One mid-August evening, a month into our endless summer, a few weeks before I was set to move to Manhattan, I arrived to Sebastian’s Westfield apartment and found him at the kitchen table surveying a pile of red bell peppers, a dozen Big Boy tomatoes, uncured garlic encased in silky paper, three basil stalks wrapped in wet paper towel. “You just missed her,” Sebastian said, meaning his mom, gesturing at the garden produce. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with all this stuff.”
“Are you hungry?” I asked. I was, and we’d planned to go out for a bite, but that seemed silly, given what was right in front of us. “I can cook.”
Sebastian cupped one of the tomatoes in his hand, weighing it. “You sure?”
I was sure of a few things that evening: that a homegrown August tomato is a heady experience; that the fitful sobriety I’d established just prior to meeting Sebastian was finally taking root in me; that he and I had—already, without any discussion of what it might mean—reached a point where we were playing house. What I’m unsure of is why I didn’t stick with making something familiar, alio e olio or caprese, or why I didn’t slice a few tomatoes and salt them, so we could devour them rare. Perhaps I wanted to impress upon him that I was as capable in the kitchen as I was adept at kissing and philosophical conversation and metabolizing caffeine late at night. Perhaps the sight of so many ripe, luscious tomatoes went straight to my heart.
I said, “We could make marinara. Do you have pasta?”
What twenty-two-year-old bachelor in his first apartment doesn’t have pasta? He had a whole cabinet full, different shapes and sizes, short and long, chunky and skinny, tubes and bowties, probably stocked by his mom. But his kitchen was otherwise minimalist: a small, deeply scored cutting board, a Teflon skillet, a stock pot with no cover. A rattling drawer populated by mismatched silverware and another, sticking as I pulled it out, with a scant handful of cooking utensils.
The kitchens I worked in were industrial and, while not glamorous, outfitted exactly; or else they had been the kitchens of weekend gourmands, the well-stocked homes of my ex’s wealthy parents, long divorced and frequent travelers, leaving us to shuttle between whichever house was unoccupied. I possessed no real understanding of how much those kitchens cost to furnish, nor that learning to caramelize onions in a copper-bottom steel pan while drinking craft beer was a kind of luxury—though it had, eventually, become obvious that my ex’s and my worlds were galaxies apart, and there was no getting around those differences unless I was willing to pretend I liked freshly grated Parmesan more than the shake kind in a plastic can.
Sebastian’s haphazard kitchen was part youth, part carelessness, part extension of his punk rock ethos: he made do with what was available and didn’t moan over lack; there was so much world outside his kitchen that mattered to him, eating happened because it had to, and he enjoyed it while it was happening, but why give it any more thought than that? His lifestyle attracted me, almost against my will. We were both working class, one generation removed: Sebastian knew how to change a flat tire and repair a busted guitar; he knew which bottom-shelf hair pomade to buy and which cult classics were worth renting; he opened the passenger-side door for me and preferred I shave my legs. In this classic narrative, of course I would be the one making dinner, and why not? I’d been cooking for myself since I was sixteen, and for others almost as long. But I hadn’t yet bridged the divide between gender roles and counterculture dictates. Even when I wasn’t being paid for it, I loved preparing food; to admit as much would, I feared, make me one of those women, like my mom, bound to her kitchen with a resigned gratitude that seemed at best half-sham. If I was going to cook for someone I adored, I had to pretend it was no big deal.
We peeled the garlic together, a whole head, and since there was only one sharp knife and one cutting board, I chopped while Sebastian oiled the skillet and filled the big saucepan with water. Garlic accented the air and stained my fingertips. I knocked the little mountain of slivers into the scarred skillet and turned the burner on medium-low, added a touch more oil and, after banging the shaker against the counter to break apart the humid clumps, some salt. Heat bloomed through the kitchen. Sebastian flipped on the old boombox that nestled on the windowsill, tuning the radio dial to the local NPR station, which played Jazz ala Mode after eight. Piano, trumpet, saxophone notes plinked out and laced around us. I rinsed the tomatoes; I cored and chopped two, liquid spilling over the edge of the cutting board, seeds in perfect, gelatinous clumps loosing from the flesh. I scraped it all into the pan even though the garlic was still bright white, nowhere near fragrant. I’d turned the wrong burner on. The back coil, not the front where the pan was, piped red. I moved the pan. A short sizzle of frying garlic—I shook the pan to relieve the heat—and the tomatoes began to sear and bubble. Sebastian pointed to the water pot, and I nodded; he flipped the dial over to high. I worked fast on the rest of the tomatoes.
