Love & Darts (9781937316075) (9 page)

Mrs. Hamel folds more napkins. “After the
apples go in, squirt it with some lemon juice to prevent all those
apples from browning. The orange juice just isn’t acidic enough.
Then the maraschinos. Halves or quarters, whichever you have time
for. Lastly, the coconut. Best to grate it fresh yourself from the
meat of a coconut. But I’ll admit I’ve only done that once. It was
such a mess getting into that thing! It took a screwdriver and a
hammer and a lot of words that I’d rather not employ to get that
sucker open. The blessed thing rolled off my counter so many times
that I ended up on the floor with it. My legs holding it steady
then hacking at it with that screwdriver and hammer. Awful. And the
milk got all over my shoes and dress when I finally did get it
open.

“So I do recommend the store-bought,
fully-processed, shredded coconut. A quarter to half a bag. A good
fistful is about right. And really it works out better than the
fresh coconut because the dry coconut takes up the maraschino juice
and the orange juice for blended flavor. But that coconut is mainly
for texture and looks. You can leave it out if you must. It’s a
great salad Christmas morning with breads and spreads. Stollen and
cream cheese every year at our house.” She smiles. “The key is high
quality oranges. A definite must. Not worth making with crap
oranges.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Hamel. Someday I’ll try it
out.”

“Well, not until you tell me how you come up
with these beauties year after year.” Mrs. Hamel gestures toward
the deviled eggs. It’s clear enough that Mrs. Hamel hates deviled
eggs. But one’s recipe is never just given away. It must be
exchanged for another equally as good. And everyone says that these
particular deviled eggs are as near to perfection as Icarus ever
was to the sun, which is much too close for Mrs. Hamel’s comfort.
She slams the salt and pepper shakers down against the table in
three different places. Nowhere seems right.

But. The young wife didn’t make the deviled
eggs. So she shakes her head and points to a tray of cookies that
she only had to bake in ready-made batches for eight to ten
minutes. She says she thinks one of the neighbors made the deviled
eggs and cranes her neck inside to ask. But the neighbors have
their backs turned, still throwing the doll’s head, and are also
distracted from her uninvolved incursion by watching the middle
school boys’ well-matched race in a video game. So the story of the
deviled eggs is never told.

Mrs. Hamel is glad not to have to listen to
such rot about whoever thinks she can make the best plate of
deviled eggs but also demonstrates a sort of disappointed disgust
in the girl’s inability to assert herself.

The young new wife of one of the older
grandchildren is not just a girl and doesn’t think it is her fault
that the row of neighbors can’t hear her asking for the deviled egg
recipe. And why should she interrupt them when Mrs. Hamel doesn’t
even want to listen? Still, it’s true enough that she isn’t quite
sure which one of the neighbors made them. So there is no one in
particular to ask. She wanders away from Mrs. Hamel, opens the door
to the basement stairs, and disappears.

Back in the kitchen Mrs. Swindan has come
downstairs. She and Mrs. Roth are working away. “Doesn’t it seem
unlikely?” Mrs. Swindan says it as if caught—an eagle in a tall
chicken wire fence. A fight is useless. They are sisters. And so
the reply from Mrs. Roth, “Mmm.” She preheats the oven and begins
to pour a layer of rock salt into a jelly roll pan. The sound of
the salt against the metal is muffled by jazz.

The sink is full of ice. The kitchen walls
bask in the last of the afternoon sun. The white wine, in glasses
lined up in the window, holds glimpses of the light. Leaning on the
stove, hands on the aprons, sipping periodically, the sisters clean
and straighten up nothing that needs to be done. They are waiting
for the oysters.

The conversation dies easily. A pattern made
by a thousand arguments not bothered with in the presence of
guests, like this nosy young wife of one of the older
grandchildren. The matronly sisters pretend not to notice that she
keeps popping up every time they both turn around. Mrs. Roth might
involve her but cannot remember her name. So instead she watches a
group of children trample her sugar snap peas in the garden as they
squabble about who should retrieve the soccer ball. Her children
and her sister’s children and some children of friends are trying
to be careful, but the soccer ball has wreaked havoc enough.

