The Kitchen Daughter (30 page)

I lift my head.

A blur of brown and white, resolving, and there she is. I see her form come together.

On the stool sits a beautiful woman, skin the color of buckwheat honey. She wears a thin white hooded sweatshirt, zipped up to the neck, with black yoga pants that end midcalf. On her feet, white slip-on sneakers, almost like Nonna’s Keds. No socks. Her ankles are bare above the lip of the shoe. I look at her face. Around the eyes there are lines and shadows. She looks sadder, and older, than her picture.

“Hello, Elena,” I say.

“Who are you?” She clings to the stool as if the floor were ocean.
“¿Quien eres?”

“Please don’t go,” I say. “I’m a friend.”

“Not my friend.”

“I’m a friend, I promise. Of David’s. And his mom’s. You know his mom? Gert?”

“Yes, I know her.”

“She’s been a friend of my family. For many years.”

“That doesn’t explain.”

“I know it doesn’t,” I say. “But the truth … the truth is kind of hard to start with.”

“It’s easier if you just say it,” she says.

Maybe she’s right.

I tell her, “You’re a ghost.”

“I know I’m a ghost.” It’s a statement, flat. She says, “I remember. I remember dying.”

“I’m so sorry.”

She says, “And why you? Who are you?”

I say, “I invoke ghosts by cooking from dead people’s recipes. Your husband asked me to bring you. I made your aji de gallina.”

Her voice cracks as she says, “I told him I’d love him if he made it. He never made it. I loved him anyway.”

“Did you?”

“What a question,” she says, “when I don’t even know you.”

“I’m sorry.”

She says, “So you’re not … with him? You’re his friend?”

“I try to be,” I say.

She says, “I didn’t understand.”

“Understand what?”

“I didn’t come before. The last time, when you made the aji. I didn’t come, because I didn’t want to.”

“What?”

“I was close—I smelled the aji—I could see him—but it was David and a strange woman in a strange place, what was I supposed to think? It was too surprising.”

“But you came this time.”

“I was lucky to get a second chance. I didn’t want to wait for a third.”

She kicks her foot, points her toes. She makes circles on the kitchen floor. We both watch her toes making one circle after another in the same clockwise direction. Around and around. Half hypnotized, both of us.

“There’s so much you never think about,” she says. “Before you die.”

“Like?”

“We were never outside ourselves,” she says. “We should have been. We should have tried.”

“What does that mean?”

“I can’t even tell you, I’m sorry. I know it in my mind. But I can’t find the words to explain.”

I hope that she will find some of them, but she goes back to making the circles with her foot again. She carves the air and it heals behind her.

If I only get the chance to tell her one thing, I want it to be the most important thing.

“Stay,” I say. “David wants so badly to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know exactly where. I’m sorry. If you wait … I didn’t mean to have you come this time. It was an accident.”

She says, “There are many accidents.”

I say, “Please stay until I can find him. He misses you.”

“I miss him too,” she says, “but I think it is too late.”

She’s right. The smell of the aji is already fainter, already disappearing. She’ll be gone, and soon.

I say, “But—for David—won’t you tell me anything?”

“There’s nothing to say, not now,” Elena says. “Too late for some things, too soon for others. I will tell him all myself, eventually.”

The palest parts of her, the arms, the shoes, go first, but it doesn’t take long before her whole form becomes mist and then nothing. Then the bare stool sits there, empty again.

I
TAKE
D
AVID’S
helmet and walk to his apartment, cursing myself all the way. I’m useless, worse than useless. I can’t bring a ghost when she’s needed, but I can invoke her by accident, and in doing so, give up the one way I could have been useful. I can’t help David, I don’t know why I thought I could. I don’t know why I thought I had the right to touch him. He barely even knows me. I pound on his door but he doesn’t answer. I assume he’s in there, hiding. Staying away. In a sense it’s the smartest thing he can do. The only thing other people can do is hurt you, so, forget it.

But I can’t. What if he’s not at home because he’s with Gert? Will he tell her what we did? What I did? I don’t want her to not like me anymore. That’s frightening. Did I seduce him? I didn’t mean to, but how would I know? I’ve never been a siren. Not that kind.

