The Kitchen Daughter

by Jael McHenry

  Usually when I get excited my body heats up, but in this case the opposite happens. I get cold all of a sudden, deeply cold. I stare out the window toward the sidewalk. I wonder if the whole winter will be like this. I put on another sweater. I consider draping Midnight around my neck like a scarf but assume she has other plans.

  Hot chocolate comes to mind. That’ll be perfect. I take milk from the fridge, cocoa from the cupboard. It’s Ma’s cocoa, one of the cans that Amanda tried to throw away that I reclaimed and put back up on the shelves. It seems a long time ago now. I understand a little better what Amanda meant that day. She didn’t want to feel their presence. And it’s confusing that I can. Until I let go of them I’m not going to be able to move forward. I have to think about it, but I think that’s what I want.

  I heat up the milk on the stove instead of in the microwave, so I can stand by the lit burner and feel its warmth. I know the right proportions by heart, one cup of hot milk to one tablespoon of cocoa and one tablespoon of sugar. I feel like there’s something missing. Maybe salt? I take Drinkonomicon down from the cabinet and flip it to the right page.

  The recipe is there, and it does have salt in it, but that becomes less important when I see the change. In tight red block print someone has added 1 TSP ANCHO POWDER to the recipe in an unfamiliar hand. I know who it was. On one hand, it wasn’t very polite of him to write in my cookbook without asking, but on the other hand, it makes me smile. It’s a form of conversation. And he was right, it makes it better. I stir in the sugar, wait for it to dissolve. Add a little cocoa at a time. The pinch of salt. And yes, a swirl of ancho powder, for that bitter, smoky tang.

  I take a long sip out of the mug. Delicious.

  There’s a movement in the doorway, and I start. A little of the cocoa slurps up over the edge and falls to the floor. I bend down toward it, thinking I’ll wipe it away, but then my eye is caught by something else. Someone else.

  David.

  “Oh,” I say, trying to sound nonchalant. “Did you let yourself in?”

  He shakes his head, saying nothing.

  “I’m making your cocoa. It’s the best, just like you said.” This probably sounds fawning and horrible. I shouldn’t be allowed to talk to people. I don’t make any kind of sense.

  He’s just standing there in the doorway, shaking his head, shaking his head.

  Finally, he says, “I’m sorry, Ginny.”

  “You shouldn’t, I mean, I’m not mad or anything, but you know, it doesn’t have to—” I look at his face. I read what I see there. I’ve gotten it wrong.

  So I backtrack, and I start over, and I ask David, “Sorry for what?”

  He sits down, almost in slow motion, on the stool in the corner of the kitchen. He puts his head in his hands.

  I go get his helmet from the mantel and hold it out to him.

  “This is yours,” I say. “I tried to bring it back to you.”

  I stand there holding it out, but he doesn’t reach for it. He doesn’t move at all.

  “Don’t you want it?”

  He doesn’t want to look at me, so I won’t look at him. I look down. At his shoes. They’re caked with slush and salt, with the by-products of a Philadelphia winter, icy and salty and messy. But there is no water pooling on the kitchen tile, and in the dining room, the hardwood floor is clean. Between here and the door there isn’t a mark. It’s not possible. He didn’t walk in.

  It’s David, but it isn’t David.

  I should have realized it, but how could I?

  How could I recognize David’s ghost if I didn’t know, never thought, he could be dead?

  That can’t be it, I tell myself. This is something else, a spirit displacement thing. Somewhere he is fine and living. Maybe asleep. And his spirit has come here, like the ghosts come here, only not like them at all.

  “David?” I want to ask him more. But I can’t put the sentence together.

  He says, “Make sure you don’t blame yourself, okay? It’s not your fault.”

  He lifts his face up out of his hands and looks at me. The bruise is still there, a crescent-shaped smear on the right side of his face. His eyes are tired and sad.

  David is dead.

  When Amanda was ten years old she used to fake faint at every little thing. She has always been dramatic. Somehow I feel this is what I should do. My eyes should roll up into my head. I should collapse.

