Welcome, Bad, Bad Lovers, to this, the fifth installment of the serialized novella, The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known as a Fairy-Tale for Superwomen). This week, it’s time to talk food. Maybe your momma was a terrible cook (Livia’s and Danae’s was), but surely there was someone in your family who made biscuits and gravy or oyster casserole (my daddy’s specialty) or strawberry shortcake that became the stuff of family legend. Whose Thanksgiving turkey was to die for, whose stuffing recipe provoked international trade wars and attracted Chinese spies. Whose kitchen seemed to produce marvels no matter what he or she (likely she, let’s face it) did in there. For Livia and Danae, this person was their Aunt Pearl (who, incidentally, helped to clean up the mess Marta had made out of her life, and her daughters’)… But before we talk food, we’ll have to hear a little bit about Livia’s bedroom closet. And her lingerie.
If you need catchin’ up, that’s easy: Installments I-IV are found here (I), here, here and here (IV).
~
The grown-up Livia’s bedroom closet was filled with black garments–wool trousers, cotton ones, all sorts of pants (she was so thin she could buy them in the men’s sections of discount stores rather than the women’s), and jeans. She also favored men’s shirts over women’s, particularly the kind without collars. They looked like they were made for a pirate. White was acceptable, as was beige, but only as an accent. She had a black cape for rain, a black wool coat for winter, and a second-hand motorcycle jacket (black leather) for in-between.
Livia only wore boots. Black boots. She had a pair of black patent leather boots, made especially for her. They had cost her five-hundred dollars and she had only worn them three times. They would last forever. In her bedroom closet, there were short boots the height of her ankles, boots with platform heels and soles, and one pair of boots with pointed toes and five-inch stiletto heels. Even in the summer, Livia wore boots. Livia was able to get away with it because she did not sweat. One of her boyfriends (back in the days when she had them) had marveled at this trait (for which, if the truth were told, Livia could accept no credit). He had finally explained it to his satisfaction by her paleness, the fragility of her ivory skin, the spun-copper tints of her hair. Valkyries, he opined, didn’t sweat.
Livia’s everyday footwear, however, was limited to hiking boots or army boots with metal pieces over the toes. She was wearing the army boots, with her black jeans, as she sipped her café con leche and thought about Danae’s telegram. Underneath the black jeans was a pair of emerald green panties, lace around the legs, tiny at the sides. The pert, economical contours of her breasts were contained by a brassiere of the same color as the panties, entirely of lace, imported from France. Livia needed two of the four drawers of her armoire for her lingerie. Brassieres–underwire, strapless, half-corset, corset. Silks, satins, elastic, hooks, lace-up. Greens, turquoise, lavenders and eggplant, peach, beige, white and black. Especially black. Livia liked to drink her coffee in her underwear. She generally threw her jeans and a tee shirt over the lovely undergarments in order to run down to the coffee shop; when she returned, she took them off again.
Today was an exception. Since the arrival of Danae’s telegram the day before, Livia had been distracted. This morning, after buying her café con leche and climbing the stairs, she had forgotten to take her clothes off. She kicked the scarred corner of the filing cabinet with the metal-clad toe of her army boot (she always kicked it in the same place) and stared up at Ophelia. Irrevocably dead Ophelia. Livia’s mission for the weekend consisted of preventing Danae from doing something irrevocable.
It was time to go, she had to work in less than an hour. Livia uncrossed her legs and stood up. She sighed and grabbed a pair of chopsticks, filed to deadly points and varnished, which she used to skewer her wavy hair into place once she had wound it into a loose beignet. She searched for her sunglasses. Danae wanted to take laudanum, wanted to end up like Ophelia, or like Elizabeth Siddall. Or like Marta.
Livia would rescue her.
But that would happen this weekend. Livia plucked her keys from the nail beside the door and grabbed her bag. She was going to be late. She hurried down the stairs, out the door, and down Broadway toward the subway.
~
Louisiana
All of the important decisions in Marta’s life, the ones that had most positively or adversely affected her–like the time her father decided she should drop out of high school to go to work (adverse) or even when the intense young man with pale gold hair married her (positive, at least until the first disappointment)–had been made by men. But if it had been men who had always decided for her, nine times out of ten it was a woman who threw her a line when she was really on the point of choking to death in the quagmire she (well, the men) had made out of her life. A collect call made from a public telephone at the bus station—Marta’s bags and boxes at her feet, her two daughters flopped atop them like twin duffle bags—to her dead mother’s twin cousins resulted in free lodging for herself, Danae and Livia, and more home-cooked food than they could possibly eat.
