The Kitchen Daughter (3 page)

Her warning.

Do no let her.

I push my body against the back of the closet but there’s nowhere further or darker to go. I stretch my fingers all the way down into the toes of Dad’s boots. I close my eyes and think of onions, how over time they change in predictable and expected ways, if you handle them correctly. If you do it right, there are no surprises. Ma said
You can’t get honey from an onion
but it turns out that, in a way, you can.

In my life I’ve had good days and bad days. Miserable days. Painful days. And no matter how bad the bad ones get, there’s a mercy in them. Every single one of them ends.

This one, thank goodness, does too.

W
hen I wake up, I move as if through water. My body is heavy, my brain is slow. My attic bedroom is a big room full of small corners. There are windows in some of its nooks, but not the one with the bed. I roll over and find the clock. Ten already. There is something heavy and warm on one of my feet. I squint. Midnight. I’m sure she’s just as happy as I am to have yesterday over, to have the invaders gone. She doesn’t like crowds either. She’s not a people cat. I ease my foot out from under her long-haired white form, inch by inch. Although sleeping, she complains with a half-swallowed meow.

The image of Nonna in the kitchen comes back to me, and I wish it hadn’t. There’s already more than I can handle. Now do I have to worry about dead relatives ambushing me here and there? Grandpa Damson on the front porch, under the portico? Dad’s second cousin Olivia, the rumored suicide, waiting for me when I step out of the shower? Ma in the hall in the middle of the night, scolding me back to bed? I can’t worry about it. I have to assume Nonna was a hallucination. But her warning tickles the back of my brain, and I have to chase it out somehow.

Listening, I tune in to the faint noises. Scratching and swishing and knocks. The acoustics of this old house make it sound like even the sidewalk is only a few steps down the hall. So it takes a while to figure out whether or not these sounds are coming from inside the house. In the end, I think they are.

The stairs creak under my feet, but Gert is busy wiping down the mantel and doesn’t look up at the sound. I watch her lean into the motion, pushing hard in long strokes to strip the dust off instead of just moving it around. Her long black ponytail sways. Gert has always had waist-length hair, the longest I’ve ever seen.

Gert has cleaned the house once a week ever since I can remember. Over the years I learned her story. Her parents, both Jewish, fled Romania for Cuba during the Holocaust. Then during the revolution it was her turn to flee. She changed her language but kept her religion, and brought us sweets from both traditions. Gert has a voice like the poppy seed filling of hamantaschen, inky and sweet, but it’s her Cuban pastries I really remember. Even now, remembering, the taste of her coconut turnovers fills my mouth. Creamy, papery white filling. Rich yellow pastry falling apart in flakes.

Gert leans back and shakes the cloth out, whipping it hard from the corners so it snaps. She lifts the bucket of water from the tile of the fireplace and turns toward me.

“Ginny,” she says. “Hope I did not wake you.”

“No,” I say.

She approaches me the only way I can stand, straight on, in plain sight. When I look down, she places the heel of her hand on my forehead and presses against it, like a blessing.

“I am sorry,” she says.

“Thank you.”

Gert has always been easy for me to get along with. Maybe I would get along with everyone if I only saw them for three hours once a week. My mother, my sister, they were always around too much. There were too many opportunities for me to screw things up. Dad I saw less, and he liked me more. There could be a connection.

“Your sister is in the kitchen,” she says, gesturing, and I realize there are more sounds from that direction. A series of thuds, some metallic, some not. I go to see.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” says Amanda, from her high perch. She’s standing on top of the step stool, pulling items from the kitchen cabinets and letting them fall into a large black plastic bag spread out on the floor.

“Why are you still here?” I ask.

“I said, good morning.”

“Good morning,” I echo.

“It didn’t make sense to go all the way back out to New Jersey,” she says. “The girls were so tired and it was so late. You just missed them, actually. Brennan took them out on a duck tour, you know, Liberty Bell, Penn’s Landing, the whole nine yards.”

When she says it I realize I overheard them talking about
duck
last night, after the house was dark and I took my hands out of Dad’s rain boots and went upstairs to my room. It got me started thinking about what flavors go with duck: orange, cherry, star anise. They also talked about
home
and
safe
and
burgers.
The house carries sounds everywhere.

Amanda drops a box of cereal into the trash bag.

I ask, “What are you doing?”

“I can’t stand it,” she says. “Eating their food. What they left behind. I … I couldn’t eat … knowing they …”

Some of that was my food, not theirs. She might know it, she might not. It doesn’t matter. “Okay, but we’re going to have to buy more.”

“I’ll figure it out,” she says. “Remind me, I need to trim your bangs, they’re completely out of control. How can you even see?”

“I can see fine.”

“No, no, let’s just go take care of this now while I’m thinking about it,” she says, climbing down. Behind us in the dining room I can hear Gert lifting and setting down the picture frames, dusting in between.

I sit on the edge of the bathtub. Amanda holds the comb out toward me and I grab the other end. I let her closer than anyone else, but she knows my limits. While I’m combing out the tangles, she says, “I should take you shopping. How long have you had that sweater?”

“I don’t know.”

“You need some new clothes, Ginny.”

“I don’t
need
them.”

“You could diversify, though. Wear something besides black.”

“I wear things besides black.” I hand the comb back to her and tug down the sleeve of my sweater, which doesn’t quite cover my wrist. It shrank. My fault. I should have left it for Gert to wash.

“Besides navy and black and brown. Do you own anything red?”

“I don’t know.”

“Red would look gorgeous on you. Hold still. You ready?”

“Yes.” I close my eyes tight and she starts to snip. I don’t like the sound, but I know how to keep still around sharp things. I examine a single cornflake in my mind. Not its taste, just its shape, uneven and pockmarked. A mountainous landscape the size of a fingernail.

