“You’d better listen to me. This situation is intolerable. Your work is unacceptable. I expect better from you, and you will do better, do you understand me? I’m surprised Miss Harbottle hasn’t sent me a note about this.”
She had. Two, in fact.
“You will show me your work every night until the fair.”
This meant that I’d have to pay more attention for a few weeks. Gloom tolled its heavy bell in my ear. I was a marked girl.
IT WAS GETTING on in the day. I’d had an inordinate and unfair amount of homework, and there were a couple of hours of decent working light left. I headed for the door at top speed. Mother sat in the parlor reviewing her housekeeping accounts. “Calpurnia,” she called, “the river again?”
Too late. “Yes, Mother,” I said, in my best cheerful-obedient-good-girl voice.
“Bring me your sewing first.”
“What?”
“Don’t say what like that, my girl. Bring me your sewing before there’s any talk about going to the river. And where’s your bonnet? You’ll freckle.”
How could I freckle? It was practically dark out. I tromped back up the stairs, feeling as if I were carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders.
“And stop stamping about like that,” Mother called. “You’re not carrying the weight of the world, you know.”
Her comment startled me into proper behavior. It was scary how she could read my mind. I crept the rest of my way up to my room and closed the door. I pulled my sampler from my sewing bag and looked at it. It had started out life as a perfect square but had evolved into a skewed rhomboid, with all the letters leaning sharply to the right. How were you supposed to make the stitches the same size? How were you supposed to keep the tension even? And, most of all, who cared about this stuff?
Well, I could answer the last one. My mother cared, and the rest of the world apparently did too, for no good reason that I could figure out. And I, who did not care, was going to be forced into caring. It was ridiculous. I threw the embroidery hoop across the room.
Two hours later, I took my work downstairs. The assignment was to embroider “Welcome to Our Home” in flowery script. I had made it as far as “Welco,” but it was all wobbly, so I had picked it out and reworked the entire W to show Mother.
“Is this all you have done?” she said.
“It’s a big letter! It’s a capital!”
“All right, all right. Lower your voice. You have done better, which shows me, Calpurnia, that you can do this if you would only apply yourself.”
Oh, how my brothers and I hated that word apply.
“Can I go?”
“Yes, you may go. Don’t be late for dinner.”
As Mother lit the parlor lamps, I shoved my handiwork away and dashed out the front door. There wasn’t much light left. Too late to collect diurnal samples. Great. I could see the newspaper: Girl Scientist Thwarted for All Time by Stupid Sewing Projects. Loss to Society Immeasurable. Entire Scientific Community in Mourning.
I seethed my way to the river and got there at darkfall. And then Viola’s bell clanged in the distance.
I clomped through the kitchen on the way to washing up and said to Viola, “How come I have to learn how to sew and cook? Why? Can you tell me that? Can you?”
I’ll admit it was a bad time to ask her—she was beating the last lumps out of the gravy—but she paused long enough to look at me with puzzlement, as if I were speaking ancient Greek. “What kind of question is that?” she said, and went back to whisking the gravy in the fragrant, smoking pan.
My Lord, what a dismal response. Was the answer such an ingrained, obvious part of the way we lived that no one stopped to ponder the question itself? If no one around me even understood the question, then it couldn’t be answered. And if it couldn’t be answered, I was doomed to the distaff life of only womanly things. I was depressed right into the ground.
After dinner I went to my room, put on my nightie, and read. I was munching my way, so to speak, through Granddaddy’s volumes of Dickens with great satisfaction and had made it all the way to Oliver Twist. Please, sir, could I have some more? The poor wretch’s circumstances were grim enough to make me reconsider my own situation.
I went downstairs for a glass of water. Mother and Father were sitting in the parlor with the door open.
“What will we do with her?” said Mother, and I froze on the landing. There was only one her they ever talked about, and it was me. “The boys will make their way in the world, but what about her? Your father feeds her a steady diet of Dickens and Darwin. Access to too many books like those can build disaffection in one’s life. Especially a young life. Most especially a young girl’s life.”
