The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted

  Janey walks beside her grandfather to the car. He has not heard Michael, and she will not tell him, for along with her other realizations, she has seen that Bampo cares equally for all his grandchildren, she is not the favorite, she is simply loved. It is good, but she had thought it was more.

  At Dairy Queen, they sit at one of the outdoor tables, and her cousins place elaborate orders with Bampo; swimming does make you hungry, and it is long past lunchtime. Janey’s stomach feels hollow; she is so hungry she is light-headed, but she says she doesn’t want anything. Bampo is surprised. He asks if she’s sure, and she says yes. Up her spine, a zip of approval, of solace, of strength. She crosses her arms over her belly and looks away from the softly melting ice cream being delivered to her cousins. She thinks of the last time she was in North Dakota and all the cousins were in Bampo’s basement, playing war. Michael and Richie and the other boys were the fighters, Janey and the other girls were nurses. She remembers how she knelt beside the injured, sympathizing with them over grotesque wounds, which they described to her in detail. She thinks of how she advised each patient not to go back into battle, but to surrender, and how they all ignored her and went back to fight. Janey understood the futility of war, the terrible cost. She knew her strength was that she did not believe in fighting. But now she wonders if it is her weakness, too.

  She hears the sounds of the cousins eating their sundaes, their plastic spoons scraping. She knows the feel of butterscotch in her mouth, the perfect mix of sweet chocolate and salty peanuts. If she were eating, she would put the spoon in her mouth right side up and pull it out right side down.

  She stares into the glare of the sunstruck cars in the parking lot and imagines herself back at home, ensconced in her room with a clean white sheet of paper. She is painting a watercolor. She is trying a new technique, using lovely pastels so thinned with water you can barely see them on the page. Look how beautiful they are.

  RAIN

  I used to have a friend who lived in a house he built with his own hands. I’d first met Michael at a party in the late sixties, when we were single and in our early twenties, both of us living in Minneapolis. I was singing in a rock band, making enough money to get by, and he was writing ad copy for junk food and making more money than he knew what to do with. Michael drove a Morgan, wore clothes right out of GQ, dated a succession of beautiful women, and lived in a tastefully furnished apartment in a hip part of town where he was utterly miserable. The last time I visited him there, he was standing in front of an open cupboard in his kitchen, wearing one of his Edwardian suits and pointing to boxes and boxes of Snackin’ Cake. “This is my life,” he’d said.

  “Well, what can you do?” I’d asked, rhetorically, of course. And he’d looked over at me, and it seemed as though I’d given him the missing piece to an equation that had been keeping him up nights at the blackboard for a long, long time. “Quit,” he’d said. And grinned.

  He was gone in a week, apartment sublet, car and furniture sold, clothes, too, for all I know. He moved far up north in Massachusetts, to some acreage that had been in his family for over one hundred years. There was a graveyard there, he said, but nothing else. Michael intended to build a house and live off the land. It took a long time for it to happen: for the first five years after he left, he rented a cheap apartment in a little town nearby and lived off his considerable savings while he built every part of his house, learning as he went along. We wrote irregularly to each other during those years—I talked about my marriage to Dennis, the birth of my son, the guilty ennui of any young mother. He wrote about swimming in the ice-cold pond on his property, wetting down his hair to comb it for the pretty women at contra dances, picking enough blueberries to fill a large silver bucket and then sharing his bounty with friends who returned the favor by dropping off a pie. The time he wrote me about coming home to that pie (I did the sensible thing and brewed up a pot of coffee and ate it for dinner), I held his letter and stared out the window, thinking of what it must be like to live somewhere where you could come home to a pie left on your kitchen table. It was so different from our way of life. We had friends, Dennis and I, but we also shopped in grocery stores for our small and overly expensive boxes of blueberries. Most prohibitively, we kept our doors locked when we weren’t at home, and oftentimes even when we were. That Christmas, I sent Michael an engraved card with an enclosed photo of our little family; he sent a handmade card on butcher paper he’d decorated with a potato stamp: Note the folksy unevenness of the points of the star, he wrote. No small effort went into making this appear effortless.

