Some Wildflower In My Heart (47 page)

Once, when I watched her flatten a ball of pie crust dough with her hands and then mash it haphazardly into the pie pan, I said, without thinking, “Would it not be better to use your rolling pin for a more uniform crust?”

She shot me a look of what I interpreted as intense animosity and ordered me to leave the kitchen. “I'll not have an impudent child telling me how to do things I've done all my life!” she called after me. Another time when she told me that I was kneading the bread dough far too long, I answered in the words of my mother, again without pausing to consider the effect. “A skilled workman does not take shortcuts.”

She laughed derisively and replied, “And how would a thirteen-year-old know anything about a skilled workman?”

Presently I was banned from all kitchen work on the pretext that I jangled her nerves with my slow, methodical movements. My grandparents ate their evening meal at half past five, and if the food itself had not been enough to suppress my appetite, the early hour would have been. “Eat!” my grandmother would cry. “Don't think you'll snack later on. You'll not get another bite until morning!”

My grandfather would lower his eyelids and study me with a sinister gaze, his great jaws masticating ponderously. “You eat now or go hungry,” he would say. Each evening I felt as if I were being pulled asunder, longing on the one hand for the unpalatable food to be swept away and the meal ended, yet on the other wishing that I could remain permanently adhered to my chair at the table so as to be spared the darker hours of the night to come.

Whereas my mother and I had talked happily as we ate our dinner, my grandparents' table was for the most part silent and hostile. When my grandmother ventured a timid observation, my grandfather either ignored her or denounced the remark as vacuous. My only conversation consisted of monosyllabic answers to my grandfather's direct questions: “Does your science teacher ever talk about the time he had to answer to the school board for allowing students to experiment with chemicals unsupervised?”
No
. “Is that Benchley boy in any of your classes—the one whose mother is a barmaid at the Taboo Lounge?”
Yes
. “Did you sit out of the dancing lesson in gym class like I told you to?”
Yes
. “Did you read that dirty novel your English teacher assigned for class?”
No
.

This last answer, however, was an untruth, though not strictly so. The book in question was
The Scarlet Letter
, which I had already read chapter by chapter with my mother only months before she died. When I was assigned to read the book in my tenth-grade English class, over two years later, I found that I remembered it with such clarity that I could yet quote brief passages from it. I felt that I knew the characters intimately. Under my mother's guidance I had extracted literary symbols, had dissected conflict and motive, had traced the three-part structure of the novel.

I did not read the book again, as I was afraid to do what my grandfather had expressly forbidden, but I performed so well on the test and essay at the end of our study of the novel that my English teacher suspected me of having received assistance from a student in another class who had taken the test earlier in the school day. I found her suspicions to be laughable, although I displayed no outward sign of this, for I had no friends who would have extended to me such aid had I been in need of it, which I was not. Though my teacher did not pursue the charges, she reassigned me to a desk in the front row, so as to squelch any further ideas of cheating, I suppose.

After I ran away from my grandparents' home, I determined to elevate the quality of my evening meal to what I had known as a child, to regain a vestige of lost refinement and pay tribute to my mother's memory. Though my income was minimal, I purchased my produce and meats carefully and prepared for myself wholesome, well-seasoned dinners. The first boardinghouse where I roomed had a large kitchen, and each renter was allowed use of it. I cooked my meals after the others had vacated the kitchen but carried them on a tray to my room instead of eating at the communal table. To my dismay, however, my cooking habits seemed to arouse a great deal of interest. Other boarders began to wander into the kitchen and exhibit an overbearing curiosity in my menu. I was forced at times to be blatantly rude.

After my son was born, therefore, I took care to find an apartment with its own stove and refrigerator. As Tyndall grew past babyhood, I began to introduce to him the niceties of proper dining, showing him how to hold his spoon, to take small bites, to wipe his mouth, and so forth. By the age of four, he was quite a gentleman at the table and would politely offer this speech after our evening meal: “Thank you, Mother, for my dinner. May I please be excused to help you clear the dishes?”