The peas can handle it. She turns away from
the window and tries to remember the name of the young woman Mrs.
Hamel must have rebuffed, picks up her glass, and puts the back of
her hand against the oven door, testing the heat.

“What’s Owen’s new wife’s name?”

“I thought you knew. She stood there
hovering and I had absolutely no idea. I was about to ask.”

“Mrs. Hamel must have said something to her.
She slithered down the stairs two minutes ago.”

“I didn’t see that. Are you sure?”

“Yes. You know how she can be.”

“Who?”

Mrs. Hamel overhears Mrs. Swindan and Mrs.
Roth. She said, “Her name is Christa. And I didn’t say a word. The
girl’s got no—”

But Mrs. Swindan doesn’t wait for her
comment. She yanks the basement door open. “Christa!”

Christa hurries up the stairs. She stands
close to Mrs. Roth who quickly hands her the salad tongs. “Just
toss everything together. Be sure to get the tomatoes and olives
off the bottom.” Mrs. Swindan doesn’t bother to remind her sister
that three people asked for salad without dressing and that two
others hate olives, which is why things were as they were with the
dressing on the bottom.

But. Mrs. Hamel forgets nothing. “What do
you expect Andre to do?” Christa looks first to Mrs. Roth, who has
obviously forgotten, then to Mrs. Swindan, who shakes her head, and
lastly to Mrs. Hamel who throws her hands up proving herself beyond
all culpability. Christa says, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

Everyone is relieved by the sound of the
garage door rising. Two men laugh heartily. One opens the door. The
other backs his way up the stairs, slowly. They each hold one
handle of an old metal tub. They carry it awkwardly through the
door and steady it with slow steps, outstretched arms, and
dictatorial statements. The women disperse like a flock of
starlings that rises just a few feet and settles again on a
different part of the lawn. Because they’ve arrived. Not the men
but what they carry.

No one says a word. Everyone watches while
the two men lift the tub, tilt it, slowly, slowly. One says,
“Steady.” And the other wraps his lips around his teeth in a
grimace. “Pull it back. Yeah. Okay. Now go.” They let the ocean
water splash down into the sink. The oysters rattle, clatter,
tumble, and fall, piling onto each other in a haze of the sea on
ice.

The men tip the tub a few inches further, to
be sure, to be absolutely sure. One of them grabs both handles,
tips it all the way upside-down to be a hundred percent certain.
Mainly for show, the other pounds the bottom of the tub.

But. Though no one expects it, one more
oyster, one lodged in the crimp somehow, comes free and drops
straight down onto the others.

One of the men says, “That’s about twice
what we had last year.” Satisfied, the men retreat. The tub
disappears, gets rinsed, gets forgotten again on the rafters in the
garage.

The women do not hesitate to return. They
talk and laugh. Their hands are deft as they wield flexible
knives.

Mrs. Swindan’s nine-year-old son announces,
“I want to do one.” The young man marries once. And his bride is
Impossibility. He conquers her in time. “Let me. Let me try.”

His mother hands over her knife. “Find a
good one.”

The boy takes the biggest oyster he
sees.

His mother hands over the glove.

“I don’t want to wear that.”

“You have to protect your hands. It won’t
let you cut your fingers off.”

The boy reluctantly puts on the wire mesh
glove. He holds the oyster level to the ground knowing that the
juice will run out if he does not. “Now what?”

“See how it’s thicker down here? That’s the
cup. Across from that there is a sort of hinge. You want to stick
the knife right into the hinge. A twist should pop it open and then
you cut the bottle muscle.”

“I thought it was really hard.”

She smiles, knowing. “It is.”

