One Hundred Spaghetti Strings

by Jen Nails

  “Um,” said Nina, “what are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about me coming back here,” he said as he stood up and went to the fridge. “I want this to work out. I need this to work out. What can I do to make this work out?” he asked as he twisted the top off a bottle.

  “Okay,” said Nina. “You asked.” She counted on her fingers. “Number one: stop being a loser. Number two: get a real job. Number three: don’t drink all that beer. Number four: Mom . . .”

  “Nina, that’s not any way to talk to—”

  “Don’t tell me what way to talk to you. You were gone for—”

  “Nina, shut up,” said Dad.

  “You shut up,” she shouted. “I hate you, Dad. I really hate you.” She ran upstairs.

  Dad stood by the fridge, drinking his beer in these long, steady gulps.

  Dad, I know what you mean about having no idea how to be around us.

  He pulled another bottle out of the fridge and walked to the door.

  We have no idea how to be around you, too.

  The chicken Parmesan and I watched as he grabbed his keys, turned the knob, and disappeared. Why was it so hard for me to say anything? I wished I could have my words prerecorded or precooked like tonight’s chicken. Then I’d just open them up, take them out, and serve them to whoever I needed to talk to—no big, messy kitchen full of measuring cups and sauce stains and flour spills.

  I went up to Nina’s room and knocked. She didn’t answer. I knocked again, louder.

  “What,” she said. I could barely hear her.

  “Can I come in?” I called.

  “Fine,” she said. I opened the door and peeked in. She was in the dark, sitting on her bed. I just stood in the doorway.

  “What,” she said.

  “He left,” I said. “He’s not here.”

  She fell onto her back.

  “I don’t care,” she said. “Good.”

  “But what are we gonna do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Just go to bed.”

  “Should we call Gina?”

  “She doesn’t care.”

  “Yeah, she does.”

  “Call her.” She turned onto her side and reached up to click on her lamp. “Close the door, please.”

  “But . . .”

  “Stef, just leave me alone,” she said very quietly.

  “But, can’t I just—”

  “Leave,” she yelled. And this ballet shoe snow globe came flying at me but smashed against the wall and shattered. A dark, wet spot started to grow on the carpet where the pieces landed.

  “Get out!” she shouted.

  “Fine!” I said.

  She got up off the bed and straddle-walked around the broken bits of glass and water and pushed the door closed almost on my face.

  I walked straight down the hall toward Dad’s room. I barged in and opened a dresser drawer. Pants. I opened another drawer. Shirts. He had actually unpacked stuff. Socks. A few pairs of shoes and even some shirts hanging in the closet. Near the crumpled bedspread that lay at the foot of the bed I sat down. I noticed the trumpet case standing in the corner.

  Even though we talked to Auntie Gina often on the phone and went to dinners over there, she was so busy and far away in her new life. I wanted her here, now, and I wanted to tell her everything, but I just couldn’t even imagine saying the words. Plus, I had been trying to not need her since September.

  Something Big at Sausage-and-Pepper Night

  In the days leading up to winter break, it was weird trying to act normal. It was a pushing-down feeling, the way you shoved down Jack in a jack-in-the-box. There were stiff springs fighting you as you pushed, but you just pushed harder.

  Waking up each morning to Dad at the table with his coffee. Like nothing happened, like he didn’t come home late the night of Kitchen Sink, like he didn’t tell Nina to shut up and then leave the house. Riding bikes with Nina to school. Like nothing happened, like she didn’t lie about what Mom said, like she didn’t throw the cereal bowl and the snow globe.

  There were lots of things to keep me busy, thank goodness. Some annoying, some fun. Annoying: that dumb outline for the autobiography was hanging over me. Fun: me and Lisa made caramel corn one day after school for the holiday party (we made a whole extra batch for Principal Schmitz-Brady). Lisa spent the night the weekend before the break. I had to get in as much Lisa time as I could, because she would be gone the whole break visiting her cousins in Portland. Also fun was the Faculty Kazoo Concert, and then on the first Saturday of break, after Dad went to work, me and Nina and Auntie Gina and Harry decorated the living room.

