A Second Chance Read online

  Adam and I follow our usual route through the store. First stop is the meat counter, where I get some liver. The clerk behind the counter has figured out that something is wrong with my husband. He has seen him following me in his clumsy way, and he knows by now that his smile is not a happy one. He is Moroccan and lately he started flirting with me, killing me with his “Madame” this and “Madame” that. The other clerks see what he’s doing and tease him. I don’t mind his advances, if it means there’ll be fewer gizzards mixed in with the liver.

  Behind me, Adam pushes the shopping cart with his belly and his left arm. We move on for the cheese, sausages, olives, and finally coffee and peanuts. In the vegetable section, I pick up parsley and eggplant. The quality is good and the price is right, just $0.99 per lb. The fruit section is next. My God – apricots and cherries in wintertime. I stick to oranges, apples and pears.

  At home, I unpack the car myself; it’s too tricky to pick out the few items Adam could manage. We have bad memories of the day he fell on the ice with two jars of the vegetable spread zacuska and another jar of olives. He does rush to hold the door for me.

  By three o’clock, I’m ready to start cooking. I’m making liver with tomato sauce and potatoes cooked the Transylvanian way – boiled in their skins, sliced into rounds, and fried with paprika.

  At five, Marta calls to make sure I’m coming and to insist I not bring anything. I tell her I’ve already made it. She wants to send Daniel to help me out. I tell her there’s no need, unless they want to give me a hand when I arrive at her house. I’m bringing the cast iron pot, which is heavy. She reminds me to wear something red.

  Damn! I never wear red. If it hadn’t been for this phone call, I could have pretended to have forgotten we were supposed to. Now, I’ll have to find something. I have a red blouse that I never wear because it doesn’t go with any of my other clothes. I dither about this, then make up my mind. Red jewelry. That’s it, that’s all: a coral necklace and earrings, a big ring carved in fish bone I bought in Cuba, and bracelets with red stones whose origin and material I have forgotten.

  As for Adam, there’s not much to choose from. He has no red clothes, just a red tie with little white hearts. I wonder who was making fun of him with a gift like that; I could swear it was Marta. It’s fine for this evening. I help him put on some black pants and a light grey shirt. He loves the tie. He studies it closely while I tie it.

  As soon as he’s ready, though, he’s gripped by fear. He’s been asking me all day about the other guests. I’ve told him he’ll know everyone, no need to panic, they’re all friends, they all know. So what’s the darned problem?

  He sits on the sofa and watches while I move between the bathroom and the bedroom.

  Does he realize this change in our twenty-year routine?

  Adam was never ready on time. Being punctual was my obsession. We had to start getting ready very early, and I was always ready before him, regardless. I’d be the one sitting on the sofa waiting for him to finish shaving and fix his unruly hair. Postponed visits to the barber made this difficult, and the results were never very good. I used to tap the floor with my foot and leave the house in a state of irritation.

  Adam doesn’t show any sign of irritation, waiting on the couch.

  Daniel and Marta carry the cast iron pot and help Adam negotiate their driveway, which is icier than ours. The cars I see on the street tell me we must be among the last to arrive.

  They’re all in the living room and the kitchen with a glass in hand, close to bowls of peanuts, pistachios, and pretzels. Adam smiles, which is the only way he knows to respond to their greetings. He was never very sociable. I’m happy he can now just pretend to be listening, which is what he always did, anyway.

  Marta has set up tables in the basement, red tablecloths and napkins, small tablemats cut out in the shape of hearts, a plastic Eros at each setting.

  We’re hungry and soon sit down. Sauerkraut, mashed beans, salads, sausages, eggplant, rice with seafood, chicken curry. My liver and potatoes dish is a hit, and I’m glad I can still surprise them.

  The men go upstairs to the living room, and the women stay on. Daniel insists Adam go with the men, in spite of the anxiety in his face. I nod my consent.

