As much as I converse with sages and heroes, they have very little of my love and admiration. I long for rural and domestic scene, for the warbling of birds and the prattling of my children.
--John Adams
Above photo by Cordelia Manning Copyright 2008.
The Cook's Assistant
By Adrea L. Peters
Lena pauses. She forgets how close to frozen her hands have become. She’s fallen under the spell of sunlight striking the stream of water. Flicks of silvered light bounce from the neck of the faucet back to the sun, as if agreeing to dance. She smiles at their perfect pairing. Washing heirloom after heirloom suddenly turns from work to art. This is why she lives. She’s sure of it. Little in life is convincing, but this is—
A piercing ring interrupts. She glances at its source, daring it to sound again. She returns to her tomatoes, only to find the cloud has caught their prey. Her hands are cold again.
The ring vibrates the antique table beneath it, mean little thing. If she had her way, phones would be obliterated, along with microwaves, computers and cars with voices.
She sips her steaming lavender tea, left over water drips from her palm to the tiled floor.
Again, it calls.
She wipes her hands on her crisp, white apron and lifts the receiver.
She says nothing.
Charlie—Chaz to his friends—sits up straight. His voluminous leather desk chair halts. Use to bobbing and darting around the room, the chair isn’t taking well to being imprisoned underneath him.
Charlie waits.
Lena returns to her tomatoes, phone tucked tight to her shoulder, stretched cord flopping and flaying for stability.
He rubs his graying goatee, a confidence booster. “Con. . .” He speaks no Spanish, but proceeds as if he does. “Magdalena Skye, s’il vous plait.”
She ignores him. Pick a language. The zebra’s are perfection—green streaks stretched to the brim of the juice tomato eager to be sliced. The flavor will dance—
“Ah, con, Magdalena?” Charlie tries again.
“Si. Es—” Her voice is harsh, crackly. It hasn’t been used in a while. “Es Lena,” she repeats, attempting brightness.
“Tres bein!”
He screwed up again. “Quien es este?” She already knows this man does not know who he is.
“Huh?”
“Por favor, juevon. Estas empujando mi paciencia. Let’s try English.”
“You have no accent,” Charlie declares.
She prays to the garden for patience, a vulnerability booster. Roses shading herbs, endless heirloom plants protecting the fragile beans and peas, dino kale, stinky but tasty Russian kale, red lettuces, bright green lettuces, in the distance pumpkin patch with favorite friend, rhubarb. Fruit trees line—
“May I speak with Magdalena Skye?”
“No.” She notes her need to pray more.
“This is Charlie. Charlie Westerly. Is this Magdalena?”
“I don’t care what your name is.”
He imagined she was a stubby, fat woman with spiky blonde hair who enjoyed being mean to children and dogs.
“My friend—”
“Or the name of the person who gave you my number. You have me. You have been calling all morning and now I have answered. Yet, you don’t know what language to speak nor do you answer questions asked.”
And old people. She’d kicked her own grandmother. But, he reminded himself, he needed her. “I want—would like—for you to cook me. I mean, for me.”
She scratches her cheek and lets her fingers fall to her bottom lips. She caresses them, waiting.
“I,” Charlie continues. “I would like for you to prepare me a meal. A meal of your choosing. Go all out.”
She laughs. “You would like me to impress you?”
“Do you know who I am?”
Lena pauses. The sunlight returns. She contemplates turning on the faucet and letting the painting continue, but sits instead in a knobby wooden chair one of her clients made for her. She loved it because it was not square, it teetered.
“You are a man of hunger,” she says, playing along. “And I think you are a man with a goatee because your voice goes in and out. You caress it when you speak. I would say beard, but your voice is too young to have a beard.”
Charlie couldn’t stop his smirk. Precision turned him on. “I meant do you know what I do?”
“Besides caress your goatee?” She’s flirting now. She can’t help it. He released her flavor when he asked her to cook for him. Like the sun on the silver, she’d agreed to dance.
“Do you always talk in circles?” He was flirting back—habit, not flavor.
“Do you always walk in them?”
He leans back in his chair. The leather breathes, softening in gratitude. “So you will?”
