Dandelion Wine (30 page)

Grandma, he had often wanted to say, Is this where the world began? For surely it had begun in no other than a place like this. The kitchen, without doubt, was the center of creation, all things revolved about it; it was the pediment that sustained the temple.

Eyes shut to let his nose wander, he snuffed deeply. He moved in the hell-fire steams and sudden baking-powder flurries of snow in this miraculous climate where Grandma, with the look of the Indies in her eyes and the flesh of two firm warm hens in her bodice, Grandma of the thousand arms, shook, basted, whipped, beat, minced, diced, peeled, wrapped, salted, stirred.

Blind, he touched his way to the pantry door. A squeal of laughter rang from the parlor, teacups tinkled. But he moved on into the cool underwater green and wild-persimmon country where the slung and hanging odor of creamy bananas ripened silently and bumped his head. Gnats fizzed angrily about vinegar cruets and his ears.

He opened his eyes. He saw bread waiting to be cut into slices of warm summer cloud, doughnuts strewn like clown hoops from some edible game. The faucets turned on and off in his cheeks. Here on the plum-shadowed side of the house with maple leaves making a creek-water running in the hot wind at the window he read spice-cabinet names.

How do I thank Mr. Jonas, he wondered, for what he's done? How do I thank him, how pay him back? No way, no way at all. You just can't pay. What then? What? Pass it on somehow, he thought, pass it on to someone else. Keep the chain moving. Look around, find someone, and pass it on. That was the only way....

“Cayenne, marjoram, cinnamon.”

The names of lost and fabulous cities through which storms of spice bloomed up and dusted away.

He tossed the cloves that had traveled from some dark continent where once they had spilled on milk marble, jackstones for children with licorice hands.

And looking at one single label on a jar, he felt himself gone round the calendar to that private day this summer when he had looked at the circling world and found himself at its center.

The word on the jar was RELISH.

And he was glad he had decided to live.

RELISH! What a special name for the minced pickle sweetly crushed in its white-capped jar. The man who had named it, what a man he must have been. Roaring, stamping around, he must have tromped the joys of the world and jammed them in this jar and writ in a big hand, shouting, RELISH! For its very sound meant rolling in sweet fields with roistering chestnut mares, mouths bearded with grass, plunging your head fathoms deep in trough water so the sea poured cavernously through your head. RELISH!

He put out his hand. And here was—SAVORY.

“What's Grandma cooking for dinner tonight?” said Aunt Rose's voice from the real world of afternoon in the parlor.

“No one knows what Grandma cooks,” said Grandfather, home from the office early to tend this immense flower, “until we sit at table. There's always mystery, always suspense.”

“Well, I always like to know what I'm going to eat,” cried Aunt Rose, and laughed. The chandelier prisms in the dining room rang with pain.

Douglas moved deeper into pantry darkness.

“Savory … that's a swell word. And Basil and Betel. Capsicum. Curry. All great. But Relish, now, Relish with a capital R. No argument, that's the best.”

 

T
railing veils of steam, Grandma came and went and came again with covered dishes from kitchen to table while the assembled company waited in silence. No one lifted lids to peer in at the hidden victuals. At last Grandma sat down, Grandpa said grace, and immediately thereafter the silverware flew up like a plague of locusts on the air.

When everyone's mouths were absolutely crammed full of miracles, Grandmother sat back and said, “Well, how do you like it?”

And the relatives, including Aunt Rose, and the boarders, their teeth deliciously mortared together at this moment, faced a terrible dilemma. Speak and break the spell, or continue allowing this honey-syrup food of the gods to dissolve and melt away to glory in their mouths? They looked as if they might laugh or cry at the cruel dilemma. They looked as if they might sit there forever, untouched by fire or earthquake, or shooting in the street, a massacre of innocents in the yard, overwhelmed with effluviums and promises of immortality. All villains were innocent in this moment of tender herbs, sweet celeries, luscious roots. The eye sped over a snow field where lay fricassees, salmagundis, gumbos, freshly invented succotashes, chowders, ragouts. The only sound was a primeval bubbling from the kitchen and the clocklike chiming of fork-on-plate announcing the seconds instead of the hours.

And then Aunt Rose gathered her indomitable pinkness and health and strength into herself with one deep breath and, fork poised on air, looking at the mystery there impaled, spoke in much too loud a voice.

“Oh, it's beautiful food all right. But what is this thing we're eating?”

The lemonade stopped tinkling in the frosty glasses, the forks ceased flashing on the air and came to rest on the table.

Douglas gave Aunt Rose that look which a shot deer gives the hunter before it falls dead. Wounded surprise appeared in each face down the line. The food was self-explanatory, wasn't it? It was its own philosophy, it asked and answered its own questions. Wasn't it enough that your blood and your body asked no more than this moment of ritual and rare incense?

“I really don't believe,” said Aunt Rose, “that anyone heard my question.”

At last Grandma let her lips open a trifle to allow the answer out.

“I call this our Thursday Special. We have it regularly.”

This was a lie.

In all the years not one single dish resembled another. Was this one from the deep green sea? Had that one been shot from blue summer air? Was it a swimming food or a flying food, had it pumped blood or chlorophyll, had it walked or leaned after the sun? No one knew. No one asked. No one cared.

The most people did was stand in the kitchen door and peer at the baking-powder explosions, enjoy the clangs and rattles and bangs like a factory gone wild where Grandma stared half blindly about, letting her fingers find their way among canisters and bowls.

