Read You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas Online

Authors: Augusten Burroughs

Tags: #Humor, #Family

You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas (5 page)

BOOK: You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas
12.6Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Upstairs.

With complete, unsupervised access to a fully equipped kitchen.

 

 

The photograph on the cover of my mother’s
Woman’s Day
magazine appealed to me enormously. A gumdrop-bejeweled gingerbread house from a spun-sugar fantasy world.

The tall, peaked roof was swirled with mounds of frosting snow. Glittering, crystal-sugar icicles hung from the eaves. And the walls, smooth sheets of pure gingerbread had been pressed into raw sugar, giving them the appearance of stucco.

Hansel and Gretel had been fools to abandon such a house after they cooked the witch alive in her own oven. I absolutely would have claimed the house as my own and used the witch’s skull as a soup tureen. When I thought about it, Hansel and Gretel deserved to die for their lack of imagination and poor real estate choices. But that was just a stupid fantasy; a story for babies.

This gingerbread house was real. There was a recipe.
GINGERBREAD DREAMS: BUILD THIS FOOLPROOF FANTASY HOUSE!
directed the headline.

I would make it as a surprise for my mother. I would bake the gingerbread house and I wouldn’t get any blood on it and it would be the center of our Christmas table.
Won’t she be surprised
, I thought,
when she comes upstairs in six hours and sees my glorious gingerbread house resting on a plate, two candy cane trees beside the front door!

The word
foolproof
spoke to me because my older brother often said, “I believe you may be a complete fool, quite nearly retarded. I’m going to have to find out what kind of pesticides were in use when our mother was carrying you.” If even a fool could make the house on the cover of this magazine, I should be able to make it, too. Then again, I knew that merely boiling water was not
foolproof
. Not when you got sidetracked by
Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids
and forgot about the water, which then evaporated and the pot fused to the burner of the stove.

Had they actually tested this recipe on a fool?
I wondered.

But this was no pot of boiling water. This was only gingerbread! And gumdrops! It was just plain silly to be
worried
about candy canes. No, the gingerbread house would look exactly like the one on the magazine cover. I knew it would.

 

 

I loved to experiment in the kitchen and if I ever used a recipe, it was only for inspiration. Recipes, I felt, were for the unimaginative. However, with this particular project I would do my best to follow the recipe to the letter. And where that wasn’t possible, I would at least stay true to its spirit.

Molasses, whatever the hell that was, sure wasn’t in our cupboard. But I knew it was a liquid because you were supposed to “gently pour” it into the other ingredients, so I used some of my mother’s cooking sherry—something she herself often incorporated into fancier recipes.

We had flour. Because the gingerbread house was gingerbread colored, I used the brown flour made out of wheat and not the other flour made out of white.

And wasn’t baking
soda
the same thing as baking
powder
? I thought so, so I used the latter.

As for the spices—cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg, ginger, fennel—I skipped them all. Because right there next to the Tabasco sauce and peeking out from behind a bottle of my mother’s saccharin was a little jar of allspice. Just the name tasted like gingerbread. It was all the spices I needed plus the rest of them. It was all of them; allspice!

Briefly, I worried about the spectacular mess I had somehow created. I had managed to use my mother’s entire set of six white mixing bowls, her electric beater, a number of pans, each of which I had greased with corn oil, and assorted spatulas, knives, forks, a cheese grater, and my father’s hammer from the basement.

It was just a shame that I wouldn’t be able to help my mother wash all these dishes, but I couldn’t get all my Band-Aids wet so she would have to do them herself.

I smiled.

She always said that art was born from chaos. “The creative process can be very messy. You have to be comfortable with that.”

I was comfortable.

I poured the thick, gluey batter onto trays and baked it stiff. Prying the gingerbread, which was nearly black, from the cookie sheets, I set about to assemble my Gingerbread Dreams Fantasy House.

Gloomily, I came to accept the fact that it was a structural impossibility to create a steep, peaked roof, like in the picture. The gingerbread kept breaking. The instant coffee I had added for color must have made it brittle.

So I gave the building a flat roof—like the modern house down the street that my mother often admired—and then spent an hour applying white frosting from a can for snow. Which looked nothing like mounds of snow, but like piles of insulation left behind by a work crew that had gone on strike. It looked, actually, just like the house even
farther
down the street; the one built in the center of a dirt field. With plastic stapled to the outside in place of siding and asphalt nailed here and there to patch holes. My mother hated that house. “It ruins the entire damn street.”

I had made
that
house, in black gingerbread. If only I had two miniature flat tires and an upside-down swing set to place in front.

I cut out more windows. Two rows of them. Immediately, this looked wrong. It looked
nonresidential.

The deeper into the project I tumbled, the more dire the results. The colorful gumdrops I’d attached randomly to the front façade didn’t look
cheerful,
they looked like what they were: an easy, colorful ploy to manipulate the eye and distract it from the wanton ugliness right before it. The more I did to try and decorate my way out of the monstrosity I had built, the worse it looked.

