ARIANE SPENT a lot of time in the kitchen, of course. She was intrigued by the idea of making the meals improve the illusion. She included a lot of fruit, and she used a lot of fish. That was the first thing that occurred to her. Although the library had no cookbooks devoted to tropical cuisines, she was able to get ideas from travel books, and she prowled through the complete works of Betty Crocker looking for recipes with any of the ingredients that seemed tropical to her, particularly pineapple and coconut. Not everything was a success, but every meal that my grandfather brought upstairs to Grandmother was enough out of the ordinary to suggest a certain distance from home.
She brought to the deception a new richness and femininity, and an inventiveness that surprised her, and from the work she did she took more satisfaction than she had anticipated, but perhaps she felt a tiny regret. Maybe, now and then, she wished that she had told Grandfather the truth: that she really wanted to be a hand aboard the boat, not just an invisible assistant. She wanted to be inside the fiction, an actor in the play, not a stagehand behind the scenes. Every time she was tempted to say something about wanting to be aboard she thought better of it and talked about Rarotonga instead, and she probably thought that she was keeping her real wishes from him, but I remember Grandfather’s smart gray eyes and the way they made me feel transparent.
[to be continued]
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