He begged to help me in all aspects of my kitchen work, often slowing my progress, of course. He took seriously his small duties, and I yet remember his earnest sobs upon dropping a saucer one night and seeing it shatter. “Oh, look, Mother! Oh, look!” he kept repeating as he pointed in horror at the broken pieces. I comforted him and swept away the fragments, but later at bedtime he wept afresh. “I broke the pretty dish, Mother! I broke it!” I have not permitted myself to think of these things for many years.

After Tyndall's death, I could hardly bear the sight of a stove or a boiling pot for many months, yet gradually as I returned to life, though a soiled and ragged remnant of it, I began once more to turn to cooking for myself in the evenings, more as an antidote for loneliness than for any concern over nourishment. In addition, I often cooked for my elderly clients when employed as a domestic.

When I arrived in Filbert and applied for employment at Emma Weldy, I was pleased to find that the kitchen staff prepared the dishes “from scratch,” as the supervisor at that time, Lola Tyler, boasted to me repeatedly. I soon discovered, however, that her claim was overstated, for a number of corners were cut, as they say. Pudding and gravy mixes were commonly used, as were instant potato flakes and Bisquick. The dessert known as cherry crisp was nothing more than canned pie filling topped with prepackaged graham cracker crumbs.

Once again I fear that I am straying from the center of my narrative, although my history pertaining to the subject of cooking perhaps helps to explain my fretful afterthoughts concerning the inelegance of the meal that I had served to Birdie and Mickey. A drought demands a proper end, I reasoned. To depict a bountiful downpour of cool rain after a dry season, that is to celebrate my acquisition of a friend after years of solitude, I should have served a banquet. My potato soup and roast beef sandwiches were as insubstantial as a trickle of rain in an arid land. I chided myself that surely the laws of hospitality had not been fulfilled.

On the day after Birdie and Mickey ate supper with us, I worried about more than potato soup and sandwiches, however. Uppermost in my mind as the morning wore on was the thought of Birdie's past suffering. An image of her disfigurement was deeply engraved upon my mind, and a simple, irrefutable truth presented itself to me. Having borne a great weight of pain in my own past, I had become impervious to that of others, always assuming that mine was worse. In all honesty, an insidious form of pride had crept into my heart and taken up residence: the pride of suffering.

The pride of suffering is ancient, I suppose. I think it likely that Job of old felt a peculiar satisfaction when, passing among his fellowmen, he overheard someone say, “There goes Job. He was the man sorely buffeted by Satan.” I can imagine him straightening his shoulders and lifting his chin as he felt a certain celebrity status. “My loss has been of such historic proportions that it will be recorded for posterity,” he may have thought.

While comparing wartime injuries, two of Thomas's cousins, both in their sixties at the time, almost came to blows at a family reunion one summer several years ago. One of them, whose nickname was Gnat, had begun bragging about the wounds he had sustained as a ball turret gunner in World War II. The other, a stout man of acerbic tongue, dubbed Gypsy, had served as navigator on a B-29 and had spent the last six months of the war in a German prison camp. Gypsy had hotly objected to Gnat's glorification of gunners in general and ball turret gunners in particular.

“So you came out of it with a little limp,” he said to Gnat. “And how many meals did you have to miss while you was laid up in the field hospital? How many times did you fight somebody for a scrap of wormy bread? Did you ever know what it was like to feel like pukin' but there wasn't nothin' to puke up?” The two of them were bellowing like rabid bulls before the contest came to an end. Thomas and his cousin Spade actually had to restrain the two of them from fisticuffs. It was perhaps one of the clearest demonstrations I have ever witnessed of the kind of pride of which I am speaking, though at the time I could not see its relation to me. I had never participated in such a debate concerning my own degree of suffering, yet I know that my pride was considerable and that over the years it had multiplied as if permeated with a potent yeast.

The sight of Birdie's scars led me to consider her loss. I was forced to reconstruct my picture of her past, which I had invented as an idyll of rural simplicity: a sun-drenched childhood; a close-knit family gathered about the hearth reading the Bible and uttering treacly sentiments, protected from life's injustices by the whim of the same God who willed that I should experience them fully; a joyous, innocent courtship; a warm and loving marriage.

