Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love

Luda and Milena

MILENA HAD LARGE BLUE EYES, an elegant nose, and smooth olive skin covered with a graceful network of fine wrinkles. “Her face is a battle-field for antiaging creams,” Luda said about Milena, and added that she wouldn’t want youth that came from bottles and jars. Once, Luda brought her old photographs to show that she used to be a real beauty too. The photographs revealed an attractive woman with a sturdy hourglass figure, imposing dense brows, and bright, very dark eyes. Some people saw a striking resemblance to the young Elizabeth Taylor, but Milena didn’t. Milena said that the young Luda looked like Saddam Hussein with bigger hair and a thinner mustache.

The two women met on the first day of the free ESL class held in one of the musty back rooms of Brooklyn College. Luda was late that day. She had been babysitting her two grandchildren, and her son-in-law had failed to come home on time. Angry and flustered, Luda had to run all the way to Brooklyn College, pushing through the rush-hour subway crowd and cutting across the meat market on Nostrand Avenue, which led to the following exchange with a large woman in a pink jacket:

“Watch it, asshole!” (the woman).

“No, it is you asshole!” (Luda).

By the time Luda opened the classroom door, they had already started the introductions. “My wife and I love America; we want to show it our respect by learning to speak its language,” a short man with a shiny nose and shinier forehead was telling the class. A young woman nodded enthusiastically as he spoke. Luda guessed that she must be the teacher. Angela Waters — Angie — endji was written on the board. Luda headed toward the wall and the only empty seat, squeezing her large body between the flimsy chairs that sagged under the weight of ESL students. “I’m sorry…. Excuse me,” she said, when she brushed against somebody with the stretched-out flaps of her cardigan.

“I apologize,” she whispered to the thin, elegantly dressed older woman in the next seat. “Don’t worry,” the woman whispered back in Russian. “Actually, I was afraid they would sit some country bumpkin next to me.”

Luda was about to answer with a sympathetic smile, but the smile died in midair. Had her seatmate just expressed relief or confirmation of her fears? She couldn’t possibly take her, Ludmila Benina, for a country bumpkin, could she? You old bitch! Luda thought, just in case.

She introduced herself in rough but confident English when Angie pointed at her with her chin. “Ludmila Benina, Luda, seventy-two years old, been in the U.S. for four years. I came to this class to improve my grammar and communication skills. I am a widow, I have a daughter and two grandchildren. I used to be a professor of economics in Moscow. I have written three college textbooks. One of my articles was translated into Hindi and appeared in a magazine in India. I used to participate in conferences all over the Soviet Union, and once in Bulgaria.” She threw a side glance at her seatmate, to see if she was duly impressed. If she was, her expression didn’t betray it.

“Milena from St. Petersburg,” she said, when her turn came. Just that. Nothing else. Luda felt stupid. She wished she hadn’t brought up the conferences. It would have been enough just to tell about her professorship and her books. She could always have mentioned the conferences later, in future classes, in a casual way. Her unease lasted all through the introductions of two elderly Russian couples; two elderly Chinese couples; three middle-aged Dominican couples; one young and handsome Haitian man; one very tall, very old, and very loud Haitian woman with a funny name, Oolna; and one dark-skinned woman who spoke so fast and with such a heavy accent that nobody could understand what she said or where she came from.

Then a man who sat alone in the back stood up and cleared his throat. “Aron Skolnik, seventy-nine. I used to live in Brooklyn with my wife. She died four years ago. Now I live in Brooklyn alone.” Luda raised her eyes and peered at Aron. The expression on his face was strange, uncertain, as if he wasn’t sure whether living alone was a bad or a good thing, as if he both welcomed the solitude and found it stifling. Luda had a sudden urge to reach over and touch the thin wisp of hair that stuck to his forehead. And Milena thought she saw a flicker of hunger in Aron’s eyes. Just a flicker, but she couldn’t be mistaken. He had nice eyes, she decided, the eyes of a much younger man. She straightened her shoulders, removed her Versace shades, shook her hair, and put the shades back on top of her head. Luda snorted and thought, Look at the old slut!