  Last year’s pine smell poured from the Christmas boxes. There were the blue bulbs and my construction paper stocking that said STEF in glitter. Tinsel and old candy canes. This big stuffed Santa that Mom knitted one year when I was really little—I don’t remember Christmas without it. Just like I don’t remember Mom anywhere but in the Place.

  I was glad Dad wasn’t there, because it was hard to imagine him hanging tinsel and singing along to Frank Sinatra’s holiday hits, but I also didn’t know how it’d ever truly feel right in me that this was my family if we could never be in the same places at the same times.

  Auntie Gina was all giggling, and she was even wearing eye makeup. While Harry and Nina were wrapping the lights around the tree, me and Auntie Gina were in the kitchen getting dinner ready. I let myself forget that at the end of it she would go back home and we would be here with Dad, not knowing how he’d be when he walked in the door.

  But for now, rolling up cooked sausages in pizza dough for sausage-and-pepper rolls made me feel like everything was okay. When there was flour on my forearms and olive oil on my fingers, and when the kitchen counter was all cluttered up with the cutting board and the pepper stems and the empty pizza-dough bags and the spices, there were words right in my mouth ready to say. I thought I would tell Auntie Gina about Dad. Nina hadn’t said anything, because maybe she thought she might get in trouble. So I’d open my mouth, and I’d tell. Yeah. Not on Nina, just about Dad. It felt like it would be okay to do that.

  But then right after we put the sausage rolls in the oven, Auntie Gina said she had something to tell us. Something big. She said to sit down. Before I even had the chance to get nervous, she blurted it out.

  “Harry and I . . . are getting married!”

  They were there, standing and holding hands by the tree and waiting for us to be happy, and there was the one you left part of me and the other it’s Christmastime part of me, and both parts were trying to win, and I couldn’t even make my lips or my face move.

  “And we want both of you guys to be bridesmaids in the wedding, and Steffy, we would love it if you would bake our cake for us. If you would like to. If it wouldn’t be too much. Would you? Like to?”

  She got into her purse and pulled out two magazines with cakes on the covers and offered them to me. I took them and nodded. Nina was off the couch and hugging Harry and then jumping up and down with Auntie Gina and looking at the ring. A purple stone set in this old-fashioned flowery silver band. I hadn’t even noticed it.

  She said they were going to New York for Christmas this year because Harry’s grandmother was still hanging on and there were some more relatives who would be there from Korea. Nina was saying stuff about the dress and how Auntie Gina would do her hair. I forced out congratulations.

  She would be in New York for Christmas. She would be gone again. She kept leaving again and again and again in different ways. After they left that night and Dad was home and we were in our rooms, I shoved the cake magazines to the back of my closet.

  Gnocchi with Nina

  We usually had spaghetti on Christmas, but this year I was making gnocchi. And for the very first time it would be just me, Nina, and Dad for dinner. Auntie Gina was making new traditions, so we had to, too.

  I got up early. On Christmas morning when we were little, we’d run into Auntie Gina’s room and she’d w
alk out yawning in her robe and we’d scream when we saw the presents from Santa.

  We’d exchanged gifts with Auntie Gina before she left. I loved my gift card to the Extra Ingredient, this fancy kitcheny store, and all my new clothes and shoes and the cookbooks and the cake pans. But I would rather have had her there for Christmas and nothing under the tree than woken up that morning to those presents in a quiet house.

  After turning the TV on to holiday cartoons (but keeping the volume on low so I didn’t wake anybody), I got out the mashed potatoes that I’d made the night before and dumped them into a bowl. I scooped in flour and mixed. I sprinkled in some salt. I had never made this by myself before, but Auntie Gina was in New York without us, and what else was I going to do? It was Christmas. Nina didn’t cook much, and I’d only ever seen Dad make coffee and toast. Plus, I’d watched and helped Auntie Gina make pasta a thousand times, so I guessed I’d just somehow figure it out.