I wanted to yell, We’re doing important work! There’s the Plant! But then I’d really catch it for eavesdropping.
“I don’t see the harm in it,” said Father.
“She runs wild all day with a butterfly net. She doesn’t know how to sew or keep house,” said Mother.
“Well, plenty of girls her age don’t know yet,” said Father. “Don’t they?”
“She can’t cook a dry bean. And her biscuits are like . . . like . . . I don’t know what.”
Rocks, I thought. Isn’t that the word you’re looking for?
“I’m sure she’ll pick these things up,” said Father.
“Alfred, she keeps frogs in her room.”
“She does?”
I wanted to call out, That’s a lousy lie—they’re only tadpoles.
But then it happened. My father fell silent. And it was his silence, his long pause while he digested this information, that filled the hallway and my heart and soul with such a great whooshing pressure that I couldn’t breathe. I had never classified myself with other girls. I was not of their species; I was different. I had never thought my future would be like theirs. But now I knew this was untrue, and that I was exactly like other girls. I was expected to hand over my life to a house, a husband, children. It was intended that I give up my nature studies, my Notebook, my beloved river. There was a wicked point to all the sewing and cooking that they were trying to impress upon me, the tedious lessons I had been spurning and ducking. I went hot and cold all over. My life did not lie with the Plant after all. My life was forfeit. Why hadn’t I seen it? I was trapped. A coyote with her paw in the trap.
After an eternity, Father sighed, “I see. Well, Margaret, what shall we do about it?”
“She needs to spend less time with your father and more time with me and Viola. I’ve already told her I’m going to supervise her cookery and her stitchery. We’ll have to have lessons. A new dish every week, I think.”
“Will we have to eat it?” said Father. “Heh, heh.”
“Now, Alfred.”
Tears sprang to my eyes. That my own father could joke about his only daughter being pressed into domestic slavery.
“I trust these things to you, Margaret,” he said. “I always feel such matters are safest in your hands, despite the burden it places on you. How are your headaches these days, my dear?”
“Not so bad, Alfred, not so bad.”
My father crossed the room, and I saw him stoop and drop a kiss on my mother’s forehead. “I am glad to hear it. Can I bring you your tonic?”
“No, thank you, I’m fine.”
My father returned to his seat, rustled his newspaper, and that was that. My life sentence delivered.
I leaned against the wall and stood there, empty, for a long time. Empty of everything. I was only a practical vessel of helpful service, waiting to be filled up with recipes and knitting patterns.
Jim Bowie came padding down the stairs. Without speaking, he wrapped himself around me and gave me one of his long, sweet hugs.
“Thanks, J.B.,” I whispered, and we walked upstairs together hand-in-hand.
“Are you sick, Callie Vee?” he said.
“I reckon I am, J.B.”
“I can tell,” he said.
“It’s tru
e. You can always tell.”
“Don’t feel bad. You’re my best sister, Callie.” We climbed onto my bed, and he curled up next to me.
He said, “You said you were going to play with me more.”
I said, “I’m sorry, J.B. I’ve been spending time with Granddaddy” But it’s all coming to an end soon enough, I thought.
“Does he know about Big Foot Wallace?”
“He does.”
“Do you think he’d tell me about Big Foot Wallace?”
“You should ask him. He might, but he’s kind of busy.” Busy without me, I moped.
“Maybe I’ll ask him,” said J.B. “But he scares me. I got to go. Good night, Callie. Don’t be sick.”
He gently closed the door. My last thought, before I fell into a restless sleep, was of the coyote. If only I could figure out how to gnaw my own leg off.
CHAPTER 18
COOKING LESSONS
Battle within battle must ever be recurring with varying success. . . .
MY TIME WITH GRANDDADDY slipped away as the domestic mill wheel gathered momentum, grinding its principal raw material—namely, me—into smaller and smaller scraps.
“Calpurnia,” Mother called up the stairs in that particular tone of voice I’d come to dread, “we’re waiting for you in the kitchen.”
