Benjamin couldn’t read yet, or if he could, no one else knew about it. He knew how to treat books, and what they meant, and recently he had begun to select volumes from the library that had no pictures, books about the life cycles of plants or the history of astronomy that may as well not have been in the children’s section. He was supposed to be practicing reading while Marie made dinner, and he sat perched on a stool at the counter, one foot on a rung and the other dangling from a leg neatly crossed at the knee. Sometimes, as Marie watched, pausing while she chopped vegetables, his eyes were on the words in front of him. Sometimes, his eyes were elsewhere—on the wall, on her, on nothing in particular. She thought he looked like an old man, her son, a being after his strength instead of before it. He was in the first grade for the second time, this year. In aptitude tests that did not require literacy, Benjamin scored above his age.
The pan hissed as she slid the minced garlic into the heated butter. The evening news played on the radio. It was the beginning of Marie’s favorite time of day, and she would not ruin it by insinuating deficiency in her son, however indirectly. Perhaps it was possible to live without learning to read.
“Would you like to grate some cheese for me?” she asked.
Benjamin looked at her. “I’m reading right now,” he said.
“Ok,” she said.
“But I guess I can take a break.”
“I guess you can, too.”
He eased himself down from the high stool, went to the pantry, took out a folding footstool, and carried it with both hands to the cabinet that held the cheese grater. Standing on the stool, he could reach the grater with one hand, well enough to tip it into his other waiting hand. Setting it on the counter, he went then to the refrigerator and opened the door. He pulled out the deli and cheese drawer and stood looking into it.
Marie, in the midst of her ritual enjoyment of the smells of garlic and onion over high heat, said without turning to look, “Why don’t you use the Parmesan, Benjamin. That should go well with the salad.”
“Ok,” he said, but still he stood, still with the door open, face illuminated by the light inside the refrigerator, still in the cold air, looking down into the drawer. The family seemed to accumulate nubs of cheeses in their labeled packages like the butt-ends of pencils almost too short to write with, but not quite.
Marie couldn’t decide on an order in which to put her vegetables into the pan. It seemed that the carrots always came out too crunchy, and the peppers too soft. Then, too, she couldn’t decide whether to add more butter or use water. She made sauté often, and each time came up against these questions, not remembering the lessons she had learned before. Each time, the danger of failure enlarged till it occupied all her thought.
The voices on the radio sounded trustworthy, though she wasn’t quite listening to and couldn’t quite hear the words. The pan hissed loud as she added a bit of water, crackled as she reconsidered and dropped in another hastily-shaved sliver of butter. Marie preferred to make dinner with the overhead light turned off, illuminating her cutting boards and stovetop with lights under the counter and lights under the hood, small pools of preoccupation and material beauty. Now, she reached under the hood to turn on the fan to capture the steam, blocking out the sound of distant wars yet further.
All the vegetables were in the pan now, a conflation of color, almost complete. Marie realized she hadn’t yet gotten out plates and silverware. Sauté faded fast once finished, wilted if left to cool. So to the last, loud minute after she added the pasta to the crackling pan under the whirring of the fan and to the distant civility of distant savage events narrated on the radio, she added the clatter of plates pulled from the cabinet, silverware drawer pulled out, forks and knives, the closing of the drawer. Looking back to the sauté, she wondered where, this time, she would have failed.
It was ready. She moved the pan to another burner and turned off the gas. She turned off the fan, then reached under the cabinet to turn off the radio. Then she turned around.
Benjamin was standing in front of the open refrigerator and the open cheese drawer. He looked up at her when she turned, eyes too old for him, arms goose-bumped from the cold.
“Which one is Parmesan?” he asked.
______________________
CC image courtesy of sean dreilinger on Flickr.