by Jen Nails
Oh my gosh, I remembered these. Somewhere, sometime so long ago, I remembered a platter of them: small puffy cookies with pink icing on the ones shaped like an S and white icing on the ones shaped like an O. And my grandma, my mom and Auntie Gina’s mom, in a dark-blue dress and an apron and glasses and hair in a bun. The shaky handwriting was probably hers, my grandma’s, because it didn’t match the recipes my mom had written.
There were so many things I could do for Auntie Gina’s wedding. I wanted to make her the best thing that she and Harry wanted though. I knew Harry was a carrot cake freak, but not everyone liked carrot cake. And Auntie Gina had given me these magazines to give me an idea of what she might want. I figured I’d maybe do a batch of either pizza frittas or S’s and O’s, for tradition, and a cake with a bunch of layers of different flavors.
Layer cakes always made me think of commercials where the daughter licked frosting off her mom’s finger. But I had always licked frosting off Auntie Gina’s finger. I could never see myself licking frosting off Dad’s finger, I didn’t think. Maybe I was too old for licking frosting off someone’s finger anyway, whether it was a mom or an aunt or a dad. Since Dad had come, I had been getting used to giving myself my own cooking tips, deciding on my own what was for dinner, licking frosting off my own fingers.
A few days after I won, on Wednesday after school, Dad took me on the bus to the Extra Ingredient, and he let me spend twenty dollars on anything I wanted because he said it was payday.
We walked down the kitchen utensil aisle slowly, because I wanted to get a look at everything they had. Stainless steel was the theme, and it was all beautiful stuff. Power blenders and cookie cutters and wire whisks and pie tins and anything you could ever think of for your kitchen.
“I’m selfishly hoping you’ll do some practice cakes for your aunt’s wedding, you know,” he said.
I giggled and could feel my face going hot. I just nodded. It was the first time me and Dad had gone alone together somewhere since I could ever remember. We didn’t have enough for the power blender itself, but I got these way-cool smoothie cups and another cake pan.
Since it was just a few streets over, we stopped off at the Harris Teeter because I wanted to get a thing of pizza dough. The pizza frittas recipe from my mom’s cookbook had been bouncing around in my head, and I wanted to try it.
On the way home on the bus, with all our bags at our feet, I thought about my afternoon out with my dad. Having him all to myself, it was like I got to see him up close. And he got to see me, too. I noticed that we both stare out windows and that we both chose fruity gum over mint. We were more alike than I’d thought.
Shaking on the Sugar
Pizza frittas made me have a whole new appreciation for pizza dough. It’s the exact same dough. If you take it and bake it with sauce and cheese and meat on it, it’s a savory main course. If you take it and fry it and put sugar all over it, it’s a sweet dessert. I was jumping out of my skin to bring pizza frittas to Mom. Maybe she’d remember her own mom. And maybe more.
Jean Sawyer was waiting after church wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. She was usually so much more dressed up, but then we got to the Place and I didn’t think about it anymore. I couldn’t wait to give Mom the frittas.
She ate two and went for a third, and Helen said she thought that was plenty. (Auntie Gina would have said, “But she’s Italian—she can always have more.”) I asked if we could offer some to the others because they were all staring. Helen said yes.
“Mom,” I said, “you remember making these? Pizza frittas?”
She squinted while she wiped her mouth.
“You know,” I said, “you take pizza dough and break it into balls and fry it up? Then sprinkle on sugar?”
Nina chewed at her thumbnail.
Mom shook her head. “I don’t know, honey. I can’t . . . I can’t picture it.”
We had to leave it there because more and more people were coming over for frittas.
In Greensboro, April can be funny. The city is in bloom, but the sky can stay gray for a week solid, and we were having a cloudy week like that. But having the frittas at the Place dusted off some of the gloom. And all right. Maybe Mom wouldn’t remember stuff on every single visit that we brought snacks, but maybe on some visits she would. I decided I would bring something every week to increase the chances.
Nina told Mom that I was a finalist in the Bob Sebuda contest. And I told Mom that Nina was trying out for Charlotte Rep. There were too many things that I hoped would happen, and I wanted to erase some of them so I didn’t get disappointed.
I put my hand by Mom’s hand, and we just both looked down together. She didn’t have the thick fingers that me and Auntie Gina had. Hers were slender and beautiful. The nails were all perfectly groomed and not jagged and bitten down, like Nina’s. Mom’s hands could jump all over a piano, and according to Auntie Gina, she used to make the best pasta in the world. I put her finger to my lips, and I kissed it.
“Good to spend time with your mom, huh?” said Jean when we were all piled into the car.
“Yeah,” I said. Nina nodded.
“Steffy, your homemade meals have been a hit over there. Not just with your mom, either.”
“Yeah,” I said. I was kind of disappointed that Mom didn’t remember anything this time though. Nina and Jean started talking about how spring was taking forever to officially just come, and I was in the backseat holding on to a thought and not wanting to let it go, like not wanting to let go of Mom’s hand. I couldn’t work out why it was so important to be remembered. Why it was so big to be talked about and to have people know about you and listen to things about you and want to know more things about you. If I could have crawled into the reason for wanting Mom to remember me, for wanting Dad to keep noticing, I would have stayed there forever to just know it and know it and know it.
