The Kitchen Daughter (2 page)

I look up, away, searching for something reassuring. These things are the same as ever, I tell myself. These things have not changed. The ornate plaster molding, a foot-wide tangle of branching, swirling shapes, lines the wide white ceiling. Tall doors stretch up twice as tall as the people, twelve thirteen fourteen feet high. There’s plenty of room, up there. It’s my home. These are its bones. Good bones.

Then I feel warm breath and someone’s solid bread-dough bulk, only a couple of feet away. It’s one of the great-aunts. I recognize the moles on her throat. She says, “I’m so sorry, Ginevra. You must miss them terribly.”

Her hand is close to my arm. My options are limited. I can’t run away. I can’t handle this.

I lose myself in food.

The rich, wet texture of melting chocolate. The way good aged goat cheese coats your tongue. The silky feel of pasta dough when it’s
been pressed and rested just enough. How the scent of onions changes, over an hour, from raw to mellow, sharp to sweet, and all that even without tasting. The simplest magic: how heat transforms.

The great-aunt says, “You miss them, don’t you?”

I want to respond to her question, I know that’s the polite thing to do, but I don’t know what to say. It’s only been three days. Missing them won’t bring them back. And what difference does it, would it, make? I haven’t seen this woman since I was six. I’m not likely to see her again for years. What’s it to her, how I feel?

In my mind, I am standing over a silver skillet of onions as they caramelize. The warmth I feel is the warmth of the stove. I’ve already salted the onions and they are giving up their shape, concentrating their flavor. In my imaginary hand I have a wooden spoon, ready to stir.

“Ginevra, dear?” the great-aunt says.

“Auntie Connie,” interrupts Amanda’s voice. “Thank you so much for coming.”

Connie says, “Your sister seems distraught.”

I nod. Distraught. Yes.

Amanda says, “Ginny’s having a tough time. We all are.”

I see her hand resting on Connie’s shoulder, cupped over the curve of it, her fingers tight. I peek at Amanda’s face and her eyes are still red and painful-looking from the tears. I wish I could comfort her. I concentrate on her familiar gold ring. It’s the color of onion skin. Yellow onions aren’t really yellow, it’s just what they’re called. Just like dinosaur kale isn’t made from dinosaurs and blood oranges don’t bleed.

“It’s a shame what happened. Terrible shame. You should sue,” Connie says.

“We’re thinking about it,” says Amanda.

“They were so young,” says Connie.

I say, “They weren’t that young,” because they weren’t. Dad was
sixty-five. Ma just turned fifty-nine. We had her birthday two weeks ago, right before they left. She made her own cake. She always did. Red velvet.

“We miss them something awful,” says Amanda, not to me. Her voice is unsteady. “We’re so glad you and Uncle Rick could come, Connie. Do you want to come meet your great-nieces?”

“Oh, yes please, we don’t get up here very often anymore,” says Connie. She lets herself be ushered away. But in the next moment there’s another someone coming toward me and I just can’t stand this, all these shoes, all these bodies. There are only so many times my sister can rescue me. Two, three, five—have I used them up already?

Crowding my right shoulder is a man with no hair, his head as pale and moist as a chicken breast. His breath smells like bean water.

“Ginny of the bright blue eyes! The last time I saw you you were so small! So small! Like this!” he exclaims, gesturing, his hand parallel to the floor.

“Got bigger,” I mumble. I have to escape somehow, so I excuse myself without excusing myself and head for the kitchen. Five steps, six, seven, praying no one follows me. When I get there, I’m still shaken. I pull the folding doors closed.

Breathe. This is home, and it feels like home. All rectangles and squares. The kitchen is a great big white cube like a piece of Ma’s Corningware. Tall white cupboards, some wood, some glass, stretch up toward the long leaded glass rectangles of the skylight. Next to the fridge we have a step stool because only Dad is tall enough to reach the top shelf of the cupboards without it. One whole wall is lined with shelves of cookbooks, bright rectangles of color sealed behind glass-paned doors, which protect them from kitchen air. Ma’s books on the left, mine on the right. A floor of black-and-white square tiles stretches out toward the far wall, where there’s a deep flat sink, itself made up of rectangles. The wide white counters are rectangles, and so are the
gray subway tiles of the backsplash above them. In the center is Ma’s butcher block, which was once her own mother’s, a rectangular wooden column with a slight curve worn down into the middle over the years. The single square window has an herb garden on its sill, four square pots in a row: chives, mint, rosemary, thyme. Any wall not covered with bookshelves or cupboards is rectangular brick. Other people call it exposed brick but I don’t. It is painted over white, not exposed at all.

