Little Earthquakes Read online

  The trouble was, her cooking fell off. She scorched a panful of stuffed Cornish game hens on a busy Friday night and sent out a Dover sole that was slimy and half raw and forgot to add sugar to the chocolate-hazelnut mousse. Her chicken with preserved lemons, which should have been a happy marriage of sweet and sour, tasted as bitter as Becky’s thoughts had become, and her soufflés deflated with a sigh the instant she pulled them out of the oven.

  “A woman with a broken heart’s got no business cooking,” said Eduardo the sauté chef, scraping the skin off one of Becky’s blackened game hens. He pointed his knife at Becky. “You got to figure this out.”

  Becky tried. She concentrated on her new boyfriend. And just when she’d started to believe that she wasn’t the size of Pluto, or at least one of its moons, Andrew came back to Poire.

  It was June, two weeks before Becky’s birthday. The air was soft and lilac-scented, and the campus and the town had a riotous, swoony feeling, an end-of-the-school-year anticipation, as if at any moment everyone would throw down their books and tear off their clothes and roll around on the freshly mown grass.

  It was raining that night, a gentle gray drizzle. Sarah came back to the kitchen and said that Andrew was sitting at the bar, alone. “Do you want me to spit in his glass?”

  “That’s a generous offer, but no.” I don’t need him, she told herself. But she couldn’t stop herself from looking. Andrew wore a brown suede jacket and a hangdog look, and there were purplish circles under his eyes. I have a boyfriend, Becky thought. And she was going home to fix him a late supper, after which they would have satisfactory, if slightly vanilla, sex, so screw you, Andrew Rabinowitz. But after she’d wiped down her station, wrapped up her knives, and walked out the back door, there was Andrew, waiting for her, his arms wrapped around himself in the drizzle, standing next to her car.

  “Well, well,” she said, “look who’s here.”

  “Becky,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “Please.” He sounded desperate. It was all she could do to shore herself up, remembering how he’d hurt her, what he’d said.

  “I have to get going.” She paused to give her next statement its full impact. “My boyfriend’s waiting for me.”

  “It’ll just take a minute.” His voice was so quiet she could barely hear it. “The thing is . . .” He mumbled something she couldn’t make out.

  “Pardon me?”

  He raised his head. “I said, I think I’m in love with you.”

  “Oh, blah blah, whatever.” She managed to sound nonchalant, even though her heart was pounding so hard she was sure he’d be able to hear it. “You know what?” She lifted her wrapped satchel. “You should know better than to fuck with someone who’s carrying knives.”

  “I am. Becky, you’re funny and smart . . .”

  “ . . . and fat,” she finished. She leaned down, unlocked her car, tossed the knives in the backseat, and sat down behind the wheel. Andrew walked around the car and put his hand on the passenger’s side door.

  “Oh, no,” she told him. “Step away from the vehicle.”

  “I didn’t exactly say that,” he said. “And it’s not what I think. I think you’re beautiful, but I was pushing you away because . . .”

  She stared at him through the mist.

  “I have to tell you something,” he said and cleared his throat. “A private thing.”

  “Go ahead,” she said, looking around the empty parking lot. “I don’t think anyone’s listening.”

  “Could I just—” he said, reaching for the door handle.

  “No.”

  “Fine.” Andrew took a deep breath and rested his hands on the roof of her car. “First of all, I’m sorry I hurt your feelings.”

  “Apology accepted. No big deal. I’ve been called worse by better.”

  “Becky,” he pleaded. “Please. Look. Please just let me finish this.”

  She paused, curious, unable to help herself.

  “See. Um.” He shuffled his feet. “The thing is, I’m . . . shy.”

  She laughed incredulously. “That’s your big secret? That’s the best you can do? Oh, please.” She slammed her door.

  “No. Wait! That’s not it. The thing is . . .” His voice was muffled by the rolled-up window.

  “What?”

  Andrew said something Becky couldn’t hear. She leaned over and rolled the passenger’s side window down. “What?”

  “It’s a sex thing!” he hissed, then looked around as if expecting to see an audience hanging on his every word.

