“But,” I began helplessly. I waved one arm at the kitchen, and the doorbell rang again. “What shall I do?” I said.
“I just told you what to do,” Mallie said sharply. “You run along and get dressed.”
Well, I already knew what to do when Mallie spoke like that. There was no further question of hesitation or disobedience. I found myself heading for the shower and the blue dress. Just as I closed the bedroom door, I heard Mallie’s voice saying, “… old friend of Dimity’s mother. Just stopped in to say hello.”
I confess frankly that I took an unreasonably long time over that shower. With anyone else, I suppose I could just have admitted honestly that I’d made a mess of things and talked big and then couldn’t perform, but with Hugh Talley, that sort of admission was harder. He’d never forget it, for one thing. And he’d never let me forget it, for another. I thought of Hugh Talley’s red face and complacent smile once when I was just ready to step out of the shower, and then I stepped back into the shower again and stayed there awhile longer. Go ahead, Dimity, I kept telling myself, go ahead, face up to it.
I felt somewhat better when I was dressed and had the smoke out of my hair and the flour out from under my fingernails. I felt a little bit cheerful—almost, as a matter of fact, as though someday, perhaps in ten years or so, living in some town maybe five hundred miles from Hugh Talley, this day might begin to seem less important to me, even, perhaps, funny.
I gathered all my pride together just inside the bedroom door, and I put my head as high as it would get with the stiff neck I had gotten from bending over that stove, and I straightened my shoulders, and finally I opened the door and I marched bravely out into the living room and up to Hugh Talley, where he was sitting in the only comfortable chair with his feet up on the hassock.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Hugh,” I said with my brave smile, “but as a matter of fact, I might just as well admit—”
“Dimity,” Mallie said sharply, “best run into the kitchen and look to that pie.”
“I might as well admit,” I went on, “that after all I said—”
“I looked in on it a minute ago,” Mallie said, “and it wants to come out of the oven right now. Right now,” she insisted, and then added sweetly, “Of course, that’s only what I think, of course. Dimity knows best.”
It began to sink into my mind, what she had said. I was so wound up for my courageous speech to Hugh Talley that it took a minute or so before I even realized that Mallie was speaking to me. Anyway, I turned around and looked at her and she gave me a prodigious wink, and waved toward the kitchen with her hand. Then, when I turned back to stare at Hugh Talley, I saw something I also had not noticed before. The little table in the living room was set for dinner for two. The tablecloth was shining, the glasses were glittering, the silverware was reflecting the light of the two tall candles set in the center of the table. It looked pretty.
Mallie said, “I’ve got to run along in a minute, but first I’d like to see how your pie came out, Dimity.”
It occurred to me, now, that she wanted me to go into the kitchen. So I went and she followed me. Hugh Talley said as we left, “Hope Dimity didn’t put on too much style for me. I wasn’t expecting much, you know.” And he laughed in an unpleasant sort of way.
I stood in the kitchen doorway. I could have sworn that when I left it a short time before there had been dirty dishes in the sink, flour on the floor, and no dinner worth speaking of in the stove. Now, however, the kitchen was spotless—a good deal cleaner, I blush to say, than it had ever been before. Everything had been put away. It seemed likely that the floor had been scrubbed.
“What?” I said—my usual intelligent remark when astonished.
“If you don’t shut your mouth soon,” Mallie said tartly, “I won’t be answerable for what falls into it.”
“But—” I said—another intelligent comment of mine.
“No time for silly questions,” Mallie said. “You listen to me, Dimity Baxter. For a while there I figured I’d let you work along on things yourself, and then come through and say right out you were wrong. But I’ll tell you something. I don’t like that young man in there one bit. First thing he says to me when he sits down, ‘Did Dimity really make this dinner herself?’ Now, I don’t call that fair at all, so I said to him, ‘She spent all afternoon in the kitchen,’ and of course that was true.” She looked me up and down reflectively. “Blue’s a good color for you,” she said, and then went on. “That’s the sort of young man you have to edge around the truth with. So don’t you tell him anything, you hear? And for heaven’s sake, get that pie out of the oven.”