  Seven years after Michael moved, he sent me a letter saying he had completed building his house, and I really ought to come and see it. A trip like that seemed impossible, but I really wanted to go, and finally I talked to Dennis about it. There was some discomfort at first, as I’m sure there would have been if Dennis had wanted to go and visit an old female friend. But in the end, he told me to go the next weekend and even to use his frequent-flier miles; he and two-year-old Will would manage fine without me. I had suggested initially that we all go, but both of us knew I didn’t really mean it. In truth, Dennis didn’t want to go; he didn’t even know Michael.

  I left Minneapolis early on a Saturday morning in late spring and flew to Boston, and much of the time I was on the plane, I thought about Michael. I remembered once when we were driving together in his car and I had pulled out a tube of lipstick and put some on. When I finished, I held out the tube, saying, “How about you? Need to freshen up?” He put the lipstick on—not a playful dot, he moved carefully from one side of his mouth all the way around, then handed me back the tube. And we drove on. I loved it. I loved that he put lipstick all over and then didn’t take it off right away. I loved how far he was willing to go, but something about it bothered me, too.

  I thought about the cold winter night when he picked me up and we drove onto a frozen lake. We spun around in circles and slid sideways, completely out of control. I laughed until I was out of breath, but my scalp prickled with fear. “Don’t you ever worry about falling through?” I asked, and he said, “Of course. That’s the fun.”

  I thought about how handsome he used to be, and I thought about how I used to look in those days, too, my black hair nearly to my waist, my clothes as Janis Joplin–ish as I could get them: feathers and pearls, bell-bottoms so wide they looked like ball gowns, patchouli-scented velvet-and-lace tops, beneath which my breasts moved freely. Michael and I had flirted with each other, and I think at various times had contemplated having a relationship—a look across a room, a certain tone to our voices when we spoke on the phone—but we hadn’t. I told myself it was because we were never between relationships at the same time, but I also sensed that, if I moved too close to Michael, I’d lose him.

  He picked me up at the airport. In those days you could wait at the gate for passengers. When I emerged from the mouth of the Jetway, I saw Michael standing off to the side—he was easy to spot; only a few other people were waiting there. But he was jumping up and down and waving his arms, saying, “Over here! Over here!”

  I walked up to him, a little embarrassed. “Clown,” I said, and he touched my bobbed hair and said, “Ah well. You’re still beautiful.”

  I touched his ragged beard. “You, too.”

  We drove a few hours on the highway, then on some back roads, and finally turned down a heavily rutted dirt road where the dust rose cinematically. Then we were there. I stepped out of the car and was, for the first and only time in my life, literally rendered speechless. “Go in,” he said.

  There was a small front porch with a rocking chair on it. There were stained-glass inserts that ran on either side of the front door in the colors of light green, orange, red, and yellow. In the kitchen was a wood-burning stove, two chairs, and a beautiful bird’s-eye maple table. The table was stationed before a bank of tiny-paned windows. I stared at the windows, just stood there for a while taking in the view of the woods and the wildflowers outside, b
ut mostly I was admiring the craftsmanship of those many panes. “Got those windows at the dump,” Michael said. “Lots of stuff here came from the dump.” I put my hand to the smooth surface of the kitchen table and looked over at him. “Yup,” he said.

  Along the kitchen walls were open shelves holding pottery dishes—he had traded firewood for those, the potter who made them lived not so far down the road. There were plastic bags with granola, dried fruit, whole wheat flour, walnuts. There was honey complete with comb, olive oil and blackstrap molasses, and Mason jars of coffee that had been hand-ground by some ancient kitchen tool bolted to the wall. Michael had depleted his savings and now made money for groceries doing odd jobs, mostly carpentry—building a porch here, putting in a cupboard there. He had told me about this in his letters, but seeing the evidence—food he’d gotten for labor—seemed a kind of miracle to me. There was a small refrigerator with Deco styling, it too rescued from the dump, where it had been tossed for the crime of being too old, but it was fine in every way. Inside was a block of butter, cinnamon bread that appeared homemade, fancy cheeses, speckled brown eggs in a pottery bowl. There were vegetables in colors so vibrant they looked fake: deep purple eggplants and carrots the orange of construction workers’ safety vests, rosy red tomatoes. Beer and wine, milk and cream. Half a jar of anchovies, the fancy white kind.

