On the way home from work Cora scrolled through a list of previously favorited restaurants in her neighborhood, Monterey Park. She scrolled carefully, really considering each option, opening up the menu and reading the reviews, as the Auto she rode in made it’s grueling rush-hour trip from Venice back to the East side. Choosing dinner had become an integral part of the after-work ritual, and there was plenty of time to consider her options on the nearly two-hour trip. Since it was a Tuesday she would be eating alone; that didn’t bother her since it gave her the flexibility to choose the restaurant and the time; anyway, she was almost never the only other person eating alone. Neighborhoods like hers, where young, single and newly wealthy Angelenos flocked, was a loner’s paradise: a little slice of utopian society where social ostracisation for being alone in public was a thing of the past. Cora even noticed some jealous looks in her direction the few times a week when she took herself out for a meal.
If it had been a Monday, or a Thursday or Friday, she would have been eating with one of her standing dinner-dates: On Monday she dined with Georgia, a former professor and mentor. Dinners with Georgia were predictable in pace, but unpredictable in content. They always met downtown, in the restaurant of the Mariposa Hotel, a restored Art-Deco masterpiece with a bar in the opulent lobby that specialized in tea-themed cocktails, and a “New American ($$$)” bistro that the Almighty Algorithm described as “classy” and “well-regarded.” First, Georgia would order a glass of wine for them, and they would each drink the whole glass before ordering anything else (besides water, which you had to ask for specifically, even in a joint so quote unquote classy). Georgia’s taste in wine, like their taste in so many things, was extreme. They preferred harsh, noisy reds, explosive with tannins, or syrupy whites that left Cora’s tongue coated with a sweet film. She almost never liked the wines that Georgia ordered, but she felt she was learning something from them, like watching a long, boring movie that revolutionized cinema at some point in history.
Conversationally limbered up by the strenuous wine and criticism of it that constituted the “first course,” they would order entrees, more wine, dessert and coffee all at once, and would share the food, reaching across the table to take bites off each others plates in the midst of the furious and gesticulative conversation that almost always followed. Georgia often came equipped with some question or quote or piece of information that they had gathered or honed throughout the week, and they spent a luxurious (by American standards, and certainly by LA standards) 1.5 hours in discussion, generally a series of wilder and wilder transgressions, transmutations and tangents on the main theme. Georgia’s wit was formidable in these conversations; they had a staggering amount of granular knowledge in many subjects, the sheer breadth of which made Cora genuinely awed, and they played with ideas the way you might imagine a pod of dolphins playing with an inflatable beach ball; picture them, moving the object between them effortlessly, a divine humor visible in their fluid movements that imbues the creatures with an uncanny intelligence that seems for a brief moment almost more immediate, more true, than the intelligence of the observer, your own intelligence.
Over a second cup of coffee they would catch up on their personal lives. Georgia often confided in Cora about their partner E’s ongoing and mysterious health problems. Cora recounted the comparatively fluffy anecdotes of her life, often lapsing into descriptions of her favorite meals throughout the week. The night would end with a walk through downtown, Cora escorting the now-drowsy and contemplative Georgia back to their converted warehouse apartment. In the Auto on the way home, Cora’s mind, flighty with wine, drifted along and around the conversations, processing them in a dream-like unfocus that wove together scenes from her past, visions of Los Angeles on the many nights she had driven home from dinner with Georgia, and the million other wisps of memory, fact and fiction that drifted through her consciousness like confetti.
On Thursdays she and the only two other women who worked in her office, Gina and Clara, got vegan tacos at a place near work and consistently got drunk enough on chili-llme margaritas that they all smoked cigarettes on the patio, started stupid conversations with strangers on the patio, and not infrequently went home with one of the other smokers on the patio. The next day at work at least one of them would be so close to tears all day that the other two would have to do damage control and give a lot of sincere hugs and whispered heart-to-hearts on breaks and in between phone calls. They all genuinely enjoyed nursing the others through their flus of the heart, though, and felt that their interdependence, and mutual mild drinking problems, gave them the feeling of having a family at the office.