I opened the oven and took out the pie, noticing dully as I did so that the meringue was perfect, and little flakes of the crust fell off the edges. “Pie,” I said.
“What else would it be if I called it a pie?” Mallie demanded. “Don’t you ever have that young man here for dinner again, you hear?”
“I won’t,” I told her fervently.
“I borrowed your piggy bank, by the way,” Mallie said.
“The piggy bank?” I said. “But there was only six—”
“Never you mind,” Mallie said. “Those lamb chops were a bad cut, anyway. Now, here’s a cookbook for you instead of that old one I threw out, and maybe someday I’ll run in and say hello again.”
Briefly, quickly, she kissed me on the cheek, a swift brush of soft old lips, and then the front door closed softly and I was standing in the middle of my clean kitchen with dinner smelling good and a cookbook in my hand.
“Hey!” It was Hugh Talley calling me from the living room. “When do we eat?”
I moved numbly toward the stove. I lifted the napkin off one of the dishes keeping warm; it was hot biscuits, light and brown and not like anything I had seen for quite a while. Another dish held the baked potatoes; a third dish held the chops. There was the pie. And there was, I discovered, a salad in the refrigerator.
There was nothing for me to do but start carrying it in to Hugh Talley, which I did.
Sitting at the table, Hugh Talley looked down comfortably at his plate. “Doesn’t look bad,” he said. He had taken three biscuits, remarking that they were probably like lead. He had taken a baked potato, with the comment that it looked a little bit hard. He had served himself two chops, noting as he did so that for a wonder they weren’t covered with some kind of fancy sauce. When he helped himself to salad, he observed that the salad dressing probably contained whipped cream. But he had supplied himself nicely just the same. I just sat and stared at my own plate; it certainly looked like food.
“You know,” Talley said with his mouth full, “these biscuits are really pretty good.” He swallowed, and gestured with the piece of biscuit still in his hand. He had plenty of butter on it, I noticed. “You know,” he said again, “I’ll bet there’s a trick or two about biscuits you haven’t caught on to yet. I bet you just use any old flour to make them—isn’t that so?” I nodded—what else could I do? “Well,” he said, consuming the piece of biscuit in his hand, “that’s allllll wrong. That’s the way all women cook. Just take any old flour and use it for everything. But now, you take a real cook—” He gestured largely, and ended his gesture over the plate of biscuits. He hesitated, and then took another. “You take a real cook, he knows about flour. Why, when I want to make biscuits I go to a special little flour place I know of, way downtown, and I say to them, ‘Listen,’ I say, ‘I don’t want any of your ordinary flour, I want that special flour you keep for Hugh Talley.’ And by golly, that’s what I get.”
“What’s what you get?” I asked him, but he didn’t hear me.
“Same thing with applesauce,” Hugh Talley said. “You take applesauce—I bet you put cinnamon in it?” I nodded again; I supposed I did put cinnamon in it. “Well,” Talley said, “I guess about everyone puts cinnamon, or some such thing, in applesauce—but not Hugh Talley.” He shook his head violently and had another biscuit. “What you want to do—that is, what a r
eal cook would do is get some of this special seasoning they have at a little place I know of; it’s not like cinnamon, exactly, has more of a flavor, you might say. I go down there whenever I want to make real applesauce, and I say to them—”
I tasted a biscuit. It tasted real and more than real; it tasted like biscuits I remembered from the time I was about twelve and eating was practically all I lived for. It tasted, as a matter of fact, perfectly fine.