  Michael let me look, he let me snoop. He followed me around, available for questions, you might say, but mostly he just enjoyed my seeing everything for the first time. It let him appreciate things anew, he said.

  A ladder led to a loft-type bedroom, where there was a mattress on the floor, covered with an Indian-print bedspread. His bed was neatly made, and I admired this about him, that such a manly man (his descriptions in letters of cutting down trees with a chain saw! Lying under his truck to grease it!) would also take such care in straightening bed linens, in placing pillows just so. The bed was stationed directly beneath an uncurtained window, and a hummingbird feeder hung outside it. Finally, I spoke. “Do they come?” I asked.

  “All day long,” he said.

  There was a little hot plate in the loft so he could brew tea without getting out of bed. There was an oil lamp that let him read by the kind of gentle golden light he preferred, and there was a stack of tapes—classical music—to listen to. Nails on the wall held all the clothes a person needed, really. Orange crates served as bureau drawers for socks and underwear. There was an old-fashioned girlie calendar on the wall directly opposite the bed, featuring well-endowed Vargas-type women: curly-headed, apple-cheeked blondes wearing see-through negligees and chacha shoes, their mouths naughty O’s. “Lonely up here?” I asked, and he smiled.

  “This is where you’ll stay,” he said. “I’ll sleep in the hammock outside.” When I started to protest (though I wondered if I didn’t sleep there where I would go), he said,

  “I like to sleep outside in the summer. Mosquito netting is the trick, there.”

  The living room was outfitted with an overstuffed sofa and chair, a 1940s floor-model radio, and bookshelves spilling over with offerings of classical fiction, history, poetry, and all manner of how-to manuals. No television.

  I even liked the outhouse—it was clean and full of light from the crescent moon–shaped skylight. The walls were papered with pages from an old Sears catalog: wringer-type washing machines, boxy men’s suits, women in cone-shaped brassieres. There was a wooden toilet seat, complete with lid, and there was very good toilet paper. A framed sampler on the wall said DO CHECK FOR SPIDERS. DON’T BE AFRAID.

  Outside, there were acres of woods and open fields. Now that he had finished the house, Michael told me he intended to make penned-in areas for lots of animals: chickens, sheep, rabbits, even a pig.

  Seeing Michael’s place filled me with conflicting emotions. I was happy for him, glad he’d stood in the middle of his kitchen one random day and pulled the veil from his heart’s desire. But it distressed me to understand suddenly that this kind of life was what I wanted, too. Everything about it—the natural beauty, the deliberateness of every choice, the apparent congruency of heart and soul and mind—spoke to some fundamental longing in me that had never been brought into focus before. But it was too late for me to live like this. Dennis wouldn’t want to. Will was all set to go to good schools—we’d chosen our suburb with that in mind. We liked our neighbors and friends, liked living near the city. Dennis and I watched the late-night talk shows together and often held hands while doing so. Sometimes I would be wearing some weird-colored facial mask, and I would think, Forget the romantic notions of marriage. This kind of comfort, this kind of safety, that’s the thing. But on the day I first saw Michael’s house, I regretted the way I’d gone, and wished I’d come with him all those years ago. Of course he hadn’t asked me to, and if he had I wouldn’t have said yes. I wouldn’t have known to—everything that let me appreciate what I saw around me now was unripened in me then.

  And so I stood having my petulant little memorial service for the self that never got to be. And then I let it go, moved back into the head and heart of a monogamous married woman with a child who loved her husband and son and her granite kitchen counters and knew how much she had to be grateful for.

