Aftertaste - Meredith Mileti [71]
I throw on an oversized sweatshirt, pull on a pair of woolen socks, and pad over to the corner where weeks ago I had stacked some boxes under the eaves, remnants of my past life, evidence that I had at one time done something that mattered. The first box is filled with magazine clippings, recipes, multiple copies of the Gourmet article on Grappa, and a dozen or so journals filled with notes and menu ideas written in Italian. These are from my apprenticeship in Italy, where I had met Jake. I pick one up and leaf through it, stopping at a page where I’d written his name over and over, filling the entire page. I toss the journal back into the box and fold the lid closed, thinking that it would be an important step to throw the rest of the boxes away unopened, something I know I could never do. I won’t be satisfied until I’ve opened each box, touched each scrap of paper, pored over every photograph. Even then I will not be done with them.
Lately, I’ve begun to doubt my past, my feelings and memories, to which I no longer feel entitled, and the result is a disconcerting mix of confusion, exhilaration, and ennui. Apart from several cartons containing my cookbook collection, the rest of the boxes are all filled with the same sorts of things, little things really, most of them neither important nor useful. The last box is shoved so deeply under the eaves that I almost don’t see it. The packing tape is cracked and yellowed, which has made the seal loose. When I flip open the flaps, I’m bathed in a thin cloud of dust.
Inside is my mother’s dog-eared copy of Larousse Gastronomique . This book had fascinated me as a child, mostly because it is written in French, a language I didn’t understand. I can remember my mother poring over it, whispering the recipes like incantations in her beautiful, honeyed French. Thrust in between its pages, rendering its spine loose and broken in many places, was a catalogue of her life: wine labels, notes in French from friends, letters from my father, menus she had particularly enjoyed. As a child I often leafed through its pages searching for something of mine, a birth announcement, a picture, handwritten documentation of my first real meal, but the collection stopped the year she moved to Pittsburgh.
The sight of my mother’s handwriting on the slips of paper and in the margins of the book causes me to inhale sharply, and for a moment I smell licorice, as if the mere sight of her heavily styled penmanship has produced an olfactory hallucination. It’s a delicate smell, more like anise or fresh tarragon than the sugary smell of a licorice pastille.
Smell, I remember my mother once telling me, is the most powerful of the senses. Without it, there is no taste. Long ago I lost the memory of her face, the sound of her voice, the touch of her fingers. But I can still remember her smell, in the aroma of a sherry reduction, the perfume, delicate and faint, that lingers on your hands after you’ve run them through a hedge of rosemary, the pungent assault of a Gauloises cigarette. Any of a thousand smells are enough to conjure her memory.
I shut the box and return to bed, wondering why it had been so hard for two people who’d shared a love of cooking to connect. Over the years there had been so many opportunities lost or deliberately avoided, when we had so much in common. Even after all this time, I was surprised to find it still hurt.
The next morning when I open my eyes, Chloe has my cheeks sandwiched in between her chubby palms and is peering earnestly into my face. She grins at me, a full-fledged smile followed by a little giggle. Her breath is warm, sweet, and smells of banana. “She’s already had her breakfast,” my father says, a peevish note seeping into his voice. “Fiona fed her.”
I know I’ve been a wretch, barely being civil to Fiona, and my father has every right to be annoyed.
“Don’t wait dinner for me,” my dad says, leaning over me to kiss Chloe good-bye. “Brian Greene is lecturing