Savage Feast Read online

  Chapter 17

  July 2015

  The Denver airport is 350 miles from Custer State Park, in South Dakota. I drove past Cheyenne; Fort Laramie, where the U.S. government signed one of the many treaties it betrayed with the Lakota; and Hot Springs, South Dakota, from where I’d received a note about my first novel from a not-Jewish Anglo woman who filed claims for the Lakota. (The novel was about Holocaust reparations.) I thanked her in the darkness.

  In daylight, I had been able to summon some marvel. Somehow, my hopefulness wasn’t dead. My parents were the reason. I’d been raised in love, and now I couldn’t stop believing in it. Of course, my family kept that love strictly for its own. But I didn’t have my own family yet. Et cetera.

  But then my father’s question tolled in my mind: You can’t wait till she comes home? Generally, my father worked to conceal his bafflement at the person I’d become—I could see through it, but he was trying—but this time he stared at me in open bewilderment. He was bewildered also because he knew he couldn’t stop me. I’d known it for some time, but this may have been the moment he did. I knew that we would never discuss it.

  Since virtually the day we’d arrived in America, more than twenty-five years before, I had helped him—found him the subway schedules that would get him back to the Port Authority bus terminal from the building where he worked as a doorman; planned his and my mother’s vacations; found and bought him the things he needed on Amazon, all of which he wanted his son to keep doing instead of learning how to himself—but in asking me to slow down and find patience, he was being a parent, and a proper one. And the experience was so unrecognizable to me that I’d nodded absently through it, and here I was now on this ill-advised road in full darkness. His words beat like a shrill bell in my ears, like the refrains that hounded me when I was most ill: You can’t wait till she comes home? You can’t wait till she comes home? You can’t wait till she comes home?

  My upbringing seemed to have left me both repelled by and addicted to closeness: Alana and I had spent our eight years separating and getting back together every several months. Did that explain Amy, the married woman, then? I’d made sure to get together with someone who wasn’t available? I pushed hard for a life together with Amy because I knew that’s what you were supposed to want, but perhaps the distance we had was the right fit? Maybe all the distances I had been discovering—with where I’d come from, with Oksana, with my grandfather, with my kitchen mates—signaled not an acceptance of my self and how I could choose among its parts without having to be completely, perfectly anything, but an inability, simply, to come any closer. And was that inability some authentic self I had to accept, or a betrayal of some truer self that was better at intimacy and that I had to keep digging down to?

  I felt an unfamiliar sympathy for my parents. I seemed unable to take good care of myself, but I wanted to take care of them. For all that I’d tried to disown, and had, I was their perfect alchemy: my father’s mother’s willfulness and preference of singing to socks full of cash, and my father’s need for his own way, somewhere far from most people; my mother’s side’s obsession with good marks, appearances, lots of noise, and never having enough. By now I had stood in front of many rooms, my first novel in hand. They always asked why you became a writer. An impossible question, but my four-headed answer floated up easily. Immigration gave me a million stories. Learning a new language at nine rather than zero left me astonished by what words could do. Because my people never expressed negative feelings directly (not a bequest of our totalitarian surroundings, but because they wished, above all, to show love, and what kind of love was it, they thought, if you disagreed openly?), I had to learn how to listen for what was meant rather than said, becoming acutely observant. That same love, however, meant I was never discouraged from speaking. A table of adults would fall silent so I could ask, or say. That last was the key: A fellow immigrant writer friend with a nearly identical background had only the first three, and had to work much harder to find the courage to put words on a page. I owed to my elders the career that had given them such alarm.

  I was feeling too much about my parents to handle a phone call to them, but I desperately wanted to hear a familiar voice. I hadn’t seen another car in what felt like an hour, and now I was pinned between two ridges, violet in the weak moonlight, that seemed ready to come to life and enfold me as I swiped right and left on that mountain-pass road, proper for one car, not two.

