The Cheerful Giver, part 1

For Jodi, Alyson, and Molly

Was it a magnetism thing that caused dust to accumulate in certain corners of a home? Gail had been cleaning for what felt like a lifetime, crawling on her hands and knees, dusting floorboards, shimmying her body underneath grandmother Agnes’ bed frame, and ruminating on magnets. It was time for a break. She sat up on her knees, brushed her wavy blond-ish hair out of her eyes. Her gaze fell on little Lauren, who was giggling in her walker, gumming on a wooden teething toy. The 7-month old’s bib was soaked through with drool. Gail let out a heavy sigh and crossed the room to her diaper bag and purse, which were propped up on a tower of moving boxes stacked five high. She pulled out a new bib and looked down at her watch–11:03 a.m. She looked around, weary. Joy and Paul Jr. would be out of school a little after 3. She’d need to be home with dinner prepped around 2:30, so she’d need to leave around 2. She pulled the velcro apart from behind Lauren’s neck and wiped it with a handkerchief, then replaced the bib with the new one and stroked the little girl’s face. Her bright brown eyes smiled at her mother wildly, then squinted with affection. 

        Gail pulled the scrunchy off of her wrist and pulled back her hair. The room was empty of furniture and belongings, save for the boxes, the bed frame, and a few pictures leaning against a wall. She looked down at Lauren. 

       “Which room should we dive into next, sweet pea?” The baby cooed in response. “You’re probably right. The kitchen. Ugh.” It was the fifth day of cleaning up her grandmother’s home. She and Grandmother Agnes hadn’t been close—she had been a pleasant woman but a proper one, the daughter of Danish immigrants. In Gail’s youth, Agnes taught her practical things like fixing a proper tea and blotting lipstick. As a grandmother, some would call her starched–at least, Gail would. Agnes smelled like expensive, heady perfumes and looked like she was headed to church. Kind of an ice queen.

But how could she not be? If she was being honest with herself, Gail had a lot of admiration for a woman who could manage to put on lipstick and iron her shirts every day with seven little ones pulling at her skirts. Especially with a husband away at war when many of them were in diapers. Good for her for keeping it all together and never missing Sunday mass. 

Gail looked down at herself and sighed–a baggy sweatshirt and jeans, unruly hair absentmindedly piled on her head. She hadn’t showered in, what, two days? But then she thought about little Joy and Paul, the way looking into their eyes brought them back to the babies they had once been. She still felt tethered to them in a real way, even when their little clumsy bodies clambered into the school bus each morning. It was like a part of her soul went away with them to keep watch. And Little Lauren, whose life thus far was just playtime and giggles and cuddles with her older siblings, well, she wasn’t keeping tabs on Gail’s appearance. They just adored each other, as-is. And when he came home from the bank each day, her husband, Paul Sr., assured her he didn’t care about her sloppy appearance, but she could feel a creeping disappointment in herself for letting herself go. 

They had met in college, both pool rats. Back then–when her stomach had been taut, her body firm–there wasn’t a girl’s swim team at the college yet, so she swam in her free time and volunteered at the men’s meets. Paul had kept up with it post-college, of course, stopping by the pool at the club a few times a week before going into work. It helped to mitigate the stress of having three kids and climbing the ladder at work. Before the kids, they had gone swimming together, but that space for herself had fallen to the wayside. Three babies had softened her around the edges, plumped her up in the rear and other regions. She was still slender, just, well, no amount of Jane Fonda videotapes seemed to narrow up those hips, no matter how high she thrust them. 

If she was being honest, what she missed the most was the way her mind went both blank and focused in the lap pool. Workout videos had a purpose but got boring. At times they felt a little scandalous. Gail was convinced that one of those women in the back of Fonda’s–a bendy perky brunette with an impossibly tiny waist and breasts that were nothing short of miraculous–had to have been a stripper.

She shook it off. Shuddering her wavy blonde head. 

“Okay Lauren, let’s conquer the kitchen next.” She picked up the baby and made her way down the hall, expertly balancing the 17-lb bubbler on her hip while grabbing a thick towel from the linen closet as they made their way down the hall. She thought maybe she should just go ahead and pack up the linen closet. As organized as it was, it would take about ten minutes. Every sheet pressed. Every towel uniformly folded. Good grief. But no, that would just be procrastination. The kitchen was the next big challenge to be conquered. 

She set up Lauren on a towel on the linoleum floor with some teething toys, then in a false jog made her way back down the hallway to the bedroom where she grabbed a couple of cassette tapes from her purse. Back in the kitchen, she popped in Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” and fast-forwarded to its second track. She pressed down on the smooth plastic play button and closed her eyes in satisfaction as the drum crashed into the mellow bass guitar and the song began. 