I kick off my shoes and feel cool tile under my bare feet. Better.

The hum of strange voices creeps in through the folding doors. I imagine Dad at the stove in his scrubs, shoulders rounded, hunched over and stirring a pot of Nonna’s bread soup. He is so tall. I take the hum of the strangers’ voices and try to shift it, change it into a song he’s humming under his breath while he stirs.

All those people. All those shoes. I need to block out their bulk, their nearness, their noise.

Nonna’s books are on my side of the cabinet, which is alphabetized. I reach down to the lowest shelf for a worn gray spine labeled
Tuscan Treasures.

When I open it a handwritten recipe card falls out. At the top of the card
Best Ribollita
is written in loose, spooled handwriting. I never learned Italian. The first time I knew that bread soup and ribollita were the same thing was at her funeral. I looked it up afterward in the dictionary. It was on the same page as
ribbon
and
rice
and
rickshaw.

My heart is still beating too fast. I dive inside the recipe and let it absorb me. I let the instructions take me over, step by step by step, until the hum begins to fade to silence.

I draw the knife from the block, wary of its edge, and lay it down next to the cutting board while I gather the garlic and onion. The garlic only has to be crushed with the broad side of the knife and peeled. I lay the blade flat on top of the garlic clove and bring down my fist. It makes a satisfying crunch.

The onion has more of a trick to it. Carefully, slowly, I slice the onion through the middle to make a flat side and slip my thumb under the dry gold-brown peel, exposing the smooth whiteness underneath. I lay half the bare onion flat on the cutting board and use the tip of the knife to nip off the top and the root end. I curl my fingers underneath to keep them away from the blade. The recipe says “coarsely chopped,” so I cut thick slices, then hold the sliced onion back together while I cut again in the other direction. I take my time. The knife snicks quietly against the cutting board. The sound relaxes me. There’s a rhythm to this. Onion and garlic in the pot. Sizzle them in oil. Check the instructions again.

Gather and open cans. Drain the can of beans, rinse them. The recipe calls for canned tomatoes broken up by hand, so I hold each one over the pot and push through the soft flesh with my thumb, squirting juice out, before tearing the tomato into chunks. The juice in the can is cold from the cabinet. Ripping up the tomatoes makes my fingers feel grainy. Something, maybe the acid, irritates my skin. I rinse my hands and dry them on the white towel that hangs next to the sink.

Wash and dry the kale, slice out each rib, cut the leaves in thin ribbons. Drop. Stir. Square off cubes of bread from a peasant loaf, football shaped. Cubes from a curved loaf, there’s a trick to that, but I do my best. Everything goes in. I thought I remembered cheese, but when I double-check the recipe, it’s not there. Salt, pepper. I adjust the heat to bring the soup down from an energetic boil to a bare simmer. That’s the last of the instructions. The spicy, creamy, comforting scent of ribollita drifts upward. I breathe it in.

I’m opening the silverware drawer for a spoon when I notice her.

On the step stool in the corner of the kitchen, next to the refrigerator, sits Nonna. She is wearing a bright yellow Shaker sweater and acid-washed jeans.

Nonna has been dead for twenty years.

Nonetheless, she’s right there. Wearing what she wore and looking how she looked in 1991.

In my grief, I am hallucinating. I must be.

She says, “Hello,
uccellina.
”

The name she had for me, Little Bird, from the mouth that spoke it. I am hallucinating the voice as well. Low, sharp, familiar. The first time I tasted espresso I thought,
This is what Nonna sounded like.
This is her. The whole Nonna, solid. Right here, sitting in the kitchen.

She can’t be. Can’t be, but is.

“You are surprise?” says Nonna. “But you bring me here.”

Her rough English. Her salt-and-pepper hair, the pattern of it along the hairline, unchanged. Same sweater pushed up to her elbows, each row of yellow stitches tight and even like corn kernels on the cob. Same once-white Keds. She looks as she should. Except that she shouldn’t, at all.

