The Memory of Lemon (15 page)

A blue haze of cigarette smoke hung in the dim, noisy tavern like fog over a river of spilled beer.

“I have to go upstairs and check on my daughter.”

Behind the bar, a bleached-blond, frazzled, younger version of Cadence Stidham tried to work her way around the man who blocked her path. Her eyes had that wary yet fed-up look of a trapped woman.

“It's gonna cost you.” He was skinny, older, with slicked-back hair that had gone out of style with Elvis.

“Les, let me get by.”

He made a point of reaching over her for the dusty, fluorescent yellow-green bottle of lime cordial from the shelf at the back of the bar, rubbing his front against her. He unscrewed the top and poured a glug into his beer, over her head.

The cloying smell of lime almost choked her.

“That's a nasty habit,” said Cadence, coughing.

“You're my nasty habit,” he said.

She looked up at him. At the nicotine-stained teeth, at those pale blue eyes that could seem so kind, then the next minute look at her so cruelly. Les had offered Cadence the apartment and a job with flexible hours after her boyfriend, Lydia's father, had died in a motorcycle accident. Cadence had once been grateful. She could raise her child, be independent, not go back to that sleepy backwater where nothing much ever happened.

Then, Les wanted more.

First, her pride. Then, her body. And now, whatever shred of human dignity she had left.

“Ooh, baby, that's good,” he crooned, cigarette dangling from his mouth. “You're my nasty.”

Something in her snapped. She untied her waitress apron and stuffed it behind the bar.

“Not anymore. I quit.”

“You quit and you leave, darlin'.” He pointed upstairs. “You and the kiddo. That was the deal.”

“Well, I quit.”

“Then get out. Now.”

“Now? It's almost two o'clock in the morning! The bar's almost ready to close.”

“I don't give a shit. You want out, you get out. Now.”

Lydia was still awake. Cady could hear her daughter coughing.

Les was drunk. And when he was drunk, he was mean.

This was her moment. The door had opened. A few clothes thrown
into a suitcase. The wad of bills hidden under the mattress. She and Lydia didn't need anything else.

Somehow, they'd get back to Vangie. She'd take them in, no question.

A small man with thinning hair and clear glasses stepped up to the bar. Cady had seen him the past few nights. He wasn't a regular, wasn't a drunk, just a quiet guy who sipped his beer all night. And observed.

Rumor was he had invented some card game, made a fortune, and was now trying to buy the entire, run-down city block. He was welcome to it.

Les was the holdout.

“You and your child need a safe place to stay tonight, miss?” the would-be real estate investor asked. “My sister lives in Hyde Park. She's a night owl and is probably still up. I could give her a call.”

I shivered. Cadence and Lydia had wandered into a dangerous place, leaving the safe haven of Vangie and the Augusta cabin.

No wonder Cadence clung to the new life she had made with Gene. No wonder lime cordial signaled the bad old days.

No wonder Lydia rejected her mother's ideas.

The scene snapped shut and I was back with mother and daughter, in my parlor.

“Let's not think about those days, Mom. I know my getting married has dredged up a lot of stuff for both of us,” Lydia was saying. “But I don't have any issue with Gene. Never did.”

Mrs. Stidham dabbed her eyes with her napkin.

“We're very different people,” Lydia continued, “and we will never vote for the same candidate, but I know Gene's heart is in the right place. Of course he should have what he likes.”

Mrs. Stidham visibly relaxed.

And the rest of us did, too.

“Lemon is usually ranked as the second-favorite dessert flavor in food magazine polls,” added Gavin, as if nothing had happened. “It gets my vote.”

After everyone left and before I headed back to the bakery, I took another moment to send a text to Luke:
Let me go.

SEPTEMBER 1948

MILLCREEK VALLEY

The Healer

Eighteen-year-old Vangie Ballou, in side-buttoned, wide-legged pants and a striped blouse, hung her sister-in-law's wash out to dry on the clothesline.

With wooden clothespins clamped in her mouth, she arranged the crib sheet on the line, then pegged it on each end. She reached down in the wash basket for one of the many cloth diapers that would flutter down the line like surrender flags.

“You should be wearing a housedress, Vangie,” Stella Mae called out the back door. “You'll ruin your good clothes. And don't get your sandals muddy.”

But Vangie wouldn't be caught dead in a housedress or a pinafore apron like Stella Mae wore. She had big dreams. They didn't include being stuck at home. She kept her movie star magazines under her pillow, and her lipstick and compact at the
ready in her purse. A Hollywood scout could discover her. Maybe she would be known by her full first name, Evangeline.

She could see her name roll on the big-screen credits. Evangeline Scott. Evangeline Adams. Evangeline Taylor.
Evangeline Something.

Here she was just Vangie, the hillbilly sister.

When she'd lived in Kentucky, she never thought of herself that way. She was just herself and she sounded like everyone else. But this tiny backyard bordered by a weeping willow and the Mill Creek was a far cry from the old home place in more ways than one.

