Read Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant for Free Online Page A

was bisected by a long entry hall that led to another apartment. On one side of the hall was my bedroom, with its own door, of course. On the other side of the hallway were my galley kitchen and bathroom. There was no door between the kitchen and hallway, and so whenever I was cooking dinner, I was standing just a few feet from the hallway, and invariably Mary Lou—a short librarian more than twice my age, with an unfortunate librarian haircut and a deeply held conviction that synthetic fabrics were evil—would come in, smell my dinner in progress, comment on how great it smelled, then shuffle into her apartment. She would then shuffle back out to walk her dog, shuffle back in a few minutes later, basically repeat how good my dinner smelled, and then disappear into her apartment for the evening. In other words, my cooking was a public affair. Many days, these interactions with Mary Lou about the aromas of my cooking were the only words anyone spoke to me all day.
    What does a person cook for himself when dining alone every day? Lots of soup. Pasta. At least a few times a month I would make something new out of The Moosewood Cookbook, something nice. A treat. But truth be told, the best treat of all was a pot of hot black beans and fresh cornbread.
    Maybe my human college friends weren’t here anymore, but I’d also met black beans in college, and they were still with me. My friends, the beans. As for cornbread, well, cornbread and I went even farther back—to the edge of memory, to family meals, to my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents. So here, on my plate, I had a small assemblage of friends who knew me well. That was enough, for those two years I lived there. Beans and me and cornbread. That was just enough.

    I remember once I was working late in my office, grading papers or maybe just playing Snood on the computer. It was in the autumn, I think, and I printed something out on the network and then went into the English Department office to retrieve the printout and there was my pal Dean, who’d been one of my professors just four years ago, but who was now my colleague. We chatted briefly and then he said why didn’t we go and grab some dinner together?
    It was a perfectly reasonable request. I liked Dean, and he had always been kind to me. (The summer between my junior and senior years of college he let me store several boxes of my belongings in his garage, for example.) But the problem was that I had retreated so far into myself—shielding myself from the ghosts and memories of this place—that I had become reliant upon the comfort of rituals and plans. I had already decided that I was going to have black beans and cornbread for dinner, and I had already picked out the can of beans—hours ago—and put it on my kitchen counter as a reminder. And I now found myself wanting, more than anything, to go home to enjoy my simple meal by myself. I stammered something about how I already had plans for dinner—even awkwardly mentioned the can of beans I had already picked out—and, bless him, Dean saw that he had hit upon a nerve and he told me that it was no problem at all and that we would have dinner another time. I agreed.
    What does an introvert do when he’s left alone? He stays alone.

    At the end of my second year, I told the department I didn’t want to teach a third year, and I started thinking of where I could move and be a writer full time. I got a house-sitting gig for the summer. It was a huge rambling farmhouse at the edge of campus, a full hundred and fifty years old, and it contained just me and a cat named Lydia. I was excited about not teaching anymore, and about getting away from this place, and about summer, so I drew up a long list of things to do—picking berries, hiking, visiting a certain used bookstore that was in a barn, etc.—and then I promptly spent most of the summer doing nothing but sitting around the house, taking daily bike rides out on the college’s farm—the only