By not even the most elastic stretch of the imagination was this a gingerbread
house.

Four walls, a flat ceiling, rows of windows, four stories high: I had built a gingerbread public housing tenement, a little gingerbread slum.

And I could populate my small-scale confectionary representation of urban blight with the deformed gingerbread men that I had baked alongside the cake. Men with misshapen arms and legs, heads that had expanded into great amoebalike structures. I had baked an entire population of pitiful, armless and legless subjects, each with a physical deformity worthy of the most corrupt circus.

I didn’t even bother to frost my gingerbread misfits. Why shame them with frivolous frosting hats and raisin eyes? Let them be plain and blind. I could give them
that
much dignity.

I would think of them as a large family who had, unfortunately, farmed too near a leaking nuclear power plant. And now they only wanted to live the remainder of their sad lives in the solitude of the cookie jar and not displayed on a platter near my public housing unit.

It was almost like I had baked a scene from the
CBS Evening News
with Walter Cronkite.

 

 

My mother made a bold and insincere fuss. “Oh, it’s just precious,” she said.
Precious
being the word southern women have always used to describe the indescribable, the unsavory. It’s also what my grandmother had said after peering at the harelip on the baby of a friend’s daughter.
Precious
meant
So positively hideous, I could produce vomit this instant and without the aid of my index finger.

She was reduced to bland compliments. “It’s so
original.
I like it very much more than the picture in the magazine.”

When I asked her, “But doesn’t it look like one of the slums on the news? Like something out of Springfield?” she replied, “No, honey, not at all.” But I could see in her eyes the distinct flicker of recognition and then agreement. Her eyes said,
Exactly!

I knew that what I had constructed was an insult to the picture in the magazine, to the entire magazine itself and to baking in general. If the people at
Woman’s Day
ever saw my gingerbread horror they would cancel my mother’s subscription.

Why hadn’t I followed the directions
exactly
? Why had I thrown the measuring cups to the wind and decided to spread my architectural wings?

Worse, though, than the visual presentation was the sensation of the gingerbread house inside the mouth.

First, the teeth made hard, damaging contact with the bathroom tilelike cake. Next, the tongue was burned by the cheap, hardened vanilla frosting. A single bite was enough to onset juvenile diabetes.

Still, the front door and a tiny portion of roof were politely sampled. A number of gumdrops had been removed, then placed back. The dog refused a chunk of window even though it was caked with frosting “snow.” This very same dog did not hesitate to eat the wadded-up ball of aluminum foil she found on the floor next to the trash can.

And so my fiasco sat in ruin on a platter in the center of the dining table. Now no longer a food item but a stand-in for a decoration.

And then my brother appeared. He had briefly left his bedroom and all the electronic equipment in there to forage for food.

With one swift and decisive motion of the hand, he cracked a third of the roof away from the structure and got as much of it into his mouth as possible before I could scream at him and tell him to stop. But I wasn’t going to scream at him. My mouth was open in amazement, not anger. I was just waiting for him to snarl in disgust and spit the partially chewed roof right out onto the floor.

“You like it?” I asked, amazed.

He shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess. Why, did you put something funny in it?” he said suspiciously, holding the last corner of roof out away from him.

“No, it’s edible,” I said. “There’s no tricks.”

He nodded. Then he devoured the fragment in his hand and returned to the cake for more, breaking away nearly one entire wall of my holiday housing unit.

“Well, since nobody else is gonna eat it,” he said, carrying the wall away with him down the hall and back to his room.

I looked at the wretched structure on the table and I smiled. My gingerbread hovel had suddenly turned in to a loved—or at least somewhat appreciated—gingerbread
home
after all.

Claus and Effect

 

 

A
T MY ELEMENTARY
school, the teachers always did a little something special to celebrate everyone’s birthday. About an hour before the yellow buses arrived to take us home at the end of the day, one of the teachers would unroll the torn but taped-back-together crinkly red paper streamer that was used over and over, year after year, and hang it from one end of the chalkboard to the other.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
would be written in neat teacher-script on the board. And a couple of boxes of Twinkies would be opened and placed on the long fake wood table below the streamer and chalkboard sign. Apple juice would be poured into tiny paper cups from a half-gallon plastic jug. It was a small school in the country; such a makeshift little party was exciting for everyone.

Except for Glen.

Sooner or later, after the juice cups had been crumpled up and pelted at the girls and the last Twinkie was gone, somebody would always say, “Poor Glen, he never gets a party.” And this never failed to plunge the room into silence. “Yeah, that’s right. Hey Glen, that really sucks.”

BOOK: You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas
12.6Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Sky Unwashed by Irene Zabytko
Chez Max by Jakob Arjouni
Forevermore by Lynn Galli
DAC_II_GenVers_Sept2013 by Donna McDonald
So Nude, So Dead by Ed McBain
The Golden Tulip by Rosalind Laker
Just Beyond Tomorrow by Bertrice Small
Kept by Him by Red Garnier
Face Off by Mark Del Franco