Perfect Little World(52)
She added the buttermilk mixture to the bowl and stirred until everything looked correct; she kept glancing at Chef Nicole, but she was reading a magazine, her feet propped up on one of the prep tables, either confident in Izzy’s abilities or wanting to disassociate herself from the entire enterprise. In the courtyard, a whole hog was cooking in the smoker that Gerdie Kent had, without batting an eye, rented for the occasion, a Meadow Creek smoker on its own trailer, so big it looked like a submarine from the Cold War. The pig had been bought from a local farm, a perfect specimen, another miracle on Gerdie’s part.
It had been almost two years since she’d prepared a hog for the smoker, but it seemed instinctual after so many days working with Mr. Tannehill. It was the rest of the meal that worried her, traditional southern sides that she and Chef Nicole had spent the past week figuring out how to make more interesting, more flavorful, more unique. The collards would be cooked for barely even a few minutes in bacon fat, instead of simmering for hours in a pot. The deviled eggs were to be pickled in beet juice so each egg turned the brightest shade of purple and was flavored with that vegetal tang, then topped with candied bacon. And Chef Nicole remembered a recipe from the restaurant WD-50 in New York where a traditional baked beans dish was instead made with pine nuts, which the two of them tried to replicate over several attempts until they got it just right. “You want it to be surprising,” Chef Nicole told her, “but still have the essential properties of the traditional thing that they love.” Like the Infinite Family, Izzy immediately thought, and she had spent the last fifteen minutes trying to figure out an organic way to give this quote to the reporter.
Through the window, as if she could control the temperature of the smoker with her mind, Izzy stared at the activity in the courtyard; the babies, all of them now mobile and powered by some internal nuclear engine, moved with great purpose around the playground, always right on the verge of falling on their faces, while the parents took photos of them with their cameras and hoisted them onto various pieces of equipment. Every month, a different parent compiled dozens of photos of the Infinite Family that had been taken in the past thirty days and had photo albums printed and delivered to everyone in the complex. Izzy had these slim, flimsy photo books, stacked in chronological order, in the bookcase next to her bed, and she consulted them often, feeling somewhat guilty that, on every page, she immediately searched for Cap’s face.
At the edge of the activity, Izzy watched the reporter from Time, a rugged-looking adventurer type who seemed mystified by the dimensions of the family, as if he’d stumbled upon an unknown tribe, talk to Dr. Grind and Dr. Patterson. One of the babies, Maxwell, walked over to Jill and reached for her hand, imploring her to join in the fun, and she bent over and shuffled to a mini merry-go-round and began to spin it for the child. It looked like a block party, something normal and middle American. This was what Dr. Grind kept stressing to them in the days leading up to this visit. He had seemed slightly annoyed by the fact that the magazine was coming to write about them at all, but, as Izzy learned from Kalina, this was the work of Brenda Acklen, their mysterious benefactor, who wanted the work at the complex to be noticed, to be a part of the national consciousness. “We’re not going to highlight what’s different about our project,” Dr. Grind told them over dinner a few nights before the visit. “We’re going to highlight what’s just like everyone else in the world.”
“Why?” Julie Howser asked. “Why not highlight why we’re so different?”
“Because,” Dr. Grind replied, smiling, gesturing to encompass every person around the dinner table, “that will be wonderfully obvious after they spend some time with us.”
Apologizing to the photographer, she ran out of the kitchen and down the stairs to the courtyard to check on the temperature of the smoker. She added some more wood and then mopped the entire carcass with a vinegar sauce, slightly different from that at the Whole Hog, her own recipe, and closed the heavy lid of the smoker, which clanged shut like a prison door. Asean and Alyssa both came over to the smoker to see if it was ready yet, and Izzy assured them that it was almost finished. Feigning great interest in the smoker, the two of them finally looked at Izzy. “We know it was a mistake,” Alyssa admitted. “It was stupid. We were drunk. What’s important now is that we don’t talk about it. What’s done is done, right?”
Izzy looked to Asean, who nodded. “We know that it didn’t mean anything, but others might not,” Alyssa continued, the longest Izzy had ever heard her talk at one time. “Dr. Grind, can you imagine what he would say? It’s done, it’s over, and we’ll just keep it to ourselves.”
“Okay,” Izzy said.
“I’m so hungry,” Alyssa said, looking back at the smoker. “I’m starving.” Then the two of them walked away, Izzy watching them return to the fold with perfect composure.
Izzy knew she should head back to the kitchen to finish the sides, but she wanted to be with the kids. Disco was playing on the boom box and the children were wiggling without any regard for the actual beat, simply acting out the sounds as it fired in their brains. The photographer was now back outside, snapping photos of the children. She watched Cap and Ally roll an oversize beach ball back and forth and occasionally try to climb it. Gilberto, unattended at the edge of the playground (even with so many adults around, it was still so strangely easy to lose track of a child), toppled over and started to cry, and Izzy scooped him up and rubbed the reddening bump on his forehead until he crumpled in her arms and went quiet. Nina came over and checked on them, and Izzy handed the boy over to her; as soon as he was transferred, a smile returned to his face and he wriggled with impatience until Nina placed him back on the ground and he crab-walked back to the action. It amazed Izzy the way the children rushed through so many complicated emotions without space between each one. Everything rose so quickly to the surface and then subsided, like firecrackers, and what had originally been so jarring to her, their unguarded emotion, now filled her with great comfort, that anything, no matter what it was, would eventually give way to something else.