  I added the eggs and started kneading. The dough was all hard, though, and I remembered a tip Auntie Gina once said: if you’re having trouble with dough, add a little water to help combine the ingredients. I did this, and it got a little easier. I thought of her thick fingers in the dough, her hands rhythmically folding, rolling, pressing, folding, rolling, pressing, like it was the easiest thing in the world to do. Her drinking coffee from one of the Christmas mugs, the three of us settling on the couch later in the morning for presents.

  Kneading turned out to be really hard, and there came a point when I wanted to throw the dough in the trash and start over. When I felt like it was going all wrong, like I couldn’t handle it because it was too thick and sticky to do anything with. I felt like that fat, blobby, scrappy dough was my life. Like I couldn’t control it or make it right, how it was supposed to be.

  Nina came down, yawning.

  “Merry Christmas, Steffy,” she said.

  “Merry Christmas.”

  She was smiling and rubbing her eyes. “Mmmm,” she said, looking at the dough. Her just saying that made me determined. There were all these nooks and craters in the dough, and it looked messy like the moon. While Nina made me a waffle, I just kept kneading. Finally, after what felt like four hours, I got it into a whole ball with not too many creases and crevices.

  “Is it ready to cleesh?” asked Nina.

  “I think so,” I said. “Finally.” I fell into a chair and wiped my forehead.

  “You need a Pop-Tart,” said Nina.

  “I do,” I said. My wrists were sore, and my fingers were throbbing. But I did it. I took those three separate ingredients (flour, eggs, and mashed potatoes) and joined them into this one big ball of dough.

  After a frosted blueberry Pop-Tart, it was time to rub a little olive oil on the dough and then put it under a bowl for thirty minutes to cleesh. I don’t know where the word really came from. Auntie Gina said it all the time about recipes, how the ingredients had to cleesh: to allow everything to fully marry up and come together.

  We watched some of A Christmas Story for a little bit, one of our very, very favorite movies of all time. Then it was time to get back to the dough. We could really tell a difference after it cleeshed: it just felt like Play-Doh when it was all fresh and you took it out of the little canister for the first time.

  I cut off a small slab, flattened it out with a rolling pin, and sliced it into long strips. Nina sat at the table with me while I did this, and after I sliced, she cut up the strips into little squares. Then we schweeted. That was another one of Auntie Gina’s words. You just pressed into each piece with your finger and kind of pulled it toward you, like you were trying to wipe a little stain off the table with one swoop, only there’s a gnocchi between your finger and the table. For each time we did it, we said, “Schweet.” We just did. After a while, you could get into a rhythm and schweet pretty fast. Even though it took over an hour to do all the dough, we were doing it together. Me and Nina were laughing so hard at each other because when we would say “Schweet,” we would try and say it in the weirdest, highest, or lowest voice each time, and one time Nina made me put down the knife because I was laughing so hard. It ended up being one of the best Christmas mornings.

  “Nina,” I said. I opened my mouth, and just air came out. “I have this dumb project for Mrs. Ashton.”

  “The autobiography?” she said, wiping flour into the trash can with a paper towel.

  “Yes!”

  “Yeah, we did that in fifth grade. I liked it. Gina wrote me my letter, I remember.”

  “She did?”

  “Yeah, are you gonna ask her to write yours?”

  “I don’t know. I was gonna—ask you to.”

  “I’m not asking Gina for you.”

  “No, I was gonna ask you—to write it for me.”

  “I can’t write your letter for you, as Gina.”

  “Nina,” I said, laughing now. “I wanted you to write it for me, as you.”

  “Oooooh,” she said. We looked right at each other. She put her arm around me for a second. “Yeah. Sure.”

  We scrubbed the rest of the flour off the table. That was done, finally. And so were the gnocchi. Right when we had gotten the kitchen back to normal, the doorbell rang, which scared me for some reason. Nina put her ear to the door and said, “Who is it?” and a voice said, “Your daddy’s friend Carol.” Nina looked at me. “From Thanksgiving,” said the voice. I raised my eyebrows, and Nina opened the door and then the screen door and invited her in.

  “Merry Christmas,” she said. We said it back, and she handed us a paper plate covered with tinfoil. “Baked you guys muffins.”

