by J. L. Newton
The shrill ring of the phone pierced my uneasy slumber. “Hello?” I said tentatively. Silence on the other end. I lay there, feeling a tingling in my arms and hands, until I fell into a shallow slumber.
Corn Muffins
Makes 12 muffins
2 cups of all-purpose flour
1 cup yellow cornmeal (stone-ground, whole grain)
1½ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
¾ cup sugar
8 tablespoons (1 stick) of unsalted butter, melted and cooled
¾ cup sour cream
½ cup milk
Adjust an oven rack to the middle position and preheat oven to 400°F.
Generously coat a 12-cup muffin tin with Pam or other non-stick spray.
Whisk the flour, cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together in a large bowl.
Whisk the eggs and sugar together in a medium bowl until combined. Whisk in the melted and cooled butter in three additions. Whisk in one half of the sour cream and milk until smooth, then whisk in the second half.
Gently fold the egg mixture into the flour mixture with a rubber spatula until just combined. Do not overmix.
Use a large ice-cream scoop or measuring cup, sprayed with Pam or other nonstick spray, to divide the batter evenly among the muffin cups. Do not level or flatten the surface of the mounds.
Bake until light golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out with just a few crumbs attached (about 16–18 minutes).
Let the muffins cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then flip out onto a wire rack and let cool for 10 minutes before serving.
Adapted by permission of Mel at Mel’s Kitchen Cafe http://www.melskitchencafe.com/cornbread-muffins/.
Chapter 9
Isobel’s face looked like a cloud full of rain. Had something happened? I’d come to her office the next morning to seek advice about the figure in red, the blue van, and the ringing phone. Were they connected or were they a series of frightening coincidences? The call had been the most disturbing. Someone knew my number, knew how to invade the safe enclosure of my home in the middle of the night. But why? Did the calls have to do with Peter’s poisoning, with my unsuccessful attempts to identify the poisoner, or were they more random, perhaps another version of the threats and harassments that single women often encountered?
Isobel was strong, also wise. She might have insights that would put me at rest, or, now that a roasting spit seemed to have lodged itself in my back, my throat, and head, she might guide me, in thinking about what to do. Isobel hugged me and the two of us sat down.
“You seem upset,” I said.
“It’s the time of year. It takes me back to something painful.”
I looked at her expectantly.
“I’ve never told you about my nephew, my sister’s son. It was two years ago, the year I was so angry.”
“I remember. I couldn’t get you to talk to me.”
“Something had happened. Years ago my sister married a man living on the reservation.” I’d never seen this reservation, although it was only thirty miles away.
“Her husband took to drinking, and so she worked and raised her son herself. I offered to help with child care, and, over the years, my nephew and I became very close.” Isobel began to rock her body back and forth ever so slightly, as if the motion stilled something inside of her. “It was his last year of high school. He’d had a tough time in local schools. He looked Mexican, but he didn’t speak Spanish, and so he was an outsider to Mexicans and whites both.” Isobel’s rocking became more pronounced. “He wanted to drop out. I guess he thought he’d tend to grapes for a living. He was already working harvests. I told him, ‘You can’t just throw your life away.’ I began to spend more time mentoring him.”
“You would do that. You mentor most of the students in your program.” Isobel gave me a thankful look.
“He began to do better. He was going to graduate in the spring, but that November, after I’d taken him to a celebration of El Dia de Los Muertos, he was found in his car early in the morning, his body full of drugs.” Tears filled Isobel’s eyes. “It was before the casino had taken off. There was a lot of poverty on the Res, a lot of drinking, a lot of drugs, and no resources for young people or anyone really.”
I felt my own eyes fill.
“I didn’t know he was into drugs. I kept thinking that I should have known, should have saved him.”
“He was like your child. I can’t imagine any greater sorrow than losing a child.” I felt a stab of pain. What if I were ever to lose Polly?
“I was so angry that year. We’ve lost so much—our land, much of our culture, our lives. Indian populations were decimated after white men arrived in California. And then to have him taken from me like that and from the rest of his family. He’d been cut down, poisoned by our history and by the life imposed on him. And I was angry at myself that I hadn’t prevented it.”
“You did your best. That’s all anyone can do.” I thought of how I’d worried about being a better friend to Miriam. I put my hand on top of Isobel’s and told her how sorry I was.
I understood now, in a more visceral way, why mentoring and protecting the vulnerable were so important to Isobel. I felt closer to her, she who’d always seemed so strong and self-controlled. You didn’t have to be blood-related to feel connection.
“Why did you come by this morning?” Isobel wiped her cheeks with her free hand.
“I was frightened,” I said and began to tell her about the events of the night before, but now my own worries, once so bold in my imagination, seemed to fade alongside Isobel’s deep-dyed grief.
