Lizzie and Elaine sat down at the kitchen table and began blowing out the insides of twenty-four eggs. Lizzie discovered that it was much more difficult than it sounded. First Elaine showed her how to poke a hole in each end of the egg. “You have to begin with a sharp needle to pierce the shell, then gradually make the holes a little larger. Sometimes a darning needle works better for that part, but you have to be careful not to break the egg.”
It took her about half an hour, from first tentative needle jab to the empty shell, per egg. Elaine, with her years of practice behind her, was much faster. Somehow she’d never thought of the insides of eggs before, or at least not in quite the same way as she saw them now.
She felt embarrassed and clumsy because she’d smashed three eggs in the process, but Elaine didn’t seem to notice, or in any event, didn’t comment on it. The resulting mixture—a bowl of egg whites and yolks—looked so disgusting that Lizzie decided she might have to give up eating eggs until the memory of the contents of that bowl blurred a lot.
Once the eggs were empty, Elaine brought out a big cardboard box filled with ribbons, crepe paper, scraps of felt and other material, construction paper, Magic Markers, and glue sticks, along with several large jars of paste. It was everything they might need or want to use to decorate the eggs. They gave them faces, pasting on bits of felt that they cut into shapes for the eyes, nose, mouth, and eyebrows, and followed that up by attaching yellow, red, black, or brown yarn for hair. Sometimes they braided the yarn, and sometimes put it into a ponytail using a contrasting piece of yarn to tie it up. Despite her feeling she was doing something wrong, or not living up to Elaine’s expectations, Lizzie felt pretty relaxed. “I was awful in art in elementary school,” Lizzie told her. “But this is really fun.”
They attached pipe cleaners to make arms and legs (another job that required a very light touch; Lizzie broke three more eggs and Elaine one) and finally they concocted dresses made out of the crepe paper.
“This is a paste-intensive job, isn’t it,” she commented to Elaine, looking at her encrusted nails.
“You bet. I think this whole holiday season is the only thing that keeps Elmer’s in business. Oh, and nursery schools, of course. But wait until tomorrow: there’s lots more paste still to come.”
Later in the day Elaine and Lizzie carefully unwrapped from layers of tissue paper the almost two dozen dolls that Elaine had created in Christmases past. “I mostly give the dolls away, but I always keep my favorite for the top of the tree. I’m saving them for my granddaughters, if Todd or George ever gets married and produces female children.”
They then began baking dozens and dozens of cookies for the family to eat and to give as gifts to friends. The word “friends” encompassed Wade, the FedEx driver, the mailman (despite his obvious and obnoxious support of the archrival Sooners from the University of Oklahoma), and the guy who delivered the paper every morning, as well as those of Allan’s patients lucky (or perhaps unlucky) enough to have a late December appointment with him. They made gingerbread persons (“I refuse to call them men,” Elaine told Lizzie. “After all, they could be women wearing pants”) as well as chocolate and peppermint thumbprints. Elaine had a large collection of cookie cutters, and they used these to make sugar cookies: bells, reindeer, wreaths, and plain old circles. They added small holes at the tops of one batch of assorted shapes so that later they could be hung on the tree.
“It’s easier to roll out cookies if you refrigerate the dough for an hour or so. A lot of people don’t know that, and they try to do it all right away. Not a good idea. And that gives you time to start straightening up the kitchen or, even better, to sit and have a cup of tea.”
When the cookies were cool, Lizzie helped decorate them. Lizzie had extensive past experience with frosting—she and Sheila used to spend many hours of their time together baking and frosting cookies and cakes. Perhaps applying frosting was a talent, like bicycling, that once learned is impossible to forget. And anyone can shake sparkles onto a cookie. You can be clumsy and ill at ease and still do a good enough job. Although maybe she was putting on too much? No, and so what if she were? She knew that Elaine wouldn’t care. She started to feel a little better.
Finally, Elaine made mandel bread, “the Jewish biscotti,” Elaine told her. “They’re Allan’s favorite, and George and Todd love them too. We’ll probably have to make more tomorrow or the next day. They’re pretty labor-intensive—you have to bake them twice, so we don’t have them very often. Have you ever had one?”
“No, I don’t think so. I mean, biscotti, yes, every coffee shop in Ann Arbor has them, but not mandel bread.”
“Ah, coffee shops,” Elaine said ruefully. “You’ll find that they’re few and far between in Tulsa. Not like Montreal, where there’s one on every corner. I think that sort of really urban lifestyle is what I miss most about living here.” Lizzie nodded but couldn’t decide if she needed to respond, or if she even had anything to add to the discussion.
“Two things to know about mandel bread, though, besides how delicious they are. They eat up”—and here she glanced at Lizzie meaningfully as if to say, “‘Eat’: Do you get it?” looking for all the world like George when he made a joke—“an inordinate amount of time. Plus, if it’s finger-licking-good cookie dough that you’re after, they’re not what you want to make. When I’m in a wanting-to-eat-lots-of-dough sort of mood, I make banana-oatmeal cookies. That dough is unbeatable. But once they’re baked, mandel bread is pretty irresistible. We’ll bake some extra so that I can send a couple of tins back to Michigan.”
Lizzie enjoyed playing sous-chef to Elaine, rummaging through the kitchen cupboards for whatever was needed for each recipe. They spent a companionable day together, mixing, tasting, rolling, baking, nibbling, washing up, and eating. Lizzie discovered that Elaine also dunked her cookies into her tea. The winter sun shone through the six-pointed mosaic star hanging in the window. It cut the light into straight-edged patches of color that landed on the table, the stove, and even Lizzie’s arm as she moved around the kitchen. By the time they finished drying the last of the baking sheets, measuring spoons and cups, cooling racks, and multiple spatulas, Lizzie, calmed down and almost happy, felt that all she wanted to do from this day on was to follow Elaine through the rest of her life. Suddenly she badly wanted to tell Elaine about the Great Game, about Jack, about how she didn’t really know how she felt about George, but she also knew that, for a number of reasons, both obvious and not, it most likely wasn’t the best thing to do.