The Kitchen Daughter (5 page)

Do not let the grief drown you
, said Gert.

Do no let her
, said Nonna.

I’m complicating things that should be simple. I should do the simplest thing I can think of.

I make shortbread. The plainest of cookies, the best first kind. I know it by heart. Flour, butter, sugar. Two cups, two sticks, a half cup. Mixed and rubbed and blended until it clings together. Rolled out in a circle, not too thin. Cut in wedges. Pricked with a fork and pressed along the round edge with the flats of the tines.

The butter is a little too cold, and I warm it too much in my hands, so it sticks. I shouldn’t rush. I make myself slow down. I roll the dough as best I can and cut a lopsided circle. I scrape the drooping wedges off the counter, arrange the survivors on a cookie sheet, and slide them into the oven. Rich, wet butter hisses against the metal. As it heats up, the oven releases vague traces of past dishes clinging to its walls.

It’s Grandma Damson’s recipe. We only met her a few times. She didn’t think it was proper for Ma to go down to Macon without her husband, and Dad was always so busy at the hospital, so we only went sometimes for holidays. She made shortbread at Christmas, so many times over so many years she was like a machine. I’d watch her and nothing ever varied. Batch after batch, dozens on dozens.

I know the recipe is written down in Amanda’s neat childhood print on a card in the cabinet. It was her first and last contribution to a recipe project she’d lost interest in immediately. But I don’t need it. I’ve made countless variations on this recipe. Chai-infused shortbread diamonds. Rosewater shortbread squares. Cocoa shortbread sandwiches spliced with Nutella. But tonight, in honor of Grandma Damson, I make hers, from memory.

In a sense, I fail. No ghosts materialize in the kitchen, not Grandma Damson, not Nonna, not anyone.

But out of the mess I make a dozen ideal shortbread wedges, perfect in shape, size and flavor. Warm and delicate. With a glass of cold milk, they are delicious. When shortbread melts on your tongue, you feel the roundness of the butter and the kiss of the sugar and then they vanish. Then you eat another, to feel it again, to get at that moment of vanishing. I eat myself sick on them. Midnight watches me, waiting for a scrap to drop, but she waits in vain. She gives up eventually, stalking off with a twitching tail-tip and an arched back.

I tuck Dad’s bottle of scotch back where it belongs, my stomach
groaning. I stay crouched down staring into the cupboard for a while, looking at the pots and pans my parents left behind. What would I leave behind? Nothing. A small heap of black clothes. A cat, lovely and indifferent. These are negative thoughts, so I try to shake them off. What does it matter what I leave behind? I won’t be here to feel sad about it anyway.

I can’t always put the right word to a feeling, but right now, I can. I feel ill and unhappy. Thinking of food doesn’t exactly help. In these situations there’s only one thing I can do. To calm myself, I read the Normal Book.

The Normal Book is soothing in a different way than food. Not an escape, but an affirmation. Which is a word I learned from advice columns, so it’s fitting that the whole thing is made up of advice columns. When I need to, like now, I scan the fractured lines.

The Normal Book has been with me as long as I can remember. My parents knew about it, but no one else. I feel calmer now. It clears my head.

Now that I think about it, if Grandma Damson’s ghost had come, what would I even have said to her? I doubt she would have known about Nonna’s message. Then again, maybe ghosts know everything
there is to know. They’re sure to have more answers than I do, in any case. I’m not even sure I know the questions.

Hours later, as I try to fall asleep, I can smell the soft, buttery scent of the shortbread. The air currents have brought it up into the farthest corner of the house. It will take all night to fade. Even though the shortbread itself is gone, I smell it as if it were right here on a platter on the nightstand. It smells warm.

W
hen my phone rings, I can’t tell if it wakes me up because I’m not sure I’ve been asleep. It never rang much before, so I fumble with the unfamiliar buttons and somehow end up on speakerphone with the unknown caller saying “Hello? Hello? Ginny?”

“Yes, this is she.”

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Me?” I figure out how to switch off the speaker and put the phone to my ear.

“Me. Amanda. Your sister.” The orange juice voice comes through.

“Hi.”

“Everything okay? You sound weird.”

“You sound weird,” I reply, even though she sounds like she always does.

“I do not. Well, maybe. I’m pretty stressed. Okay. Great. So.” She takes a deep breath. This means she’s going to start talking about something I don’t want her to talk about. Or she’s smoking. But Amanda doesn’t smoke. As I once heard Ma say of something deeply unlikely, it would be like the Pope drunk on Manischewitz.

She says, “I wanted to have this conversation in person, but I just can’t get out of the house.”

“Is something wrong?”

“It’s just life,” she says. “The girls are kind of a handful today.”

“Take your time,” I say.

“Well, but we need to start packing things up.”

“Why?”

Another deep breath, blown air. “We talked about this. I have time now, I may not have time later.”

“But why even later?” I ask. “Why can’t we just leave things where they are?”

“We just can’t. Oh, and I meant to tell you, I don’t think she’s going to come today, but I didn’t want you to be worried if she does. If she shows up and I’m not there. Just let her in. Show her around.”

I’m completely lost. “Who?”

“Angelica. My friend from high school, the real estate agent. She knows the Center City market like the back of her hand. She’s going to check out the house and make some recommendations, maybe show it to some people.”

“Why?”

“So maybe someone will buy it.”

“But we’re not going to sell it.”

“Well, we’ll see how it goes.”

“You’re not listening to me,” I say. “I don’t want to sell it. That doesn’t mean maybe. That means no.”

