Joe wasreserved?I said, “Well, I like him very much, of course.”
Susie laughed. “I’ll bet you do.” She was taking food out of the bag as if she were in her own kitchen. “I’ll do this, and you can make the coffee.”
“Oh. All right.” I did it very carefully—it was only my second time, and there were many steps—and said, “I’m afraid I have nothing to offer you with it. Well, bread and jam perhaps, but this bread is rather odd. We have an automatic toaster, though. Would toast and jam do?”
“Sure.” Susie had been opening cupboards, but now she found the right one and began slotting in the tins I’d purchased. “If you don’t mind my asking, what are you making for dinner tonight? Your cupboard’s mighty bare, and Joe looks like a hungry man to me. Youdohave enough money, don’t you? Or is that it? Most kids at Stanford have some dough—well, their parents do—or they wouldn’t be here, but with the GIs, who knows? They get that twenty dollars a week for the first year after they’re out, so he’s probably getting that, and then there’s the GI Bill, since he’s going to college, but that’s not much, is it?”
“Really,” I said, “your conversational style is quite extraordinary.” I smiled when I said it, though. How could one help it? “We have enough money, I believe. We have an automatic toaster and an iron—I don’t know how to use it yet, but Joe has one—and a cooker and refrigerator, as you see, and bicycles.”
“And you’re wearing a dress that screams ‘New York City,’ Susie agreed. “So what’s the story with the food?”
I said, “Is it wrong, then? The food? Joe seemed a bit disappointed last night, but I thought—” I broke off.
“Uh-huh.” Susie was leaning back against the table now, her arms folded. “What did you give him to eat?”
“Oxtail soup,” I said, “because he liked it on the train. Though it didn’t taste the same.”
“From one of those cans?”
“Well, yes.”
“OK,” she said. “And?”
“And what?”
“What else besides oxtail soup?”
“Well,” I said, “vegetables are important, for vitamins, so I cooked some carrots, as you can get them here even in November, which is very lucky. I’ve seen that done, the scraping and then the cutting so they look like coins, and then I cooked them in a pan. They burned a bit on the outside but were still rather crunchy, so perhaps the pan wasn’t correct?”
“You gave your husband,” Susie said slowly, “canned soup and carrots for dinner.”
“And a potato,” I said. “He likes the kind that are baked in their jackets, so I prepared one of those, but it was a bit … lumpy, I think. A bit hard. Perhaps it was the wrong type of potato?”
“Oh, dear,” Susie said. “And my mother saysI’llnever find a husband, what with my tragic lack of the soft soap and not being what you’d call ‘willowy.’ Nobody’s ever going to delight in having his hands span my waist the way I’ll bet Joe does with you.”
“The soft soap?”
“I’m too frank. You’re supposed to butter men up.”
“But this is not good for them,” I said, “too much flattery. One must speak one’s mind, although politely, of course. Otherwise, what happens when hedoesmarry you, and your true self emerges?”
“A quick trip to Nevada, that’s what.” Susie’s very freckles seemed to dance. “How are we coming on that coffee?”
“Oh!” I jumped. “Has it been eight minutes? It must have been. I’m sorry, I forgot about the toast. I’ll just?—”
“I’ll pour it,” Susie said, jumping up and turning off the fire. “Forget about the toast and go find a pencil and a piece of paper.”
“Of course, if you need them.”
She sighed. “I don’t need them.Youneed them. If you give Joe another dinner like that,he’sgoing to be heading to Nevada, and I can’t let that happen to a sister-in-arms. I’m going to dictate a grocery list, and you’re going to go right back to the supermarket and buy everything on it. And then I’m going to come home from class and show you how to make a dinner that a man might want to eat.”
Joe came home at fifteen minutes after five and stopped in the kitchen doorway. “Well, hello,” he said, with that smile that went all the way to his eyes. “Something sure smells good. I smelled it all the way out on the sidewalk, but …”
“But you thought,” I said, flying to him with a laugh for my kiss, “that it—” I had to stop, because he was kissing me. Joe kissed like men do in the movies, with his arms behind my back and with me bent a little backwards. It’s a very satisfactory way to be kissed. A verythoroughway to be kissed. When I was upright again, I said, somewhat breathlessly, “You thought that it couldn’t possibly be so, for you have a wife who cannot cook. But you see? I’m learning.”
“Right now,” Susie said, grabbing the wooden spoon that stuck out from the pan, “you’re burning. You need to watch your pan better. Hi, Joe. It’s Sloppy Joes. Oh, wait. That’s awkward, isn’t it?”
“Hi, Susie.” Joe still had an arm around me, and he was still grinning, too. “You took my bride in hand, huh?”
