The pie did work! Luda herself was surprised how well it worked. She had had some doubts as she was spreading the filling over the dough. To make the pie more authentically Russian, she had substituted cabbage for spinach, boiled eggs for feta cheese, and gotten rid of pine nuts altogether. She had a moment of worry that maybe those stupid pine nuts were the key ingredient after all. But when Luda took the pie out, not as perfect as on TV, far from perfect, but warm, and gleaming, and fragrant, all her doubts disappeared. She knew it would work. She closed her eyes and imagined that her own pie looked just as golden and perfect, and then she imagined Aron’s smile, and then — and this was the most delicious image — the stunned and furious expression on Milena’s face.
ARON ACTUALLY MOANED when he tried the first piece. When he finished the second piece, he took a napkin, wiped his lips, and looked at Luda. Looked at her and saw her. It had been such a long time since men saw her when they looked at her. “So good. I could eat it every day and not get tired of it,” he said. But even this didn’t give her as much thrill as the lost expression on Milena’s face. Poor Milena, Luda thought. Poor Milena, who wore a low-cut blouse and had brought store-bought eggplant caviar and to whom Aron said, “Did you buy it at the International on 5th and Brighton? They make a much better one in the Taste of Europe in Bensonhurst.” Poor, poor Milena.
I WONDER what the fat pig will make today, Milena thought, as she entered the bathroom the next Friday morning with a steaming coffee mug, a pack of cigarettes, and a book squeezed under her arm. Milena sat down on the toilet, put her coffee and the book on top of the laundry hamper, and lit a cigarette. People like Luda resembled battering rams; they would pummel and pummel, patiently, without taking a break, for as long as it took them to get what they wanted. Her lover’s wife was the same way, and she got her prize in the end; she still had her husband, who finally became a really good husband, because by now he was too old, too worn out, too scared, and too beaten to cheat. And Milena, stupid proud Milena, who had always thought it was beneath her to fight for a man, what did she gain? Nothing. She wound up with nothing. Just look at her: old and alone, sitting on a toilet with a coffee mug and a cigarette! Well, she wasn’t above fighting for a man this time.
She took a sip of coffee and started leafing through her book—pozharskie kotlety, kotlety pokievski, rasstegai—an old cookbook, with fine yellowed pages and elaborate drawings, a legacy from Milena’s allegedly aristocratic grandmother. There were countless long mornings when Milena’s grandmother would sit little Milena at the table and teach her how to make pozharskie kotlety or rasstegai. Afterward, she graded Milena’s work, usually poorly, because Milena was too impatient and wouldn’t do everything just so. How she hated those mornings! But she had learned how to cook. Surprise, surprise, fat pig!
LOOK, GUYS, we have something new from one of our Russian students today,” Angie said, taking a blue cotton napkin off Milena’s porcelain plate. There under a napkin were perfect golden squares of cheese puffs that smelled as if they had been taken out of the oven a second ago. There was a secret to that, which Milena’s grandmother had shared with Milena as a gift on her sixteenth birthday (Milena would have preferred new earrings). The puffs were so beautiful that people couldn’t bring themselves to grab them, as they did with other food at the feast. They picked up pieces with two fingers and chewed slowly and didn’t talk while they chewed, so all you could hear were the sounds of small crunchy bites. When all the puffs were gone, Aron flicked the few golden crumbs off his shirt and asked Milena what her name was. “Beautiful and unusual,” he commented.
Luda didn’t know much about medicine, so she didn’t know if extreme frustration and anger could cause an immediate heart attack. She decided that they couldn’t, because if they could she would be dead by now. The worst thing was the look on Milena’s face when Luda unpeeled the foil cover on her offering. The bitch actually chuckled. Yes, Luda had brought another Greek/ Russian cabbage pie. So what? It worked the last time; what was so stupid about assuming that it would work again? Luda loosened her scarf and sat down, hoping that either she or all the other students, along with Aron and Milena, would disappear somehow. She tried telling herself that Milena’s offering wasn’t better, it was simply new, but this thought failed to console her, as it had failed to console her many years ago, every time she sniffed yet another scent of a new perfume on her husband’s shirt.
The big heavy arm on her shoulder made Luda flinch. “I didn’t like her puffs,” Oolna said. “Show off. Not real food.” Luda wanted to bury her face in Oolna’s soft, boundless chest and cry with gratitude. And then the wife from one of the Russian couples sidled in and whispered that she didn’t like the puffs either. “Too salty, didn’t you think? And she is wearing way too much makeup for her age.” Luda smiled and happily shared her observation that Milena’s face looked like a battle-field for antiaging creams.
IN THE WEEKS to come, Luda saw that she wasn’t just an annoying old woman anymore, she was the star of the show. The whole net of clumsy alliances was quickly spinning around her. There was Oolna, the oldest and truest of her fans. There was the Russian wife, and there was the Dominican couple who didn’t like feeling intimidated by Milena’s clothes and demeanor. The husband even made a show out of mocking Milena’s haughty manner of walking into the room, and the members of Luda’s fan club eagerly laughed.
But Milena too found herself surrounded by allies. First of all, there was the Chinese woman who had nursed a grudge against Luda since the day when Luda’s pie managed to outshine her spring rolls. Her other ally was the wife from the second Russian couple, who identified herself (somewhat incorrectly) with elegant, sophisticated women like Milena. And there was the second Chinese couple, who joined the camp simply because they always sided with the first Chinese couple. All of them laughed happily when Milena compared Luda to Saddam Hussein. The husband of the second Chinese couple was deaf in one ear, so his wife had to retell him the joke loudly and in Chinese, and then he laughed too.
But while both camps acknowledged that there was a contest going on, and while everybody knew what the main prize was, nobody ever mentioned Aron. They couldn’t help but wonder, though, whether he knew what the competition was all about. If he knew, he never showed it. He seemed to be bent on preserving his independence and his right to favor the winner. There were Fridays when Luda’s dish would come out too sloppy (either the fault of one or another Food Network host or of Luda’s overt zeal). And there were Fridays when Milena’s offering would be just a bit too subtle or too bland. And since Aron’s romantic gestures always went strictly in sync with the competition, Luda’s and Milena’s gains and losses in intimacy were fluctuating as well. There were Fridays when Aron seemed to have formed a special connection with Luda. He would sit and talk with her in the corner (after the best food was gone, never before), he would joke with her, he would ask her about her life and even make vague plans for the future, something like, “Do you like Manhattan Beach? It’s nice down there. I go for a stroll sometimes. Not too often.” And sometimes he would even walk her home. Once Aron kissed Luda on the cheek. His lips felt warm and dry and vaguely disappointing.
And there were Fridays that belonged to Milena. Aron would walk Milena home and try to brush against her sleeve or touch the flaps of her jacket, and once he attempted to play with her necklace. Sometimes he would even share his memories. One time, for example, he told her about a lovely woman with whom he had had a brief but passionate affair and who looked just like Milena, “No, seriously, the same eyes, the same cheekbones, even the same oval mole on the neck.”