“Don’t be afraid,” she says, and I wasn’t until she says it but then I am, and I would flee except that the only way out is through a crowd of strangers who want to put their swarming, sweating hands on me and given that, there is really no escape.

I back against the glass cabinets and say, “Nonna, what’s going on? Why are you here?”

Nonna says, “You bring me with the smell of ribollita, and I bring the message. I come to tell you. Do no let her.”

“Her? Who?”

The folding doors swing open. Cooler, fresher air pours in, bringing the murmuring sound of the invaders, which fades as the doors swing shut. I hear one shoe strike the squares of the kitchen tile, then another. I can’t close my ears so I close my eyes.

“What smells so good?”

Silence.

“Ginny, what are you doing? Are you cooking something, what for? Are you okay?”

I open my eyes just a sliver. Nonna is gone. I see Auntie Connie’s yeast-colored shoes. I smell her beerlike smell. Then too late I see her fingers, reaching.

Contact.

When someone touches me wrong it isn’t a feeling. It isn’t hate or fear or pain. It is just blackness and a chant in me:
get/out/get/out/get/out.

I push past Connie, I can feel bone under the flesh of her shoulder like the shank end of a ham, and I nearly trip on the step down into the next room and everyone is there, not just shoes but knees and elbows and torsos and open mouths. I have to get out, but they’re all in my way. I shove through. I feel oven-hot skin, clammy fish-flesh skin, damp chicken-liver skin, they’re all around me. My heart beats faster, the chant matching,
get/out/get/out/get.
Out of the question to go all the way upstairs. Need whatever’s right here.

I duck into the coat closet and pull the closet door shut fast fast fast and turn away from the sliver of light under the door. I reach for Dad’s rain boots. They squeak against each other like cheese curds. I kneel down, pull them up into my lap, and shove my hands inside. Leather would be better but this particular old rubber-boot smell is still a Dad smell.

The onions, I need the idea of the onions, I soothe myself with it. Slowly growing golden. Giving off that scent, the last of the raw bite mixed with the hint of the sweetness to come. I press my forehead down against my knees, crushing the boots between my chest and thighs. My forehead is hot. My knees are hot. Thin, long strands shaved on a mandoline start as solid half-moons and melt away over time. More salt? No, just patience. Stir. Wait. Adjust the heat. Wait. Stir.

Light floods in. Real light.

“Oh, Ginny, please.” It’s Amanda’s voice. She has a voice like orange juice, sweet but sharp. Right now it’s watery and harsh with tears. I look down and see her shoes, glossy and black as trash bags. The pointed toes make triangles against the floor.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. I reach out to pull the door shut but with my booted hand I can’t do it. The wide round toe of the boot thuds uselessly against the door.

She bends down to me, speaking softly. “You can do this,” she says. “You were doing fine before. You were just fine.”

I shake my head no, no, no. I wasn’t fine. She can’t tell that. She only sees the outside, which isn’t how I feel at all.

She puts one hand on the toe of a boot. She says, “Can’t you come out? It isn’t for much longer, I promise.”

I say, “No.”

She puts her other hand on the other boot. But my hands are protected. I can’t feel anything.

“It’s hard enough without this,” she says. “I’m barely holding it together, and I can’t have you melting down on top of everything else right now. Don’t you understand? Don’t you realize how this looks?”

I open my mouth to apologize again when a high-pitched siren drowns everything out. Amanda’s hands vanish first and then her toes. I hate noise but I know what this one is, and she can handle it. By twisting my wrist and using the heel of the boot to catch the edge I manage to pull the door shut again, and although I close my eyes against the light I can smell the smoke in my nose, a charred, acrid smell. Vegetal, not chemical. Angry voices. Amanda shouting, “Don’t worry, it’s just in the kitchen, everyone, it’s okay.”

Amanda always takes care of things, whatever happens. She’s like Ma that way. Trusting her is like relaxing into a hot bath. Or, like it
used to feel when I took baths. I don’t anymore because steeping in hot water makes me feel like an ingredient. An egg, a noodle, a lobster. Now I take showers.

I press myself tight against the closet wall and take deep breaths. The siren stops and the only sound is chattering voices. I fade the noise away. I focus on the feeling of my hands in the rain boots, the warm closeness around me. The feeling of Dad nearby. A reassuring presence. But then when I think of Dad, I think of Nonna’s ghost, in the kitchen with me. So real.