Page 55 - Vol. V #6

large white plate with military precision. Rachel was a friend from college. Due to a downtown role at a law firm, she was one of Abby’s few mar- ried friends who resisted the pull of the suburbs. “We were just talking about this new restaurant in town and we wanted an expert opinion.”
One of the party guests chimed in with an anec- dote about not being able to use a microwave properly. The group laughed and dispersed into the living room like scattered marbles.
There were two other people in the kitchen, both holding glasses of wine. They were similarly dressed, a sort of relaxed yuppie chic, something Abby associated with a step away from parent- hood. Abby introduced herself. Jim brought her a glass to match the others.
Throughout the dinner, Abby tried to follow the conversation but found that her own pockets were empty of snack-sized anecdotes. These were people who had fully stocked lives, their various aspects arranged in nice shelves that could be taken down and examined.
“Abby here used to be in culinary school,” Rachel said, brushing back an errant strand of red hair as she finished with the plate. She motioned for Jim to take it into the living room, which, Abby sus- pected, would be decorated in seasonal candles and some kind of understated centerpiece.
“Abby, how’s your paper coming along? She’s getting a PhD you know,” Rachel said, clearly no- ticing her friend’s silence. The rest of the table stopped their chatter and turned to her. The light jazz in the background was the only sound in the room.
“I was, yeah, but I didn’t have the touch. I could mix everything but so much of cooking is art and flair,” she said, trying to sound casual. Instead, she blushed a deep red.
Abby gave her usual overview: second year in molecular genetics. She was working a lot with proteins, she said. Bacteria. Worms. Model Or- ganisms. She had a big paper due in a couple of weeks to her advisor but she tried not to sound as stressed as she was. It was the most important thing in her life right now, and it barely registered as a conversation topic worthy of a follow-up anecdote or a joke.
Cooking school brought up memories of steam- filled shouting, the warm flame across her face. After school, she had to bathe her face in vari- ous moisturizers; her body literally couldn’t stand the heat.
She took a sip of her wine. They asked about plans afterwards and Abby said maybe a lab or a post- doc, she wasn’t sure. She looked at the rest of the time in her PhD as a sparse tundra ending in a final mountain, and beyond that, her future, just another barren landscape.
Then there was the frustration of subjectivity— success up to the whims of the taster but also, somehow, to the whims and moods of the cook. She had tried to eliminate variables, took time to ensure that her pans and stoves and ovens were all reaching the temperatures they were sup- posed to—she even went so far as to spend her own money to buy a thermometer to see that she hadn’t been saddled with the one defective stove—but the results still didn’t match expecta- tions. The only thing she could quantify was how much weight she’d been losing, how many times she had to take sleeping pills to get a solid four hours, and how many times she suspected The Belgian was cheating on her.
Still, the partygoers seemed impressed. But be- yond the initial recognition of intelligence and then the requisite questions about what her field entailed, Abby worried that they were approach- ing a conversational cliff where people would fall into awkward silence or, even worse, tired com- ments about how they were never good at biology or they had a family member who was a doctor.
~
(continued on next page)
46