  My grandfather had been getting tired out earlier and earlier in the evening, and it was later in New York, but I decided to try. But when I tried the “big phone”—that was what he called the landline—no one answered. This meant that either something bad had happened or he and Oksana were out somewhere at ten in the evening. To my relief, he picked up the “little phone”: They were outside the building, on the row of ratty foldout chairs that was out there all the time. When the weather was clement, various old people who wanted fresh air but couldn’t walk far descended to Kibitz Row and kibitzed.

  “Nothing good, nothing good,” he said when I asked how he was. I saw myself turning around in the darkness, rushing back to the airport—whatever illness it was would be significant enough to overcome my self-sabotage, and I almost wished for it. But it wasn’t his health—they had gone for a walk, and he had left his jacket in the Chinese café on Bay Parkway. Fuck the jacket, he had ten jackets—it’s that there were two lottery tickets in it! These were going to be the ones—these! I thought about pointing out that it was his mania regarding the murderous power of drafts that made him wear a jacket in July in the first place, but I refrained. They walked to the Chinese café every day, ostensibly for exercise, but also for baked buns. He dunked them in tea and chewed on the mash like an infant. On the way back, he bought lottery tickets like an addict. He had become too old to hustle up neighborhood deals. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t making money, and it had undone him.

  The upsetting part was that it made this most generous of men ungenerous and suspicious. He and Oksana always split the cost of the lotto tickets so they could split the grand win when it finally came, but one time, she had scratched off the forms, said it was nothing, and thrown them away. But she didn’t throw them away! They were winners—big winners! And she was secretly collecting the millions. So secretly, I said when he claimed this, that she couldn’t stop cooking and cleaning for an old man? What can I say, he said. She’s devoted to me.

  Why was he outside at bedtime? The heat had died down, he said—you could breathe. I knew what he was doing—delaying the moment he had to turn on the A/C. Now he really did have to make it on his Social Security—he refused to take money from us; it was supposed to go the other way—and Con Edison rates did not take pity in the summer. My mother had come up with the fiction that the federal government reimbursed senior citizens for 50 percent of their cooling bills in the summer—she would give my grandfather the money and then get “reimbursed” when she sent in the bill—and it seemed like he bought it, but I knew he kept it off whenever he could, just in case. A liar knows lying.

  For better or worse, speaking to my grandfather had made me forget my surroundings—I was next to him on that warm, dusty pavement outside his building—so that when he asked me where I was, I had to think a moment before I said “Colorado.” With him, you could be truthful, because Colorado, Calcutta, Kaliningrad—all were the same. I could have told him Colorado was next to New Jersey. The only thing he wanted to know was “what they had there.” He meant, partly, what kind of natural formations—mountains? rivers? oceans?—so that he could curate his admonishments properly: Be careful in that water—do not go deeper than the knee. Be careful with those forests—let other people go in them. The second meaning was: Did they have unique, well-made liquors? Perhaps there was a good bottle I could buy to add to the fancy-liquor collection in the cabinet of his wall unit.

  Having moved through our script—

  Me: Okay, I won’t go in the river.

&
nbsp; Him: Who needs it? Don’t do it.

  Me: I’m telling you, okay!

  Him: Let other people do it.

  Me: For fuck’s sake—I’m thirty-six years old!

  —and the bad feeling without which we could not complete a conversation, I was safe to move on to Oksana.

  “Hello, lover boy,” she said.

  “I see the grapevine is working efficiently,” I said.

  “We all want something to root for,” she sighed.

  “What do you think?” I asked her.

  “If she is good, if she is kind . . .” she began. “The woman is what matters. If the woman is certain, then the man can have all the doubts he wants. She is the rock.”

  “Oksana!” I yelled before I could stop myself. “I want a life partner, not a servant!” This was the platitude side of her. The submitting side. It was the first time I’d raised my voice at her, and I felt instant regret, not least because maybe it was just carryover from talking to my grandfather. Then again, it wasn’t a friendship until you had fought. Right?

  “You’re right, of course,” she said without resentment. “I’ve lived for others for so long I wouldn’t know how to do otherwise.”

  Sometimes, “submission” was just another word for acceptance. I did not have her submission, and I did not have her acceptance.

