The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister Read Free Book Online

party next door and she had rolled on top of him while the water fell on her hair. The endless winter mornings in bed as the gray light slowly brightened and James caressed her bulging belly and assured her she was the sexiest woman he had ever seen. She remembered, she did. They were the memories she played in her head these days as she soothed herself to sleep, long after his breathing told her it was safe.
    It wasn’t just that she was a mother now, or in need of some good lingerie, as her younger sister had recommended. She realized, standing there at the sink, that when she replayed those scenes in her head, she was trying to find someone she had lost, and it wasn’t James. James was still the same.

    “That’s PROBABLY CLEAN NOW.” Carl’s wife was standing next to her. “My name is Helen, by the way.”
    “Mine’s Claire.”
    “Carl tells me you’re a mother.”
    “Yes—I have a three-year-old and a baby.” Claire, lost for the moment in her thoughts of James, remembered her children with a start.
    “That’s an interesting time,” Helen replied carefully.
    “It is,” Claire responded, then paused. Something in Helen’s expression, an openness, a sense of listening, made Claire feel bolder. “I love them,” she said. “Sometimes, though, I wonder . . .”
    “Who you are without them?” Helen offered with a gentle smile.
    “Yes,” Claire said gratefully.
    They walked back to the chopping block, Claire carrying the crab in her hands. Helen paused. “You know, I’d like to ask you something a friend asked me once, if you don’t think it’s too personal.”
    “What is it?”
    “What do you do that makes you happy? Just you.”
    Claire looked at Helen for a moment and thought, the crab resting on the block beneath her hands.
    “I was just wondering,” Helen continued. “No one ever asked me when I was your age, and I think it’s a good thing to think about.”
    Claire nodded. Then she took the cleaver and cut the crab into ten pieces.
     
    What did she do that made her happy? The question implied action, a conscious purpose. She did many things in a day, and many things made her happy, but that, Claire could tell, wasn’t the issue. Nor the only one, Claire realized. Because in order to consciously do something that made you happy, you’d have to know who you were. Trying to figure that out these days was like fishing on a lake on a moonless night—you had no idea what you would get.
    On the morning she had gone into labor with Lucy, Claire had walked about their garden, holding the hose over the rose-bushes, one contraction per rosebush, ten minutes, five. The pains were slow and warm at first, like menstrual cramps. It was a gorgeous Sunday and all around her people were working on their yards, lawn mowers buzzing in preparation for backyard barbecues and pitchers of Sunday sangría. She felt completely and utterly herself, a woman about to give birth.
    Over the hours, the labor pains had sharpened. When they arrived at the hospital, time changed and nurses moved with quick precision, strapping monitors onto her and plugging her into machines. Everything was gray and cold, except for the pain that began to grind into her, deeper and deeper, pulling her under. She kept thinking the waves would slow or break for a moment, but they didn’t, one after another until there was nowhere left to go but in, to dive down and hope for air on the other side, but there was no air, no way out, just a desperate reaching and grasping until finally she felt something deep inside her—not physical, not emotional, simply her—break into pieces. And into the arms of that cracked-apart person that had been Claire, they placed a baby and a love came out of her, through the pieces, that she didn’t even know was possible.
    She remembered thinking later, as she held her newborn child in the cool darkness of her hospital room, that all she would need was one quiet moment and she would be able to find those