THAT NIGHT, as she lay in bed on her stone-hard mattress, Luda continued to think about Milena. There had been this moment, when Luda took off her cardigan and hung it over the chair, that Milena actually sniffed the air and moved deeper into her seat. It was true that Luda hadn’t showered in a while, but this was not because she was lazy or had a dislike of cleanliness; it was simply because she had a dislike of cold. She had always preferred hot baths to cold showers, but after being submerged in water that was warmer than air, it felt unbearable to get out. Freezing. Freezing. Trembling. Groping for a towel. Shaking. For some reason cold always filled her with panic. If only there was a way not to become cold afterward, she wouldn’t have minded taking a bath. Really. If, for example, there were somebody waiting for her with a large thick towel stretched in his arms…. She had a fleeting image of Aron standing in her bathroom, wearing his silly shorts. The image was both touching and ridiculous at the same time.

Luda groaned as she turned onto her side. “It’s Sealy orthopedic mattress, Mother, very expensive,” Luda’s daughter had said. She gave it to Luda after her husband had tried it and hated it. Luda’s apartment was almost entirely furnished by her daughter. There was a rickety kitchen table that Luda’s daughter had used when she first came to America. There was a flowery sofa that Luda’s daughter’s friends found too tacky. There was a black bookcase that appeared in Luda’s apartment after her daughter had bought a set of light-brown furniture. Only one thing was Luda’s own acquisition — a leather armchair with scratched legs and a big cut on the back. Luda had found it standing by a pile of garbage about six blocks away from her home. She called a taxi and paid a driver five dollars for delivery and another five to drag the huge thing upstairs. When they made it to her apartment, Luda felt happy and generous, so she added two more dollars and half of an Entenmann’s apple pie as a tip. The armchair had been Luda’s prized possession ever since. She especially enjoyed the low groan the armchair made when she sat down. It was the groan of somebody who was profoundly annoyed with Luda but still loved her very much.

MILENA’S APARTMENT was barely furnished at all. She slept on a narrow sofa that she had bought from her brother for sixty dollars. Her TV stood on the floor, and her video player was placed on top of it, which was wrong because it caused the VCR to overheat, as Milena’s brother repeatedly pointed out. He had sold her his VCR after he bought a new DVD/VHS player for himself, and he felt it was his duty to ensure that the VCR would be used right. Milena ignored his warning, as she ignored his offer to sell her a large chest of drawers. Her favorite pieces of furniture were her chairs, all nine of them, all different, all bought at one or another garage sale, the price ranging from eight dollars to fifty cents (that one didn’t have a seat). She used eight of her chairs as stands for her large photographs and posters, as shelves for vases, and sometimes as hangers for her dresses, because the sight of good clothes never failed to cheer her up. The ninth chair served as a nightstand. It was a wooden chair with a square seat, a perfect size and shape to hold a couple of books and a large shoebox, where she kept her pills, some squeezed-out tubes of expensive antiwrinkle cream, some of her old photographs, and a pencil sketch of the man who had been her lover for over twenty years — including several breakups, other lovers, his never-ending marriage to another woman, and her short-lived marriage to another man.

Milena opened the shoebox and started looking for her sleeping pills, wondering if Luda really used to be as famous and successful as she said. There were so many people who lied. That old Haitian hag in class said she owned a chain of expensive boutiques. A chain! Or that pathetic little man who claimed that he used to be the most famous psychiatrist in Minsk—“You won’t believe the bribes they were willing to give just to get an appointment.” But Milena didn’t really blame them for lying. Actually, when the teacher asked them to introduce themselves, Milena was tempted to lie too. Other people’s introductions made her whole life seem like a mocking string of nones, nevers, nos, and so-sos. She didn’t have a husband. She didn’t have any children. She’d graduated from a mediocre college. She had worked at the same boring job for thirty years. Once they had offered her a very promising position in Moscow, but she wouldn’t leave St. Petersburg, because her lover was in St. Petersburg, and because Moscow was known for being populated by pushy, conceited, obnoxious people. Just look at Luda, with her conferences in Bulgaria!

And then Milena remembered that she had lied in class after all. Her documents stated that her first name was Ludmila. It was her lover who had come up with Milena, claiming that her real name didn’t suit her. He saw a Ludmila as a tall languid woman with a thick braid dangling down her spine, and both Luda and Mila, the name’s usual diminutives, were too common for her. Milena sounded just right. An exotic name, light, nimble, and unique. She used to enjoy that name. She used to enjoy being a small, elegant, irritating puzzle. Now she was too tired to enjoy it. Now she wished she could slump in somebody’s arms — to be easy and reachable and to be stroked on the head with tenderness and pity.

