Umami

‘When was the very, very first time you heard anyone talk about umami?’ I ask.

‘I never told you? I was at a conference dinner where I got lumbered sitting next to a grouchy Japanese man, one of those people who make waiters miserable for sport. He complained that his food didn’t have enough umami in it, and of course I had no idea what he was talking about. It was 1969. Is this any use to you?’ he asks, holding up a microscopic hose, which I immediately recognize.

‘A Dampit?’ I say.

‘A what?’

‘A Dampit. It’s a guitar humidifier.’

‘Really?’ he asks.

‘I think so, let me see. Yep.’

Alf laughs, ‘I always thought it was to keep cacti and other things you don’t need to water from going dry; I found it one day out in the corridor!’ He’s really losing it now: ‘I suppose one only sees what one wants to see.’

‘It was probably my brother’s.’

‘Well, in that case, take it.’ He takes a couple of deep breaths and manages to stop giggling. ‘Tell him I nicked it off him.’

‘I haven’t seen you laugh like that for ages,’ I say without thinking. He sighs and his face relaxes into a smile somewhere between stoical and serene, and which makes me feel older than I am. Emma always says I have an old soul, and sometimes I think she’s got that right.

*

I leave Umami with a loaded trolley. Aside from Marina’s dainty hammer and Theo’s useless Dampit, I have: a shovel, a rake, a pair of enormous, mucky gloves, an extension hose and some garden shears which Alf uses to prune the little tree on his porch. It’s a lemon tree that has never given lemons. I’ve only just started to appreciate the huge amount of plants in his house. Before, I always focused on the MM, never on the pots inside, which I thought were more his wife’s territory. Her name was Doctor Noelia and she always offered me sugar-free candy because she was worried I would get fat. It worries me too now, a little bit, but I can’t consult her anymore because she died three months after my sister. When I ask my mom if I’m fat she says no, that it’s only baby fat and that I’ll grow out of it.

‘So, what you mean is that I’ll keep growing till one day I burst out of my fatness and leave it behind like snakes shed their skins?’ I ask her.

‘Calm down, Ana,’ she says.

‘I’m not a baby,’ I say.

‘You’ve got such beautiful eyes,’ she says, and I get mad because she’s always trying to change the subject.

Growing the milpa is a matter of principle, but the houseplants inside are more like Alf’s pets. That’s what I think as I leave Umami. He looks after them lovingly. Not as lovingly as he looks after The Girls, but almost; a lot like the other old folk in the neighborhood look after their dogs. Normally I like to hang around Umami for hours, but this time I left quickly because ever since I let slip about Chela I feel bad. Sort of like a traitor. This reunion with her mom is going to be the weirdest thing that Pina’s done in her life, and it’s going to happen without me. I didn’t even help her pack. I decide I’m going to call her tonight. I hope her cell works in Macuque, or whatever that beach is called. Me, I don’t have a cell. One day I asked Dad for one and he said, ‘If you lived in the nineteenth century, what would you think of a thirteen-year-old girl who spent all day glued to the mailbox waiting for a letter?’

‘I’d think she was pathetic,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ he said, ‘end of discussion.’

I’ll ask again when I start high school. Safety first, Dad.

I leave the trolley by the bell in the passageway and head out of the mews again. Then I cross the street and poke my nose under the door of the house in front. The feet are still there, and I bolt it again. It’s only when I’m back at home arranging the tools out in the yard that I realize two things. One: I’m as stupid as stupid can be. Two: the feet under the door are a pair of shoes.

*

A week later I’m finally ready to throw out the old soil. Since you can’t do any work in the afternoons because of the dumb summer rains, I’ve been waking up earlier, pretty early in fact: around ten!

I emptied the planter with the shovel. It took me the best part of the week. Then I put the mega-loads of mud in trash bags, which I stacked in a corner. Now I’m hauling the bags through the mews out onto the street. One of them snags on the bell, splits open, and covers the passageway in soil. Bah, the rain will wash it away.

I’m just putting the last bag out on the street when Beto pokes his head out of a window of Sour House.

‘You’re polluting the planet, my girl,’ he calls down to me on the sidewalk.

‘Au contraire,’ I tell him. ‘This soil here is full of lead, whereas the one in my yard will have plants and the plants will produce oxygen!’

‘Right on,’ he says.

My mom has called Pina Pi her whole life. Pina calls my mom Aunt Linda. I also used to call Pina’s mom Aunt Chela, and she would call me Ananás, which means pineapple in French. But she doesn’t call me anything anymore because she disappeared when we were nine, and even though she’s back now, she still hasn’t shown her face around here; instead she wrote Pina an email and sent her a ticket to go visit her Mitsubishahi beach. Anyway, Beto is just Beto, and he calls us kids ‘my girl’ or ‘my boy’, even though we’re not in any way his.

‘How’s the plantation coming along?’ he asks.

‘Come down and see,’ I say. ‘Come over for a beer later. My dad always has a beer in the yard around eight.’

‘You got it.’

I think I’m pretty generous for having invited him. He must miss Pina. Although not more than I do. Beto shuts his window and I head back into the larynx feeling like a breath of fresh air: light and magnanimous.

*

I’ve got soil in my nails and hair. The new stuff is a lot softer and almost black, and as much as I try to spread it out evenly, I can’t. It’s a bit like trying to pour flour from its packet into a jar. If you squeeze the sack you can end up squashing it into clumps, and then only one side of the planter gets any soil and you have to go back and fluff it all up again with the rake. The one thing I’m really not keen on is the worms; where the heck do they all come from? Once I’m done I’ll clean the plaster around the planters. Soap, bucket, scouring pad. Mom watches me from the window, frowning.

‘What?’ I ask.

‘You’re so pretty,’ she says.

‘No I’m not,’ I say.

But that night, after my bath, I inspect myself in the mirror. Maybe I’m not so ugly these days.

*

I spend the next three weeks sowing, by which I mean that I spent one day pressing seeds into the soil and now I spend my mornings reading aloud to them, to cheer them along. That’s what Daniela did with Baby, and now she does it with the new one inside her, which we’ve already begun to call Baby II. I miss Pina like crazy, and then I don’t miss her so much. I miss my brothers too, but only because now that they’re not here to distract Mom she spends hours on the sofa with a book in her hand never turning the page. I make her iced tea with fresh mint and she takes a few sips, leaning on one elbow and barely lifting her chest, as if she were sick or something. Then she leaves the rest untouched. The ice melts. The glasses sweat. Dust has started to build up all over the house. The beds are unmade. It rains every afternoon and I really want a cat or a turtle, but when I bring it up Mom says, ‘You’re just nostalgic for camp.’