* * *
Six men, one woman—all white, all in the sciences—sat like headstones at a heavy, wooden table, reading binders. It was afternoon by now, and I’d arrived for my first meeting as a participant in the Super Committee, a group that nominated members to all the faculty committees on campus. I had some thoughts about what I would try to do as its newest associate. I’d prepared myself for the meeting by reading and analyzing the committee’s membership rolls over the last twenty years, and thus I knew I was the only current member not in the sciences. That was bad enough, but I had been surprised to learn that the Super Committee had had no representatives from social science for half of the past twenty years and no representatives from the humanities for almost as long.
The Super Committee and, therefore, most of the committees on campus had been staffed by mainly white male scientists, with, yes, a few white women scientists thrown in, and it was easy to understand why. Men in science tended to know other men in science and felt confident sharing power with them. It was clearer now why it had been so hard to get new courses in Women’s Studies approved. There’d been no one on the Education Committee who had had any familiarity with work outside the sciences. I’d been appalled by my findings. Things on the Super Committee were far worse than I’d imagined.
“We need to get started,” the chair of the committee said. She was a woman scientist with straight black eyebrows like the wings of a raven. I opened my own binder. It contained lists of committees and the names of members past and present.
“Our first order of business is to nominate members to the Promotion Committee.” Since this committee voted on the promotions and tenure of every faculty member on campus, only full professors with a lot of clout would do. I raised my hand—I’d prepared for this as well.
“I’d like to nominate Antonio Conti, director of Native American Studies. He’s a high-ranking full professor and has an international reputation. He’s been a consultant for several projects with the United Nations.” A ripple of consternation passed over one of my colleague’s face. Two others moved in their seats.
“I don’t think he’s the right man for the job,” Collin Morehead said.
In his fifties, Collin reminded me of a picture I’d once seen of a bulldog�
�s face superimposed on the body of a man wearing a checkered shirt. I remembered Collin from the panel the previous spring. Like Peter, he worked on GMOs. I wondered what kind of relationship they had had. “Think more about C.M.,” I wrote in a tiny script on the top of my pad of paper.
“Conti once wrote an angry letter to the Promotion Committee about something he claimed was an injustice on their part. We can’t nominate someone like that to the committee.” Collin, an Australian, seemed to chew upon his words as if worrying a large bone.
“If he was angry about injustice,” I ventured, “isn’t that a good thing? Don’t we want someone with a critical perspective on the work of the committee?”
“Well, yes,” another of the scientists broke in, a gaunt man with white hair and round glasses, “but not someone who’s angry about it.”
God forbid we should be angry. I thought. God forbid we should have someone who really cares about injustice.
“It’s important to diversify the committees, however,” I persisted. “Professor Conti would bring both scholarly and philosophical diversity.”
Raven eyebrows, chair of the committee, looked as if she’d been slapped.
“I hope you’re not suggesting that we care nothing about diversity,” she said.
“Of course not, but I’ve read through the membership rolls over the last twenty years, and it’s been almost entirely white.”
Collin pursed his lips as if he had just taken a bite of a bad ham sandwich.
“We’ve certainly put women on committees,” he blustered. He grew larger in his chair, the buttons of his shirt straining to encase his stomach—as if it were a sausage swelling in a microwave.
“Yes,” I said, “I’ve actually counted them.”
Collin squinted his small eyes at me. The stark rejection of Antonio, whom I knew to be a good and highly qualified man, said a lot about the myopia of some with power in the university, but I decided not to press Antonio’s case. There’d be plenty of other nominations, and I didn’t want to alienate my fellow committee members so completely and so soon. I’d already violated an unwritten law for outsiders such as myself: don’t call attention to the status quo. It wasn’t just a question of changing it. They didn’t want to know about it either. But there was still the budget committee and I had two names on my list—one a full professor in Asian American and the other a full professor in African American studies. I was white and could use race privilege to help make the university a more equitable place, but despite, or even because of that, I was growing a reputation for acting out of line.
* * *
I walked the arboretum path seeking to restore a sense of peace, but after my struggles on the Super Committee, even the ducks sipping at their puddle didn’t comfort me much today. I’d reached the farthest bridge once again, when strolling toward me through the redwood path was the man with the reddish sweatshirt and wild pirate’s beard whom I’d seen three times before. He was looking up at the tall trees. This time, my adrenalin spiked, I didn’t stop but walked deliberately toward him. I came within six feet and stopped.
I always mistook him for a homeless man—Professor Ned Goldman of Entomology, who spent his life outdoors studying butterflies. He’d been on sabbatical for a year, and I’d all but forgotten him, but even when he hadn’t been away, I always had trouble recognizing who he was at first. Constant exposure to the sun had turned his skin the color of a walnut and lined his face with wrinkles, and he always seemed to be dressed for working in the fields. But the look was not just practical. I was aware that Ned cultivated a certain eccentricity. The wild frizz of cinnamon-colored hair and beard were deliberate. He liked throwing people into confusion with his looks the way he liked writing essays that overthrew conventional assumptions, and he’d certainly succeeded in confusing me.
