by Jael McHenry
She says, “This is exactly what I’m talking about. You have two speeds. Scared and angry. Don’t you want to try being normal?”
I stare at the wisps of hair scattered across the floor. It looks like someone has shaved one of those rare black squirrels. I breathe a few times to calm down. She doesn’t need to know about the Normal Book. So I say, “Normal doesn’t just mean what you want it to mean.”
“Okay,” she says. “But, I mean, try to see where I’m coming from. You’re my sister and I care about you. Things are different now. You’ve always had Mom and Dad to … rely on … and now they—” She stops, pulling the washcloth off the ring next to the sink and pressing it against one eye, then the other.
She’s right, I’m used to having Ma and Dad around. This was the first time in years they’d gone away. When Dad turned sixty-five in September, he retired. Ma’s present to Dad was a trip, just the two of them, visiting every state he hadn’t been to yet. He wrote the name of each state on a card and shuffled them around on the floor, arranging and rearranging, taking into account weather, local festivals, highways, everything. They were supposed to come back in six weeks. In Maine, something went wrong with the heater in their cabin, and the room filled with carbon monoxide during the night. Of all the ways to go, it’s one of the quietest. If they had to die, which we all do, I think they would have been okay with how they went.
The front door rattles and slams open. Amanda rubs the washcloth across her face and hangs it back up. I try to think of something comforting to say but she has already squared her shoulders and turned her back to me. If she’s going to pretend she hasn’t been crying, I might as well follow her lead.
“We’re back,” calls Brennan’s voice.
In the living room, Amanda sweeps Parker up into a hug. Parker is the younger sister, four years old, blonde like her mother and grandmother. Amanda waggles the fingers of her free hand, threatening a tickle, and Parker giggles. “Did you have a good time?”
“Ducks are awesome!” says Parker. “Philly is awesome!”
“Shannon, did you have a good time?” asks Amanda.
Five-year-old Shannon is toying with the zipper on her jacket. She flips the plastic zipper pull, a flat pink rectangle, up and then down.
“Shannon?” Amanda repeats.
“Yes,” Shannon says, flipping the zipper pull up and down again.
I hear Brennan whisper to Amanda, “I think we distracted her for a while.” I’m not so sure. I know from experience you can be sad anywhere.
They’ve explained to both the girls that Grandma and Grandpa aren’t coming back, but it may or may not have sunk in. It hasn’t sunk in with me, really. This is my parents’ house, full of their things, the same as it has always looked. I expect them back any minute.
Gert says, “Oh look, it is the girls!”
“Girls, this is Gert!” says Amanda. “We’ve known her for a long time. Probably since we were your size. Ginny, you think so?”
“Yes,” I agree automatically. I’m watching Shannon, who is still toying with the zipper pull. She hasn’t looked up once. I only see the top of her tiny dark head.
Amanda says, “It’s funny, they’re just like us, right? Two girls, a year and a month apart. I don’t know how Mom and Dad did it. They’re exhausting.”
Parker shouts, “I’m exhausting!”
Brennan and Amanda and Gert laugh.
Gert says, “If you want, I can come back and do more cleaning tomorrow. I do not want to be in the way.”
Brennan says, “Actually, Amanda, I was thinking we could take the girls home.”
“I don’t want to leave Ginny alone, though.”
“Why not?” I ask.
She says, “I worry about you on your own.”
“I’m socially awkward,” I say. “I’m not retarded.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
Parker says, “I’m not retarded!”
“Hush, honey, that’s not a nice word. Aunt Ginny shouldn’t have said it in the first place. You know, Ginny, you really need to watch what you say around these ones. Little pitchers have big ears.”
I say, “Pitchers don’t have ears.”
Gert says, “I will come back tomorrow.”
I add, “Retarded is a medical term. It has a specific meaning.”
Amanda says, “Ginny, not now. Gert, it’s okay. Maybe we should go home and rest up a bit. Ginny, you could come with us.”
I say, “No, thank you.”
Parker squirms out of Amanda’s arms, sits down on the floor, and starts unzipping her jacket. Brennan walks over to her and starts zipping it up again. She makes little animal noises, grunts of protest.
Amanda says, “Fine. Gert, I’ll just write you a check, okay?”
“Okay.”
