I slam the back door and I beat it down the street toward the river and it’s August so it’s still light out but the sun is softer this time of day and I’m glad for that. I start trying to concentrate on Tina waiting for me and I want the light and I want it to be soft and I keep thinking about how she says I don’t have to talk and that makes me feel better and it makes me think that I’m right about Tina. And thinking that, I start to feel the eyes on me. I’m going along a street of shotguns that are like them twins you see in pictures that are joined at the hip and the stoops all have people sitting and catching the early-night sun and maybe a little breeze off the river and the men are smoking and the women are in their bare feet and they all are looking at me as I pass and they know the sight of me cause I been coming by here for a long time and they always say Hi.
So they know enough to see the difference in me. They know I got something on my mind now. They can see things like that. Most of them along here are black folks and Elvis had a special feel for them. They taught him his music. He always said that. And they know by just looking at me that I’m thinking about Tina. They smile at me and say, Evening, and I dip my head when they do because I don’t want them to think I don’t appreciate who they are but it makes me feel real funny this night because they’re right. I’m thinking of the looks she says she’s been giving me and I can see her eyes on me from across the classroom and they are flat blue and when they fix on me they don’t move, they always wait for me to turn away, and I always do, and now I think maybe she’s been seeing as much about me as these folks on the stoops. Maybe more. I think maybe when I show her who I am, she’ll just say real low, but in wonder, “I knew it all along.”
Then I’m past Pelican Liquors and the boarded up Piggly Wiggly and a bottle gang is shaping up for the evening on the next corner and they lift their paper bags to me and I just hurry on and I can see a containership slipping by at the far end of the street and I have to keep myself from running. I walk. I don’t want to be sweating a lot when I get there. I just walk. But walking makes my mind turn. Mama’s robe falls open and I look away as quick as I can but I see the center of her chest like you sometimes see the light after you turn it off, she comes out of her bedroom and her robe falls open and I see the hollow of her chest, nothing more, and when I turn away I can still see her chest and it’s naked white and I wonder why Elvis didn’t appear there. She could’ve kept her own secret then and known his too, and there wouldn’t never had to be nobody else involved in the whole thing.
I’m walking real slow now. I even stop. The ship has passed and it looks like the street up ahead just runs off into nothing. I can’t see the river. But I know it’s there and the warehouse is not far now and I hear a sound nearby and I leap a little inside and I turn and it ain’t nothing but an old hound up on its back legs trying to get into a trash can. I watch him for a long time and he turns his head once, one of his ears flopping over his nose, and then he goes on trying to get in, though it doesn’t look like he ever will.
And then I see that the light is starting to slip away and I better get on, if I’m going to do this thing. And I turn down the next street and I can see the river now and I follow it and the warehouse has a chain link fence as high as my house but it’s cut in a few places and I find Tina on the other side already and she sees me and she comes my way. She’s wearing a stretchy top with ruffles around the shoulders and her stomach’s bare and she’s in shorts and I haven’t seen her legs till now, not really, and they’re nice, I know that, they’re longer than I figured, and we both have our fingers curled through the fence links and we are nose to nose just about and she says, “Get on in here.”
I go in and she says “I was worried you wasn’t coming” and I find out I don’t have anything to say to that and she smiles like she’s remembering that she told me I don’t have to talk good. But I can tell she’s misunderstood that. I talk okay in my head. I just can’t let it out. She says, “I don’t know this place so well. Where should we go?”
I nod my head in the direction of the end of the warehouse, on the river side, and I feel a lock of my hair fall onto my forehead and we move off and the ground is uneven, rutted and grown over with witch grass and full of stones and pipes and glass, and she brushes against me again and again, keeping close, and I think to take her hand or put my arm around her, but I don’t. I want this to go slow. We walk and she’s saying how glad she is that I come, how she likes me and how she is really on her own more or less in her life and she has learned how to know who’s okay and who isn’t and I’m okay.