Marta’s contacts with Cornelia and Pearl had been sporadic at best since her own mother’s death. Her efforts to stay in touch had dwindled to cheap cards at Christmas, with her signature and a blurry Polaroid of Danae and Livia in their best school dresses. Her daughters’ dresses were always of very good quality–she had earned that much by moving in with the handsome man and pretending to be his wife even though she really wasn’t–but because of something in her that she was never able to identify (Marta wasn’t given to introspection), she just couldn’t spend money on certain things. Buying her Christmas cards at the drugstore was perhaps the only family tradition Marta carried on, and it was one that Livia would later break with gleeful seasonal overspending at the stationers.
Cornelia and Pearl had inherited their mother’s farmhouse and a small plot of land when they were still in their teens. After their father was killed in World War II, their mother sold produce from her gardens at local markets until she died of cancer just after she turned forty. Cornelia and Pearl had gradually sold off the land, bit by bit, until they were left with the house, in need of extensive roof repairs and a coat of paint, and a three-hundred-foot margin of arable land around it on all four sides, of which Pearl gardened every available inch. There were trellises along the wide front porch and flat up against the back walls.
Tomatoes and creeping zucchini occupied the closely spaced trapezoidal grid up to waist height; above were honeysuckle and nasturtiums, a variety of flower which didn’t ordinarily climb trellises, but had been coaxed by Pearl into emitting curling, tendril-like vines instead of its habitual thick stems. The strong, pungent, almost acrid scent of the nasturtiums kept tiny, gnawing bugs away from the tender leaves of young basil and lettuce.
There were window-box gardens on every sill, some quite deep, as is often the case with old houses, where Pearl planted radishes, and even a curious breed of miniature eggplant an eccentric friend had brought her as a souvenir from California. There were apple trees all across the front limit of the property, which bordered a dusty dirt road. The city of Baton Rouge had once allotted funds to pave the road, but the money had mysteriously disappeared before the job was even begun, so dusty it had remained.
The proper Cornelia had at first resisted the unseemly addition of chicken coops beneath the front porch, complaining that visitors would be put off by the squawking and the smell. But Pearl had declared (rightly) that they never had visitors, and had installed the birds, coops in stacks one above the other as high as space would allow, that very afternoon. Pearl religiously collected the chicken and rooster droppings every morning and deposited them into a rusty, dented bucket which she remembered seeing in her mother’s hand. The chicken droppings were combined with the collected scrapings from hers and Cornelia’s plates and used to fertilize window-boxes and vegetable gardens. Pearl thought of this series of actions as a miniature cycle of life and the thought pleased her.
Both Cornelia and Pearl were virgins. Pearl had been pretty in her youth, even into the first decades of middle age, and you could still detect traces of neglected beauty in her face if you looked closely. The rounded face of her twenties, thirties and forties had gradually expanded into a pumpkin shape, with rosy cheeks and a permanent tan from the many afternoons she spent gardening without a hat. Her brown eyes were bright and wide, her lips still a dark brown-red.
When Livia thought of her, she thought of tilled earth, of sweet potatoes laced with cinnamon and cream. Of gingerbread cookies, fresh from the oven, wafting forth their aromas of nutmeg and cloves, of apples picked from the trees in front of the house in the fall, of mashing them and making apple cider. All of Aunt Pearl’s teeth were fine and white, large and carnivorous, except for one gold cap on her left canine tooth. Her hair hung down her back in a gypsy-braid, dark and silky-black, with surprisingly few strands of gray for a woman her age.
Pearl had had a beau when she was young. She had been engaged to marry him–a dress had even been chosen from a book of Vogue patterns only a year or so out of date. All of which gave her sister heartburn.
