Someone (7 page)

“Glory be to God,” my mother said. “Now you read the recipe, Marie.”

I looked down at the little card. The ink my mother had used was brown. Her handwriting was lovely and neat, the capital
S
and the capital
B
at the top of the card were striking—perfectly shaped, perfectly proportioned. My mother had learned from Irish nuns. “Marie?” my mother said.

The sound of her voice was more familiar to me then than my own; I knew the end of my mother’s patience when I heard it.

“You tell me,” I said softly. “You tell me what to do.”

Behind me, I heard my mother cross her arms over the rickracked apron.

“There’s a recipe in front of you,” she said. “And unless I’m very much mistaken you know how to read. Read it.”

I lowered my head the way I’d seen horses do, and dogs, when they didn’t want to be led. “You tell me,” I said again.

I heard her stamp her foot. “I won’t.” Anger always stirred my mother’s brogue, like meat brought up from the bottom of a stew. “I wrote it out for you so you could read it. Now read it.”

I didn’t turn around. “Just tell me,” I said.

“A recipe is meant to be read,” my mother said.

I dipped my head again. “I’d rather you just tell me.”

In the silence that followed, I could hear, faintly, the noise from the street, where I wanted to be: cars passing and children calling. There was also the distant thump of doors closing in the apartments below, various footsteps on the stair. There was the whine of someone’s clothesline pulley. The chuckling warble of some pigeons at the window.

“Measure out your flour,” my mother said slowly, relenting. I shifted my feet a bit to accommodate my triumph: better than risking a sly smile.

I put my hand on the measuring cup. “How much?” I said.

And now, even without turning around, I knew it was my mother who was smiling. “You’ll have to read the recipe to find out,” she said. “Won’t you?”

It was a wonder, my mother said later, in every retelling of it, that we didn’t kill each other on that bright morning. Slowly, through a series of niggling concessions on both our parts—some telling, some reading, some turning away in anger, and some giving in—the ingredients were placed into the bowl and the bread was shaped and lifted into the black frying pan. When my mother brushed past me to mark the cross in its surface, her hands were trembling with anger.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” my mother said, and banged the pan on the top of the stove, then banged it into the hot oven. “You are the most stubborn child.”

She put away the ingredients, slamming cabinet doors, and washed the bowl and the spoon in the sink.

She turned to me again. The sunlight caught the green in my mother’s narrowed eyes, as if she were peering into a deep green wood. “The strangest child I’ve ever heard of,” she said. “Refusing to read a simple recipe.”

She dried the bowl and put it away. She dried the spoon. She said, “Can you at least, at least, keep an eye on the clock and take this out in forty minutes? I’ve got to meet your father downtown. Can you be responsible for that much?”

I said yes, but my eyes went to the sunlight at the window.

My mother took my chin and made me turn to the clock on the stove top.

“When the big hand comes around to the twelve,” she said, “take the bread out. Use the cloth. Can you do that? When the big hand comes around to the twelve.”

“I can tell time,” I said sullenly, risking her anger once more.

Once again my mother studied my face, as if it were lost in a thicket of trees. “And you can read, too,” she said, measuring out her words. “But today it seems it’s not a question of can, is it? It’s a question of will. Will you do it is what I’m asking.”

I turned my face to the light at the window. I pulled off my glasses. I was a bold piece—I could hear my mother’s accusation even before she said it. “All right,” I said, and then collapsed into the single chair beside the table. “I will,” I said, and crossed my arms over my chest, turning my exaggerated gaze to the small clock on the stove, its old glass fogged, its numbers and its two hands mere slashes of black. “Here I am,” I said, all impertinence. “I’m watching the time.” Knowing my mother’s voice as well as I did, I could already hear her say, “Oh, you are a bold piece.” Knowing the limits of my mother’s patience, I could already feel the slap on my cheek.

But my mother merely stood beside me with her hands on
her hips, studying her stubborn daughter once more, even as that daughter kept her exaggerated, myopic stare on the clock. “I suppose this is how it’s going to be,” she said softly, more to herself than to me. “You’re growing up.” And then, for a moment, she put a gentle hand to my head.

