The Lost Recipe for Happiness Page 5
The other joy was Mama, Maria Elena, who wrapped her namesake in worn thin cotton aprons and stood the little girl on a chair next to her while she cooked for the multitudes. She told Elena to call her Mama. She showed her how to measure flour and pat out tortillas and stir a pot of stew. And there, again, Elena was safe.
What else could she have done with her life but cook?
At the supermarket in Aspen, Elena simply walked the perimeter at first, to check out the layout. It was predictably big and bright and clean, with all the accoutrements of a high-end grocery—a stunning bakery, acres of deli offerings, and a produce aisle with piles of the very freshest arugula and purple fingerling potatoes and grapes the size of her palm.
But to her surprise, she also found an aisle bursting with a plentiful display of Mexican ingredients—dried red chiles of many varieties, big and small; canned and pickled green chiles; masa and corn husks and spices and almost any other staple a person would need. It seemed bizarre that such a wealth enclave should have such good Mexican supplies, until she spied a short dark man in a plaid shirt and jeans weighing a plump package of chicken.
Of course. Such a heavy tourist market would require huge crews of construction workers, cleaners, cooks, gardeners, labor that would be supplied by Latin American immigrants in all their forms—legal, green-card, and not.
Standing there in that shiny aisle, with rock classics playing over the speakers, she realized she was going to live closer to home than she had in almost twenty years. The snake of history on her back burned for one long minute, as if it were uncoiling into a live being, a whip of white and orange light. Standing there in the brightly lit grocery store with a vastness of homey foods to choose from, Elena felt suddenly hollow, terrified, and she wondered if this was a mistake, to come too close to home.
“Just cook, Elena,” said Isobel, standing by the chiles, her arms slim and young. “Just make the soup.”
“I have to cook for Julian tomorrow night.” Elena looked over her shoulder. There was no one in the aisle. “I don’t know what to make.”
“He wants your favorites.” Isobel ran her hands over the bags of posole, the yellow cartons of Mexican hot chocolate. “Be yourself.”
Elena plucked a bag of dried posole from the rack and settled it next to the bag of masa. Cook. Just cook. Forget about the critics who, like ravens with black shiny eyes, would be secretly hoping for her to fail. Forget Dmitri and failure and the fact that Julian Liswood was maybe one of the most—
Never mind.
There was no other choice. The Aspen restaurant was the chance she’d been working toward for two decades. For that, she would cook. For that, she would start again in a new place, building a new home.
And she would begin by cooking.
SIX
ABUELA MARIA ELENA’S POSOLE
2 cups dried posole (dried whole hominy)
2–3 lbs. boneless pork shoulder
3 cloves garlic, sliced thin
1 onion, chopped
1/2 cup mild fresh green chiles, reserving a handful of thin strips for garnish
1–2 peeled, seeded, chopped tomatoes (about 1 cup)
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro
Salt to taste
Rinse posole in cold water until water runs clear. Soak overnight.
To cook pork, put it in a heavy pan on the stove with a little water, salt and pepper, and let it cook real slow until it’s falling to pieces, about 2–3 hours. Remove the pork, leaving the fat in the pan, and brown the onions and garlic, then put the meat back in the pan, add the posole and enough water to cover it all, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, covered, till posole pops, about 1 hour. Meanwhile roast the chile peppers (if fresh) in a paper bag in a 400-degree oven for about 10 minutes, remove, cool, peel (skin slips off easily), and chop. Add the chiles to the pot after the posole has popped. Simmer, covered, 4 more hours. Taste for seasoning, add salt to taste. Simmer, covered, 1 more hour. Garnish with cilantro and thin coils of pepper and finely chopped tomatoes.
SEVEN
Julian sat in a big chair, his legs crossed, a lamp shining over his shoulder. In the background played Billie Holiday, singing “Good Morning Heartache,” the old jazz sounds a ghostly memory of a time long gone, the best music he knew to write horror. Or anything really.
On a tablet in his lap, he was trying to block out a new screenplay, and had been all summer. It shouldn’t have taken so long. He’d done sixteen films in the twenty-two years of his career, and he understood what audiences and the studio wanted of him. This one should have been a piece of cake, the third in a trilogy that had been vastly popular, but it wasn’t coming. He loved horror, everything about the genre, but he’d had enough of the type that was selling just now—buckets of blood and nubile girls screaming in terror as they tried to outwit yet another crazed serial killer. It was fun, in its place. It had made him piles of money, his studio piles of money. More money than he could spend, honestly.
He wasn’t in the mood for it right now. Not that he knew what he was in the mood for. He’d done a lot of kinds of horror flicks, from ghosts to slashers to an upmarket historical vampire flick that was still one of the top DVD rentals on every list a decade after it had been made.
The past few weeks, there was a taste in his mouth, a hint of something that he couldn’t quite catch, a whisper or promise. Thus the pad of paper, no electronics between himself and his imagination, just an open legal pad with crisp white paper and a fountain pen with strong black ink. It made him feel like a bard to write with a fountain pen.