THE INTERNATIONAL FEAST, Angie wrote on the white board the next day. “We’re going to start this Friday, and then we will have it every week.” She had a large blue marker stain on her cheek, but this didn’t prevent her from looking enthusiastic. “We’ll create a wonderful informal atmosphere, so you all can improve your conversational skills and get acquainted with your diverse cultures. You don’t have to bring expensive or complicated dishes, just something simple, something typical of your country.” Luda wrote it down: Fris, feast. Bring Rus. food. Diversity. Culture. Simple. She looked over Milena’s shoulder and saw that Milena had put a fat red star over Friday in her calendar. Of course, Luda thought. An International Feast with all its food, culture, and informal atmosphere was a perfect opportunity to get a man to notice you, and Milena knew this as well as Luda.

On Friday, they pushed some of the desks to the wall to create a makeshift informal space, and put the foil, plastic, and paper containers with food on the teacher’s desk in the center. The diverse cultures were represented by fried plantains, duck gizzards, pastelitos, tostones, corn fritters, shrimp spring rolls, two kinds of Russian potato salad, a pack of hard, ring-shaped Russian pretzels, and an extra-value meal from McDonald’s brought by the couple who wanted to show their respect to the United States by learning its language. “Our country is America now, we eat American food,” the man explained, with the same proud expression. But Angie wouldn’t allow her students to start eating. “Mingle, guys, mingle, you have to mingle first,” she kept saying. So they all crowded around the desk, sipping soda from plastic cups, trying to ignore the food and make conversation.

Luda studied the room, trying to think of a way to approach Aron through mingling. She was wearing a bright scarf pinched a day before from her daughter’s drawer and dark lipstick found at the bottom of the same drawer. “Wipe it off, Grandma,” her six-year-old granddaughter had said. “You look stupid.” She was afraid that her granddaughter might have been right. Another thing that made Luda uneasy was that she couldn’t figure out how to mingle with her classmates. The two Chinese couples wouldn’t mingle with anybody but themselves, Dominicans clearly preferred other Dominicans, and the two Russian couples stuck together, with the wives expressing visible displeasure whenever Luda tried to approach them. She had experienced this kind of displeasure before. Her very presence seemed to irk married women of her age, and this was not because they saw her as a threat but rather because her widowhood and loneliness reminded them that they could soon end up like that too. They looked at Luda with wary squeamishness as if she were a scabby dog. Oolna was the only person who didn’t mind talking to Luda, but she was too old, and Luda didn’t want to appear old by association. As for Aron, he clearly preferred the company of Jean-Baptiste, the handsome young Haitian, seeing kinship in the fact that they were the only two single guys in class. “So tell me, Jean-Baptiste,” Aron asked. “Do they try to fix you up? They try to fix me up a lot. But I don’t know, I don’t know. You know what they say, marry a dancer when you’re in your twenties, a masseuse when you’re in your forties, and a nurse when you’re in your sixties. But what about me, my friend? I’m seventy-nine.” Luda sighed. There was no way she could break into this conversation.

Milena wasn’t mingling either. She had flitted in like a summer breeze, put a pack of square Russian biscuits on the table, and sat down on the edge of one of the desks, not looking at anybody, one leg over the other. Summer breeze with creaking joints, Luda thought, but she was worried. One passing look from Milena told her that she did appear stupid in her scarf and her caked lipstick. Luda knew that look very well. Mocking, condescending, sometimes pitying. She had seen it all too often on the faces of her husband’s countless secretaries, all attractive single women.

Milena smoothed the folds on her skirt and looked out the window. She thought she’d just sit and wait until Aron noticed her. “Impress and ignore” had been her strategy for years, but she wasn’t sure if it still worked. It had been awhile since she’d lost her ability to turn heads, and sometimes she thought that the saddest thing about it was that she couldn’t say exactly when it had happened. Men used to look at her, and then they didn’t. Something used to be there, and then it was gone; it was as if a part of her died and she hadn’t even noticed when. Still, Milena couldn’t think of any other strategy. She knew that trying to approach other couples was pointless — married women of her age looked at her as if she were a disease. Their warning stares reminded her of the expression on the face of her lover’s wife in the photograph he kept on his desk. Every time Milena happened to see it, she felt that the wife was staring directly at her, at times begging her to leave her husband alone, at other times threatening. Luda looked a little like her. The same heavy features, the same stupid scarf. Respectable, boring, the very picture of righteousness.