She said, “God help us both,” and left the kitchen.

I kept my eyes on the small face of the clock until my mother came back in her hat and coat, her purse held over her arm. “Thirty minutes more,” she warned, and I withdrew the question I was going to ask, “Where downtown?” in order to sigh impatiently instead. “Yes, Momma.” I heard her close the apartment door. I put my glasses back on and let my gaze wander around the solid world, to the stove top with its black burners, to the blank white enamel face of the oven door. To the sink and the drain board beside it. The tile wall and the narrow shelf above, where there was a yellow matchbox and a small statue of the Blessed Mother in her blue cloak. To the table at my elbow and a faint crescent moon of spilled baking soda that marked where the bowl had been, to the window and the light and the clothes on the line. The sunlight had already moved past fresh morning and into the steady weight of the rest of the day.

I looked around. I wanted to leave the kitchen, of course, to leave the apartment and call on my friends, which was, until this morning, my usual Saturday routine, but I resisted it. I stared at the clock once more. What I needed was a book or the newspaper, I thought. I imagined my mother coming home to find me sitting here, with the newspaper spread before me and the perfectly golden bread cooling by the window, confounding all her expectations. There would be some satisfaction in that.

I left the chair in the kitchen, rehearsing as I did the innocent look I would give my mother when she returned—convinced, of course, that the bread had burned—and discovered instead
that I was sitting serenely at the table with the newspaper spread before me and the perfect loaf cooling on the windowsill.

I walked through the living room, but last night’s paper wasn’t there. I walked into my parents’ bedroom: the trick would be to convey by my own astonished look my utter disbelief that my mother had ever doubted me. My mother’s housedress and apron were thrown haphazardly across the bed. Where downtown? I wondered.

I went into my own room—my room alone now that Gabe was in the seminary. Now that Gabe was in the seminary, he slept on the couch in the living room when he came home and hung his dark clothes in the hall closet like a visitor. From my window I could see Gerty Hanson and another girl strolling arm in arm toward the part of the street where the boys were playing. I tilted my head to watch them climb the stoop four doors down, where a small knot of the usual girls were already sitting on the steps.

It would only take a minute, I knew, to run down and tell them all that my mother had me inside baking bread. That I would be with them in forty minutes’ time, at most. But when I arrived at the stoop, the girls were all bent over their knees, laughing extravagantly into their laps and their hands. Gerty had just told a story, which she repeated for me, a story her father had told about a very drunk man who was throwing tomatoes at the door of a church, during a funeral no less. “What the devil’s gotten into you, man?” her father said. And the man, wound up like a pitcher on the mound, said to her father, “To hell with the devil,” and threw the tomato anyway.

Unless you count the absurdity of good little Gerty saying “hell” in a longshoreman’s gravelly voice, I was aware even then that the story wasn’t funny enough to merit the other girls’ mad laughter. That the laughter itself was meant mostly to get the
boys in the street to glance over from their game. To get the boys to cry out, “Ah, shut up,” as they were doing now that Gerty’s second telling had the girls roaring once more. “Bunch of cackling hens,” the boys said to one another in their own fathers’ voices, even as the girls shook their heads, as their mothers would do, and pretended they hadn’t heard.

When the laughter had subsided and the boys turned back to their game, I announced that my mother had me trapped. “Time I learned something about cooking,” I repeated, which led Gerty to tell another funny story about how her aunty had recently tried to hide a pot of burned parsnips in the dumbwaiter. It was well known to us all by then that Gerty’s aunty hadn’t even known how to peel a potato when she first arrived from the other side to run the household.

“She still can’t poach an egg,” Gerty said with some haughtiness. “I’ve tried to show her a hundred times, but she just can’t learn.” She held up a finger, instructing all of us. “A touch of vinegar in the water does the trick.”

“Well, I don’t want to learn,” I said. “Once you learn to do it, you’ll be expected to do it,” and was amazed at the way my own words clarified for me what had been, until then, only a vague impulse to refuse. They looked at me over their knees, this gaggle of girls: a lifetime of hours in the kitchen bearing down on us all. “I’d rather be like your aunty.”

