This might be a fragment, or it might be a little horror story; sometimes I run across something in my archives and wonder who wrote it, and then I encounter a turn of phrase that sounds like me so I can’t deny it’s my fault these words came together in this order …
She met him a month after her twenty-first birthday, when her father cut off her allowance. “Adulthood,” he had said. “Consider it my gift; you’ll appreciate it someday.”
At the time she was working at the bookstore twenty-two hours a week and living in half a duplex with two other girls. When she wasn’t working, she was at the coffee shop, or taking long walks around the lakes, or going to see French movies at the art house cinema. Though she did not live extravagantly, the loss of her allowance meant that she had to take on more hours at the bookstore and curtail the number of lattes she ordered.
He was in the cookbook section on a Friday night in November, a night she didn’t usually work. It was almost ten o’clock, and she was making the rounds of the store, asking the last lingering customers if she could help them find anything, reminding them that the store would close in thirty, twenty, fifteen minutes. He was holding a big book of Italian recipes, full of pictures of whole squids, roasting pigs, naked pheasants strung by their feet on wooden poles. She had to ask twice if he needed help before he looked up.
“Have you ever had pasticciata alla Pesaresa?” he asked. He said it easily, as if he said it all the time.
“No—“
“The veal has to be browned very quickly, then simmered for hours until it almost melts. Are you a vegetarian?”
“No—“
“Good. Vegetarians are hard to feed.”
She wasn’t sure what to say, so she said, “We’re closing in ten minutes.”
“Do you work tomorrow?”
“No—I—Sunday.”
“I’ll see you Sunday,” he said. He put the book back on the shelf very carefully, and left with a little wave and a nod.
And there he was on Sunday morning, as promised, with the same cookbook. He was a little older than she—thirty, maybe?—and dressed nicely, though not so nicely that he seemed to have come straight from church. His hair was curly and brown, a little unkempt, and smelt slightly of cinnamon, ginger, and roast turkey. When he invited her to dinner at his house, for his inaugural run at pasticciata alla Pesaresa, she accepted, and only thought later that it was odd to be invited to a stranger’s house for supper.
His house was not big, though it was in a nice neighborhood, nicer than her own. It had a large porch—maybe it was even a veranda? She wasn’t sure how that fancy title was earned—and an even larger kitchen, with brushed aluminum appliances, pot racks hanging from the ceiling, and open pantry shelves overflowing with jars and boxes and bags. The rest of the house seemed squeezed into too little space by the kitchen.
The smell of the simmering veal filled the house, fogged the windows. He said, “It needs to cook another half hour,” took her coat, and led her to the large dining room table which was already set with wine glasses, a basket of soft bread, and plates of deep green leaves drizzled with walnut oil and studded with ruby-like currants.
She sat with her knees together, hands folded in her lap, and watched him bustling around the kitchen, not hurried but deliberate and light, like a dancer. “Try the salad,” he said as he passed by the kitchen door with a steaming pan in his hand, “I’ll join you in a few minutes.”
When he came into the dining room he carried a white platter on which were laid round, moist medallions of veal covered in a rich red sauce that smelled faintly of fennel and anise. He stood over her right shoulder and placed a medallion on the dinner plate above her salad, then swept the empty salad plate away. She didn’t see where it went—up his sleeve? Away into thin air? Turned into a dove with a puff of white smoke?
“How is it?” he asked when he sat, finally, at the chair across from her.
Her mouth was full of the buttery meat and tangy sauce, so all she could do was nod. She hoped her eyes were shouting, “Delicious.”
“Good,” he said and took a careful, dainty bite.
After that night he came to the bookstore every day she worked with a boxed lunch: prosciutto on crusty bread, baba ganoush and hummus on flatbread, a salad of orange wedges and grapes on radicchio with a curried yogurt dressing. Her co-workers marveled at the meals in the dingy break room, begged for a taste; sometimes she relented.
Once a week she went to his house for dinner—plates of baked pasta, bowls of creamy stew, dishes piled with schnitzel or pot stickers or chorizo. Then twice a week, then four times a week, until finally she told her roommates to find someone else to share the rent. Since they seldom saw her, they didn’t argue much, or miss her terribly.
He did not prepare the food at their wedding. Though he planned the menu, selected the baker, and chose the wine, others did the cooking. She was disappointed with the food—the fish was dry, the chicken tough—and she was relieved when he brought poached quails’ eggs with hollandaise sauce to her bedside the next morning.
Her clothes had become tight and constricting since she moved into his house. After three months, before the wedding, she had surrendered to a larger dress size. When she complained that his food made her fat, he laughed, and said that she was only just starting to look healthy, and kissed her belly.
When she became pregnant with their daughter, he brought foods full of iron and calcium to her on the couch: spinach roulades, baked brie, seared steak, halibut stuffed with artichokes. He put his lips to her belly and tasted the delicate kicks of their child, rested his head against her full breasts, and touched her heavy thighs and broad hips. The little girl was round and soft, with rolls of fat around her chin and deep dimples in her cheeks, and everyone remarked at the child’s likeness to her mother.
He no longer kissed her belly or touched her hip; he still said she looked healthy when she complained that she needed to buy ever larger clothes, but she didn’t feel reassured. The house felt as tight as her shirts; the kitchen seemed as broad as her belly. She hadn’t been able to wear her wedding rings since the fourth month of her pregnancy.
He made supper in the morning, filling the house with pungent smells before he went to work. When the baby napped, she sometimes crept into the kitchen to peek and taste. When she started to taste larger portions, he began to make a lunch for her, too, light but filling like the long-ago boxes at the bookstore. She lay awake in the mornings listening to the snoring baby, the bustle of his work in the kitchen, and floated in the rich odors from the oven.
The night he didn’t come home, she lay awake on the couch sniffing the air, imagining the pasticciata alla Pesaresa, its buttery sweetness, and wondered what he had left in the oven.