Cornelia, always their mother’s favorite because of her domestic inclinations and docile nature, had begun, at the tender age of ten and a half, to amass bits of china, linen, and underclothes–many were her mother’s torn or worn cast-offs which she industriously mended and dressed up with hand-crocheted lace. At nineteen, however, despite her assiduous attendance at church socials, potluck dinners, corn-huskings, and hayrides, the chestless, long-faced, nearsighted Cornelia had still been without aspirants to her hand. Her self-righteousness vis-à-vis her younger sister, manifested in supercilious examinations of Pearl’s “trousseau” (consisting of scandalously few garments and almost no linens), was laced with a considerable amount of envy.
Cornelia’s lack of sympathy for her sister’s prostrate grief upon learning that Emmett was to be sent to the front, from whence they had recently been informed that their father would not return, was immediately forgiven, as was her overly-solicitous pampering of Pearl with calming herbal teas and homemade poultices upon their reception of the news that Emmett would also be remaining permanently overseas. Pearl, however, who hadn’t a petty bone in her body, had appeared not to realize that the recently re-opened channels of friendship and sisterhood were at least partly due to the fact that she, like her sister, would probably never marry.
After Emmett’s death, Pearl took to walking barefoot about the nearby fields (which no longer belonged to them) after the moon had risen, when her sister had gone decorously to bed. She never prayed (her sister did enough of that for both of them); she simply drew comfort from the land and the air and the night, her body compensating for its loss by forging an almost erotic tie with the earth and its fruits. And her love was requited. Her tomatoes were redder and plumper than any of the neighbors’, her gardenias like whipped cream; her zucchini greener, her vines curlier and leafier, her green beans crisper and crunchier. She sold her hand-made fertilizer to the local farmer’s market but no one could ever duplicate her results.
Formidable gardener though she was, Pearl’s greatest talent, as far as Danae, Livia and Marta were concerned, was culinary. In the window boxes above the kitchen sink, she cultivated herbs whose names none of them knew (only Livia would come to know them. She had been hired at the restaurant because of her reputation for herbal witchery–her specialties were sauces and roast meats, poultry, and fish). Pearl said that herbs liked the shade, with just a little indirect sunlight. The rusted metal awnings that shaded the exposed southern windows provided the perfect protection for their dark green, curiously shaped leaves.
Just before cooking, Pearl would harvest some of the leaves from one, or sometimes several, of the plants, making her choices according to criteria gradually imparted to the fascinated Livia. The leaves washed and arranged on a piece of brown paper, Pearl made the trip out to the front porch and placed her offering in a patch of direct sunlight in order to get the flavor started. When Livia helped Pearl wash up after supper, she could smell their pungent, individual aromas blending into one delicious scent, better even than wild onions.
Pearl’s body lost its heaviness in the kitchen; her feet floated above the cracked linoleum floor as she hurried from cutting table to stove to icebox and back again. She seemed to cook effortlessly–Livia never saw her consult a recipe–adding a pinch of this or a spoonful of that to her sauces, soups, cassoulets, and meats throughout the cooking process, following minute tastes of her creation which she rolled around on her tongue as though tasting from a priceless bottle of wine. Pearl told Livia that there were two reasons she looked like she wasn’t really working while she cooked. One was that she knew how to find things; the other was that she never let herself run out of anything. Those were the marks of a true cook–you knew where everything was in your kitchen, right down to the most insignificant wooden spoon, and you kept your cupboards, your flour jar, your sugar bowl, your basket for onions and garlic, fully stocked.
Pearl, although she carefully hid it, had at first been surprised by the silent, insistent presence of Livia in her kitchen. Thin, pale Livia, the sort of child you would expect to find hiding atop a tree, the kind of little girl who picked at her food and left her plate practically untouched. If anything, Pearl would have expected interest (if only superficial) in things culinary from Danae. Danae spent her afternoons in her room practicing hairstyles and trying out Marta’s makeup, or drinking sodas in Baton Rouge with her friends (she took the bus home just as it was getting dark, steadily pushing at the envelope of the definition of “dark”).
When she was thirteen, Danae had announced that she had a boyfriend; she would probably, before long, be thinking about husbands. At least she should learn how to scramble an egg to a man’s satisfaction, Pearl had often mused to herself, but once Danae’s body began to show signs of what it would one day become—the spitting image of her mother—Pearl had changed her mind. With her looks, she’d probably be able to get by without ever lifting a spoon.
