The Kitchen Daughter (24 page)

“Dad—”

Dad says, “You seem okay, though. Maybe I didn’t mess you up too much. I hope I didn’t.”

And then, terribly, too soon too soon too soon, he is fading.

I say, “Dad, I’m not messed up, Dad—”

And too soon, he is gone.

H
EARTBREAK IS STUPID
and impossible. Hearts don’t break. Hearts squeeze, they wrench, they ache, they shrivel. Hearts pull apart in wet chunks like canned tomatoes. I go as deep as I can into the closet. It isn’t enough. I wish there were a closet behind the closet, somewhere deeper to escape to. I turn my body toward the back of the closet and place my hands and forehead against the back wall. Turn my back on the world. Hide from the slightest hint of light.

I don’t cry, but I ache. I ache because my father was sorry I was born, because I’m the way I am, and that’s what he needed my mother to forgive him for. Me. I ache because I feel hopeless and sad that people were keeping so many secrets from me and I never knew. I ache because Ma spent all that time with me making sure I was okay and now that she’s gone I’m falling apart.

I don’t know how long I’m in the closet. Minutes. Hours.

But it doesn’t matter. I don’t leave the closet because I feel better. I don’t feel better. I leave the closet because I need to take action, and there’s only one way to do it. I make up my mind and squint into the light.

I may be strange and hopeless. I may be a disappointment to my father, the one person I thought always loved me exactly as I am. But now I know something I didn’t know before, and I know who else needs to have that information. Dad had the syndrome and he found a way to succeed anyway. He found something he was good at and he used it. Maybe I could do the same. Cooking, I’m good at it, maybe I could use that to connect with the world instead of hiding away. But it’s Shannon I’m thinking about. It may be too late for me. It’s not too late for Shannon. If Amanda can help her, if she thinks about possibilities instead of diagnosis, Shannon could be okay.

My dad was normal in his own way and so am I and my heart is wrung out like wet cheesecloth and I am going to do something normal about it.

I dial Amanda’s number, and it seems like it takes a long time for her to pick up. When she does, she asks, “Are you calling to apologize?”

“Apologize for what?”

“What you said about Shannon.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You said you think she has the syndrome.”

It takes me a few seconds to remember she hadn’t read the e-mail last time we talked. It seems like forever since I sent it, so much has happened since. “I wondered if she might, and it wouldn’t be so bad if she did maybe, and that’s not the point.”

“Oh, it’s not? Then what is the point, Ginny, since you know so much, tell me, what’s the point?”

“I don’t know whether I have this syndrome or not,” I say. “But if Shannon has it, you should—”

“If what? If Shannon what?”

She doesn’t understand. And I’m so exhausted I don’t know if I can make her understand anyway. I want to curl up on the closet floor. I find words. I don’t know if they’re the right ones.

“If Shannon has Asperger’s.”

“She doesn’t,” says Amanda. “My daughter is not … like that.”

“If she is, it’s okay.”

“Okay?”

“It’s no big deal.”

“No big deal?” Amanda’s laugh sounds red and raw like ground beef. “Spoken like someone who doesn’t understand … who just … you don’t understand anything at all. Not what it’s like to deal with you, and not what it’s like to be a mother.”

I can’t tell her what I want to tell her if I can’t make her listen to me. I have to defend myself. “Of course I don’t know what it’s like to be a mother. I’m not one.”

“That’s right. So don’t try to interfere with how I raise my children.”

“I’m not trying to interfere. I’m just trying to—”

She cuts me off. “You know what? You’re so all-fired excited to be left on your own, I think that’s what I’ll do. I’ll just leave you on your own for a while. Like maybe forever. Maybe you can just live in that house that you’re so attached to, and you can leave my family alone, and you can forget about me trying to help you get better and have a better life because I am just done with this, you understand me, Ginny? I am done with you.”

She hangs up.

I’m scared, that’s for sure. I know rage when I hear it. I heard it in Evangeline’s voice and now I’ve heard it in my sister’s voice, and it’s so far from anything I’ve ever heard from her before.

