Up For Renewal

by Cathy Alter

  I told her that the recipe said to take the chicken out of the pot and shred it onto a plate. “The hands-on time is only twenty-five minutes,” I explained. “It doesn’t say to do something overnight.”

  “Well”—she sighed—“I’m here if you have a cooking 911.”

  I walked home carrying Jeanne’s pot, and curious bystanders looked at me like they were expecting me to stop and serve them a free meal. “Sorry,” I told one man I recognized from the building next to mine, “there’s nothing under the lid.”

  When I got home, I discovered that the pot was too big for the kitchen counter, so I had to set it down on the living room floor. My cat Raymond traipsed over and sniffed it. The phone began to ring, and when I walked into the room to get it, I noticed he was sitting on top of it, licking one of his front paws.

  “There’s been an accident,” came Karl’s crackled voice at the other end.

  I immediately had an image of him in traction, laid up in some rinky-dink hospital in West Virginia with tubes coming out of his chest and both legs rigged up by pulleys. His roommate Bobby John, who had blown off four toes while loading his rifle, was calming himself by reciting a rosary of NASCAR drivers.

  “What?” It was the first thing I could think of to say. “Oh shit,” was the second.

  “Not me,” he said quickly, knowing that my mind immediately jumps to the worst possible outcome in the book. “I’m okay.”

  “Who, then?”

  “Larry.”

  Ever since his birthday party, Karl had spared me from being around Crazy Larry. They continued to ride together occasionally on weekends when the weather was too good not to suffer his company, but he rarely mentioned his name anymore.

  “Is he dead?” I immediately felt guilty for all the bad thoughts I had ever thrown his way.

  “No.” Karl sighed. “But his bike is.”

  It turned out that Crazy Larry, in an effort to impress Karl on the track, had tried to pass him on a particularly tight corner and dropped his bike. Both rider and motorcycle went sliding side by side into a wall made out of hay.

  “It kind of took the fun out of things.” He half-laughed. I could tell he was shaken. Seeing another rider, a friend on top of it, skidding across a graveled track with nothing but his leather pants and shiny helmet to save him from a collision, was like having it happen to yourself. “I don’t feel right going back out there,” he admitted. “I’m ready to call it a day.”

  My relief that he was unhurt and coming home gave way to a new brand of panic. He was coming home. I wasn’t nearly ready to start dinner. My fantasy was that Karl, dirty and homesick, would walk through the door, and I’d have the candles lit, his slippers in hand, and food on the table. Now I’d be lucky to have twelve quarts of water boiling in time for his arrival.

  I hung up the phone and began a calming mantra of shitfuck shitfuck shitfuck. Fortunately, the water only took about thirty minutes to boil. Once it did, I decided to follow Jeanne’s instructions and let it boil for fifteen minutes before adding the chicken. (She made a very good case, that Jeanne. And I guessed if I screwed anything up, I could count on her sympathy. “I’m sorry I steered you wrong,” she might say.)

  While the water boiled, I needed to wash the chickens and pat them dry with paper towels. Up to this point, most of the chicken I had handled had been boneless breasts. Staring at these two whole chickens, I couldn’t figure out how to remove their plastic wrap. There was no “open here” arrow or Ziploc seal. I picked up my first victim, took a knife, and cut a hole where I guessed the head once was. Once I got both chickens unwrapped, it was time to wash them off. They each weighed about three pounds, and when I held the first one under the sink, I instantly felt like I was holding a head like some shampoo girl at a salon. The way its pimply skin fell around the bones had such a human quality. Maybe this was what it felt like to prepare a body for burial.

  Once I slid the clean chickens into the pot, I looked at the water, expecting the boil to continue. I consulted the recipe, looked back at the stove, looked back at the recipe, and stood there deciding what to do. The water remained flatlined. What if it never boiled again?

  Karl returned home, dirty and a bit homesick. He was in the next room, laughing. Having lived on his own since he was sixteen, he was as relaxed in the kitchen as he was on his bike taking turns at 90 mph.

