The Memory of Lemon (17 page)

Neely

For the next few days at Rainbow Cake, I worked with renewed purpose.

As I sipped my Cuban coffee, before we opened, I sighed with relief once again. No black SUV. No guy with a telescopic camera lens. No one to make me feel trapped, hemmed in, constrained.

I felt freer than I had in weeks.

I would meet with Luke. He'd sign the divorce papers. Our divorce would move along.

I had had a wonderful letter from Ben. I would see him soon and we would see where things would go.

Now I could focus again on work.

In the back, while Norb was baking, I assembled our signature rainbow cakes for a special order—those coral, butter yellow, pale
green, rose, and lavender layers all frosted with a robin's egg blue buttercream. As much as I loved this cake—and our customers did, too—that teal blue coloring always found its way to outline my fingernails, sort of a litmus test of how busy we were.

When we opened our doors, Maggie wore that expectant look again that quickly faded to resignation. We hadn't seen the Professor since his last date with Maggie at the VFW. Mornings just weren't the same without him.

Maggie wasn't the same without him. She had pale, shadowy circles under her eyes. Even the rhubarb-colored T-shirt she wore couldn't make her blue eyes pop. She looked faded.

“Maybe he went on vacation,” I said, as I put an order of our vegan cinnamon rolls in a box for a customer.

“Yes. A vacation from me.”

“Don't say that. We don't know why he hasn't been here. Maybe it has nothing to do with you.”

“I think it has everything to do with me. Maybe I introduced him to my mother too soon.”

“Everybody likes Patsy, and I'm sure the Professor did, too.”

She sighed. “He hasn't even kissed me yet, Neely.”

“We all know he's the shy type. Just give him some time. And some encouragement.”

“If I ever see him again.”

I squeezed Maggie's arm, tagged the order for pickup, and went to the next order on the list.

The morning went by, smoothly and uneventfully, and I found myself with time on my hands.

I scooped up a half dozen more of our lemon tartlets and
made another attempt to see Gran in the memory care wing of Mount Saint Mary's.

She was awake and sitting up in a wheelchair.

“I think Dorothy knew somebody was coming today,” said a staff nurse. “She's been a little more animated. Kept looking at the door.”

I sat down beside Gran and opened the box of tartlets. “Gran, I brought you a treat. Your famous lemon pie. Can you smell it?”

I held a tartlet up to her nose and she inhaled the sharp, buttery fragrance. And smiled.

“Jack,” she said and put her hand up to my face.

Close enough.

“Jack is getting better,” I said. “I've been writing to Dad. He's been writing back. He's been telling me about his time in Vietnam.”

“Blue hands,” Gran said. Slowly and shakily, she took one of my hands—stained from making rainbow cakes—and kissed it.

“Occupational hazard,” I said and kissed her back.

“Do you want to try a bit of tartlet?” I asked. “Your famous recipe.”

I put the tartlet on the paper plate I had brought and gave her a forkful.

“I'm making these for a big wedding in Augusta, Kentucky.”

Gran looked at me.

“Vangie,” she said.

How many people had I ever heard of who were named Vangie? Only one. “Did you know Vangie Ballou, Gran?” And then the other shoe fell. The pie recipe with spicebush berries. Little Abigail's custard pie. Did Vangie ever live here? I would have to
ask Lydia or her mother. How strange that our families might have known each other.

Gran took a third bite and sank back into her chair. She turned her head and closed her eyes.

I knew it was time to go back to Rainbow Cake.

While I had been gone, another thick letter came from my dad. How much of that City Vue stationery had he taken with him? Maybe I should send him paper, envelopes, and stamps in my next care package.

But this was a good sign.

I had a breakthrough, Claire, in my group therapy session. Maybe it was all those lemon goodies you keep sending. I don't know. But something that was knotted up in me got smoothed out. Some things that were fuzzy all of a sudden became clear.

I'm not going to ramble on like some crazy person. That is me, being ironic.

But I want to write this down while it is fresh from my newfound memory. It hurts like hell to even think about it, sort of like physical therapy. But this is emotional therapy, the guys say. And it's supposed to hurt.

I remembered the girl with blue hands. I know this isn't all of it, but it's a start.

My last mission was to fly a major and his party up to Quang Tri near the North Vietnam border.

It was October 25, 1970, almost two years after I left home for the Army.

Clear day. But Typhoon Kate had hit the Philippines to the south a few days earlier and was coming up the coast.

The typhoon meant my layover in Quang Tri was a lot shorter. The Army brass moved up my next mission to take a team of four men for a drop into northern Laos for a long-range reconnaissance mission. We weren't at war with Laos, so it had to be secret.

We took off, no problem. The sky to the south and east was turning blue-black with that weird green like a tornado sky, so I churned up the Huey to its full capacity.

The drop into Laos went fine. Quick down, quick up. The men made for cover just as the rain started falling. In just that time—five minutes, maybe—the wind formed a massive wall.

Jimbo, my gunner, and I were in midair when I felt the pedals go soft. I couldn't turn the chopper. I was scared shitless.

