“What if you’re wrong about my left leg?”
“I could be, I sure could be. In that case you’re gonna have to bump him from the other side and make him give you that rib. Either way he has to bend identical either direction or he’s gonna get beat by that cow the first turn around or the hundredth. It’s there. But don’t get me wrong, you got you a good scald on your colt today.”
Natalie had an interest in cooking that was unshared by her sister, Evelyn, despite the same patient training in a household that tried without success to be conventional. Oddly, Natalie disliked cooking while Evelyn — with a lifelong history of fallen cakes, loaves and soufflés, overcooked meats, congealed sauces and mushy vegetables — enjoyed it tremendously and was a scourge to her guests. She also loved to eat, especially food that had been prepared by other people. So, when she was invited to lunch by Natalie, despite a feeling of indeterminate dread, she accepted, arriving early and standing in the brisk new fall air in front of the tiny house that Stuart had built for them, the tiniest bungalow in a book of home plans, now surrounded by orderly evergreens and a small bed of flowers. She had taken this pause like some forensic diner to identify specific familiar food items — cold veal, gnocchi salad and, she thought, pumpkin soup — that she could already smell from the partially opened kitchen window. Natalie’s refrigerator, unlike the stark cold box in Evelyn’s house, would be bursting with cheese rinds, five kinds of mustard, melon parts scattered over five shelves, identical milk cartons at different degrees of fullness, cooked chicken halves, bits of meat wrapped in foil for possible dog visits, browning parsley, cellophane and cardboard boxes no longer containing garlic, Italian jug wine as well as pyramids of root vegetables from the back garden she disliked as cordially as cooking. It all seemed to stand for the wish she had for a life rich in people, for social luxury instead of a gruesome snack box for Stuart and herself.
Evelyn walked into a hallway so abbreviated her eye was at the level of the fifth or sixth step of a steep staircase, and a mere pivot revealed the living room, whose little brick fireplace had, upon its mantel, a photograph of their provider, Sunny Jim Whitelaw, with his accustomed scowl. There was a compact bookcase with a series of “chicken soup” books, some form of chicken soup for everyone and everything, except for the chicken itself which, in Evelyn’s view, most needed consolation. “We’re eating out on the porch!” came Natalie’s voice from the kitchen, and there Evelyn found a table laid, a white cloth, a plate of large tomato slices and Spanish onions in malt vinegar, tall goblets next to a wrapped bottle of Fumé. Evelyn sat down and looked at the low glare of cold sun beyond the winterized confines of the porch, frost-curled green ash leaves scratching at the glass. Evelyn lifted a goblet with its satisfying knock of ice and water within and thought how pleasant this was and how close to success many unsuccessful lives were, and how rare were genuinely sordid existences outside books and movies. Her sister and Stuart were an unsuccessful couple, not as Evelyn and Paul had been, but because Natalie was obsessed by what she perceived to be the hidden advantages of others. While Stuart was gentle and kind, Paul claimed he was simple enough to hide his own Easter eggs. Stuart’s remark at her father’s death—“That’s the best news I’ve had in years”—made Evelyn think there might be another side to him.
With a great exhalation of breath, Natalie swept in, balancing the meal on one hand and gesturing with the other for Evelyn to remain seated. Evelyn was pleased to see the anticipated tureen of pumpkin soup, but instead of gnocchi, she found sharply seasoned raviolis stuffed with pork.
“I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t love you,” said Natalie, sitting down in a disgusted heap. She found a kind of primness about Evelyn as she waited to be served.
“It’s beautiful, Nat. I don’t know how you manage.”
“What do you eat out there on the ranch, corn beef and cabbage?”
“Various stuff, not that.”
“You cook for Bill regularly?”
“Not regularly.”
“How’s his health?”
“He’s hanging right in there.”
Natalie spread her napkin in her lap. “When Dad sent you for riding lessons, I don’t think he ever figured you were never coming back.”
“Must have been the horses.”
“Well, whatever. Anyway, it was Mama always drove you out there, not Dad.”
“She liked to talk to Bill.”
“She really liked to talk to Bill.”
“I don’t think there was anything to it, particularly,” Evelyn said.
“Maybe, maybe not. But she sure liked driving you out there.”
Evelyn thought she’d let this one drop. But it was remarkable that anything that ever happened to her or Natalie was known almost instantaneously by Bill, however many miles away. And he was forever frustrated that Natalie couldn’t be made to take an interest in the ranch. He must have learned that from Alice Whitelaw. Perhaps, a friendship existed, and if so, fine.
“This was Daddy’s favorite soup, but not for now, for summer. How is it?”
“Really good.”
“You’d eat anything,” Natalie said, looking into the tureen as though daring its contents to be imperfect.
“I wish I could cook like this, but my mind goes shooting ahead and things catch fire.”
A car passed by pursued by a column of disturbed leaves, and Evelyn felt something odd about the two of them sitting together as though all the elements that had accounted for them were lifted momentarily and they would now bear the gravity of being the only excuse for their own lives.
“I’m in love with Frank Sinatra,” said Natalie, starting “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” with the touch of a button, “and I’m afraid of winter.” Wind-borne clouds were darkening the sky, and she was obliged to turn on the brass overhead lights, reconditioned salvage from an extinct ranch house in Black Eagle. Stuart gathered odds and ends from junk shops in such odd places as Box Elder and Medicine Lake and Opportunity. Evelyn remembered his pulling up in front of the house with a mountain of junk on a fifth-wheel lowboy, looking contented. “Thousand feet of straight grain Doug fir tongue-and-groove from Hungry Horse!”
“Old Blue Eyes,” said Evelyn.
“Funny you’d know that.”
“One of Bill’s horses, crop-out paint, he looks nuts.”
“How about ‘Der Bingle’ for Bing Crosby?”
They were at some sort of dead-end, and Evelyn looked around blankly. Stuart had really made a comfortable little house, though he baffled Evelyn in other ways with facial expressions that seemed to lie behind a scrim, like the faces of people on television whose identities were being protected; and he was so remarkably sexless that she could imagine him coming along before the age of anatomically correct dolls, a curious smoothness not without its appeal. Evelyn noted that Natalie’s intense concentration on her food would provide an excellent backdrop for difficult conversation offered in the form of mere incidentals. As here it came: “You won’t be offended, Evelyn, if I state that Paul is no Daddy.” She paused to make room for the reply that did not come. “He doesn’t understand the first thing about that business. You know Stuart speaks with the utmost kindness of other people, and even he says that Paul is completely lost. When employees go off and leave their pensions behind, something has gone badly wrong.”
“I’m sure there’s a problem with the transition. Daddy never budged.” Sunny Jim actually had said, “Budge and you die,” something he might have gotten from Bill. At any rate, there was this whole culture of budging and not budging that Evelyn couldn’t follow.
“It isn’t that at all, Evie. Paul is cruel and he’s inconsistent and he doesn’t know how to run the plant.”