I remembered a paper I’d happened upon while searching the Internet for hints on how to create a butterfly-friendly garden. Some local butterflies, Ned had argued, fed on plants that were regarded as invasive species. If butterflies were good, as most people assumed, how could you regard the plants they fed on as something bad? You couldn’t have the butterflies without the invasive plants. Conventional wisdom about the matter was not complex enough.
How many times had I seen him and gone through this shock of suddenly realizing who he was? He attended talks of every kind all over campus, even those in Women’s Studies, and yet I never knew him from a distance.
“Hello, Emily.”
“How are you, Ned? Welcome back. Are you stalking butterflies?”
“Nope, just taking my short cut to the arboretum. I live near campus and I like to walk through this redwood grove to reach the creek. Did you know these groves were planted in the 1930s? Some of the trees are two hundred and twenty-five feet high.”
“No, I didn’t know that. Do you find butterflies here?”
“Not really. But it’s a good place. I like to be near these trees.”
“I can understand that. Well good to see you, Ned.”
“Have a good day.”
The man in red was Ned Goldman! Talk about a person who looked like an invasive species. But would Ned tear up a cornfield or poison someone? I doubted that very much.
* * *
I sat in my office, chagrined at my failure to recognize Ned and at my assumption that someone who looked like an outsider was necessarily a danger. But I couldn’t dwell upon that now. I still had my seminar in popular culture to teach. Today, I was beginning a section on how to analyze a magazine. My focus was on the way magazines respond to social anxieties by offering their readers desirable identities and a sense of community, both of which could make readers feel better about themselves and the way they led their lives. I, myself, loved popular magazines and was addicted to ones on homes and gardens and now food. Miriam had been a reader of Architectural Digest, but I preferred the more approachable Sunset Magazine. I read it eagerly as a way of participating in the sensuous and relaxed existence that I often didn’t have time to live. I cut out plans for ambitious gardens that I lacked the time to lay out and clipped endless recipes that I never cooked. But clipping the recipes made me feel as if, perhaps, I had cooked them after all.
Of late, I had taken to teaching a magazine on Asian American popular culture. Many of my Women’s Studies students were Asian American, and teaching the magazine was a way of engaging them in the course, of understanding the relations between race and gender, and of making Asian American culture visible to the class as a whole. One result of using this material was that I was always well informed about Asian American entertainers. I could tell you a lot about the early years of Michelle Yeoh, Jet Li, and Adam Saruwatari. There were no recipes, unfortunately, but there were occasional references to food like cornmeal pancakes with kumquats for which I had found directions on the Internet. The kumquats were candied in honey and coconut milk, then served on top of pancakes with a coconut syrup. It was a recipe I’d been dying to try.
I’d just settled into my office chair when there was a knock on the door. I rose to open it and stood face-to-face with Sergeants Gina Garcia and Dorothy Brown. I showed them in, and they sat at the small round table I kept in my office for meetings.
“We have further results,” Dorothy said eagerly. “The lab found traces of onion and goat cheese too. Does anyone else you know make this recipe?”
“Not that I know of, but I got it online and modified it a bit, so plenty of people could have had access to something similar. There are dozens of recipes for corn bread I’m beginning to understand. I thought for a minute. “You know, choosing this particular recipe becomes meaningful in view of the fact that there are so many recipes for corn bread. If someone else bought the corn bread or made it, why didn’t they buy or make plain corn bread or corn bread with chilies? Why use corn bread with trendy ingredients like goat cheese and caramelized onions? My impression is that you can’t buy that kind of corn bread in Arborville, so either someone used a piece of mine a
s a vessel for the poison or went out of their way to make corn bread that was similar.”
“I see what you mean,” Gina said.
“Would anyone want to throw suspicion on you?” Dorothy asked.
“That never occurred to me,” I said. Did I have enemies I didn’t know about? I’d certainly irritated my colleagues on the Super Committee by pressing Antonio’s nomination and then by successfully nominating both the professor of African and of Asian American Studies to the powerful Committee on Budgets, but that was too recent to explain much. Who else had I angered in the past? And would someone I’d annoyed go so far as to make anonymous phone calls at 3:00 a.m.?
“There’s something else I wanted to tell you. I’ve been getting phone calls in the middle of the night. Is there anything the police can do about that?”
Dorothy and Gina glanced at each other.
“We’ve had some experience in that area,” Dorothy said. “You can have the phone company transfer late night calls to a religious call line. That usually stops the caller cold.”
“I’m going to try that.” It had never occurred to me that the phone company could be so obliging.
“What pesticide did the lab find in the corn bread?”
“Furadan.”
I stopped breathing for a moment. I thought of Juan Carlos’s father in a cowboy hat.
“How could someone put Furadan in food without another person detecting it?”
“Furadan is colorless, odorless, and tasteless,” Gina said. “And it doesn’t take much to kill someone.”