An old unresolved confusion gathered like asthma in Denise. She felt a need to get away and cook.
“I stopped at the necessary markets,” she told Brian.
“It doesn’t seem fair to put our guest to work,” he said.
“On the other hand, I offered, and you’re paying me.”
“There is that, yes.”
“Erin, now you be a pathogen,” Sinéad said, slipping into the water, “and I’ll be a leukocyte.”
Denise made a simple salad of red and yellow cherry tomatoes. She made quinoa with butter and saffron, and halibut steaks with a color guard of mussels and roasted peppers. She was nearly done before she thought to peer under the foil coverings of several containers in the refrigerator. Here she found a tossed salad, a fruit salad, a platter of cleaned ears of corn, and a pan of (could it be?) pigs in blankets?
Brian was drinking a beer by himself on the deck.
“There’s a dinner in the fridge,” Denise told him. “There’s already a dinner.”
“Yikes,” Brian said. “Robin must have — I guess when the girls and I were out fishing.”
“Well, there’s a whole dinner there. I just made a second whole dinner.” Denise laughed, really angry. “Do you guys not communicate?”
“No, in fact, this was not our most communicative day. Robin had some work at the Garden Project that she wanted to stay and do. I had to kind of drag her over here.”
“Well, fuck.”
“Look,” Brian said, “we’ll have your dinner now, and we can have hers tomorrow. This is totally my fault.”
“I guess!”
She found Robin on the other porch, cutting Erin’s toe-nails. “I just realized,” she said, “that I’ve been making dinner and you already made it. Brian didn’t tell me.”
Robin shrugged. “Whatever.”
“No, I’m really sorry about this, though.”
“Whatever,” Robin said. “The girls are excited that you’re cooking.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Whatever.”
At dinner Brian prodded his shy progeny to answer Denise’s questions. Each time she caught the girls staring at her, they lowered their eyes and reddened. Sinéad in particular seemed to know the right way to want her. Robin ate quickly with her head down and declared the food “tasty.” It wasn’t clear how much her unpleasantness was aimed at Brian and how much at Denise. She went to bed soon after the girls, and in the morning she had already left for mass when Denise got up.
“Quick question,” Brian said, pouring coffee. “How would you feel about driving me and the girls back to Philly tonight? Robin wants to get back to the Garden Project early.”
Denise hesitated. She felt positively shoved by Robin into Brian’s arms.
“Not a problem if you don’t want to,” he said. “She’s willing to take a bus and leave us the car.”
A bus? A bus?
Denise laughed. “Sure, no, I’ll drive you.” She added, echoing Robin: “Whatever!”
At the beach, as the sun burned off the metallic morning coastal clouds, she and Brian watched Erin veer through the surf while Sinéad dug a shallow grave.
“I’ll be Jimmy Hoffa,” Sinéad said, “and you guys be the Mob.”
They worked to inter the girl in sand, smoothing the cool curves of her burial mound, thumping the hollows of the living body underneath. The mound was geologically active and was experiencing little quakes, webs of fissure spreading where Sinéad’s belly rose and fell.
“I’m just now putting it together,” Brian said, “that you were married to Emile Berger.”
“Do you know him?”
“Not personally, but I knew Café Louche. Ate there often.”
“That was us.”
“Two awfully big egos in a little kitchen.”
“Yuh.”
“Do you miss him?”
“My divorce is the great unhappiness of my life.”
“That’s an answer,” Brian said, “but not to my question.”
Sinéad was destroying her sarcophagus slowly from within, toes wriggling into daylight, a knee erupting, pink fingers sprouting from moist sand. Erin flung herself into a slurry of sand and water, picked herself up, and flung herself back down.
I could get to like these girls, Denise thought.
At home that night she called her mother and listened, as she did every Sunday, to Enid’s litany of Alfred’s sins against a healthy attitude, against a healthful lifestyle, against doctors’ orders, against circadian orthodoxies, against established principles of daytime verticality, against commonsense rules regarding ladders and staircases, against all that was fun-loving and optimistic in Enid’s nature. After fifteen grueling minutes Enid concluded, “Now, and how are you?”
Since her divorce, Denise had resolved to tell her mother fewer lies, and so she made herself come clean about her enviable travel plans. She omitted only the fact that she would travel in France with someone else’s husband; this fact already radiated trouble.
“Oh, I wish I could go with you!” Enid said. “I so love Austria.”
Denise manfully offered: “Why don’t you take a month and come over?”
“Denise, there’s no way could I leave Dad by himself.”
“He can come, too.”
“You know what he says. He’s given up on land tours. He has too much trouble with his legs. So, you just go and have a wonderful time for me. Say hello to my favorite city! And be sure and visit Cindy Meisner. She and Klaus have a chalet in Kitzbühel and a huge, elegant apartment in Vienna.”
To Enid, Austria meant “The Blue Danube” and “Edelweiss.” The music boxes in her living room, with their floral and Alpine marquetry, all came from Vienna. Enid was fond of saying that her mother’s mother had been “Viennese,” because this was a synonym, in her mind, for “Austrian,” by which she meant “of or relating to the Austro-Hungarian Empire”—an empire that at the time of her grandmother’s birth had encompassed lands from north of Prague to south of Sarajevo. Denise, who as a girl had had a massive crush on Barbra Streisand in Yentl and who as a teenager had steeped herself in I. B. Singer and Sholem Alei-chem, once badgered from Enid an admission that the grandmother in question might in fact have been Jewish. Which, as she pointed out in triumph, would make both her and Enid Jewish by direct matrilineal descent. But Enid, quickly backpedaling, said that no, no, her grandmother had been Catholic.
Denise had a professional interest in certain flavors from her grandmother’s cooking — country ribs and fresh sauerkraut, gooseberries and whortleberries, dumplings, trouts, and sausages. The culinary problem was to make central European heartiness palatable to Size 4 Petites. The Titanium Card crowd didn’t want Wagnerian slabs of Sauerbraten, or softballs of Semmelknödel, or alps of Schlag. This crowd might, however, eat sauerkraut. If ever there was a food for chicks with toothpick legs: low-fat and high-flavor and versatile, ready to fall in bed with pork, with goose, with chicken, with chestnuts, ready to take a raw plunge with mackerel sashimi or smoked bluefish …
Severing her last ties with Mare Scuro, she flew to Frankfurt as a salaried employee of Brian Callahan with a no-limit American Express card. In Germany she drove a hundred miles an hour and was tailgated by cars flashing their high beams. In Vienna she looked for a Vienna that didn’t exist. She ate nothing that she couldn’t have done better herself; one night she had Wiener schnitzel and thought, yes, this is Wiener schnitzel, uh huh. Her idea of Austria was way more vivid than Austria itself. She went to the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Philharmonic; she reproached herself for being a bad tourist. She got so bored and lonely that she finally called Cindy Müller-Karltreu (née Meisner) and accepted an invitation to dinner at her cavernous ‘nouveau penthouse’ overlooking the Michaelertor.