The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman

Author:Allegra Goodman [Goodman, Allegra]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-679-60381-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

Jess knew the Tree Savers did not feel quite the same about her, although she tried to pull her weight. While Leon was away, no one looked overjoyed to see her, or saved a place for her at the kitchen table. No one moved a car to help her park in the communal driveway when Jess returned that night, driving her sister’s car. Emily was back east for the holidays, and she had left her new Audi for Jess to use.

After Friday night dinner, Jess had to drive several blocks before she found a space. Just her luck. As soon as she parked, it began to rain. She ran to the Tree House in a downpour.

Once inside, she pulled off her shoes, left them on the rubber mat, and ran all the way upstairs in her wet socks. She was hoping Leon had come home, but when she opened the door, the room was just as she had left it, bed unmade, desk strewn with unfinished problem sets for logic class, and a badly tangled Hegel paper in notes and drafts. Chilled, she took off her dripping clothes and hunted in the closet for dry sweatpants and a warm sweater.

She picked up her Fichte reader and her Hegel and her reading notes, and turned once more to her term paper on “being for self.” She was staying in Berkeley for winter break so that she could take care of her Incompletes. But the work was lonely, and she paced the room and thought of Leon. Sometimes late at night he slipped into bed with her, and she turned and wrapped her arms around him, and he pulled off her T-shirt and slid on top of her to take his first rough kiss. And then sometimes she woke and realized that she had been dreaming, and she was still alone. She did not expect to be with her boyfriend all the time. She had always known he was a traveler and a politico, and she admired him for it, but she missed him, even as she wondered why she needed companionship so much.

This is a mistake, she thought as she took Phenomenology of Spirit into bed. The book made her sleepy at her desk. Under the covers she didn’t have a chance.

What was it about Hegel that got her down? His sentences bristling with bony definitions? His arguments disguised as systems of the universe? He was everything Jess had come to loathe in her philosophy classes: stentorian about the world, but somehow alien from it. She had come to philosophy reading Plato’s dialogs, and now she found herself waist-deep in inner monologs about the Self. Was there a future for her in this marshy field? Or did she like forests too much? And leafleting? And living? She propped her head on the pillow and alternately read and dozed, and dreamed that Emily asked her in Hegelian fashion: What is now?

Now is night, Jess answered.

What is this? Emily inquired, pointing to a lonesome pine.

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