Still Life with Wine

I came across this today. I had written it in 2005, if the date on the file is to be believed. The events took place around 1996, so I think I must have written it out by hand long before I typed it up on a computer.

Reading it makes me sad, but happy that I’ve come as far as I have.

Still Life with Wine

Spanish Rice
1 cup rice
2 cups water or chicken broth
onions
garlic
green chilies
tomatoes (optional)
salt, to taste

When I add onions to the skillet the room becomes a different place. It's suddenly home. It doesn't matter what's waiting for me on the other side of the doorframe, inside the tiny kitchen I have a personal space created for me by the aromas of my hands' work. I don't grow onions, but I do buy them, peal them and then chop them finely before putting them into the pan. My favorite way to use onions is to put them in the skillet first, with just a tablespoon of oil, heated until it makes a ring around the outer three-quarters of the surface, with a dot in the center. That's how I know it's ready, that ring that the oil creates when it's just about to be too hot to use successfully. So before a visible cloud of smoke lets the rest of the household know that I've been lax, I add the onions and keep the oil too busy to make smoke. An invisible cloud forms, instead. An odiferous cloud that marks where my space begins. It's sacred, this space.

There's nobody waiting for me anywhere in the house at the moment. I have the place to myself. I could dance naked in the living room, and I have known myself to do it. I have put the stereo speakers in the window and danced salsa outside on the deck without a shirt on. By myself I can lounge and read, I can sing, I can paint or play the piano. With nobody around to question what I'm doing I'm free to do what I want. The problem is that I don't paint or play the piano enough. I don’t long to do those things until somebody's around me criticizing me for doing them.

I will have company before too long, and tonight I want to have dinner ready and waiting. Not that I'm one of those abused spouses that gets slapped against the wall if dinner's not waiting for the man as soon as he walks in the door. I just want that things go smoothly tonight. He has to work late and it always makes him so tired. He's not abusive, just quiet and sulky. I feel like a burden to him, sometimes.

We're staying at my place tonight, which is a surprise. We rarely stay here. I don't know why I still have a place of my own, except that he hasn't invited me to live with him. I suppose that he still enjoys having the only set of keys to his home, and a place to go to if he's too angry to be with me. It's funny, but I'm not allowed to retreat here if I'm just too upset or tired to deal with his miserably immaculate house. I have never, for one minute, felt comfortable there. And I've never cooked there, or seen him cook. He's heated frozen dinners, but that's the extent of his culinary ambition, which is fine because he would only have to spend the next week cleaning the kitchen if he actually used that lonely stove. Over there, I drink instant coffee in the morning.

I have my music playing on the stereo. I don't have to worry about him turning it off and turning on the television for at least another hour. Music makes my food turn out better. I don't know why I don't date somebody with the same musical taste that I have. It would be easier that way. I wouldn't have to wait until I was alone to enjoy the Caribbean rhythms and soulful voices.

Fortunately, my house is such that the stereo is on the other side of the living room and I can still hear it perfectly. It's only about six steps away. My kitchen and bathroom, which together make up about a 5'X10' space, are the only things in the house that qualify as rooms aside from the studio area, which houses my papasan sofa and my piano, my dining room table and my bed. There is no actual door between the kitchen and the dining area of the long room, which is my house. There is a door that folds sideways between the kitchen and the bathroom and right above the stove is a big window, which is always open.

The onions have now long since sautéed and I have added the green chilies and tomatoes and garlic to the mixture. Rice browns separately and as soon as it's ready I'll put the sautéed vegetation and two cups of chicken stock, which I froze last time I cooked chicken. Chicken backs and necks are good for making stock that I freeze and use later, with the few scraps of meat that come off of those pieces.

By the time he gets here the rice will be ready and still hot, the beans have been cooking all day, so they're ready, and I have just to put one more pan in the oven to melt the cheese inside the enchiladas. Then dinner will be ready.

Cheese enchiladas
corn tortillas
cheddar cheese
flour
chili powder
beef bouillon (optional)
3 cups water

While the rice simmers I soften the tortillas in hot oil. I'm not making that many enchiladas this time, so I don't have to add more oil. If we were going to be having others over I'd have to put more oil in two or three times and let it heat before continuing. I love having people in my home and I love cooking for people. But there are only a couple of my friends that he will tolerate. He's careful never to openly criticize my friends, so that I don't have any ammunition against him. He just uses the passive/aggressive tactics that he has learned very well to make sure that he's never around when they are. Plus, he gets very cranky if I have friends visit while he's at work. It's amazing that I have any friends left at all. The ones that he does like don't particularly care for him. They never say this, but I can tell in their demeanor. They are far more polite than they would otherwise be. My friends don't tend to be incredibly refined. I don't hang around ruffians, but we love to laugh and have a good time.

