Fiction Friday

It's back...for all one of you who have been asking. ;) This is from "The C Word," in progress...

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The television in the living room, Liza notices, is tuned to the show Estelle’s son Charlie used to produce, the two women who only seem to talk about sex and shopping, before he moved on to the one with the four women who only seem to talk about sex and shopping. One of the women, a loud brunette with too much lipstick, is asking which Prada bag goes with her shoes. It seems like such an irrelevant waste of electricity that Liza announces she’s going to go start the soup.

Estelle looks up from her knitting. She’s been at this project it seems every waking minute for the last three days but she won’t announce what she’s making. All Liza knows is that it’s very large, and very yellow, and it keeps her from wanting to smoke. “What kind of soup?” Estelle asks.

“Lentil,” Liza says. Iron to build Estelle’s blood. Fiber to cleanse her colon. And, mostly, because there’s not much else in the house. Between her nutrition classes and her freelancing and hunting down the elements of the perfect cancer-killing diet, she’s neglected to keep up with their customary level of what Adam calls “normal food.” Which, if left to Adam’s choice, would consist of white bread, American cheese, hamburger meat and Doritos.

“What are you serving it with?”

Liza stops, puzzled, mid-way across the kitchen, holding a bag of kale and an onion in the other. “A ladle?”

Estelle huffs out a breath as if seeming to think, “who is this imbecile who married my son?” “I meant dinner. The main course. What are you serving it with?”

“Well, this sort of will be the main course. It’s a meal, with salad and bread. The soup has kale, and sweet potatoes.” More antioxidants. “It’s filling.”

Liza gets a skeptical grunt. The needles click.

“Adam likes it,” Liza says.

The needles click.

With a sigh, Liza returns to her task, chopping onions and garlic. The rhythm calms her, as does the satisfaction of seeing results. Soup, she can control. She can chop the onions as fine or course as she desires. Add celery or not, add potatoes or not, pour in a little wine or not.

A puddle of olive oil shimmers at the bottom of the pot. From the living room, the two women debate the merits of pointy toes versus round as seriously as if they were members of the UN Security Council. She’s disappointed all over again at Charlie. He knew back in college that he wanted to work in television, but he wanted to do something relevant. Bring important issues to the fore. Ferret out the truth, make poetry out of the struggles of the common man. She doubts that when they were sitting in Professor McClure’s Media and Society class that he was thinking that one day he hoped he would bring to the daytime homebound of America a lipstick that wouldn’t stain your coffee mug.

A voice rises over the television.

Liza comes around the corner, wiping her hands on a dishtowel. “Did you say something, Estelle?”

“I said, we’ll have chicken soup. Not tonight. Just some night when I’m here. I’ll show you. Adam likes that, too.”

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Once again Estelle leaves Adam with Mrs. Steiner. It’s been so often that Estelle is afraid that Adam will start calling her Mommy. In a silent prayer she asks her child to forgive her, forgive her absences, forgive her distraction. She made a promise to herself to always be there when he came home from school.

But this afternoon she’s making soup in her parents’ kitchen. On the way she gets a nice chicken from the butcher on the corner, who winks at her and asks when the baby’s coming and gives her a little extra. He knows the family. Everybody knows the family. She stops at the greengrocer and buys a little celery, a little carrot, a little parsnip, a little onion. As Mr. Silverman is weighing out her produce, Charlie wakes and stretches, kicking her low and to the right. She braces a hand against him, and all the women in the shop smile with that knowing smile. Charlie had been giving her trouble all week, twisting this way and that. In bed she sees a foot, an elbow, a knee. The women on her mother’s block all have their theories, what it means when a baby gives you heartburn, when he kicks, when certain foods make him act up or calm down. But later, as she’s skimming fat off the top of the water, as she’s tapping the spoon into the coffee can beside the stove, as the steam curls the hair around her face, Charlie stops fussing. The ladies find something prophetic about that, too.

He likes when Estelle cooks.

It’s not every food. Pot roast made him cranky. Made him press some knobby appendage up into her diaphragm in protest. He liked the lighter things. Soups. Breakfast. He loved breakfast. Eddie was gone too fast in the morning for breakfast, liked to sleep as late as possible, so she’d make for herself and Adam. Eggs, pancakes, French Toast.

Pearl, Eddie’s mother, said she was spoiling her older son. “You’re going to give some poor woman a headache, he’ll always expect the royal treatment.”

But Estelle didn’t care. The only happiness, the only comfort she’s had since her mother got sick has been in the company of her Adam. Eddie ate her meals and ran. Her mother’s appetite has been hit or miss. Her father picked distractedly, Estelle had to remind herself to eat for Charlie.

Adam ate enthusiastically, anything she put in front of him, and it was a pleasure to behold.

When she was pregnant with him, he didn’t show a preference like Charlie. Or she’d been so overwhelmed by the mere fact that she was having a baby that she’d failed to notice these little nuances.

Charlie likes her soup.

Her father comes into the kitchen. Mom wants a glass of water. “You’re making her hungry, she keeps asking when it’s going to be done,” he says, and kisses his daughter’s cheek. Then he makes some weak protest about Estelle being on her feet, but she says she doesn’t mind. She doesn’t mind at all.

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Adam holds the basket for Liza. “Mom said not to forget the parsnips.” He looks lost and frustrated and keeps checking his watch. He’s got a conference call with Eugene, Oregon at five. Also, he hates this store because they don’t sell Doritos and white bread, but the result will be his mother’s chicken soup, so he’s trying to be patient. Not hard enough, in Liza’s opinion.
“I don’t even know what a parsnip is let alone where to find one.”

He’d lived with Estelle Trager for how many years, eating her chicken soup, and he doesn’t know what a parsnip looks like? But then again, he didn’t spend too much time in the kitchen. When she met Adam, he was living on pizza, beer, chicken wings and care packages from his mother. “It’s like a big white carrot. It’s probably near the radishes.” As he goes off to root among the roots, Liza mentally calculates what she’ll need to buy next. More garlic and onions and sweet potatoes. Fresh cranberries for vitamin C and phytochemicals, she’ll make sauce and cut down the sugar.

Pleased with himself, Adam comes back holding a chunk of horseradish in a plastic bag.

“Close,” Liza says.

His expression falls. They hunt about some more and finally find them next to the cilantro. “Why don’t they label things in this store?” Adam says. “For the prices they charge, they could make some freaking signs.”

“They have signs,” Liza says. “They’re just really, really small. And, apparently,” she points out the one that reads ‘parsnips,’ “invisible to the male eye.”

“Funny,” he says, and watches her hands as she deftly snaps a plastic bag from the roll and works it open. “Please tell me you’re not going to do something like make the matzoh balls with whole wheat flour and bird seed.”

He looks truly worried that this will be his fate. But she’d learned her lesson with the grilled cheese sandwiches. Her free-spirited parents had shucked the conventions of their youth, but through Charlie, and then Adam, Liza had learned something about tradition. That sometimes it trumps common sense. She lets out her breath. “I guess the occasional glob of white flour isn’t going to hurt. Much.”