* * *
—
If these encounters took place in the early morning, Elizabeth would rise soon after to go make breakfast. Although she’d originally agreed to cook dinner five nights a week in exchange for rent, she also added breakfast, then lunch. For Elizabeth, cooking wasn’t some preordained feminine duty. As she’d told Calvin, cooking was chemistry. That’s because cooking actually is chemistry.
@200° C/35 min = loss of one H2O per mol. sucrose; total 4 in 55 min = C24H36O18 she wrote in a notebook. “So that’s why the biscuit batter is off.” She tapped her pencil against the countertop. “Still too many water molecules.”
“How’s it going?” Calvin called from the next room.
“Almost lost an atom in the isomerization process,” she called back. “I think I’ll make something else. Are you watching Jack?”
She meant Jack LaLanne, the famous TV fitness guru, a self-made health aficionado who encouraged people to take better care of their bodies. She didn’t really have to ask—she could hear Jack shouting “Up down up down” like a human yo-yo.
“I am,” Calvin called back, breathless, as Jack demanded ten more. “Join us?”
“I’m denaturing protein,” she shouted.
“And now, running in place,” urged Jack.
Despite what Jack said, running in place was the one thing Calvin would not do. Instead he did extra sit-ups while Jack ran in place in what very much looked like ballet slippers. Calvin didn’t see the point of running indoors in ballet slippers; instead, he always did his running outside in tennis shoes. This made him an early jogger, meaning that he jogged long before jogging was popular, long before it was even called jogging. Unfortunately, because others were unfamiliar with this jogging concept, the police precinct received a steady stream of calls regarding a barely clad man running through neighborhoods blowing short, hard bursts of air out between his purplish lips. Since Calvin always ran the same four or five routes, police soon became accustomed to these calls. “That’s not a criminal,” they’d say. “That’s just Calvin. He doesn’t like to run in place in ballet slippers.”
“Elizabeth?” he called again. “Where’s Six-Thirty? Happy’s on.”
Happy was Jack LaLanne’s dog. Sometimes he was on the show, sometimes he wasn’t, but when he was, Six-Thirty always left the room. Elizabeth sensed there was something about the German shepherd that made Six-Thirty unhappy.
“He’s with me,” she called back.
Holding an egg in the palm of her hand, she turned to him. “Here’s a tip, Six-Thirty: never crack eggs on the side of a bowl—it increases the chance of shell fragments. Better to bring a sharp, thin knife down on the egg as if you’re cracking a whip. See?” she said, as the egg’s contents slipped into the bowl.
Six-Thirty watched without blinking.
“Now I’m disrupting the egg’s internal bonds in order to elongate the amino acid chain,” she told him as she whisked, “which will allow the freed atoms to bond with other similarly freed atoms. Then I’ll reconstitute the mix into a loose whole, laying it on a surface of iron-carbon alloy, where I’ll subject it to precision heat, continually agitating the mix until it reaches a stage of near coagulation.”
“LaLanne is an animal,” Calvin announced as he wandered into the kitchen, his T-shirt damp.
“Agreed,” Elizabeth said as she took the frying pan off the flame and placed the eggs on two plates. “Because humans are animals. Technically. Although sometimes I think the animals we consider animals are far more advanced than the animals we are but don’t consider ourselves to be.” She looked to Six-Thirty for confirmation, but even he couldn’t parse that one.
“Well, Jack gave me an idea,” Calvin said, lowering his large frame into a chair, “and I think you’re going to love it. I’m going to teach you to row.”
“Pass the sodium chloride.”
“You’ll love it. We can row a pair together, maybe a double. We’ll watch the sun rise on the water.”
“Not really interested.”
“We can start tomorrow.”
Calvin still rowed three days a week, but only in a single. That wasn’t uncommon for elite rowers: once in a boat oared by teammates who seemed to know one another at a cellular level, they sometimes struggled to row with others. Elizabeth knew how much he missed his Cambridge boat. Still, she had no interest in rowing.