I was in my room reading Granddaddy’s copy of A Tale of Two Cities. I put it down and didn’t answer.
“I know you’re up there,” said Mother, “and I know you can hear me. Come down here.” I sighed, slipped an old hair ribbon into the book to mark my place, and trudged downstairs. I was the condemned young aristocrat holding my head high in the tumbrel. It was a far, far better thing—
“There’s no need to look like that,” said Mother as I walked into the kitchen, where she and Viola sat waiting for me at the scrubbed pine table. “It’s only a cooking lesson.”
On the table was the marble slab, the sugar tin, a rolling pin, a large bowl of green apples, and one bright yellow lemon. And a book. I perked up until I got a closer look at it.
“Look here,” said Mother. “It’s my Fannie Farmer cookbook. You can borrow it until you get your own copy. It has everything in it that you need.”
I doubted that. She presented it to me in the same way that my grandfather had handed me his book—the other book—a few short months before. Mother smiled; Viola looked determinedly blank.
“We’re going to start with apple pie,” Mother said. “The secret is to add a splash of lemon juice and a handful of lemon zest to give it that nice tart flavor.” She smiled and nodded and spoke in that coaxing voice mothers use on reluctant children.
I tried my best to smile back. Lord knows what I looked like because Mother looked alarmed, and Viola cut her eyes to the corner.
“Won’t that be fun?” said Mother, wavering.
“I guess so.”
“Viola’s going to show you how to make the crust. It’s her specialty.”
“Get two scoops of flour out of that bin, Miz Callie,” Viola said. I blinked. She had never called me Miss before. “Dump ’em in this bowl. Okay.”
Mother thumbed through her cookbook and planned our Sunday dinner while Viola tried to lead me down the tricky path of pastry-dough making. I must have seen her make a million pies as I wandered through the kitchen, and it had always looked so easy. She never measured anything, instead cooking by eye, by instinct, and by touch, throwing in handfuls of flour and thumb-sized chunks of lard and drizzling in more or less cold water, depending. There was nothing to it. Any idiot could learn it in two minutes flat.
An hour later, I stood panting and thrashing around with my third bowl of dough, with Mother and Viola growing more incredulous by the minute. The first batch had been watery and lumpy; the second so dense I couldn’t roll it out with the pin; the last had turned out as sticky as wallpaper paste and with the same unappealing consistency. It was all over my hands and pinafore, smeared across the counter and the pump handle, and there were streaks of it stuck in my hair. I think there was even a glob on the fly paper hanging from the ceiling several feet above my head, but how it got there, I had no idea.
“Next time a kerchief, I think, Viola,” Mother said.
“Mm-hmm.”
“I tell you what,” said Mother. “Maybe we’ll let Viola finish the dough. You go ahead and peel and core the apples. Hold the apple like this, and draw the knife toward you. Be careful. It’s sharp.”
I held the knife and apple in imitation and, with the first paring motion, sliced my thumb open. Fortunately, I only bled on a couple of the apples. Viola plunged them in water, but they were still tinged pink. We all pretended not to notice. Mother went off to get me a sticking plaster. Viola and I sat at the table and looked at each other. We didn’t speak a word. I sighed and put my chin in my hand. I wanted to put my head down on the table, but that would have meant more dough in my hair. Idabelle, as if sensing my despair, climbed from her basket and came over to butt her wide forehead against my shins. I couldn’t even stroke her, I was so covered in goo. Viola got up and threw flour and water and lard together with seeming thoughtlessness and rolled out a nonsticky, nonrunny, perfect crust in no time. Then she skinned the lemon for me, whether to spare my wound its acid or to stop me from bleeding on any more fruit, I wasn’t sure.
After Mother returned and patched my cut, Viola said, “Miz Callie, you got to check the temperature of the stove.”
“How do I do that?”
“You stick your hand in there. If it’s too hot to hold it in there for more than a blink, you got a medium oven.”