The boy, concentrating, holds the oyster
with the awkward glove. He finds the hinge and struggles to get the
knife tip in. The knife slips and rams into his palm but is stopped
by the steel mesh of the glove. His eyes are wide.

“See; we could be on our way to the
emergency room right now.”

Understanding more, he tries again. He can
feel it now. That place where the tip of the knife must penetrate.
“I get it.” He doesn’t falter. The flat tip goes in. He holds the
cup firmly but level in the glove and twists his knife hand enough
to pop the shell open.

“Now get it loose underneath.”

He cuts hesitantly. He doesn’t want to lose
the juice. He quits, offers up both the knife and the oyster. “I
can’t. You do it.”

“Just keep going slowly. You’ll get it.”

He does not want to try. He does not want to
be told to keep going. He does not want to do it wrong. He does not
want to not know how. He keeps looking around, at his mother, at
his father, at his aunts, at his dog, at the new wife of one of his
older cousins, at his brother, who nods. The pressure of the knife
is a little much and the oyster pops back, juice splashing down his
wrist, lost. But the muscle was cut and he holds the oyster up so
his mother will give it a squirt of lemon juice and a little
Tabasco. He knows this part and sucks it down, relishing his
work.

She is satisfied and grants permission for
him to be dismissed. He hands back the glove and watches his mother
and aunt wield their knives, their experience. They shuck ten to
his one oyster and he wonders how it’s possible. They shuck them
and lay them out on the rock salt without losing a drop of the
juice. Even with three-year-olds running past them and tugging at
them and screaming at the top of their lungs and crying and
fighting over slobbery dog toys. His mother and his aunt don’t lose
a drop of juice. He is amazed by his mother, but doesn’t say so,
never will again. And he will forget this moment the instant he
leaves the room. Only somewhere—at a funeral, in a boardroom, on a
mountaintop—sometime later will the image come back to him and he
will be watching again, seeing his mother at the sink shucking
oysters.

The oysters marinate for twenty minutes.

But no one waits.

Mrs. Roth goes out to the yard, kicks the
soccer ball one time, runs after it, hard, fast, then says nothing
but picks up the black-and-white ball and turns back. The children
follow her across the lawn, leaping, jumping, trying to grab the
ball back before she gets into the house, into the bathroom, where
they swarm around her holding their cupped hands up, waiting their
individual turns for two squirts of the fun foam soap.

They know the rules. So Mrs. Roth makes no
announcement about how the soccer ball will wait in a newspaper
basket on top of the TV until everyone’s eaten.

Mrs. Swindan can’t be bothered right now.
She is swirling her hands in the jelly roll pan, smoothing out an
inch-deep layer of coarse sea salt. “Just get another bottle from
the garage,” she says as she scours half the oyster shells and
nests them in the salt. Mrs. Roth wraps each fresh oyster in a
streaky rasher from the deli downtown and lays it out in a shell.
Mrs. Hamel drizzles a mixture of white wine, hot sauce, garlic, and
parsley over the shells. Half go out onto Mr. Roth’s grill. Half go
under the broiler in the kitchen.

The neighbors, talking loudly after all the
mai tais, white wine, and sangria, line up, each with a heavy paper
plate.

Summer sets in. Mrs. Swindan calls Christa
over to the oven. There is no ceremony, no kneeling knightship, no
rite of passage for a warrior in the woods, no moment of hesitation
at all. Just, “Here. Take this out.” So as instructed, the young
new wife of one of the older grandchildren carries the most
important platter to the table, elbows her way through the line of
neighbors, and there are the angels on horseback, between the
deviled eggs and Mrs. Hamel’s Christmas fruit salad.

The river moves midsummer slow. Two poles are forgotten on
the weathered wood and three bodies roll naked on a raft, moving
over each other but trying not to shift so much they’ll all sink.
There is no crime where there is an agreement. She moves away from
their embrace; lets the men have it for a while. None of them
speaks.