On the paper, he doodled. Music rose in a cloud to the exposed rafters of the cathedral ceiling. What was it that kept sweeping through him? On the page he wrote, yearning, redemption, sorrow, catharsis, hunger.
He drew a circle around each word and sketched bubbles going out from each one. Horror was always about catharsis, about letting go of pent-up emotions, recognizing that life as it is was not so bad.
It was also about redemption—monsters and ghosts and zombies put in their place. He had a flash of a graveyard, an open grave, and a sense of cold loss. With quick, sure strokes, he captured the wisp in a sketch.
Each kind of horror had a particular function, fulfilled a particular longing or fantasy on the part of the audience—and the filmmaker, of course. What fantasy was he yearning to fulfill?
For a long moment he sat still, his pen unmoving, then he pulled a sheaf of papers from the back of the notebook. Photocopies of old newspaper clippings, from the autumn of 1988, most of them reiterating the same information. The top story was taken from the Albuquerque Journal, November 1988. A photo showed the marks on a tree trunk and a hill with crosses standing against a twilight sky.
LOCAL TRAGEDY
FOUR TEENS DEAD, ONE CRITICAL IN CAR CRASH
AP Espanola—Four teens were killed instantly and another critically injured in a high-speed crash on State Highway 76 Thursday night when the driver lost control and slammed into a tree. The teens were all students at Espanola Valley High School. Three were from one family—the driver, Isobel Alvarez, 18, a senior; her younger brother Albert, 14, and the lone survivor, Elena Alvarez, 17, who sustained catastrophic injuries and has not regained consciousness. She was airlifted to an Albuquerque hospital and is listed in critical condition. The other victims were Edwin Valdez, 18, the survivor’s boyfriend, and Penelope Madrid, also 17, a cousin to the Alvarez family. Alcohol was not a factor in the incident.
Julian flipped the edge of the paper with his thumb. An ordinary story in ways, both utterly banal and absolutely devastating. It happened every day—cars trying to beat an oncoming train, drag-racing up lonely farm highways, navigating bad roads in the dark; drinking and driving in any fashion at all.
It still left a pit in his belly, a hollowness. Three children ripped from a family in a single swath, two siblings and a cousin dead, and a fourth so badly mangled that it appeared it had taken more than a year for her to leave the ho
spital.
He fingered the silky goatee beneath his lip. An ordinary horror. Like a murder, a woman being snatched out of a grocery store parking lot and murdered, her body dumped in a field. How many times each year did it happen? Once a week? Once a day?
How did those families survive the loss? He couldn’t even bear to think of the loss of his daughter, for fear that it would bring it closer. Even he, who thought of dark things for a living, skittered away, whispered preventive prayers to angels he didn’t believe in—never, never, please, not ever that. The darkness on the other side of such a thought was unbearable.
He’d found the article when he ran a Google search on his new chef. He ran checks on anyone he planned to hire in a leadership position, just to make sure nothing untoward showed up. The Vancouver newspaper article had hinted that Elena Alvarez had experienced a loss in her youth, but had not elaborated.
Catastrophic injuries. What did that mean? How long, he wondered, had she lain in a coma, unaware that her siblings and friend and cousin were dead?
In the quiet room, Ella Fitzgerald started to sing in her haunting way, “Summertime,” a song that always sent a knife through his heart. When he’d found the article, he’d wanted to throw it away, forget it, let it go.
And he’d known, equally clearly, that he would not. It was a story he had not explored, another angle on the endless question of his movies—how did people grapple with darkness? His creative curiosity had been snared, even as he was a little shamed by it. Was it prurient or the natural curiosity of a storyteller?
Once the door was flung open, there was no closing it. His muses, skinny and pockmarked, stalked the alleyways of dark events, taking notes on events that made others look away. What, he wondered, were the statistics on people who survived such catastrophic events? Did they tend to thrive or self-destruct? What issues did they face?
From the black granite and cherry table at his elbow, he lifted his notebook computer, rubbed the mouse square with the edge of his thumb and brought up Google. He tucked his pen between his teeth to free his hands and typed, survivors catastrophic car accidents.
A slim figure emerged from the shadows of the hallway. “Whatcha doing?”
Julian shut down the search, feeling weirdly guilty. “Nothing, kiddo. What’s up?”
His daughter Portia flung herself into an easy chair. “I’m bored.”
“School starts in a few days, and it will get better.”
“Oh, like I love school so much.” She twisted a strand of extra-shiny blonde hair around a finger. Her outstretched foot wiggled. “I miss home.”
“I know. You’ll make new friends here.”
“I liked my old friends.”
Julian nodded. “But they were not particularly good for you.”
“How do you know people here will be better for me? Maybe I’ll find even worse friends.”
He inclined his head, mentally flipping through the parental handbook to see if there was a proper answer to a veiled threat. She had been in serious trouble in LA, running with a crowd of kids whose parents had too much money and not enough time. Left to their own devices, with far too many resources, they drugged and drank in great quantities.