Now I go to shred the cheese. I shudder at the thought of his seeing me do this. Why didn't I have the cheese already shredded, he'd want to know. Everything I do makes him tired. It makes me tired that he's never happy with anything I do. I struggle to think of the last time that he smiled, so that I could believe it, anyway. I roll the cheese inside the softened tortillas and place them in a glass baking pan.

I discard all but about a tablespoon of the oil. In this I brown flour and make a roux. In that I briefly brown the chili powder and then add the water and beef bouillon. When it comes to a boil I turn down the heat and simmer until the sauce thickens. When it's thick I pour it over the rolled tortillas and set the pan aside to wait for him to get here. Just before I put them in the preheated oven I sprinkle more shredded cheese on top.

He's not cranky that I still have to heat the enchiladas. I've waited for him to get here before I heat those, so that they'll be fresh out of the oven when we sit down to eat. The griddle is hot, so the tortillas will also be freshly heated. When we do sit we don't face each other because there are only two chairs at the table that sit up straight. It's fine to sit across the table from my chair; one just has to accept that they'll be tilted. The floor is cracked down the center of the room, and few spots resemble level in this room. I've propped the table with wads of paper, so it's about as level as I am.

My music is now turned off and we eat to the sound of the news—no conversation. The television is on the station that perpetually broadcasts news. That is the station that I would watch were I to turn on the set, but I never do. And, even now, I look at my plate and at the table, anything to avert my eyes from the hypnotizing spell that the television has over my brain. I can't hide from the voices, though, and my enchiladas and flour tortillas are flavored with the stock market at the moment. In a while the beans will be seasoned with a plane crash, the same plane crash that they've reported twice, now, since he's arrived.

I drink my tea—wine and beer are frowned upon these days—and look at the ring that the glass is leaving on my Formica tabletop. From the benefit of the slanted room a ring once formed that looked as if a penis had been lying on the table and the water had dried underneath it. I liked that little piece of art that fate left for me as a gift, but he "accidentally" wiped it off when I wasn't looking.

Cheese and red wine
Cut sharp cheddar cheese into small cubes. Enjoy with a glass of red wine.

It's a new day. I'm not working today and I sit basking in the sun on the deck outside my house. The space between my garage apartment and the main house has brick laid on the ground. It's a living deck that we mow every week. I sit in a lawn chair and drink a glass of red wine. I have cheese cut into cubes inside, but I wanted to be outside in the sun for a few minutes. There is no music playing and this, my first glass of wine in months, burns my tongue. The sharp cheddar cheese compliments it perfectly. The sun isn't doing what I'd hoped it would … bring feeling back into my numbed body. I still don't get up and go inside. I sit back in the lawn chair wondering if the owner of the house is going to come home, and, if he does, whether he'll come around the back to go inside. The entire length of my room is inside the back yard, so I have a lot of privacy, if not space. The garage part of the building, which hasn't seen a car in it in years, is outside the yard, on the other side of the tall wooden fence. I contemplate turning the music on. That's all; I just contemplate it. Just like I contemplate getting more cheese from the dining room table. If I sit still enough it's like I have no feeling in my body at all.

The vine is growing up the brick wall of the main, two-story house. Even though the owner persists in tearing it down, the vine comes back, always, just like the grass grows between the bricks of the deck no matter how much we pull it and mow it. It's determined. The grass is almost thicker here on the deck than it is in the rest of the yard, which lies in the shade of the tall trees. Tall shrubs line the fence on the other side of the yard, so there's no worry that anybody will see me, or notice me. Not that I'm doing anything. I couldn't do anything if I wanted to; there's no music playing, there's no cheese in my hand and he won't ever be coming back here again. It's a good thing.

I didn't like it when he was here and I didn't like being at his house. He didn't like either of those things any more than I did, so why did it take so many months to make this break? And why do I feel the desperate need to call him and beg him to come, or let me come over, just like we did to each other seemingly endlessly over the past few months?

