Yes, I thought. I need a sister. I need my Baby Girl.
“How about cookie cutters?” I said. “Small metal objects that are useful as well as beautiful.”
Tamar has a small cheesecloth bag of cookie cutters in our junk drawer at home. We don’t use them. We don’t make cookies. Tamar doesn’t believe in sweet things. She has a streak of asceticism in her. She would not admit to it, but she does. If they do it the way it should be done, monks and nuns are ascetics. They live alone in cells. Absolutely bare. Stripped of everything worldly, which means anything colorful, anything frivolous, anything that is not essential to the sustainment of life. If they do it right, monks and nuns go to sleep on hard cots with one blanket in a cell that has one cross hanging on the wall, preferably at the head of their narrow single bed with its one, scratchy, thin, brown, wool blanket, similar to the kind of scrap of horse blanket that the young Georg Kominsky slept with in solitary confinement.
Our small cheesecloth bag of metal cookie cutters contains a bell, a heart, and a star. That’s it. You can’t get much more basic than that. To my knowledge, they have never been used. The most sugar the antisugar Tamar allows is a teaspoonful on her Cheerios. She’s a thin woman, Tamar. Some might call her scrawny.
The old man saw possibility. The old man saw potential in things that I could not. Tinfoil, for instance. A person like the person I used to be would rip off just enough tinfoil to wrap the leftover with, wrap it, and stick it in the refrigerator. But the old man made tinfoil swans out of his leftovers.
“That’s a waste of good tinfoil,” Tamar said the one time I tried to make something pretty out of two leftover boiled potatoes at home.
I was not doing a good job of it. I tried for a swan first, but that didn’t work. Then I tried for a heart shape, but it was lopsided, so I settled for a roll with twisted tinfoil tails.
“It’s an abstract sculpture,” I said.
“It’s an abstract waste,” she said.
If I had tried to argue with Tamar about the tinfoil abstract sculpture, I would have said that my abstract sculpture was useful because it protected the boiled potatoes. And that it was beautiful because it was an abstract sculpture. The waste of a few square inches of tinfoil is secondary to the beauty. That’s what I would have said, had I tried to argue with Tamar. But the fact is, she’s unarguable.
It is not common to find, for example, beautiful cookie cutters set out in the trash. Instead, the old man and I used to find pre–cookie cutters: strips of thin scrap metal behind the service station, for example, or old tin milk crates stacked up behind the Sterns Co-op. The old man had the eye. He could tell what had the potential to become a cookie cutter and what had a different destiny. I could see his eyes going from one trash pile to another. He looked and he kept on looking. Then he would pick something up and put it in the Jewell’s bag.
“This has possibility,” he said.
Or he said nothing.
There was an abundance of plastic bags that particular night. Thin, filmy plastic bags, the kind you put vegetables in at Jewell’s. They were blowing around the trailer park. Patches of white on branches. One puffed up at me like a ghost.
“Why are there so many plastic bags blowing around here?” I asked.
The old man didn’t answer. It wasn’t a question that demanded an answer anyway. Some questions demand answers; others are rhetorical. I decided to ask a series of rhetorical questions.
“Rhetorical question number one: Why do people choose to let their plastic bags blow around in the wind? Two, would it kill them to put their vegetables all in one brown paper bag instead of a series of plastic bags, one vegetable species in each? Three, do these plastic bag people ever stop to think about the ten thousand years it takes a plastic bag to degrade?”
“Clara,” the old man said.
That’s all he said. What he meant was: quiet down, please.
I quieted down. We walked up Route 365 into the village of Sterns. Jewell’s Grocery was closed, as was Crystal’s Diner. The old man spotted a big olive oil can behind Crystal’s. There was a picture of Italian hills and an olive tree on the front of the can. It had a big dent. I once remarked on the greenness of the oil I was observing Crystal mix with vinegar.