And I still don’t say anything and I couldn’t even if I wanted to because I’m shaking inside pretty bad and we enter the warehouse through a door that says danger on it and inside it’s dark but you can feel the place on your face and in your lungs, how big it is and how high, even though you can’t see real clear at this time of day, you just see the run of gray windows down the river side and dust hanging everywhere and there’s that wet and rotted smell but Tina says “Oh wow” and she presses against me and I let my arm go around her waist and her arm comes around mine and I take her into the manager’s office. The light’s still coming in clear in the room and there are some old mattresses and it doesn’t smell too good but a couple of the windows are punched open and it’s mostly the river smell and the smell of dust, which ain’t too bad, and I let go of Tina and cross to the window and I look at the water, just that. The river is empty at the moment and the last of the sun is scattered all over it and there’s this scrabbling in me, like Elvis goes way deeper there than my skin and he’s just woke up and is about to push himself out the center of my chest. I want to try to say something now. Not say. There’s words that want to come but it feels like a song or something. I try to slow myself down so I can do this right.
Then I turn around to look at Tina and she must have gotten herself ready for this too because as soon as I’m facing her where she’s standing in the slant of light, she strips off her top and her breasts are naked and I fall back a little against the window. It’s too fast. I’m not ready, I think. But she seems to be waiting for me to do something, and then I think: she knows. It’s time. So I drag my hand to the top button of my shirt and I undo it and then the next button and the next and I step aside a little, so the light will fall on me when I’m naked there and she circles so she can see me and then the last button is undone and I grasp the two sides and I can’t hardly breathe and then I pull open my shirt.
Tina’s eyes fall on the tattoo of Elvis and she gives it one quick look and she says “Oh cool” and then her eyes let go of me and she’s looking for the zipper on her shorts, and whatever I’m thinking will happen, it’s not that. It’s not that. The secret of me is naked before her and I know she can’t ever understand what it means, and then I know why Mama is naked so easy and why the face of Elvis didn’t come upon her, why it come upon me instead, it was already lost to her, and then I’m sliding away and the shirt is back on me before I hit the warehouse door and I don’t listen to the words that follow me but I’m stumbling over the uneven ground, trying to run, and I do run once I’m out the cut in the fence and I hear a voice in my head as I run and it’s my voice and it surprises me but I listen and it says, “Once there was a boy who was born with the face of a great king on his chest. The boy lived in a dark cave and no one ever saw this face on him. No one. And every night from deeper in the darkness of the cave, far from the boy but clear to his ears, a woman moaned and moaned and he did not understand what he was to do about it. She touched him only with her voice. Sometimes he thought this was the natural sound of the woman, the breath of the life she wished to live. Sometimes he thought she was in great pain. And he didn’t know what to do. And he didn’t know that the image that was upon him, that was part of his flesh, had a special power.”
Then I slow down and everything is real calm inside me, and I go up our stoop and in the front door and I go to the door of M
ama’s bedroom and I throw it open hard and it bangs and the jowly faced man jumps up from where he’s sitting in his underwear on Mama’s bed. She straightens up sharp where she’s propped against the headboard, half hid by the covers, and she’s got a slip on and I’m grateful for that. The man is standing there with his mouth gaping open and Mama looks at me and she knows right off what’s happened and she says to the man, “You go on now.” He looks at her real dumb and she says it again, firm. “Go on. It’s all over.” He starts picking up his clothes and Mama won’t take her eyes off mine and I don’t turn away, I look at her too, and then the man is gone and the house is quiet.
It’s just Mama and me and I have to lean against the door to keep from falling down.
“Woman Loses Cookie
Bake-Off, Sets Self on Fire”
The day my husband died, I baked a batch of cookies. Hold-Me-Tight Chocolate Squares. Bar cookies that took forever to eat, never going away no matter how long you chewed, sticking between your teeth and up into your gums and making your hands quake and your tongue feel like it was about to dissolve. I put in two cups of sugar. That was a different time in my life. The end of a time, and the only way I knew to enjoy it was in the terms I’d lived it. So I put in two cups of sugar and three cups of milk chocolate chips and ate the whole pan-full that night. I was still shaking from it three days later at the funeral and everybody thought it was grief.
