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

taking out pieces of crab and dropping them onto the small plates Lillian had waiting.
    “This is incredible, Carl,” Claire heard Helen exclaim softly next to her. “Try a piece.” Helen raised her dripping fingers to Carl’s mouth and fed him a bite. She turned to Claire.
    “Have you tried any yet?”
    Claire shook her head. “It’s awfully hot, still.”
    Helen deftly pulled a piece of meat from the shell. She smiled when she saw Claire’s amazement.
    “Asbestos fingers, dear. From years of taking fish sticks from the oven. There are a few benefits. Now, forget all that and eat.”
    “Hmmm,” Claire responded, and lifted the crab to her mouth, closing her eyes one more time, shutting out the room around her. The meat touched her tongue and the taste ran through her, full and rich and complicated, dense as a long, deep kiss. She took another bite and felt her feet settle into the floor and the rest of her flow into a river of ginger and garlic and lemon and wine. She stood, even when that bite, and the next and the next were gone, feeling the river wind its way to her fingers, her toes, her belly, the base of her spine, melting all the pieces of her into something warm and golden. She breathed in, and in that one, quiet moment felt herself come back together again.
    Slowly, Claire opened her eyes.

Carl
    Carl and Helen came to the cooking class together. They were one of those couples that seemed to have been born within close proximity to each other, twins of a nonbiological origin. Nothing physical substantiated the thought; he was tall and tended toward thin, with astonishingly white hair and clear blue eyes, while Helen was shorter, rounder, smiling easily with the other students in the class, pulling out pictures of her grandchildren, with the natural understanding that ice must be broken and babies do it better than most things. And yet, even when Carl and Helen were separated by the width of the room, you thought of them as standing next to each other, both heads nodding intently in response to whatever was being said or done.
    It was unusual to see a couple at Lillian’s cooking school; the classes were expensive enough that most couples sent a designated representative—Marco Polo-like explorers on a marital mission to bring back new spices, tricks to change meals or lives. As elected delegates, they usually arrived with clearly defined goals—one-pot dinners for busy families, a never-miss pasta sauce—occasionally undermined by the lush solidity of fresh goat cheese lingering on the tongue, a red-wine marinade left for days to insinuate itself into a flank of steak. Life at home was rarely the same afterward.
    When a couple came to class together, it meant something else entirely—food as a solution, a diversion, or, occasionally, a playground. Lillian was always curious. Would they divide their functions or pass tasks back and forth? Did they touch each other as they did the food? Lillian sometimes wondered why psychologists focused so much on a couple’s life in their bedroom. You could learn everything about a couple just watching the kitchen choreography as they prepared dinner.
    In the swirl of before-class socializing, Carl and Helen stood together at one side of the room, watching those around them, their hands gently linked. Her face was smooth, in marked contrast to her white hair; he stood taller for being next to her, his eyes kind behind wire-rimmed glasses. There was no sense of remove to their position, no seeming desire for isolation; they seemed to exist in an eddy of calm that drew others, women first, toward them.
    “Oh, no”—Helen laughed, talking to the young woman with olive skin and large brown eyes who had approached them—“we’ve never taken a cooking course before. It just looked like fun.”
    Lillian called the class to take their seats then, and Carl and Helen chose two in the second row, against the windows. Helen took out a notepad and a slim blue pen.
    “No