I think about speaking up but she is already writing the check, so I don’t. I have a credit card for most things but we pay Gert in cash, and Ma made sure I was prepared. She left me twelve envelopes of cash, six for Gert and six for the person who delivers the groceries. Both happen once a week, and since Ma and Dad were supposed to be gone for six weeks, twelve envelopes should have been enough. Now they’re too much. There are still eight envelopes upstairs in my nightstand drawer. Amanda hands the check to Gert.
“Shannon, you ready to go, sweetheart?” asks Amanda.
“Yes, Mommy.”
“Ginny, I’ll see you in the morning,” says Amanda. “The girls will stay with Brennan and I’ll come back to help you pack.”
Gert says, “You are packing up your parents’ things?”
“Yes.”
“You are thinking of selling the house?” she asks.
At the same time, Amanda says, “Maybe,” and I say, “No.”
Gert says, “There will be plenty of time to decide these things.”
“Yes,” Amanda says.
As Amanda turns her back to me, and I see all their backs—Brennan’s, Amanda’s, Parker’s, Shannon’s—it comes in a flash. The smell of ribollita. Nonna’s espresso voice. Do no let her.
I say, “Don’t—”
Amanda says, “Don’t what?”
But I don’t know the answer.
So I just say, “Don’t drive too fast,” and she says, “Of course not,” and Brennan says, “Take care, Ginny,” and Parker says, “Bye, Aunt Ginny!” and Shannon says something, but too softly for me to hear.
When they are gone, Gert says, “I have another half hour to clean, that is okay?”
“Of course. Take whatever time you need. Oh, and don’t be scared when you go in the downstairs bathroom and see all that hair on the floor. Amanda cut my bangs.”
“I can see. You look nice.”
“Thank you,” I say.
She says, “I only have to take out garbage from kitchen, and I will be done there.”
I remember Amanda up on the step stool, throwing soup and cereal and rice down into a plastic bag. “No, don’t worry, I’ll take care of that. Would you start on the bathroom instead?”
“Yes, of course. And do not forget the grocery list, okay?”
“Thank you.” This is the rhythm we set up for the trip. Once a week, Gert comes to clean. She takes the grocery list with her. The next day the groceries are delivered. Someone from the store brings them, I think, but I don’t lie in wait to see who, I just pick up the bags from the entryway and shelve everything. So much has changed, but we are still sticking to this part of the rhythm. I, for one, need it.
I go into the kitchen. The bag is still there, open, on the floor. The cupboards, nursery rhyme–style, are bare.
It doesn’t make sense to throw out perfectly good food. If Amanda can’t stand the thought of touching anything that belongs to our parents, how can she even stand to be in this house? It’s theirs, it’s all theirs.
I go through the bag. A container of oatmeal has burst and spilled out, but other than that, everything’s intact. If I put things back in the cabinets right away,
she won’t be fooled. But if I wait until the new groceries are delivered, I can sneak things back in, and she won’t even know. Luckily she didn’t get as far as the refrigerator, with its orange juice and mustard and countless jars of jam.
Is this what I was supposed to stop Amanda from doing? Throwing out our parents’ food? I don’t know why Nonna would come from beyond just to tell me so, but I do a lot of things without really understanding why. Ma taught me a lot of rules and I follow them. In that context, there isn’t that much difference between saying “Thank you” to a compliment you don’t agree with, and obeying a dead person’s warning. You assume there are reasons.
Since I don’t have long before Gert leaves, I prioritize. Make the shopping list first, then hide the trash bag. I start with the usual basics, milk and eggs. Then I always get some fruits and vegetables, but this week I’m not sure what to do. Maybe I need to order more, or less. I don’t like all this uncertainty. I scribble a few notes, adding oatmeal and butter to the list, and some other things I’m in the mood for: cider, oranges, breakfast sausage.
Gert comes to say good-bye and I hand her the list.
“Thank you, he will come tomorrow, probably in morning. There is—I wanted to say one other thing. Your parents,” she says. “We will all miss them.”
“Thank you.”
“It is hard at first. I know yesterday, it was very difficult. I will not tell you it gets easier. But it changes.”
I realize she must have been here, at the house, after the funeral. I didn’t really see faces, only bodies, mostly arms and backs and feet. She would have known not to say anything then. She would have known I couldn’t stand it.
Gert says now, “Do not let the grief drown you.”
I think Do no let her.
I say, “I’ll try.”
When she leaves, I’m still remembering this house packed full of strangers yesterday, and it reminds me how alone I am now. No one left here but me.