  Nevertheless, I stay on my feet. I feel sick. I am sick.

  I say, “I’m sorry too.”

  He looks me in the face, but I don’t even flinch. He says, “I know.”

  “What happened?”

  “I couldn’t. I just couldn’t anymore. Tell my mom it was an accident.”

  “I can’t tell her I saw you—she doesn’t know—”

  “I’m right next door,” he says, pointing down the block with an arm that is already growing faint.

  “I’m sorry,” I say again, because I don’t know what else to say, he is less solid and more translucent by the moment, and as I rack my brain for the right thing to ask him or to tell him he is gone.

  ….

  I DON’T KNOW what to do. I can’t process it. First I’m mad at myself because I didn’t think to tell him about Elena, then I realize it wouldn’t have mattered, nothing would have mattered. Of all the impossible things that have happened to me, this is the one I get stuck on.

  What do I do?

  It doesn’t make any sense, but I do it anyway. I walk to the front door and open it and look out in the street. Ice and brick and bare brown trees. Nothing there. No one there.

  The hot chocolate goes cold on the kitchen counter before I realize the one obvious thing I absolutely have to do.

  I have to call Gert.

  I dial her number. Too fast, too soon. I shouldn’t have called her, I realize too late, I don’t know what to say. I hold the phone away from my ear. I stare at the buttons, not sure what to push. How will I talk to her? How will I tell her?

  Faintly, I hear the phone ringing. But it’s not the sound of my phone ringing hers. It’s the sound of her phone ringing. On the other side of the door.

  I open it. She’s here.

  “Gert,” I say, and she puts her palm on my forehead, and I reach out to do the same, placing my hand against her forehead like a blessing, because I know she needs a blessing, and I say, “I know, I know, I know.”

  We stand in the open doorway with our heads bent down, searching for comfort.

  PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL IS only a block away, and that’s where he is. Right next door, he said, and he was right. They called Gert, and she was coming to see if they’d made a mistake, and she needed someone beside her, so she stopped to ask me. Everything else fades to nothing. Gert needs me, and besides Amanda and the girls, she’s the closest thing I have left to family. She grips my hand and doesn’t let go.

  The doctor—a gray-haired man with lines in his face and gentle, clasped hands, like Dad’s—explains things to us in a calm, quiet voice. David was on his bike. We know how tight the streets of Center City are, no room for error. One car turns, another brakes, but not fast enough. David, caught, knocked into the next lane.

  It was fast, he says.

  We are escorted into a room, a cold one, where a body is covered with a sheet. I hang back, letting my feet get heavy, delaying the moment.

  “Don’t be scared,” Gert says, so I try not to be.

  Her hand clutches mine so hard it aches. She can break it for all I care. I never had to look at Ma’s and Dad’s faces. No one made me.

  When the nurse exposes David’s face I force myself to look where she looks, and follow her gaze down.

  The dulce de leche eye, the bruise, the cheek the color of Arbequina olives. It’s him.

  Gert makes one loud sob, and her grief unlocks my own, and my sob follows hers like an echo. My throat narrows until I can hardly breathe. My cheeks are wet, then wetter. I’m crying, hard.

  Still holding on, Gert gasps, “Ye
s,” and there’s the swish of the sheet lowering again, thank God.

  Now that my tears have started flowing they won’t stop. I’m not just crying for David, but that doesn’t matter. Today has an all-encompassing sadness. My grief is pouring out over everything like spilled salt.

  Afterward, I try to keep my wits. They’re needed. Just as we worked our way into the hospital, step by step, we work our way out. From the place where they keep the dead to the place where they break the news, then to the place where people wait, then to the place where people have just arrived and aren’t even sure what they’re waiting for. I have to guide Gert so she doesn’t run into anything or anyone. As we work our way to the outer circle the other people around us are becoming more frantic. They’re not watching where they’re going. We’re islands in a river, in our way. There’s so much movement and noise I shouldn’t be able to do it. But Gert needs me to do it, so I do. I walk with purpose.

