Lara Vapnyar: Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love

Andrei came on time, even earlier. At five minutes to three he already stood in Nina’s hall, removing his bulky leather jacket and his leather cap sprinkled with raindrops. He smelled of wet leather. He handed Nina a bottle of wine and a baguette in a sodden paper bag. “In movies, when a man hands a woman a baguette and a bottle of wine, it always seems chic, doesn’t it?” he said.

Nina nodded. Andrei looked more homely than she remembered. Nina’s memory somehow had managed to erase the red spots on his pasty cheeks, to color his brows and eyelashes, to make him slimmer, and add an inch or two to his height. It was strange seeing him in her house, especially in her tiny hall, where every object was familiar, its place carefully considered. He clashed with the surroundings like a bad piece of furniture. Nina hurried to lead him into the kitchen.

“So, are we cooking broccoli today?” Andrei asked. He began leafing through Italian Cuisine: The Taste of the Sun , his freshly washed hands still smelling of Nina’s soap.

“Broccoli, yes,” Nina mumbled. She was suddenly struck by a dreadful suspicion, which was immediately confirmed upon opening the refrigerator.

In all her shopping frenzy, she had forgotten to buy any vegetables.

She jerked out the vegetable basket, faintly hoping for a miracle. The basket was empty and sparklingly clean, wiped with a kitchen towel moistened in Clorox by her sister’s firm hand. There was only a tiny strip of onion skin stuck between the edge of the basket and the shelf above. Nina turned to Andrei, motioning to the empty basket. Her throat felt as if someone were squeezing it. Suddenly everything seemed hopeless and absurd: the counter crammed with gleaming, artificial sets of kitchenware; the barren vegetable basket; this perfect stranger, who came to cook in her kitchen; Nina herself, with all her energy and excitement of moments ago, now pressing her forehead against the cold vinyl of the refrigerator door.

“Do you want me to drive to a supermarket?” Andrei asked.

Nina shook her head. She knew it would never work now, after everything had been exposed to her in all its absurdity.

“What’s this?” Andrei asked. He was looking toward the back of the refrigerator. A bunch of broccoli was stuck between the third shelf and the refrigerator wall. It hung upside down, the florets nearly touching the shelf below. The bunch wasn’t yellowed or covered with rotten slime. On the contrary, for the weeks that it lay between the shelves, it had become darker and dryer. A few more weeks and it would have turned into a broccoli mummy. It smelled okay, or rather it didn’t smell at all. “I’m sure we can still cook it,” Andrei said. He began showing Nina what to do.

Nina ran cold water over the florets, then shook the bunch fiercely, letting out a shower of green drops. She chopped off the stem, then cut off the base of each floret, watching with fascination how they split into new tiny bunches of broccoli. She then peeled the stem and cut it into even, star-shaped slices. Some things turned out to be different from Nina’s cooking fantasies, others exactly the same. Some were disappointing, others better than she ever imagined. The best thing of all was that, when the broccoli was already on the stove, sputtering boiling water from under the shiny lid, Andrei pulled one of her kitchen chairs close to the stove and suggested she stand on it.

“Climb up and inhale,” he said. “The hot air travels up. The strongest aroma should be right under the ceiling.” He stood back, giving her room.

Nina stood on the chair, her hair just grazing the ceiling. She closed her eyes, lifted her nose, and breathed in deep. The warm aroma of broccoli rose up, caressing Nina’s face, enveloping the whole of her.

S ERGEY WOKE UPwith an erection and a headache. The first was soon gone but the second lingered, radiating jagged rings of pain from a point of distress somewhere in the center of his skull.

He closed his eyes, hoping for the comfort of darkness, but saw instead the great hairy surface of the carpet that he had installed in New Jersey the day before. Sergey had been installing carpets for eight months, ever since Pavel had taken him on to work with him, and now whenever he closed his eyes he would see, smell, and even feel carpets. Yesterday’s color was called Georgia Peach but was in fact a pale brown with a pinkish hue, bland and dry. The carpet smelled like dust, glistened with synthetic threads, and was dead to the touch.

All carpets were named after something bright and tempting. When Sergey began the job, he would often ask Pavel, who spoke good English, what this or that expression meant. “Warm honey,” Pavel would translate, “Hawaiian waterfall,” “Mulberry tree.” The earthy tones were the most popular, and the same grayish-beige color could be called Morning fog, Bay fog, Autumn leaves, Brown sugar , or Elk’s horn. At first, as Sergey measured, cut, and tucked, he would entertain himself by making up new, truer names for the carpet colors: Moldy bread, Puddle of dirty water, Pig’s feet, Cow dung on a warm day. He had stopped doing this sometime ago. The names for the colors became just words for Sergey, simple combinations of letters and sounds. The word peach no longer sounded grating, because it didn’t bring a peach to mind anymore. There was no need to think up a better name.

Sergey stretched, careful not to knock the table with his arms. “See, big enough to fit a sofa and separate from where I sleep too,” Pavel had said about the kitchen in his studio. He had sublet it to Sergey, referring to it as “your room” during the transaction and “the living room” or “the kitchen” ever since.

Sergey turned onto his side so he lay facing the mangy back of the sofa, where he kept a snapshot of his wife stuck between the pillows. He hadn’t seen Lenka for almost a year, but he looked at the snapshot every day. And now, whenever Sergey tried to call her face to mind, it was the image in the snapshot that came to him. The woman in the snapshot had the same thin nose as Lenka, the same fair brows, and the same high cheekbones, but her mouth was stretched into a tight smile, and the expression on her face was awkward and insincere. Sergey knew this wasn’t Lenka’s expression, but he couldn’t see what her face really looked like anymore. Sometimes a fleeting memory of the pasty skin of her cheeks, or the dimple in her chin, or the beads of sweat that would speckle the tip of her nose when she moved on top of him, would appear to Sergey, but these visions were always too brief and incomplete to be satisfying. The only time he could see her whole face now was in his sleep, where she often didn’t look like Lenka at all, but Sergey just knew it was her.

Other parts of her body he remembered better. Her legs were thin and pale, easily bruised, often covered in the summer with scratches and pink swellings from mosquito bites. He could see her ribs and her vertebrae when she sat smoking on the opposite side of their bed. Once he began tracing the contours of her spine with his finger, but she made him stop. She said that when she was a little girl, she had this drunk uncle who used to sit her in his lap and “count her ribs,” poking his fat fingers hard between each bone. Lenka’s fingers were light and cool, always light and cool. This Sergey remembered very well.

When he phoned her last night — early morning in Russia — she sighed, and yawned, and didn’t say anything for a long time. He asked her if he had woken her up. “Um, no, I don’t know,” she mumbled. He looked at the snapshot and imagined that it was not a picture of Lenka but of some other — strange — woman, and it was this strange woman who had picked up the phone. The real Lenka, his Lenka, wouldn’t have yawned into the phone, she would have squealed with delight at the sound of his voice, as she always did during the first couple of months after he left for America. The real Lenka would have cried, “Serionya! You!” The real Lenka would have begged him to return home sooner. “Yes, I know, I know we need the money, I know,” she would say, in a light, tiny voice, quickly sounding out of breath. “But can’t you do something — anything — to speed it up?”