Sebastian had a full-time job he enjoyed and a half-sleeve of tattoos and his own cell phone and a car payment. Though he was barely two years older than I, his way of being in the world appeared secure to my tenuous. I didn’t think I was ashamed of not knowing what I wanted, though I wouldn’t have admitted out loud my increasing ambivalence: I had plans, even if they sounded like daydreams to everyone else. I was moving to the City, where I would write poems and figure it out. But having stumbled into someone whose arms encircled me whole and complete, I was filled with doubt. Was I meant to give up my city dreams and my fledgling desire to finish undergrad? Would he wait for me to graduate? What would we do then: get married and buy a house in his hometown? Where would poetry and band practice go once we slipped into playing suburban homeowners permanently? I had a true terror of this vision, of being trapped forever. Home was the place I wanted by all means to escape. How could I reconcile this with Sebastian, who was, in a blissful and unsettling way, my new home—a place I never wanted to leave? How could one word encompass such violently different meanings? It’s painful to admit, but I didn’t voice these fears to Sebastian, because I wasn’t supposed to have fallen for him: we’d met only a few weeks after his high school sweetheart had broken things off. To say he was hurting would have been the understatement of the new millennium.
The contents of the skillet looked decent—softening and thick—as I scraped in the rest of the tomatoes, realizing too late I chopped too many. Fresh liquid flooded the pan. I adjusted the heat higher. On the next burner, the big pot of water inched toward boiling. A few more air bubbles appeared along the edges. It’s not that we were in a rush, we never were that summer, but I worried about timing: I didn’t know how long marinara took to finish; would this impossible pot of water boil too fast or take too long? My eyes fell on the red peppers: I’d meant to add one, should have sautéed it with the garlic.
The kitchen was long and narrow, with enough space between the small table and the stove for us both to maneuver, and as I went for a pepper, Sebastian intercepted, hands around my waist, pulling me close. I thought he wanted a hug, but no, he twirled me before resettling an arm around my waist, left hand palming my right: he was asking me to dance. We bumped, laughed, kissed; we relaxed into each other as we circled the dusk-glow kitchen. The tomatoes spat and hissed. Our tastes in music were very different—give him hardcore punk and me a girl-lyricist with an acoustic guitar—but jazz was common ground. We spun and clung like two people who speak different languages drawing closer and closer to an understanding.
“What’s this one called?” he whispered. His mouth pressed into the hair above my ear, the vibration of his words filled me.
“’You Go To My Head,’” I murmured. And he did: being held by him was like the kicker in a Julep or two. Better, even. Often, when we were together, especially late at night, I had the sensation of dissolving into him. If I stayed in the feeling, I knew I wanted it to last forever. But, later, alone, t-h-i-n-k-i-n-g, I could not abide my own desire.
When the song ended, we stayed flush, lingering in the balmy, damp sweetness, as the host gave details of the recording. Before a new song started, I remembered the pepper. I never dice a bell pepper without thinking of Nadia, the Ukrainian woman who taught me in Romito’s downstairs kitchen, during a slow season, how to cut vegetables. Ring the top of the pepper and pull it off, slide the knife down one seam, then splay the pepper open, remove the other seams and seeds, slice vertically in one-inch-strips, then line them up and bring the knife down quick, horizontally, producing squares or mostly squares. Here, no, she said, correcting my form. You make good wife, some day. A husband likes a girl can cook. Take the top ring and carefully separate it from the stem, dice the circle into more squares. Nothing wasted.
I don’t plan on getting married, I told her. But I appreciate your teaching me.
She gave me what I can only describe as “the eye”—milky blue, whether from cataracts or bad lighting I wasn’t sure—and said, every girl wants husband. Eventually.