Cora’s Friday night date with Dakota was a relatively recent arrangement. Each Friday afternoon still felt electric, each meeting rare. Cora anticipated the dates all week, resisting the urge in her downtime to try on outfits or otherwise “prep” herself; but she had a hard time restricting her mind from its fantasies, which her gluttonous imagination fed on like candida yeast on sugar. The bubbly output of those fantasies rose through her body, a certain carbonated energy, all day on Friday. Inevitably by the time their date began she had psyched herself out entirely, and was exhausted before they had finished eating.
Part of the excitement was a delight in the novelty of Dakota’s cooking; it had been years since anyone cooked for her. His kitchen, outfitted with a wide array of tools, hammered copper, steel, wood, ceramic, leather, stone, hung and tucked away, and the food it was stocked with, real ingredients, the pickles, flours, grains, milks, honey, leaves, salt, in buckets and brown bags and baskets and jars and little cups that lived on the countertop, reminded her of her mother’s kitchen when she was growing up, the last kitchen where she had seen real people cook real meals until she met Dakota.
Dakota wasn’t a big fan of technology, but he wasn’t a luddite either. He just liked well made things. He only owned objects that were made out of high-quality materials, with a high degree of craftsmanship, and when he did something he did it with intense focus and intentionality. He made her a soup that began with roasting tomatoes in the oven for three hours; he warmed the plates before he put the food on them. He didn’t make complicated meals: buttery polenta and white beans, roasted vegetables and minted rice, crispy fried eggs and kale with slices of thick-cut bacon. Her mother hadn’t cooked at all like that, mostly managing to get casseroles and bagged coleslaws on the table by dinnertime (heroic, compared to the way her peers ate at home growing up) but the food recalled a past life she felt she almost remembered, a time of focus and self-assuredness and plenty, obviously (to her) an imagined era that she had conjured, but held and valued for its symbolic power.
She felt utterly spoiled by these meals; the time that went into their preparation translated smoothly into time that she felt had been invested directly in her. Watching him move around the kitchen, she felt richer, weightier afterword, as if before they sat down at his kitchen table she had been a spirit of some kind, a hologram person, and only after the plates were cleared was she truly corporealized. But Cora found herself unsure of how to behave in this new body, and her unfamiliarity of the setting added a layer of alienation that contrasted the powerful nostagia that she felt when she watched Dakota cook. The clearing of the table, the dishes, these were awkward, long-forgotten rituals that made her self-conscious when she attempted them, like a foreigner trying a customary greeting in another language.
After the kitchen was set to rights, after the strawberry ice cream, after the movie in the darkened living room, when the space for intimacy should have been at it’s most expanded, she felt the warmth in her cheeks fade, her nervous stomach reverted to its usual calm, her mind agitated, tired, ready to leave. This was the part of these dinner dates that she was careful to leave out of her daydreaming throughout the week. Whatever captivated her in the moments leading up to dinner predictably dissipated as they settled into the couch. Dakota’s deft hands, so natural against the grain of the cutting board and around the handle of a knife, lingered uncomfortably on her arm. He laughed often, which she thought ought to endear him to hear, but really made her suspect his sense of humor. His assured posture, tossing a pan of sauteeing brussel sprouts or cutting the ends off a bunch of parsley, was forced when he put an arm around her shoulders.
She was only halfway through the ride and had decided on Japanese. There was at least another 10 miles to slog through before she’d be dropped off at the restaurant. Cora opened a book she had downloaded earlier that day, The Joy of Cooking. She had remembered seeing it on her mother’s shelf, the covers patterned like an old-timey red and white gingham cloth, and bought it on impulse. She was surprised by the vividness of the memories jogged by the digital version. The book had actually been a small three ring binder, filled with a stack of thick, shiny pages time-stained to a light yellow. She remembered the pumpkin pancakes recipe she had made so many times as a child, flecked with bits of dried pancake batter and orange blotches from wet pumpkin puree. She could almost taste the cake-like, spiced pancakes, the soft walnuts mixed into the batter, and the puddle of real maple syrup she dipped each forkful into. She began to read the book, becoming entirely absorbed in warm world of her mother’s kitchen and the life-sustaining things that had been made for her there, until the cabin beeped and the slowly pulsing cabin black lights brought her back to her surroundings. She found she wasn’t hungry anymore, and had the Auto take her home.
Evelyn C. McLean 