I knew now that at some point a grim intermission had interrupted this charmed play. That she had done battle with cancer was evident. I knew also by now that she had borne no children, and I suspected that this too had caused her great pain. Which is worse—to have lost a child or never to have had one? I could not say.

The realization that Birdie Freeman had suffered gave me cause to worry, for it disarmed me in a sense. I saw Birdie and myself in sharp relief as two sides of a coin: peace and strife. We had both been damaged yet had emerged as opposite as heads and tails.

There is a certain confidence, an unhealthy superiority I suppose, spawned by the attitude that one's own suffering exceeds that of others. I recall watching an old television program in a neighbor's apartment one day as a child. When my mother played Scrabble in Mrs. Gault's apartment, I was permitted at times to turn on the television. As I remember it, the program, which was called
Queen for a Day
, consisted of a parade of downtrodden women who, one by one, tearfully confided to the world at large the miseries of their lives.

While I deplored their private distresses and their public humiliation (it did not occur to me at the time that their televised confessions were voluntary), I was filled with admiration at the efficiency of the Applause Meter in determining which woman's suffering was greatest and therefore deserving of relief in the form of a new washing machine, refrigerator, and the like. I have often wondered since that time if any of the winners ever lorded their victories over the other women backstage after the program, flaunting their armfuls of red roses, then patting their “Queen for a Day” crown and boasting, “My misfortunes are the grandest of all!”

How was I to approach Birdie now that I knew her secret? A single inadvertent glance as she had bent to retrieve an earring had narrowed my edge over her. For many years I had used my suffering as a wedge between others and myself. I was excused from the requirements of friendly social interaction because my past had taught me to trust neither God nor man. Though I still felt assured, I suppose, that my suffering would register far higher on the Applause Meter than Birdie's, her scars had nonetheless taken me back. She had suffered, yet she had not withdrawn. Rather, she reached out to others with eager hands, giving, helping, and always, always touching. I knew that my friendship with Birdie would force me to recast my life in drastic ways, in ways that I thought of as disruptive.

And not only were my worries that day confined to the inappropriate meal I had served and to the disturbing discovery about Birdie, but as I moved about our duplex that Sunday, looking for things to set right—adjusting a lampshade, straightening an antimacassar, moving a footstool—my thoughts turned to Thomas. Without his noticing that I was doing so, I observed him as he read the newspaper and then turned on the television, first watching the conclusion of an old movie titled
The Mask of Fu Manchu
and later changing the channel to watch WWF Wrestling at noon.

He exercised no restraint in the expression of his enjoyment over the wrestlers. I was accustomed to his laughter and to his frequent entreaties as I passed through the room. “Look at this'n, Rosie! Ain't he a beefy thing? Watch 'im now; he's gittin' ready to pounce! Whoa! Right in the solar plexus! Don't you know that's gotta hurt like all get-out?” Of course, he was fully aware that each bout was a staged affair, that the blows were neither delivered nor received, yet he found great humor in the entire production.

I have never deluded myself as to Thomas's earliest and strongest attraction to me. To assert that it was anything other than my cooking would, I believe, be falsehood. Thomas had lived alone for over ten years. There is no need to elaborate upon what a hearty meal will do for such a man, what visions of future meals he may conjure up. The first meat I cooked for him was oven-barbecued chicken; I make my own barbecue sauce. When he took his first bite, the expression upon his face was one of bliss long deferred.

Though I was by no means actively searching for a husband at the time, given my vitriolic distrust of men, it came to me, as I said in an earlier chapter, that the two of us could cohabit to the mutual benefit of the other, and when Thomas proposed marriage, I agreed. After our marriage was made legal and Thomas moved into my duplex, we took upon ourselves traditional roles. I was cook, laundress, and housekeeper. Thomas proved himself most useful in a multitude of capacities: general repairman, auto mechanic, house painter, plumber, electrician, errand boy, gardener, and so forth. Indeed, he was a factotum of home maintenance.