The Kitchen Daughter (11 page)

There are so many flavors of normal, it doesn’t matter which one I am. That’s what the Normal Book tells me. There really is no normal. After all the upheaval of the last week, after the funeral and the ghosts and my unreasonable sister and everything, it’s worth reminding myself. As strange as my life gets, it’s just my life. I’m still in it. Whatever happens, I’m going to have to find a way to get by. Hopefully, on my own. Because I don’t like the other options.

A
manda and I work in silence most of the next day. Since it won’t do me any good to refuse to cooperate, I come up with a new plan. I delay. I pack as slowly as I can. I think about each move before I make it and afterward I think about the move I just made. I fold everything neatly, much more neatly than I need to, folding and refolding to get everything absolutely right. I check every pocket, turning them inside out, slipping my fingers down into each corner to feel for anything left behind.

After my parents’ bureaus are empty, I try to start on the closet, but it feels different. The clothes in the drawers were just clothes.
The clothes on hangers remind me of their bodies, as if my parents are still inside their clothes and I just can’t see their faces or hands. It’s very unsettling. So I soothe myself.
It’s okay, it’s okay.
Think of red velvet cake, as Ma made it. White flour sifting down like unmeltable snow, the basis for everything that follows. Blending, tinting, leavening. The soft, liquid batter firms as it bakes in the oven. Growing ever more solid. Rising, thickening, settling. Staying improbably red. Finish the cake with a thick sweet cream cheese frosting, so it all looks pure white again until you press the knife into it, exposing its red heart.

“Ginny,” says Amanda. “Are you listening?”

I say, “Yes,” because I am now.

She says, “Can you handle this?”

I stare at a lace collar that once lay against my mother’s neck and say, “Not right now.”

“Okay,” she says. “It’s all right. Tell you what, why don’t you go look through the boxes in my old room?”

“Okay.”

I turn away from the closet and go to Amanda’s old room. I pull the boxes out from under the bed into plain sight. A few old pairs of shoes, a box of T-shirts from camp, a small collection of stuffed animals. They are already sorted and just need to be labeled.

In her closet there is another unlabeled box, and I tug it out to start going through it. There are layers of construction paper and notebooks and homemade book covers with no books inside. Children’s drawings. Amanda’s drawings. Rainbows, unicorns, flowers. I lose interest halfway through. I write
AMANDA KIDHOOD
on the side and put it with the stack of boxes against the far wall. These are all things Amanda can take away with her. Whether we sell the house or not, these things don’t need to be here.

I should tell her again that I don’t want to sell the house. She didn’t
want to talk about it yesterday, but at some point, we’ll have to. I have to confront her, and I have to figure out Nonna’s warning, and I have to make myself realize that Ma and Dad are not coming home. Any one of these things alone is enough to give me a stomachache. All together it’s more like a stomachache after a birthday party. Yellow cake and chocolate frosting and too many cups of sickly sweet punch. I never had my own birthday parties but I went to Amanda’s.

The Normal Book is hidden, the letter I found in the fireplace is hidden, is there anything else I need to hide? I go up to my room and count the envelopes of cash that Ma left for me. I realize I forgot to pay David for the groceries he brought. But he’ll come back in a few days and I can leave him extra money then. I tuck the envelopes in between the mattress and the box spring in the meantime. If Amanda finds them I can say I just wanted to keep them safe. And lecture her about respecting people’s privacy.

I walk down the stairs, slowly. As I near our parents’ room I don’t see or hear any sign of my sister. I look at their closet. It’s empty. She’s packed everything away. I take two steps back. Near the door she has a box of shoes. On top are Dad’s dress shoes and Ma’s slippers. I listen for Amanda to figure out where she is. A glass clinks, far off, and then I hear a soft thud like the refrigerator door closing. She must be in the kitchen. I take both pairs of shoes and put them back on the closet floor where they belong. Then I close the door.

Amanda is sitting at the dining room table, eating a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and drinking a glass of milk.

“Hey,” she says, looking up.

“Hey.”

“I guess I should have asked if you wanted to eat too.”

“No, I’m not hungry,” I say.

“You’re not dressed yet.”

“I’m dressed.”

“Pajamas are not dressed. Angelica’s coming later. No one’s going to buy the place with you lurking around in black pajamas like a ninja.”

I say, “Well, maybe that’s okay if no one wants to buy it, since I don’t want to sell it.”

“Not again,” she mumbles, almost to herself, but she wants me to hear her.

“It’s half mine,” I say. “I get a vote.”

“Let’s please just not do this right now. I don’t want to get in a big argument. Here’s a great question to get in the habit of asking yourself. It’s how I always make sure everything gets done. Whenever I have a free moment, I ask myself, could I be doing something useful?”

I think of Angelica, and remember what she said. “Yes, I could.”

First I go upstairs and change out of my pajamas as Amanda suggested. Then I go to work in the kitchen.

I don’t really need a recipe, but I pull down one of my favorite cookbooks anyway. It’s an awkwardly large, heavy old tome called
Drinkonomicon
, and as Dad used to say, anything not listed on its 738 pages isn’t worth drinking. I run my finger down the list of mulled cider ingredients and set to it.

The pot, the jug, the cutting board, first. Break the seal of the hard red plastic cap. I pour the cider into a tall pot and turn the burner up high. I hone the knife before slicing the orange into whisper-thin, windowpane slices. I pinch the spices out of their small glass jars. Whole cloves, stars of star anise. A cinnamon stick. A few black peppercorns. Lay the orange slices on top. Turn the heat down to a bare simmer, until the bubbles are only a suggestion around the edge of the pot.