“And you take chops,” Hugh Talley was going on; how he could eat so much and talk so much and do both together without stopping made me wonder For a minute, and the sweet thought that he might choke himself to death occurred to me. “Pork chops, you know,” he said, “you have to treat a good pork chop right or it just simply tastes like any other pork chop. Now, I always take my pork chops, and I marinate them. Now, most people will tell you that marinating pork chops is all wrong, but not Hugh Talley.” He shook his head positively. “The trouble is, most people think that by marinating pork chops I just mean simply marinating them, but no real cook would do that. Not,” he said, “to a pork chop. You want to take a special combination of French dressing—not the French dressing you buy, of course.” He stopped and looked at me aggressively, and I nodded again, because I was, by now, just nodding every time he stopped. “Naturally not,” he said. “So you take French dressing, and you add this special—”
Pork chops? I thought suddenly. Pork chops? I looked down at my plate, took a taste. I was certain that I had bought lamb chops. Then I remembered the lamb chops down on the sidewalk and Mallie saying “I borrowed your piggy bank, by the way.”
“Excuse me,” I said hastily. I ran into the kitchen; the piggy bank was gone and the six cents it had contained lay on the shelf.
“Where’s that lemon pie I heard so much about?” I heard Talley shouting from the dining room.
It didn’t seem possible, after the dinner he had put away, but I picked up the pie and started in with it. As I entered the room, he began again. “Now, you take lobster,” he said. “Most people, they don’t cook lobster right.” He watched approvingly while I brought over the pie. As I was about to set it down, he took a deep breath and began, “The trouble with women—”
I couldn’t help it. Nobody could have helped it. Even Mallie couldn’t have helped it, and I almost think she would have approved.
I thought it was terribly funny, and I’m afraid I began to laugh. Hugh Talley wiped the lemon pie off his face and glared at me. Then he stood up, brushing meringue From his sleeves and shaking crust off his hair, and he tried to catch his breath, and then, with his face red and his eyes glaring, he tried to think of something to say, something cutting enough, I suppose, to sound furious through a faceful of lemon pie.
“You—you—woman cook!” he shouted finally.
I heard the door slam behind him and I thought: small credit to me; I only threw the pie—Mallie baked it. And it seemed to me that perhaps Mallie had baked that pie for only one purpose, and that purpose had just been served.
I figured right then that there was one thing I really owed to Mallie and I’d better get started on it right away, and deal with the mess on the floor later. Anybody could clean up a mess, but Dimity Baxter was going to set herself out to learn to cook, and with no more nonsense about it, either.
I went into the kitchen and got the cookbook Mallie had left for me and came back and sat down in the comfortable chair Hugh Talley had so recently vacated. The cookbook was patterned in blue and white checks, and had “Dimity Baxter” written across the front in gold letters. Inside, on the flyleaf, it said “To Dimity from Mallie.” And it had positively the strangest table of contents I had ever seen. It started with “Dinner for Mr. Arthur Clyde Brookson,” a name I had never heard before, although, reading it, I said it over once or twice and liked the sound of it, oddly. Instructions for the dinner, which began on page one, started off: “Now, don’t you get all flustered, Dimity. No need to worry about this dinner—he’s going to like it, whatever you cook. Probably won’t eat anything, anyway, either of you.”
I turned back to the table of contents. Another item caught my eye. It read: “Luncheon for mother-in-law and two friends.” I blinked, and giggled.
Another listing was “Dinner to be served to daughter’s young man,” and still another was “Family dinner, to serve fifteen.” Also, “Dinner for husband’s employer, and wife.” That one made me laugh out loud.
Then one listing caught my eye, and, unable to resist, I turned to it. It was called: “First dinner of married life,” and the instructions began: “Dimity, you take off that yellow organdy apron and put on the good practical one your mother sent you. Save the yellow one to serve dinner in. And don’t let him get the idea he doesn’t have to help do dishes.”
There was only one thing I could think of to do, and, after a minute, I knew how to do it. I went out into the kitchen and said softly, “Thanks, Mallie.”