It takes everything I have not to run straight to the closet but I clench my fists and plant my feet and don’t let myself. Instead of giving
in to the anger I analyze it. Take it as a given. If the milk goes sour, you use it like buttermilk. Pancakes, biscuits, things that need its acid. She’s angry, I’m angry. She’s furious, I’m furious. She doesn’t know what’s best for me and I can’t communicate with her. If we were calmer I could tell her.

This syndrome, it affects our family, but it doesn’t make us helpless. I’m not helpless. Dad wasn’t helpless. If Shannon has it, she doesn’t have to be helpless either, but the way to deal with it is to deal with it, not to hide her away from the world. I got hidden away and now it’s harder to break out. I think I can. I don’t think it’s too late. The Normal Book had the right message, but I can’t just read the message. I have to live it.

I go upstairs and retrieve the pictures of Evangeline from under the bed, and I leaf through them. She’s not who I feared she was. My father didn’t have an affair with her. Her ghost was terrifying, and I don’t know what kind of person she was all her life, but once she was a young nurse who did someone a favor. She stood in the courtyard behind the hospital with an awkward young doctor she knew and looked toward him, looked away, let her picture be taken, because she wanted to be nice. There are people like that everywhere. People who will overlook my awkwardness. People who understand, like Dr. Stewart, that the word
normal
is inclusive. Maybe I can live in the world, and be who I want to be, after all. But what about Amanda? If my sister hates me, and my whole family’s gone—

A memory comes to me. Five years old. Sitting on Nonna’s lap and leaning against her soft angora sweater. I am telling her all about round things,
a biscuit cutter is round and the sun is and so is the moon, and a ring like you wear on your finger
, and picking bright, crunchy, candy-covered sunflower seeds out of her outstretched hand. I remember how much I loved that sweater. Six months after that she didn’t wear the sweater anymore and I asked her why. She said,
When you
cut yourself, you remember? The hand you cut. You went looking to find your father, you were hiding in the hospital. But anyone who try to help you, you no let them touch you. They tell me, after. You are so quiet until they try to look at your hand, and then you scream and run. They call me, I come. I hold you on my lap. And we wait until your father come. Hours we wait. But you are happy because of the sweater. And then when your father look at you, your hand, it is too late. He clean it out, sew it best he can. On the sweater, after, there is too much blood. It never come out.

I had already learned to apologize.
Nonna, I’m sorry I ruined your sweater.

And she said,
Oh
, uccellina, uccellina.
No you worry. Always there are other sweaters.

Nonna is gone. Her sweater is gone. That memory, there’s no part of it I can ever have back again, except the taste. I want the sunflower seeds, that exact kind. The kind in waxy, clingy chocolate with an unnaturally bright candy shell around the outside. I want to shake the long plastic package and hear the rain-stick sound it makes. If I can’t have anything else from the past, I can at least have its taste.

So I grab the credit card and walk down to the Korean grocery, and it looks like it’s going to be one of the nine out of ten uneventful trips. I get my sunflower seeds and a Fresca, and set them on the counter.

The woman behind the counter picks up my card, and I read the long list of ingredients on the back of the package of sunflower seeds while she handles it,
dehydrated cane juice cocoa butter whole milk powder chocolate liquor soybean lecithin carnauba wax
, and my attention is elsewhere so when she speaks to me I’m startled.

“No,” she says.

For a moment I think she’s trying to stop me from buying something she knows is bad for me. For a moment it’s touching. Then she says “No” again, and taps the credit card, and I realize she’s saying the card won’t work.

Amanda.

She said she would leave me alone and see how I liked it. Apparently she’s done more than that. Alone doesn’t just mean without people. It can mean without anything else. And maybe, even without putting a word on me, she’s found a way to take away things I thought were mine. If this is the start I have no way to know when it will stop.

I leave the candy on the counter and walk out, hoping hoping hoping no one will touch me as I leave because I don’t think I could take it, and no one does, and I walk straight home almost running and the closet downstairs still has Dad’s rain boots in it and thank goodness for that.

