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Lynn's roasting a chicken. She takes out garlic, chili powder, and a lime. "What's that for?" I say. "There are pine nuts above your head," she says. I hand them down to her. Now she butters the pan. She's got the coriander in a bag, cloves, curry, and two oranges. Then other green herbs. Jesus Christ, I'm thinking, all that crap for the chicken.
"All that's for the chicken?"
"What?"
"What? That." I'm pulling on my eyebrow hair. It's a nervous habit, but I feel like plucking these long curly ones. "All that goes on the chicken?"
She rinses off her hands and says, "This is a recipe from my mom."
It's early summer. It's afternoon, and the kitchen is the brightest room in this house. It's like a greenhouse in here, very sunny. The house itself is small and cheap, though a hundred and fifty years ago somebody planted a sycamore on the front lawn. Protected from the wind and fed by sun and water, the plant grew into a giant. The limbs stretch up—it's like an elephant, white tusks against the sky.
"Up we go," she says, upending the chicken. She pulls a little wax-paper bag from inside it like an envelope and drops it in the sink.
"What the hell is that?" I say. Lynn wipes her forehead with her wrist. She takes the bag out of the sink and tears it open, spilling the contents into her hand. It's meat—it looks like tongues.
"Oh, my God."
"It's chicken livers. See?"
She flicks them with her finger. It's three glistening pieces of purple meat, but not at all like steak. They look like they were alive five minutes ago. She holds one. She seems to enjoy touching it.
"O.K., get rid of it." Lynn puts the bag and the livers in the garbage. She says, "You make it with onions. My mother loves it."
"Yeah."
This is the whole chicken, an entire animal. Like, I haven't exactly seen this done before by a person my age. We're both kids. We don't know how to cook this stuff.
In all the time we've been living together, Lynn's never cooked a whole chicken.
I'm leaning close enough to her that I can smell her shampoo. Her hair is thick and reddish brown, full and shiny, and her skin is the color of creamy tan suede. Mexican mother, Irish father. You know how they airbrush the skin of ladies in Playboy? I see Lynn's body every day, I look at her skin up close, I've had my eye an inch above her stomach or her shoulder or her calf, and it's flawless. It's golden skin. Every morning after her shower, Lynn comes and stands in front of me—I'm either getting dressed or making notes for work—then she turns around and I rub cream across her shoulders, underneath the bra straps, bright-white fabric against her tan skin.
She cuts the fat off the chicken, that makes sense, but with scissors, of all things. She holds it like a little playmate, flipping it over, rocking it under the faucet. She washes out the hole in it, pouring some little pieces of red guts into the sink, shaking out the dried blood or cartilage that runs down and sticks in the drain. Sickening. Then she tears off a piece of brown paper bag and folds it, dabbing the outside of the chicken.
"What are you doing?" I ask.
"It gets the old oil out of the skin."
"Old oil? What, like sweat?"
"No, not like sweat," she says. "Like sweat? Chickens don't sweat."
"I know."
"I'm cooking you dinner and you're gonna stand here and give me shit?"
"No! No way. This is gonna be sensational."
I love her. Man! I really do. She's a pistol. It's not placating love, it's really passionate love. Uncharted territory, yes, definitely. But that's what love is—undefined.
"Move aside, termite," she says to me, grabbing the bottle of olive oil.
"Termite," I say. "Good one."
I love how she says that— "Are you gonna give me shit?" That's funny. The answer is yes, I am.
Lynn's awesome, though. She knows what she's thinking, and she knows what you're thinking. She's got you. She's a keeper, as they say. I want to keep her.
"Would you rather I'd left the feathers on?
No, no, youre the chef. It makes it taste better."
"Sounds good," I say. I mean, whatever this girl touches turns to gold.
Say something bad happened to her, and we have no control over it. All of a sudden there's a situation. Hang on, let me start this over.
It's hard to explain—poor kid—a month ago Lynn had to get an abortion. What a lead balloon. What a joke. It ain't no joke.
"Give me that," she says, pointing at the pepper, and I hand it to her. She rubs chili powder on the skin. Now the paprika, now salt, now some other stuff.
In Spanish, the word is aborto, a foreign word that even I can master and pretty easy for Celia, Lynn's mother, to yell at her a few times over the phone. "Aborto! Aborto! Clak-ata-clak-ata-clak-ata."
Lynn called home. It was night, we were lying in bed, and I heard everything from my side. I wanted to help, but what could I do? You don't interfere with a family. Lynn nodded into the phone, picked up a pencil and stared at it.
"Mom. We already decided."
"Goddamn it!" I heard Celia say. "You slut. You and your jackass boyfriend."
After two minutes, Lynn hung up. She didn't say anything.
"Jackass boyfriend?" I said.
"She said to tell you she hates you."
"Thanks."
In my mind, I saw Celia stomping barefoot through her newly carpeted house with the antenna phone and her 1950s bouffant hairdo and ten pounds of eye shadow, shaking her fist, saying, "Goddamn jackass," meaning me, blaming it on me.
To read the rest of the story, buy the book...
Copyright© 2000 by Matthew Klam
Read more excerpts from Sam the Cat and Other Stories
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