A Feast of Brief Hopes

by Bruce Meyer

  “Chamfering,” she replied. “Cham-fer-ing. It makes the hard wood more comfortable.”

  My mother and father’s chairs were upholstered in marbled plastic. They were made of chrome. Outside, in the garden, I heard a crowing. I stood up on the chair seat to look out the window and saw a white hen being chased by a brown and orange rooster. He had a red comb on his head. The hen out-ran him but not before she spread her wings as if trying to fly.

  “May I play with the chickens?”

  “Get down off the chair before you fall and hurt yourself.”

  I sat and waited. She placed a glass of milk in front of me on the yellow iron table top. When the cookie was set down, she said: “Only one for now.” I gripped the glass of milk in both hands as I had been taught when I was at someone else’s house, and drank it slowly.

  And when my parents and grandparents came to fetch me home, my grandfather sat with the others in the parlour and cupped his hands in a patch of sunlight on the yellow wallpaper, and the shadow of his fingers took the shape of a spider that climbed the wall among the cabbage roses and settled itself into the web from the window.

  Everyone waved goodbye as the car drove away leaving a cloud of dust on the lane behind us. I turned around in the back seat and waved out the rear window, but the man and the woman had already turned away and headed back toward the house. The woman paused for an instant on the porch and wiped her hands on her apron.

  When I woke in my own bed that night, I saw a pale beige house-haunter swing from the fixture and drop to the floor. I pulled my feet into the covers.

  I’ve told you about this many times.

  I had never been able to be certain whether the place I had been was real or was a dream. Spiders are real. A person is never more than six feet from a spider. I know they are everywhere. They live in both shadows and light. They weave webs.

  Are dreams webs?

  And if they are webs, what becomes trapped in them? Time? Images? People? Faces?

  I often described the dream to members of my family. They would shake their heads. “Yes,” they would say, “you must have been dreaming.”

  But when I told them that our kitchen table was being built in Selkirk, my mother said: “You should drop by Auntie Margaret’s old place and take a look. We left you there one weekend when we had to drive to Detroit.”

  That’s why we had to go there on our way to see the cabinet-maker about our table.

  He, too, had a house with hollyhocks climbing a post near his door. He, too, had a weathered, dark green shed out back. That’s where he did his cabinetry. He invited us in. Just inside the door on a wooden work bench where a set of gleaming chisels were arranged like instruments in an operating theatre, there was a seat he was chamfering. I paused as he made his way to the back of his shed, and ran my hands over the indentations.

  He rifled through a stack of wooden boards he had salvaged from old houses in the area that had been torn down or fallen down.

  “You can’t let the past go to waste.”

  “No,” I said. “They don’t make wood like that any more.”

  He had planed old floor boards. He reached into a galvanized bucket full of water, splashed a handful onto five boards he had laid atop a large work bench. As his hand spread the water, the tiger stripes in the maple caught the light from the cobwebbed four-pane window, and the wood glowed.

  “That’s your table top. Do you like it?”

  I could imagine, couldn’t you, sitting there, eating our dinners with our children, perhaps baking ginger bread cookies and mixing the dough on the surface.

  “Tiger for the top, birds-eye for the legs,” he said. “It will be beautiful.”

  We sorted through more lumber, and he let us select his finest birds-eye maple from the tangle of webs and boards.

  The table is now the centre of our home together. It has done us good service for the past twenty years. We will pass it on to our daughter, and perhaps she will give it to one of her children.

  It has been the place we lay our meals and weave our conversations.

  After we finished imagining our table into being at the cabinet-maker’s farm, we drove along a concession for a few miles and turned right into the mouth of a lane. I had to get out and lift the heavy iron gate from the entrance.

  No one had been in the house for many years.

  As we approached, I saw the veranda overgrown with vines. There were no hollyhocks to be found. The porch boards were jumbled like the teeth of the old man at the gas station where we had stopped earlier to ask directions. When he smiled, he nodded, and said: “Yep, I knew them well. All gone now. Long gone.”