The Christmas Sculpture

It's nearly Christmas. My younger brother, my older sister and I have had an online conversation going on for a couple of years now. In it we were talking recently about Christmas and family and how hectic and overwhelming the whole thing can be. (I think we all save quite a bit of money on therapists by talking with each other this way.) Naturally, we thought about our childhood, because Christmas is 90% about children, childhood and memories. It's easy to think about a simpler time, but the biggest difference between now and then is the fact that we were children then and we are now adults with the attendant responsibilities that we didn't comprehend before. Of eight siblings, the three of us were the only ones left living in our mother's home. There is an age gap between us for one thing. Also, the first five have a different father with whom some of them were living at that time, and some had already moved out to begin their own lives. So, it was just the three of us for a quite few years with our mother and father. And, as in so many stories of the simpler times, we were very, very poor.

One year our father told us that there wasn't enough money for a Christmas tree, and judging from the way he was talking it seemed that we might skip Christmas altogether. I remember listening to him talk – much the way in old Charlie Brown movies adults speech is represented by a "Whah-WHAH-whaaaaaah". My father had a way of lecturing that tended to be rather long-winded and the tiniest bit imperious, as if he were explaining something to a bunch of hammerheads who had been arguing with him for an hour, when actually we had yet to say a word. The gist of it was that Christmas is about materialism anyway, and there wasn't extra money, so we were going to have to do without a Christmas tree this year. We didn't dare ask about presents. What will be will be; there wasn't much we could do about it anyway, and asking would only make him angry. (In his defence, this can't have been an easy conversation to have with children who were between twelve and four years old.)

There wasn't much we could do about Santa Claus bringing us presents, but we could do something about the tree. We were no strangers to walking to the park. If we had nothing else, we had time on our hands and it was an age in which children weren't expected to remain indoors and/or in constant contact with their parents. So, the three of us bundled up against the cold and set off on foot for the park where we knew there were evergreen shrubs. Wind biting the skin on your face was a way of life in the Panhandle of Texas and crunching through snow was as fun as anything else we could have been doing. We laid out our plan all the way there. We would gather up limbs from the evergreen shrubs, take them back home and build our own tree. I imagined in my mind using baling wire, because this was before duct tape became a common household item, and baling wire was how you held things together then. (Those simpler times had some limitations.)

On the way back home my sister and I were chatting about how we could put it together. My little brother, almost five years younger than me and probably only four years old at the time, was just happy to be along and part of things. We were not exceptional children with regards to bickering; we certainly had our arguments and screaming matches. Our parents' favorite way to put a stop to the fighting was to make us sit on the sofa holding hands. (The giggling inevitably started in less than three minutes.) But, carrying Christmas Tree limbs through the cold, back to our home, we had our heads together and we just tossed around ideas about how to build a tree.

I don't remember exactly how many limbs we managed to get or who carried what, but we got home and showed our mother what we had brought and told her about our plan to make a Christmas tree, since we weren't going to be able to buy one this year. She looked at the limbs and considered. I still wasn't sure how all of it was going to be held together, but mothers are magical creatures who know everything, and, as if she had been expecting us to come home bearing evergreen boughs, she almost immediately began putting them together. She had a trunk that she kept fabric in (still keeps fabric in, as far as I know.) This she covered with a sheet and she laid the boughs across the trunk, creating a bush right there in our living room – not really a bush, but more than a stack of limbs. Truly, what she made was a sculpture with our found objects. She used one string of Christmas Tree lights, winding them through the limbs and we put a few baubles on it. Then we all stood back.

It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful Christmas Sculpture I could imagine, much better than a tree. And, we did it together, the three of us and our mother. Warming up indoors after walking through cold wind, our fingers tingled, but there was a more subtle feeling of security that came from being warm when the wind was still blowing outside and the windows were fogged. Having our Christmas Sculpture there in the living room and feeling all warm, happy and excited, we decided together that it didn't matter if we had presents. It didn't matter at all because we already had the most beautiful Christmas Sculpture ever. We couldn't wait to show our father when he got home.

Santa did come that year. Christmas morning brought gifts for the three of us and for our parents. I don't remember what Santa brought me that year, but the thing about Christmas gifts is that seeing them wrapped first thing in the morning is the most exciting part. Lately I've been trying not to think about the past at all, to look only ahead. But, talking with my brother and sister this year, I very much remember the Sculpture and the three of us taking it upon ourselves to make sure that we had a Christmas.