Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [175]
Connie put on the turkey according to a recipe Adele had clipped from a slick women’s magazine, having filled it with a mix of nuts, cornmeal, mushrooms, green peppers, and raisins. Adele had her cover the poor bird with aluminum foil, although Connie knew that would spoil the bird and steam the skin. She obeyed. She felt chunk with food. Her time sense was altered by all the coffee. The world seemed to have slowed down as she speeded up. On the ward, hours passed and she never knew where they had gone. Now she felt as if she were running and when she looked at the clock an hour later, only fifteen minutes were used up. The drug and the caffeine battled in her, and she felt high and fast.
Candied sweet potatoes made from a can! As if she didn’t know real ways to cook sweet potatoes. Eddie had loved yams. She remembered the time she had told Luciente that with some money and a decent kitchen, she was a good cook! How many ways she had learned to cook in her life: Mexican, Puerto Rican, soul food, and what Professor Silvester called continental. All good food. She wished she could be cooking a feast for Luciente and Bee. She pretended she was making a Thanksgiving dinner for Luciente’s whole family, and for Sybil and Tina Ortiz too. They would all meet and sit down to feast together and they would drink wine and make jokes and maybe she would even, only politely for the season but with feeling, kiss Bee one last time. Then she would be the one cautioning Luciente to remember that the food was not nourishing, was not real, out of your own time!
She and Adele put all the boards into the dining room table, making it very long, and then covered it with snowy linen and set it with china and real silver plates and silver-plated salvers for breads and rolls and crystal goblets, except for the little children, who got ruby-tinted glasses for their milk. Luis came in to open the wine himself with a fuss, a sparkling rosé.
Now Luis sat at the table’s head in a chair with arms, carving the huge turkey with an electric knife he flourished wildly. The strange stuffing he had already piled in a big bowl. On his right and left were Mark and Bob, his sons by his second marriage. Next to Bob, Dolly was dressed up in a jade green pants suit with a ruffled copper chiffon blouse, looking gorgeous and wound tight enough for her head suddenly to fly off. Nervousness ticked in her throat like a bomb. Delicately she ate green olives from a glass dish. Neither Shirley nor Carmel was there, of course, left to their own devices. Luis liked to command the attendance of all his children at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, having the money to back up his commands. But Nita was missing. Carmel had insisted she was too sick to go. Then came Celeste, Adele’s eight-year-old from her first marriage, Connie herself, and then baby Susan in her high chair on one side of Adele and the toddler Mike on the other side.
Luis, big with pleasure, lorded it now over his full plate and the dinners of everyone else. “Mark, you take more potatoes. That’s how come you’re so skinny. Makes you weak. That’s why you didn’t make the football team. Now, you try out for wrestling, listen to me—you can be skinny in wrestling. You wrestle in your own weight class, see?”
Mark grew red in the face and his fork slumped in his hand.
“Now take Dolly. She doesn’t need to eat to get fat. She just looks at the potatoes and she gains weight, right?”
“I’m not fat, Daddy. I’ve lost all the weight I need to.”
“It won’t last. It’s heredity. Look at your