  We talk about dieting. These women all have low-calorie recipes to share. This doesn’t stop them wolfing down everything on the table, even as they calculate the calories in every bite. They’re surprised I haven’t yet switched to quinoa seeds, the new miracle food. I tell them my theory, which is that the human body doesn’t necessarily know how to get the most out of unfamiliar foods. The others believe in alimentary diversity, I in nutritional history. No one agrees with me. They all carry on exchanging quinoa recipes. Lily’s instructions on preparing all-saints’-worth essential oil is useful; this is a good moisturizer, especially for the hands, which get dry with age. She tells me about tea as a remedy for insomnia.

  The cheese course reveals our greed again. I can’t blame anyone for coming up with so many different varieties, since cheese certainly is part of our nutritional history. The sin, if there is a sin, is the number of pretzels everyone spreads with lashings of cheeses like Frère Andre and La passion des anges.

  The next subject is the need to make a will. We discuss the pros and cons and analyze who should inherit more – the children or the husband – and in what proportion.

  Dora wants to leave her fortune to her husband. She finds this ethical; they’ve worked together to build their fortune, and he has a right to take advantage of it. Children have to prove they deserve to be spoiled.

  Sandra disagrees, saying it’s foolish to give your husband everything, for that’s like giving him a dowry for his next marriage.

  Then there are our eternal remains. Roxana wants to be cremated, but a small cohort rebels against such a sinful thought: our Orthodox tradition wants us turned into land, not into ashes. Roxana doesn’t care; she just doesn’t want to freeze at forty below for six months every year. She has even talked about the acquisition of a small pigeonhole in a chapel not far from her place. Those who want to be buried have not yet started searching for the best spot. They’re wavering between Montreal and Laval, between being far away or close to their kids and friends. Burial is not the main issue. The main question is, who would come and visit us?

  Dora asks a disturbing question. “Do you realize we’re going to start dying?”

  We’re young and lively, and, so far, we’ve mostly known happy events – birthday parties, weddings, and baptisms. When our parents died on the other side of the ocean, each of us went to the funerals and did our mourning over there.

  I check on Adam. He’s sitting in a corner of the living room with a glass of beer in his good hand. It looks as though he’s listening carefully to what the others are saying, as he turns his head to every speaker. He sees me and thinks it’s time to go. I signal to stay put. I know he’s tired, but I want to stay a bit longer. I think the best strategy is to start drinking again, which I never used to do. Usually after the main course I drink only water, but water makes me sleepy and eager to get home.

  The women are talking about dieting again. This is because the cakes have been brought out. Dessert is Marta’s responsibility, and she spares no expense. There’s cheesecake, chocolate mousse, and a flan. They all eat with gusto, amusing themselves with their own appetite. It’s time to add up all the calories they’ve consumed in the course of the evening.

  Marta and Daniel are leaving in a week for a holiday in Venezuela, on Margarita Island, with three of the other couples. They chose Chavez over his friend Fidel. People in our circle often take a week off in February and head south in a group. They speak about their last-minute preparations.

  The talk moves to plucking and shaving and the amount of hair we still have on our pubis. Some say they’re still hairy, others say they’re, sadly, bald. Most are menopausal, so we share r
emedies for hot flashes. We’re laughing and making fun of the shape, density and colour of our pubic hair when Daniel appears, looking for something. He hears laughter, catches a few words, and heads back upstairs.

  As we say our goodnights, we realize that, for the first time, none of us danced at any point in the evening.

  Adam never liked new foods much, and neither did I. However, he loved everything meaty, whereas I was always more interested in vegetables. I insisted on eating foods we ate as children and on avoiding everything that was not in season, like strawberries in winter and tomatoes in spring. Adam never agreed with me that this was against nature.

  Our ancestors had no access to such variety year-round; they had to wait for warm weather to take advantage of the land’s plenty. In the villages, those first sources of civilization, people ate what nature offered them, and, over the centuries, this became a ritual. Penury was transformed into tradition. Lent and Advent, for example: why did people fast then? Because there was no alternative.

