She shrugged. You’re still better than I am, she said.
What did you get?
She looked down at her fingers, nails recently painted an electric spangly pink.
She got an A, said the tennis girl.
I laughed.
Do you think he saw me in the hall? Eliza whispered.
I turned back to the quad. The science kids had left to go talk to a teacher.
For a brief stage that year, I did tell a few people about the food. How am I? I’d say when someone asked. Well, I’m a little caught up with the donut. Generally, it went one of two ways. Either the person would look at me strangely, think I was a kook, and go on to something else, like the tennis girl did. I mentioned it to Eddie as we hurled tennis balls into the street and he said huh, and then stuck his hand up my back. I figured that was the usual, but one afternoon at lunchtime a new girl showed up, freshly arrived from Montana-hazel-eyed Sherrie with all the silver jewelry. She was grateful to have a group to eat lunch with, and she’d met Eliza in English class, and as she bit into her chicken sandwich she told us all about how Los Angeles was so much better than Butte. I mean, it’s huge here! she said, spreading her arms. All the movies are here! she said. Halfway through lunch, Eliza had to go talk intently with the tennis girl about something, so it was just me and Sherrie, left on the grass/cement, bored. To fill space, I held up my last crumby cafeteria chicken nugget and started to list all its various complexities. Ohio, busy factory, bad chickens, stoic breader. I just said it for something to say, but Sherrie scooted closer, her silver- filigree bracelet clunking on the ground. Wait, what? she whispered. What are you saying? she said.
Such a lift I felt that day, when she looked at me like I was the most intriguing person in the world! I explained a little more about it, tentative, and she grabbed my arm and invited me back to her house that very afternoon, where, in her parents’ kitchen, she baked up a pan of brownies on the spot and handed a square over, wide-eyed. After one bite, I dropped it on the counter. Ugh, I said, muffled, grabbing a glass for water. You are massively depressed, I said. She laid her head on the counter and started to cry. It’s true, she said. I could barely get out of bed, she wept. And this!-after the whole lunch discussion of how everything was so great in California, how the move was a chance to re-invent herself, how all was astounding in the new dawning day of glory. Baked goods were still the quickest like that. So when can you come back? she asked, an hour later, her eyes round and shiny with tears. I left that day with a skip in my step: A new friend, I sang to myself. A new, true friend! A gift from the Big Sky Country! I went over to her house many more times, and each time was the same routine: an overly cheery greeting, then chocolate-chip cookies, then rice-crispie treats, down, down, down into the pit, then my response, her tears on the table, her moaning of my rightness. I didn’t mind at first-I loved going over with such a sense of purpose and pacing around her kitchen expounding on my thoughts on her interior. I described every single nook and cranny of feeling I could taste. We were inseparable for months. She called me Glorious Rose, and we sat in her bathroom and played mournful electronic songs that went on for ten minutes, and while I perched on the edge of her bathtub and ate her desserts she helped me dye my hair black, then red, then black-red. But it got to the point where I’d go over to her locker and she’d shove a biscuit in my face and ask me how she was feeling, because she couldn’t tell without me. She’d run after me in the halls with a slapdash sandwich she’d made in five seconds to get me to tell her if she really liked this guy or if she was just kidding herself. I don’t know everything, I said, shoving sandwich bites in my mouth. You like him, I said, nodding. You really like him.
I still didn’t even care until I was over at her house one afternoon and I told her about how Joseph had this disappearing trick that no one had ever figured out and she flattened her bangs over her forehead and asked who’s Joseph? We were in her kitchen, baking as usual. We’d just talked at length about the intricate nuances of her crush on a stoner volleyball player.
Joseph? I said, squinting. My brother?
You have a brother? she said. Is he cute? Hey, will you taste this toast for me? Do you think I’m still depressed?
The walls seemed to sag around us. The toast wavered in the air. Hey, I said, slowly. You know, I’m kind of full. Just for today, I said. Let’s do something else. Sherrie’s face squinched into a purse. How about a movie? I said. But why? she said, licking the edge of the peanut-butter knife. What’s interesting about a movie? I could do that with anyone! Please, she said, Glorious Rosie? Just one teeny tiny bite?
That day, I left her house early and leaned against the window glass of the bus, crying a little into the corners of the six-dollar junky cat-eye sunglasses she’d encouraged me to buy. I didn’t feel like seeing anyone else. At the movie stop, I pulled the cord and welcomed the darkness of the theatre, where I sat alone and ate no popcorn and relished the soft velvet of the armrest that I shared with no one and movies are all sight and sound only and a beautiful landscape and I saw what they showed me and nothing else at all. When Sherrie called later and asked me over for the next day for lasagna, I said I had plans.
And, I thought I’d take a break from the food stuff, I said. For a little while. If you want to see a movie this weekend, or do anything else, let me know.
She called me a fickle drug dealer and slammed down the phone.
In this way, for these reasons, despite her grade coddling and gold standard normality, I was grateful for Eliza. When she overheard the tennis girl’s question about food that lunchtime, she didn’t say a thing, but the next day she brought out a twin to her sandwich. We had too much turkey, she said, putting the spare in its wax paper on a sunlit section of cement. It was probably the first time she understood why I might’ve spent an hour at the drinking fountain that long-ago day in third grade. When it looked like she was just going to leave the turkey on the ground, I picked it up. Unwrapped the plastic. Ate it slowly.
If I didn’t focus on how envious I was that this lightness was where she came from, those sandwiches did help me through the rest of the day.
25
It seemed to happen in springs, the revealing of things. With fresher air, and jasmine blooms, something else new. There was the spring of my food discovery. The spring of my first interactions with my father, and Joseph’s disappearances, and my mother’s affair, which seemed to be ongoing, since I had never tasted the teary residue of a breakup in her meals.
The fifth spring of my brother, in his own apartment, alone.
He had followed through with the daily call requirement. For years, the phone rang at five, usually while my mother was preparing dinner, and they talked about his classes and his day and her classes and her day. He seemed to be enjoying school well enough. He was studying all the time. His grades were good. Since Mom was chopping and stirring as they talked, her meals often took on a tinge of worry and also some kind of ravenous pride. My son, said her dinners, is a beam of pure focus.
He called every day, so if he was still disappearing, he did it on an effective schedule.
Only one time did Joseph fail to call at the appointed hour. When Mom called to see why not, he didn’t pick up. Nor did he answer the following morning. Two days went by and still no response, so Mom drove over, worried, used the spare key, and found his apartment empty. Drove home. Paced. She called on the hour, every hour. No answer. My father, who had never found anything interesting about these disappearances, chalking them up to the private explorations of a twenty-two-year-old young man, tried to calm her down as she roamed the house. The next morning, day three, she drove over again as soon as it was light, and when she arrived at his place, she found Joseph facedown on the floor of his bedroom, limbs spread out like a starfish. His heartbeat slow. Breathing shallow. She called an ambulance and they went to the hospital right away, where they gave him numerous tests and said he was severely dehydrated and weakened but would be all right. Where were you? Mom asked, and the doctors asked, but Joseph just shook his head. Nowhere, he said, and that was the best they could get out of him.
My father did not visit, but sent his usual bunch of tulips and roses to the nurses, to ensure the best of care.
It was in mid-April, after Joseph was comfortably re-set in his apartment, fully irrigated, back to his once-a-day calls, reregistered for a spring advanced quantum-mechanics course at LACC, that my mother lifted up her fork at