The Donation Pie
There were a million things that were happening. Farthest off: Mom’s birthday, July 1. Closer was Harry and Gina’s wedding, June 22. Even closer was Chefs of Tomorrow, June 15. And first was my autobiography assignment, which was due May 28.
It was the last Saturday in April, and so I had a month to finish it. I had my letter from Nina, and as I rode my bike to St. Theresa’s that morning, I wondered if I might gather more letters. I wondered if that would be okay with Mrs. Ashton.
Spring weather that had taken so long to officially come had slipped through our fingers like long spaghettis slip off your fork, and now it was just plain old hot. I was now a robot at making gnocchi, and I’d brought batches to school for Principal Schmitz-Brady, to Gina and Harry’s for Harry’s birthday, and to the Place for all the residents in the rec room. Mom hadn’t come up with any memories that day, but she had eaten three helpings.
With a yam-pecan pie in my bike basket, I pulled up right outside the church. I had baked a couple practice pies, and I thought I’d donate the too-sticky one to the soup kitchen. It was bona fide hot outside, and as I put the kickstand down, I noticed how sweaty I was.
I went into the church and handed over the pie to the receptionist. I hoped it hadn’t gotten as soggy as I had from the humidity. After taking the pie and thanking me, she went back to flipping through a stack of papers.
Church was still and empty inside. And cool. Oh, it felt so good in there—not as cold as the Harris Teeter feels, especially in the frozen-foods aisle, but better than outside.
I hadn’t come over to the church just because I was being a good citizen and donating the pie. But it was smart to have an official reason to come, and the pie was a perfect excuse. I glanced toward the basement steps. I pretended like there was suddenly an important thing that I had to go down there for, and I walked, like a person with an important reason would, right over and started going down. With each stair, I covered my nose and mouth with my shirt to block out the cigarette smoke.
There was this girl standing up in front of everyone. I saw Dad and Carol in their regular seats. Th
e guy with the ponytail from last time was in the front row. I crouched down in the middle of the stairway where I could see everything pretty good and tried to be invisible.
“I was fourteen when I had the baby,” the girl said. She said she had it in the hospital and her mom didn’t show up and her boyfriend didn’t show up and it was a girl and they took it right after it was born to give it away but then she started to feel all bad and started partying, she said, just like her mom. She said it was all around the house. It got so bad she stopped going to high school and then stopped doing anything, it got so bad.
The more she talked, the more I liked her, with her long hair and glasses. She talked all the way up to being twenty-three and living with her boyfriend downtown, and she said it got worse and worse. She said she had another baby, a boy, that was one pound and died. She said she hadn’t seen her mom in over ten years, but she’s thinking of trying to find her now. And she said the best thing she ever did was give up that first baby, because she knew she couldn’t take care of it the way that she thought she should.
My stomach started hurting. I felt like I was about to get in trouble, like I did something really wrong. Like by knowing these things, by sneaking down there, everything was too scary and real. This wasn’t TV or reading something online. This was right in front of me.
I thought of all the pieces of Dad that I was putting together since he came back. Him telling us about being at the ocean and feeling like the only person in the world and those big, scary waves. I thought about him deciding to move to California. Him telling Carol about all the eyes on him in Greensboro. But even though there were eyes, maybe he came back because he thought he could take care of us now the way that he thought he should.
I tiptoed upstairs, where the faint smell of incense filled the sanctuary. The church was just as quiet as it had been before I went down—there were only a few old ladies doing rosaries—but there was so much jumbling around inside of me that I felt like it was so loud they could hear.
I didn’t want to know about what the girl was saying, but at the same time I did want to know. Nina was going to be fourteen this summer, exactly that girl’s age when she had her first baby. And I was only three years from fourteen, but I felt one million years from her story. I wondered what Dad’s story was about, and I really wondered what my story someday would be.
The Cream-Puff Flash
We brought cream puffs to Mom’s the next day, and we got all messy eating them. I sat right by Mom with our arms around each other and told her about the contest again, how the finals were coming up in June. Nina talked about Charlotte Rep auditions, too. And I even told her that Dad was doing good, painting a big building downtown.
“Tell me more about James,” said Mom. Nina’s eyes shot over to mine, and she shook her head.
“Good, Mom, you knew that his name is James. He’s . . . pretty good,” I said. We couldn’t tell her about James because we didn’t really have much to tell.
“How is my dad?” asked Mom.
“He died a while back,” said Nina. “Maybe, like, eight or nine years ago.”
Mom’s eyes got full, and me and Nina hugged her more. “My dad’s mad at me,” Mom said. I took one of her hands, and Nina took the other.
“No,” said Nina. “Nobody’s mad at you, Mom.”
Helen said sometimes a memory will flash to a TBI person that will feel so close but that will be something that happened years and years and years ago, and they can’t figure out the difference. I laid my head on Mom’s shoulder and rubbed her hand.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the girl downstairs at church and those two babies. Even though they were sad memories, she talked about them at the meeting, and it seemed to make her feel better. It made me mad at God that he would take away someone’s memories—or jumble them around—all the little things that made up who they were. I was also mad at the cream puffs, because I wondered if they made Mom remember something bad about her dad.