  We kept the weekend friendly, and we kept it safe: we cooked together; we talked about old times; we walked for many miles. On Saturday night after dinner, we sat in the living room listening to a symphony performance on the radio—Michael put on a tie for this, and I did, too. On Sunday, we had breakfast and then drove back into Boston so that we could go to the Gardner museum before he took me to the airport. He kissed me on the mouth when we said good-bye, but only briefly.

  I saw him standing at the plate-glass window inside the airport as the plane backed out of the gate and then began taxiing down the runway. He held his hand up, and I pressed my own hand to the airplane window, though I doubted he could see me. Over here! I thought.

  A couple of years later, Dennis got a job offer he couldn’t refuse, and we moved to Boston. Michael and he finally met and truly liked and admired each other. We drove up to see Michael a few times a year, and he came on occasion to see us. Once, when he was desperate again for money, we hired Michael to stain our deck. My next-door neighbor, Suzanne, spent a fair amount of time standing in the backyard and talking to Michael while he worked. His style might have changed: he cut his own hair—badly—and wore thrift shop clothes, but he was still a very attractive man. He had streaked blond hair, eyes so blue they were navy, and he was in the kind of enviable shape you enjoy when you use your body for real work. Michael had taken his shirt off that day, and Suzanne stood with her arms crossed and watched the muscles move in his back. I thought I knew a little about what she was thinking. And I had the misplaced proprietary feeling of a married woman who has a handsome single man for a friend.

  One day in August, when I was seven months pregnant with my second child, Dennis, Will, and I all went up for a visit. Michael had lots of animals by then, including a big, fat pig named Sally. I had always been beguiled by pigs, or at least by the E. B. White–ish idea of them, but standing right beside Sally, no fence between us, made me a bit nervous. She ate huge mounds of scraps every day, and it is something I would have happily paid to see, the pig’s ears coyly over her eyes from the way she bent down to attack her dinner, her grunting sounds that made anyone watching smile, you really had to. The curly tail going round and round and then stilling for a certain kind of pleasure: a hard scratch to the hindquarters, or coming upon something delicious to her in her slop pan—bits of blueberry pancakes, perhaps, Sally was inordinately fond of blueberry pancakes. Bizarrely enough, she also liked bacon.

  There were lots of cats and dogs by then. The cats were nearly feral, and came close to the house only at dinnertime. They formed a semicircle not far from the door and waited, and Michael put out food for them and then sat in a lawn chair, smoking a cigarette and watching them.

  The dogs were another matter: they loved all human
kind, all the time, and they lived all over the house. Michael favored cocker spaniels, and it seemed that one of them was always having puppies. The one he named Señorita Rosalita Carmelita had delivered seven fawn-colored puppies—all boys—on the day before we visited, and Michael let my then five-year-old son hold one of them. Will was overwhelmed with the pleasure and the responsibility: he sat still as a statue, afraid to move, afraid even to breathe. When my husband asked him to smile for a photo, the most he could offer was a twitch of one side of his mouth. Rosa watched my son anxiously but did not move from nursing the rest of her brood. When the puppy was returned to her, she eagerly sniffed him everywhere she could reach, and then Michael turned the puppy on his back so that Rosa could leave no spot unexamined. “Everything appear to be in order?” he asked. Rosa looked up at him and wagged her tail, and Michael put his hands on either side of her head and kissed her full on her mouth.

  “Eww,” Will said, but he had the courtesy to whisper, and I think, too, that there was some respect and understanding mixed in with his squeamish commentary. It occurred to me to make some flip remark about Michael being lonely up here, just as I had years ago, but it seemed as though it wouldn’t be funny anymore.

  I remember we went into the house afterward, and I made spaghetti sauce from the riches of Michael’s garden: onion and garlic that were sautéed in olive oil, basil and oregano and tomatoes still warm from the sun. I added a little honey and a little red wine and we let the sauce cook down, and then we ate outside, watching the sky redden, then purple, then go black and starry. Maybe it was the wood-burning stove, but I have never tasted better marinara. We had salad, too, butter lettuce also from the garden dressed simply with lemon juice and olive oil and salt. Michael had Hershey bars from his last trip to town, and we ate those for dessert.