“I’m sure you can if you try,” he said after a minute. “There must be some stoner snowboarders around. Probably some speed freaks, too, and hey—if you try, I bet you can find some abusive alcoholic boyfriend to punish me with.”
She pursed her sullen lips, unpainted and sweet as a Kewpie doll’s. Just now, she was still slightly blurry, a soft-edged version of the woman she would be in a few years, but one day she would be a tremendous beauty—a gift that would be more burden than blessing if he didn’t figure out how to help her develop the right tools to manage it. If the movies had taught him anything, it was that Beauty often self-destructed.
“I hate my life.” Portia blinked back tears. “How’m I supposed to know what to do?”
“Maybe you could listen to your dad, huh? You’re only fourteen. You’re not supposed to have all the answers.”
She shrugged.
“What I’d like to see you do here is make a fresh start. Make friends with kids who have goals and dreams, who want to do something with their lives.”
“Oh, like jocks and cheerleaders?”
“Since you’re a natural athlete, I would like to see you mix it up with some jocks, actually. But maybe spend time figuring out what you love and find other people who love those things, too. Just find friends who want to believe in life instead of making fun of it.”
A little of the tension eased away from her body. “I guess.”
Julian mentally wiped sweat from his parental brow. Whew. Right answer. For once.
Flinging herself forward to perch elbows on her knees, she said, “I have an interview with somebody for community service tomorrow. What do you think it will be? My friend Aida is working at a museum. That would be so boring I’d want to kill myself.”
Aida was one of the friends Portia had gotten in trouble with, the anorexic daughter of a pop star. “It’s hard to imagine her in a museum. What is she doing?”
“She says she’s giving tours, but I think she’s cleaning bathrooms.” Portia made a face. “Gross. Will I have to do something like that?”
He knew a lot of people who’d had to spend time in community service, mostly for drinking-and-driving offenses. Portia had a lot of hours to work off. “It seems like there are a lot of jobs out there, kiddo. My suggestion is to think of something you wouldn’t mind doing as a volunteer, then see if they have anything like that.”
“Like what? They probably don’t have anything to do with fashion.”
“Probably not.” He thought a minute. “Something with animals? Maybe skiing? God knows there’s plenty of skiing here.”
“Get off the skiing, Dad. I’m not going to ski. It makes your thighs fat.”
“Muscular,” he corrected, but raised a hand to stop the argument before it continued. He’d chosen Aspen in particular because he believed she could not live here when the slopes were open and continue to resist the lure. “Okay. Animals, then.”
“I’ll think about it. Can I get on the Internet?”
He grinned and passed the laptop over to her. She was only allowed access to the Internet through this laptop, and only in his company. She probably did go to Internet cafés, but that was limited access, too, so he looked the other way. “All you had to do was ask.”
“This is stupid, too, you know,” she said, flipping open the laptop.
“Probably.” He doodled circles on his page. In one, he wrote, sorrow.
“You don’t have time for this, to monitor my every move. You have movies to make. People to see.”
He grinned without looking up from the page, and drew a line between two circles. Descent, he wrote into the second circle.
“Are you working on a new movie now?”
“Sort of. It’s not going that well.”
She tapped something into the keyboard and waited, her poreless skin bathed with blue-white light. “You want my opinion, slasher pics are overdone.”
“That would be my opinion, too, kid, but that’s what they want.”
“Life is short, Dad. Maybe you should make the movie you want to make.”
He grunted, thinking of the mountains of responsibilities that surrounded him, not the least of which was this child. Slasher flicks seemed to satisfy something in the public right now. Maybe a reaction to the war, and he couldn’t completely ignore that.
As he gazed at his daughter, however, he realized where his resistance lay. He didn’t want to make a movie about fresh young women being preyed upon by twisted bad guys.
Huh.
“What?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “Maybe you’re right. I’ll think about it.”
“Werewolves,” she said without looking away from the screen. “I like werewolves.”
He chuckled. “Of course you do.”
Light fell through the window, a round pale spill like a moon on the counter. Elena tied back her hair. Into the CD player went Norah Jones, soft and smoky and easy to sing along with, and she rolled up her sleeves to start cooking. There was something about this kitchen that made her think of home ec classes in junior high.
Chopping carrots into perfect rounds, she let her mind drift there. Back to school, which had bored her to death for the most part. The chalky sameness, the too-easy sums and the dense questions asked by students over and over again. Whenever the priests spoke of original sin and all the evil that had come into the world because of Eve, Elena thought of school.
But junior high threw a beautiful curve—she walked into home economics the first day and swooned over the tiny kitchens with their individual stoves and fridges and sinks. Isobel took shop, metals and wood, scorning the traditional female pastime of cooking, but Elena was in heaven. She loved the cabinets stocked with cookie sheets and casserole dishes, the drawers full of matching flatware, the cupboards with matched sets of Corning Ware that didn’t break. Every tool imaginable was there, too—whisks and wooden spoons; spatulas and graters; measuring cups in metal and glass. The knives and thermometers were checked out of a big locked cabinet, and more than once they had to wait while the knives were counted at the end of a period.