The man was at the door of the helicopter, the pilot already settled in at the controls. “Exactly,” he said, looking back over his shoulder. “Quoderat demonstrandum. Case closed.” He lifted himself up into the glass bubble, careful to dangle his feet outside the open door long enough to unlace his shoes — cordovans, in oxblood, with black rubber heel lifts — remove them, and rap them gingerly against the body of the machine. They stood there watching him in silence as if he were performing a holy ritual, a little man on a gray day on an island far from shore, beating the mud from his shoes. Then the big blades began to whirl and they stepped back away from the wash of them and the sudden shrieking assault of noise. “Two weeks,” he mouthed over the roar, and then the door pulled shut and everything they knew and wanted and hoped for lifted off into the sky.
Sus Scrofa
From dreams of exhaustion — her dreamself so depleted she can’t think, her legs gone to stone, her arms leaden, her two hands so weak she’s barely able to fold back the blankets and crawl into bed — Alma wakes to the first hesitant gathering of light. It quivers on the ceiling above her, not quite ready to cohere, the trees beyond the open window dark still, gaunt, stiff-kneed. From the direction of the sea there’s a soft continuous wash that’s indistinguishable from the murmur of the freeway whispering at the wall behind her, broken only by the distant solitary cry of a bird suspended over the waves. She lies there, adjusting to the world, nagged by the feeling that something’s out of place, until very gradually she becomes aware of a rich penetrating aroma wending its way through the hall to rise up the stairs, slip under the crack of the door and wrestle her back to her childhood: bacon crackling in the pan, giving up its salts and nitrates and heavy freight of animal fat.
It takes her a moment to understand: this is her childhood. As unlikely as it might seem, especially in a vegetarian household at — she squints in the direction of the digital clock — six thirty-two in the morning, a parental figure is stirring in the kitchen, sorting through pots and pans, adjusting the coffeemaker and toaster oven, laying thin strips of cured pig flesh in a cross pattern in the depths of a Farberware frying pan, sans top. There will be spatters of grease all over the stove, the floor, the teapot, and the smell of seared meat, like the odor of cigarette smoke in a non-smoking room, will linger in the corners, in the carpet, in the folds of the drapes, for weeks, months maybe. Before she’s even pushed back the covers and set her feet on the floor, she’s upset — or no, not upset, because this is her mother, after all, arrived unannounced with her stepfather last night at dinnertime, but put off her rhythm. Put out. Agitated. Or — but what’s the use? The facts are these: Tim’s out on the island, her mother’s in the kitchen, and she’s got a breakfast meeting in Ventura at seven forty-five.
Katherine “Kat” Boyd — she dropped Takesue after the death of her husband and elected to keep her maiden name on remarrying, because that was who she was and what she felt comfortable with — is fifty-nine, short, square, suffering from adult-onset diabetes and a creeping addiction to vodka and diet tonic. She keeps her peach-colored hair cut in a pageboy, which makes her look younger than she is — people mistake her for fifty, or fifty-five, anyway — and she favors blue jeans and T-shirts, the uniform of her generation. For twenty-two years she taught third grade at Coeur D’Alene Elementary in Venice, before retiring to Scottsdale. She has an antipathy for the ocean, a fear and dislike bordering on hatred, and she’s seen enough fog to last her a lifetime. Right now, she’s got so much bottled-up energy she doesn’t know what to do with herself, so she’s cooking. Alma won’t touch the bacon — she hasn’t eaten meat since her conversion to vegetarianism in the seventh grade under the influence of her best friend, a girl from India whose parents were both doctors and who persisted in wearing a red caste mark on her forehead through the end of junior high — but Ed will. And she might have some herself.
Though she isn’t really conscious of it, in a way she’s laying claim to her turf, because why should she feel like a stranger in her own daughter’s kitchen? She’s rearranged the cups on the hooks beneath the cupboard, facing in rather than out, run the dishwasher, mopped the tile floor and then mopped it again to get rid of the streaks and adjusted the radio to a station she can hum along to. Cat Stevens — the Muslim apologist — is singing “Peace Train” at the moment, and he was preceded by the Carpenters and before them whoever did “Up Up and Away in My Beautiful Balloon.” The bacon pops and sizzles in a gratifying way. She pokes it with a fork, then removes it piece by piece to drain on a paper towel. Turning down the heat under the pan, she mixes in tomatoes, peppers and onions for huevos rancheros, to which she’ll add a generous shake of Tabasco once the eggs firm up. And then, when Alma has gone off to work and Ed is propped up in front of the TV with his eggs and bacon and his morning Bloody Mary, she’ll preheat the oven and separate the eggs for the cake batter.
Upstairs, in the bathroom, Alma shucks her robe and steps into the shower. For a moment steam rises around her, but the shower’s never hot enough, some glitch with the water heater, and now, suddenly, it goes cold. Lurching back and away from the icy spray, the shock electric, instant gooseflesh, she raps her elbow sharply on the aluminum handle of the shower door and lets out a clipped reverberant curse. Her mother must be running hot water, filling the teapot, or God forbid, switching on the dishwasher, in which case the rest of the shower will be an exercise in masochism, her feet cold against the tiles, cold spray splashing her ankles. . she’s about to pound the wall and shout out to her when the hot water suddenly comes back and she’s ducking her head under the stream and spinning a quick pirouette to distribute the warmth. Though she does her best thinking in the shower — something to do with the calming effect of trickling water and the opening of the pores — she nonetheless strictly limits herself to five minutes, regulating the time on the diver’s watch Tim gave her for her birthday last year. It’s hardly enough to get her hair shampooed, rinsed, conditioned, rinsed again and combed out with the spray-on detangler — especially when the flow goes stone cold for fifteen seconds — but she won’t waste water, not during the ongoing and eternal drought brought on by deforestation, global warming and user demand that grows exponentially by the day because the developers have to turn a profit and the condos keep on coming. Guilt — that’s what defines her usage. Guilt over being alive, needing things, consuming things, turning the tap or lighting the flame under the gas burner.
The minute hand shifts, the seconds beat on, and she rinses for the second time and shuts down both handles with nine seconds to spare. Shivering, she towels off briskly before running Tim’s electric shaver over her legs and digging out a dry towel to wrap her hair in. All the while, even through the steam and the cloying scent of the various perfumes the manufacturers have somehow managed to work into their allegedly unscented hair-care products, she smells incinerated flesh, and what do they cure bacon with anyway? Salt and carcinogens, what else? Faintly, through the misted-over slab of the bathroom door, she can hear her mother, in the kitchen, singing along with the easy-listening station.
The night before, just as she’d been sitting down to dinner with a film she’d picked up at the video store on her way home from work (keep it simple, stir-fry and brown rice, Madame Bovary, in the Jean Renoir original), the doorbell had rung. She’d hit the stop button just as Emma, busty, square-shouldered, with the little puckered mouth and razor eyebrows of the thirties, was coming on to the country doctor in a bucolic farmyard with its lowing cattle and a cadre of piglets straining at the teat, thinking it was somebody selling something, only to pull back the door on her mother and gaunt alcoholic stepfather, both of them cradling sacks of groceries. Her mother had insisted on cooking—“We’re both of us starved and you know how I hate road food”—and ten minutes later the three of them were standing in the tiny kitchen, she with sake on the rocks and her mother and Ed with tall glasses of vodka adulterated only by a splash of diet tonic and a paper-thin twist of lemon peel while her mother whipped up a quick spaghetti sauce, “Vegetarian for you, hon, eggplant, peppers and mushrooms, with some turkey sausage on the side for your father. Or Ed, I mean.”