The Cheerful Giver, part 2

For Alyson, Jodi, and Molly

It wasn’t an unforgivable sin to interrupt her mother’s weekly cribbage group, but it was. 

Aunt Helen answered the door, her tiny Bichon Frise, Fritz, by her side. Aunt Helen was one of the sweetest people to have ever walked the earth, which is why everyone forgave her the existence of Fritz, the most poorly behaved dog of all time. She frequently liked to remind people that Bichon’s had once been used by the French for acts of diplomacy–they would let the fluffy white dogs trot down the planks of the ships before them, because who could be antagonistic towards such cute, fluffy white dogs? Fritz was no diplomat. She was a yippy, corn-chip scented mess of tangled, white fur that was pink and gooey around the eyes. She nipped at children, pulled on her leash, was known to knock down the trashcan for extra scraps of food, and–as she got older–was having an increasing number of “accidents” inside the house. But Helen was devoted to the dog, so the smattering of dampened newspaper on her linoleum was forgiven by her closest friends. 

Helen, on the other hand, was an effortless hostess. She always kept the gin handy, had endless bowls of roasted rosemary cashews on-hand for nibbling. The cribbage group came to her house every other week. In her off weeks, hosting rotated between the other three women. In her widowhood she had bloomed a bit, no longer tied down by her two children or doting on her husband Big Earl, she fancied herself an artist, and had taken up making large abstract paintings in the garage. 

She was a stunning woman, but not in the traditional sense. She moved about the world like a crane, all legs and neck and flowing skirts and statement jewelry. Of course, she wasn’t actually Gail’s Aunt, not in the slightest–Gail’s mom had been her best friend since they were both in pigtails. But she was more of an Aunt to Gail than Aunt Violet, Vera, or Myrtle had ever been. Gail had grown up in her arms almost as much as her mother’s. She had been present at every recital, swimming meet, and birthday party that Gail could recall.   

“Gail, sweetheart!” Helen had no sooner opened the door than had her arms around Gail, Lauren, and the plate Lauren precariously held out in her hands. “What a surprise!”

“Gail’s here?” she heard her mother’s shouted inquiry in the background. The house smelled overwhelmingly of Chesterfields. By the time Helen backed away, Gail spied her mother’s stout frame just behind Helen’s right shoulder. When she walked out from behind her best friend, she sported a cautious and confused smile and a smoking cigarette in her right hand. Helen had towered over Lucy since the sixth grade and Gail had always found the dichotomy of the two women charming. 

No one had called Gail’s mother, Lucille Cousins, by her full name since her Christening. She was Lucy since the day she was born. The fifth of John and Agnes’ children, followed only by Peter, she was a rabble-rouser who had gotten away with almost everything her entire life. It was a quality her siblings both resented terribly and found irresistibly endearing, despite their own better judgments. This quality first made itself apparent when she was weaning–simple acts that tested the boundaries of her family’s patience like pushing her food jars off of her highchair, pooping as soon as her diaper was changed, and killing all of her mother’s indoor plants with the bathwater. Being the fifth child suited her just fine. Most of her mischief either went undetected or was for the most part tolerated by her parents who were so preoccupied with the demands of having so many children to pay much attention to any of them. When Lucy realized she could diffuse just about any situation with a mournful, watery-eyed blue gaze she took it further. In third grade, she talked Sister Gertrude into a second recess simply because, “God created such a beautiful day, don’t you think he’d want the little children outside?” By the time she was in high school,, she was notorious in her hometown for her devil-may-care attitude, too preoccupied in classes thinking up what her next prank or joke would be to pay much attention to lessons. Consequently, her hands were often red from ruler slaps. 

Where she had fallen short as a mother she shined as a grandmother. Lauren’s kids shone under her playful confidence, always eager to please her. And she loved poking fun at them more than anything, or plotting pranks with them together. “What helps is that they’re not my responsibility,” she told Lauren the week before when they were first tackling Grandma Agnes’ house. “You’ll understand someday dear–all the pressure of motherhood is gone when you’re a grandmother. You get to just swoop in whenever there’s trouble then go home and have a drink without being riddled by questions or irreverent meltdowns. It’s glorious.” 

“Sweetheart, is everything alright?” Her mother said now, who quickly gave her a hug before reaching out for the still drowsed Lauren, freshly woken up from her car nap and cooing at her grandmother with delight. 

Gail was being ushered in now. Wordlessly, Helen walked them down the hallway, pulled up an extra chair to the kitchen table for Gail between Millie and JoAnne, and poured her a glass of tonic with a lime. With a shake of her head, Gail declined the gin–school pick-up was only an hour and change away. The table was home to the women’s time-worn cribbage board and a smattering of finger sandwiches, highball glasses, and ashtrays. “Yes ma’am, I’m so sorry to interrupt but I wanted to ask you something,” her mother raised an eyebrow as she snuffed out her cigarette to keep it from the grabbing baby. 

Gail fancied this moment to be an opportunity for some showmanship, but her removal of the tinfoil from her grandmother’s plate was disappointingly awkward and loud. All senses of buildup and drama were lost. 

The five women stared at the plate blankly. With hope, Gail looked up at her mother’s face. She had expected at the very least surprise and delight, with a dash of shock. Instead, she found very little. She followed her mother’s gaze to the plate, only realizing then that the brown biscuits weren’t much to look at—brown on brown, lumpy.

It was all about the flavor.

“You interrupted our cribbage game for some brown . . .cookies?”