The Huey made big loops at first.

And then the loops got tighter and tighter.

We started to spin. When your tail rotor fails, it's like you're driving a car on an icy road and doing doughnuts at high speed. It's happening fast, but it feels like slow motion.

I knew I had to drop us down as close to the ground as possible.

I white-knuckled us down into a valley, trying to aim for the small space between where the jungle stopped and the terraced hillside started before I cut the rotors and the Huey fell. But we blew in too close. We rammed into this stone tower that cropped up out of the bush. I thought my neck would snap off.

But we stopped. Jimbo opened his door and fell out, sideways.

I struggled to get out of my door and my parachute deployed. I was lost in this silky white cloud. But I jumped anyway. And then I felt the tug of my harness. I didn't clear the chopper. I dangled like a marionette.

Then the rain came, sheets of rain straight into my face, into my nose and lungs.

I hung there in midair pounded by rain for what seemed like hours. But maybe it was only minutes. I don't know. But in a split second, I fell.

When I came to, one side of my face was stuck in the mud. The rain had stopped temporarily. A skinny little boy leading a baby goat by a piece of rope prodded me with a stick. I hobbled over to the other side of the chopper. I saw that Jimbo was dead. I wanted to bury him, but I had to get out before the Viet Cong came.

I took Jimbo's rifle to use as a cane.

I followed the boy back to a wooden hut at the end of a cluster of huts. Inside it was dark and smoky. There was a big vat over a fire in the center and a smoke hole in the ceiling above it. Everything smelled like piss. A scared young woman offered me a cup of water and a bowl of rice. She had dark blue hands. She said something to the young boy and he took the goat and left.

I don't know what this means, but I remembered it, like the cobwebs had been dusted off or something.

There's more. I know there's more. And when it comes, I'll be ready for it. This is the only way to get better, honey.

I've blathered on enough.

Thank you, thank you for the lemon tarts. I think that's what did it, sweetie.

Love,

Dad

NOVEMBER 1950

MILLCREEK VALLEY

The Healer

The cellar still had the warm smell of coal dust and they hadn't even burned any coal yet.

Dorothy O'Neil knew it was silly to wash the white net curtains again. They would only get increasingly dingy every week once the coal furnace got going when the weather turned. By spring, the curtains would be grayish yellow. That was the price a modern homemaker in an old house had to pay for staying warm in winter.

Still, it was a fine house. Shotgun style. Parlor in the front, dining room in the center, kitchen at the back. A long hallway leading from the front door to the bathroom.

It had been the home of former clients at Emmert's Insurance, Mr. and Mrs. Tom O'Neil. Their deaths had led her to their son,
George, whom Dorothy had married, and from there to baby Jack, just weeks old.

She should be tired from childbirth and caring for a newborn.

But Dorothy was filled with a restless energy. She needed something to do.

Baby Jack was asleep in his little blue bunting on top of the folded laundry in the willow basket. He had another hour to go before his next feed. Dorothy had the bottles of formula already made up in the icebox, where the lemon Jell-O salad with the grated carrots was chilling in individual metal molds.

The peeled potatoes were in the saucepan, covered with cold water, ready to boil. The pot roast was in the oven. No one could say that she drove her husband to drink at Hinky's because she didn't have dinner on the table when he came home from work.

Dorothy leaned down and patted her son in the basket. He was so perfect, so innocent. His whole life before him. Once again, a fierce love overtook her and she trembled. Once again, she vowed to herself that no matter what, her son would have a good life.

Dorothy stood up and turned her attention back to the laundry. She had soaked the curtains in borax, drained out the dirty water, and filled the tub of the wringer washer with clear water. Dorothy always added bluing to the rinse when she was doing the whites. She put a few drops of bluing into a jug of water until the water turned a dark blue. As she poured the bluing into the rinse tub, Dorothy saw the shack again, out of the corner of her eye. And the little boy with a goat. The boy looked Chinese.
Were they . . . ?
She turned sharply to look and splashed the bluing over her left hand.

There was nothing there in the corner of the cellar. But as the bluing stained her hand, an inky dark taste filled her mouth, the deep empty blue of an abyss, a bitter flavor of hopelessness.

She dropped the jug into the rinse tub and looked at her left hand in horror. Now she was marked. She plunged her hand into the rinse water, grabbed the scrub brush, and furiously went at her hand until it was raw.

But she could still see the bluing around her fingernails.

And still she could taste the bitterness. She could also feel the knot in her stomach, the sensation that something was terribly wrong. Usually, when she sensed a flavor, it emanated from someone close to her, someone she let in to her mind, and she understood that the person's story that unfolded had taken place in the past. The only two people in this cellar were Dorothy and Jack.

Jack, sleeping peacefully. Jack was too little to have stories just yet. Dorothy had never gotten tastes, then glimpses, of her own stories. Why would she? She already knew them.

This must be what they call the “baby blues,” when you aren't quite yourself.

Dorothy had just read an article in
McCall's
magazine about the baby blues, about how young mothers didn't realize what was happening to them. How their husbands and best friends might not know, either. In the end, the article said, the young mother just had to find a way to snap out of it.
Stay busy. Think cheerful thoughts. Get enough rest. Eat right. Have something to look forward t
o.

