Here’s how my mom made toast (a little procedure that endeared her to Aaron the first time he saw her do it): She waited at the toaster until the bread caramelized, then spread butter on its surface in dramatic whorls, like icing. Then she stabbed it with the tip of her knife, making potholes for greater absorption, and stood over it until the butter melted and filled every yeasty pore before reapplying a fresh topcoat of butter and sending it to us across the counter. As we ate it, the warm fat often dripped down onto our wrists, which made her beam and say, “Butter’s good for your brain.”
Where others used milk or stock to moisten, she used butter: on dry mashed potatoes, on top of lasagna, on leftover braised beef. Nothing went into the microwave for reheating without a dollop of the yellow pomade schmeared on top. My mom’s dish of room-temperature butter was more than a mere cooking fat, it was an ointment, filling, spackle, emotional salvo, as essential to combatting the deep Minnesota winter as lotion. Her dishes got butterier whenever she felt the need to soothe us; and when things were bad, they fairly sobbed with butter.
8
GIVE A GIRL A KNIFE
The overstuffed, rust-colored wing chair sitting in our living room was as high as a throne in a pulpit. Naturally it was where Father Reid—our priest at St. Peter’s Catholic Church and backyard neighbor—sat when he graced us with his presence for happy hour, which he did a few times a year. He never called ahead.
My mom jumped when she saw his tight grin and triangular nose in the high square window cut into the back door. It was rare to see any face at all in that window when the bell rang, as this entrance was used almost exclusively by neighborhood kids who were all too short to show. “Eeekk!” she squealed. “Fa-ther! You should have called!” She wiped her hands dry on a towel before opening the door.
We all knew that he had come for one of our parents’ famous brandy Manhattans. Probably two.
Following a sip, ice cubes fracturing, he closed his eyes and let the black low fringe of his hair settle against the fuzzy high back of the chair.
“You like school?” he asked me, a shallow question deserving of only a nod. I was not going to try to pull a single story out of my wild fifth-grade life.
My mom returned to the kitchen to put a lid on her rice. “You’re welcome to come in here, Father. I have to clean the pea pods,” she said, her voice blowing out into the living room. He glanced her way but stayed put.
“You go on doing what you’re doing,” he rasped, gave me a weak smile, and stopped pretending to care. His beaklike nose floated up into the air and his face clouded over, as it did in church when the woman from the office got up to read the parishioner news.
Now at 6:45 in the evening on a Friday, in the dark of winter, Father Reid was gone, having minutes earlier toddled down the rounded, snowy back steps and across the yard to the rectory. A house full of nuns lived right next door to him, but apparently they weren’t much for liquid company.
In the kitchen, my mom peeled apples. “I thought he’d never leave,” she said. Her simultaneous respect and disdain for the church always puzzled me—why would you ever do something you didn’t really want to do? I never got that. I looked at everything, including religion, with what my mom called “a jaundiced eye.”
My mom held a paring knife, wooden-butt-first, in my direction, motioning me to help. I knew bare-nothing of chores at this point and had shown zero natural aptitude for anything householdy. I was a sniffly, snotty, allergy-ridden kid, known in school for honking into a Kleenex and then stuffing it up my sleeve, grandma-style, right in the classroom—and also a bit of a klutz. When my mom called to me from the shower for some shampoo from the bathroom cabinet, I reached in and the whole clutch of toiletries went down like a spray of tilted dominoes. The woman who prided herself on her economy of movement, a homemaker choreography so smooth it was nearly mechanized, popped her head out of the shower door and sighed. But miraculously, cooking was something I could sort of do.
I took the knife—an old one whose short blade had been sharpened over the years into the shape of a bird’s beak—and tried to copy the way she sliced apples for the pandowdy for the church bake sale. Never once did she tell me to be careful. “Cut it like this” is what she said. She held the trimmed quarter loosely in her left hand and deftly sliced, her knife passing through the apple to rest on the pad of her thumb. Through red skin to pink skin, and back again, without incident. Thick apple triangles fell in a blur into the bowl below.
“Or if you want, you can make chunks,” she said, steering the apple quarter this way and that, cutting quickly. Shiff shiff shiff, pyramid-shaped pieces fell into the bowl.
“The knife won’t cut my thumb?” I asked. The skin on my thumb looked thin and pink as it bulged softly around the blade.
“Never!” my mom said. “Trust me, I’ve been doing this for years.” She reached for another apple piece and lobbed the last two into my workspace. “My knives aren’t all that sharp.”
She ran her hands in the stream of the faucet, shook them off against the sink, her rings clicking reassuringly against the steel, and then wiped them half-dry on the kitchen towel. My mom’s hands were usually damp and water-chilled.
She dumped a hill of sugar on top of the mound of apples. It shushed on the landing, trickled down into the crevices, and let out a faint stink—white sugar’s peculiar processed funk. I knew to shake the cinnamon hard so that it whiffed out of the holes like a sneeze. My mom dribbled in vanilla extract from the cap and then gave it all a brisk stir. She worked from memory, with a knowledge that was housed in her hands. It was kind of like watching a veteran carpenter build a house. The crust flopped into the rectangular glass dish and her fingers deftly shoved the dough into the corners. She listened to my endless stream of middle-school drama, humming assent in all the right places, as she popped the apple pandowdy—more like a slab pie with a puffy, light pastry encasement—into the oven and started trimming mushrooms.
I never imagined that someday I’d have that same facility with a knife—although she assumed it. You give a girl a knife; that’s just what you do. Eventually, hopefully, she might learn how to use it. Someday she might even consider that knife an extension of her hand, as wedded to her finger as a nail.