  “You look perplexed. Can I help you?” he asked, wandering into the kitchen. He studied the quiet sea of chicken and told me to be patient. “That’s what happens when you boil a lot of water,” he said, as if he were explaining how air blown into a balloon causes it to inflate.

  “It smells good,” he added before going back to the couch to watch a movie.

  After an hour, Karl reached into the pot with two wooden spatulas and transferred the chickens onto the plate I was shakily holding. They looked slimy and raw. “Are they done?” I asked him. He cut into one and declared it perfect.

  I burned the tips of my thumbs and index fingers while trying to yank the yellowed and puckered skin off each chicken. I continued to burn them while pulling the tender meat off the bones and shredding it onto a plate. I refused to use any meat that was irregular in texture—no funny veins or dark spots, nothing that looked fatty. My mother always made turkey soup after Thanksgiving and wasn’t as discriminating. If you didn’t chew with caution, you were likely to bite into gristle and small bones.

  Next, I added the rice to the broth and threw the chicken back in. Since I had removed the carrots and onions, Mexican soup wasn’t really more than just stock, rice, and a load of chicken. It looked nothing like the picture in Real Simple. But miraculously, it tasted delicious. The chicken was so moist it was practically liquefying. And the broth, infused with lime, was light and slightly tangy. It was so good, I wanted to jump in the pot and soak in it.

  “I love when you cook for me,” said Karl. “For us,” he corrected himself. “I love when you cook for us.”

  We left the soup simmering, and after a short while, the rice had turned into a thick paste. But Karl still served himself a second bowl, and even with this new consistency, it wasn’t half bad. We also had enough leftovers to feed a family of nine. And the only damage that resulted, other than a few blistered fingers, was a large, jagged line trailing across the countertop, caused by dragging Jeanne’s pot from the stove to the sink. No amount of scrubbing or Clorox would remove it. It was my only battle scar in the line of cooking duty.

  I couldn’t believe it. Whenever I ordered chicken at a restaurant, my parents’ favorite joke was for one of them to lean over and ask me, “Do you need me to cut that for you?” They had long held the belief that I was ungraceful and uncoordinated, and I had been dissuaded from trying out for cheerleading, taking up percussion, and doing anything in the kitchen that required a hot oven.

  But the funny thing was, after believing myself to be all thumbs, clunky, and without rhythm, I was realizing that that might not have been an accurate picture of who I really was, even though it certainly helped shape who I had become. But by proving myself in the kitchen, maybe I would begin to create a new, more flattering photo album for myself.

  Even though I was experiencing my share of gastronomical victories (the ensuing nights featured impressive entrees such as Pasta Pesto with Green Beans and Potatoes, Winter Lentil Soup, and Chicken Riesling), I was having a hard time not washing my hair every day. I began to dread the mornings when I had to don the shower cap. I found myself making social plans only on my clean hair days, when I scrubbed my head with even more alacrity than the Real Simple article condoned. However, most of my bad hair days were of my own doing. For years, I’ve had an anxious habit of grabbing strands of my hair, guiding the bundles up to my eyes, and examining everything at close range for split ends. (Come to think of it, this exercise, while being bad for my hair, probably isn’t very good for my vision, either.) When I once visited a friend in Los Angeles, we drove by the Paramount lot and she told me that
she once saw Jennifer Aniston, pulled over in her car by the gate, cell phone in one hand and a clump of hair in the other, checking for split ends. And more recently, I was absentmindedly checking the status of my ends in the backseat of a car and one of Karl’s friends turned around and said, “I know what you’re doing. My sister does the same thing.” I wondered if we girls were all gorillas; if his sister and Jennifer Aniston and I would one day all sit around grooming one another.

  The act of guiding the strands over and over between my thumb and index finger also spread around a lot of oil. A long time ago, before I picked up this habit, my mother told me that when she was a girl, she had a duckling that she petted so fervently, it died. All her stroking had spread around the oil that naturally lived in the feathers, essentially clogging all the duck’s pores and suffocating it in its own feathers.