Even Eva. Of course, she wouldn’t suspect it was anything else. Bless her heart. My friend Eva. She came up to me by the open coffin and she was smelling of lavender. She tried to make some lavender cookies once, its being her favorite smell outside of the kitchen. Lavender is in the mint family, after all, and I admire her now, thinking back, for trying that. She couldn’t possibly have had a real hope that lavender cookies would please her family. Or maybe she could. Still, her husband Wolf threw them across the room. She blamed herself.
So at the coffin she said, “My poor Gertie. I’m so sorry.” And she took my hands, which were having this sugar fit even then, and when she felt them, she rolled her eyes. “I know how you feel.”
Wolf had died almost a decade before. Barely turned sixty. Arteries stuffed full of her Butterball Supremes, I suspect. Not that she wanted it that way. At the time, I wept with her, thinking she was so dreadfully unlucky, thinking, Oh God, how could I bear this myself. But when the moment came for me, when Karl went all white in the face with my delft tureen in his hand at the dinner table and he put it gently down before pitching forward into the Wiener schnitzel, I began instantly to bear it, and my mind turned, as it so often has in my life, to cookies.
Of course Eva thought she knew how I felt. I can’t blame her. We’d spent the better part of forty years thinking we knew what each other felt. Most of my daughters were sitting in the funeral parlor at that very moment with stricken faces, and I figured I knew what they were feeling, though waiting now before one of a hundred electric ovens in the Louisville Fair and Exposition Center, waiting for our judgment at the Great American Cookie Bake-Off, I’m not so sure. Maybe I don’t know anything about anybody.
But Eva held my hand and she couldn’t even recognize what was really going on in me. We’d quaked like that together over our kitchen tables more than once, laughing at what we’d just done, baked a batch of cookies and eaten them all. We could do that together, our little unconscious thumb to the nose. But we’d go right back and make another batch before Wolf and Karl and our children came home. These sweet little things were for them, after all. First and foremost for them.
So when Eva held my hand by the coffin, I looked into her face and I felt scared. Both for my having this dreadful feeling of relief—that’s the only word I could find for what I was feeling about the death of the man I’d lived with for more than forty years—and for having this dear friend, my other self, so blind to what was really going on in me. I wanted to run away right then. Down the aisle of the funeral home and out into the street and home to my kitchen and I would bake more cookies—Peanut Butter Bouquets, those were the cookies in my head beside the coffin—I would make a batch of Peanut Butter Bouquets and I would eat them all and I wouldn’t even hear the clock ticking over the sink or the afternoon breeze humming in the gutters or the daytime TV coming from the open windows next door and I wouldn’t have to watch the laundry lifting on the line and snapping and falling and lifting again or the sun filling the empty lawn and then yielding to the shadow of our roof, sucked in by the shadow of our house like so much bright lint on the rug disappearing into the vacuum. Another sound. The vacuum. Roaring. And smelling like burnt rubber. My hands smelling of Lemon Joy. Or Lysol. Clean. Everything clean. Smelling clean. But all that was transformed by the turn my life had taken. I could bake cookies and sit and Karl would not be coming home that night and the girls were all in their own kitchens in various distant places and I would eat and eat and there would be no more batches to make unless I wanted to eat some more.
Eva expected me to be baking my Peanut Butter Bouquets in the Bake-Off today. Six months before Karl failed to finish his evening meal, she and I sat at her kitchen table and there was bright sun in the yard and sheets on the line—we neither of us liked the smell of the laundry when it came out of our electric dryers—and I could hear the sheets flapping. Eva and I sat at her kitchen table and there was a Good Housekeeping open between us and the full-page ad said that cookies were what made a house a home and now somebody was going to earn a hundred thousand dollars for baking her best cookies.
“Wouldn’t it be something to win that?” Eva said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Not that I need it. Wolf was so smart.”
