With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo
Catharsis
’Buela comes into the kitchen and turns on the radio. The sound of Marc Anthony wailing alongside an orchestra fills the kitchen. I would wrap my soul in a bow and sell it with the quickness to be able to cook for Marc Anthony. That man can sing. ’Buela pulls out the herbs that she gets directly from el campo in Puerto Rico and sets them on the counter. The sweet-smelling yerba buena, the Caribbean oregano. She hands me the knives before I ask for them, cleans the cutting board before I realize I need it rinsed.
Some days, when my feelings are like this, like a full pot of water with the fire on high, I don’t know what to cook. Plans and ideas escape my mind and instead I let my heart and hands take control, guided by a voice on the inside that tells me what goes where.
I push aside, or maybe I push forward, all the things I feel. Angry that I have to give Babygirl away every other weekend. That I have to dress her like a doll for her grandmother to love her. Conflicted about this damn elective that I convinced myself to take and that has now become my toughest class. Upset I have a greasy-ass job serving some cookie-cutter food where I get in trouble for the smallest mistakes. Confused about a father I love but also miss. Nervous that it’s senior year and I don’t know if college is in the plans for me. And I don’t know what is in the plans if not that.
My hands move on their own, grabbing and slicing and mincing. And ’Buela and I are making music alongside the radio, the clanging of pans, the mortar against the pestle, our voices humming.
When all the sounds stop, including the radio, it’s like I’m waking out of a fog. The stove is turned off. ’Buela wipes down the counter and folds the dishrag before turning to me. I lift the pot lids and see that I’ve made a fragrant yellow rice with cilantro. Somehow, black-eyed peas found their way into the rice, but I can tell from the smell that it works. The chicken looks juicy, and smothered in onions, it’s cooked perfectly without a thermometer. The green salad with a spinach base is crisp. Not a complicated meal, but one made for comfort.
I plate ’Buela’s portion using one of the lessons I learned from the cul-arts textbook: the starch on the bottom and the protein on top, sauce spooned over both; a separate bowl for the salad.
After the first bite, she closes her eyes, and when she opens them, she is in tears. She laughs when she wipes her eyes. “Look at me crying! Like this doesn’t happen every time, nena.”
I don’t often ask questions about how people react to the food I cook. It makes my belly squeeze tight to know my dishes might have an effect I don’t mean them to have; like something inside me left my body and entered into the pots and pans without a permission slip. But today I need to know. “What did it make you feel, ’Buela?”
She squeezes her napkin in her hand and doesn’t look at me as she moves her fork around the plate with the other. “It brought back a memory of being a little girl and staring out at the ocean. And wanting so badly to jump right in and swim far, far away, and being scared that if the water ever went above my neck it would swallow me whole and never spit me back out.”
I nod and take a bite of my own food. No memories spring up, no new feelings. The only thing that happens is my taste buds respond to the tangy and salty notes.
“Even that memory, of longing for what I was afraid of, warms me up. Like a candle being lit from the inside. You were given magic, nena.”
I let go of a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. I don’t know much about pathogens and storing sugar, but damn if I don’t know how to cook good food that makes people hungry for more, that makes people remember food is meant to feed more than an empty belly. It’s also meant to nourish your heart. And that’s one thing you won’t ever learn from no textbook.