  Finally, on the sidewalk outside the hospital, we break clear of the crowd. I stop leading Gert, and turn to her.

  I try to read her face. I know she’s in anguish, her whole body tells me that. But I look at her face because I hope it will tell me what to do.

  Mostly, Gert just looks lost.

  “Come rest at the house,” I tell her.

  Her look doesn’t change.

  “It’s so close by, and you should sit down. Come on, come over,” I say. “Just for a minute.”

  She nods just slightly, and next to me, shuffles along. But I’m afraid she might fall, so I have to take her arm. She accepts it with no indication she knows it’s there.

  It’s the coldest day in Philadelphia that I can remember. The sky is cloudless and bright, and in the half block between the hospital and my house, my arms go numb and my face freezes into a mask. I left without a coat. Even with this, I have no desire to stay inside. If I need to stay out here for an hour I will. I only want to be helpful.

  We make our way slowly, but we get there. Up the steps. Through the door. Down the hall. I get her seated on the couch. I make tea for her, mint tea, heavily laced with honey.

  “Is there anything else you need?” I ask her. “Anything you want? Anything I can do?”

  She cups her hand around her tea but doesn’t drink it. She stares down into the cup.

  I gesture toward the fireplace. “I could make a fire.”

  “Oh, Ginny,” she says. “Do not be helpful. Not just now. Right now, please, just be here.”

  So I reach out for her hand, and hold it. It’s neither warm nor cold, wet nor dry. I squeeze and she doesn’t squeeze back. If she wants me to be here, I’ll be here.

  We sit on the couch, facing the empty fireplace. Facing nothing. The smell of the sweet mint tea slowly disperses through the room.

  The two of us stay that way for a long time, until someone from the temple comes to take Gert, and David, home.

  MY PARENTS ARE dead. David is dead. What comes next? Gert’s grief was all I could think of while she was here. If you don’t know how to deal with emotion, other people’s feelings can hit you like a drug. But now that I’m alone here it’s my own grief I’m obsessed with. How my mother did so much for me, and I never thanked her, not once. I begin taking ingredients out of the cabinet for a recipe to summon her ghost, and then realize I am crying so hard I would never be able to form words, so I put them back again.

  Did he want to be dead? Did he say to himself, I can’t take this, and shove his handlebars toward the left at a crucial moment, and end his life on purpose?

  I can’t imagine him doing that. But I don’t have a very good imagination.

  It hurts, knowing I couldn’t help him. We both reached out. The ache in my body shifts, encompassing my lost parents, my lost friend, my lost life. And in another way I’ve lost my sister, but there’s a chance, some chance, that I might be able to get her back.

  This is why Ma wanted to protect me. This is how much life hurts. But even now, even in this pain, even in knowing that, I’d rather be living it than hiding from it.

  My stomach is growling with hunger when I hear another noise, faintly.

  Knock-knock.

  Not spoken, but rapped: knuckles on wood. The sound, an everyday sound, but full of mystery. Let me in.

  It’s a knock on the front door.

  I think hard about it. Is there anyone alive I want to see right now? Is it someone alive who’s knocking? What makes me answer the door is the fear that it’s something important, and they would be persistent. It’s easier to answer than not to.

  The woman at the door, the hood of her jacket raised against the cold, is familiar.

  I’ve only seen her twice, but the circumstances were memorable. I recognize her right away. Reddish hair. Slender build. She was at the temple. She made matzoh ball soup for the family with the sick daughter.

  “I’m Miriam,” she says. “From the chevra kadisha.”

  “I remember.”

  She says, “I’m sorry to bother you. I would have called. But I knew only the address. May I come in?”

  “Of course.”

  She comes in and stands inside the door. She places her feet firmly on the welcome mat, so any melting snow will be caught.

  I don’t know what to say to her. I don’t know why she’s here. My thoughts are in the kitchen, and with Gert, and under that hospital sheet.

  Miriam says, “We would like you to help us with the meal of consolation for Gert and her family.”