  I studied my reflection in the bathroom mirror, visualizing myself as a giant duck, gasping for air, dying by my own nervous hand. On the counter in front of me was Oprah’s seven-minute-eyelift article, her recipe this month for looking “instantly livelier and more awake.” I was planning on going under the knife, or tweezer, in an effort to “offset droopy lids and make the eyes appear wider.” As I administered the first pluck to the arch, just above the outer rim of the iris, the phone rang.

  “Hi, pet.”

  It was Richard, the better half of the fabulously gay duo. He had been complaining of stomach pain, which we had both chalked up to his days as a heavy drinker. Even though he had been sober for months, I had still seen him double over more than once, usually after eating just a birdlike portion of his meal.

  “What did the doctor say?” I asked, absentmindedly working the tweezers in the air.

  “It’s not good,” he whispered.

  “Tell me.”

  “I have pancreatic cancer.”

  I swallowed hard and tried to squelch back the wail that was rising out of my belly. “Oh, my sweet.”

  Although I considered him one of my closest friends, Richard was very guarded about his life away from our social one. A traditional Southern gentleman, he stood whenever a lady entered the room, treated me to all our fancy nights out, and phoned me whenever he was en route anywhere—from the grocery store to the Gap—to ask if he could pick up anything for me, like I was an infirm grandmother. Like someone from my parents’ generation, which he was not, Richard would have never wanted to burden me with anything as troubling as his personal tragedy. And other than telling me he had cancer, he offered very little further detail.

  I scanned my brain for anything I knew about cancer. In the past, I had interviewed a slew of breast cancer survivors for a series of articles that appeared on Lifetime Television’s website. Years later, I still emailed many of my favorite women; their unfailingly upbeat responses—and just the fact that they were still alive to email back—provided me with a bit of hope. The one characteristic these survivors all shared was a healthy sense of humor.

  “At least you don’t have to worry about your hair falling out,” I said. Richard was already completely bald.

  “You know what they say,” he said, perking up although I could tell he was weeping. “The sense of humor is the last thing to go.”

  I got off the phone and had a good, hard cry. Then, I called my father. Even though he was technically an optometrist, I still continued to run to him with all of my medical questions. He had met Richard during my parents’ last visit to D.C., when Richard sprang for an expensive Sunday brunch. My father fell instantly in love—with his generosity and with the sweet way in which Richard looked after me.

  “Richard has pancreatic cancer,” I told him.

  There was a long silence at the other end, like maybe my call had been dropped. As I was about to repeat myself, I heard my father exhale a deep breath. “Oh, Jesus,” he said in an oddly measured tone. “That’s a death sentence.”

  “What do you mean?” All this time, I had been under the grossly naive impression that the doctors would just remove the offending organ and Richard would get better.

  “Cathy,” my father said seriously. “You need to prepare yourself.”

  “What do you mean?” I could feel myself unraveling. My hands started shaking, and my face felt red and hot.

  “This is a fast-moving cancer,” he said gently. “He probably has about three months left.”

  Up until that point, I had thought my magazines had the power to prepare me for anything. But not this. I may have known how to throw a party or handle a difficult coworker—even poach a chicken—but I had no idea how to handle the pain of losing someone right in front of my eyes. I felt stupid and humiliated for being so self-absorbed in my own unwashed hair and sitcom experiences in the kitchen.

  What made it worse, if that was possible, was that this month, Jane had an article about a woman who died from cervical cancer, written by her best friend and titled “I Hate Tumors” (winning the award for title in the poorest taste). The first photo showed the friends in better days, almost identical, with long sun-bleached hair and perfect complexions. The subsequent photos were a timeline of her slow decline. The last image, of the author cradling her gaunt and gasping friend in her hospital bed, was so awful, I had to stop reading the article and turn the page—which revealed the last photo of the story, a sweetly reposed woman in an open casket.