Was she conscious of her talent? Hardly. If asked about her cooking, Grandma would look down at her hands which some glorious instinct sent on journeys to be gloved in flour, or to plumb disencumbered turkeys, wrist-deep in search of their animal souls. Her gray eyes blinked from spectacles warped by forty years of oven blasts and blinded with strewings of pepper and sage, so she sometimes flung cornstarch over steaks, amazingly tender, succulent steaks! And sometimes dropped apricots into meat loaves, cross-pollinated meats, herbs, fruits, vegetables with no prejudice, no tolerance for recipe or formula, save that at the final moment of delivery, mouths watered, blood thundered in response. Her hands then, like the hands of Great-grandma before her, were Grandma's mystery, delight, and life. She looked at them in astonishment, but let them live their life the way they must absolutely lead it.

But now for the first time in endless years, here was an upstart, a questioner, a laboratory scientist almost, speaking out where silence could have been a virtue.

“Yes, yes, but what did you put
in
this Thursday Special?”

“Why,” said Grandma evasively, “what does it
taste
like to you?”

Aunt Rose sniffed the morsel on the fork.

“Beef, or is it lamb? Ginger, or is it cinnamon? Ham sauce? Bilberries? Some biscuit thrown in? Chives? Almonds?”

“That's it
exactly,
” said Grandma. “Second helpings, everyone?”

A great uproar ensued, a clashing of plates, a swarming of arms, a rush of voices which hoped to drown blasphemous inquiry forever, Douglas talking louder and making more motions than the rest. But in their faces you could see their world tottering, their happiness in danger. For they were the privileged members of a household which rushed from work or play when the first dinner bell was so much as clapped once in the hall. Their arrival in the dining room had been for countless years a sort of frantic musical chairs, as they shook out napkins in a white fluttering and seized up utensils as if recently starved in solitary confinement, waiting for the summons to fall downstairs in a mass of twitching elbows and overflow themselves at table. Now they clamored nervously, making obvious jokes, darting glances at Aunt Rose as if she concealed a bomb in that ample bosom that was ticking steadily on toward their doom.

Aunt Rose, sensing that silence was indeed a blessing devoted herself to three helpings of whatever it was on the plate and went upstairs to unlace her corset.

 

“G
randma,” said Aunt Rose, down again. “Oh, what a kitchen you keep. It's really a mess, now, you must admit. Bottles and dishes and boxes all over, the labels off most everything, so how do you tell what you're using? I'd feel guilty if you didn't let me help you set things to rights while I'm visiting here. Let me roll up my sleeves.”

“No, thank you very much,” said Grandma.

Douglas heard them through the library walls and his heart thumped.

“It's like a Turkish bath in here,” said Aunt Rose. “Let's have some windows open, roll up those shades so we can see what we're doing.”

“Light hurts my eyes,” said Grandma.

“I got the broom, I'll wash the dishes and stack them away neat. I got to help, now don't say a word.”

“Go sit down,” said Grandma.

“Why, Grandma, think how it'd help your cooking. You're a wonderful cook, it's true, but if you're this good in all this chaos—pure chaos—why, think how fine you'd be, once things were put where you could lay hands on them.”

“I never thought of that....” said Grandma.

“Think on it, then. Say, for instance, modern kitchen methods helped you improve your cooking just ten or fifteen per cent. Your menfolk are already pure animal at the table. This time next week they'll be dying like flies from overeating. Food so pretty and fine they won't be able to stop the knife and fork.”

“You really think so?” said Grandma, beginning to be interested.

“Grandma, don't give in!” whispered Douglas to the library wall.

But to his horror he heard them sweeping and dusting, throwing out half-empty sacks, pasting new labels on cans, putting dishes and pots and pans in drawers that had stood empty for years. Even the knives, which had lain like a catch of silvery fish on the kitchen tables, were dumped into boxes.

Grandfather had been listening behind Douglas for a full five minutes. Somewhat uneasily he scratched his chin. “Now that I think of it, that kitchen's been a mess right on down the line. Things need a little arrangement, no doubt. And if what Aunt Rose claims is true, Doug boy, it'll be a rare experience at supper tomorrow night.”

“Yes, sir,” said Douglas. “A rare experience.”

 

“W
hat's that?” asked Grandma.

Aunt Rose took a wrapped gift from behind her back.

Grandma opened it.

“A cookbook!” she cried. She let it drop on the table. “I don't need one of those! A handful of this, a pinch of that, a thimbleful of something else is all I ever use—”

“I'll help you market,” said Aunt Rose. “And while we're at it, I been noticing your glasses, Grandma. You mean to say you been going around all these years peering through spectacles like those, with chipped lenses, all kind of bent? How do you see your way around without falling flat in the flour bin? We're taking you right down for new glasses.”

And off they marched, Grandma bewildered, on Rose's elbow, into the summer afternoon.

They returned with groceries, new glasses, and a hairdo for Grandma. Grandma looked as if she had been chased around town. She gasped as Rose helped her into the house.

“There you are, Grandma. Now you got everything where you can find it. Now you can
see!
”

“Come on, Doug,” said Grandfather. “Let's take a walk around the block and work up an appetite. This is going to be a night in history. One of the best darned suppers ever served, or I'll eat my vest.”

 

S
uppertime.

Smiling people stopped smiling. Douglas chewed one bit of food for three minutes, and then, pretending to wipe his mouth, lumped it in his napkin. He saw Tom and Dad do the same. People swashed the food together, making roads and patterns, drawing pictures in the gravy, forming castles of the potatoes, secretly passing meat chunks to the dog.

Grandfather excused himself early. “I'm full,” he said.

All the boarders were pale and silent.

Grandma poked her own plate nervously.

“Isn't it a
fine
meal?” Aunt Rose asked everyone. “Got it on the table half an hour early, too!”

But the others were thinking that Monday followed Sunday, and Tuesday followed Monday, and so on for an entire week of sad breakfasts, melancholy lunches, and funereal dinners. In a few minutes the dining room was empty. Upstairs the boarders brooded in their rooms.