Good for the Jews

7. April 2006

Chapter Seven April 2006 From the start, Ellen had been excited about cooking for Alex. She had a battered copy of Recipes for a Small Planet, and from this paperback volume came congealed bowls of adzuki beans and brown rice, salads of black seaweed, which proved entirely resistant to teeth, sweets with the heft and taste of an anvil. There’d been a disturbing vegetable terrine, an unidenti‹able jellied substance curdling on its surface, and a peanut butter and tomato soup so vile that Alex had eventually admitted to ›ushing the leftovers down the toilet. “Let me cook for you,” he ‹nally said. “I can cook vegetarian.” He made a Japanese soup with udon noodles and vegetables. “Wow,” she said over her ‹rst steaming bowl, the smell of garlic and ginger in her nose. “I thought when men cooked it was . . . like . . . hotdogs boiled in beer.” He laughed. “Pretty surprising thought, my dear. Given the century.” “I know.” “Why don’t you let me cook for the next stretch?” She did. He made crab cakes, Greek ‹sh in a packet, pasta with Swiss chard and pine nuts, a frittata with zucchini, mint and dill. The pleasure of pleasing her, he said. Somewhat of a relief that she was one of those vegetarians who ate ‹sh. “You like? You like?” he’d say, as she tasted each dinner. Then add: “I’m becoming a Jewish bubee.” 156 157 “Bub-ee,” she said. “Not boob-ee.” “I like it, but you know,” she eventually admitted. “It embarrasses me. All those things I made for you. I mean, I guess . . . I guess I’m a terrible cook.” “You’re pretty bad,” Alex said. But by the time they were living together in the Ridgeway house, things had changed. At ‹rst, Alex and Ellen had cooked together. Alex poured them each a glass of wine, and they lazily cut ingredients and talked or listened to NPR. He showed her how to smash garlic with the side of a knife, prep Swiss chard, cook a perfect pot of rice. After the accident , though, Ellen simply replaced Alex in the kitchen. “Stop,” she called, one night, as he was holding a yam with the three ‹ngers of his left hand, and trying to cut the rolling tuber with the knife in his right. “Just let me do it. I know you can do it, but I get so scared watching you.” He wanted to yell at her, he told her later—the ‹rst time he ever had the urge to do so. Instead, he put the knife down on the counter and walked into the bedroom. She followed, wringing (actually wringing ) her hands, and saying, “Sorry, sorry, it’s not you, it’s me. I know you can do it. You’re ‹ne. I know.” This hadn’t helped. Alex kept his hand in a bandage long past the time he needed to, a mummy’s hand, a cartoonish mitten. He never looked when Ellen dressed and redressed the wound. “You know,” he said, on the night of their dinner for the Clarks, Tamar and Kristen. “I guess I’ve been depressed.” “I think I knew that,” Ellen said, as she pulled items from a grocery bag. “A lot’s been going on.” She sensed he felt his luck had turned with the injury, that it wasn’t the lost ‹ngers he was grieving as much as the damage to come. Her job, as the younger member of the couple, was cheer: to insist that good things awaited them, no matter what the tenor of her thoughts. For Alex, the dinner for the Clarks and Tamar was something of a test, a chance to see if he was ready for conviviality, right here, in his incomplete home, where he’d let himself mope for several weeks—over Greg Shardon, over his injury—and where Ellen had tried to gauge his sentiments, going for her long runs while he read or attached himself to the computer for an evening of e-mail. 158 Ellen began to cut peppers for the salad. “Let me help,” Alex said. “Oh, yes, of course,” Ellen said blithely, as if she didn’t see how things had changed between them, now that he was asking for her permission to use his own knives. It was an evening, she knew, not for talk, but for NPR, which they listened to...