  In autumn, starting in November, the goats, mutton, and cows got pregnant and could not be milked anymore until spring, when they gave birth. Chickens laid fewer eggs in winter, too, sometimes none at all. The pig slaughter was postponed until the cold created a natural refrigerator. People had to feed themselves with what they had: carrots, potatoes, radishes, turnips, beans, peas, lentils, nuts, pickles and cabbage marinated in vinegar or brine. There were no fresh tomatoes, salad greens, asparagus, or cucumbers.

  In early March, the chickens started to lay eggs and sit on them, and other livestock gave birth to lambs, calves, kids. Suddenly there was milk, cheese, and meat again; fields and gardens were bursting with new growth; fallow land was full of sorrel, rhubarb, nettles, amaranth, and patience. After the long months of making do with salted meat, lard, marinated vegetables, and dry seeds, the body cried out for the vitamins and minerals of fresh produce.

  The summer was paradise for vegetables and fresh fruits. They were juicy, ripened out in the sun and not in warehouses, and chock-full of oxygen. First came the strawberries and cherries, and, later, the watermelons, apples, pears, and plums. In early June, people started with kidney beans and spring radishes. Then came the cucumbers and zucchini. By August, there were tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers.

  Summer meats were primarily chicken, duck, and goose. Sometimes, there was game: rabbits and partridges from the harvested wheat fields. In some regions, there was fish.

  And the cycle began again, year after year, without much variation.

  Here, we have access to everything. Eating strawberries, tomatoes, and watermelon in winter is ungodly to me. Foregoing radishes, turnips, marinated cabbage, and pickles seems to me a mortal sin.

  Adam used to tease me about this with our guests, carefully explaining how my seasonal interest had determined what they had on their plates. When he discovered an out-of-season ingredient, he pretended to be indignant.

  “What is this horror? Why is this slice of tomato on my plate in the middle of winter? Who smuggled this forbidden product into our kitchen?”

  I usually took this in good part, except when we were out shopping. He would be piling cucumbers and tomatoes into our shopping cart, and I radishes and zucchini. I used to take sadistic pleasure in showing his out-of-season vegetables to him one week later, rotten in the refrigerator, before I threw them out in disdain.

  As Adam so rarely cooked, he was obliged to eat what I put on his plate, and I had difficulty making a tomato salad in winter. I always preferred cabbage, or beets with a pinch of horseradish, or grated carrots and celery with salt and olive oil. I have occasionally gone so far as to try a parsley salad with garlic, fresh lemon juice, and extra-virgin olive oil. This last was a frequent cause of his sarcasm.

  “Since when did your ancestors eat olive oil?”

  To which I quickly replied, “You see how open-minded I am?”

  More recently he had started to tease me about my new habit of adding a few drops of extra-virgin olive oil to a slice of Danish blue.

  “No kidding. Danish blue! I bet your ancestors ate a lot of it, as their cheese was surely getting musty at the bottom of their barrel. If you want my opinion, though, the best way of helping you swallow that is to add onion. Take my shepherd’s word for it.”

  Since he had his stroke, we’ve been eating what I like. My whole life I felt I had sacrificed my tastes for his: so much meat, of so many kinds, in so many different ways. If we could only calculate the number of animals that had been sacrificed on the altar of our kitchen. I had to put up with the smell of fried and boiled meat every day of the week.

  Not any more. I can now devote myself to eggplants, tomatoes, marrows, radishes, and cabbages, all in their season. We eat light soups, mashed zucchini, barbecued eggplant, fruit compôtes. We have meat just once a week, on Sundays, and for holidays, and when we have guests.

  Adam now eats whatever I prepare without any fuss, and he accepts my seasonal and heredity theories without a quibble. In the morning, he chews a few parsley leaves from the bunch set in a glass of water beside the coffee machine. He knows all about its vitamin content and its breath-freshening properties. Whatever I recommend, he accepts unquestioningly. He doesn’t balk at marinated cabbage anymore, or ask for tomatoes in winter.

  Is he happy about it?

