It’s 2:00 A.M. Tim and I have just come, last call, from McNally’s, the pub near campus. We have been together day and night for two weeks. We are in his kitchen in the house he and his roommates call the Village, and I’m hungry. Tim rinses his hands over the sink, letting the cold tap water run over his roommates’ empty glasses, plates smeared with the hardened paste of mashed potatoes, diarrhea stains of gravy, cereal bowls half filled with gray milk and spongy rings of cereal, miniature waterlogged inner tubes of pink and orange and green and blue. He stands slightly pigeon-toed, swaying lightly. His sneaker thwacks on the sticky floor when he puts out a foot to balance himself, as if he’s lifted it from a strip of tape. I’m thinking: I have never been in a kitchen no woman has touched. I’m thinking: I’m drunk. The insides of my eyes, my stomach, roil as if each rides out its own set of slow-rolling waves. I’m thinking: no one knows where I am, this college frat house in the hills inhabited by men I barely know. I’m thinking: I like this.
Tim opens the fridge and pulls out a bowl of barbecued chicken, sets it on the counter. The skin on the legs and thighs and wings in the bowl is puckered, yellow in parts, charred brown in others. I feel detached from what I am about to do, woozy from the two beers I drank and woozy from love. Tim bites into a leg. The smell of barbecued meat fills the kitchen. Am I really doing this? I pick up a wing. It’s shriveled and cold from the fridge but still smells of smoke. I bite the tip, rip it off, chew. Smoky, meaty, sweet, and salty: I haven’t eaten a piece of chicken since before middle school, but the taste is like an old friend.
You won’t want it when your body’s pure, my mother says in my head.
I suddenly feel ravenous, hungrier than I can ever remember being. Tim comes up behind me. I finish the wing, move to a thigh, pull flesh from bone with my teeth. Tim presses against me with his stomach, thighs. He puts his hands on my hips, turns me so we are pelvis to pelvis, lowers his head until our chins touch, his nose pushing against mine. His lips, dry and firm, open my mouth, tongue probing gently. His skin and hair have, compared to the chicken thigh still in my hand, no smell. His breath tastes fresh. He takes my free hand and pulls me toward his bedroom. I drop the thigh into the sink as we pass. I can’t throw up here, where Tim or his rugby roommates can hear. I can’t fast properly because that requires three days of bed rest. This food will have to stay in my body and become part of me. Part of who I am moving forward.
Lying in bed, my first sleepover with a boy, our ankles touch. That night, in my dream, my mother is standing on an unfamiliar dock. A wind blows her dark hair; overhead the robust midday sun is hard and yellow. The ocean behind her is black-blue. She lifts her hand, palm and fingers flat, to wave at me. I wave back at Tim, who is on the dock now. My mother is gone.
* * *
It’s July and Tim has driven down, a surprise visit, from his parents’ house in Northern California, for my twenty-first birthday. We have been together four months.
That night I slip out the sliding glass doors that open from my bedroom and run, nightgowned and barefoot, across the driveway, climb the guesthouse stairs. In my life I wear boys’ shirts and jeans. I still part my hair too far on the side and haven’t yet considered even lip gloss. But Tim has been showing me things I hadn’t known to appreciate about my body. Now I slip in beside him under the cool guest-room sheets. He is awake, waiting for me, shirtless, dressed in only his briefs. He pulls off my nightgown, presses against me; his chest is warm and smooth-skinned and muscled. A warrior tamed and tucked away in an empty upstairs room.
* * *
“I’m going for a run. Wanna come?” It’s Saturday, 6:00 A.M. in Berkeley, and Tim is putting on his shorts. I groan. Doesn’t he want to just sleep a bit longer? I don’t like getting up this early. Still, this morning the fog will be threading through the hills. We will end up, as we always do, in a canyon or on a mountaintop, someplace I have never been. When I’m with him, the fog seems dramatic and beautiful, not dreary. Is an extra hour of sleep worth missing a Tim adventure? Whatever he wants to do, it’s never something I would do if he weren’t there, pushing me. It’s the afterward, when I’m warm and dry, that I like most. The feeling of being tired and of accomplishment, the expanded way of seeing things. Left to my own devices, I’d do none of this. Should I stay and sleep? I throw back the covers.