Here it was noisy, crowded, and hot. With the windows open at night, Vangie could hear cars and trains and trucks into the wee hours of the morning. The neighbors were only a stone's throw away on each side and referred to her brother's family as “briar hoppers.” This muddy, smelly creek was nothing like the wide Ohio River, which changed colors with the passing of sun and clouds. And the brick house held in the heat of the day unlike their cabin, which was snug in winter and cool in summer.

But Vangie knew there was no turning back. Her future was here. At least for a while.

All the able-bodied farmers had left Augusta to fight the war or find factory jobs in the Queen City area after gas was rationed. It had become too expensive to farm with machinery instead of mules and horses. The few tobacco farmers who had big wagons and horses that could haul tobacco all the way to Maysville did all right, but the Ballous weren't among them.

Vangie was to start her own factory job in the office of the Simms and Taylor mattress factory on Monday. She had taken a correspondence course in stenography and had learned to type in high school. Plus, she was young, tall, and good-looking. She
wore her dark, pin-curled hair parted in the middle and swept back from her face with hair combs, just like Bess Myerson, who had been Miss America right after Japan surrendered and the war ended. Bess was the daughter of a Jewish house painter, so why couldn't the daughter of a Baptist tobacco farmer make it big? Anything could happen. This was America.

The washtub sat on an oilcloth-covered table outside. Vangie used the cloudy rinse to water the pots of gladiolas and the morning glories climbing up the porch trellis. Then she dumped the rest of the water and turned the washtub on its side to dry on the tiny back porch.

“Vangie, can you watch Cadence?” Stella Mae called out to her in the yard. “I'm going upstairs to lie down for a while.”

Vangie opened the screen door and hoisted her baby niece, who always had a runny nose, up on her hip. Cadence was teething on a carrot and there were carrot shreds all over the floor. The pots and pans that Deuce had taken off the low shelf were littered all over the kitchen and into the middle room, where the family listened to the big Crosley radio. Three-year-old Deuce was filling a battered saucepan with cigarette butts from the ashtray. The front parlor had no furniture.

To be fair, Stella Mae had tried her best to make this a home. But this rented place still had the feeling of “just for now.” Vangie's brother, Harold, hoped he could save enough money to move back home to the family farm. But Harold and Stella Mae had already been in this little house for four years. Harold spent his days making mattress covers on the assembly line. You'd think, thought Vangie, that he'd at least put in a garden out back to keep his hand in, but when he got home, he just sat in his chair by the radio, smoked, and yelled at the kids.

Cadence started to fuss. Vangie got her bottle out of the icebox and put her down in the middle room's playpen. Cadence was happy to lie back and feed herself. Deuce was taking the cigarette butts out of the saucepan and putting them back in the ashtray. His fingers were sooty. He would soon take a nap, too.

Now would have been the perfect time for Vangie to escape. Maybe walk down to the drugstore on Millcreek Valley Road.

A movie producer motoring from Queen City to Chicago could be nursing a hangover and stop in at the drugstore for a Bromo-Seltzer at the soda fountain. He'd gulp it down, start to feel better, and turn around on his counter stool to discover Vangie trying on a new shade of lipstick. She would end up playing the ingenue in his new movie and be on the cover of
Photoplay
and . . .

That wasn't going to happen today.

Vangie's second tried-and-true escape was more domestic. Making pie. She scooped flour into a large bowl, cut off a chunk of leaf lard from the icebox, sprinkled in a little salt, and used two table knives in a scissor fashion to cut the fat into the flour. She added ice water, a little at a time, to make the dough. The familiar motions took her back to the double cabin on top of the hill where she could hear the birds singing and the river running.

If she were back home, she could go out and pick Indian summer blackberries and have enough for a pie. Or take out a jar of home-canned fruit. But here?

Vangie had to make do with milk, flour, sugar, and eggs from Amici's around the corner. But she had her mama's favorite pie recipe.

In the middle room, Cadence was asleep and Deuce was curled up in his daddy's chair with his thumb in his mouth, just dozing off.

Vangie quietly crept upstairs and pulled her suitcase out from under her bed in the children's room. From the quilted pocket, she pulled out a small handful of dried spicebush berries, crushed them in her palm, and inhaled the nutmeg fragrance with the citrus and spice notes.

For a second, she was back on top of the hill, sitting on her mama's rocker in the dogtrot and watching the river flow by, always the same yet ever changing.

Back in the kitchen, Vangie took out the brown school notebook that her mother had filled with recipes in her sprawling, penciled script. Vangie didn't know who Little Abigail was, perhaps some long-distant relative who was probably bossy. But Vangie loved the pie.

Little Abigail's Custard Pie

Take a thimbleful of crushed spicebush berries and put them in a pot. Add a quart of sweet milk and put over a low fire. The milk should feel hot to your fingers. Take the pot off the fire and cover it. Don't rush. The longer it sits, the better the flavor.

Go about making your pie pastry. Line a pie pan with your dough. Lift the spicebush berries with your fingers from the milk and rinse them off. Leave the berries to dry so you can use them again. Beat 8 eggs and 2 teacups of white sugar together in the yellow bowl. Pour this into the pie shell. Sprinkle the top of each pie with a little more sugar.