Oh, really? Luda thought to herself, having caught Milena’s stare. Respectable? Boring? For your information, I have had lovers too. Lovers was stretching it a bit, but Luda had had one encounter, with a colleague, on the last night of the three-day conference in Bulgaria. The man’s name was Stoyan; he was heavy and dark, with jet black hair spurting above his collarbone. He offered to see her to her hotel, and as they walked, discussing the problems of the advanced Socialist economic system, Luda couldn’t help but marvel at the linguistic similarity of his name to the Russian word for erection. Later, in bed, he had wanted her to yell out his name, but she wouldn’t; she was too bashful for that. I’m not as innocent as you think, Luda thought, fixing her scarf with defiance. Let’s just see.

But then Angie announced that it was time to eat, and the students ditched their conversation partners and rushed toward the food. Plastic tops covering the dishes were removed, foil was peeled off, paper containers unclasped, and the room filled with happy clatter and the air with culturally diverse aromas of curry, ginger, garlic, and basil. The spring rolls were the first to go. It seemed as if one moment there was a whole plateful of them, and the next there was nothing but the oily stains on the students’ fingers and a wonderful shrimp-and-scallions aftertaste in their mouths. Tostones and pastelitos followed suit. The Dominicans and the Russians were a little skeptical about duck gizzards but soon learned to appreciate them. Nobody was particularly enthusiastic about the two varieties of potato salad, so the two Russian couples who brought them ate each other’s offerings. And the extra-value-meal couple ate their extra-value meal. By the end of the feast there were only two items left, the hard, round pretzels and the hard, square biscuits. Angie ate one of each and politely pronounced them authentic and interesting, but nobody else appeared to share her interest.

Both Luda and Milena saw they’d made a mistake: they should have brought something more exciting. They knew it as soon as they saw how Aron’s face changed when the food was uncovered. At first his expression was hopeful but uncertain, as if he were a child seeing his favorite toy but wasn’t sure if it was meant for him or not. But as he filled his plate, his cautious grin disappeared in the deep furrows of a beaming smile. He chewed slowly, with his eyes closed, making sounds similar to the drone of a happy electric appliance. His cheeks became flushed and tiny beads of sweat gathered on the bridge of his nose. “Who made this? This is divine!” he would exclaim from time to time. Aron finished the last spring roll, crinkled his nose, and laughed. He looked radiant; he looked twenty years younger; he looked — Luda couldn’t think of a word right away, and then it hit her — he looked inspired. You couldn’t help but smile when watching Aron eat. And so Luda smiled. And Milena smiled too. Luda and Milena had heard that the path to a man’s heart ran through his stomach, but they’d never believed it. Aron Skolnik proved them wrong.

THE PROBLEM was that neither Luda nor Milena cooked. Milena had a particularly tortured relationship with food. For years and years, her life had been structured around her lover’s visits. He would come to her place after work, twice a week, to spend about an hour with her. “No, no,” he would say, when she offered him food. “Let’s not waste time. My wife is waiting for me with dinner anyway.” Milena would attempt to cook for herself at times, out of spite, out of defiance. She would mix the ingredients in the bowl, telling herself that she didn’t care; she would cook and enjoy a good meal by herself. “I don’t care, I don’t care,” she would still be saying as she scooped the contents of the bowl into the garbage pail.

And Luda? Luda had always been too busy working. Moreover, for most of her married life she had lived with her mother-in-law, who cooked a lot and enjoyed cooking, especially if she could come up with a dish that Luda couldn’t stand. Once Luda figured that out, she learned to fake her culinary partialities. To confuse her mother-in-law, she would feign great enthusiasm for the food she hated (“Zucchini pancakes! Can I have another helping?”) and appear indifferent to something she really liked. She mastered the art of faking so well that by the time her mother-in-law died and Luda could finally start eating according to her real partialities, she found that she no longer had partialities. Her sense of taste was ruined, her interest in food gone.

Which didn’t mean that she couldn’t learn how to cook, Luda thought, on the Thursday before the next feast, while flipping TV channels at home. Learning how to cook was a challenge, and she was used to meeting challenges head on. The first three shows of Food Network were a complete waste. Luda couldn’t care less about the chili cookoff, nor did she need information about candy-making technology. In the third show, the host explained how to make tiramisu, which could have been helpful if not for her cleavage — so prominent that Luda couldn’t concentrate on the movements of the woman’s hands. The fourth show, however, turned out to be much better. The host was making Greek feta and spinach pie, and she seemed to know what she was doing. Besides, the cleavage, if there was any, was well hidden under her chef’s jacket. Luda opened her brand-new notebook and prepared to write down the instructions.