“That’s because it’s pure olive oil,” Crystal said. “I use it because my grandmother was 1/16 Greek. That’s the only part of me that’s not Polack, the 1/64 of me that’s Greek.”
“That’s one of Crystal’s olive oil cans,” I said. “Someone ran over it, looks like.”
The old man nodded. He turned it around in his hands, looking at it from all angles. I could tell he was considering. He was mulling over the possibilities in his mind.
“I can see the wheels turning,” I said. “Get it?”
“This has possibility,” he said.
When he said that, I took the dented olive oil can and studied it myself, for the possibility. I’m training my eye. It’s slow going.
The old man: Dented olive oil can = pre–cookie cutter.
Me: Dented olive oil can = ?
You have to look closely. You have to concentrate. You have to have the ability to see another destiny for something, a fate far removed from its original one. That’s what the old man was good at.
“Okay,” I said.
I never disagreed with the old man. You’re not allowed to argue or disagree when you’re an apprentice. You have to have the utmost faith that the master knows full well what he is doing. All things will be revealed to the apprentice in the fullness of time.
The old man held the dented olive oil can in one hand and we walked back to his trailer. The lady two trailers down looked out her window when we passed. She didn’t wave. She never waved. Many was the time I considered giving up waving at her, but I kept on. You never know. There may come a time.
The old man washed the can with soap and water and got his tin snips. We sat down at the table and he snipped the can open down each side. He set the dented side apart and laid the others out before us. I watched everything he did. I used to observe every move the old man made when he worked on something. That’s how apprentices learn. That’s how Paul Revere became the silversmith he was, back in the colonial days. First he was an apprentice, then he was a journeyman, then he was a master.
“Tamar will be here in twenty minutes,” I said.
“All right,” he said.
The old man tilted his head and studied the pieces of tin. He studied tin, and I studied him. His tin snips lay on the table. That, and his solder iron, were the only two things he brought with him from his country that doesn’t exist anymore. They were the only things that stayed with him to the end.
The old man also had a small forge. He kept the forge, along with a vise, in back of his trailer, on the patch of land that ran along Nine Mile Creek. That way the smoke didn’t bother anyone. When the old man wanted to do some blacksmithing, he used his forge. I used to sit on the bank of Nine Mile Creek and watch the smoke spiral up into the air.
The old man bought the forge and the vise at an auction in North Sterns. Mr. Jewell drove him up there. I know that because I once overheard Mr. Jewell ask the old man how the forge was holding up.
“Good,” the old man said.
“The vise too?”
“The vise too.”
Later I asked Mr. Jewell how he knew about the forge and the vise.
“Because, Miss Clara Winter, I drove him up to the auction where he bought them,” Mr. Jewell said.
After the old man was gone, I found an old Sears Roebuck catalogue at the Back of the Barn Antiques on Route 12 north of Remsen. I went there with Tamar once, so she could visit her friend who works there. Tamar’s friend owns a bird who sits on her shoulder all day long. The bird is silent. It is neither a talking nor a singing bird. For a while I thought it was a clip-on bird. That was before it blinked its eye at me and yawned.
In the catalogue there was a picture of a forge and a vise that looked like the old man’s forge
and vise. Here is the description of the forge from the Sears, Roebuck & Co., Cheapest Supply House on Earth, Chicago, Catalogue No. 111, page 613:
The Forge. We furnish a lever forge having hearth 18 inches in diameter. It is furnished with 6-inch fan. The gear is the simplest, strongest and best ever put on a forge. Only a slight movement of the lever produces the strongest blast.
The Vise. We furnish a wrought iron solid box and screw blacksmith vise, with steel jaws, weighing 35 pounds.
The vise and the forge came with a complete set of tools, and altogether the complete set cost $25. I asked Mr. Jewell how much the old man had paid for his forge and vise at the auction.
“I wouldn’t know, Miss Clara,” he said. “Why do you ask?”
The old man had been gone for months by then.