  I sometimes ask him if he likes my cooking. He says yes, with a large smile on his face. I don’t ask for more. The beneficial effect on his health is obvious. His cholesterol dropped to the normal level without any help from Lipitor. I even stopped giving him Advil. His doctor had recommended the drug for his blood circulation, even though that was what had caused his cerebral vessels to break down. He is thin without being anaemic. His belly is supple, and his muscles are bulky.

  If I have settled the matter of his body, I am still groping around for his brain. My genetic theories are not much help here, though the doctor did confirm that Adam’s stroke can be traced back to his family history: two of his grandparents died from the same kind of stroke, but at the age of eighty.

  Sometimes, I have a strange vision of his brain as a realm where a disconcerting enemy has settled. I see myself walking hand-in-hand with Adam in an immense forest. All around are centennial trees with their large trunks and magnificent crowns. Our goal is to get from one tree to another; we’re looking for treasures buried beside their roots. What is slowing us down, though, is that the narrow paths through the forest are overgrown with weeds, ferns, and thorny branches. We try to cut through this thicket in order to move forward, but it closes in behind our every step. We move forward and backward, lose track of where we’re headed, and end up retracing our steps.

  This must be the maze of his mangled memory.

  From time to time, I wonder at which moment we sign the blank cheque of our own destruction. What am I doing right now that will one day sentence me to death? What am I eating, drinking, and thinking that will do me in?

  When was it that Adam took the path to a stroke? How did it happen that he ended up at odds with his own body? Why has he so readily given up battling his own genetic legacy?

  Overprotected as we have become, our life is still in perpetual conflict with the world we live in, which is out to destroy us. Nature is not our friend, contrary to what some documentaries suggest about the beauty of the wilderness. Nature is ugly, hostile, brutal. It’s only in tourist leaflets that it’s beautiful. It was conceived to annihilate us with its cold, its heat, its wind, its rain, its heights, and its abysses.

  It took us thousands and thousands of years to tame it, to convince it to accept our presence. We deciphered the secret of its edible fruits and its poisonous ones, we dug up its roots, we hiked in its forests to pick its bounty, and we learned to heal our wounds with its most humble weeds. We have become a race of vanguards and destroyers.

  The malediction, however, remains in our blood. We transfer
it to our kind from generation to generation. We are not programmed to last. We are doomed from the day we are born.

  On Monday, March 6th, the temperature goes up to minus nine. In the morning, I go out onto the balcony to watch two squirrels chasing each other up and down the trunk of the maple tree. At dawn, I had the impression I heard birds singing.

  Adam follows me, dragging his feet in his slippers. He doesn’t look good. Nothing I say seems to interest him. He’s turned in on himself. I know this from his eyes, which avoid mine.

  There’s no point in asking him what he’s thinking about. For a while, I did put this question to him, and he soon learned to take this as a test and be wary. He was afraid of getting the answer wrong.

  Odd that he’s ashamed of his own imperfections and still unable to touch the nature of his condition. What happened to him? What did he do? He’s unable to figure it out; he’s just waiting for an explanation. As long as I give no clear account, he prefers to keep quiet. Until the elucidation of the mystery, he carefully avoids discussion.

  I’m going to barbecue today. I defrost two steaks and light the coals. We could say we’re celebrating the early spring, if we really need a reason for eating meat.

  I ask Adam if he wants to watch the grill, sprinkle the coals from time to time, turn the steaks over, but he says no. He doesn’t like playing with fire. The fierce light and the heat of the incandescent ashes frighten him. Perhaps the fire illuminates something dark in his brain, some well-buried tragedies. In the mysterious forest of his brain, I’m sure there’s a trunk with some horrible secrets lurking somewhere in the mud of the past.

  I don’t know if these memories are related to his own experience or to that of previous generations of hunters, warriors, and murderers. If he doesn’t find recent memories of his own, perhaps he unearths the big fires lit by Genghis Khan in Asia or by the Ottomans at the siege of Vienna, the cruelties of the Crusaders in the magnificent city of Constantinople, or the torching of the Temple in Jerusalem.