The Kitchen Daughter

by Jael McHenry

  “It’ll get eaten.”

  “True. It’s so cold in here. Is that window open?”

  I reach over and close it. “Sorry.”

  “Ginny, what happened?”

  “What?”

  “Your hand!”

  “Oh. I caught it on the railing out front.”

  Amanda says, “You caught it on the railing? Does it hurt a lot? What does Dad—” She stops short. “You should get it looked at.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Do you usually hurt yourself this much?”

  “It doesn’t hurt much.”

  “This often, I mean.”

  “Once isn’t that often.”

  “Fine. Okay.”

  “Okay,” I echo.

  Amanda asks, “So did Angelica come by this morning?”

  “Not yet.” I realize how disastrous it would have been if she’d stumbled upon me interrogating or being interrogated by a ghost. I was lucky David didn’t come in at a worse time either. Although maybe he would have just dropped the bags off and rung the bell as usual, so then I could have controlled the interaction. That’s how I get through. Control the interaction. When control is lost, everything is lost.

  Amanda says, “Well, she’ll probably be by later today, then.” She grabs a scrap of paper out of the junk drawer and starts writing. “I’ll put her number up here on the fridge in case you need to get in touch with her, but now that I’m here, she’ll probably call me about most things.”

  “I really don’t want to sell the house.”

  “Let’s not open that can of worms again right now, please.”

  I take a different approach. “What does the will say?”

  “About the house? That it belongs to both of us.”

  “Half and half?”

  “Half and half. Can we get started, please?”

  “Okay.”

  I bring the roll of trash bags from under the sink and Amanda gets the empty boxes from her car.

  We pack up our parents’ clothes for charity. I start with the bureau, but my mind isn’t on the task. There is too much swirling in my brain, and I can’t discuss any of it with Amanda, not a bit. The ghosts. The secrets. When I pack my dad’s clothes into boxes I try not to think about the letter he wrote, and when I pack Ma’s clothes I try not to think about her receiving it. She must have forgiven him for whatever he did. I try not to think of Necie’s ghost saying It didn’t make a lick of sense. They went together like whipped cream and sardines. She loved him. They loved each other.

  My abraded hand itches underneath the bandage, so I make myself not scratch it. I hear the clinking of jars from the master bathroom, where Amanda is working, and then for a while I don’t hear anything.

  I call out to her, “Amanda?”

  She says, “I’m here,” but softly, and her voice is squashed down somehow. I get up to see what’s happening.

  She is sitting cross-legged on the floor, a perfume bottle in her hand. A ridged white cylinder with a bird on top. L’Air du Temps. Ma’s.

  “You remember?” she says. “She used to let us wear a little on special occasions. Here and here.” She turns her wrist upward and taps it in the center, then tips her head and places her finger on the side of her neck.

  “Yes.”

  “It doesn’t smell right. I’ve been sitting here smelling it and smelling it. But it just isn’t the same as when she wore it.”

  “It’s chemistry,” I say. “The warmth of a person’s body and the oils in their skin react with the perfume. So it’s different on everyone.”

  “Oh, Ginny,” she says. “It’ll never … she never … she’s gone.”

  “I know,” I say. Then I realize she’s not telling me. She’s telling herself.

  “They’re gone,” she says, and curls in on herself, bringing all her limbs toward her stomach.

  She’s wedged on the floor between the vanity and the wall and there is no good way for me to get down there. Instead I put my hand on top of her head and stroke her hair. I always find that reassuring when I’m sad. She pulls her knees up to her chest. Her crying is soft and steady like the technique for drizzling oil into homemade mayonnaise, never much but never stopping.

  I say, “I miss them too.”

  She says, through tears, “I know you do, sweetheart. It’s easy to think you’re not feeling anything because you’re not showing it, but I know you loved them. I know it’s hard.”

  “It’s hard,” I echo.

  Amanda wipes at her cheeks with her fingers and says, “This is not what I thought would happen.”

  “To Ma and Dad?”