Why did I ask? I wouldn’t know.
Next time I went to the old man’s, on a Saturday afternoon, the tin-snipped pieces of olive oil can had disappeared from the table. The old man had screwed in large cup hooks all along the top of the far kitchen window frame. Hanging on the hooks were new cookie cutters. If you looked closely, and if you had personal knowledge of their previous life as a dented olive oil can, you might be able to tell that what were now cookie cutters had once been broken pieces of metal.
The olive oil can had been reincarnated as objects of light. One was in the shape of a decorative tin lantern, another was a candelier, another was a candlestick with a cutout of a burning candle in it.
“But soft!” I said. “What light from yonder window breaks? It is the east, and cookie cutters are the sun.”
The old man smiled.
“Juliet,” he said. “Juliet is the sun.”
Did the old man listen to Shakespeare in his own language, back in his country that doesn’t exist anymore? Is it possible that in his small village, there was a troupe of traveling actors who passed through the countryside every year, performing a different Shakespearean play each time? Is it possible that the old man loved the poetry of William Shakespeare and never missed a performance? Did he crouch as a small boy behind the cloth-curtained stage of the traveling troupe and absorb every word they spoke so that the language of Shakespeare became part of every fiber of his being?
I will never know.
I studied the former olive oil can carefully. This is something you must do when you’re an apprentice. You must look at all finished objects with the knowledge that they came from something unfinished, something in an unbegun state. You need to consider all their states of being, all their transformations.
Each cutter had been created in the image of something that already existed: a lantern, a candelier, a candlestick. There was a theme to all three cookie cutters: they were all objects of light, they were all objects that had been most often used in a previous era, they were all objects most often constructed of tin.
The old man wanted me to learn how to find consistency. That was why he taught me by example. That is what it means to be an apprentice to the art of possibility.
A breeze gusted through the trailer and set the cookie cutters jostling and tinkling together. The noise that the cookie cutters made was like the noise of a thousand soda can tops strung together with string and shaken gently. Sunlight glinted off the metal. It was the same kind of beauty that you see in a sunshower, light broken to shards through rain.
Shards. How I love that word.
“There was a time,” the old man said, “when most cookies were made with cutters.”
The drop cookie is a modern invention, according to the old man. Cookies used to take time and care. They were not beaten together and immediately dropped onto a metal sheet and baked. They were not patted into a pan and called bar cookies. They were mixed, chilled, rolled, formed, cut, baked, dipped, powdered, sprinkled, iced, decorated. They were delicately sugared and a trifle brown around the edges. They were thin, not thick.
“Lemon peel,” the old man said. “Always put lemon peel in your sugar cookies.”
You wouldn’t think that the old man would have known that much about baking. To look at his Jewell’s shopping list you would never have guessed that the old man was a master cookie baker.
It’s possible that the old man once baked sugar cookies with lemon peel for someone he loved, back when he lived in his country that doesn’t exist anymore.
Did Tamar ever do anything like that?
I could come right out and ask Tamar some of my answer-demanding questions, such as, “Did you ever bake cookies for someone you once loved, such as my father? What is my father’s name? Where did you meet him? Where is he now? Did he love you, and did you love him more than words can say?”
But I don’t.
“How did you get pregnant?” is what I ask.
Tamar doesn’t mind questions that sound scientific. She likes science, except when it runs amok as in the case of margarine.
“In the usual way,” Tamar said.
Tamar knew what I was really asking. I was asking about my father. I was asking about love.
I should have asked the old man.
There’s a chance that when the old man was seventeen and still living in his village that doesn’t exist anymore, he fell in love. People grew up fast in the olden days. By ten you could be considered close to an adult. When the old man was a young man, fifteen or sixteen, did he meet a girl? Was she a girl that he had grown up with but had never noticed until she was a young woman with brown curls and he was a young man?
