She releases the bite on her lower lip to blow a renegade strand of hair from her eyes. With a swift wave of her right hand, she moves the pan of braised ptarmigan in reduced crushed juniper berry and red current juices to the back burner, and with her left hand guides her roux of most beloved imported ingredients to the closer flame: butter, rice flour, a dash of paprika, two grinds of sea salt, four pinches of Aleppo pepper. She gradually adds the homemade vegetable stock. With one hand she whisks without pause, a hint of music between each beat. With her other hand she drops finely chopped carrots and peas into a sunken pan of hot caribou fat to brew a hash; then diced onions, zucchini—all from the garden—into a dry stir fry pan, tossed over a low flame to sweat them together. A continual lift and twist of her wrist throws the contents into the air and catches them.
It’s a cacophony, a discordance of motion. I play a game with myself, trying to intuit her next move, but it’s dizzying for me to watch her hands. Instead I watch her feet. Bare and cracked, they hardly move. Only a slight shift of weight from one to the other indicates the mayhem delivered by her upper torso. Her ankles slim, her calves thick from combat, plaid cotton boxers come down just past her buttocks, rounded, firm. I want to lunge into the kitchen, press my breasts against her back and bite on her ear, tug on her ponytail, and laugh—but I know it would only disrupt the flow. Our flow. The rhythm in her head. Her manic cooking, her panic. Her fear of sleeping hungry.
In the cities where her story began, there are those who have it worse than us, those who live in the shadows cast by wealth. They fight for rotten scraps. They shed tears, wring hands, gnash teeth so gnarled they can only suck and gum what food they find. She tells me stories about those she lived among, what she had to do to survive. Sometimes I tell her to stop talking about it; I am laden with guilt for the contrast of our lives. I was born and raised in Anchorage—a city with different social ills than those Outside. I had the luxury of summers and the great outdoors sans concrete, suffocated earth. Very young I learned to fish and hunt, gut and tan. My palate is simple like my cooking, if I couldn’t catch my food I might starve, too.
She has an inherent ability, a gift, to look into a cupboard even an impoverished city dweller would see as bare, and as an outrageous throe of movement and attitude, adorn a plate with piquancy and lusty appeal in under an hour of aerobic culinary activity. She says poverty taught her to cook. Poverty and eating scraps off rich people’s plates when she worked busing tables for wages so low that a full day’s work didn’t afford her the price of an aperitif.
Sometimes when I watch her work, I can see the impressions left behind—a shadow in her eye, a twitch in her brow, a turn in her lip. When she is so buried in those moments, I resent not just her history, but how she squanders the moment by living it only as a means to defeat the past. In those instances, she cannot see me; she cannot see the ease in which I swing my axe; my perfect posture as I brace, draw, and release; the gracefulness in my cut and clean. It is as though I am posturing for a blind artist. It is as if I am only living between her seconds, between the notes she’s humming in her head while she wields and blows.
This incessant motion of hers is not relegated to the kitchen. It’s how she moves through life—it keeps her from noticing the hollow, the void—the place where anger and pain reside. She’s at war with her demons, the ones who determined for her before she was old enough to cross the street alone what the outcome of her life would be. The sexual reprobates whose acts buried within her a path that would know only struggle, doubt, and false footing.
I don’t always know how or where I fit in her life, but I take solace in knowing I am not the problem. I am not her past. I am now. I get to sit here with her. Eat the cuisine she creates out of food we harvest and I catch. Feel her tears fall onto my shoulder at night when she thinks I am sleeping. Listen to the monsters growl and churn inside her while she slumbers. I want to pick up my rifle and shoot her demons, but have learned the best way to help her fight the bastards is to hold them down when she needs to kick them.
Sometimes, when the volume is turned up in her head and she’s immersed in a burst of activity, her tongue lashes out at me. I am not a fighter, I’m a hunter. So I stand aside and bide my time. I have a hunter’s quietude, a fisherman’s patience. Eventually, in short time, she comes around, wraps me in her earnest embrace, lets me taste the wealth of my fortitude, reminds me why I wait.
A hush is unfolding in the kitchen. Each burner’s flame is extinguished. Discarded culinary effects are placed in the sink. Her feet move more than her hands. They dance between spaces as she removes two plates from the cupboard. Two glasses. A bottle of sour wine made by neighbors. She begins to hum, then sing . . . and I release the breaths I’ve been hoarding.
“My darling lives in the green,” her voice soft in sound but firm in texture.
“She wants to be . . . ah la la . . . with me.”
A pool of copper brown, spicy roux. A scoop of vegetable hash doled atop.
“But darling . . .”
Notes rise and embolden.
“I’ve no time to be deceived . . .”
A twirl and spoon of blues.
“By the sweetness of desire.”
Ptarmigan placed gently atop . . .
“Ahh . . . All I’ve got is time for sweet . . . sweet . . .”
A trill and fade.
“Sweet ed-di-bal . . .”
Delicate swirls of deep red, tart rhubarb syrup.
“She wants to taste my sweet ed-di-bal . . .”
Carrots and peas . . .
“Sweet ed-dah-bal love . . .”
She spins the plate down in front of me. Places on my mouth soft lips with sour wine lingering upon them.
For now, we feast.