“Seriously, Ginny? I don’t see how you get a veto in this situation. It’s not like you need all that space.”

“You want to kick me out of my house?”

“No, I just, no! Parker! Get back here! Listen, sis, I gotta go, just keep an eye out for Angelica, she’s a real sweetheart. Start pulling together some of the stuff for charity.”

“Charity?”

She says, “I could have sworn I told you this. Didn’t I? We need to pack up their clothes for donation regardless. That’s in the will. That’s what they wanted.”

“You’ve seen the will?”

“We’ll talk about that later. Start packing up the clothes in their bedroom, okay? Make yourself useful. I’ll be there when I can.”

“Okay,” I say, and hang up. She can’t know the effect she has on me. Otherwise she’d behave differently. She couldn’t know that if she tells me to do something, I don’t want to do it, and as soon as she tells me not to do something, it makes me want to. With Ma it wasn’t this bad. With Amanda, I feel much more contrary.

I try to see things from Amanda’s point of view. This is an exercise the advice columnists generally advocate. They have different ways of saying it.
Take a new angle. Pivot ninety degrees. Remember that the villain is the hero of his own story. Put yourself in her shoes.
I’ve tried putting myself in Amanda’s shoes before but it doesn’t work. I’m too literal. I can’t stop picturing her shoes, and how uncomfortable they must feel, and I never get to the emotional stuff.

Maybe I should just do what I would do if this were an ordinary day. Of course if it were ordinary Ma would be here. In the spring or
summer I’d go with her to the community garden first thing in the morning, before anyone else got there, but now it’s winter. If I didn’t have anything in particular I wanted to cook for breakfast, I’d stay in bed and open my laptop. I’d visit thirty-seven food blogs to check for updates, then five daily advice columns, and then nine cooking sites, and finally Kitcherati, which is my favorite. I like eGullet and Serious Eats but they both spend a lot of time talking about restaurants, and I only care about the cooking and not the eating, so Kitcherati is the best place for me.

They say you learn by doing, but you don’t have to. If you learn only from your own experience, you’re limited. By reading the Internet you can find out more. What grows in what season. The best way to strip an artichoke. What type of onions work best in French onion soup. Endless detail on any topic. You can learn from people who are experimenting with Swiss buttercream, or perfecting their gluten-free pumpernickel crackers, or taste-testing everything from caviar to frozen pizza to ginger ale. All of their failures keep you from having to fail in the same way.

I reach for my laptop, but then change my mind. Maybe I should do what Amanda suggests after all. If I’m organized when she gets here, maybe she’ll stop worrying about me. Then again, if she’s made up her mind to worry, there’s probably not much I can do to stop her.

The house is quiet but not silent. I get up out of bed and walk downstairs. The stairs creak just like I expect them to. A car goes by in the street with a soft whoosh like I expect it to. The morning light beams in through the skylight at the front of the stairs just like I expect it to. I stand on the second-floor landing and hug myself around the waist. It’s a big house. Everything feels large, and empty, and permanent, the same way it has forever.

I had just gotten used to living here in Ma and Dad’s absence, and now I need to get used to the idea that they’re not coming back. I can’t,
not yet. I can’t even believe that they’re gone. Maybe this means I am in denial, as the advice columns say. Maybe it just means they haven’t even been dead a week and they were plenty alive last time I saw them.

The night before they left I heard them talking. Ma said,
It’s not too late to stay.
Dad said,
I don’t want to stay. I want to go.
Ma said,
I worry about her.
Dad said,
Well, stop.
They went. Now they’re dead. I can’t believe that, but I also can’t process it.
Process
is a very popular advice column word. So is
issues.

Most of what I know about how to act and what constitutes psychological disaster, I’ve learned from advice columns. On some level I know this is absurd. It’s troubling to know I study the emotional range of humans as if I’m not one. But after a while you see patterns. Patterns help you figure things out. The columnist almost never says,
Do this.
Or,
That’s not normal.
Or,
Leave him.
She says,
Think about it.
She says,
Be clear about what you want.
Or she says,
There is no normal. There’s only what’s right for you, and being honest.

I like
There is no normal.
It appears several times in the Normal Book. But whether I am normal or not, whether my life is a good one or not, I know it isn’t my perception that matters. Ma’s did. Dad’s did. Amanda’s does. Really, my perception seems to matter less than everyone else’s, if it even matters at all.

Thinking of the Normal Book reminds me that Amanda’s coming over. If I’m unlucky, this Angelica person will too. There are a number of things I want to hide from my sister—the envelopes of cash, the food she threw out that I reclaimed—but above all I don’t want her to see the book.

I find the Normal Book on the floor of my room. I must have dropped it when I fell asleep. I look for a place Amanda won’t find it. Under my bed is too obvious. There are many nooks and crannies in my attic space, but there must be somewhere else more secret. I head downstairs to the library.

Midnight is curled up on Dad’s leather chair. I shoo her off. She sniffs a few things, investigates a few corners, and yawns ostentatiously.
Ostentatious
is one of my favorite words. I learned a lot of words when I was young by the same method. When I read a word I didn’t know, I looked it up in the dictionary. Then I learned whatever was on that page. When I first read the word
osteopath
in one of Dad’s medical books, I opened the dictionary to
osteopath
, and from that same page I learned
ostentatious
, and also
osso buco.
This worked well except for once. When I was ten, my mother slapped me for the first and only time, because I told her she was niggardly. It was on the same page with
Nietzsche
and
night-blindness.