A
N HOUR LATER
, I go upstairs to my parents’ room and find Midnight on the window seat. She blinks when I turn on the light. I lean back against the wall, and stroke the cat’s soft fur, and take stock of the situation. I could take the cash from one of the envelopes, and pay for the sunflower seeds with that, but the short-term problem is not the real problem. It’s the other things Amanda might be able to take away. She is cutting me off, cutting me out. I try to apply logic. On one hand, I can deal with that. I can get the card reactivated, I’m sure that won’t be a problem. My name is on it. There’s a number on the back. I can call. And maybe, if she leaves me alone for a while, that’s okay. Because I’ve done what Nonna and Ma told me to do, what Dad tells me he and Ma were very careful to do my whole life. I’ve kept her from putting a word on me. She can live with her family and I can live by myself, and we’ll all be happy with that, won’t we?

But it’s not all about me.

Do no let her. It’s very important that you not let Amanda.

Maybe it’s not me I’m not supposed to let Amanda put a word on.

Maybe, by trying to figure out what the ghosts want and blocking
whatever it is they want blocked, I’ve actually made the thing they don’t want come to pass. I was the one who suggested Shannon might have the syndrome. If Amanda puts a word on her, it’s my fault, not hers. Mine.

I call Amanda, call her, call her. She won’t pick up. She knows it’s me. After ten o’clock at night I realize I need to stop calling, it’s getting late, and when I try one last time she’s turned her phone off anyway.

There is a kind of sleep where you’re absolutely certain you were awake all night. That’s the kind of sleep I have, waiting for morning, hoping tomorrow isn’t too late.

F
irst thing in the morning I call the only person I can call.

“Gert, I need a favor.”

“Of course. I will help you if I can.”

“I need you to drive me somewhere.”

“I am sorry, Ginny, this is something I cannot do. I have no car. I do not drive. I do not need to.”

“Oh.”

She says, “A few years ago David used to drive me where I needed to go.”

“Does he still have a car?”

“He has it,” she says. “He does not like to drive it, but he has it.”

“Thank you,” I say.

I try calling Amanda again, but the situation is the same. The first few times she lets it ring through to voice mail, then later, she turns the whole phone off.

I can’t reach her this way, but I have to reach her. I’ll have to try something else. List the options, figure out what’s possible, make it happen.

This is one of Ma’s lessons:
Sometimes you have to cut toward your thumb.
It was a hard lesson for me. It was a cut toward my thumb that scarred me, and all the books say not to do it. After I hurt myself, she took charge of me in the kitchen. She wouldn’t let me touch the knives
unless I promised to use them only on the cutting board. But when I was nine, she taught me a new lesson that contradicted the old one. She was showing me the secret of her potatoes au gratin. First, she taught me that au gratin doesn’t mean cheese, like everyone thinks it does. Then, she taught me that everyone else slices their potatoes, but she chips them. And so I learned to chip.

You slice off a bit of the potato. It’ll leave a point. See this here, this point? Then you cut that off. It makes this little kind of triangle shape. But now you have another place where too much potato sticks out. So you cut that off too.

I do as Ma says. In my mind, I chip the potato. Cutting off any part that sticks out. Cutting toward my thumb, though I had learned always to cut away. Cut, turn, drop, cut, turn, drop. Until my hands are sticky with starch. The starch makes them slippery, like oil, but white and powdery, like chalk. The heap of chipped potatoes grows on the cutting board. Cut, turn, drop. Cut, turn, drop.

In my mind the knife slips so fast I don’t feel the pain until long after I’m cut and bleeding. A fat, thick, wet red bubbles up out of the gash. It isn’t real but it still hurts.

It’s time to cut toward my thumb in another way. I dig through the kitchen drawers until I find the scrap of paper bag I’m looking for. I look up the address on the Internet, and just put my feet on the sidewalk, and go.

T
HE HOUSE AT 114
Pine Street is a brownstone, flat and imposing, not as large as my parents’ house but in the same classic Philadelphia style. I swing open an iron gate and go down a short set of stairs to the door marked 114A. Cold air settles into the stone. I knock. He answers, brown hair sticking up all over. I try to read his face. I can’t imagine he feels anything but surprise.