Cornelia had been barred from the kitchen for decades. Her sis, according to Pearl, had only to look at a soufflé and it would never rise. If she accidentally touched a bowl of bread dough, Pearl firmly believed that the bread would come out flat and tasteless. A sort of balance had eventually been achieved between the two sisters: cooking and gardening were the only two domestic chores in which Pearl would condescend to engage. Her sister kept floors, windows, and other surfaces free of dust and grime, content to reap Pearl’s outstanding meals as a reward for her labors. Cornelia, during meal preparation, was banned to the sitting room to work at the pair of socks or scarf she was always knitting for some charitable organization or other.
Livia, nervous and meticulous, with her books that she left lying about the house in the oddest places, would not, to Pearl’s seasoned eye, make marriage material. But Livia’s appetite was voracious, her appreciation for subtle differences in texture and flavor sophisticated, and her culinary aptitudes quickly became apparent to her great-aunt. If she wanted to learn, whatever her reasons, Pearl would certainly teach her. Soon Livia was the only member of the strange little household admitted into the sacred precincts of the kitchen while food was being prepared.
Marta, for her part, never demonstrated even the slightest interest in learning the arts of the kitchen from Pearl. She detested anything domestic. Livia still retained sharp-edged memories of the hodgepodge of canned and frozen foods that had made up the few meals her mother prepared when they still lived with her father. Her mother claimed that her dislike for anything to do with housekeeping stemmed from the years she had spent serving food to disagreeable clients in a restaurant every night with no day off, and from cleaning the houses of their bored, complaining wives during the mornings. Pearl always nodded sympathetically and said she was sure that was so, Marta, don’t worry your head about it, why don’t you go on outside on the porch and have a bit of mulberry wine before dinner?
Livia and Danae suspected that their mother had more than a bit, because her speech was slurred by the time she sat down to the table, and she disappeared upstairs to her room as soon as dessert had been cleared away. Pearl and Cornelia pretended not to notice, Cornelia out of a rigid sense of propriety that refused to even acknowledge the possibility of someone’s not abiding by her rules, and Pearl out of a sweet-faced sympathy for her niece’s frustration and boredom. And besides, as Pearl used to say with a wink in Livia’s direction as they sat down to chat and play cards after the dishes had been dried, the pot has no business calling the kettle black.
Pearl’s hands were so rhythmic and methodical as they shuffled and dealt the cards for another round of black-jack or gin-rummy that Livia was hardly conscious of the swift, graceful detours they made toward the bottle on the far side of the table, of their brief stop and hovering above Pearl’s old crystal wine-glass, the only survivor of a set she had bought thirty years before in anticipation of her married life with Emmett.
But Pearl never touched a drop until after dinner had been served, eaten, and cleared away, until after the plates had been scraped, washed, dried, and returned to their shelves (likewise, Livia only allowed herself a tiny shot of brandy once her shift was almost finished). Like a great pianist who pales before the very idea of giving even the most unimportant performance while inebriated, Pearl’s very particular sense of proprieties demanded that every morsel of food prepared by her hands be the most succulent, well-seasoned, browned or braised, that it could possibly be. Such masterful performances as hers had to be executed with a clear head.
After the applause and the encore, she plumped her body, with its pronounced concavities and convexities (Livia was to remember Aunt Pearl many years later when she studied the Venus of Willendorf), into the rickety kitchen chair and took up the cards and the bottle of mulberry wine with a smile that bordered on smug self-satisfaction.
And she had every right to her smugness. Rare was the meal to which the five women sat down without someone emitting an involuntary, inarticulate moan of pleasure as a sauce, a bit of tender beef, or a perfectly seasoned stalk of asparagus made contact with her tongue.
Once, as she tasted the delicate flesh of a partridge sauteed in butter after a two-day soak in raspberry marinade, Aunt Cornelia had emitted a long, drawn-out guttural noise, followed by a shuddering sigh the likes of which Livia had never heard before.
Cornelia’s sigh made Marta start from her own rapt enjoyment of the luscious, raspberry-flavored flesh of the young bird and turned her face a brilliant red. Livia stared down at her plate, away from Aunt Cornelia’s loss of control; Danae giggled and dropped her knife. Only Pearl smiled, flashing the gold gypsy-tooth in a soundless laugh, as she observed her sister’s reaction.
~
To be continued, Bad, Bad Lovers, to be continued.
Right here, next week.
Same bad time, same bad, bad place.
Come on back, now, y’hear?
~