I carry his helmet home under my arm and put it back on the mantel. I look at the picture next to it, the one of the fountain, a vacation picture without the family. The scene is most beautiful without people in it. People just screw things up.

Forget the whole thing, the world, all the living people, I tell myself, and it has a ring of truth to it. The dead are better, aren’t they? The dead don’t betray or harm. They’ve already done all they can do. I can’t figure out what people mean or who they are or whether they can be trusted, so, forget them. Don’t even try anymore.

For now at least, forget the living.

M
y world has turned upside down again and again, which should mean it’s right-side up now, but it isn’t. Everything’s different, everything’s the same. Midnight still basks in the window seat and there are still seven piles of childhood artifacts sitting on the floor of my parents’ room. Neatly spaced at regular intervals. If I were a civilization, unearthed by scientists of the future, what would these artifacts say about me?

Then I think about Elena, and what she said.
We were never outside ourselves.
Maybe I should try to get outside myself. Think about someone else for a change. I look down at the piles of paper. Change the question. What would these things say about my parents?

Sixth grade. A five-page paper on “The Initial European Resistance to and Later Culinary Assimilation of the Tomato.” Was I the one who chose the topic? The grades are okay on the report card but the comments section says things like
occasionally disruptive
and
needs to participate more
. Nothing here about anyone but me.

Fifth grade. Quarterly reports on my performance. The grades dance. In the first quarter I get a D in Earth Science. The next quarter Earth Science is up to an A, but English has fallen to a D, and Social Studies to a C. Then English takes the A, and Social Studies the D, and Earth Science back down to a C again. It’s almost like music. I
remember Ma showing me flash cards on all these subjects. I hadn’t remembered each one took turns.

Fourth grade. A unicorn notebook, pink. The names of nuns who wrote letters repeated in varying orders down the left-hand margin. Only the left. Class notes alternate with excerpts that even now I know are from Heloise’s letters to Abelard. It’s a jarring effect now. At the time I’m sure I could read it easily.

Third grade. Precise, repetitive drawings of fruits from every angle. The delicate spotting at the base of a ripening Anjou pear. Shading to emphasize the round fullness of a muskmelon. A note from the teacher:
Goal for the summer—let’s try to expand Ginny’s focus! Needs to make more progress next year to keep up, and if she’d work as hard on math as she does on her drawings
… And then it trails off.

Second grade. Those Turkish rug patterns. Some in margins. Some taking up an entire page. The page-size ones even have a perfectly regular border of knotted fringe drawn at the bottom and top. Declining grades on the report card. A note from the teacher:
Ginny failed to turn in a completed assignment, please acknowledge you have received this notification.
Signed by Dad in his scrawl. Another note, same message, different date. Signed neatly, Caroline Damson Selvaggio. After that the grades nudge upward again.

First grade. A picture of the whole class, all thirty of us. Mrs. Mitchell in the middle. I remember her, she was my favorite. I’m nearly hidden in the picture, tucked half behind the boy to my right and half behind the girl to my left. Only one of my eyes is visible and it’s looking down. My grades are all Satisfactory. There is a thank-you note from Mrs. Mitchell thanking my mother for the Christmas cookies.

Kindergarten. A drawing of a family. Curly-haired Ma holding baby Amanda, whose face is colored in pure red. Dad is wearing scrubs and a surgical mask. Two words in an adult hand:
Where’s Ginny?
Rows and rows of perfectly formed capital and lowercase As
on an exercise sheet intended for the whole alphabet.
Come in for a conference
written on the first report card, and grades are better on the second.

Preschool and before. Crayon drawings and practice pages covered with Gs and Vs. The teacher’s note says,
Let’s get Ginny to come out of her shell! Needs to share more with the other children.
The drawings of the house with the purple roof and yellow sky. The broken handprint.

