Lily Eats

Empire

We ran into Ray Ray at the farmer's market. He was overseeing four or five trash cans, filling rapidly with compost that people brought from home--in five-gallon buckets, tupperware, whatever they had. Eggshells, banana peels, all the concealed textures of winter. Ray handed Adrian and I each a "Buddha Box" that played chants at different pitches, and we marveled at how if you put one in your back pocket, you could think it was coming from far away. "Lina thought she was hearing singing from a mosque," Adrian told him, "until she realized the noise was following her up the stairs with you."

So we wandered around the stalls at Ft. Greene. Heated tents filled with kimchi, oysters sold off of a wood-slatted table, hydroponic lettuce that Adrian jumped at. I got kale--"though, A, I'm not sure it'll work, it's not the right kind"--a carrot big as two of my fists, Yukon golds, we said goodbye to Ray Ray by the food scraps.

Adrian had to get to work at the Karrot, so Lina and I went to lunch at Zaytoon's. We tried to avoid it ("It's what we always do," she said, and I though, I've been to New York only three times in the last year) by going to Maggie Brown's instead, but the wait was an hour long. So we sat over our friendly neighborhood lentil soup, with dark cumin and squeeze-your-own lemon wedges, and it was halfway through the basket of hot pita that we realized neither of us would have room for the sandwiches we'd ordered. They came out and we felt lame or unnecessary or foolish or still hungry even if we weren't hungry--so we took a few token bites, and Lina biked to work, and I set back to their apartment with the spare keys Adrian had given me.

The lentils weren't what I was used to. They were red, and I wondered if the discolorations were normal, before telling myself, it's probably like tempeh. It's fine. I boiled potatoes in two small pots, worried that they'd overflow if I tried to cook them all together. Chopped vegetables on a white cutting board stained with avocado Adrian and I had eaten earlier with melba toast--onions, carrot, a cucumber because Adrian had no zucchini. And half the food drained, the other cracking on the stove, two or three tablespoons of tomato paste, a quick run into Adrian's bedroom, to jump on her bed, throw my torso out the window, and pick thyme from the herb garden on her fire-escape.

When the boys arrived, the oven was preheating. There were some sharp pounds at the door, I opened it to four men I haven't seen in at least as many months. Who I knew would be coming, and still I was so surprised to see, I just said, "Adrian's not here." (As though, what? I wasn't going to let them in?) "That's fine," they said, and charged in, immediately took over the living room. Sweeney grabbed a book off the shelf and someone said something about how the apartment smelled nice. I thanked them and retreated to the kithen, half-mashing undercooked potatoes with a fork, till they all announced they were going out as quickly as they came, to the hat store.

Greg stayed behind--I guess he already has a hat--and asked me two or three times if he could help with anything. Something about not knowing any measurements, or the distance between anything in Adrian and Lina's kitchen, kept me from accepting. Instead, he read sporadic passages to me from a book about Russian Freemasonry, the description of an elaborate initiation ritual which was agonizingly concrete until he got to the part where the novice had to drink from "a cup of evil." Buried alive we get. Paddling we get. A cup of evil? I shredded the kale from its stalk, chopped it finely, streaks of dirt beneath it on the cutting board.

They returned from buying caps, already stealing each others' instead of wearing their own. Adrian back from the Karrot, the food was in any way hot by now. I finished up with the Corresponding Society rushing around me to start their meeting--my hands deep in a soup pot filled with kale, since there was no bowl big enough. Minced garlic, olive oil, a little bit of lemon juice. The shepherd's pie resting on the front burners of the gas stove. Everyone helped themselves onto enormous plates, because there were no human-sized ones, and anyways, we've all got to be giants once in a while. The pie was bland, but no one said anything, except me, and then Adrian and I told each other how it was silly to blush over a thing like that. She'd told me the meal she cooked for me the night before was bland, too, and really, we both know that doesn't mean anything. Still I felt like I was standing over the onions again, my face firing, trying to explain how it tasted different when I made it in Baltimore. "It tastes like potatoes, and lentils, and tomato," she told me. What bland? "If you meant that it's not spicy, then no, it's not."