PARTY OF BOYS
MY OLDER SON, LAURIE, has a birthday early in October, so on good years he goes with his father to New York for the World Series; years when Brooklyn loses the pennant Laurie just has a birthday party at home. Toward the end of last summer, when it began to seem depressingly clear that Laurie would celebrate his twelfth birthday far away from Ebbets Field, he began a loving and detailed plan for the properest and gayest manner of celebrating a boy’s only twelfth birthday. He began by proposing, as the only reasonable foundation upon which a happy birthday might be built, that both his younger sisters spend that weekend with their grandmother in California. I said that the distance between Vermont, where we live, and California, made this idea untenable, but that I would guarantee that both girls would spend the entire day visiting friends locally. Laurie then suggested that he invite eighteen friends and they play baseball on the side lawn. I said the side lawn was not an athletic field, and anyway I would not feed eighteen of his friends unless they ate in the barn. Laurie sighed, and offered to compromise on twelve, and volleyball. I said that the side lawn was not an athletic field, and besides I was fairly sure it was going to rain. Laurie thought for a minute and then asked with enormous courtesy whether it would be all right if he just asked Robert over for the afternoon, and they could play chess?
I told him that our dining room could hold eight twelve-year-old boys comfortably, provided they didn’t run footraces or fence with the table knives—or perhaps, I suggested, he might like to have an evening party, with a little supper? In that case, I pointed out, I could make lots of sandwiches and a nice fruit punch, and he could invite as many as half a dozen boys and half a dozen gir—At that point Laurie left the room, remarking poignantly that sometimes he got to thinking that everyone in the world but him was crazy.
He finally decided that a Saturday afternoon movie was the thing, with supper afterward, and he invited his seven closest friends, all of whom could be depended upon to bring sensible presents, such as the latest popular records, and chemical retorts, and Tarzan books, which are very much in demand in Laurie’s set. It was particularly specified in the invitations that formal dress was not expected. The guests arrived by bicycle, neatly wrapped packages dangling from the handlebars. The packages were put on the dining room table, to be opened at supper, the bicycles were lined up by our back porch, and Laurie and his seven friends wrestled one another happily into my car, to be driven into town to see “The Mad Fiend from the Lost Planet,” and “Pride of the Rancho Grande,” and “Tattooed by the Ape Men,” and two serials and a cartoon, not to mention the news-reel and the coming attractions. I had cashed a check in the morning, and given Laurie enough money to pay eight admissions into the movie, with popcorn and a candy bar apiece, and I was to pick them up again after the movie.
My younger son, Barry, who is not quite three and regards his brother’s friends with vast admiration as a superior order of being, infinitely tall and wise and able to fix any number of small toys, accompanied us to town, peering worshipfully over the car seat
at the birthday party, which had crushed itself mercilessly into the back half of my station wagon. Barry and I had plenty of room in the front seat, since no party member was prepared to admit himself effeminate enough to sit with us. The eight of them seemed considerably jammed together in back—every now and then a wildly waving foot, or an arm upraised in protest, showed in the rearview mirror—and I kept wondering all the way into town if they were not all secretly hoping that I would run into something.
“Chees,” came a voice from the back, which I was able to identify as Stuart’s, “chees, I sure would hate to miss this week’s serial. Remember—they were caught by the A-rabs?”
“Yeah, well, listen?” Oliver insisted. “You know they’re going to get away?”
“Well, if it was you was that guy, well, now, what would you do?”
“But hey, he lied, din’t he?”
“Yeah, but only because they said they were gonna shoot. I mean, what would you do? Not give up or something?”
“But sure, hey, because gosh—”
“But he did. You were there—he did.”
“Well, if it was me, I mean that guy there, I wouldn’t of.”
“Hey, you guys.” It was Laurie, reminiscent. “Hey, remember last week? We sure heard from that usher, boy.”
“Boys,” I said. “Remember, no fighting. Behave like—”
“Jeeps,” Laurie said. “I forgot you were here.”
“I’m not,” I said testily. “Barry is driving.”
“I am driving,” Barry confirmed. “I am right now turning on the wipeshield winders.”
“Yeah, but.” The conversation continued after a cautious pause. “Suppose it was you. Would you?”
“Well.” This was Tommy, considering. “It’s like if you took something din’t belong to you. You wouldn’t just give it back, would you, if you meant to take it? Just because they said?”
Just an Ordinary Day: Stories Page 8