“You’re joshing me.” I looked at her. “That’s what you do?”
“That’s what you do.”
“How do you tell when it’s a hot oven?” I said.
“Why, you can’t get your hand in that far. It’s too hot.”
“Isn’t there a thermometer or something?” I asked. They both laughed like this was the funniest thing they’d heard all week. Oh, funny, all right. I opened the stove and was met by a blast of hot air as if from a dragon’s cave.
“Go on, girl,” said Viola. “Go on.”
It hadn’t killed her yet, so I guessed it was safe. I took a deep breath and plunged my arm deep into the heat and pulled it out a split second later.
“Yep,” I said, fanning my hand in the air, “medium oven for sure. Maybe even hot.”
“Put those pieces of apple in the dishes. Get some sugar, like this much here,” she said, showing me sugar cupped in her palm, “and put it over the apple, you don’t need to stir it up. That’s right. Now we got to put the top crust on.”
She handed me a spatula to lift the tops from the rolling board onto the pies, which was easier said than done. The uncooperative dough flopped in all directions. When I touched it, it stuck to me; when I manhandled it, it turned leathery. It took me a good ten minutes to finish putting three pies together. I looked at them. They were a sorry-looking exhibit.
“They don’t look so good,” I said.
“You got to crimp the edges with your thumb, like this. That makes ’em look nice. You go ahead and do it.”
I pinched my way around the pies with my good thumb, and they did look better, although no one would be fooled into thinking they were Viola’s handiwork.
“Okay,” said Viola, “you only got to do one more thing.”
“What?” I croaked, exhausted.
“You got to put the letter C, for Callie, on top. Make a letter C out of dough and put it right there on top. Put it in the middle, show everybody you made it. Then you brush it with the egg yolk. Makes it all shiny.”
I rolled out three worms of dough and curled one on top of each pie as instructed. I brushed the yolk on top, and we all stood back and looked.
“There you go,” said Viola.
“Well,” said Mother. “Very nice.”
“Whew,” I said.
That night, when SanJuanna had cleared the main course and brough
t dessert in, my mother called for quiet and said, “Boys, I have an announcement to make. Your sister made the apple pies tonight. I’m sure we will all enjoy them very much.”
“Can I learn how, ma’am?” said Jim Bowie.
“No, J.B. Boys don’t bake pies,” Mother said.
“Why not?” he said.
“They have wives who make pies for them.”
“But I don’t have a wife.”
“Darling, I’m sure you will have a very nice one someday when you’re older, and she’ll make you many pies. Calpurnia, would you care to serve?”
Was there any way I could have a wife, too? I wondered as I cut through the browned C and promptly shattered the entire crust. I tried to cut slices but mangled the job and ended up spooning out pie that looked more like cobbler. Father smiled at his dessert, smiled at Mother, smiled at me. My brothers made exclamations of appreciation and fell on their portions like hungry dogs. My cooking lesson had taken all afternoon; the results were downed in four minutes flat. None of them could flatter me enough to make up for the fact that I had lost hours with my Notebook, my river, my specimens, and my grandfather. Granddaddy chewed his pie, deep in thought.
CHAPTER 19
A DISTILLERY SUCCESS,
OF SORTS
We have seen that man by selection can certainly produce great results, and can adapt organic beings to his own uses. . . .
“CALPURNIA,” GRANDDADDY CALLED up the stairs, “will you come out to the laboratory with me? I require your assistance if you’re not otherwise engaged.”
Since I’d heard my domestic life sentence delivered, I had sunk into the deepest quagmire of ill temper and low spirits, keeping apart from the others as much as possible, so much so that there had been the occasional talk of cod-liver oil. It held no healing powers for the mangled paw caught in the cruel trap.
When Granddaddy called, I was sulking in my room and knitting yet another sock in the endless series of Christmas socks. But I did not consider myself otherwise engaged at all, and here he was, offering me temporary respite from the tyranny of the house. I dropped the needles, ran from my room, and slid down the banister.
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate Page 17