Preserves

In winter, Lara eats root vegetables from the cellar—crisp carrots and sugar beets that snap between her calcified teeth. Outside, the snow is like hardened tissue, and Lara fills her plate like the good little girl she hasn’t been for forty years, like the girl she was when she filled herself with bread and olive oil, with her grandmother’s rice pudding and fudgy chocolate cake, before her mother told her no, no, no you cannot indulge, you cannot consume like a wild animal.

Lara eats chocolate cake again when the man she loves brings it to her after his wife has gone into town to run errands. She licks the frosting from each of his knuckles as he tells her his wife’s secret ingredient—mayonnaise. After the man leaves, Lara pulls the mayonnaise from the fridge and eats it directly from the jar, tries to imagine the frosting, its decadence, but only tastes eggs and oil, and she gags, caps the mayonnaise and slides it back into the fridge.

In March, Lara adopts the lean diet of spring—herbs like basil, and the spiciness that garlic allows. The strawberries she’s planted are rooting beneath the soil, but she is not. She is not. She returns to the house she still thinks of as her parents’ after shearing the sheep, after shooing the coyotes trawling the field beyond the high wire fence she installed when the earth was soft enough to relent under the weight of her spade, and finds the man’s wife kicking gravel into potholes on her laneway.

“I need you to leave my husband be.” She slips her hands into her front pockets and lifts her chin to the front porch where Lara is standing. As she squints into the sun, Lara thinks her face looks like a half-scrambled egg. The nails of her delicate fingers are caked in brown, and Lara wonders if they taste metallic or sweet.

Lara shakes her head slightly, and the woman’s hair becomes wild, electrified.

“Then I need you to leave,” the woman says.

“I can’t. My life is here.”

The woman laughs, crests a hand over her eyes. “What life?”

In summer, the man slurps strawberry juice from the webbing of Lara’s fingers. She sinks her teeth into the flesh of his shoulder and tells herself that she is full, that that isn’t hunger she feels, that it’s just her mind playing tricks. For weeks after, the man doesn’t come, and Lara allows work to lull her into a sleepy repetition: weeding, cleaning eavestroughs, nailing a luffing tarp more firmly to the saltbox roof, wearing the shirt she got on her thirteenth birthday, the round logo smooth, the shirt still perfect, perfect, perfect as the day she pulled it from the crisp white box held together with a green satin sash. Her mother’s mouth tugging at a smile but not too much so her face wouldn’t become worn, her smile overused. The way her father held the shirt’s heavy cotton in his hand, admiring the quality that would serve Lara well for years.

Her father brought her to the barn where they once kept horses, Lara high stepping through wild grass that tickled her chin, her head full of the days and months left before she could leave the prairies, seek out land that sprawled into the air, and he approached a small chest of drawers and unwrapped a muslin cloth with seeds tucked into powdered milk to preserve them until next season’s planting. He opened her palm.

“These seeds come from a strong bloodline.” He dropped the seeds into the bowl made by her puckered skin.

Lara looked from the seeds to her father, his face full like the glint of the moon that refracted through the slats of the barn.

I don’t want them, she wanted to say. Instead, she flattened her palm and held it out to her father like she did when she fed the colts.

Her father cupped his fingers over her palm and nudged the seeds into her chest. “They’ve been in our family for three generations—four after you marry and have a family of your own.”

And Lara pictured the city she’d never know, imagined filling the mason jars in the cellar with her dreams and preserving them on a shelf. She pictured the seeds sprouting, spreading and growing around her palm, up her arm, over her mouth and nose, suffocating her.

On the autumnal equinox, Lara walks by the tree-lined creek, forages for mushrooms and listens to the birds, envies their instinct for where to go and when to leave. When she returns to the house, she calls the man, tells him she’s hungry for cake.

“I can’t. I’m sorry.”

For a moment, Lara can hear his husky breath through the line simmering with heat.

“Tomorrow then?” She coils the telephone line around her finger and takes it in her teeth.

“No, not then either. Jenna says she’s pregnant. We’re moving to San Francisco to be close to family. Near cousins. She doesn’t want the baby to grow up an only child.”

And Lara heard what the man didn’t say: Like you.

A betrayal for a betrayal. It gnawed at her.

In October, Lara jars her harvest, turns basil into pesto, which she freezes. Crushes grapes into wine she’ll never allow herself to drink. She stains her perfect shirt while wiping the mushrooms clean. She refuses to pull the heirloom seeds from the soil. Decides to let the earth take them and do to them what it will.

One morning she wakes, and her window is covered in icicles that grow like beards across the glass. The wind lashes at the window, at the fields and the delicate seeds she hasn’t pulled from the earth and wrapped in muslin. And she hears her stomach, and she hears her mind, and both are hungry, hungry, hungry. Both are starving.