  “If you had all the money in the world,” I said in a conciliatory tone of voice, “and a week when you couldn’t work, and you couldn’t have contact with your kids—if the world froze, basically, and you had a satchel of cash in your hands—what would you do?”

  There was a long pause. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “You know I’m proud of taking care of your grandfather. But so badly, I want a result. You know what I mean? A result. An outcome that affects lots of people. Let it be a café I own where I cook for people. Or I don’t know what. But lots of people. I’m good at doing things fast, I’m organized, I can do a lot with a little. I want to leave some kind of trace, you know? And I know I never will. What it would take to do that—to have less time for my kids; to go without income for a time—I know I will never be able to do. It’s a dream. That’s okay. It’s a dream.”

  First, I felt all the usual caretaking feelings. I would save her. We would open a café together. She would cook, and I’d be front of the house. I would put up the money so she didn’t have to interrupt earnings. Et cetera. The next thought was: As they fantasize about an entrepreneurial life of exactly the sort you’re living, they keep trying to fill you with fear about the foolhardiness of its worry and risk. The third thought was: I love you all so much, and I am so tired of you. I signed off in the family way that I had started to use with her after our trip to Ukraine—“a kiss for you”—and returned to the road, no longer at all like the road I was on before I had called them.

  Chapter 18

  What to cook for forty Lakota children

  What to cook to turn a mistake into hope

  It was nearly midnight when I arrived at Custer State Park. My headlights swept up the drive Jessica had walked so many hours, and there she was, her shoulders drawn because of the chill. Over the phone, we were nearly in love, but the last time we’d seen each other, I’d spent the evening angrily avoiding her gaze. We’d been in the same room all of three or four times.

  Everyone would wake up if I set up my tent in the main camping area, so we pitched it in some very tall grass near the road. Inside, it felt like a small boat in high water. “It’s better in person,” Jessica said, and fell asleep on my chest. I stayed awake, trying to think of what we’d said to each other all those nights on the phone. To my disbelief, I remembered very little. It was impossible to put on a show—to keep saying only things that would achieve the desired effect—for a week’s worth of seven-hour phone calls, wasn’t it? That kind of madness would have to be noticeable even if one’s self-awareness wasn’t very high, wouldn’t it? Or had that falsehood grafted so fully onto whatever was underneath that they were indistinguishable?

  What had been a star-dusted black bowl the night before revealed itself, in the sharp morning light, to be a field of tall grass on the edge of a lake scored with contrails of what looked like sun crystals. It was bright. After Jessica left, I counted to a hundred and followed her. A cluster of boy tents climbed up one side of a depression that kept camp protected from the weather, and a cluster of girl tents climbed up the other. One of the other counselors, thin with long hair, walked past me holding the fresh-ground coffee and raw sugar I’d brought in the hope of ingratiating myself, sat down by a camp stove, and clapped in anticipation of this improvement on the instant he’d been drinking. His gratitude didn’t extend to acknowledging me.

  There were children in the trees above him. A girl of ten or so, with high cheekbones, a round face, dark skin, and light brown hair that swung like its own curtain whenever she moved branches, and a boy, a little older.

  “Loretta,” the counselor called, digging in the grounds with a camping spoon. “You’re going to fall into my coffee.”

  As if challenged, she yelled and leapt down to the ground from what seemed too high up the tree. Then she charged him, he began shouting “no, no, no,” and she stopped just short of him and fell to the ground laughing.

  “Loretta, for God’s sake, go brush your teeth,” he said.

  Loretta got up and walked off, though for some reason she went into the boys’ bathroom.

  Though I stood next to them, I could have been invisible.

  By a group of picnic tables enclosed by a semi-open log structure, Jessica was scooping yogurt into plastic Solo cups and sprinkling it with granola while a junior counselor cut up apples. She was as beautiful as she had seemed that night I dropped trash on her feet outside Moscow57. Other than that, I felt nothing clearly. The children were eyeing the row of Solo cups without great excitement.

  “What about cereal?” a boy with short, spiky black hair said.

  “You had cereal yesterday,” Jessica said. “This is good, try it.”

  “Yogurt makes my head hurt,” he said.