Since I’m in here anyway looking at the spice shelf, I go through the jars to determine what I need the next time I place an order online. Cinnamon, definitely. Bay leaves. Some of the more interesting powdered chilies. Ancho, aleppo, chipotle. People think chilies are
just chilies but they each have a completely distinctive heat. The sweet sear of habanero, the smoky burn of chipotle, the tart green vegetal bite of jalapeño.

“Making yourself some cider?” Amanda says, looking down over the top of the pot.

“It’s for the smell. Angelica said the place should smell like cooking. Have some if you want.” I hold the ladle out to her.

“Don’t mind if I do,” she says, helping herself to a mugful. “It’s really sweet that you would do this. I’m so glad you took Angelica’s suggestion. Thanks.”

The doorbell rings.

When I see who comes in, I wish for the relatively inoffensive custard-skinned Warren. I look back, almost fondly, on his stupid suit.

Besides Angelica, there are two adults, and two kids, little boys whose age I can’t possibly estimate. They are older than Amanda’s girls and younger than teenagers. I take several steps back as soon as I see them. One is very loud. The other, even louder. They dash around the ground floor and I stand on the stairs in the hopes my body will block them from charging up to the second floor as well. Their parents don’t seem to make any effort to keep them in check. Confining them would be like confining race cars, weasels, tornadoes.

Angelica claps her hands and says, “Okay, everyone? Let me show you this gorgeous parlor to start with! This way!” Most of the family tracks her, but the mother comes my way.

“You grew up here, right?” says the mom. I back up to keep a decent distance between us. The heavy carved banister of the stairs works as a natural barrier. I grip its solid bulk with both hands. I should always talk to people with a stair banister between us. I might lead a happier life.

I answer her. “Yes.”

“Was it a great place to grow up?”

“Sure,” I say. “I broke my leg falling down the stairs, but it was just the one time.”

“Oh.” She asks, “But the neighborhood’s safe, right?”

“Yes. There aren’t nearly as many muggings as there used to be.”

Suddenly there’s a clatter and a howl, and it turns out that one of the children has burned himself reaching into the pot of hot cider, and the other one turned the heat up instead of down, making the situation worse, and everything’s high-pitched howling wails and chatter and shouting, so I just stay out of the way at my perch on the stairs, and everyone retreats quickly, and I’m left alone, thank goodness. I walk into the quiet kitchen. And after all that no one even turned the stove off. I extinguish the flame and ladle myself a mug of cider, then leave the rest to cool so I can put it in the fridge for later.

Amanda comes back in and stomps around a bit, but doesn’t talk to me. She probably blames me for the accident with the kids. So the same thing that got me praise half an hour ago is now evidence of my incompetence. I decide if I can’t do anything right, I might as well not do anything I don’t want to do.

Instead, I go into my parents’ library. The desk, the leather chair, the floor-to-ceiling books. I’d rather be reading anyway. I run my fingers over the spines, title after title after title. Three-quarters of the way around the room I find the title
How to Be Good.
Curious, I open it up. I’m disappointed to find it’s fiction.

I scan the shelf for something to read. Romances. Science books. Dictionaries. A few histories. In the end it comes down to the two books with the most interesting titles:
The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
, and
An Anthropologist on Mars.

I think about widows and I think about Mars, and I decide Mars sounds more pleasant. I listen for Amanda. She’s down the hall in the room that used to be hers, going through the boxes I set aside. Every
once in a while I hear a soft, pleased squeal. She sounds happy to be rediscovering things she thought lost.

Reading in Ma’s window seat, comfortable on those yellow cushions, would make me happiest, but I don’t want Amanda to find me in there. I push the library door mostly shut and drop my body into Dad’s big leather chair.

An Anthropologist on Mars
turns out to be nonfiction, and about science. A series of essays. The people in the book are all damaged in some way, and it’s a good thing for me to read, because it reinforces the message of the Normal Book: there is no normal. People are people, and that means a broad spectrum. Loose wires, crossed signals. The brain can take hairpin turns, at birth or after. I’m not the most unusual, by far.

One essay in the book is about a woman who has built herself a hugging machine. It makes me somewhat jealous. A thing you can crawl into and feel loved. People frighten me but physical reassurance is something I crave. My family hugs me, but my family’s getting smaller. I wiggle around in the chair, with its wide, heavy arms, and try to get it to hug me, but it doesn’t feel right. A machine would be perfect.

After a while I can see that the line of sunlight under the door has shifted. It’s getting later.

I hear Amanda’s voice calling, “Ginny, where are you?”

“Library!” I shout as loudly as I can, to make sure she hears me. I stand up from the chair and close the book, then look around to see what I could be doing that would make it look like I haven’t just been sitting here reading for the last two hours.

The chair is in front of those black boxes of Dad’s, the only things on the shelves that aren’t books. I haven’t looked in them yet. I pull one off the shelf and take the lid off to start looking through.

Amanda doesn’t come in, though, and if she calls out again I don’t hear it. I quickly lose myself in the contents of the box.

Photographs. That’s unexpected. Dad always took a lot of pictures but I assumed they were neatly arranged in photo albums. Dad loved order and so did Ma. But all the photos in this box are shuffled together from all times and places, with no logic or order to them at all.

Pictures of him and Ma, long ago. She looks at the camera. He doesn’t. Pictures of his mom, Nonna, looking much younger in a place I don’t recognize. A blurry shot I think is Grandma Damson. I open up the next box and it’s the same thing, countless photographs all shuffled randomly together. Third box, same thing. There must be hundreds of pictures here.

I sort them out onto the floor in piles. There are hills and beaches and bricks and trees, people from close up and far away. Everyone looks at least a little familiar, except one person, and I sort her into her own pile.