The city coming down like cats and dogs

A week and a half here and the clouds above the North Shore are boiling outside the train window, over the anonymous metal creatures spindled and crouched along the shore. I lower the free newsweekly and look. It is printed on thin paper and the pages are broad. It smells like a newspaper, soft and a little sour. The train rushes on over the water. Every page of the magazine tells me what to do, what to eat, what beer to drink, and where to find out about more things to eat, drink, bike, and dance. With the help of such magazines, coworkers, shopkeepers at shops I like, the crooked-streeted city's beginning to fall into a recognizable order, a grid of cool and culture.
I'm a creature of desire here, a hungry prowler nosing the streets for masa meal, local eggs, raw milk, lard, a bicycle, knives, plantains, ripe avocados, wi-fi, ball jars, wine crates I can put plants in. The list expands and contracts, like breathing. I get off the T and walk. Heavier, I get back on the T again.
There is something troubling in this relentless search for the city I imagine, hidden beneath the surfaces of the city as it first appears. The first city is chaotic as a human being; the imagined city as orderly as the news. As my feet work themselves over the streets, the imagined city irrupts more and more into the first city, like the logic of dreams sloshing over into the cacaphony of waking.

...

Francisco is middle aged and smiling. He looks down through the chainlink fence. I put my hands in the chainlink and pull down. My body rises, so I can look at his rows of neat, bushy tomatoes. Francisco's wife moves behind him. She does not speak, but only smiles. He gives me radishes, a big bundle. In the kitchen they become small, without the greens. I met him because I saw his tomato plants from across four loud lanes on Monsignor Street. His whole yard is growing tomatoes and other foods. We talk for a few minutes. His corn seed comes from his father, in El Salvador. The corn kernels will be not yellow, but black. "You cannot get that kind of corn here," he says. I say, "That's good that you're growing those. Carrying on the old variety." I want to tell Francisco something about the people who know nothing of his country or its corn, who would be very excited by the lime green sedgy stalks in his highwayside garden. But I do not want to appear as if I know more about his corn and the meaning of his corn than he does.
I put the radish greens in a plastic bag I keep in the freezer for stock. They are fresh and prickly, and obscure the ends of onions, garlic skins, and cilantro stalks that fill the bag. By now, down in the basement kitchen across the street from my room, the sharp leaves are crisp with frost.

...

At an Indian market in Brookline we buy two perfectly ripe mangoes. They come from a cardboard box of perfectly ripe mangoes in the back of the store. Also we buy peppers, slim and dark green, dozens of them in a plastic bag. One is enough to season a whole meal. The grocer tells me their Hindi name. In English, only "Hot!"

...

The mangoes become salsa. My housemate asks how this has happened. Our other housemate, who claims ignorance on kitchen matters and has played along in spinning the tale of Robert the head chef who must be consulted in the smallest cooking decision, gets her customary sass back, cutting me off as I begin to answer: "Well, you just cut them up--" I'm saying, when "Don't you even try to impress us, Robert," she says, and over my protests, "Even I've made mango salsa. It's like the most basic thing in the world." A third housemate looks skeptical about this. As we finish the meal, the sun is gone on the rooftop and the Citgo sign looms brilliant and close above the fens. The mango salsa, along with the yam curry we carried up the precarious back stairs, is mostly gone. The skeptical housemate asks if we can make, like, American food? Next time? So we do. We make hamburgers. With sweet fries and ketchup mixed with ginger, cilantro, the Indian hot pepper and lime.
Local season hasn't started yet for us. The city's too new, and the sudden bracing onslaught of ethnic groceries and fractious culinary histories and personalities takes precedence. After all, we are hardly locals yet.
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