Tim runs ahead of me on the uphill fire trail, like a deer, landing left and then right, dodging the greenery, ducking pine boughs, grabbing fistfuls of bushes and thrusting them away. I try to keep up, determined to show him I am equal to whatever test this might be of my abilities. My shirt and shorts are wet with sweat; my hands and face are pink with cold. My lungs burn, my forehead smarts with prickles of sweat, my bangs flattening the way I hate, even with the bandanna I tied as a headband. Trying to keep up but also trying not to notice the way his rear end, tight, muscled, pushes against the thin fabric of his running shorts. This run is fun, but I am also at the limits of my endurance; we’ve already been running hard, and mostly uphill, for what feels like a very long time. Fun and hard, I’m beginning to understand, is going to be a recurring pattern with Tim. Yesterday we launched a borrowed Hobie Cat in the bay and, despite gale warnings, I stepped into a wetsuit, peeled on the thick, warm rubber, and zipped it up the back. The wind was howling, and the sea-size basin was blown dark gray, dotted with explosions of tiny whitecaps. Crashing though the waves, when we hit our angle just right, the small catamaran lifted onto one pontoon, the sails singing a high-pitched hum, and Tim yelled at me to lean back in the harness, so I did, going against every instinct in my body, soaked and terrified and thrilled, as we sped on, suspended high above the windblown, unfamiliar waterscape. The weekend before, we drove to Tahoe, the rocky granite and pine forest terrain growing more and more majestic, to swim in the still-cold-from-snowmelt June glass-clear lake. In the book my mother read to my brother and me when we were little, Where the Wild Things Are, Max’s room dissolves so he is standing suddenly in the great wide world. With Tim I have become a creature of movement and activity and wild expanses. I’m learning he pushes every boundary he comes to and lifts me outside of myself, which adds to the exhilaration of this new love and keeps me from sinking into my old sadness. Beers after practice, cold chicken from his fridge after beers, I make the salads, Tim barbecues the chicken, the steak. I feel like I’m tumbling in a warm, effervescent whorl of new feelings. My emotional allegiance has transferred from my mother to Tim and when I’m with him, I can eat Top Dog hot dogs, waffles at Denny’s, 7-Eleven. It’s—it’s guilt-free. At 2:00 A.M. nothing counts anyway. I rip at the flesh with my teeth; blood runs down my throat. I imagine caves, tribal fires, and loincloths, an ancient past of violence and the heat of the hunt, the heat of freshly spilled blood, the heat of glowing embers to ward off a cold world. For the first time in my life I belong to the strong tribe. The dominant tribe. I am doing what everyone else does.
* * *
I’m in the back of Tim’s pickup truck, lying on the bed, watching the sky as he drives through the tunnel that separates Berkeley from Lamorinda. On the other side of the tunnel the air smells warmer, sweeter. I sit up to see brown hills rolling by. Oh, I think. Like a pasture. Like farmland. I like it here.
Tim and I move into a rugby friend’s mother-in-law’s unit in Lafayette. The unit has no stove, so we cook everything in an electric wok, which sits on the countertop. It’s surprising how many foods—pancakes, chicken-fried steaks, broccoli—can be made in its curved skillet.
We move from the condominium and rent a house that has linoleum floors and worn wood cabinets in the kitchen, old carpet, spiderwebs in the corners of the windows, and smells musty in a good way, like my grandmother’s farm. A few months into living in Walnut Creek, we find a trail into the hills. Fourteen hundred acres, it turns out, of protected land: grass and mud and dirt and rocks, coyotes, squirrels, hills with one medium-size mountain in the middle. I open every window and let in the green smell of rain. I wade out into winter-dark skies; black mud; wet, knee-deep jade-colored fields; my sneakers and jeans soaked; my hair curling in the misty drizzle. These are my own real-life red dirt roads, my own farmy knolls, warm with the sunny, peppery yellow-flower smell of dandelion and mustard seed, my own Mary Poppins chalk drawing I have jumped into.
* * *
My parents are getting divorced. My mother is attending a jazz concert in downtown LA, where Jean-Baptiste Illinois Jacquet, an African American saxophonist who cut his teeth playing in bands with Lionel Hampton, Cab Calloway, Dizzy Gillespie, and Count Basie, is performing his signature instrument, the tenor saxophone.
My mother will tell us that Illinois toured with the greats. His hit solo, “Flying Home,” released when he was nineteen, was considered the first “crossover,” a 45 that both whites and African Americans flocked to buy. Another first: In 1944, while playing at the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los Angeles, Illinois transposed clarinet fingerings onto his saxophone and pushed the instrument two and a half octaves higher than the tenor saxophone had ever been played. The crowd and the jazz world erupted and the saxophone was changed forever.
After the concert, my mother introduces herself, and as they talk, she and Illinois discover coincidences: Illinois taught himself to play the bassoon, the instrument that helped strengthen my mother’s lungs after her fall from the tractor. My mother’s family lived in Illinois when she was a child. She and Illinois also share the same birthday, October 31, Halloween. He has perfect pitch, as does she.
Jazz becomes my mother’s new religion. It is the highest expression of music, she says, intellectually demanding, spiritually pure.
* * *
After Braddy finishes high school, my parents sell the Beverly Hills house and my mother moves back to New York. She tells me she was always cold in California. She helps my brother rent an apartment in Manhattan and she moves in with Illinois, in his redbrick house on a tree-lined street in Addisleigh Park in Queens, a neighborhood that was considered quite exclusive in the late 1940s, she tells me, when Babe Ruth, Count Basie, and Ella Fitzgerald were neighbors. Illinois’s poor health has stalled his career, so my mother implements blended salads. When I visit, my mother serves them on a foldout tray and pats his head as he tucks his napkin around his shirt neck. Illinois and I joke about the Program restrictions. He is happy and healthy, but hungry.