  I can’t believe I didn’t think of it. All those mourners and mitzvahs. All those meals Gert made for others in grief. The oblong foods, the separation of meat and milk, the casseroles for the freezer. Kugel and soup and muffins and cakes. All lovingly prepared. Now, she is the one grieving. Hers is the family that needs consolation.

  Miriam says, “It is unusual to have someone help who is not Jewish. I think you understand why?”

  “Of course.”

  “But this is an unusual case. She brought you to help us because you’re a very good cook.”

  “I’ll be very happy to help,” I tell Miriam, because Gert needs me. I will help the burial committee make the meal of consolation. I will take a new approach to death, because what is important about death is not the dead. It’s the living. Those of us left behind.

  I ask Miriam, “Could I bring another woman with me to help?”

  “It’s unusual.”

  “But it’s okay?”

  “It’s okay. You know she’ll help?”

  I say, “I’ll call her and ask.”

  “Tomorrow morning at the temple,” she says. “Ten o’clock?”

  “I’ll be there. I hope we both will.”

  “You are good daughter,” says Miriam, putting her hood back up, and walks off into the snow.

  I HOPE AND hope that Amanda will answer her phone, but she doesn’t. So much has changed for me in only a couple of days, but she doesn’t know that yet. For her it’s only been a little time. She still thinks it’s worth holding on to her anger. She knows a lot more than I do about a lot of things, but there are still things she doesn’t know.

  I figure it out. I look up at the scrap of paper on the refrigerator, a few precious digits. I dial a different number.

  A woman with an orange juice voice answers, “Hello?”

  “Angelica, it’s Ginny Selvaggio, please don’t hang up,” I say, and she doesn’t. I tell her that someone has died, it’s hard to explain why this is important but it was our cleaning lady’s son, our friend Gert’s son, and I need Amanda to come help me tomorrow morning, and I need her to forgive me and won’t Angelica please call Amanda and let her know that we shouldn’t be fighting anymore and she’s right that Ma and Dad would want us to work together, and that I love her, she’s my family, that’s the thing that’s important, and everything else we can figure out how to deal with together.

  There’s a pause, and I’m afraid I’ve lost her.

  A sound, a swallow, a gulp of air. Then s
he says, “It’s me, Amanda, I was having dinner with Angelica so I answered her phone while she was in the bathroom, it’s me, Ginny, baby, are you okay?”

  “I will be.”

  “I’m sorry about all this, I’m sorry,” she says. “Is Gert okay? What happened? What do you need from me?”

  I tell her what she needs to know, not everything, but enough. She agrees to meet me at the house tomorrow so we can walk over to the temple together.

  After I hang up, I give Midnight extra food because I feel like feeding someone, but go to bed without dinner myself.

  IN THE MORNING I decide to sit and wait on the steps. It’s still cold, but with layers and the sunlight, protected from the wind by the portico, it’s warm enough.

  When I see Amanda walking up, I stand and come down the steps to meet her.

  The first thing she says is, “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too,” I say. “Let’s go.” I point her in the right direction.

  As we walk I tell her about David and his wife, her death, his inability to deal with his grief.

  “Scary,” says Amanda. “That’s not going to happen to us, is it?”

  “I don’t think so,” I say.

  “And do you think—I mean, it sounds like it was, but the way you’re talking about how he was feeling before it—do you think it was an accident?”

  “Yes,” I say, because that’s how he wanted it. And if I couldn’t give him what he was looking for while he was alive, I can at least give him that.

  She says, “Do you really need me? For this?”

  “I’ll feel better with you there.”

  “Okay.”

  “Besides, you want to learn to cook, don’t you?”

  “This isn’t what I had in mind,” says Amanda.

  “Not what I had in mind either,” I say, “but we have to make do with what we’ve got.”

  We walk into the temple and I guide her through to the kitchen.

  Miriam says, “I’m glad you’re here.”

  I say, “Us too,” and we start to work.

  First I have Amanda pick through the lentils, making sure there are no stones, and she is diligent. When she has finished with the lentils I show her how to make hard-boiled eggs, the twelve-minute technique, the same one Gert taught me.