But the kale is satisfying in any condition. Because it's vital. Because it feels nourishing to eat a thing raw you'd always thought you had to steam to hell and back before it was digestible.

Raw Kale Salad

1 bunch kale

2 cloves garlic

1-2 Tbsp olive oil

pinch of coarse sea salt

juice of 1/4-1/2 lemon (to taste)

-Rinse the kale leaves thoroughly. When clean, tear all leaves off the stalks into a bowl.

-Chop or rip leaves into smallest pieces you can manage.

-Add olive oil (1 Tbsp at first, more later if you need it), garlic, and lemon juice.

-Massage for up to five minutes, add sea salt, massage to distribute.

-Serve at room temperature if you have ten hands reaching into the pot, but chilled if you can ward them off while it refrigerates.

I ate a little bit, less than everyone else. Even Sweeney ate three servings, trying in earnest to become full with no meat. In the end, though, he said he needed a fried chicken sandwich, and that was that. "I think I'm allergic to all these vegetables," he said gravely. The meeting went on in the next room, I tried to entertain myself play-cleaning the warm kitchen, but I'd been at it too long. I sat on Adrian's bed, pulled the door shut, and smoked out the cold window, writing about what I wanted, and what that meant about me. Till Adrian herself popped in, red hearts all over a white dress, and asked me to help her in the kitchen. I put candles in a ring around a cake that Dave made, decorated like a NY-style black and white cookie. Too many candles at first, because Adrian miscounted and bought an extra box, I smoothed the extra holes out with a butter knife while she zested lemons into the tops of martinis. Since they had decided not to drink, "except a warm-up," until the meeting was finished, I supposed the gin marked the end. Dave stood at the doorway, growled effectively at Sweeney that he just couldn't come in the kitchen. Till I walked out into the wood paneling, and turned the lights out on their conversation with no warning, and Adrian had to re-ignite a few candles with the cake already in front of Sweeney before he could blow them out.

And the rest of the weekend was the vortex I remember. More gin and less vermouth, I almost walked into traffic and after Dave pulled me back, he apologized. "No," I said, "thank you." Not wanting to say, If the people around me would only let me, I'd walk into nearly every car I see. I told Mary Kate that I remembered sitting on the grass with her, and someone else, maybe Robby, while she ate vegetables out of a tupperware container. Hugged Robert Balkovich with no reservations and told him I love Fleetwood Mac now. Made coffee Sunday morning in Adrian's turquoise leggings and a yellow Pratt t-shirt she'd used to be a lion for Halloween.

And if anyone knows yet how I am about goodbyes, it's the New Yorkers. I walked all the way with them to breakfast, stood outside finishing my cigarette, while the waiters rearranged the diner to accommodate so many tired poets, and some fully awake, and one still drunk. Stood there with them, hugged everyone on the sidewalk, and told them to give my best to the few back inside. I walked back with no breakfast, and I was starving by the time I reached Lina's to collect my things and say goodbye. I ate half a vegetable kabob sandwich, screeching about polyamory and driving cross-country, one foot always a pivot for me to jump up from the table.

In line for the bus, I ran into and officially met Young Peter, who works at Okay Natural Foods. Not wanting to be presumptuous but not really minding, either, I sat down next to him for the ride home. When he saw me pouring something into my water bottle around the end of the Turnpike, he asked, "Is that Emergen-C?"

"Yeah," I said. "I figured, I drank gin last night, I drink Emergen-C today. It balances out."

"Emergen-C is like, two-thirds sugar."

"Are you saying I was better off with the gin?"

"God no," he said. "There's lots of sugar in gin."

We entered Baltimore at an odd angle, and we both sat marveling with no idea where the hell we were. It's funny, and I don't know which city it speaks to. How someone goes to New York for the first time, and someone goes back to New York after a long time. And they both come back to Baltimore and don't recognize a single thing until they're on the sidewalk again, with their brother's face saying, I guess this looks right.