Maybe bringing food to Mom was a bad idea. How could I know what memories were connected to what foods? I definitely didn’t want to come visit our mom and make her upset.
Later that night, I called Lisa.
“I need your talkies,” I said. There was a pause.
“My lunar-talkies? What are you up to, Steffany Sandolini?”
I didn’t tell her everything on the phone because it was almost time for bed, but she agreed to bring them.
The following morning before advisory group, Lisa and I secretly transferred her lunar-talkies from her backpack to mine. It wasn’t a secret to have them at school, but it was secret what we were going to do with them.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Ten-four, Houston,” she said.
If Dad was a little bit slow to tell us more stuff about himself, I was going to keep trying to find out my own way.
Sauce and Stew Meat and Down the Stairs
After going down and watching the meeting once, the second time was easier. I felt freer, but also knew that I had to be so careful and not make a sound. If Dad saw me, I didn’t know what I’d do. But I was just too curious not to go back, and with Nina at all these extra practices for the Charlotte Rep tryouts, I was by myself a lot of Saturdays.
After handing over the Tupperware of leftover sauce and stew meat to the receptionist for the soup kitchen, I snuck downstairs.
Carol told everyone about when she was married and had all these kids, and she never knew they were really there. How they still hated her, some of them. How she could never go back and do the right things but how she was trying to now. How she thought about them all every day and how she hated herself some days. “But I don’t hate myself enough to go back,” she said. She smoked and smoked while she talked. She said she was sober for nineteen years. From the first meeting I watched, I knew that meant she hadn’t been doing drugs or drinking.
There were parts of her story where you just couldn’t believe she was saying it out loud to people—things about leaving her twin babies and her four-year-old alone all night, about stealing money. Things a person wouldn’t ever want anyone to know about. She said the only thing she was glad about was that none of the babies died. And that someday maybe they’d forgive her. She said she didn’t care if it didn’t happen until after she was dead, as long as someday they did.
I had the same sick feeling when I left as I had after the first meeting. Like I was going to get in trouble for hearing these things, like hearing them right there in that same room with a person that I ate Thanksgiving dinner with was so much scarier than hearing something like that in a movie or on TV. Carol was real and this was her story, not like an actor playing a part.
This was the grown-up world that I saw on Dad’s face the morning after Christmas. Being on this stair was being in that world—a different Greensboro that I never knew about.
I had to keep coming back until I heard Dad’s story.
Later that afternoon when Nina was at Denise’s and Dad was still not home from “work” (or “choir practice”), I went out front with one of the lunar-talkies. Lisa had said the batteries inside were new, and so I turned it to On and shoved it right inside the overgrown bushes behind the card table.
The Berries Keep Spinning and Spinning
The following Saturday, Dad wasn’t going down to his meeting. He didn’t tell me that, of course, but I knew it because instead he was taking Nina and Denise to try out for Charlotte Rep. His car deal hadn’t happened yet, so they were taking the bus. I’d have been nervous about what to say to him during the two hours to Charlotte, but I knew Nina’d be fine. I couldn’t get over that Dad was actually going to bring them all the way down there, wait while they auditioned, and then bring them back. Like an actual dad would do.
“I don’t think I’m gonna get in,” said Nina.
“Nina,” said Denise, “think positive.”
I was in the kitchen adding strawberries to the blender. I was kind of jumpy around Dad, because
when you spy on people and then you see them normally, you feel like any second you’re gonna get caught, and I wanted to keep spying. He stood by the door, fumbling around with his keys, waiting for Nina to put the rest of her stuff in her dance bag.
“I didn’t think I would become a finalist in the cooking thing,” I said, pouring milk into the blender.
“Oh, that was a cinch, Steffany. You have this totally unique talent.”
“Dance is unique,” I said.
“Not really,” Nina said. I looked at Nina in her sweats and tank top, her hair in a bun, and she looked back. I knew I would never, ever be able to dance and maybe she knew she’d never want to cook, but we understood each other so perfectly right then.
I pushed Puree on the blender, and strawberries smashed to the side and milk shot up to the lid and ice popped around on top of the silvery blades. As they were about to walk out, I handed them each a smoothie.
“Oh my gosh, Steffy, yum! Where’d you get these cute cups?” asked Nina.
“The Extra Ingredient. Two for five dollars.” I glanced at Dad, who gave me a thumbs-up. They said they loved the smoothies, and I said they were really easy, just strawberries, yogurt, and a little ice and apple juice in the blender. You could actually pop in any kind of fruit you wanted. Bananas, strawberries, blueberries, whatever sounded best to you.
Each time I added another ingredient, the smoothie changed and got better and more flavorful. While it blended, something became obvious to me: Nina, my mom, my dad, Auntie Gina—of course I would ask all of them for letters for my autobiography assignment.
It was due in two and a half weeks. Mrs. Ashton had given us lots of writing time in class lately, but all I did was put all the recipes that I’d made this year in an order. I wasn’t sure how I was going to make that into an autobiography, but that’s what kept feeling right.