  “Oh.” A sex thing. Oh, God. He’s a cross-dresser. He’s impotent. He’s an impotent cross-dresser, and he wears a smaller size than I do.

  Andrew leaned into the car and didn’t lift his head to look at her as he spoke. “You know when you get used to doing something a certain way and then that’s the only way you can do it? Like, you drive to work a certain way every day and after a while it’s like there’s no other way you can do it?”

  No, she thought. “Yes,” she said.

  “Well, I’m like that. It’s like that for me. It’s like that with . . .” He gestured toward his crotch.

  “Sex?”

  He nodded miserably.

  “So you can only do it, like, in missionary position?”

  He sighed. “I wish. I’ve actually never . . .”

  It took her a minute to realize what he was saying. “Never?”

  “I can only do it by myself. I have this very specific method, and . . .”

  “What?” she demanded, shifting her weight so that her thighs were rubbing together. She was intrigued. And very turned on. “Tell me! Unless it involves, you know, your mother’s girdle or something. In which case you should feel free to lie.”

  There was a thunk as he banged his forehead against the roof of the car. “I can’t.”

  Becky poked his chest through the opened window. “Can’t tell me or can’t do it?”

  “It’s idiotic,” he said. “It’s so dumb, and I’ve never talked about this with anyone.”

  “What?” Her mind was ticking off possibilities, each more horrific than the last. Leather. Whips. Plastic wrap. Oh, my.

  He winced. “I can’t believe this,” he said, as if he was talking to himself. “I can’t talk about this anymore.”

  “Yes, you can,” she said, reckless in the warm June rain, willing herself to forget, for the moment, her earnest engineering-student boyfriend, who was probably waiting for her in his bed, on his beige percale sheets. “Take me home and tell me.” She unlocked the passenger’s side door. “I promise I won’t laugh.”

  Half an hour later, Andrew and Becky were back on his futon. The room was lit by two candles burning on top of the television set. Andrew had a juice glass full of Scotch in his hand, and his eyes were squeezed shut, as if he couldn’t stand to even look at her. “My mother . . .” he began.

  Oh, Lord, Becky thought. Please don’t let this involve something inappropriate with his mother.

  “She’s very. Um. Intrusive. When I was a kid, she didn’t let me have a lock on my bedroom door. The only place I could get any privacy was the bathroom. So I learned to . . .”

  “Get off,” Becky supplied.

  He smiled a little, his eyes still closed. “Right. Um. Lying on my stomach on the bath mat. Kind of, um, rubbing back and forth.”

  She exhaled the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. Given the possibilities—nurse’s outfits, enema bags, stuffed-animal costumes, and worse—she was pretty sure that she could deal with a bath mat. “That’s not so bad.” She glanced toward the closed bathroom door, trying to remember whether she’d ever even seen his bath mat and whether jealousy was appropriate.

  “It’s not so bad until you try to do it any other way.” His voice got softer. “Like with a girl.”

  “So you never . . .”

  He swallowed a mouthful of Scotch and shook his head, his brow furrowed, eyebr
ows knitted. “No. Never. Not even once.”

  God. She felt so sorry for him . . . sorry, and aroused. A virgin. She’d never been with a virgin. She could barely remember being a virgin herself.

  “Tell you what,” she said. “I think we should do an experiment.”

  “It won’t work,” he said. “I’ve tried before.”

  Her mind tingled with possibilities and with questions. She wondered what had happened during his experiments. Would he get to a certain point with a girlfriend, then dash off to the loo and belly flop on top of the bath mat for the finale? Or fake orgasm? Could men do that?

  “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” she asked.

  He gave her another ghost of a smile. “I don’t know. Dying a virgin?”

  Becky winced. “Okay, that actually is the worst thing that could happen. But I bet we can figure this out.”

  He opened his eyes. “I appreciate that. Really, I do. No matter what happens, I’ll never forget that you were so . . .” His voice cracked. “. . . Nice about this.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said. A plan was forming in her mind. “So what do you think? Should we try?”

  He got up off the futon, reaching for his belt buckle.

  “Whoa, cowboy! Slow down!”

  He dropped his hands, looking puzzled. “I thought we were going to . . .”

