Cauldron

After Frankie moved in with me, I told him I wanted to learn to cook.  He clapped and rummaged through all of the cabinets in my terrible galley kitchen, where everything was metal and painted awful forest green.  When I asked what he was doing he only held up a finger to shush me, then finished his review and waved me toward the front door.  He drove us to his favorite department store, where he bought several kitchen gadgets: a spiralizer, a Kunz spoon, a microplane grater, several peelers.  He selected a “proper” wood cutting board, a big one (“You need a big one for making pasta,” Frankie said), along with a new stainless steel colander.  When I pointed out that he owned several of these things already, Frankie whipped around to look at me, an expensive spatula pointed at me like an epee, and said, “But every chef must have his own.”

     Then we went shopping.  Frankie liked to mull over tomatoes and peppers, picking them up and sniffing.  He never told me what he was looking—smelling—for, but he knew it when he found it.  He heaped a basket with all sorts of fresh produce, a rainbow of fruits and vegetables, then selected a pricy cut of beef.

     “Okay,” he said when we were back in my—our—apartment.  “Let’s begin.”

     I was terrible at everything Frankie tried to teach me.  No matter how carefully I measured, my sauces came out too salty or too sweet; my cheese blends soured.  My pasta was too wet or too dry.  I committed nuclear war against slabs of meat or I threatened us both with food poisoning, pink strips in the center of chicken thighs or cuts of beef pulsating with bacterial life.  My soups were like gruel or water.

     And yet, Frankie ate it all.  He took huge bites, slurps, swallows, nodding as my culinary disasters slithered down his throat, his mouth curled in a clownish smile all the while.  Once the food settled—I imagined rocks, spikes, sand, glass—he would nod and say, “Okay, here’s what we’ll do differently next time.” 

     Somehow, I never made him sick.  I never made him wince or cough or gag or cry, even though my food did those very things to me.  I made a chicken marsala that had me leaning over our toilet through the middle of the night, everything I’d eaten or drank the last twenty-four hours gushing up my throat; a gazpacho I put together—a gazpacho!—smelled so bad I vomited into the kitchen sink before I even took a bite; one of my homemade lasagnas was so wretched I couldn’t move for a day, as if everything horrifying about it had petrified my innards.

     But Frankie didn’t blink.  He ate and took care of me.  Where I was sweaty, shivery, and nauseous he was whistling and smiling and handing me saltines and ginger ale.  He pointed out where I’d gone wrong only because he wanted to steer me right.

     “How?” I asked after a bout with a particularly disastrous bolognese I’d known would be a catastrophe from the start.  I took a deep breath.  “How are you always fine?”

     Frankie grinned, his dark eyes sparkling.  “I’ve always had a stomach of steel.  I was my dad’s testing grounds.”  He opened his mouth wide, lips glistening with moisture.  “He liked to call me his trash compactor.  I’ll eat anything.”

     “I don’t think you’re trash.”

     “A compactor.  Not the trash itself.”

     “So what I make for you is trash.”

     “Hmm,” he said.  “Maybe it’s time for a new term.”  He looked around.  We were sitting in my small living room that was made to feel even smaller by the bulky, ancient furniture I’d had since college.  I could afford better but had never had reason to upgrade.  I had little artwork on the walls, just a few framed photographs I’d found for cheap at consignment stores—I went through a phase, albeit a brief one—black and white things, blurry, of skyscrapers with some of their windows alight. 

     In the midst of my stomach’s bolognese upheaval, I felt a moment of intestinal calm.  I said, “You’re like a big stew pot.”

     “Stew pot doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.”

     “Okay,” I said.  The black and white of the photos gave me an idea.  “You’re a cauldron.”

     “Yes,” Frankie said.  There was no hesitation.  “A cauldron.”  He beamed and leaned his head on my shoulder.  “You’re perfectly, absolutely correct.”

     I never became a good cook, but it wasn’t for a lack of effort.  Frankie’s, anyway.  After the bolognese, I was ready to give up, but Frankie kept bringing home ingredients, sharing more challenging recipes (baked mezzani, cacio e pepe, timpano), buying more complex gadgetry that, after one use, languished in drawers and cabinets.  He ate every disaster I put together without complaint.  Eventually, he taste tested for both of us while I subsisted on sandwiches and fruit.  Frankie took everything on offer, downing one, two, three bites, savoring what he could and suggesting what I do better next time.  And there was always a next time, even if there wasn’t ever a better one.  As I cooked—or whatever one would call what I did in the kitchen—I would imagine my concoctions entering Frankie’s mouth, drizzling down his esophagus, and then plopping into his stomach, a wrought-iron thing full of sizzling acid and bubbling liquid, a little person in a witch’s hat hovering above the glop and stirring the mass, distilling all of my terrible sins into a stew, a potion that would disperse throughout Frankie’s body, full of some magic that, within his blood and bones, became something better, something good.  Because this is what Frankie could do: take all of the bad in me and make it better.  That was his spell.  That was, forever, his magic.