yearning to be out for dinner . february 12. 2009
Nights much like tonight, I am biking home and it is cold and I fear that my arrival there will be one of disappointment. Trains and tracks still scattered in a state of shattered industry; my favorite pots used to heat foods with a surfeit of unpronounceable ingredients; children, who should be in bed, watching DVDs characterized by Disney's worst parental annihilation; a husband whose energy was spent and has no desire to join me in the exultation of potato shallot soup.
Nights much like tonight, I wish that I was out to dinner. It is not the food that I desire, but the memory of a time whose simplicity belied its solitary pain. On a day like today, the birthday of a man long since left and, while unforgotten, seldom thought of deeply, seldom missed; on a day like today, I wish we were eating dinner together.
While we were not happy in that sunny, upwardly mobile condominium in Reston, Virginia, we were flush with the luxury of expense accounts and a shared entrepreneurial endeavor. What we lacked in bliss we made up for in calamari and aioli.
Tonight, as I turn the corner, panniers bouncingly full of their freight of milk for my children, I am longing to be sitting in front of a table covered in a white tablecloth, dimly lit by candles and hooded lamps, two place settings, menus that I must hold close to read. There are prints on the wall, of well-bred hunting dogs, geese flying, still Scottish ponds. There is reserve, and quiet clinking of forks against restaurant dinner plates.
Instead of wide white plates, each with riches: two forks, a spoon just for coffee, a reserved knife for butter and another, more carnivorous sort; instead of this, I know I must stand over a kitchen sink whose tiles have been awkwardly replaced, scrubbing the dregs of our forks and spoons to center myself enough to cook dinner. I must wash the plates and bowls, empty pots of their oatmeal remains, wipe the crumbs of sourdough bread from the counter.
I think of what I will have first, blonder-than-blonde bread in chunky slices, butter in gold foil packets, perhaps a salad of spinach leaves (kidnapped from Californian fields before their time), sugar-crusted walnuts (sparkling with iodine and salt), crumbles of corporate cheese. And he, he is picky, he will design a salad by its ingredients, nothing sprung wholly out of the chef's head for Jeffrey. Jeffrey. I still remember his salad orders, his social security number, his middle name. But I know nothing of him. Oh, I know dimly; he is successful in his work, he still lives in the apartment in New York we shared (the day he signed the title, I was with him, we spent $100 for lunch to celebrate), he is married to a "Mrs." But who is he now? I do not know at all.
I wait at a traffic light, foot to the ground, passing the fingers of my mind over the gilt cake stand on which I have heaped shallots and garlic hoarded from the farmer's market, a jar of cinnamon sticks, peppercorns and sage leaves scattered from soups past. These I will peel, slice, melt into pork fat, as the dark rain outside my kitchen window whispers its lonely nighttime song.
For my entree, trout, crusted in more walnuts, butter, garlic. I order it and eat it hungrily, although it is never as I long for it to be, both crispy and sweet, both salty and tender, sparkling with culinary skill, worth the eighteen dollars. It is the nut-crusted trout of the late-shift cook, the one who is already halfway through a pitcher of margaritas in his brain, who is emptying one of his fryers of its oil to hasten cleanup. He can already see the clock stamping its mark of freedom on his timecard. Jeffrey's fish is barer than mine, salmon with nothing but lemon wedges and plain white rice. He lifts it by enormous forkfuls into his mouth, brain food, insipid, practical.
A slim mention in the alumni magazine erupted the memories, molten solitude, anger, long-hardened wrongs flowing, burning my always-raw emotions. "Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey S.," it began. There was a baby, Michaela, and I wondered if I should be happy for him, moving on, or something else. Fearful, perhaps, or just melancholic, a bare concern.
It was the reason. Having children. Or, that -- not bare, but raw, desperate -- concern for how they would flow into the world, how they would erupt into his life, whether he could manage those behaviors of which I never spoke, never breathed, never felt beyond the doors of our condos, New York, Reston, Charlottesville, Charlotte. It was for them that I finally made the decision, said "no" and "it's over" and "I'm leaving." For those unborn ones, for it would be my care in which God would entrust them. Those babies, they deserved my protection, my unbounded love. And with him, no.
I am ordering dessert, he does not wish for me to but I do, apples and crumbles of brown sugar and oats and butter, ice cream, a bitter cup of espresso, a curl of lemon peel. The sweetness and cinnamon brighten my senses for a breath, I sip deep caffeine, I believe in the world briefly before I must go home to parquet floors that are cold beneath my feet, to the yawning quiet emptiness of our life together.
I take a deep breath as I coast down the long block toward my home, fenced with bike wheels and reclaimed lumber, cluttered and anguished and loud and mine, mine, mine. Those dinners of my past, never interrupted by the shrieks of a six-year-old, the messy elbows of Truman, the angry hunger of the toddler who considers my body his, his, his -- those dinners are not what I want after all. No, I want potato peels in a compost bucket, I want to spill raw cream from the top of a jug into my bowl, I want fermented cabbage and peppers from a quart jar, stirred in, I want to spoon it into my mouth in the dark of this long-uncelebrated birthday, I want to revel in this complex, love-sheltered life.