She hummed along to Stevie Nicks’ droning alto while half dancing, half walking around the room, assessing where to begin. Her plush socks slid across the linoleum floor, making her feel as smooth as Michael Jackson. She looked down at Lauren, making the exaggerated faces of mime as she went along just to see the baby’s gummy smile. “Lord, forgive me for loving Stevie Nicks so much,” she said out loud. 

The first thing she observed was that she needed a lot more boxes and packing paper to accommodate all the dishes and Corningware. She made a mental note to drop by the grocery store and ask for old newspapers the next time she went in. Still not sure of where to start, she opened all of the cabinets one by one, just to see what was inside. The drawers all had dividers. Everything was in its right place. Extra things like table napkins and dish towels were stowed away in decorative biscuit tins that must be over a hundred years old and very well-loved. 

She reached the overhead cabinet to the right of the kitchen sink. It opened with barely any effort, the magnetic latch well worn. The earthy aromas of cinnamon, coriander, and anise greeted her. Endless bottles of spices and herbs, all organized to perfection in neat little rows, made up the bottom shelf. Above them were various flours and baking powders, lined up like little soldiers awaiting orders. Lord, Grandma Agnes could bake. Christmas at her house was an explosion of confections. She baked profusely and passionately—delicate wafer-like anise cookies, homemade Brunkager, and Pebber Nodder. Homemade peppermint patties and gingerbread men. The little warmth that she exuded usually was sourced from a pan in the oven.

Gail reached up for the tiny vial of lemon extract. She unscrewed the tiny ribbed red lid and breathed in deep.

She would never forget the sugared-lemon scent of her fifth birthday–the slick feel of her bathing suit and grass clippings on her ankles as she and her friends screamed and jumped through the sprinkler on the lawn. The pinata of a donkey strung from the tree, which her friend Jessica had finally cracked open, a shower of taffy and cheap bubblegum showering her little brown head. Grandma Agnes had arrived early with the most incredible cake yet. Gail loved lemonade more than anything. She used to set up lemonade stands in the front yard–they lived at the end of a cul-de-sac, no one drove by–so she was free to sample her wares by the cupful. Grandma Agnes had shown up with a four-layer lemonade cake with lemon-cream icing, expertly piped and decorated with tiny pink sugared roses. Just the thought of it made her want to squirm and giggle with delight again. 

Grandma Agnes approached each confection like a scientist. Gail knew now how much effort went into a cake like that, and for Grandmother Agnes more so than most. Her mother had told her once that after the depression, when things had gotten better and the family was back on their feet, she would sometimes come home from school and find the freezer full of rejected cakes. “Her Bible Study actually banned her from bringing any more cakes at one point,” her mom’s breezy laugh came through the phone,  “none of them could fit into their skirts, their waistlines had expanded so much.” Agnes was constantly tinkering with her recipes, not content with anything short of perfection. Rejected cakes or her failures were either stored in the freezer or given away to some local charity case or group. 

Gail pulled a small stepladder out from between the refrigerator and cabinetry and dragged it across the room, then pulled out a small box. These spices and herbs shouldn’t go to waste. She could pack these up nicely and bring them home with her. 

Little Lauren plopped over on her back on the towel. 

Gail climbed up the ladder, figuring it was best to work from the top down like she did when she was cleaning. All-Purpose flour, pastry flour, cake flour, bread flour, self-rising flour, Semolina. They were all stored in tightly sealed Hermes clamp jars, their labels, all written in Agnes’ compact and curled handwriting, taped on tight, their paper yellowed with age. She pulled them each down, using both hands, and placing them safely in the basin of the sink. She was pulling out the last one when her hand hit something slight and flat leaning against the jar. When she pulled out the jar, she heard it slide and drop flat on the top part of the cabinet. After placing the jar with the others, she climbed back up. 

The wire-ring notebook was heavily discolored and stained, if not a little warped. Its pages, yellowed with age, turned crisp and easily. Here, Grandmother Agnes’ script was more casual and unadorned–the loops wider and unrestricted. The first entry was dated September 6, 1953.

Kids are at school. Had some of Doris’ drop pecan cookies yesterday and found them lacking. She was boastful about her ½ and ½ use of brown and white sugars, but the overall effect left something to the imagination. Also, they were dreadfully flat–butter should have been whipped and warm. Got the recipe from her anyway, to tinker with. I believe there’s something to be had with the half-brown sugar, half-white sugar combination, and my imagination will pick up where hers petered off. 