“Arrive at 4. Cancel your late evening plans. Wear jeans, running shoes and a tee-shirt or button-up. If you have nothing casual—”
He glances down at his legs. A Tom Ford linen suit is casual.
“Go buy some. You mustn’t eat past 11 this morning. I don’t want you digesting when you arrive here.”
“Shall I bring something?”
“Your hunger is plenty. We will find the ingredients when you arrive.”
He frowns, not understanding, but skillful enough to know he is not meant to know yet.
“Don’t arrive early,” Lena says. “Or late.”
She returns the receiver to the cradle.
He does the same, wondering what would happen if he were early, or late.
---
Charlie Westerly recently became a desperate man. He doesn’t take to the role well, or often, but his back is against the wall this time. Luckily his man Stan had warned him to be anything he wanted to Lena, just not desperate, or he’d never get what he needed from her. And Charlie Westerly wanted to suck everything from Lena Skye that he could.
Stan manages Charlie’s lives—his restaurants, his hotel, his homes and his stream of impulsive choices.
“You spoke to her?” Chunks of coffee-dipped oatmeal scone flew from his mouth.
“After she answered the phone on the ninth try.”
He poured pressed coffee into a dented condensed milk can and stirred it with his butter knife. “She hates phones.”
“You said she was Spanish.” Charlie notes the high pitch to his tone. Pitiful.
“I said she speaks Spanish.”
“She called me an egghead.”
“Egghead? You mean juevon?” Belly laughter fills Charlie’s ear. “Juevon means asshole.”
Charlie rubbed his goatee—his new found awareness of it made him note to shave it after he hung up. A three minute phone call and his life was in chaos. He could handle women. Charlie Westerly knew women. Lena Skye was no different.
“Asshole or not-- she agreed to cook for me. What kind of flowers?”
“NO! Don’t play her. Trust me. Act normal.”
“Flowers is not a play.”
Stan made an odd gurgling sound as if he swallowed wrong.
“Okay. No flowers. But this is not normal. Normal is when I cook. Normal is when I create the ambience. Normal is when I am chef, not a thief, hoping to steal someone else’s—”
“Share. Share someone else’s gifts.”
“I already sold her. There’s no sharing in that.”
“She’ll be the first to say take what you want.”
“That’s because no one can repeat what she does.”
---
Magdalena Skye lived at the end of a dusty road near Calistoga. The heat of summer felt good to him—the city had its winter while the rest of the country enjoyed hot summers. Though he owned the convertible Mini for years, this was the first time the top has come down. Time seemed to stop as he realized how little of it he treasured. As the skin of his hairline tingled under the burning heat, he could hear time return to its ticking state.
His thoughts moved around like dried flour and water trying to become batter—the dust will dirty the car, this woman will see straight through me, I should have applied sunscreen, what if her food sucks, why would I have sold a concept I’d never before experienced?
Ahead of him, a billowing dust stream. Another traveler? Did she have the nerve to invite another? This was his—
The truck slowed to a stop. A cowboy looking creature emerged. A child no more than ten years old clutched his oversized shining silver belt buckle and meandered bow-legged toward Charlie’s Mini.
“You’re too early,” the cherub cowgirl—Charlie hadn’t taken his eyes off the belt buckle long enough to see the blonde braids streaming out from beneath the Stetson.
Charlie couldn’t speak. He’s never seen a mini-girl-cowboy. She was a cartoon. An angel in cowgirl’s clothing…
“Sir?”
Sir! God, could she get cuter?
“She likes folks to be on time. It’s only 3:33. You need to wait at the side of the road for—
He could see her calculating.
Tick tock.
“For 24 minutes.”
“Don’t you mean 27?”
“She told me you seemed like the correcting type.”
The cherub-cowgirl smirked and winked. Proud to play him. “If you wait 27 minutes, you’ll be late. Then she won’t cook for you at all. Takes about three minutes from here.”
The cherub tapped the brim of her hat and ambled back to her pick-up. She revved up the engine and peeled out sending a cloud of earth straight for the Mini.
Charlie leaned back into the flambéed leather seat and let the dust settle onto him. What the hell had he gotten himself into?