  “Oh, thanks,” I said, taking them and putting them on the counter.

  “They’re gonna be nothing compared to what you can do in the kitchen,” she said to me.

  “You haven’t tasted everything I’ve done in the kitchen,” I said. She smiled.

  She said she’d walk us to church to meet Jean Sawyer for our ride to Mom’s, because Dad was still asleep and nobody wanted to go wake him up. Carol said she had choir practice at the church this morning anyway.

  Choir practice?

  I loaded up my backpack with the gifts me and Nina had picked out for Mom and Helen, and headed out with her and Carol. I couldn’t think of anything to say on the way—there was too much going through my head. Was Carol Dad’s girlfriend or something?

  I thought back to meeting her at Thanksgiving dinner. How she had brought over those loaves for making garlic bread, how I had liked that so much. How she didn’t get mad when I spilled gravy on her pants. How she’d brought us muffins that morning. Truth was, I liked Carol. But if I liked Carol, would that make me against Mom?

  While I was trying to make sense of all this, Nina was finding things to ask her about. Where she was from (Charlotte), and if she ever went to Greensboro Grasshoppers games like we did in the summer (yes). Carol asked us how school was and we said fine, and she asked us how Dad was and we said fine, and then no one said anything until we got to St. Theresa’s.

  It was pretty empty except for the lady in the office because it was between masses. After we said thank you to Carol, she headed down to the basement for choir practice. A couple other people were coming into the vestibule and then going down, too. It seemed strange that they had practice on Christmas.

  Choir practice.

  Was Dad in the choir?

  Had Carol come over looking for Dad so they could go to choir practice together? I just couldn’t imagine that. I couldn’t imagine that at all. But maybe. He did play the trumpet—he was a music person, so maybe he could sing, too. But why wouldn’t he tell us he was in the choir? Something felt fishy. I definitely couldn’t imagine Carol in a choir. For one thing, her voice was all scratchy, and it sounded like sandpaper when she spoke, maybe from all the smoking. So I couldn’t imagine her singing voice sounding that pretty.

  There wasn’t enough time to wonder about it right then. We got in the car with Jean and ate hunks of this coffee cake that she
had baked. Still warm. And perfect.

  “Jean, why can’t we hire you to be our personal chef?” said Nina.

  “Mmmm-hmmm,” I said, through a mouthful of cake.

  “I don’t think I’m anywhere near the chef that Steffy is,” she said, winking at me in the rearview mirror.

  At the Place, hallway D was all decorated with tinsel and cutout candy canes and stockings, and the rec room tree was blinking with tiny white lights.

  “Hey there,” said Helen, tipping her Santa hat to us. “Merry Christmas, ladies. Your two girls,” she told our mom.

  Mom stood up from the couch and hugged each of us hard. We gave her kisses and sat on either side of her on the couch. Right when we got comfortable, me and Nina looked at each other. There were the real bad days, and when the smell of Mom hit us, we knew this was one of them. She was all wet down in front.

  “Mom,” Nina said, “let me help you to the bathroom.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Listen to this, girls,” she said. “The letters are L, U, E, and Y. The clue is, ‘smoldering on the holiday fire.’” A newspaper tear-off was on a magazine that sat in her lap. She chewed her eraser.

  “Yule,” said Nina.

  “Yule!” Mom said, and she started erasing. We watched her erase and erase and erase what she had written, and the newspaper got thinner and thinner and thinner and started to get a hole in it. “Damn it,” she said. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.” Then Mom said a bad word that I’d never ever heard her say before. Me and Nina looked at each other.

  “Mom,” said Nina, standing up and holding out her hand. “Come on.”

  “No,” she said. She wiped her eyes and threw the pencil.

  Helen was right there in a second. “Come now,” she said. “Put it down for now. Put it down.” She took the magazine and word scramble from my mom and picked up the pencil. “It’s okay. Girls, this morning your mama played ‘Let There Be Peace on Earth’ from memory.”

  We said all the “good job” stuff we’re supposed to say. Helen knelt in front of Mom.