The recipe followed. 

Many of Agnes’ recipe books and baking books were well-loved and worn at her mother’s home on the other side of town. Agnes had kept them all safely stowed away on a shelf in her office. It was unlike her to misplace something like this. Plus, Agnes was dreadfully short, stowing it away on the top shelf would have taken a memorable amount of effort. Gail thumbed through the pages–it looked like a dedicated journal to just one recipe. One of her process notebooks. Mom had told her about these, how Grandma would fiddle with a recipe until it was perfect, then catalog it in one of her “Master Volume” notebooks, all of which were stored at mom’s house. She would have to ask Mom about it Friday when they were working on it together. She knew better than to interrupt her mother’s cribbage game now. Few things in her mother’s life were as sacred. 

She thumbed through the book–the recipe sounded unfamiliar, and yet, there were over two dozen iterations of it in the pages of this faded notebook, with dates spanning over a decade throughout the entries. She went to the second entry, dated a few weeks later. 

It’s amazing how something as simple as salt can awaken all of the suppressed flavors hidden within a cookie dough. Adding just a pinch–approximately half a tsp. here completely transforms this otherwise bland cookie. Marvelous stuff. Playful and tender on the tongue. 

Then the next, about a month after that. 

Today waited for the cookie to beckon from the oven. Between eleven and twelve minutes, it really coaxed my nose. They had a wonderful, warm aroma, and came out a lovely golden brown just around the edges. Doris had said nine but leaving it in the additional time led to a bit less of a doughy mess when cooled. Ate the whole batch before the kids came home.

Gail laughed under her breath at the thought of Grandmother Agnes rabidly eating a dozen cookies on her own before her seven children descended on her household. She understood the impulse. The only sweet tooth in the world that rivaled her own were those of her children and husband. She seldom baked for that reason. She had very little self-restraint and neither did they. A brownie pan seldom made it an evening–shoot, an hour in their house. Birthday cakes rarely made it more than a day or two. Either they ate the whole thing compulsively or they overindulged from the outset and made themselves sick in the process. In those instances, Gail would quietly dispose of the crumbling remains of the cake in the trash, so that the tummy aches didn’t last more than a day or so. 

Lauren was making a wild attempt to nom on the foot of the stool now. 

“Oh honey, no, no, no,” Gail said, realizing her own distraction at finding the notebook. She scrambled down, the notebook in hand, and picked up the gumming baby. After grabbing a wooden spoon for Lauren from the drawer to the left of the oven, they plonked down on the floor together, Lauren in her lap with the spoon and Gail with the notebook. Then, Lauren attempted to get to the notebook, tiny raccoon hands grasping wildly at the aged pages in Gail’s hand. Gail kissed the baby on the forehead and raised the notebook overhead, craning her neck upwards, and continued to read. 

Stumbled on something truly remarkable this morning. Got the kids all off to school and went back to work on this recipe only to realize I was out of pecans. Found a bar of baking chocolate and chopped it up, added those in instead. Must confess, the batter barely made it to the pan. 

Now that was something. Grandmother Agnes furiously gobbling up a dozen cookies after they’d cooled she could imagine. But eating raw cookie dough was something else entirely. What had she been like, early in the morning when she was younger? Gail had always just assumed that she woke up flawlessly, her hair adeptly subdued in rollers, her perfectly manicured hands clinking against a coffee cup while she scrambled eggs for her brood? Gail had never really thought about it. She couldn’t imagine the matriarch’s stern mouth without lipstick on, let alone licking sugared, sticky cookie dough off of a stainless steel spoon, then busily jotting notes in a notebook. Had the pen ever stuck to her fingertips? Had Grandmother Agnes at one point, ever, in her life been sloppy?

Her neck was starting to ache. At least Lauren seemed sufficiently distracted by the wooden spoon in her mouth. Cautiously, she lowered the notebook and thumbed through it. Sometimes it didn’t seem like the recipe had been tinkered with at all, that the cookies themselves were just an excuse to indulge and journal a bit. 

“Lauren, sweetie, I think we only have one option,” she said, kissing the curl of hair on the crown of the baby’s head. She put the baby back on the towel, spoon in hand, and started preheating the oven. She pulled the all-purpose flour from the sink, put the salted butter on the countertop to warm up a bit, pulled out the hand mixer, two large bowls, and assembled the rest of the ingredients from their various prescribed spots in the kitchen. Luckily, there were plenty of wooden spoons in the drawer, Lauren could hold onto hers. 

