Good Enough to Eat by Stacey Ballis Page A

felt alone until you . . .”
    “Yeah, I mean, I hope you don’t think I go around molesting women in museums. I just . . . well you were crying and I was crying and . . .”
    “I know, and I didn’t even think I was . . .”
    “Me either. But then I saw you and you were from the plane.”
    “From Chicago, but on the plane . . .” I grin. He laughs.
    “Right, on the plane, and for some reason I thought, well . . .”
    “Well . . .”
    “Well. Can I ask you something that may sound really insensitive to our location?” He looks like he is truly afraid to offend me.
    “Sure.”
    “Are you hungry? Because I’m suddenly starving, and I know a good place near here, they make chicken soup almost as good as my grandmother’s, and if you’re hungry too, I thought maybe you’d like to join me for a late lunch, since right now, as good company as I usually am for myself, I’d sort of rather not be eating alone. Which sounds really needy and a little effeminate, but there it is.”
    I look at him, the gentle rejection ready on the tip of my tongue. I can’t imagine going anywhere or doing anything with this guy, and then my stomach growls louder and longer than it has ever growled before, reverberating off the stone walls. I can feel my face flush red, and he laughs.
    “Well, that is an answer if I ever heard one!” And before I can utter a sound, he cups my elbow in his hand, and guides me out into the sunlight.

TURKEY TETRAZZINI

    The first meal I cooked for Andrew was on our fourth date. On our third date he took me to a movie, held my hand, and then kissed me passionately on my doorstep. Before he left, he made me promise that our next date could be a quiet night in, and the look in his eyes, the tone in his voice, everything about that little phrase told me that what he really meant by a quiet night in was sex, and probably lots of it. It made me melt. He looked at me the way I look at a really nice dessert buffet, as if it all looks too good to even know where to begin, and once you start, you don’t know if you’ll ever be able to stop. I dated a reasonable amount for a girl my size, tending toward quiet, bookish types who read me poetry in bed, majored in missionary, and were always both shocked and deeply grateful when I gave them head. But I had never been with someone who targeted me as an object of lust, who wooed me, who looked at me the way most guys look at Pamela Anderson. For that first dinner I made a simple green salad with homemade creamy vinaigrette, a classic turkey Tetrazzini casserole, buttered asparagus, and chocolate cupcakes with vanilla frosting for dessert.
     
     
    “So then what happened?” Nadia asks, bouncing up and down. She is in her pajamas, sitting on the couch hugging a throw pillow, as I tell her about my weekend. My suitcase is in the middle of the floor, and I haven’t checked my messages or gone through the mail. Nadia tackled me as soon as I came through the door, and frankly, I’m so swept up with telling her about my adventure that I couldn’t care less about anything else. I can’t remember the last time I had a good girlfriend dish session, especially where I was the one with the dish, but even though I feel like a weird episode of Sex and the City , it is elating.
    “So we went to this little Jewish deli and ordered big bowls of mishmash chicken soup . . .”
    “What is mishmash?”
    “Everything in it . . . matzo ball, noodle, rice, kasha, and kreplach.”
    “Okay, whatever.”
    “Exactly. It was soup. It was good. We talked about life and everything under the sun. He’s a documentary filmmaker, based in Chicago, but takes jobs all over the world. He just finished a film on the Maasai tribe, and is working on the editing and postproduction for the next few months while figuring out his next project. He was in D.C. for a cousin’s kid’s bar mitzvah. He has a huge family, very close, grew up in Evanston, lives downtown, never married but lived with a