  “Well, no, or yes, because I certainly didn’t expect … okay, no, I’ve got to stop crying, you started me up again. No, I thought I’d be able to handle this.”

  “You are handling it.”

  “Without tears. Okay, so that’s how I’ll do it from now on, without tears. I’ll be like you, right? I’ll just do something else. There’s plenty to do. I’m just going to make a list of what furniture we have in what rooms. I’ll start downstairs.” She stands up and wipes her cheeks again, this time with force.

  “Okay,” I say.

  I go back to the bureau and keep moving things out of drawers and into boxes. The lingerie I put directly into a black garbage bag, since no matter what we do with our parents’ other belongings there is no question of saving my mother’s underthings. I don’t always know what’s appropriate, but I know that.

  Once the top drawer is empty of clothes there are just two more things in it to deal with. One is a small cedar box. I think this is where she kept her good jewelry. It’s locked and I don’t see a key in the drawer. Amanda may know where it is. I set the box up on top of the dresser so we’ll both see it.

  The other thing at the back of the drawer is Ma’s Bible. It has a worn black cover of very soft leather. I fan the pages out with my fingers. No marks, other than the family tree written inside the front cover, which makes sense. Ma was never the type to write in books. She taught us not to. Dad’s medical textbooks are marked up from front to back, in pen and pencil and three colors of highlighter, but Ma’s books are all factory ink.

  I am just trying to remember the last time Ma snuck us into church when I hear the doorbell ring. Amanda can deal with it, so I don’t really need to rush. But I need her to see that I’m capable, that I don’t need to be coddled, so I set the Bible down next to the jewelry box and head for the stairs.

  As I walk I can hear the high-pitched sounds of women greeting each other, but they are trilling nonsensical syllables, like “Duh!” and “Cuh!” Then they chirp with laughter.

  Inside near the front door there’s a man in a suit, and two women with incredibly shiny blonde hair that’s exactly the right length to touch their shoulders. One is Amanda. The other might as well be. The pointed chin, the shiny shoes, a neatly fitted dark suit that reminds me of the one Amanda wore to the funeral. I wonder if they shop together.

  She says, “Hi! I’m Angelica! Nice to see you, Ginny.”

  As if I weren’t disoriented enough. She sounds like Amanda too. That orange juice voice, comforting and biting at the same time.

  I know I’m supposed to shake her hand, so I steel myself and do it. Angelica’s hand feels like hanger steak cooked too far past medium, tense and constricted.

  “Listen, I’m so sorry!” she says. “I meant to call, but we were just around the corner unexpectedly, and I told Warren about this place and he thought it might be up his alley, so we thought we’d swing by!”

  Warren is a flan-colored man in a suit, with one of those shirts that has a collar that’s a different color than the rest of the shirt. He reaches for my hand, but he’s too far away to actually reach, which is okay with me. So I give kind of a nod and wave to acknowledge him. He bares his teeth and says, “Sorry. You look flustered.”

  Fluster is on a dictionary page with flush and flux and fluvial. I say, “Yes.”

  Amanda
says, “Well, yeah, we weren’t expecting anyone yet, so the place is really, it’s not, you know, not cleaned up or anything.”

  Angelica says to Warren, “I told you, didn’t I?”

  “I just wanna get a sense, we’ll be two shakes,” says Warren.

  I hang back. This is not a situation I can control, so my best course of action is to keep quiet and stay out of the way. I look up and get transfixed by the slowly rotating ceiling fan. Even as I’m looking up I realize I should be looking away, but can’t. There’s something about the pattern.

  Hypnotic.

  It’s been forever since this happened to me. It did all the time when I was little. If I don’t break the pattern I’ll stand here drooling for half an hour.

  So I force my eyes closed, and remember a Korean restaurant Dad took me to for my fifteenth birthday. Ma was out of town and Amanda wasn’t invited. We cooked wet, slippery beef over grills set into our table but most of all I loved the panchan. Countless tiny dishes of exotic things, which Dad explained to me one by one. Kimchee, sour, hot. Spicy radish, a yellow so bright it glowed. Green beans dotted with wheels of jalapeño. A clear, trembling walnut jelly. I remember each panchan, savor its imagined taste again.

