and put the pots on display, as if her kitchen were a set and she was about to be profiled by a lifestyle magazine. Every day she receives plastic-wrapped catalogues from homeware stores, which slide prophylactically across the foyer floor.
I love cooking: the slicing reminds me of playing scales, and it’s all about timing. I retain the idiosyncrasies of each vegetable. I’m not to slice into the okra pod because it would make my dish gummy, but if I were to make gumbo, slicing would be a good thing. I like the way I have to rinse the quinoa to remove its bitter coating. I can account for all the sugar, the carbohydrates, the nutrients, tallying them before I administer my injections, then testing two hours afterwards to see if I calculated correctly. I’m jubilant when I am within my target blood sugar range, devastated when I’m not. When other people cook, they slip sugar into things that I don’t notice; they mix protein into rice so I can’t measure it in a cup. Sometimes I feel embarrassed about how control-freakish I am about food, but then everyone I meet is celiac, pregnant or vegan, pescetarian, hypoglycemic or fat-phobic, finding some medical or ideological reason to fend off food.
I deseed a chili (chili stimulates the metabolism). I’m going to make a spicy tomato sauce to go with my okra.
‘You want some help?’ says Marcella.
‘No.’ I bash the garlic (releasing its antibiotic qualities) with the Japanese knife handle. I don’t like people fussing around me as I cook. Wendy is inclined to reorganise the spice cabinet, undermining my sense of kitchen ownership. Marcella looks grateful; she didn’t really want to help but was brought up to offer. She, like Wendy, can’t cook. Neither can my mother: her most successful meals were when she made soups, boiling ham hocks in stock pots, adding the fridge miscellany and simmering for hours. I never realised that asparagus was anything but canned until my old cello teacher Lydia showed me her garden.
The frying chili makes me cough as I chop up peppers to go with it.
‘What’s in this pot? I hope you’re not serving us that,’ says Marcella.
It’s the fish. He has been circumnavigating the stainless steel pot for a while now. ‘Wendy, should this go back in the vase?’
‘What? Oh, right. I forgot.’ She slips her hand into the water and picks Iggy up. He flops around. ‘This feels nice, like a massage. You should try it.’
‘Wendy!’
She throws him back in the now half-filled vase and he dives down to the bottom, looking freaked out. ‘Maybe I should have given him filtered water.’
‘I think you’re only meant to refresh half their water at any given time. That way they don’t get chemical shock.’ Marcella’s in Wendy’s spot on the sofa, channel surfing.
‘Oh shit. Iggy, you’re going to be fine, right? You’re tough, pal?’ Wendy taps on the glass, and Iggy retreats to the furthest corner of his world.
‘Nothing, nothing, a hundred channels and fuck-all to watch. You should get cable,’ says Marcella.
‘And how do you propose I pay for that? Are you going to give me some more rent?’
‘Come on, Wendy, you’re sucking me dry already. And I’m still waiting to be paid. Six dollars an hour for a doctor of philosophy, it breaks my heart. Still, I got some tips.’ Marcella settles on some nature programme, where an iguana is eating a cricket, its black legs kicking furiously as it is swallowed.
I add a can of tomatoes to my chilies, garlic and peppers. The quinoa begins to crackle; it has absorbed all its water. I throw a knob of butter in, then some salt (the kernels won’t pop if you put it in too soon) and, switching off the gas, I place the lid on.
‘So any luck on the real job front?’ says Wendy.
‘I had an interview today, after my shift at the hotel,’ says Marcella.
‘What does that mean?’
‘What do you think? The head researcher took me back to his apartment, filthy hovel that it was, and we had sex.’
‘Oh.’ Wendy’s face puckers a little. ‘Do you think that is a wise strategy?’
‘You should try it some day. I got an assignment, researching the Ukrainian community in New York City for a documentary they’re pitching.’ Marcella looks jubilant, but still too bloodless to fuck. Maybe the researcher makes her lie still and pretend to be dead.
‘They’re pitching. So does that mean it’s going to be made?’ says Wendy.
‘Oh yeah, PBS are just finalising the contract.’