He saw her one day, walking down the road in the spring wearing a dress with yellow flowers printed on it, running upstairs to the stone house above the bakery where she lived with her family.
She was a graceful girl. She was singing, or humming, as she ran up the stairs. She was wearing brown leather sandals. The smell of yeast rising in the bakery below her home came to the young man’s nose, and he breathed in and watched her run and listened to her humming.
Did the old man foreverafter associate the smell of baking bread with the image of a pretty, running girl?
When she got to the top of the stairs the young girl sensed something, and turned around, and saw the old-man-as-a-young-man. She met his brown eyes with her own. She looked right back at him. She knew his name.
She whispered it to herself: Georg.
She smoothed the skirt of her dress with the yellow flowers printed on it. She was just about to push open the door of her home—her mother had left it ajar for her—and her hand was suspended in the air while she gazed back at the young man. She stared for a moment, maybe two seconds, then laughed and pushed her hand at the air and opened the heavy wooden door and disappeared. The old man stared for a few minutes more and said her name to himself.
What was her name?
Was it Juliet?
Juliet, he might have thought. The sound of her name, unspoken, hung in the invisible air before him. Juliet, Juliet, Juliet.
Did the young Georg make cookie cutters for Juliet? Did he make her beautiful objects that were also useful? Did he bake sugar cookies for her and teach her the secret of adding lemon peel to the batter?
When I first met the old man I dreamed up a life for him, back in his country that doesn’t exist anymore. His father, his mother, his younger brother Eli, all of them living together in their warm thatched hut, cornmeal mush or hot gruel for breakfast, a black iron pot of stew for dinner, the mother beating clothes white against the rocks, the father teaching his sons the art of the forge, how to turn heated metal into objects of use and beauty. I dreamed of the old man as a hero, rescuing tiny babies from floodwater, surviving ten years of unjustly sentenced solitary confinement.
Before he was gone I learned more about the old man’s real life, but not all. You can’t ever know all there is to know about a life. There will be gaps.
There may well have been a girl named Juliet. It’s possible. She may have lived and breathed in the old man’s village. The first time the old man ever saw that girl, she may have been runnin
g up the steps above the bakery, wearing a dress printed with tiny yellow flowers. Maybe the old man never forgot the sight. Maybe the old man thought of her every day of his life. He might have loved her more than words can say.
My only hope is that she loved him, too.
Chapter Eight
One day last fall Tiny pulled up to CJ’s trailer just as CJ’s white Camaro screeched off the road, up over the grass, and around the bus. The top was down. There was a man in a red flannel shirt behind the wheel. He gave Tiny the finger.
“Jesus H Christ,” Tiny said.
I looked over at CJ. There was a look on his face.
“Who’s that driving your car, CJ—your dad?” one of the North Sterns boys said.
“Yeah, is that the famous Chucky Luck?”
“No that ain’t my dad,” CJ said. “I told you about my dad. Does that guy out there look like a professional wrestler to you?”
The boys looked out the window.
“I guess not.”
“Well there’s your answer,” CJ said.
“How about your mother? Is she a professional wrestler too?” one of the boys said.
Everyone was quiet. No one talks about CJ’s mother. CJ Wilson’s mother has never been seen that I know of. Were it not a law of nature, you might wonder if CJ even has a mother. CJ looked at the boy who asked the question. The boy looked right back at him.
“I’m asking about your mother, CJ.”
CJ turned around and pointed to me.
“And I’m asking about Wipe’s father. Wipe? Where’s your father at?”
All the boys turned and looked at me. The boy who asked about CJ’s mother laughed.
“Maybe he ran off with CJ’s mother.”
“Yeah. CJ’s mother and Wipe’s father!”
CJ looked at me while the boys laughed. Didn’t say a word.
There must have been something CJ’s mother loved about CJ’s father. There must have been something Tamar saw in my father, something she loved, even though she won’t talk about him. CJ may well wonder about his mother the way I wonder about my father and grandfather.
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