The pie did work! Luda herself was surprised how well it worked. She had had some doubts as she was spreading the filling over the dough. To make the pie more authentically Russian, she had substituted cabbage for spinach, boiled eggs for feta cheese, and gotten rid of pine nuts altogether. She had a moment of worry that maybe those stupid pine nuts were the key ingredient after all. But when Luda took the pie out, not as perfect as on TV, far from perfect, but warm, and gleaming, and fragrant, all her doubts disappeared. She knew it would work. She closed her eyes and imagined that her own pie looked just as golden and perfect, and then she imagined Aron’s smile, and then — and this was the most delicious image — the stunned and furious expression on Milena’s face.

ARON ACTUALLY MOANED when he tried the first piece. When he finished the second piece, he took a napkin, wiped his lips, and looked at Luda. Looked at her and saw her. It had been such a long time since men saw her when they looked at her. “So good. I could eat it every day and not get tired of it,” he said. But even this didn’t give her as much thrill as the lost expression on Milena’s face. Poor Milena, Luda thought. Poor Milena, who wore a low-cut blouse and had brought store-bought eggplant caviar and to whom Aron said, “Did you buy it at the International on 5th and Brighton? They make a much better one in the Taste of Europe in Bensonhurst.” Poor, poor Milena.

I WONDER what the fat pig will make today, Milena thought, as she entered the bathroom the next Friday morning with a steaming coffee mug, a pack of cigarettes, and a book squeezed under her arm. Milena sat down on the toilet, put her coffee and the book on top of the laundry hamper, and lit a cigarette. People like Luda resembled battering rams; they would pummel and pummel, patiently, without taking a break, for as long as it took them to get what they wanted. Her lover’s wife was the same way, and she got her prize in the end; she still had her husband, who finally became a really good husband, because by now he was too old, too worn out, too scared, and too beaten to cheat. And Milena, stupid proud Milena, who had always thought it was beneath her to fight for a man, what did she gain? Nothing. She wound up with nothing. Just look at her: old and alone, sitting on a toilet with a coffee mug and a cigarette! Well, she wasn’t above fighting for a man this time.

She took a sip of coffee and started leafing through her book—pozharskie kotlety, kotlety pokievski, rasstegai—an old cookbook, with fine yellowed pages and elaborate drawings, a legacy from Milena’s allegedly aristocratic grandmother. There were countless long mornings when Milena’s grandmother would sit little Milena at the table and teach her how to make pozharskie kotlety or rasstegai. Afterward, she graded Milena’s work, usually poorly, because Milena was too impatient and wouldn’t do everything just so. How she hated those mornings! But she had learned how to cook. Surprise, surprise, fat pig!

LOOK, GUYS, we have something new from one of our Russian students today,” Angie said, taking a blue cotton napkin off Milena’s porcelain plate. There under a napkin were perfect golden squares of cheese puffs that smelled as if they had been taken out of the oven a second ago. There was a secret to that, which Milena’s grandmother had shared with Milena as a gift on her sixteenth birthday (Milena would have preferred new earrings). The puffs were so beautiful that people couldn’t bring themselves to grab them, as they did with other food at the feast. They picked up pieces with two fingers and chewed slowly and didn’t talk while they chewed, so all you could hear were the sounds of small crunchy bites. When all the puffs were gone, Aron flicked the few golden crumbs off his shirt and asked Milena what her name was. “Beautiful and unusual,” he commented.

Luda didn’t know much about medicine, so she didn’t know if extreme frustration and anger could cause an immediate heart attack. She decided that they couldn’t, because if they could she would be dead by now. The worst thing was the look on Milena’s face when Luda unpeeled the foil cover on her offering. The bitch actually chuckled. Yes, Luda had brought another Greek/ Russian cabbage pie. So what? It worked the last time; what was so stupid about assuming that it would work again? Luda loosened her scarf and sat down, hoping that either she or all the other students, along with Aron and Milena, would disappear somehow. She tried telling herself that Milena’s offering wasn’t better, it was simply new, but this thought failed to console her, as it had failed to console her many years ago, every time she sniffed yet another scent of a new perfume on her husband’s shirt.