  Now that I’ve leveled out I open my eyes. I’m back in the world. I gather my strength. The first thing I hear is Warren saying, “It’s really cold in here! Doesn’t the heat work?”

  “The heat works fine,” Angelica reassures him.

  “We like it cold,” Amanda volunteers.

  “As long as the heat works,” he says.

  “It works.”

  Warren says, “Rock and roll.” I don’t see what music has to do with it.

  Angelica points out a few features, the working fireplace, the high ceiling with its ornate and imposing molding, the long hardwood planks throughout the whole first floor. Warren cranes his neck wherever she says to. Amanda trails them into the kitchen. I am invisible.

  I don’t follow, but Warren’s voice is sharp and loud, so I can hear him saying, “You know, I was really hoping for an upgraded kitchen, with stainless steel. The Sub-Zero, the granite. High-end.”

  Angelica says, “Do you do a lot of cooking?”

  “No,” he says. “But I want something less … retro.”

  “Okeydoke!”

  I go upstairs while they finish touring around the ground floor. I guess correctly they will not be coming up to the bedrooms. I watch the street from my parents’ window. Warren and Angelica shake hands good-bye on the porch. He walks away. Then Angelica pauses, and turns, and rings the doorbell again. Amanda lets her in.

  As I come down I hear Angelica saying, “Hey, I’m sorry about that, truly. I should have come by first to take a look at the place. I guess it wasn’t really what he wanted. But he kept wanting to see more and more places. I had to do something, so I took a chance.”

  Amanda says, “He seems like a guy who’s hard to say no to.”

  “You can say that again,” says Angelica. “Oh, hey, Ginny.”

  I need something to say, so I try, “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Actually, we’ve met,” says Angelica. “But it’s been ages. In high school I used to come over here and study.”

  “Study.” Amanda laughs. “She used to come over here and read Seventeen.”

  “My parents wouldn’t let me subscribe. Strict household. You guys were lucky.”

  “Yes,” I say, “we know.”

  “I came for Thanksgiving once too. I still remember it. All that food. Your mom was an amazing cook.”

  “She was,” I say, because it’s true, though I must have cooked half of that meal, and Angelica didn’t even notice. She probably never looked in the kitchen. Then again, if I don’t remember her, should I expect her to remember me?

  Amanda says, “Well, that talent skipped a generation in my case.”

  I say, “Anyone can learn.”

  “By the way,” says Angelica, “I couldn’t say it while Warren was here, but I’m sorry about your parents.”

  “Thank you,” Amanda and I say in unison.

  Then we’re all silent.

  Angelica says, “I’d forgotten just how awesome this place is. I mean, I remember the molding, of course, and the high ceilings and the giant doors—it always seemed so big—but these details are great too, like there, the tile around the fireplace. You guys are going to make a killing on this place.”

  I think Amanda can tell I’m about to say something because she quickly says, “Well, nothing is final, we don’t even know if someone’s going to make an offer we like. We’re a long way from a final sale.”

  “Oh, of course,” says Angelica. “The only certainty is uncertainty.”

  She runs her fingers along the edge of the mantel. I hope she’s not looking for dust, because knowing Gert, she’s not going to find any.

  “You must have missed it when you were in L.A.,” Angelica says to Amanda.

  “L.A.’s just so different,” says Amanda. “The house wasn’t what I missed.”

  Angelica turns to me and says, “You’ve lived here all your life?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’ll be a big change for you to leave.”

  “It would be, yes,” I say.

  Amanda says, “Since you’re here, Cuh, you want to tour around a bit?”

  “I would, but I’m starving.”

  “Well, then why don’t we go to lunch first?”

  “Fabulous!”

  Amanda says, “Okay, Ginny, we’ll see you after lunch, then. You okay here?”

  “Of course.”

  She says to Angelica, “I just need to wash my hands, meet you at the front door,” and she’s gone.