Did I want a husband? I dropped the pepper into the bubbling orangey-pink tomato substance that resembled broth more than sauce. The garlic drifted like little moons. Was Sebastian the husband I wanted? My affection and desire for him felt like a plant yielding unexpected fruit, beyond what anyone might believe possible. We never used the terms boyfriend or girlfriend to refer to each other, though the amount of time we spent together meant there was no way to see anyone else. We hadn’t gone any further than kissing. After 4 weeks! No friend could believe it. He hasn’t tried to—? No, he hadn’t. And I didn’t push; I liked kissing him. I thought I probably wanted more, too, but not yet. There was so much between us to parse and sex would only complicate things. He was grieving his ex-girlfriend; I was leaving for the city at the end of the month. He had mentioned, a few days earlier, that he had started taking pills, given to him by a friend, or maybe a cousin; one of the side effects was difficulty sustaining an erection. Whether this was general or specific to him, I was unsure. What pills? I pressed. His admission caught me off guard: I knew he was struggling with Marie’s leaving, but that was normal of heartbreak. He wouldn’t give more information than that they were anti-depressants. Maybe that was meant to reassure me. He was straight edge, after all, not a recreational drug user. Was it safe to take someone else’s medication? He batted away this question too. I want to feel better, he said.
Better than this? I wondered.
If he sometimes seemed absent, or cried himself to sleep while I rubbed his back, I took it in stride. I hadn’t confessed that his presence in my life was most of what was keeping me sober. I knew it wasn’t easy to lose someone. The night of the tomato sauce was a good night. We had so many good nights together, and I believed in them with the innocence of a girl not yet twenty-one, not jaded enough to ask what might have been the obvious question.
“How will we know when it’s done?” Sebastian said, resting his chin on my shoulder as I stirred the broth-sauce. The peppers had turned crisp red. The garlic remained opaque. Satiny tomato skins floated over the top of the liquid.
“Not sure,” I said. “I guess when the pasta is ready, this will be too.”
He poured salt in the rolling water and stuffed the spaghetti in. Eleven minutes on the oven timer. Our first time preparing a meal together. Our only time. He stood beside me, our arms touching, and watched the water bubble while I tried to scoop out skins. Neither of us thought to stir the spaghetti as it cooked. When the timer beeped, he opened a few cabinets and located a plastic strainer, carbon copy of the one my mother had in her kitchen, avocado yellow with feet and a handle, remnant of Tupperware parties. “Are the ends supposed to do this?” he asked.
“No,” I said. I might have laughed—I often do when nervous—as I poked the noodles in the colander. Most were al dente, but some clumped together, stick-like in the middle. “They’re okay,” I said, “we can eat around those parts.” I dialed off the sauce burner, and gave one more valiant scoop for skins; more rose to the surface. “But I don’t know how good this is going to be.”
I felt suddenly and completely over the process of cooking, my appetite deflated by the way what I was about to serve looked. Sebastian mentioned Marie often, in the bewildering shorthand of someone who hasn’t quite moved on, but I didn’t actually know much about her. At some point, he showed me an old photo of them camping. She had dark hair, which waved around her pale, open face, and she was as tall as him, curvy; she was into fashion design and favored the same music, often acting as photographer for his bands. She struck me, from these brief glimpses, as simple. Not dumb, I would never say that about another woman, but purposefully blank—the type of girl ready to assume her boyfriend’s identity, with lipstick and a smile. If she liked to cook, if he’d planned on making meals with her in this kitchen, I could only assume. However full his and my new bushel of tomatoes might be, how could I possibly measure up?
“I’m sure it’ll be great,” he said. “Smells delicious.” He nipped my bare shoulder playfully and when I batted him away, he pulled me into him, nibbled at my neck. He was eating more regularly by then, but probably still not enough. Sometimes he was ravenous.
We carried our bowls out to the little porch off his bedroom window—I held his bowl as he climbed through, then he took both while I did the same. There were two folding chairs filling the small space, and Arthur, the big Mastiff mutt, who till that moment had been snoring on the bed, joined us, gouging his back nails against the sill as he clambered. There wasn’t really room for him, so I propped my feet up on the rail and he lay down beneath my legs.
Sebastian ate his entire serving and climbed over Arthur and me to get seconds. I pushed my noodles around between bites, avoiding the poached garlic and crunchy peppers. Clearly this wasn’t the way to make marinara. It was as if I’d sentenced the beautiful, unsuspecting fruits to a wrongful death.
Sebastian, if he had thoughts anywhere similar to mine, voiced the exact opposite. “This is awesome,” he said. Twice.
“Thanks to the tomatoes,” I amended. The sauce, aside its unusual texture, tasted good. Like summer, like—bright sun and fresh air and the peculiar disorientation of too much of both.