Gerty shook her head. “My dad says she’d burn water if she could.” And the girls laughed again, stamping their feet and slapping their knees. And the boys playing ball in the street looked over their shoulders to shout, “Be quiet, can’t you?” There would be no veering from that future.

I returned home with fifteen minutes on the clock still to spare. I opened the oven door and used the towel to take out the heavy bread. It was, I knew, paler than it should have been, but I turned off the oven anyway, simply to dispatch the task. I joined
the girls again just as they were gathering themselves to leave the stoop and walk slowly down the street, pretending we only wanted to get a soda.

When I came home again, my father was at the dining-room table and my mother was bringing him his tea. My mother crooked her finger and led me into the kitchen, where the loaf, sitting on the cutting board, was darker than it had been. “What time did you take this out?” she asked, one eyebrow raised.

“When you told me to,” I said vaguely.

“It was hardly cooked,” she said.

I shrugged, indicating both that I could not be blamed and that it was all of no matter to me.

My mother sliced the rebaked bread and carried it in to my father where he sat at the cloth-covered table. I followed with the butter. Gabe’s place at the table was empty now. Now, after dinner, we listened to the radio.

The tea was poured. My father spread the butter on the thick slice of bread and winked at me before he took a bite. And then chewed, and then moved his mouth as if his tongue had been burned. He swallowed and took a drink of tea. My mother said, “Too much baking soda,” and placed her barely bitten piece of bread on her plate. And then put her hands in her lap, her back straight. “You must have added it twice,” she said, sternly enough to show that she understood this was sabotage. “I don’t know how I didn’t see it.”

I had added it, in fact, four times, with my back to my mother and my mother’s impatience—Glory be to God, read the recipe, Marie, how will you ever learn—making her, on three separate occasions, turn away.

“You’ll have to learn to pay more attention, Marie,” my mother was saying. “You’ll never learn to cook if you don’t pay
attention. A kitchen can be a dangerous place if you don’t pay attention.”

“Oh, she’ll learn,” my father was saying, amused. “She’ll learn in good time.”

I bowed my head and studied my hands. I would not, I knew. I would not learn. Gerty Hanson had learned, but I would not.

I raised my eyes slowly, touching my glasses back onto my nose, well pleased with myself, but careful not to give this away. The day had grown cloudy and the dining room was dim. My father had returned the piece of bread to his plate, but as if to convey his sympathy, he still held the edge of it gently between his thumb and index finger—perhaps not wanting to hurt my feelings any further by letting go of it completely. His other three fingers, held delicately aloft, were trembling. His broad hand against the white cloth and the china plate was a color I had not expected: the gray fingernails sunk too deeply into the swollen yellow flesh. His flesh was swollen, thin as he was. I looked at his smiling face. Although we were only a few feet apart, across the familiar cloth at the familiar table, I felt my eyes strain, as they sometimes did when close things seemed suddenly to contract into a great distance. In my recollection, there was something of the smell of ether in the air.

That night, I found my mother sitting on my bed when I came out of the bathroom in my slippers and my robe. She asked me, “How are you?”

Surprised by her presence, I replied, “Fine, thank you, and yourself?” which was how she always answered when asked the same question by people on the street. Now she looked a little surprised. She said she was fine, thank you, as if by instinct alone. Her hands were in her lap. Her back was straight.

“Although,” she said, conversationally, as if we were indeed neighborhood ladies meeting on the street, “I’m a bit worried
about your father.” She told me then that he was going to stop by the hospital tomorrow, to see if they couldn’t fix him up.

I said, with street decorum, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

I felt no threat from this news, blithe child that I was, because my thoughts were all on the strange sight of my mother sitting, idly, it seemed to me, on the edge of my bed. She came into my room often enough in those days, but always at a bustle, there to dust the furniture or mop the floor, to place clean clothes in my dresser or to turn the mattress or to scrub the bed frame with ammonia to ward off bedbugs. She came in to pull the blankets up over my shoulders every night, to kiss my forehead and remind me to say my prayers. Her stillness now, sitting here, her hands empty, made her presence particularly peculiar.