  “Oh, we are. But not tonight. Tonight,” she said, “we’re just going to make out.”

  He grinned, looking honestly happy for the first time since he’d arrived at Poire. “That,” he said, “I can handle.”

  Three hours later, Becky’s lips were swollen, her cheeks and chin rubbed raw from his stubble. “Please,” Andrew groaned, pressing his whole length against her. “Please, Becky, I know it’ll work, please . . .”

  With a force of will she hadn’t known she’d possessed, Becky wrenched herself away. She knew that if they kept kissing, if he kept touching her, if his fingertips grazed the crotch of her panties one more time, she wouldn’t be able to wait.

  “Friday,” she gasped. “After work.” She’d have to make some excuse to her boyfriend. “Can you pick me up?”

  He could, he said. She kissed him, kissed him, kissed him, planning the menu in her head.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  In spite of Becky’s career at Poire—and in spite of what people might have inferred from her figure—good cooking did not run in the Rothstein family. When Becky was a teenager, most of her mother’s meals had come in the form of a powdered shake mix that she’d blend with ice cubes and, if she was feeling really sporting, bananas. Ronald Rothstein had eaten whatever was set in front of him, without ever seeming to taste it or even really looking. “Delicious,” he’d say, whether it had been or not.

  Grandma Malkie was the cook in the family. With her shelf of a bosom and wide, quivering hips, she was also Edith Rothstein’s worst nightmare. “Ess, ess,” she’d croon to little Becky, slipping bits of rugelach and hand-rolled hamantaschen into her mouth when her mother wasn’t looking. Becky loved spending nights at her grandmother’s house, where she could stay up late, sprawled on her grandmother’s peach satin comforter, playing Crazy Eights and eating salted cashews. Grandma Malkie was the one Becky had come to in tears after Ross Farber had chanted “Fatty, fatty two-by-four” at her on the bus back from the Hebrew-school field trip. “Never mind him,” Grandma Malkie had said, handing Becky a clean handkerchief. “You look just the way you’re supposed to. Just the way your mother should, if she’d let herself eat a meal once in a while.”

  “Boys won’t like me,” Becky said, sniffling and wiping her eyes.

  “You’re too young to worry about boys,” Grandma Malkie decreed. “But I’ll tell you a secret. You know what boys like? A woman who’s happy with herself. Who’s not making herself miserable with the Jane Fonda videotapes and complaining all the time about whether this part or that one’s too big. And you know what else they like?” She leaned close, whispering into her granddaughter’s ear. “Good food.”

  Becky had started cooking when she was fourteen, out of self-defense, she’d later joke, but really, it was to honor her grandmother. With the help of Julia Child and a copy of The Joy of Cooking her mother had gotten as a wedding gift and never even opened, she discovered heavy cream and chives and shallots, lamb chops seared on the gas grill she’d bought herself with her bat mitzvah money, quiches and soufflés, napoleons and éclairs, stews and daubes and ragouts, and fresh Florida fish baked in parchment with nothing but lemon juice and olive oil.

  She’d cooked for men before. She had a boyfriend her sophomore year who was heavily into salmon, after he’d read that it could help prevent prostate cancer, but he could only afford the canned stuff, which he’d bring her in bulk from the grocery store. “Prostate patties,” Becky would announce . . . or, once, feeling ambitious and wanting to get rid of a half can of bread crumbs and three eggs, “Prostate loaf.”

  But this would have to be her very best effort—food fit for a king. Or at least food fit for a man who’d spent the last decade or so making love to the bathroom carpeting.

  Figs, she thought. Figs for starters. But were whole figs too obvious? She remembered a fig-jam pizza she’d had once at a restaurant in Boston, on crispy flat bread with prosciutto and asiago cheese. She could pull that off. And some kind of meat for the main course, seared crisp on the outside, juicy and pink-tender in the center. Mashed potatoes with heavy cream. Asparagus, because it was supposed to be an aphrodisiac, and then something completely decadent for dessert. Maybe a cheese course with organic lavender honey. Baklava! Chocolate truffles! Fresh raspberries with cream!

