Family history is often a simple study of frightened hypocrisy and our innermost insecurities. It is a study of select bigotries set amidst the self-righteousness of our own singular and lonely realities.
As always, unapologetically unedited
I.
(You only thought you were in the right - you like me - with our high and mighty sense of self-serving superiority and sense of absolute immunity from it all. What did others do before us? What did others think before you?)
*****
This is the story as it was never told.
An exhausted wind blew in from the kitchen window that day and across the countertop. A nearby stove belched hotly as if in agreement as she knelt to open the oven door. The air around her rustled; it picked briefly at a well-thumbed recipe circled on a page of the Press-Telegram. The recipe's page was floured and smudged where it was folded and lay slightly greased against the mixing bowl. Here it was greeted by a peanut butter-covered spoon that slid lazily toward the sink. Through that same window, she heard the rumble of trucks on the highway headed to the Port of Los Angeles. She smelled the trail of their exhaust as it infringed on the peanut buttery heat of the day.
Not far from the kitchen adults argued between "Adalai or Ike" in November, and sparred bellicose jabs back and forth like workers pitted against each other on the picket line. Kids in the other room played Cowboys and Indians save for the one or two that ran through the kitchen asking her Are the cookies ready yet? She heard the dial chunk forward and the slap of canned clapping as Ed Sullivan introduced Topo Gigio on the television. Weren't the kids up too late? She hoped they'd all be gone soon enough, but the kids were out for summer so it was hard to say. Maybe later she'd get a chance to watch What's My Line? in peace. At least it would only be another few minutes before the next batch - the second batch - came out.
The first batch had burned. Maxine wasn't quite sure what she'd done wrong - maybe the peanut butter was too old or too greasy, or maybe she hadn't measured the flour or sugar correctly. She knew that she should have used more lard but the recipe was all a bit muddled in her brain. She was, after all, quite ill. Her mind kept drifting to what would happen to her darling Kenny when she was gone. Those burned cookies had been just her easy excuse to escape for a moment the thought of her life and death, and the fact that like life and her body, the recipe had failed her.
She heard her husband and the men arguing about wages at the Port, about the damn Communists, and about just giving up and going back home to where things were always better in Kansas. She heard the cackle of her three sister-in-laws and two Great Aunts, of her cousins' sons, and of someone else's mother-in-law's neighbor from across the street - all bitching or gossiping about this and that. They talked about playing Canasta or Bunko next Tuesday night and all pretended not to hear the hushed whispers from the men about how Bill Bess had taken the car's exhaust to himself in his closed garage last week. You know the doctors said he might try to do it again... She heard one of the sisters yell to her in the kitchen, Maxine do you know "Lucille" Bess - that poor dear?
They talked about cutting back the pyracantha bushes and the Jap gardener who smiled all the time but did damn good work but who barely spoke English. She heard one of the men say, I think he smells like fish. She heard her neighbor's chortle and chaffe that there "was nothing but white kids singing and dancing like the niggers" on the TV programs anymore. She thought for a moment her ears would burst from all their babble. Did they not realize she was doing everything she could to just stay alive? She'd just got back from the City of Hope.
She heard someone yelling at Jimmy to set his punch on the table and to take it off the television set before he knocked it over. She could hear someone asking her sister-in-law "Where has Maxine run off to?" and someone else grunt, "Well, she's in the kitchen of course trying to fix her damn cookies," they guessed.
Finally, the timer rang off. The smell of peanut butter and freshly baked cookies floated through the air. This batch was perfect. They were nicely formed and ever-so-golden brown with just the right texture and ripple effect. There'd be no mistake when folks bit into them that they were indeed the best peanut butter cookies anyone had ever made. She removed them carefully from the baking sheet, sliding them off gently onto the waxed paper and officially segregating them from their burnt brethren from the first batch. Maybe she should just toss the first batch out? They looked so tired. They looked so exhausted.
Maxine stepped back and admired her work. She shook her hands and rubbed her arms to get the blood to flow back into them. She tugged at her cooking gloves making sure they covered the marks on her arms from the disease. She rubbed at her hidden sores. She knew the sisters all watched her thinking that they or the kids might catch her disease if she didn't cover herself but they were too selfish or too embarrassed to say a word. Could they? Could they catch it? After all, nobody really knew where she'd contracted it from. Was it at that hospital in Kansas City like she'd always told everyone it was?
She wondered sorrowfully, but half smiling at the thought of it. Yeah, that would shut them up, she thought to herself. Maybe she'd ask Kenny to put some cream on the sores for her later. That would help. That would be perfect. This second batch of cookies was perfect too. For a moment she didn't feel so tired or so exhausted. And then her nephew ran through demanding, I want a cookie right now!
He was that good but bright and sometimes demanding kid. The boy was Kenny's first cousin but Kenny was so much older or so she thought. She didn't pay much attention to how all the kids were related to one another. There were so many. It seemed like they were all someone's brother or sister or niece or nephew's kid, or some half cousin of someone from back home. It all muddled her brain. Maybe the cortisone shots she had scheduled would help with that too?
Her mind felt jumbled up, sticky, and burned. For a moment, she couldn't tell the cookies from the sores on her arms. She could hear her sister-in-laws' laughing in the other room. The loud cackle of their laughter and cigarette smoke wafted into the peanut butter smells escaping from the kitchen. She heard one of them comment that her coffee was getting cold waiting for those cookies. She heard one of the sister-in-laws harrumph yet another tale about how she'd managed to get a good price on pork shoulder at the Value-mart after complaining to the manager that they still needed to honor a coupon expired from the day before. She would be nobody's fool that's for sure.
Maxine
"Jimmy, the cookies are for everyone," she nodded at him while hurriedly whipping the grease from her hands onto the kitchen towel. The recipe from the Press-Telegram fluttered in the hot breeze as if in some small greasy agreement.
"I want one now!" Jimmy howled in reply. "You let Robbie Sullivan and the Stubbs boy have punch before I did. I want a cookie before they get one. It's not fair!"
"Fine," she replied. She winced, looking over at her perfectly baked second batch of peanut butter cookies. Did she really want to disturb them - her perfect cookies? She felt the sores on her arms throb a bit like warning beacons at the port. She preferred to carry her cookies out en masse to the group of women in the other room. They were for everyone. She needed everyone to see that they were perfect. She needed everyone to see that she was perfect too. Still, there was Jimmy who wouldn't leave her alone. Oh, what harm could it do if she gave him just one? The sores on her arms throbbed. The cookies really were perfect, weren't they?
Then it struck her. The burned ones. Jimmy probably wouldn't even know the difference. Quickly moving in front of that perfect second batch and bustling her apron around in front of him she took one of the lesser burn-scared cookies and gave it to Jimmy. Who would ever know? The boy grinned in unsweetened delight as he ran off to brag to the others about his spoils. Then she gathered together the perfect ones, that second batch, and presented them like Betty Crocker might have. Then she walked them out to the back porch to share that perfection, to share them where the men watched outside from the late evening barbecue, and to where the other women and other children gossiped and played games, and to where they all descended on her and that second batch of simply perfect cookies like vultures on a peanut butter carcass.
Or so she hoped.
It was about then that she heard her sister-in-law's voice. Why did you give my son a burnt cookie???
And so it was as it was in the beginning...
*******
"The Mistaken Man"
We are each nothing more than Maxine or Bill Bess.
We are each never hearing anything more than the echo of someone else's cackling sister-in-law.
We are each all Jimmy more or less.
We are each that someone reaching for some grease-covered recipe.
We are each never anything more than burnt cookies put to the test.
