Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,33
School Dropout” at me as he stacked and stacked his beans. I looked into his eyes and wiped the red chili oil from my fingers under my right eye and my left, the most glistening, fragrant war paint. You would have leaned across the table and licked it off me. I know you would. You like living. Tom reached for his fork, the fork of civilization, and ate from the serving plate.
CASHEW
Do not eat a raw cashew do not eat a raw red kidney bean do not eat elderberry or a potato do not eat the rind of a mango do not put a hydrangea flower in your mouth and a daffodil will induce severe drooling and aloe the healer will make you convulse.
Cashew shells and poison ivy are covered in the same oil, urushiol, if it touches you it spreads a rash through your armpits, buttocks, groin. The nuts you love are fine but they’ve been boiled out of their shells. To come into any contact with the uncooked shell is to fall into the poison ivy patch at the side of the Appalachian Trail.
Kidney beans house phytohemagglutinin. The elderberry carries cyanide. The potato, uncooked and exposed to sunlight, is loaded with solanine poison. A potato that’s begun to turn green is remorselessly, ferociously toxic.
I don’t understand how it occurred to humans to cook the inedible into the edible. Why we peel the mango. Why daffodils go on the vase on the table and not the plate, why aloe is softened into a goo, where we found as a species the courage to say this bad thing can be made good again, can be made, furthermore, delicious!
It’s religious, it’s a very small, very daily resurrection.
It’s a courtship of the sinister.
Whose shell would you boil off and what’s the flavor of their inner nut?
Joan have I been itching from the oil of your outsides and has Tom made it through to your safe meat?
WAFFLES
Mishti had invited me to a pancake breakfast with Carlo because she wanted me to get to know him better, but after twenty minutes Carlo hadn’t yet come.
We were sitting at Sarabeth’s on Amsterdam, which seemed that morning to be an odd place for anyone to sit voluntarily. It felt like crouching in the hot insides of a Macy’s Parade float sponsored by Pillsbury.
Mishti needed a way to get the meal started, in Carlo’s absence or to avenge Carlo’s absence, so she ordered something from the “Fruity Beginnings” section of the menu that cost thirteen dollars. I realized that breakfast was on Carlo. The empty floral-upholstered chair became at once the most substantial presence at the table.
I leaned back into my own upholstery in silence because I wanted to tell Mishti about you and Tom and I couldn’t. What confused me most was that I didn’t know how she’d respond. Would it mainly surprise her that Tom did something? The funny little verbs for fucking filled me like zoo animals: did, banged, boned—would she protest the grading advantage? Would she laugh at Barry? Would she marry Barry herself?
I wondered if she could hear my thoughts (or indeed if she had always been able to hear my thoughts, if our friendship had been founded on that kind of channel) when she volunteered, “The thing that makes it easy is that Barry will never actually leave Joan. And Joan’s too deep in the logistics of Barry’s financial life to leave him, either.”
I was grateful for my previous silence then because it wasn’t weird to stay silent, to betray nothing on my face. Carlo rushed in.
“Mendelson,” he said, as he took his seat. “Mendelson,” he repeated.
Mishti had just finished her berry bowl and she glared at Carlo while licking the curve of her spoon. Carlo had apparently exerted himself—a thin mist of sweat, the most sweat I could imagine his body embarrassing itself by producing, mustached his upper lip. He knew it was there and he wiped it.
“He needs me, day and night, and I can’t find a way to say no to him.”
The bafflement about Carlo was that he really was excellent, his excellence was pristine, and he was sexy too, and the fact that I didn’t appreciate him was my fault.
He ordered a lemon ricotta waffle and it came instantly, as if a certain number of lemon ricotta waffles were ordered each morning and they had them ready to deploy. Mishti and I had both ordered omelets that came out a minute afterward.
“Tell Nell about Bermuda,” Carlo cut