“And to you,” he said. He upended his bowl and drank the remaining liquid. Then he pointed to mine, cradled in my lap half full, and asked if he could finish it.
What if every night was like this, the two of us sharing meals and kitchen dances and l’heure blue, pinpricks of stars adorning the sky? What if we were—against our better judgments—in love? Inside the bedroom, there was a label-less prescription bottle on his cluttered desk; the pills were there. This unorthodox remedy struck me as dangerous; the pills a shroud, covering up something that needed to breathe. It wasn’t my place to tell him how to manage his depression. I knew that. But I also knew—and thought perhaps he should too, given his anti-drug, anti-alcohol stance—that taking someone else’s prescription medication was a bad idea. I was furious at the person who had given him the pills. I may have blamed that person more than I blamed Sebastian for my dread over what those pills might do. Why not go to the doctor and get your own? If I asked him this, I don’t remember. Perhaps he told me he didn’t have insurance and couldn’t afford it.
I want to remember more of this evening, because I suspect there’s a clue hidden in all of this, but it was so long ago, and after our meal, my memory fractures. Or, perhaps, better put, it fritzes in and out, like faulty electrical wiring, like Miles Morales in the multiverse without the special wristwatch. I can make an educated guess about how the rest of the night went, by assuming that Sebastian reached over and squeezed my hand and asked, “You want to watch something?”
Some of my favorite hours that summer were spent curled beside him on the couch, a crocheted blanket thrown over us. It sounds strange, maybe, because by most twenty-year-old’s standards, I had already lived a full, and exciting, life. But I had never experienced, until that summer, the simplicity of two bodies at rest together.
This night, though, I don’t think I stayed. I imagine I said, “I’m pretty tired.”
This wouldn’t have been untrue. I was often tired that summer, though the adrenaline of attraction helped keep me wired. The drive between his apartment and my parents’ house was twenty-six miles on backroads, and though I never minded that passage between the home I wanted to escape and the home I wanted to establish, on that night, I had a sense I belonged between the two—somewhere I could be alone. Even if being alone meant rehashing the same old questions: Was it love if I craved my own space? Was it love to tend to my own needs? Was it love to disagree? Entertaining even the tiniest doubt felt criminal, like I must be faking. And I wanted it to be real, I wanted it to be real so badly that I couldn’t see how very real it was.
“Okay,” he said. Because of the shadows, it was hard to read his face. Maybe it didn’t strike him as strange at all, though it was a rarity for me to leave his place before midnight.
“Let’s do the dishes.”
“I can clean up later.”
Perhaps I insisted. Perhaps we migrated to the kitchen naturally. Perhaps I hadn’t even decided yet to go.
The sauce had thickened as it cooled, and the peppers shaded paler red. Maybe we just needed more time. There’s no use hurrying tomatoes. The tail-end of Jazz Ala Mode piped from the boombox speakers as we packed leftovers and cleaned the dishes. I washed and he dried, wiped down the stove. When we were done, Sebastian switched off the overhead light, and summer darkness draped around us, the only illumination coming from the spotlights and streetlights outside. He took my hand once again, and gave me a gentle twirl, held me close as the horns faded.
Two days later, Sebastian picked me up after work and we went to his apartment as we often did. We took the dog for a walk, and I asked how his previous night had been—he had band practice, which I’d used as an excuse to see some friends—and Sebastian told me that after practice, he and Liam, the lead singer, had come back to his place and finished the rest of the sauce. “He thought it was delicious,” Sebastian said of Liam, who was vegan. In the summer of 2001, that translated as difficult to please. “He asked how you made it—he wanted to give Vanessa the recipe.” Vanessa was Liam’s long-time girlfriend; they’re probably married now.
“What’d you tell him?” I asked.
Sebastian shrugged. “I described everything you did as best I could remember.”
We stopped to let Arthur sniff around the base of a street sign. The air had a touch of briskness. Fall would arrive very soon.
“I don’t know if it can be replicated,” I admitted.
Sebastian wrapped his free arm around my shoulders. I relaxed against him, cheek on his t-shirt. His body radiated the heat of the day, warm and familiar.
“That—” he said, kissing the top of my head “—is why it was so good.”
Sara Rauch is the author of WHAT SHINES FROM IT: STORIES and XO. Her prose has appeared in Revolute, Split Lip, So to Speak, Hobart, Paranoid Tree, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Massachusetts. www.sararauch.com