  When I was younger, if I ever saw a disturbing photo or drawing in one of my books, I’d ask my parents to throw the book away. They had to destroy the evidence because to my highly imaginative mind, just knowing that photo (usually of a ghost or monster) was still somewhere in the house meant it could still crawl out of the bookcase, pop out from the top of the stairs, seep into my dreams, and haunt me.

  That night, long after Karl had fallen asleep, the image of me holding an emaciated Richard like the Pietà continued to play across my closed eyes. Planning tomorrow night’s menu was the last thing I wanted to think about.

  The slick pages of my magazines had left me bereft, and I sought solace from Dr. Oskar.

  I told him about Richard’s diagnosis, how life was so unfair, how Richard had spent the last year renovating his home with a fantastically expensive Aero Thermostatic shower and wouldn’t be around long enough to enjoy it. “I sound like a cliché,” I complained, reaching for a Kleenex.

  Whenever I cried, Dr. Oskar usually joined in. After I had pulled a tissue from the box, he leaned over and took one as well. We both blew our noses and looked at each other.

  “Oh, boy,” he said. “This is really bad stuff.”

  He asked me exactly what the doctors had told Richard. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “He didn’t tell me very much.”

  I did know that Richard had scheduled an appointment with a specialist at Georgetown Hospital for the following week. “I think the doctor wants him to go in and get a biopsy.”

  Dr. Oskar nodded, his signal for me to continue talking.

  “I want to do something to make him feel better,” I said, more to myself than to Dr. Oskar. “Something that will give him a bit of relief before the doctors rip him wide open.”

  “Yah. Wow. Okay,” remarked Dr. Oskar. After he’d borne witness to my bluntness week after week, I could still manage to offend his senses. “So I think you just gave me a head job,” he said, shaking his head.

  “You know what I mean.” I shrugged. “I want to make him feel good before things start to get bad.”

  “Just remember to take care of yourself,” he said, finger wagging. On the scale of cancer and things that aren’t cancer, it amazed me that Dr. Oskar was still concerned about my welfare. “I don’t want this to eat you up.”

  Whether he recognized the irony or not, Dr. Oskar’s bad pun gave me an idea. There was something I could do for Richard, something that I had been preparing for all month. I had cooked for Karl, at first, out of assigned obligation. But as the month went on and as the meals continued to roll out, I began to rethink my place in the kitchen. When Karl jokin
gly asked one night, “Did you ever think you’d be cooking a Spanish omelet for a Chew?” I had to admit to myself, No. I never thought I would ever have that chance. And when I admitted to my mother that, well, I actually didn’t mind making dinner every so often, my mother merely pointed out the obvious. “It makes a difference,” she acknowledged, “when you cook for someone you love.”

  Inviting someone else to the table, I would be able to offer the love and generosity that cooking had come to represent for me. This was the gift I could give to Richard. This was why people cooked.

  I invited Richard over the night before he was to switch to a bland diet in preparation for his surgery. I was going all out with the menu and was even stepping way out of my comfort zone and making an actual appetizer—a bruschetta with smashed chickpeas, garlic, flat parsley leaves, and balsamic vinegar. It was the first time in my life I had ever peeled and chopped a clove of garlic. And for some reason of science, the parsley stung my fingers. But the mix tasted good, and before I set the bruschetta aside in the refrigerator, Karl took a picture of me posing with my creation.

  My timing had improved since the beginning of the month, and there was still forty-five minutes before Richard was due to arrive to cook up Cosmo’s recipe for jerk chicken (complete with Scotch bonnet chili, a spice as fantastical to me as myrrh). Looking at our dining room table, which I had set with celery-green plates, crystal wineglasses, and pairs of Victorian candleholders ready to be ignited, I felt like my mother, who usually had our house decked out at least three days prior to her annual New Year’s Eve party. She may have preferred to feed my father Lean Cuisines, but my mother could arrange a centerpiece like an Oscar-winning set designer.

  “Oh, sweetie,” Richard exclaimed when he saw the table. “You even put out real plates!” We had a joke that I was going to register my china pattern with Chinet.