I remember Great-aunt Connie’s question at the funeral about whether I miss my parents, and of course the answer is yes. Yes, I miss them. Yes, I desperately want them here, to talk with, to trust, to lean my head against. This is the way I’ve always been. I think of the answer long after the person asking the question has lost interest and walked away.
So this is what distraught feels like. It feels like a stomachache. It feels like a firm hand wringing out the paltry juice from a Key lime, or a French press squeezing the flavor from coffee grounds. It feels like the air bladder that winemakers use to press the juice from the grapes, which they say is gentle but still presses, presses, presses until all the liquid has leaked out and pooled. I’ve read about that. It’s easy to imagine.
I try to shake the feeling with action. I haul the bag of groceries upstairs and slide it into my closet, pushing it back as far as I can against some old cardboard boxes. But as soon as I’m still, the memory returns.
Nonna said, You bring me with the smell of ribollita, and I bring the message.
I go to the kitchen.
On the stove, cleaned and almost as good as new, is the empty pot I used to make the ribollita. It smelled wonderful. It would have been delicious. I lean down and put the pot back in the cabinet. I put the step stool back in its corner, but it is just a step stool right now.
She looked so real. One hundred percent. It doesn’t make sense that I hallucinated her. I didn’t even remember that sweater until I saw it. I only remember one sweater of hers, and it wasn’t yellow. But I thought about her, made her food, and there she was.
Nonna believed in ghosts. Is that what she was? Not a hallucination, but a ghost?
I miss my parents, and I wish they were here. Dad especially. Can I bring him, by trying? Can I do something that reminds me of him and see his shape on that step stool, looking back at me? Could I say, Dad, I miss you, and hear him say, I know?
I look up at the elegant skylight and try to think of my dad. First, his voice, sharp and round at the same time like tomato juice. How he lifted his chin up every time he looked at himself in the mirror in scrubs, and how he jerked his chin down whenever he looked at himself in the mirror in a suit. I picture his cropped white hair, his small ears, his energetic walk. Nothing happens.
When I was eight I read a book about ESP. I decided to practice bending spoons with my mind every night. No one could know whether practicing would make it possible, if nobody had ever stuck with it long enough. I practiced every night for a couple of months, and then one night, I just didn’t think of it. It was the most important thing and then it wasn’t. Before ESP it was round things, and afterward it was Turkish rug patterns, then letters written by nuns. But along with those, and every day since, it’s been food.
When I think of Dad, nothing happens. Maybe I need something beyond the memory, something physical, something his.
Ma kept the alcohol for company in the dining room china cabinet. All the sweet after-dinner liqueurs nestle there together. But there is one bottle she never knew about right here in the kitchen. I reach deep into the cabinets and remove Dad’s hidden bottle of Lagavulin. I set a tumbler on the counter and pour him two fingers of scotch. This is a tumbler, watch it tumble, he said. The golden brown liquid, more gold than brown, somewhere between weak tea and apple juice. I stare at it. Nothing.
Out loud I say, “This is a tumbler, watch it tumble,” an incantation or a toast or both, and drink it down.
It’s like drinking a handful of matches. It burns and then smokes. I fight back a cough. There’s a note of something deep and earthy, like beets or truffles, which then vanishes, leaving only a palate seared clean. Nothing lingers. I hope they didn’t suffer. I don’t think they did.
Yes, I miss them. The answer I’ve come up with, far too late for the question. Yes.
Still, no Dad.
This brings on a wringing, squeezing ache, because I desperately wish I could talk to Dad again. Ma, she was closer to Amanda. Amanda was a more standard daughter. Dad and I didn’t waste time feeling. We just did things. Acted. Were. Not like the others, who talked, asked, wondered, dreamed.
I remember once hearing Dad refer to my sister, out of her hearing, as Demand-a. That was when I first realized there was a difference between how people act and what they think. No one had ever told me. Now I realize it’s because they didn’t think they needed to. Other kids my age had already figured it out.
I pour another shot of scotch for the smell, but I’m afraid to drink it. I’m already dizzy. More would be unwise. Ma never let me drink alcohol, along with the other things she never let me do: go on dates, get a job, move out, travel to other cities alone. It was part of the deal we made years ago. I could cook whenever and whatever I wanted, and she would buy me all the ingredients and utensils and pots and knives I asked for, and set aside half the shelves for my cookbooks. In return I would follow her rules. She always said we’d talk about it again when I finished college, only I still haven’t, and now she’s not around to talk about it anymore.
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.