Free Shakespeare's Kitchen by Lore Segal Page A

basket—a cornucopia. “Bourbon-spiked marmalade! That’s disgusting,” said Eliza.
    “Let’s try some,” said Leslie.
    “Canned jugged hare! Toss it out. Look at the size of the pears! They’re obscene,” said Eliza.
    “The superfruit, in—what kind of still-life paintings am I thinking of ?” said Leslie.
    “The kind that has a worm crawling out of the apple, or a bug, a wasp. A spider.”
    Ilka said, “Eliza, you have to imagine being Una and not knowing what to do about you. I think she really is in pain.”
    “She’s a pain in the neck,” said Eliza.
     
     
    “Really, though,” Ilka said to Leslie when he drove her home, “what did Una do that made Eliza drop her?”
    “Eliza and I,” said Leslie, “dropped Una.”
    Ilka accepted the reprimand. In a moment she said, “Imagine you have friends you love, whose kitchen you are used to walking in and out of, and one day they will not let you in and won’t tell you why.”
    Leslie was silent for such a long time that Ilka said, “Why won’t you tell Una why?”
    “I’m trying to think of the answer to your question,” said Leslie. “I don’t want to answer you until I have thought.”
    “Sorry.”
    “I’ll get you a copy of Winterneet’s little book called Tales from the Mouth of God . They’re quite nice. In each of Winnie’s
tales, God rather irritably corrects a Bible story that misrepresents what he had in mind. God says, ‘Why would I have expelled Adam and Eve for eating a fruit?’ The trouble was they bored him, but he didn’t want to tell them. It’s devastating to know you are a bore, because it’s not something you can do anything about. Kinder to let them think it was something they had done wrong, so they could live in the hope of stopping doing it and getting back into paradise. So God said, ‘Let there be sin.’ ”
    “Do you think Una is a bore?”
    “Don’t you think?”
    Ilka said, “But wasn’t she the same bore when you liked her and brought her to the States with you?”
    “In another of Winnie’s stories, God explains why he created falling in love, which makes the other person’s sin smell like your own sin—that’s to say, not at all. Ah, but the stink after we fall out of love, out of friendship!”
    “That is so terrible!”
    “Yes, it is,” said Leslie.
     
     
    Back in the kitchen Eliza was filling Winterneet’s glass. She filled her own glass and said, “The phone rings. Una is strapped for money and the bank is about to close. Leslie runs over to drive her to the bank. The phone rings. Una is suicidal. Leslie runs over to catch her jumping out the window. ‘You have to imagine being poor Una being strapped!’ ” said Eliza in a mincing voice, with an innocent gape of the eyes, and a Viennese roll of the “r”, “‘You have to imagine being suicidal!’ I don’t have to bloody imagine being suicidal! And I don’t have to ‘imagine’ Una when I’ve got her bloody underfoot.”
    Winterneet tilted the empty salad bowl and picked out the pieces of arugala sticking to the sides.

    Eliza was still going strong the following evening, at a dinner party at the Ayes. A letter had been slipped under Eliza’s kitchen door. “I swear I will call the State Department and get her extradited if she persists in creeping round my house in the night.” Eliza read the letter in its entirety, and in a voice of emphatic drama: “ ‘Expulsion and excommunication are cruel and unusual punishments for the commission of a crime of which one has not been accused. I feel that I am living a Kafkaesque who-done-it that opens with my hanging as the criminal who has to double as the detective trying to discover my crime.’ Here,” said Eliza, “we come to our central mystery. Una writes, ‘Was it the ice cream?’ Una appears to suspect herself of having committed an ice cream. ‘Give me five minutes’—three exclamation marks—‘and I will tell you what I meant about consistency’—one more