Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [20]
She returned to the kitchen with a jar of last summer’s tomatoes in each hand; instead of the soup she would make imam bayildi, her mother’s stuffed-vegetable recipe, which Lusa herself much preferred to anything milky. Cole wasn’t crazy about imam bayildi. He was even skeptical of spaghetti, which he called an “Eye-talian” dish. But it was his fault she’d lost the cream, so fine, then, let him eat foreign food. I’ve stooped to this, she thought. The former National Science Foundation scholar with the most coveted postgraduate fellowship in her department now wields her influence on the world through acts of vengeful cooking.
His whole big exasperating person was still there at the table, smoking cigarettes. Arcs of pale ash stretched like starry nebulae across the dark tabletop between his left hand and the ugly tin ashtray balanced halfway off the table. The whole scene looked like something she’d like to wad up and throw away. It wasn’t like Cole to be this slow getting out to his cattle and his tractor. It was a full hour past dawn now; the sun was well up. Was he that determined to vex her?
“What does Herb want with our pressure sprayer, anyway?” she asked.
“I don’t know. No, I do know. He said they’re exterminating at the church. They’ve got some kind of bees moved into the walls, Mary Edna said.”
“Oh, that’s perfect. Exterminating God’s creatures down at the church. It’s a good thing God didn’t leave Herb and Mary Edna in charge of Noah’s ark. They’d fumigate it first, and then they’d sink it.”
He refused to laugh. “Lusa, honey, where you come from maybe they think it’d be nice to have a church full of bees. People get sentimental in a place where nature’s already been dead for fifty years, so they can all get to mourning it like some relative they never knew. But out here he’s alive and kicking and still on his bender.”
“My husband, the poet. Nature is an uncle with a drinking problem.”
He shook his head. “That’s how it is. You have to persuade it two steps back every day or it will move in and take you over.” Cole could fend off her condescension with astonishing ease. He had his own I-can-put-up-with-this tone of voice that made Lusa want to scream her red head off.
“Take over what?” she said, trembling to hold back a rage. “You’re nature, I’m nature. We shit, we piss, we have babies, we make messes. The world will not end if you let the honeysuckle have the side of your barn.”
We have babies? I didn’t notice, his look seemed to say. But he asked her instead, “Why tolerate a weed when you can nip it in the bud?”
Every word they said to each other was wrong, every truth underneath it unsayable, unfindable. Their kindnesses had grown stale, and their jokes were all old chestnuts, too worn out for use. Lusa threw down the dish towel, feeling suffocated in clichés. “You have a nice day out there in the big woolly jungle. I’m going to go do your laundry. Your damn cigarettes are stinking up the kitchen.”
“While you’re cursing tobacco, you might consider it was last year’s crop that bought your new washer and dryer.”
“Yil’an deenuk!” she shouted from the hallway.
“If my Ay-rab mama had taught me to swear, I wouldn’t be proud of it,” he called back.
Ay-rab mama, Polack daddy—he held this against her too, apparently, along with the rest of his family. But hadn’t