Dorothy dried her hand on her apron, picked up each net curtain from the rinse tub with her laundry stick, and guided each curtain through the mangle as she turned the wringer. She
took each flattened curtain between both hands and shook it out to full form, then pegged the curtains to the clothesline she had strung up in the cellar. When all the curtains were hanging on the clothesline, she picked up the basket with the sleeping baby and went back upstairs.

Dorothy put the basket down on the kitchen floor and went through the swinging door into the tiny pantry. She took a spoon out of the drawer of the Hoosier cabinet and plunged it into the sugar canister, then into her mouth.

The sugar melted on her tongue, softening the bitter edges of the terrible taste, making the hallucination go away. The shack. The boy with the goat. The feeling that a towering black storm cloud was coming. The feeling of being trapped.

When she had this disaster dream at night, Dorothy always had to save the baby. George never seemed to be in the dream. It was always just Dorothy and Jack.

If she and Jack were in the car, she had to drive away from the cloud. If they were shipwrecked, she had to grab a floating spar—and the baby—and paddle away. If the tornado was approaching, she had to run into the cellar as the storm broke in its black fury.

The little stained glass window high up in the pantry wall sparkled colored lights on the linoleum floor as the sun shone through.

Dorothy sighed.

She took a glass custard cup, a mixing bowl, the rotary beater, vanilla, and the sugar canister out into the kitchen. She cracked and separated three eggs: yolks in the custard cup, whites in the mixing bowl. She whipped the egg whites with sugar and vanilla until they were white and billowy. White clouds. She spooned
the meringues onto a baking sheet. She took the pot roast out of the oven and checked it with a fork; it was tender. It could stay on top of the stove for a while. She put the egg yolks in the refrigerator. She'd use them to enrich a cream sauce for tomorrow's fricassee. She turned off the oven and put in the meringues to slowly bake and get crisp.

By the time she went to bed this evening, the meringues would be ready.

She would eat this sweet nothing in her nightgown and keep another by the bed. When the dream came this time, she would be ready.

NOVEMBER 1968

MILLCREEK VALLEY

They celebrated their turkey dinner on the Friday before Thanksgiving.

Jack was leaving for helicopter pilot training on Saturday. He had to be in Savannah to report for duty on Monday morning. Dorothy was thankful just to have him there. Ever since he had enlisted in the Army, she had dreaded this day.

But Dorothy was not going to send him off with tears and bad feeling. She wanted to send him off with confidence, with strength, with the safety net of family.

The night before, Dorothy had made a lemon pie and a pumpkin pie, noticing how the moonlight shone through the stained glass window up high in the pantry as she brought the sugar and flour and spice through to the workspace on her kitchen table.

Friday morning, before she left for work, she set the table in the small dining room with her ceramic turkey and Pilgrim boy and girl candleholders as the centerpiece. Helen and Jack always made fun of the holiday figurines, but that was the point. Family memories. Even a running joke.

When she went home for lunch from Emmert's Insurance, she put the turkey in the oven, the lid of the roaster on tight to keep the bird moist. When she got home, she'd remove the lid so the turkey would brown and warm up the sweet potatoes and the spinach casserole, Jack's favorites.

She had asked Helen to open the can of jelled cranberry sauce and put it on a serving plate when she got home from school. And then peel potatoes and put them in a saucepan of cold water. Helen was no cook—she just didn't have a feel for it—but those were two dishes it would have been hard to ruin.

After Dorothy picked up her bakery order at Oster's on the way home from work, she put the cloverleaf rolls in the kitchen, then went upstairs to put the meringues on her bedside table.

That old dream had come back. The one she had had since Jack was a baby and her husband George was still alive. And with it the taste of bitterness, like blue-black ink that spilled and spread and ruined everything in its path.

This particular bitterness did not signal danger. Dorothy wasn't afraid for her son's life. Yes, he was going to war. But she had the feeling he would come back to them.

If she had tasted spice, that would have been different. Spice was for loss, for remembrance, for the past.

This bitter, ink-dark flavor brought on more a feeling of hopelessness. Of blackest night, the absence of light.

And then flashes of story. A girl with blue hands. A little Asian boy. A baby goat. There they were in suspended animation, surrounding Dorothy, looking as if something was just about to happen. By now, Dorothy had figured out it had something to do with Jack. She was tasting a flavor, seeing a story that was yet to be. His story.

Like any mother, she had prayed that whatever it was, it should happen to her, not her child. She was strong. She could take it.

Jack was young. He was just starting his life.

As they sat down to dinner and said grace, Dorothy looked at her son, Jack, and her daughter, Helen. Her children. And she felt a fierce maternal love surge through her.

Let this terrible thing be taken from him, whatever it is. Give it to me.

Let it be me
.

But the next morning, at the bus station, she could only hold him tight for one last time and send him off with a taste of home. Turkey sandwiches with cranberry sauce. And the lemon pie he loved so
much.