Her first efforts in the kitchen were clumsy and inadequate, everything tasteless, burned, the beans hard as gravel and the soup so salty it was like spooning up seawater. She was at a loss. The stove was too hot, then it wasn’t hot enough. Pots boiled over, meat blackened in the oven. She served the three men at table through breakfast (overcooked eggs and chalky gruel), luncheon (lamb or salt pork fried in lard, with hot sauce, Mexican beans, fried potatoes and bread that was like hardtack because it wouldn’t rise) and dinner (more of the same), and sat at the far end of the table with her own plate and watched their faces as they lifted one forkful after another to their lips. They grimaced, sluicing the meat into the beans and the potatoes into the meat, mashing the whole business together and drowning it in grease, hot sauce and pepper, but no one complained, or at least not to her face. In fact, during those first weeks everyone seemed to tiptoe around her, Adolph vague and elusive, Jimmie solicitous, her stepfather going out of his way to conciliate her now that he’d seen she was going to be compliant, if not exactly reconciled to her lot — but then what choice did she have?
He did the slaughtering and showed her how to sharpen the knives and cut chops and sear them in the pan or rub a leg of lamb with thyme and rosemary and bake it so that the juices flowed and it didn’t taste like wood pulp. When they had turkey — or more rarely, chicken — Jimmie cornered the bird, took off its head with a stroke of the hatchet and hung it by its feet to bleed out, but it was up to her to scald and pluck and gut it, the wet eviscera steeping her hands and getting up under her nails so that she was forever picking at them and running her orange stick over her cuticles. The first time, she tried to spare herself, poking gingerly at the pale stippled skin with the tip of her knife until Jimmie took it from her and ripped the bird open from the slot at its rear all the way to the breastbone, and when she tried to dislodge the organs with a knife and spoon rather than her fingers, Jimmie just reached in and tore them out. “There’s nothing to be squeamish of,” he said. “It’s just animals. Meat, that’s all it is.”
The days tumbled past. Her hands toughened. She cut herself or burned her palm on the stove or the handle of the frying pan two or three times a day and learned to ignore it. Out of boredom — and a sense of standards, that too — she cleaned up the kitchen till it was as orderly as when Ida and her mother had been in charge, and very gradually, as a matter of self-preservation as much as anything else, she began to find that she did have a way with cooking after all. Not that there was much range for variation — the meals were standardized to the point of ritual and the household was forever running short of one thing or another so that she had to improvise more often than not — but at least things seemed to taste better, or at least she thought they did. She never did get the knack of baking — her loaves were like wheaten bricks, her bread pudding dense and unpliable. And when she fried abalone steaks, no matter how often she shifted the pan around the stovetop, they were invariably sodden, tasteless and tough. After a while, even though abalone were her stepfather’s favorite dish (at least in the abstract, since they cost nothing), he stopped bringing them to her.
She’d heard it said that people could get used to anything, like the Arctic explorers who had to butcher their dogs just to keep from starving and then wear their coats around as if the animals who’d inhabited them had never been their companions and confidants, or the prisoners in solitary confinement who made do with a rat or roach for company — or even Robinson Crusoe, who got so inured to his island he didn’t want to leave it — but to her way of thinking adaptability was a curse. She sank into the usual and the usual had nothing to do with her life. The evenings were hardest. During the day she was so busy with the chores she hardly had time to think and when she wasn’t cleaning up after one meal and preparing the next she made time to get out and away from the house, tramping the dunes and ridges of the island till she became as strong and fit as an Alpinist and her mind ran free. (If she saw a lamb that had been abandoned she left it where it lay bleating and if Jimmie or her stepfather came across it, they butchered it and ate spring lamb and she didn’t think twice about it. She wasn’t a sentimentalist, not anymore.) But in the evenings, after the meal had been served and the dishes washed, the emptiness overwhelmed her.
She made a fourth for whist most nights, glad for the distraction, and more often than not chose Jimmie as her partner (“Excellent choice,” her stepfather would say, always in his best humor at the card table, “pitting the young folks against the old once again, isn’t that right, Adolph? And who do you think’ll win this time?”). Jimmie wasn’t much use as a player, though — he was too busy gaping at her or gazing off across the room as if he’d been hypnotized and he never gave a thought to protecting his cards so that her stepfather always seemed to know what suit Jimmie was going to bid before he did himself. Still, once in a while they did win a hand, and on rare occasions a game or two, and when they did she couldn’t help taking satisfaction in the way her stepfather’s face froze up with disappointment. There was the Ouija board too, but without her mother there to guide them, the messages seemed bland and obvious (Spirits abide; Sheep money; Treasure comes horizon) and though they were all eager to hear from the beyond, her mother’s spirit never entered the room. The men didn’t much care for the game in any case and after two or three attempts, she put the board away and never retrieved it again.
But God in heaven was she bored! She took up with Jimmie where they’d left off — she the mistress, he the slave — but it wasn’t the same. She’d seen what life was now, Ida exiled, her mother dead, her stepfather set in place to rule over her and all her prospects rubbed off the board as if her own life were a game she’d already lost, and their play-acting seemed to take on an intensity she hadn’t felt before. Jimmie had changed. He wasn’t content to be her foil, not the way he once was. He was stronger, more sure of himself, and he understood perfectly well that her pool of companions had drawn down to one. “I’m the ram,” he said, giving her a look. “And what does that make me,” she said in return, “the ewe?” His eyes jumped away and then came back to her again. “Yes,” he said, drawing out the single syllable as if this were a philosophical proposition he was mulling over at length, “that’s right. That’s it exactly.” She was bored. He was bored too. And when her stepfather tried to discourage them from spending time together, from hiking, beachcombing, swimming — anything out of his sight and control — they came together all the more determinedly.
It began almost at once, in the very first week. Jimmie was in the kitchen, helping her put things in order — she had him up on the stepladder driving nails into the high beam so that she could hang things there and get them out of the way — and she’d just handed him the cast-iron stewpot when he sprang down off the top step, laughing aloud in a sudden excess of spirits, took her in his arms and danced her across the room to a madcap rhythm all his own. The first few steps were awkward, almost as if they were grappling, but she let herself go and followed him and they went round the room two times, three, both of them laughing now. Everything had been grim — everything was grim — and here was this burst of exhilaration to take her by surprise. She was alive after all, giddy suddenly. And when she pushed him away — pushed hard, as if they were children roughhousing on the playground — and then pulled him to her so that they were breast to breast and their faces inches apart, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to kiss him. On the lips. And this was a different sort of kiss altogether, qualitatively different, nothing at all like when he kissed her hand like a courtier or she’d made him press his lips to her feet, her ankles, her calves and thighs — this was mutual, a partnership, ram and ewe, and she could feel the heat of him burning and burning as if she’d gone right inside of him to live there like Jonah in the belly of the whale.