  I tried to look in the glass of the front door, but a lace curtain still hung over the window and barred my view. The front window was also curtained. I wanted to see in. I wanted to look into the past and see if it had been a dream or if it had been real.

  I walked around the side of the house and could see into the garden. The green shed had collapsed on itself and I wondered if the ball-peen hammer and the paint cans were still in there, but I did not go to look.

  But as I started to come back around the front, I stopped. The oval window was at shoulder height now. I stood on my toes and looked in. A brown and grey wolf spider hung from its web on the outside of the window and stared at me with caution. I did not want to break its web. I put my hand over my eyes to get a better look. The wolf spider climbed the rungs of his trap and waited on the windowframe for me to leave.

  I spit on my index finger and cleaned a small portal from the dirt that had accumulated on the glass. The yellow cabbage roses were still in bloom on the walls, although the places where the pictures had been had turned to squares of light, and the mantle clock was not there to count the hours.

  “I know this place. I thought I had dreamed it, but it is real. It has changed,” I said to you. “Maybe the past is not a dream after all.”

  Patiently, you wrapped your arms around me. I felt your fingers climb across my neck.

  The Cards in Her Hand

  My grandparents’ house on the maple-lined street is a long way from the bus stop. It is a cold walk on a winter night. I am chilled to the bone when I arrive. As I lean against the radiator in the front hall, my arms and legs begin to warm and I place my boots in the tray with their mouths facing the heat. It is a Thursday night and after dinner with my grandparents I go the final two blocks to the family church for choir practice. It is a long journey for a seven-year-old on his own.

  My grandfather, who is deaf, has not heard me arrive as I step into the living room and see him cleaning up the dining room table from the Thursday afternoon bridge club, shuffling the cards back into decks and sweeping crumbs from the family heirloom Irish linen table cloth. I can picture the gathering of grey-haired friends, their jokes spoken loudly so my grandfather can hear. They smile and play their hands — north, south, east, and west — all converging in their elemental concentration as they bid and deal and bid again. I can see the cards in my grandmother’s thin hands, her eye brows raised as she examines what she has been dealt.

  My grandmother cooks dinner and I play solitaire on the enamelled-top kitchen table before setting our places with the cutlery arranged as I had learned from her. I look up from my cards and tell her she reminds of me of the wimpled Queen of Hearts. She dismisses the idea, but I know she is happy that I see her in unexpected places. With my parents, she and my grandfather are the solid cornerstones of my life. North. South. East. West.

  Hers has not been an easy life — a Victorian childhood, the First World War, the lists of the war dead on which she found her friends and the boy friends of her chums. She rolled bandages with her friends around the dining room table, and comforted them when they returned to the circle of cloth with their grief still fresh. She had fallen in love with a frail young man from around the corner who cannot hear the shouted commands or distinguish half the colours in the spectrum. He has been turned down for active service,
and each week a woman presents him with a white feather when he goes downtown, and each week he goes to the recruiting office and is turned down.

  In the early years of their marriage my grandfather saw the old city firms that employed him fall one by one for want of eldest sons to take their helms. Just when they thought the hardship might have passed, there was the Great Depression, that draughty hallway of a decade when there was never enough coal in the cellar to keep the boiler hot. And just when she and my grandfather thought they were clear of the trials and tribulations of the world, another war came and took the sons of their friends. My grandfather sits every evening with the remaining hearing of his good ear tuned to the blaring vacuum-tubed radio. And when his nose tells him that dinner is ready, he pulls himself up from his armchair and joins us at the table. The smell of baking always fills the house.

  Food — the recipes, the tastes, the old cravings — is the one thing that remains faithful to a person throughout life. As long as the familiar dishes are there, a person feels rooted in their blessing. The food at my grandparents’ kitchen table is simple and honest. It is a food that comes from the heart and sticks to the ribs to give comfort on a cold night. Meatloaf topped with bacon strips, mashed potatoes with thick tomato gravy, creamed celery, and to top it off snow pudding and sugar cookies, and strong black tea with a little milk to soften its edge.