“For chocolate and deliciousness,” she insisted, defensiveness in her voice. “It was one of grandma’s recipes–I found her process notebook in the kitchen.” She passed the plate around to the women. “You don’t recognize these, mom?”

“Not in the faintest,” she responded, pulling a cookie from the plate and passing it to Helen. Quietly, the older women took contemplative nibbles of the cookies. As soon as the flavor hit their palettes, they were besotted. “Oh, Good Lord in heaven, child what is this? I have got to have this recipe,” Millie exclaimed. Millie had come into the fold through the women’s Bible study when she and her family had moved to town a decade or so ago. She was round and congenial, with hair that had once been red, was now white, but dyed to more of a coral color. She almost exclusively wore coral, yellow, and salmon, which gave her the distinct air of a woman permanently on a beach vacation. The beach was nowhere nearby. The other women nodded in agreement. 

Gail pulled out the notebook from her purse.

“You’ve really never had these, mom?” Her mom swallowed. 

“Oh, believe me, honey, I think I’d remember these,” she said, waving her half-eaten cookie in the air with her free hand while the baby reached up wildly for it. 

“But there are about 50 different versions of this recipe in here,” Gail responded, placing the notebook in front of her mother. Lucy finished off her cookie, wiped off her hands, and started thumbing through. 

“I don’t know what you’re implying, Gail. I would be hard-pressed to believe anyone could hide something this miraculous,” JoAnne chimed in. Without responding, Lucy flipped through the notebook to the first entry. “1938,” she said. 

“They go until 1977,” Gail responded. 

Lucy closed the notebook with assertiveness and pushed it an inch or so away from herself. Like a woman donning a stunning mink stole, she assumed the mien of a woman unruffled. Of course, that was a lie Gail recognized. She had seen the same false air about her mother when she had come down from making her valedictorian speech at high school graduation without thanking–or even acknowledging–either of her parents. 

“I’m sure you just forgot, Mom,” Gail said quietly. 

“It’s no matter, sweetheart. You should have seen all of the notebooks I had to throw away. It was an obsession, Completely without rhyme or reason. There’s no way she could have remembered all of the recipes she came up with over the years. This one probably just fell into the abyss of her own mind.” 

They locked eyes across the table. There was no way this recipe was simply cast to the wayside. She knew it. Her mother knew it too. But her gaze plainly said to drop the matter. The silence was broken by JoAnne. “So Jerry tried to leave the house this weekend–I caught him sneaking out with his tennis bag over one shoulder while I was cleaning up breakfast–naturally, he was nowhere to be found when cleanup started,” she began.

Gail’s mind wandered back to the notebook, sitting in front of her mother. Its cover was a faded red. It was such a lovely, worn thing. Gail had never been one to journal, herself. And she supposed if she had the opportunity to ask Grandma Agnes about this notebook–this and all of the others her mother had pitched–she would first scold Gail for being so nosy, then insist that she didn’t journal either. These were strictly research. 

Gail’s gaze fell back to her mother, now absorbed in conversation with her friends and the game in front of them. Little Lauren was on the floor now. Lucy herself was a caring mother with firm boundaries whose humor was usually self-serving. There were proper things to discuss with your children. So a lot of things, with her, just went unsaid–she was well-practiced in partitions. It was half the reason why she was so good at playing pranks, Gail reasoned. Even here, she realized, as her mother relaxed and seemingly forgot Gail was there, her laugh was more boisterous, her jokes more cynical and sarcastic. She was letting herself just be around these women. 

Lauren crawled over to Gail’s feet, attempting to teeth on her plush socks, graying on the bottoms. She picked the little girl up. As she looked at her little daughter, she thought of Grandma Agnes–banned by her Bible study from bringing cakes, their waistlines losing the battle with their sweet tooth’s. For a moment, she mourned her half-knowledge of her mother. And her mother’s half-knowledge of Grandma Agnes. That morning, before their adventure in the kitchen, Gail had packed up her Grandmother’s closet. She thought of its contents now, the pressed tailored suits that still smelled like dry cleaning. There were at least a dozen tailored suits amassed over the years–one for every occassion. She had admired the fully-lined camel pencil skirts of worsted wool until she tried it on herself–breathable but too itchy. The single-breasted mustard suit jacket, Grandma had worn to every Easter service that Gail could recall. She could still see her in her mind’s eye, sitting with practiced grace at the end of the shining wood pew at St. Claire’s Cathedral downtown amidst all of her children, and all of her children’s children. Then there were pencil skirt-dresses with matching cropped jackets–things she had worn to the bank or to make a call on Pastor Philip. Cotton blends, tweed, velvet trims–each carefully stowed away in its own storage bag. She had been buried in a canvas-textured blue tweet number–dark blue velvet trim, with the rest  a muted cornflower that would have complimented her eyes beautifully, had they been opened. Before the viewing, she had seen her mother adjust her Grandmother’s favorite brooch in the casket. It was a bold move conducted discretely, but lovingly, knowing that her mother would never approve of entering eternity with such an oversight on her breast. 

Gail wondered if she should share the recipe after all.  Maybe there had been a reason for her to go through the trouble of shimmying up a step ladder just to conceal the book. Maybe it had been her intention to lay the cookies to rest, too. 

And what kind of person disrespected the secrets of the dead? 

She felt careless and clumsy for having brought the cookies here in the first place. She never would have guessed that her grandmother would have kept a cookie from her own children, especially for that long. 

To be continued…