Amanda works for a while in silence, then says, “You’re going to
love this. Shorter bangs will frame your face better. We both have the same problem, wide face, tiny chin. If you don’t break the line it’s a giant triangle. When I was in Lorna’s wedding she made us pull our hair back and the makeup gave me a monster breakout so I looked exactly like a freaking Dorito. Cool Ranch. Ah, I wish I had your skin.”

I picture her slipping my skin off my skeleton and climbing into it like a jumpsuit, and say, “That’s really gross.”

“I meant you’re lucky,” she says, and just goes on snipping. “Pale skin with dark hair, the contrast thing is all the rage. I just look washed out if I don’t tan, which was a lot easier when Brennan and I were in L.A. I’d love to show you what looks nice on you. Makeup too. Emphasize the blue eyes, maybe a nice red lip, like a little china doll. You could look so pretty if you tried. We should definitely go shopping this week.”

“Okay,” I say, because it’s easier to agree, for now. I don’t tell her what happened the last time Ma took me shopping, six months ago. Metal hangers shrieked against metal racks. The salesgirl wore a flesh-colored top with stitching down the middle that looked like sutures. When I tried on a light blue floaty dress it was so thin it didn’t even feel like clothes and the salesgirl said
Oh this eight is too big but the length is good here let me show you if we nip it in at the waist like this.
She pinched me on both sides and I slapped at her hands but she thought I was joking or something and she pressed with both hands and I squirmed and twisted but couldn’t twist away so I slapped harder and everything blurred and Ma said
Quiet, quiet
, but I didn’t know I was being loud, and we left without buying anything. I don’t tell Amanda any of that.

The silence between snips grows longer. Amanda says, “We’ll need a break from packing at some point. Maybe we can go later in the week.”

I say, “Packing?”

“All done.” She sets the scissors down on the sink. I stand up and all the wisps of discarded hair fall on the floor. “There, don’t you look so much better?”

“Thank you,” I say, even though it wasn’t exactly a compliment. “You said packing?”

“Yes. I figured we could work together on packing up Mom and Dad’s stuff.”

“Why?”

“Well,” she says, “life is going to intrude at some point. You know how busy I am with the girls. We’re lucky Brennan’s around to help for a while, but at some point his firm is going to send him back out on the road, and then I’m not going to be as available. And it wouldn’t make sense to have this place just sitting here empty.”

“It’s not sitting here empty,” I say. “I’m living in it.”

“Well, but that’s going to change.”

“Why?”

“Ginny, we can’t keep the house. We’ll sell it.”

It’s a horrible thing she’s saying, but I don’t want to jump to conclusions, like with the skin, so carefully I ask, “Are you joking?”

“No.”

“Well, we’re not selling it,” I snap.

She exhales, forcefully, loudly. “I was afraid you were going to have a knee-jerk reaction.”

“My knees aren’t jerking anywhere.”

“I meant you didn’t even think about it.”

“I thought about it. Just now. It’s a terrible idea.”

“Keep your voice down!” says Amanda.

“You keep your voice down!” I reply.

Amanda leans against the sink and crosses her arms. “It’s too much house for one person. Besides, do you know how rare it is for a place like this to go on the market? A Portico Row four-bedroom, going on
two hundred years old, with all the original detail? I was telling my friend Angelica about it, she’s a real estate agent, she was practically drooling. Wash West was scary as hell thirty years ago, Mom and Dad picked it up for cheap. And it’s totally paid for. We could make an amazing amount of money.”

I cross my arms too. “We have enough money.”

“Spoken like someone without her own checkbook,” says Amanda. “It never hurts to have more.”

“It’s home. You’re talking about selling our home.” I stare at a spot on her shoulder, where a tuft of my cut-off hair has caught and settled.

“It’s not really about the money,” she says. “It’s about you, to be honest. Do you think you’d really be okay here? By yourself?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“You’ve never lived alone.”

I say, “It’s not fair to assume I can’t do something just because I haven’t.”

“Well, you’ve never … you’re so … okay. Yesterday you started a fire. What if we hadn’t been here?”

“But you
were
here. And it was only almost a fire.” I can’t tell her the reason I left the pot on the stove and ran away. I can’t tell her about seeing Nonna. I’ve never been institutionalized, but I know I wouldn’t like it.

“And you ran and hid in a closet.”

“And?” I crouch down and start picking up the little black clumps off the featureless white floor.

“Don’t bother with that, come on, leave that for Gert,” says Amanda. She crouches down beside me. “Ginny, baby, are you gonna be okay?”

“Yes. I already said that.”

“No, really, I mean it. Look at me.”

She knows I can’t. She remembers, belatedly.

“Sorry, Ginny, sorry, that’s what I tell the girls.”

“I understand.”

She stands up and puts away the scissors in the top right-hand drawer, which is not where they go, and then says, “Actually, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

“It can wait, I bet.”

“No time like the present,” she says. “I want to talk about your problem.”

I sit on the edge of the tub and look at the little crystal knobs on the vanity drawers. “I don’t have a problem.”

“You do.”

“I have a personality. That’s what I have.”

“Ginny, Ginny, Ginny. Please don’t push me away.”

“Well, please don’t be an asshole,” I mumble at the floor.

She says, “This is exactly what I’m talking about. You have two speeds. Scared and angry. Don’t you want to try being normal?”

I stare at the wisps of hair scattered across the floor. It looks like someone has shaved one of those rare black squirrels. I breathe a few times to calm down. She doesn’t need to know about the Normal Book. So I say, “Normal doesn’t just mean what you want it to mean.”