Bake in a hot oven for 15 minutes, then turn down the heat and bake until you can stick the tip of a silver knife in the middle of the pie and it comes out clean.

Back in the kitchen, Vangie put the spicebush berries in the saucepan, poured the milk over them, and put the saucepan over a low flame on the stove.

While the kids slept, she let the milk and spicy berries steep.

Mama would approve
.

She rolled out the chilled dough for the crust with a deftness that came from much practice. She lined her mother's old pie tin.

With her fingers, as Little Abigail had once instructed, Vangie removed the spicebush berries and rinsed them at the sink. Vangie washed her hands, getting out all of the milk residue. She dried her hands and inspected them. Her red-lacquered nails had held up just fine. But there was more to do.

She made the filling and spooned it into the pie. With the pastry trimmings, she cut out little leaves and glued them with a little beaten egg yolk to make a decorative border around each pie. She carefully brushed the leaves on the outer rim of the pastry with the rest of the beaten egg and dusted the border and the filling with sugar.

So pretty.

While the pie was baking and everybody was still sleeping, Vangie wrote out the recipe for Dorothy Mooney, that nice girl at Emmert's Insurance. Vangie had brought her a slice of pie last week when Harold was late with his insurance payment and Dorothy had told old Mr. Emmert that she had simply forgotten to record it on the correct day. Dorothy had gone on and on about how good that pie was, so Vangie felt beholden. Vangie would drop the recipe off when Stella Mae woke up.

Dorothy had given Vangie a recipe for Shaker lemon pie that
you made with thin sliced whole lemons. But lemons were a luxury right now. That would have to wait.

Later that Tuesday evening, when they had finished their dinner, the family went into the middle room to sit around the radio. Vangie cleaned up the dishes. Stella Mae looked beat, so Vangie offered to bathe the kids and put them to bed.

When Vangie came downstairs an hour later, Harold sat in his favorite chair and Stella Mae was stretched out on the divan. Into the room on the WLW airwaves came Fibber McGee and Molly, a tall-tale teller and his commonsense wife who lived in a place called Wistful Vista. Fibber's get-rich-quick schemes never panned out except for laughs, and even Harold chuckled.

When Harold and Stella Mae went up to bed, Vangie indulged in her third form of escape—her fiddle. It was an old one, as old as the abiding cabin. The red velvet lining in the bottom of the fiddle case had faded to pink. A paper pasted to the inside lid held the signatures of all the women who had played and loved this instrument: Abigail Newcomb, Sarah O'Neil, Little Abigail, Lizzie, and, lastly, Vangie's mother, Daisy Ballou. One day, Vangie would sign her name to the list, but not yet. Who knew what lay ahead of her? Maybe she'd meet a movie star and get married.

Vangie picked up the fiddle and tucked it between her chin and shoulder, just like her mama had taught her. Lightly, she drew the bow over the strings and felt the familiar tingling that went through her arm and into the instrument.

She played the first few notes of “Wildwood Flower,” her mother's favorite song.

I will twine, I will mingle my raven black hair

With the roses so red and the lilies so fair . . .

In the corner of the room, Vangie conjured the image of her mother, lit only by the pale light of the cabin's kerosene lamp, and it brought tears to her eyes.

He taught me to love him and promised to love

And to cherish me over all others above

My poor heart is wondering no misery can tell

He left me in silence, no word of farewell.

That song, as beautiful as it was, left Vangie feeling unsettled rather than comforted. Her mother used to say that such a feeling was a portent. But who was leaving? Who was staying?

MAY 1949

AUGUSTA, KENTUCKY

Vangie's heart was heavy.

She had to grow up. And grow up fast. All those stupid dreams about Hollywood.

Real life had a way of smacking you in the face.

Vangie rocked on the steps of the dogtrot, soothed by the evening breeze off the river below. She smoked a cigarette, taking a long draw and puffing out the smoke into rings that floated off into the night air. She would have to make a new life right here where her old one had been.

Deuce and Cadence were tucked in under the rafters upstairs.

Oh, if her mother were only here now. Vangie brushed away a tear. It was not good to cry. That wouldn't help anything.

When Stella Mae lost the baby, it started a downward spiral. Stella Mae was never right in the head after that. Vangie had to quit her job and stay home to take care of the little ones.

And then Stella Mae started wandering. She'd get up in the night, take off all her clothes, and roam the streets, talking to imaginary people and telling stories that would make your hair curl. Stella Mae, the quiet one, as noisy and showy as a guinea hen. The police would bring her back, muttering, “Damn hillbillies,” under their breath.

Harold was mortified. And scared. And helpless as a man usually was in a domestic crisis.

Eventually, Harold had to put Stella Mae in a mental hospital in Queen City. It was all very hush-hush; it had to be if Harold was to keep his job. If they knew you had a wife in a mental institution, they looked at you funny, too, Harold had said. So Harold and Vangie just told everyone that they were taking Stella Mae and the kids back to Kentucky.

Good riddance,
their neighbors seemed to indicate. No one had offered to help them pack up the truck that Harold had borrowed.