That was apparently true. Eva’s life did not change in the slightest after he was gone. Like in the Bible the brother would marry the sister-in-law after she was widowed, Eva was married now to Wolf’s interest-bearing accounts. Even though there was just his money, she kept her house the same way she always had, and she slept alone on those sheets that always smelled of the sun and the fresh air. And I always admired her for this. With a great swelling of the chest and a catch in the throat, I would speak of Eva’s life to my other friends and my words would be full of admiration.
“You could do your Peanut Butter Bouquets,” she said.
“You should enter alone, Eva,” I said. “You win this year and I’ll win next.”
“It wouldn’t be like we’re competing,” she said, putting her hand on mine in the center of her tabletop. “We’ll root for each other. I want to do this with you.”
So we sent in our recipes and on the same Tuesday afternoon, Eva and I got our letters. I was sitting at my kitchen table and I always worked my way down the pile of mail one thing at a time. So after seeing what Lillian Vernon and Harriet Carter had to offer, considering for about the hundredth time buying 20,000-hour lightbulbs, I found the notice from the contest sponsors. I read how they congratulated me warmly, Mrs. Gertrude Schmidt, and were looking forward to my joining ninety-nine other cookie bakers in Louisville in the fall and they said that my wonderful Peanut Butter Bouquet recipe qualified me, but if I wanted to invent something brand new, I could do any cookie I wanted at the final bake-off. Once they had their special one hundred, they liked surprises. You could use anything you wanted in your recipe as long as you greased your pan with their brand of no-stick aerosol cooking spray. Sincerely yours. Then the phone rang and it was Eva and she was weeping with excitement.
“I will do something new,” she said.
“But I like your Butterball Supremes,” I said. “They were Wolf’s favorites.”
She was silent for a long moment, and I was afraid I’d just made her sad, bringing up Wolf like that. I punched my forehead with the heel of my hand and waited out her silence. Then she said, thoughtfully, without any throb of pain, “Do you think it should be like a tribute?”
“No, no. I was wrong. Do so
mething new. That’d be fun.”
“You think so?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll pretend he’s alive and bake the cookie of his dreams.”
At the time, this notion touched me. Now it makes me sick to my stomach. Eva was assigned the oven next to mine this morning and she’s been baking for him, every moment. When we began, we all stood before our ovens, the auditorium so quiet I expected to hear sheets flapping somewhere, and our preparation tables were behind us and I glanced at Eva and her face was lowered and there was another face beyond hers and another and another stretching far away, all of us waiting to do our life’s work, and I looked again at Eva and she was thinking about Wolf, I knew, and she was trying to ignore me, it had come to that, and I should have been ignoring her too, but there we were, and on the day we learned that we’d made the bake-off finals, my own husband was still very much alive. “Yes,” I said to Eva. “I’m sure Wolf’s spirit is still somewhere there in your kitchen. Make the cookie of his ghostly dreams.”
I don’t know what came over me to say that. I think I wanted to reassure her that he was still present in her life or something. But I said it badly, and she took this idea with a long moment of silence and then she said, “Yes.” She said it with a throb of resolve in her voice and we hung up.
I sat for a while, thinking about breaking the news to Karl.
And it wasn’t just the sounds of this place or all the minute things I saw every day of my life or the smell of my hands or my sheets or my upholstery that were mixing in my head and heating up and getting ready to pop out of the oven when eventually Karl pitched forward into his food. It was him too. It was him. It was me sitting there and not knowing how to say to him that there was actually a reason for me to go to Louisville, Kentucky, and try to do something. Damn my misguided Eva, I thought. It was a sweet “damn” that I spoke in my head, sweet and with an arm around her, but damn her for the whole idea, I thought. I shouldn’t have to be facing this fact about my husband. I shouldn’t have to be sitting at my kitchen table trying to figure out—with a quake in my hands that wasn’t from too much sugar—how to talk to my husband about cookies that weren’t for him. And I wasn’t coming up with any answers.
Tabloid Dreams Page 5