Coco and I spent the past three days trying not to argue. I’ve been on a lot of bike rides like this, slogging up hills and rolling down, but never all the way. Up and up and up, if you get my drift. I can’t find the rhythm. My legs burn. I should be getting stronger, but I’m not. Coco isn’t fond of me. She stays out of my way. All is quiet, for what it’s worth.
Bitchiness breaks out the minute we start talking about cooking. We wanted to re-create the salad wraps we used to get at the Baby Greens drive-up before it closed. Oh boy, I think, I can use actual green vegetables. The shopping list in my head includes raw spinach, three kinds of lettuce, perhaps some mint. . .and then Coco informs me that the only thing she ate at Baby Greens was the Chicken Caesar wrap, which contains chicken, croutons, tangy lime dressing and Romaine lettuce.
I get it, I think snarkily: you like Baby Greens as long as it contains no baby greens. I hear myself put that thought into words, and now the gloves are off. Romaine lettuce is nothing but nutrient-free cardboard, the chain-restaurant of the lettuce family. I’m a big, big food snob. Someone alert the media.
Here’s what Coco yells about: my insincere attachment to quote-unquote healthy food. Apparently I forgot that talk of “good” and “bad” foods can be triggering to a person with an eating disorder. Indeed I’ve had my finger on that trigger for two months. I laughed when Jerry Seinfeld’s wife wrote a book about sneaking vegetables into her kids’ dinners, but I’m not laughing now. I really, really don’t want to spend an afternoon with a bunch of Romaine lettuce. And Coco really, really doesn’t want to eat a bunch of nutrient-rich grass.
My-lettuce-beats-your-lettuce is a pretty lame argument when you come right down to it. It lasts fifteen minutes. Now it’s time to cook.
Last week we crockpotted almost a gallon of black beans. Today, we’re re-frying them, stuffing them into burritos and bean burgers. Halfway in, I understand that making your own frijoles is one of those inane things I do, like shaking mulberries out of the tree onto a tarp and painstakingly separating the berries from the schmutz in order to make completely tasteless jam. It’s actually okay to use canned black beans, I think. But do I tell Coco? Not yet. I have my pride to consider. A pile of freezer-wrapped burritos rises on the counter.
Tonight after dinner we’ll work on the recipe notebook she’s planning to take back to Dallas.
“Put in that margarita recipe,” she reminds me. Ah yes, the Margarita of the Ex-Wife of the Ex-Husband. A classic booze concoction, full of romance and longing. (And frozen limeade and Old Milwaukee beer.) I’m proud to have it included. Also my Dad’s Chinese pork buns and sesame noodles, my husband’s salmon burgers and all my permutations of roasted vegetables.
“Matt will think I’ve turned into a completely different person,” she says, with a spatula in each hand and two frying pans going at once. “After chopping so many onions this week, I have moved goggles to the top of my long kitchen wish list.”
Ooooh, a kitchen wish list! My father checked so many things off mine—the KitchenAid mixer, the chef’s choice knife sharpener, the syrupy balsamic vinegar, the Chinese cleaver, the coolers of steak he sent my husband on major holidays.
I ask what else is on the list.
“A melon baller! A food processor. A knife roll, with all my knives in it, all chef-worthy!”
“Do you have any knives?”
“Crappy Big Lots ones. . .”
Coco took me to Big Lots last year–right as her BED was getting bad, although I didn’t know it at the time. It was a big store, filled with big lots of crap. I walked around hoping I wanted something there because it was so cheap, and, as my Dad used to say, more is better. But more crap?
“Do you go to Big Lots anymore?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “I just don’t.”
Here’s a picture of Coco’s hands covered in re-fried black beans. If I don’t include it, she says, no one will believe she did it.
