The Wife Between Us(32)
I pause in rinsing off the chopping board.
I am so used to masking what I feel that it’s easy to slip on a smile and chat with Aunt Charlotte. But the reminders are everywhere, as always—in the white wine I dash into my sauce, and the salad greens I push aside to reach the mushrooms in the refrigerator’s vegetable bin. I fall into light conversation with my aunt, gliding above the thoughts roiling through my mind, like a swan whose churning feet are hidden as he floats across the water.
“Mom was a tornado,” I say, even conjuring a smile. “Remember how the sink was always overflowing with pots and pans, the counters coated with olive oil or bread crumbs? And the floor! My socks would practically stick to it. She didn’t exactly subscribe to the belief that you should tidy up as you went along.” I reach into the big ceramic bowl on the counter and pull out a Vidalia onion. “Her food was great, though.”
On her good days, my mother would create elaborate three-course meals. Worn volumes by Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, and Pierre Franey lined our bookshelves, and I would often find her reading one the same way that I might devour Judy Blume.
“You were probably the only fifth grader who would get homemade beef bourguignonne and a lemon torte on an ordinary Tuesday night,” Aunt Charlotte says.
I flip the chicken breasts, the uncooked side crackling against the hot pan. I can see my mother now, her hair wild from the heat seeping from the oven, clattering pots onto burners and mincing garlic, and singing loudly. “Come on, Vanessa!” she’d say when she caught sight of me. She’d twirl me around, then shake salt into her hand and throw it into a pot. “Never follow a recipe exactly,” my mother always said. “Give it your own flair.”
I knew a crash would come soon after those nights, when my mother’s energy had burned itself out. But something in her freedom was glorious—her unfiltered, stormlike joy—even though it frightened me as a child.
“She was something else,” Aunt Charlotte says. She leans an elbow on the blue tile countertop and rests her chin in her hand.
“She was.” I’m glad my mother was still alive when I married, and in a way, I’m grateful she isn’t around to see how I’ve ended up.
“Do you like cooking now, too?” Aunt Charlotte is watching me carefully. Almost studying me, it seems. “You look so much like her, and your voice is so similar sometimes I think it’s her in the other room. . . .”
I wonder if another, unspoken question is in her mind. My mother’s episodes grew more severe in her thirties. Around the same age I am now.
I lost touch with Aunt Charlotte during my marriage. That was my fault. I was even more of a mess than my mother, and I knew Aunt Charlotte couldn’t just swoop in to help me. I was too far gone for that. The hopeful, buoyant young woman I was when I married Richard is almost unrecognizable to me now.
She turned into a disaster, Hillary had said. She was right.
I wonder if my mother also suffered from obsessive thoughts during her episodes. I’d always imagined her mind was blank—numb—when she took to her bed. But I’ll never know.
I choose to answer the simpler question. “I don’t mind cooking.”
I hate it, I think as my knife comes down and severs the onion cleanly.
When Richard and I first married, I didn’t know my way around a kitchen at all. My single-girl dinners consisted of Chinese takeout or, if the scale was mistreating me, a microwaved Lean Cuisine. Some nights I skipped dinner altogether and munched on Wheat Thins and cheese as I sipped a glass of wine.
Still, the unspoken arrangement was that once Richard and I married, I would cook for him every weeknight. I’d quit working, so it seemed more than reasonable. I rotated between chicken, steak, lamb, and fish. They weren’t fancy meals—a protein, a carb, and a vegetable—but Richard seemed appreciative of my efforts.
The day we first visited Dr. Hoffman—the day Richard learned I’d been pregnant in college—was my first attempt at making something special for him.
I wanted to try to ease the tension between us, and I knew Richard loved Indian food. So after I left Dr. Hoffman’s office, I looked up a recipe for lamb vindaloo, searching for the one that seemed the least complicated.
It’s funny how certain details stick in the memory, such as how the wheel of my shopping cart needed to be adjusted, causing it to squeak every time I turned down a new aisle. I wandered through the market, searching for cumin and coriander, trying to forget how Richard’s face had looked when he learned I’d gotten pregnant by another man.
I’d called Richard to tell him I loved him, but he hadn’t replied. His disappointment—worse, the thought of his disillusionment—upset me more than any argument could. Richard didn’t yell. When angry, he seemed to coil into himself until he regained control over his emotions. It didn’t usually take him long, but I worried I’d pushed him too far this time.
I remember driving home on the quiet streets, the new Mercedes sedan Richard had purchased for me purring past the stately colonials constructed by the same builder who’d sold Richard our house. Occasionally I saw a nanny out with a young child, but I’d yet to make a friend in our neighborhood.
I was hopeful when I began to cook dinner. I cut the lamb into even chunks, following the recipe carefully. I remember how sunlight glowed through the large bay windows in our living room, as it did toward the end of every day. I’d found my iPod and scrolled down to the Beatles. “Back in the U.S.S.R.” twanged through the speakers. The Beatles always lifted my spirits because my father used to blast John, Paul, George, and Ringo in our old sedan when he took me out for ice cream or to the movies during my mom’s lighter episodes, the ones that only lasted a day or two and didn’t require Aunt Charlotte’s assistance.