The big heavy arm on her shoulder made Luda flinch. “I didn’t like her puffs,” Oolna said. “Show off. Not real food.” Luda wanted to bury her face in Oolna’s soft, boundless chest and cry with gratitude. And then the wife from one of the Russian couples sidled in and whispered that she didn’t like the puffs either. “Too salty, didn’t you think? And she is wearing way too much makeup for her age.” Luda smiled and happily shared her observation that Milena’s face looked like a battle-field for antiaging creams.

IN THE WEEKS to come, Luda saw that she wasn’t just an annoying old woman anymore, she was the star of the show. The whole net of clumsy alliances was quickly spinning around her. There was Oolna, the oldest and truest of her fans. There was the Russian wife, and there was the Dominican couple who didn’t like feeling intimidated by Milena’s clothes and demeanor. The husband even made a show out of mocking Milena’s haughty manner of walking into the room, and the members of Luda’s fan club eagerly laughed.

But Milena too found herself surrounded by allies. First of all, there was the Chinese woman who had nursed a grudge against Luda since the day when Luda’s pie managed to outshine her spring rolls. Her other ally was the wife from the second Russian couple, who identified herself (somewhat incorrectly) with elegant, sophisticated women like Milena. And there was the second Chinese couple, who joined the camp simply because they always sided with the first Chinese couple. All of them laughed happily when Milena compared Luda to Saddam Hussein. The husband of the second Chinese couple was deaf in one ear, so his wife had to retell him the joke loudly and in Chinese, and then he laughed too.

But while both camps acknowledged that there was a contest going on, and while everybody knew what the main prize was, nobody ever mentioned Aron. They couldn’t help but wonder, though, whether he knew what the competition was all about. If he knew, he never showed it. He seemed to be bent on preserving his independence and his right to favor the winner. There were Fridays when Luda’s dish would come out too sloppy (either the fault of one or another Food Network host or of Luda’s overt zeal). And there were Fridays when Milena’s offering would be just a bit too subtle or too bland. And since Aron’s romantic gestures always went strictly in sync with the competition, Luda’s and Milena’s gains and losses in intimacy were fluctuating as well. There were Fridays when Aron seemed to have formed a special connection with Luda. He would sit and talk with her in the corner (after the best food was gone, never before), he would joke with her, he would ask her about her life and even make vague plans for the future, something like, “Do you like Manhattan Beach? It’s nice down there. I go for a stroll sometimes. Not too often.” And sometimes he would even walk her home. Once Aron kissed Luda on the cheek. His lips felt warm and dry and vaguely disappointing.

And there were Fridays that belonged to Milena. Aron would walk Milena home and try to brush against her sleeve or touch the flaps of her jacket, and once he attempted to play with her necklace. Sometimes he would even share his memories. One time, for example, he told her about a lovely woman with whom he had had a brief but passionate affair and who looked just like Milena, “No, seriously, the same eyes, the same cheekbones, even the same oval mole on the neck.”

But just as it happened with Luda, Aron never walked Milena all the way to her house. He would stop a few blocks away from her building and say that walking was getting harder and harder; he’d better head back. And just as it happened with Luda, come Monday, all the Friday intimacy was gone. He never gave any sign that they had formed some kind of connection, never spoke to either of them before or after class, hardly even looked at them. On Mondays, there was no indication that he wanted either of them, or that he ever would. On Mondays, Luda and Milena felt deflated and tired too, and perhaps even a little ashamed of their Friday excitement. But as the week was coming to an end, the memories of Aron at his best (or perhaps fantasies of what Aron could have been like at his best) grew more and more intense. Luda imagined how she would stroll with Aron on Manhattan Beach past all the other couples, and how if her daughter ever tried to push another piece of furniture on her, she would refuse, saying that her husband didn’t like it. And Milena thought of being in bed with Aron and how he would smile at her and tell her that she still had it. And as Luda’s and Milena’s fantasies flourished, so did their fear and fury at the thought that he could pick the other as the ultimate winner.

THE AFTERNOON before the last International Feast, Luda plugged in the food processor, pushed cubes of beef and lamb down the tube, and pressed the button. The mere image of Aron leaving with Milena after the last International Feast (with Milena’s allies rejoicing and Luda’s allies saying something unconvincing about Aron’s unsubstantial worth as a boyfriend) would send Luda into a state of murderous rage. For several weeks now, all her thoughts were concentrated on her final dish.