In Los Angeles, my father is making television movies with Bette Davis, Jeff Bridges, Samuel L. Jackson. He marries Marge, an ex-scientist whom he met while living in his apartment by the beach and whom he tells us he reveres for her intellect. They move to a house in Bel Air, a neighborhood akin to Beverly Hills in affluence, and the house reflects it. Most of the flooring is marble, Marge has large paintings displayed on easels throughout the house, and there are bronze busts and statuettes perched on antique armoires and tables. When I visit, my father sits quietly watching his television with a smile as Marge lights up her afternoon cigarette on the couch.
“Modern medicine,” he says. I have somehow left scuff marks from my rubber soles on Marge’s kitchen floor and she’s in the other room instructing the housekeeper how to clean them. He holds out his hands to show me the pills he is about to swallow, which include blood thinners, antianxiety, and blood pressure medicine. “What science has achieved.” He shakes his head. “To consider that worthless?”
My father transitions into making miniseries: Evergreen, starring Lesley Ann Warren, “the story of America,” he will later say, about immigrants in the United States in the early twentieth century; Ken Follet’s On Wings of Eagles, starring Burt Lancaster; The Kennedys of Massachusetts. His 1983 documentary, He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin’, about a ballet studio in New York, wins both an Emmy and an Academy Award, a first for any production. My father gives Greg a position after college as assistant editor on the movie Footloose. Greg also writes a screenplay, The Night Before, which he sells.
* * *
I am standing in my father’s Burbank Studios office. I’ve come to discuss the fact that I want to be in his business. This feels like a big moment.
“What do you like about this business?” he asks. He often uses the word nepotism, scornful of people who hire their relatives whether they are qualified or not.
Isn’t the answer obvious? Movie sets, movie stars; the feeling of belonging, of being a part of something larger than life, of feeling singled out, chosen, lucky. I don’t know how to say all this without sounding silly. I also don’t know how not to hear between the lines of his question: You’re not in the club. Just wanting it isn’t enough. I have to be what he might think I’m not, crackling with charisma in the way the people around him are. Regardless, at twenty-four, I’m grown-up and his world isn’t my world by default anymore. Now I have to earn it.
* * *
My mother’s Ayurvedic practitioner, Dr. Joshi, a tiny man with a plum-colored robe and pale, bluish hands, holds his thumb to the pulse at my wrist. His office is quiet except for the sound of his breathing. I can hear a wheezy whistle at the tail end of each exhale as the room fills with the smell of mild poop. It’s coming from his breath. I recognize, though also wonder at, the early-in-a-fast smell of cleansing. Shouldn’t he already be cleansed by now?
In my mother’s kitchen, blended salads have given way to kitchari, a warm yellow dal and basmati rice soup, the cornerstone meal of an Ayurvedic diet.
I have agreed, to make her happy, to this appointment. Dr. Joshi is touring the country, using various patients’ homes as temporary offices to see clients who can’t make it to either of his permanent headquarters in Albuquerque or New Delhi.
“He’s going to be in Oakland the same week as my visit,” she tells me over the phone while making her own plans to travel from her house in Queens to Southern California, to see my brothers, then me, her last stop. She will be with me for two weeks.
Now, alone with Dr. Joshi, I wonder if I ought to express a concern I could never share with my mother, who is waiting in the foyer.
“So…” I begin as he finishes with my wrist and, straightening his glasses, flips to a fresh page in the blue notepad on his desk. He pushes his glasses back against his nose again and looks up at me. He’s a doctor. He looks to be somewhere near seventy. He’s seen it all, right?
“I crave blood,” I say. The newness of eating everything I want, my guilt dulled by the elation of my new relationship with Tim, has worn off, along with the high of new love. I’m back to Earth, and meat, once again, seems to ground me more than I want to be grounded. I am back to longing for the lightness. I’m also back to the searing guilt I feel when I eat meat. I’ve begun to notice that there are times when it’s easier to resist, begun to realize that the one time my craving overpowers me is just before my period. In this part of the month, during ovulation, the longing is a force I can’t seem to surmount. Surely, I think to myself, in his travels across his lifetime and across the world, Dr. Joshi has come across this before?
For a moment it appears as if he doesn’t seem to know how to respond. He looks paler than he did a moment ago. After a few more seconds of silence, I realize he actually really doesn’t know how to respond.
“There’s something…” he begins. He doesn’t meet my eyes. Is he embarrassed? Am I a monster to him, this gentle man who has easily eaten warm spiced beans and rice every meal of every day of his time on earth?
“There’s something in you, Christine.…” He trails off, then stops. I wait, but he doesn’t say anything more. It’s the most he can do.
He looks down at his notebook and begins to write up the list of spices that need to be added to my kitchari and ginger tea. The personalized ingredient list that patients from across the country come to get.
“How was it?” my mother asks.
I show her the list of spices.
“He was great,” I say.