  “Yogurt does not make your head hurt.”

  “It hurt my head yesterday, seriously,” he said.

  “You didn’t have yogurt yesterday.” She waved the yogurt tub—she had just opened it.

  “It makes your head hurt ’cause there’s nothing in there,” another boy proposed.

  “If there was nothing in there, it couldn’t hurt,” the first boy said. He nodded, as if, upon reflection, the logic checked out. A third boy—he had light brown hair that reached midway down his back, but he had the first boy’s face and thick chest—came over and laid his arm protectively on his shoulder. They looked like two little refrigerators. They had to be brothers.

  “What’s he, your boyfriend?” the first boy said to Jessica, pointing to me.

  “He’s my friend,” Jessica said. “He’s from Russia. You know where that is?”

  “You gonna teach me some Russian curses?” he said.

  Curry favor by despoiling the youth, or take the high ground and miss a chance to establish a connection?

  “Va fangul,” I said.

  “Va fangul,” he said.

  “And you’ve got to—you have to scrape your nails up your neck, sort of—like this.”

  He scraped skillfully. “Va fangul,” he said to Jessica.

  “Wonderful,” she said.

  One of the other senior counselors appeared, holding boxes of Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops. The kids began chanting: “Cereal! Cereal!” Deflated, Jessica stared at her. “Shit,” the counselor said. “Sorry. I thought—”

  While the children blew milk, pink from their cereals, at each other, Jessica and I set to making lunch for the road: She smeared Miracle Whip over limp slices of wheat, I wedged in one piece of turkey and one cheddar, and she wrapped in plastic. At one point I realized she was holding out bread and looking at me quizzically. I wasn’t sure how long she’d been waiting.

  �
�You all right?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said to her. “Of course.”

  “I know it’s a lot,” she said, motioning to the kids.

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “So what is it?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.”

  I was saved from further interrogation by the approach of the lead counselor. She didn’t introduce herself. Instead she said, “You’re going to cook dinner for forty people?” I had gone through a phone interview and a background check, but for some reason I was feeling a wall of doubt from the counselors.

  “Jessica said your cook canceled,” I said neutrally.

  “Well, we’ve got our hands full,” she said.

  “So that’s all I mean,” I said.

  “I’ve got two hundred dollars left for food, and that’s it,” she said.

  Forty people, two hundred dollars a meal—I could manage that.

  “No, no,” she said. “Two hundred total. Until the end.” The end was three nights away. Presumably, the children were meant to eat dinner on all three of them.

  “I see,” I said.

  Six chicken roasters, 5–6 pounds each

  Two pork shoulders, 10 pounds each

  Aluminum cooking trays (3)

  Bell peppers

  Tomato paste

  Cilantro

  Apple cider vinegar

  Apples

  Onions, 10 pounds

  Kale (5 bunches)

  Dijon mustard

  Garlic

  Parmigiano Reggiano

  Lemons

  Idaho russets, 5 pounds

  Goat cheese, 2 large logs

  Ground beef, 10 pounds

  Carrots, 5 pounds

  Bay leaves

  Extra-virgin olive oil

  Linguine, 10 pounds

  Black Forest cake (2) (3)

  I had come in at $193. None of it was organic, but some of it came from more or less nearby—California is a lot closer to South Dakota than to New York, though the same things cost more in South Dakota—and none of it was very terrible for you. Except the Black Forest cake. But I needed childproof insurance. The rest of the first dinner would be simple: roast chicken along with egg noodles, which I’d found in the camp larder, sexed up by a bath in the chicken fat. We had moved from a campground to a college in Rapid City, which had given us a kitchen with virtually no utensils, cooking implements, or serving plates, but I’d bought aluminum cooking trays, and the camp had its own pot to boil water. The only problem with the chicken recipe was that the high temperature—you cooked it at 450, for a crispy skin—invariably set off the smoke alarm, and there were no windows in the kitchen. I wondered what the Jewish prayer for competence was. I did the only thing I could think of: I sat down, as if to rest before a trip, as per Russian tradition. The only good thing about the cooking anxiety was that it covered up the other one.