  Her mind was racing. Her mouth was watering. Her bank account wouldn’t be able to withstand the assault she had planned—the wines alone would cost in the triple digits. Becky happily busted out her For Emergencies Only credit card without even bothering to worry about what she’d do when she got the bill.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Andrew was waiting for her at the bar again on Friday night, looking considerably less hangdog than he had the time before.

  “Are you two friends again?” Sarah asked.

  “Something like that,” Becky said, but her tone must have given her away because Eduardo and Dave immediately began chorusing in a combination of English and Spanish about how Becky, even with her diminished culo, was back in love and would, God willing, stop ruining paying customers’ dinners as a result. She pulled her bags of groceries out of the walk-in where she’d stashed them, added a loaf of bread and two bottles of wine, and hurried out to meet Andrew at the bar.

  “What’s all this?” he asked, eyeing the bags.

  “Food.”

  “You’re going to cook?” he asked. Clearly, whatever he’d been imagining, dinner hadn’t been included.

  “I’m going to cook,” she said. I’m going to knock your socks off, she thought. I’m going to make you forget every other girl you ever kissed. I’m going to make you love me for the rest of your life.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Back at his apartment, Andrew lit candles while Becky spread fig jam on the flat bread, added drifts of cheese and thin slices of prosciutto, and popped it under the broiler.

  “What are you making?” he asked, watching her every move as she worked in his closet-sized kitchen. She hoped he liked what he was seeing. She was wearing Old Faithful, her Gap denim miniskirt, and what she hoped wasn’t too much perfume.

  “Appetizers,” she told him. He wrapped his arms around her waist and leaned her back against the kitchen counter, nuzzling her neck. “You smell nice.”

  Okay, then, not too much perfume.

  “I bought us something,” he said, reaching over her head into a cabinet. She smiled when he handed her a can of mandarin oranges. He’d remembered. That was good.

  She pulled the pizza out of the oven, set water to boil for the asparagus, and dredged the pounded-thin slices of veal in flour while he took his first bite of the flat bread.
“Wow,” he said, “this is amazing.”

  “Isn’t it?” This wasn’t a night, she’d decided, for false modesty. And the pizza was fantastic, the pungent cheese blending perfectly with the sweet fig jam.

  “Come here,” he said. She wrapped an apron around her waist, set the veal to sauté in olive oil and butter, and complied. “You feel so good,” he whispered. “And everything smells delicious.”

  “Patience,” she said, smiling against his neck. “We’re just getting started.”

  She poured the wine, trimmed the asparagus, crumbled blue cheese over the veal slices, and set them in the preheated oven. The rice was bubbling away; the cheeses were warming on the counter. She handed him the plates, the glasses, the wine, two linen napkins, and the forks she’d already decided they wouldn’t be using for long, and led him into the living room.

  “Relax,” she told him. With his shoulders tensed and the corner of his mouth twitching, Andrew looked more like a man with a dentist appointment than someone gearing up for a night of gustatory and sexual ecstasy. “I promise, whatever happens, this won’t hurt a bit.”

  Twenty minutes later, dinner was served. Andrew spread a sheet out over the floor, and he sat there, cross-legged, one knee jouncing up and down.

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh, wow.”

  They ate in silence for a few minutes, looking at each other shyly, tasting everything.

  “It’s so good,” he said, pushing his plate away. “I’m just not that hungry.” He tried to smile. “I’m nervous, I guess.”

  “Close your eyes,” Becky said. He looked worried—perhaps imagining that she’d be breaking out restraints, or a video camera—but complied.

  She lifted the glass of wine to his lips. “Take a little sip,” she told him. “And keep your eyes shut.”

  He drank. His lips curved up in a smile. “Open,” she said and fed him a morsel of veal. He chewed slowly. “Mmm.”

  “Want to try?”

  He gave her a spear of asparagus, easing it slowly into her mouth. She heard him breathing harder as she brushed his fingertips with her lips. Then he took a pinch of rice. She licked the grains off his fingers, then sucked, hearing him sigh. “Can I . . . ,” he whispered. She opened her eyes a slit. He’d dipped his fingers in the wineglass and was holding them out for her to suck.