The food processor, another discard from her daughter’s pantry, was an old bulky thing with a crack on the side covered by a piece of duct tape. It whirred and vibrated and jumped all over the table surface, but it did its job well. Luda smiled as she watched how the meat cubes bounced under the knives. The onion got stuck in the tube, and she had to hit it with the wooden spoon handle to push it down. Luda stopped before reaching for a bowl where the bread had been soaking in milk; she wasn’t sure if the bread had to go into the food processor or not.

MILENA MOVED about her kitchen quickly and gracefully. She prodded the bread with her finger to check if it was soggy enough. She knew that when making meatballs you should never put the bread into a food processor. First of all, the bread was soft and soggy enough to be easily broken with a fork, but — most important — coarsely minced bread was essential for making meatballs fluffy and plump. She put the bread into the bowl with the ground veal, added some crushed garlic (a lot of it) and a couple of eggs, and started working the mix with the fork, enjoying the slurping sound.

AND NOW for the secret ingredient,” Luda thought, throwing small cubes of pancetta into the hissing skillet. “Pancetta,” The Food Network host had moaned, “So good, your guests won’t know what hit them!”

FAT, MILENA THOUGHT, all the flavor was in the fat, and people are just kidding themselves when they try to believe otherwise. She put a chunk of nice sweet butter and a smaller chunk of lard in the middle of the skillet and swirled it around. The rest was easy.

NO, THIS WASN’T hard at all, Luda decided. Especially if you found the perfect method. She shaped the balls and threw them onto the hissing skillet with her right hand while holding the spatula with her left. When the meat under her fingers got all warm and sticky, she rinsed her right hand under cold running water and started again. Her small kitchen was quickly filling with smoke and the smell of burning fat, but Luda didn’t pay any attention to that. She worked very fast. So did Milena. It was amazing how fast the bowl was becoming empty. As she was shaping the last meatball, Milena had a sudden urge to squeeze it. And she did just that, so hard that tiny bits of soggy meat came out between her fingers. She wiped her hand and went to open the window.

ON THE MONDAY after the last International Feast, Angie’s hands trembled so much she had to grip the wrist of her right hand with her left to be able to write on the board. Her legs trembled as well, so she went to sit down in the low chair that stood by her desk. She said that it would be nice if everybody said a few words about Aron.

One of the Dominicans said that it was too bad that Aron didn’t have a family. “That’s a wonderful observation,” Angie noted.

A man from one of the Chinese couples said that Aron taught everybody a lesson. “This is an excellent point.” Angie nodded and reached into her purse for a tissue.

She had never had a student die during her class before. Nobody she knew had ever had a student die during class. She had been plagued by ghastly flashbacks throughout the whole weekend. Bright and loud, the images of the last feast kept spinning in her head as if she were caught inside a horror movie. And now the movie was starting to play again.

They tune the radio to some nasty Latino music. They uncover the food. The smell! She is so sick of that smell. They stomp their feet to the beat of the music. Poor Aron, happy as a child. Moving closer to the table. Filling his plate. Gorging. Starting to choke. They all step away in horror. Angie pushes buttons on her phone. For the life of her she can’t remember which buttons to push. Jean-Baptiste rushes forward, grabs Aron from behind; his fist thrusts into Aron’s stomach. Thrusts again. Again and again. Finally! The fucking Russian meatball is out! Sighs of relief all over the room. Angie snaps her phone closed. And then Aron’s legs go slack and Jean-Baptiste starts to sway under Aron’s weight. For a moment it looks like they are dancing together to the loud beats of Latino music. Old Oolna starts to laugh, a horrible cackling laugh. And then, only then, they finally realize what has just happened….

Angie blew her nose and looked over her silent class. “Do you want to say something, Jean-Baptiste?”

“Yeah. Aron was a funny man.”

“Good, Jean-Baptiste, good,” Angie agreed.

Luda said that they would all miss Aron, and Milena said that his was an enviable death. Angie raised her brows at her.

“Quick and easy. And he died happy, didn’t he?” Milena explained in a calm patient voice.

Angie shuddered and pronounced the class over.

IT WAS COLD and very bright outside. Milena reached into her bag for her sunglasses, but Luda only squinted her eyes.

“Going down that way?” Milena asked. Luda nodded. They started walking down the street together.

“You know,” Luda said, after a while, “I don’t enjoy cooking that much.”

“Me neither,” Milena said, and they continued to walk.