What We Lose(10)
Afterward, I thought of him often, remembering the warm, excited feeling I felt for those hours I sat in the passenger’s seat of his car. But I was angry that he had led me on, and I didn’t reach out to him.
Eight months later, he emailed me, saying that he and his girlfriend had finally broken up. He invited me to Portland to stay with him for the weekend, saying he’d pay for the flight. I didn’t hesitate much, but I also didn’t tell anyone.
One afternoon in my senior year of high school, I came home to what I thought was an empty house. I wrestled out of my backpack and jacket, propped my feet up on the couch, and laid my head down. As the day drifted away and I began to sleep, I heard a noise coming from upstairs. It was the familiar sound of a body shifting on a bed, the floorboards complaining underneath. Then a faint, muffled sniffle.
Upstairs, my mother was curled up on her bed, her eyes red. She was still wearing her work outfit—gray blazer, pleated skirt. Her collared shirt was unbuttoned and her stockinged feet poked out from under the covers.
She had been in pain for the past two weeks. That morning, she had gone to the doctor to find out the results of her tests and had stayed in bed since. The pain had started in her chin, an aching that came out of nowhere and spread to her spine. She had had difficulty getting out of bed the past few days.
She told me how scared she was, and the tears kept coming and coming. I had to ask her to stop, to calm down, and surprisingly, she listened to me, if out of nothing else than desperation. “If they don’t know what it is, why should you worry?” I asked. She smiled at me, my na?ve logic seeming to calm her. She laughed softly. I kissed her, and then excused myself to go downstairs and switched on the television.
The pain continued and the doctors continued to be confounded. The air at home was decidedly anxious. Our family dinners of curries and aromatic roasts ceased. My father fixed simple, utilitarian meals that filled my stomach and suited my mother’s health restrictions. I brought a tray to my mother’s bedroom every evening and ate at the kitchen table with my father. He fumbled with the dishes and silverware as the sound of the TV buzzed from upstairs.
“Thank you,” my mother would say as she stared at the television. She would hug me or touch my cheek, and I would look deep into her eyes, searching for something that had already gone.
At last a chain of referrals led to an oncologist. I was called to the office at school on the day of the appointment, and I was almost relieved to learn what it was, even though it was the worst possible outcome, because it ended this horrible period of not knowing.
He is waiting for me at the airport, carries my small suitcase all the way to his blue hatchback. We kiss in the car, chastely, tentatively. His apartment is on the top floor of a three-story building in King. The landlady is an old Russian woman who smokes at the bottom of the back stairwell and cries every night. She has no family and no visitors; her life is a mystery that I fill in with tragedy.
His apartment is a one-bedroom, spare, decorated with brown thrift-store furniture. It smells faintly of mothballs and cologne. In the living room are four towering bookcases. None of them match. The books overflow from the shelves, stacked in corners, piled on the coffee table. We sit in the kitchen and he makes me peppermint tea. When I finish the tea, he takes the cup from me and puts his lips to my forehead. I sigh. We embrace and sink into each other. We find our way to his small bedroom and his low platform bed. He undresses me and runs his fingertips all over my body. When we make love, it’s like we are two halves of a whole joining. There is no space between us, no awkwardness. We lie in bed for many hours afterward, smiling, tracing the light from the window on each other’s skin.
That evening, he takes me shopping at the neighborhood market. It is a pioneering food co-op that also runs a food bank on weekends, serving different income types in the area. We stroll down the aisles. I push the cart from behind and he steers with his hand on the front. He pauses every few steps to hold up an item. You like this? You need this? Do you drink dairy milk? I prefer rice. I say yes to granola, rice milk, a young organic chicken, lemon, fresh rosemary, and baby potatoes.
When he goes out for work on my third night, I take the chicken out of the fridge, wash it, and pat it dry. I load it into his only suitable baking pan. My hands shake as I grease the skin with olive oil and rub salt and pepper all over the body. My knife wriggles as I cut the lemon in half and squeeze citrus over the bird. I tear the leaves off the rosemary and dot them all over the skin, shoving the stems deep inside the cavity along with the spent lemon halves. The baby potatoes I run under the tap, trying to be gentle as I massage off the grit under warm water.
My mother taught me how to roast a chicken to succulent moistness inside and crispiness outside. She taught me that men don’t always need, but they love, a woman who can cook and keep house. It wasn’t sexism, she said (such a disavowal, I noted, was usually a signal that it was); domesticity was harder to find in a partner now, because of feminism, and just like a job candidate who can code HTML, it was something that set you above the others.
As I lift the chicken, covered in foil, into the oven, I worry that I have not remembered my mother’s instructions correctly. Is it an hour at 350 degrees, or 400? Or do I start at 350 and then move up to 400 when I remove the foil? What if the oven is irregular? What if, no matter how perfectly I cook the chicken, he doesn’t like it? Then I would be a bad feminist and a bad cook. I shove the bird into the oven and collapse onto the floor.