  Perhaps because I am hungry now, I go rummaging for the small red box that sat on my grandmother’s kitchen counter on those nights when I would arrive cold and hungry. My mother gave it to me to take to grad school. She imagined I would be cooking for myself, but I never got around to opening it or putting its secrets to work. When I was hungry I would boil a hot dog or go for some fast food. I know that in the red box are the secrets that made my grandmother’s dinners so special, menus and recipes conjured from the heart of simplicity because their magic was called forth by love and patience and the warmth of a well-used kitchen on a winter night.

  I shut my eyes, just as my grandmother used to draw down the dark green black-out blinds after the dishes were done and the kitchen was settled for the night. I am a ghost that has arrived in the past. I stand beside my grandmother as she is patting a meatloaf into shape. My grandfather is listening to the late afternoon radio shows, and I have not yet arrived at their house. She holds the highsided silver pan in her hands as if it is a jewel box and sets it on top of the stove to open the oven and slide it in. Making food was her ritual, and I want to stand and watch how the rest of the meal is made and try to recognize what it means when someone says they put love into their cooking, but I am brought back to reality.

  My wife calls down the stairs and asks me what I am looking for. I tell her I am looking for the secret ingredients of my past. Together we shuffle the plastic bins from side to side in the store room until we find the one that contains the red box.

  “I am going to write a short story that presents my grandmother’s recipes. I want to show my writing class that stories can be useful.”

  “May I suggest that before you do that, you try them?” My wife is wise in these things. “You don’t want the story to poison anyone.”

  We take the box up to our kitchen and open it as if it is a reliquary. I sort through the neat filing cards. Some recipes are scraps torn from newspapers or magazines. “Here is the one for sugar cookies,” I say, holding it up as if a rare pearl.

  The card is written in an elegant secretarial cursive. The flourish of the capital letters harkens back to a time when people cared not only about what they said but how they presented themselves to others through the written word. In an age of cares, they took care in what they did. My grandmother’s handwriting, those cards in her hand and the details of the ingredients in each recipe, tells me that her cooking was an act of love. As I hold the cards in my hands, I am standing beside her watching as each item is sifted carefully and mixed in her favourite bowl on her enamel table top, each ingredient a small note in an opus she composes.

  “I am going to begin with the end of the meal,” I tell my wife as I lay the butter, flour, and sugar on the table. Dessert must always be made first because the conclusion of a solid meal takes the longest to make, and it must be as memorable as a farewell kiss.

  Sugar Cookies

  1 cup shortening (butter)

  1 cup granulated sugar

  2 eggs

  2 ½ cups all purpose flour

  1 tsp baking soda

  1 ½ tsp cream of tartar

  ½ tsp salt

  1 tsp lemon extract or almond extract

  Method:

  Cream shortening and cream in the sugar gradually. Beat in the eggs. Mix and sift together the dry ingredients and add to the creamed mixture together with the lemon or almond extract. Mix well. Drop by teaspoons on an ungreased baking sheet. Flatten with the bottom of a glass dipped in sugar. Sprinkle with white sugar. Bake in a moderate oven 375 Fahrenheit about ten minutes.

  Makes five dozen.

  The cookies turn out well enough though there is something missing in them that I seem to remember. I have been impatient in my work because I desire to bring the lost taste back to life, and I have rushed the patient process of mixing and stirring. “Love suffereth long and is kind,” my grandmother would say as she blended the mixture with her wooden spoon and turned the bowl to scrape the clingings from the side.

  I once decided to hide inside my grandmother’s kitchen cupboard with the cookie tin all to myself. The tin was adorned with pictures of English crowns. It was a memento of Elizabeth II’s coronation and an emblem of my grandmother’s attachment to “the old country,” though she had been born and raised in Canada and never set foot overseas. I had pulled the cupboard door shut behind me. She came into the kitchen to find a baking pan she was about to loan to a friend, and when she bent down and opened the door I said ‘hello’ to cover my guilt. The shock sent her to her knees, gasping. I was cut off from the wonderful cookies for a week, and that seemed an awfully long time. If I was good, I would be given a third cookie at the end of dinner, and if I was especially good I was allowed to take a fourth one home with me. The cookie never lasted past the first block on the drive home.