  I look over at Angelica’s shape in the doorframe and think of Nonna’s warning, Do no let her. Is she the one I’m supposed to stop? How can I? If I could find the right ghost to ask, maybe I could find out. But fear still holds me back.

  “Amanda says you like to cook,” says Angelica.

  “I do.”

  “You should get in the habit of making something every morning while we’re showing the place,” she says, looking up at the branching pattern of the molding and down at the long boards of hardwood. “Baking, especially. Cakes, cookies, breads. Makes people like the house more. Makes them think it’s a home.”

  “It is a home,” I say.

  “Their home,” she clarifies.

  Amanda’s orange juice voice calls from the hallway, “Get a move on, Cuh!” and both of them chirp and chatter their way out the door. I’m left alone.

  I walk up the stairs, they squeak under my feet, I walk into my parents’ closet, pull the door tight shut, and sit down with my hands in Dad’s shoes. I need the dark. I need the comfort. I look for a food memory to calm me and I settle on ceviche. A tart bite, a clean, fresh wave of flavor. Think of the process. Raw fish is translucent, but when you drip the lime juice onto it, it becomes something else. Cubes of white-fleshed fish begin to flake. Shrimp turn pink. Texture becomes color. Visible streaks, almost stripes, show the grain.

  The shoes haven’t always been part of my self-soothing, but the small dark space has. Ma used to call it recharging my batteries. She knew the strain of interacting with people wore me out. So after school, or other activities that took me out of the house, she’d give me permission to recharge my batteries for one hour. Never longer. When I sit down on the floor of the closet I set a mental clock. Even though she’s not here to tell me what to do, I’m doing what she’d tell me if she were here.

  Whether this is a good sign or a bad sign, I have no idea.

  The hour isn’t up yet when the doorbell rings. I want to ignore it. I am comfortably settled in the far corner of the closet, where no light can reach. But what if it’s Amanda and she’s forgotten her keys? She’ll have a fit.

  I settle Dad’s shoes back in place, right on the right and left on the left, and go down to open the door.

  “Hey, remember me?” he
says. “David?”

  “Yes, of course.” His voice sounds a little less muddy than before, a little more like very strong coffee. His brown hair still sticks up all over.

  “How’s your hand?”

  I hold up the gauzed mitt. “Just fine, thank you.”

  “I brought you something.”

  He hands me a carton of eggs, flipping the top open to show their round, smooth white tops. “Voilà. One dozen, intact.”

  “Oh, my sister bought some too, so we have more than we need already.”

  “I just thought I’d replace the ones I broke. I feel bad about that.”

  I realize I’ve been rude. Ma would be appalled. “Sorry, no, we can always use eggs, right? Come on in. I’ll put them in the fridge.”

  I head for the kitchen and he follows me at a distance. He gives me plenty of space. I like that. It makes me comfortable, which right now is the thing I most need.

  “Wow, this is a great kitchen!” he says. “Huge! The stove’s so vintage. Love it.”

  “You like to cook?”

  “I’m not very good at it.”

  “It’s not hard.”

  David says, “People who are naturally good at things always think they’re easy.”

  “No, you just have to learn, is all.”

  “And you have to get all the right ingredients, and plan ahead, and it takes so much time … it just doesn’t seem worth the effort. I don’t have the energy.”

  I say, “You’re overthinking it. Are you hungry?”

  “Well, actually, yes. I haven’t had lunch.”

  “Hand me the eggs.”

  He does. I pause to think. All the ghosts have come when I cooked from recipes. Handwritten recipes. I can do this without worry.

  “Here,” I say. “I’ll show you how easy it is to make an omelet. It’s so fast, you won’t believe it.”

  “You really don’t need to,” David says.

  “I know. But this’ll be so quick.” I like being the expert for a change, and focus immediately on the task. Butter and eggs are all I need for my mise. A fork, a bowl, a plate. A knife for the butter. The pan’s already waiting on the stove. Silently, I crack and beat the egg, heat the pan, drop in the butter, pour the egg in, swirl and swirl and fold and flip it out onto the plate. The whole business takes less than two minutes.