The baby book, where it all started. I flip through every page, even the blank ones, this time. A scrap of newsprint falls to the floor. What’s on the page itself is nonsense. Part of an article on lumber prices, one of those legal ads announcing an auction. I turn the scrap over. What’s important is what’s gone. This side is an advice column, with a small rectangle missing. Just about two lines. Maybe I wasn’t the one who cut the first bit of newspaper for the Normal Book after all.

Now it’s clear. I sit back on my heels.

Ma had to work hard, so hard, to keep me unlabeled. It would have been so much easier to let someone else tell her what to do with me. To accept help, to accept the suggestion that I be moved down a grade, or into a special class. Instead she went back to each teacher, insisting I could get by with a little help. I know Ma. I’m sure she charmed them. I’m sure every teacher thought
Oh, no
when she came in but by the time she left was thinking,
Caroline’s right, maybe I am a little too hard on Ginny. She’s just a little shy is all.

And that was just the dealing with other people. She also had to deal with me. And I was difficult. I didn’t want to be protected, and I made it hard on her. But she chose her battles. She protected me, maybe too much, but she didn’t let me retreat from the world completely. And no matter which way she leaned, protecting me or pushing me, I fought her every step of the way. I was mad because she wouldn’t let me stay in my room by myself. I was mad because she made me go back to school, again and again, after every
failure. She gave me what I needed. The evidence is stacked up here on the bedroom floor. And Dad loved me, but he wasn’t the one who helped me get by. He was just a person too, with flaws, not the hero I made him out to be.

It took their ghosts to do it, but now I think I understand who my parents were. And who I am.

Usually when I get excited my body heats up, but in this case the opposite happens. I get cold all of a sudden, deeply cold. I stare out the window toward the sidewalk. I wonder if the whole winter will be like this. I put on another sweater. I consider draping Midnight around my neck like a scarf but assume she has other plans.

Hot chocolate comes to mind. That’ll be perfect. I take milk from the fridge, cocoa from the cupboard. It’s Ma’s cocoa, one of the cans that Amanda tried to throw away that I reclaimed and put back up on the shelves. It seems a long time ago now. I understand a little better what Amanda meant that day. She didn’t want to feel their presence. And it’s confusing that I can. Until I let go of them I’m not going to be able to move forward. I have to think about it, but I think that’s what I want.

I heat up the milk on the stove instead of in the microwave, so I can stand by the lit burner and feel its warmth. I know the right proportions by heart, one cup of hot milk to one tablespoon of cocoa and one tablespoon of sugar. I feel like there’s something missing. Maybe salt? I take
Drinkonomicon
down from the cabinet and flip it to the right page.

The recipe is there, and it does have salt in it, but that becomes less important when I see the change. In tight red block print someone has added
1 TSP ANCHO POWDER
to the recipe in an unfamiliar hand. I know who it was. On one hand, it wasn’t very polite of him to write in my cookbook without asking, but on the other hand, it makes me smile. It’s a form of conversation. And he was right, it makes it better. I stir in
the sugar, wait for it to dissolve. Add a little cocoa at a time. The pinch of salt. And yes, a swirl of ancho powder, for that bitter, smoky tang.

I take a long sip out of the mug. Delicious.

There’s a movement in the doorway, and I start. A little of the cocoa slurps up over the edge and falls to the floor. I bend down toward it, thinking I’ll wipe it away, but then my eye is caught by something else. Someone else.

David.

“Oh,” I say, trying to sound nonchalant. “Did you let yourself in?”

He shakes his head, saying nothing.

“I’m making your cocoa. It’s the best, just like you said.” This probably sounds fawning and horrible. I shouldn’t be allowed to talk to people. I don’t make any kind of sense.

He’s just standing there in the doorway, shaking his head, shaking his head.

Finally, he says, “I’m sorry, Ginny.”

“You shouldn’t, I mean, I’m not mad or anything, but you know, it doesn’t have to—” I look at his face. I read what I see there. I’ve gotten it wrong.

So I backtrack, and I start over, and I ask David, “Sorry for what?”

He sits down, almost in slow motion, on the stool in the corner of the kitchen. He puts his head in his hands.

I go get his helmet from the mantel and hold it out to him.