  As the last tray of the five dozen comes out of the oven and the air is sweet with a tart vanilla bouquet, snow is falling on our backyard. Light from our kitchen window spreads across the garden and the gentle rolls of drifts in the illuminated beds and plantings reminds me of snow pudding.

  Snow Pudding was the dessert she loved to serve me. This old Canadian dish is a delicious misnomer. It is neither snow nor a pudding as one might expect. It is a lemon and gelatin concoction covered in a creamy custard sauce. My grandmother always loved to tell me of Victorian picnics beside the Don River when the favourite finale to an outdoor meal was lemon snow with custard. The ingredients would be packed in crushed ice, and when the ice was just going soft was the moment the dessert would be served beneath the branches of weeping willows. On the tongue it is cool and refreshing, but just as the taste of lemon tang appears to speak, it vanishes as if a memory I cannot quite bring to life. It is a dessert of ghosts.

  During my childhood, I loved the pudding but was not wild about the custard. My sister did not like the pudding but loved the custard. It was a good arrangement. Whenever we were sick, my grandmother would send up bowls of snow and Mason jars of yellow custard to put us back on our feet. I scan the recipe card and notice that the pudding and the custard share a sense of economy; one requires yolks, the other the whites. During the Second World War when everyone was issued ration books, a clever cook could make several dishes with very limited ingredients. Meat, eggs, bread, and dairy were ‘kept back’ to feed the troops. What one was permitted to buy had to go a long way. Snow pudding and custard sauce were as much about making the most out of the least as they were about the taste and sweetness on the tongue. The snow required just as much sugar as might be left over from a week’s allotment after coffee and other baking had taken th
eir share. I knew by the pride and patience my grandmother took in making sugar cookies that she had not been able to make them during those six long years when the black out blinds were drawn down at four o’clock. When she was able to bake it was because she was able to trade something else with a diabetic woman who lived down the street. But even in times of shortage, snow pudding had been possible.

  Snow Pudding and Custard Sauce

  1 quantity of lemon jelly recipe

  1 egg white

  ⅛ tsp salt

  Lemon jelly:

  1 ½ tbsp of gelatin

  ⅓ cup cold water

  ½ cup granulated sugar

  1 ⅓ cups hot water

  ⅓ cup lemon juice

  Thin shavings of lemon rind

  Method for lemon jelly:

  Soak the gelatin in cold water. Combine sugar, hot water, and lemon rind, boil together for two minutes. Strain out the rind. Pour this over the gelatin and stir until the gelatin is dissolved. Then add the strained lemon juice.

  Method for Lemon snow:

  After the lemon jelly has set, when partially set, beat the lemon jelly until foamy. Add salt to the egg white and beat until stiff. Add this to the beaten jelly beating it in well. Allow the mixture to set. Lift out in spoonfuls into sherbet glasses. Serve with custard sauce.

  Serves Six.

  Custard Sauce:

  1 ¼ scalded milk (heated to hot without boiling)

  2 ½ tbsp sugar

  1 tsp corn starch

  ⅛ tsp salt

  2 egg yolks slightly beaten

  ¼ cup cold milk

  ¼ tsp vanilla

  Method:

  Scald the milk. Combine sugar, corn starch, salt, and egg yolks with the cold milk. Add this to the scalded milk. Cook stirring constantly until thick. Add the vanilla. Chill. Before chilling add a piece of wax paper to the top to avoid a skin.

  The scalding of milk sounds painful. Scalding was a more common occurrence in kitchens than it is today. Now, if we want something, we microwave it and know enough to let the seconds run down before removing the cover. My grandmother had her arm in a bandage one evening when I arrived because the celery water had splashed her while she was draining the pot. She made no fuss about it, but I could tell by the way her other hand tried to cover it as we talked over dessert that she was in pain. That is what scalding means in one sense. In the other sense, it is merely about bringing the milk to the verge of boiling and then pulling it off so it will not talk itself into a heavy taste and a thick skin.