At any given point in life, your chili recipe is an edible mission statement, an evolution that mixes your desires and compromises and reveals your vision of your place in the world. If you froze batches throughout your lifetime and thawed them at the end, you would have a taste-album to carry you back to your various former selves, to the days of transition between one stage and the next, and to the people with whom you shared your chili.
The year I met Victoria, my chili tasted more like goulash than anything else: a pot of change and poverty, full of strange spices and odds and ends from our cupboard. After college graduation, my husband and I moved to a new city just to say we’d done so. We got silly jobs while we figured out how to mold the putty of our lives. We made friends with people on the outer-edges--liberals who liked to smoke dope, criticize the government, and try to find ways to avoid mainstream life. We fit right in.
Victoria was the most extreme of these new friends. I loved her immediately. How could I not? She was a lesbian witch with a bevy of fascinating experiences and a fathomless knowledge of esoteric occultica. She hopped trains and went hunting. She practiced pagan moon rituals and grew pot in her closet. She seemed to hold the entrance sign to a path of meaningful living in her hand.
Like all dreamers and people on the fringe, Victoria never had much cash and treasured food like a holy relic. If I could not ride the rails with her, at least I could feed her and bask in vicarious glory. For a year, she came over to eat at least once a week. She’d rub her belly and I’d laugh and mix the inch of rice in the bag with the quarter box of leftover macaroni, a can of kidney beans, and the dollar store chili powder.
But then I got a real job and my husband went back to school. I learned to love our home comforts, purchased with clean money I earned in conservation non-profit. I discovered the pleasures of dinner at seven, a positively-received press release, and a quiet night reading in bed with my husband on one side and the dog on the other. Soon, we only saw our old friends at the occasional going-away party. Or when Victoria showed up at my door, rubbing her belly. Each time, tension built between us. Each time, I stood paralyzed between the urge to slam the door or feed her.
By the night our simmering conflict finally boiled over and scalded the stove, my chili tasted of balance and twists on tradition: a solid base of standard ingredients--tomatoes, beans, and chili-powder--mixed with exotic spices purchased at high-end food markets. My chili spoke of a happy home without the corporate cubicle, of a life where ideals held hands with bill paying and cake baking. As I cubed tofu and sprinkled in cinnamon and clove, I glowed with contentment. No right-wing soccer mom could digest this.
The doorbell interrupted my complacency. I wiped my hands on my sarong and opened the door. My heart sank. Combat boots, worn fatigues, and a gleaming leather beret.
Victoria.
“Tracie,” she said. Her eyes peered into mine with manic intensity. “We need to use your computer. Bjorn has to contact the Swedish consulate about his girlfriend. They’re using the Patriot Act to give her electro-shock therapy! We’ve got to get in touch with his parents, man.”
I heard a rustling sound and looked around her shoulder. A tattered boy slunk from behind my bushes. He smiled the smile of a dreamer. The energy-efficient fluorescent bulb of my porch light reflected in his glassy eyes.
I resisted the urge to slam the door. “Sure. Come on in.”
“May I use your bathroom?” Bjorn asked with exquisite politeness and surprisingly perfect grammar. He scratched at a constellation of bug bites ringing his wrist. I pointed out the right door, and then cringed with embarrassment as I remembered the new embroidered hand-towels I’d just hung there, with great pride, the day before.
I led Victoria into the living room. She looked around with a look of great surprise on her face.
“Hey, you’ve really changed this room,” she said. “Where are the brown chairs?”
I flinched inside when she sat her dirt encrusted fatigues on the ancient brown chairs’ replacement: an antique chaise lounge I’d bought for boiled peanuts at the flea market and spent filet mignon levels of money to restore. Then I felt a wash of shame. She was my still my friend.
"We haven't seen you in a while, Victoria. How've you been?"
She leaned back and scratched her stomach. "Oh, you know, some of the coven kids are in town. They always stay with me. I've been taking care of them, you know, cleaning their souls a bit. One of them came in with a demon clinging to the back of his neck. I had to work for hours to expel it."
"Well, that's a good thing to do," I said, hoping she could not see my skepticism. Tarot cards were one thing, but soul-eating demons?
The toilet flushed. When Bjorn came out of the bathroom, I showed them upstairs into the computer room. I turned on the computer and gestured Bjorn into the chair.
“Don’t you need to log on?” Victoria asked.
“No,” I said and blushed. “We have DSL now.”
“Wow,” she said. “You must be making some money.”
I sat down on my hope chest. She flopped into my papasan, a former staple of my living room now banished upstairs. “Well, not really, you’d be surprised, I...”
Bjorn pounded away at the computer like a Matrix hacker. I looked around the room and flinched away from the Halloween window-clings stacked in a pile against the closet door.
Victoria began a dizzying monologue. Three psychic vampires, two warring factions of underground homeless gangs, and a conspiracy theory later, I was dazed. I murmured with sympathy at the appropriate places and tried to seem attentive.
“Well, I’ve been doing a lot of talking, man. How are you?”
I wanted to tell her how I had just finished a half-marathon, started a new novel, and saved sea turtles at work. All those things seemed extraordinary that morning, but in Victoria’s presence, the ordinariness of them rose up and backhanded me so hard my eyes burned.
“Not much,” I said. “Just work and home, you know.”
The computer keystrokes throbbed against the miserable silence as Victoria and I stared at each other. My stomach roiled wondering what she would say next. Just as she opened her mouth, Bjorn showed the mercy of the gods and finished his cyber-punking.
As we headed down the stairs, the scent of simmering chili wafted up and embraced us.
“Is it about dinner time for you guys?” Victoria asked. She rubbed her tummy and gave me her traditional grin.
I opened my mouth to answer her. I thought about my DSL and my guest towels and my window clings. I thought about the shame I felt towards my life now whenever she came over. And now she wanted my chili. My hippy chili that was sure to taste as bland as pea soup to her. I shook under the hammer of anger that struck me.
“It’s got a couple hours to go,” I said. “And we really don’t have much.”
“Oh,” she said. She blinked and blinked again. “Oh. Well, I guess we better get going, then. We need to get down to the library, so Bjorn can get a temporary account to use the Internet there.”
“Okay,” I said. I walked to the door. Guilt and regret turned my relief rancid, like milk that spoils when it hits your stomach.
“Thank you for your hospitality,” Bjorn said.
“You’re welcome,” I said, surprised the hypocritical words did not dissolve in my shame before escaping my mouth.
Then Victoria walked outside. She turned around to face me from the outside of the doorway, but stared at the ground.
“Thanks, Tracie,” she said. Then she looked up at me. I recognized the expression on her face. I’d seen it on every boyfriend I’d ever left. I saw it on my mother as I backed out of her driveway on moving day. Each time, the image lay on my heart for hours, years later. The abandonment, the loss, the pain of someone who knows you are leaving them behind.
Victoria reached out and pulled me into a deep hug. “We’ll get together soon,” she said.
We both knew we wouldn’t.
My husband and I ate dinner as soon as they left. We spoke little. I asked him how he liked the chili. He loved it; it was great, just right. But the cinnamon burned the back of my tongue. No matter how much water I drank, I still tasted the bitterness. Too much spice.
I could have thinned that chili. Just a cup or two more of water--just enough for two more people--and it would have been perfect.
But I did not. And never would again.
