by Erin Hutton
On Wednesday nights, Kevin makes me dinner in his Wilkinsburg apartment, on the edge of Pittsburgh. The apartment is almost all white. The kitchen cabinets were once a pure, new white, but over the years they have begun to yellow, matching the once-white linoleum floor. The fridge and stove are bright white, new appliances Kevin scrubs every weekend with a wet rag. The living room carpet is off-white and the walls are painted eggshell or cream or some other fancy word for white. One wall is covered in mirrors that reflect the apartment’s whiteness.
Kevin makes me off-white food from off-white boxes: Tuna Helper with a side of Pastaroni or Hamburger Helper made with venison (his father is a hunter) and a side of canned corn. Sometimes, he makes Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, the box a blue buoy in an off-white sea.
I have not eaten this kind of food before, food from boxes. Kevin’s cabinets are filled with boxes. Hamburger Helper in different varieties: Classic Cheeseburger Macaroni, Stroganoff, Beef Pasta. Tuna Helper: Creamy Broccoli, Tetrazzini, Cheesy Pasta. Pastaroni: Butter and Garlic, Angel Hair Pasta with Herbs, Tomato Parmesan. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Beside the boxes there are cans of tuna, corn, and peas. They’re organized in perfect rows. When he runs low, he goes to the grocery store and buys three boxes of each pasta-based meal, as well as two cans of corn, two cans of peas, and six cans of tuna. He also buys a gallon of milk, a jug of Sunny D, and three boxes of cereal. Sometimes there are bananas, peanut butter, bread, taco fixings, and a box of some new quick-fix dinner he wants to try. There are no spices, not even salt and pepper.
I come from a family of cooks. My mother baked cheesecakes and apple pies from scratch and sold them to fancy restaurants. My father makes Caesar salad with whole anchovies and smokes his own bacon. My brother takes the time to de-seed, salt, and drain the tomatoes for his tomato-basil bruschetta. I learned to make coq au vin before I learned to scramble eggs, and long before I was old enough to drink the wine in the sauce.
Kevin dances when he cooks for me. His iPod is filled with Britney Spears, Shania Twain, and Stephen Lynch. He belts out it’s rainin’ men! Hallelujah it’s rainin’ men! as he reads the ingredients on the Hamburger Helper box: hot water, milk, butter. When the venison has browned, he drains off the tiny bit of fat in the tall-sided skillet, and then adds the carefully measured liquids and butter, dried off-white noodles, and a packet of “Sauce Mix.” I do not read the ingredient label.
For a side dish, Kevin will often mix up a batch of Pastaroni: dehydrated noodles with a white powder flecked with green that turns into a sauce when you add milk and simmer. Noodles with a side of noodles. I prefer it to the canned peas and corn, but I can’t help but wonder what makes Pastaroni a side dish to a main dish of pasta with meat sauce? Perhaps the lack of meat makes it “different enough.” Perhaps it’s just that it’s easy and different from canned veggies. Perhaps it’s that Kevin doesn’t like to keep anything perishable in his apartment, so he just buys a lot of noodles.
I could make better pasta with herbs and cream. I could make thick noodles from scratch and smother them in Alfredo sauce, serve it with white wine and a salad. If I could, I would spend the whole day cooking for him. I would make him homemade gnocchi with pesto. I would prepare tiramisu al limone that I learned to make when I lived in Florence.
Kevin sets the timer on the microwave and opens me up a beer. Just a few minutes until it’s time to eat. The beer is usually a carefully chosen micro-brew from Church Brew Works:Pipe Organ Pale Ale, Celestial Gold, or Pious Monk Dunkel. When Colbie Caillat’s Fallin’ for You comes on, he twirls me around the kitchen. These are the moments that I’m not worried about anything, the moments we are both singing and waiting to eat. We go through all the motions of a serious relationship together, but we don’t say, this is it, this relationship might just last.
When the song ends, I skip back and start it over again. I see colors, sunny yellow and green grass and big blue skies, the colors of warm days and holding hands walking along the Allegheny River.
Every Wednesday, Kevin invites me over for dinner and makes me off-white food that he serves on off-white plates with pink and blue flowers in the center. He opens craft beers from Pennsylvania breweries and we eat at his maple table and then watch movies on his black futon covered in a pink sheet. He never has seconds. I always do. Sometimes I have thirds. The cream sauce on the Pastaroni and the cheesy Hamburger Helper are comforting. I welcome how full I feel, how lazy, how slothful, how safe. Sometimes he makes popcorn or opens a box of cookies during the movie and opens a second or third beer.
Kevin knows that I’m in my first year of graduate school and I have very little money. He knows I was stubborn and didn’t borrow enough student loans to live on. It’s just so much debt, I tell him. He knows I’m too stubborn to ask my parents for help, even though I know they would. He knows that I wait for oatmeal to go on sale and then buy it in bulk, but he doesn’t know that sometimes oatmeal is the only thing I will eat all day. He also doesn’t know that I drink cup after cup of hot tea, using the same tea bag until I’m just drinking hot water, and write wearing my ski hat because I keep my heat set at fifty-eight degrees. But he guesses.
On Thursday mornings, he pours me a bowl of off-white cereal and a glass of Sunny D before dropping me off at my chilly apartment. He is the man I turn the heat up for. I turn the thermostat to seventy-three degrees a few hours before he visits. When chicken goes on sale, I make him chicken and yellow rice. When the coupons are right, I bake brownies and write on the kitchen floor next to the oven where it is warm. Mostly, he comes over after dinner and I feed him oatmeal with brown sugar for breakfast.
Even with the heat turned up, my apartment won’t quite warm up until spring, but Kevin doesn’t complain too often. He wears his red Ohio State sweatshirt and sleeps over anyway. He kisses me on my red couch that it will take me a year to pay off. He calls me beautiful and talented and never says but how will you make a living as a writer? He never says how will you feed yourself? He never says what are you going to do with an MFA? He never says the things I worry about at night as I try to sleep in my green ski hat under all my blankets.
Instead, he makes me dinner. Sometimes, he invites me over on weekends, a bonus meal. He’ll make slightly more labor-intensive dishes like tacos or venison sloppy joes. Sometimes he broils a venison steak until it is what my father would call “shoe leather.” He mixes up a side of mashed potatoes, instant; they stick like glue in the pot. I’d never seen how instant mashed potatoes were made – they are on my mother’s list of banned foods, along with Miracle Whip and Kraft Parmesan Cheese. But I never complain about the chewy steak or the powdery potatoes. He always has barbecue sauce to help the flavor. Kevin makes me everything I do not eat and I always ask for more.
I do not know that, years later, I will ask him to make me Hamburger Helper with venison because I miss those first days of our relationship when he cooked me bland food in a bland apartment and it tasted like bright colors. I do not know that years later he will admit that he doesn’t get what I write, but he knows it’s important to me, that he’s sure other people must like it, even though to him my work is bland as canned peas. I do not know that I will publish and give readings and find work that will pay for food and leave time for writing. But that winter Kevin knows that if he feeds me, it will help. All I know is the beer is cold and the food is warm and a meal made just for me is fantastic.
Erin writes the loosely food-themed blog Don’t Forget to Eat! Her essays and poems have appeared in Ophelia Street, Underwired, and other publications. She lives in Pittsburgh with the man she turned the heat up for and their cat and dog.