‘Right, so you’ll start soon?’
‘He told me he’d call me when they got the green light.’
‘Okay,’ says Wendy.
When I lift the pot lid to a gush of steam, the okra are a startling lizard-green. I arrange them on Wendy’s Crate and Barrel platter and pour the spicy sauce over the top. Cheese, some crumbled feta; I’m addicted to its saltiness. ‘Dinner’s ready, if anyone wants some,’ I sing-song, sounding like my mother. Only she’d call it slop or grub, putting me off before I even tried it. ‘I wonder how far off Toby is?’
He was going into Manhattan to meet with a recruitment agent, but she cancelled to take her cat to the psychologist — depressed, apparently. But then he hooked up an interview with someone at MTV. He looked excited when he left the house, which is promising in itself. Maybe London will loosen its grip on him.
I hope he turns up soon, because Wendy’s helping herself to ladlefuls. Marcella is watching me squeeze a fold of flesh for my insulin pen; it surprises her every time I inject myself. Normally people don’t notice and my blood-testing machine is mistaken for a cellphone, but Marcella can’t help but stare. She blinks a little when I’m done, then spoons okra onto her plate, ensuring the spicy sauce doesn’t bleed into the quinoa. She pecks at it, making cheeping sounds as she swallows.
‘Mmm, this is delicious, Rebecca. You’re one of the healthiest cooks I know,’ says Wendy, gushy with her praise. ‘Of course, my French room-mate was pretty good too, but I might have become obese if he’d stayed. He’d use a stick of butter in every dish he made, and I tell ya, he really knew how to roast a bird.’ Helping herself to seconds, she silently challenges me. Will I cook meat? Probably not, even though my vegetarianism is tenuous, lapsing at mushu pork and prawn curries.
‘Save some for Toby, Wendy,’ I say, looking anxiously at the door. So many bad things can happen. A few days ago, Marcella came home distraught, having been in the same subway carriage as a mother and a small boy. The boy was leaning against the doors when they slipped open a crack and he fell out. The woman screamed, someone pulled the emergency cord, but Marcella didn’t know if they found him; she just remembers the woman’s cries filling the carriage. I feel ill when I think of this
story. Those slicing wheels, that third electric rail.
What would I do if Toby didn’t come home? Would I have to identify his body, sliding him feet first from a morgue drawer? Would they lift the sheet to a necklace of bruises, a crushed sternum? Would I have to kiss his forehead and zip up the body bag, arranging the paperwork so that he flew home in the luggage hold, his flesh freezing slightly, frost gathering in his eyebrows? And would I fly home with him, wearing my black clothes, to attend the funeral in a front-row seat? What music would play in the funeral? Toby likes Brazilian, dance music, alt-country. Should I play the Pixies’ ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’? Or maybe The Smiths’ ‘There is a Light that Never Goes Out’? And would there be incense, and would I get to wear a Spanish mantilla? Would I return to New York after he was buried, open to possibilities, to new relationships, finding myself more illegal jobs? I stop: I’m enjoying this escape fantasy too much.
Toby arrives when I’m doing the dishes. Apparently the person who cooks also has to clean, but since Wendy never cooks I find this rule unfair.
‘Hey, hey, Rebecca,’ He kisses my neck, then my mouth, even though I’m soap-sodden. He jumps around the kitchen, hyped.
‘So you found a job?’ I say.
‘No, but I got some great leads, and I met this cool guy. Oh look, vegetables. Vegetables gooood. Pizza slice baaad. Cheap as chips though, only a dollar fifty.’
‘Why were you out so late?’
‘The creative director was showing me all his books, watching my show reels. But mainly he was chewing my ear off, asking me why the hell we’ve moved here when we come from paradise. Lord of the Rings and all that.’
‘Paradise, and the arse-end of the world,’ I say.
‘He was impressed that I’d done VJing at dance parties. I was telling him about the graphics I did in the late nineties, my crunchy assembler code stuff that used to send people into trances. He couldn’t believe that I done that as well as government websites. Here, people are really narrow,’ says Toby, sucking in the okra until it pops into his mouth, leaving a perfect O.