While the oven and butter warmed, she packed away the spices and the other flours. Grandma Agnes, by way of her mother and aunts, had a lifelong vexation with people who were too impatient to think about how much those small details matter. It was a rant she had gone on so many times in her life that all seven of her children could recite the greater portion of it, and they would, whenever they were tasked to bake for their own families, with a mocking but loving impersonation of their own ornery mother. “If you can’t even wait long enough to let the oven get to the temperature you don’t deserve to be in the kitchen at all,” they’d begin. “If you put it in when it’s preheating it won’t cook evenly, it’ll end up a disastrous mess. Why not put the whole thing in the trash, to begin with?”

It was a short, but effective speech. Neither Gail nor her brothers and cousins would ever dream of not letting their oven get to temperature before putting in any dish. And the tirade was still recreated by whoever was hosting Thanksgiving, in the wee hours of the morning when the oven was first lit, the giant bird buttered, stuffed, and seasoned beyond recognition, waiting to bake low and slow for hours on end, ritualistically basted between cups of coffee and sneaking bites and samplings of the various pies, soufflés, and savory sides that proliferated the kitchen. 

Having thumbed through the notebook, Gail had taken some mental notes. The butter should be room temperature and whipped with the sugar separately before adding the egg, then whipped again. The mixture of dry ingredients should be added gradually afterward. 

She had made it to the scooping of the dough with an ice cream scoop—another piece of expert advice—when she remembered Grandma Agnes’ note about eating the batter. She contemplated it, weighing the pros and cons and possible salmonella in her mind for a moment. Then, guiltily meeting little Lauren’s gaze on the floor, she dove her finger into the batter. “Eating raw eggs is bad for you,” she told the little girl, who was starting to fuss. It was lunchtime and soon nap time. Her few hours of relative freedom were slipping away fast. Looking down at Lauren, she knew that the baby’s meltdown was imminent. Gail let out a resigned sigh, scooped up some batter from the bowl, and dove it into her mouth. 

“Holy shit.” 

The exclamation was muffled by the batter, but the sentiment was clear enough, even to the baby on the floor in front of her, who was temporarily distracted from her onsetting fuss and gazing up at her mother in surprise. She even raised her faint, developing eyebrows.

 The flavor was so beyond comprehension. Every olfactory lit up like a Christmas tree with pure joy. Why in the world was it even necessary to bake this? The creamy combination of whipped butter and sugar enchanted her. The touch of salt enhanced it. She was bewitched before a shard of chocolate even graced her tongue. When one finally did, she held it there until it melted. The effect was euphoric. She wanted to cry. Instead, she took another dab from the scoop, then dolloped the remaining batter onto the pan. 

Since she had quartered the recipe she only had to repeat this process seven times or so. She took her time with it, enjoying a sampling from each lump of batter before planting it on the baking sheet. It took a lot of willpower to put them in the oven. 

“Now we wait,” she said to Lauren, picking her up at last. With the baby on her hip, she prepared the bottle one-handed, an action that had once been clumsy and alien to her but now was second nature. She loved her ability to complete most minute tasks with one hand or at times just her foot. It made her feel like a seasoned professional, as far as mothering was concerned. She at least had it down with little ones. Her latest, new challenge was with Joy, who was seven now.  Joy was a perfectionist—a trait possibly inherited from her now-deceased great-grandmother, as it certainly wasn’t from Gail. And the young girl had entered a phase where she would completely fall apart if something didn’t meet her impossibly high expectations. If a finger painting didn’t meet her vision, or if she wasn’t fastest in a foot race–it didn’t matter the circumstance, just the outcome. This obsessiveness manifested in an increased bossiness over her two younger siblings and at times over her parents. Paul was better at handling her in these moments. He merely shrugged her off and kept doing things his way. But for Gail, letting the young girl down deflated her. And being bossed triggered unexpected anxiety that seemed impossible to tame. 

Bottle prepared, baby food, and spoon in hand, she sat the baby in the high chair she had brought and started to feed her. 

After a dozen minutes or so, Lauren’s face orange with carrots, the aroma of the cookies from the oven called to her. Their scent was seductive and rich. The airy, joyous dough had been transformed into something sumptuous and rich in the heat. Beckoned by the creamy scent of melted chocolate, she handed Lauren her bottle and made her way to the oven, grabbing a worn mitt from the same drawer as the wooden spoons.

They were a rich, golden brown now, firm and crisp on the edges, soft in the centers. They were too hot to eat right away, but Gail knew it would only be a few long minutes before she would try one. The thought of letting them cool completely was laughable. 

She grabbed a box and started to empty the wooden spoon drawer into it, which only took about a minute. Then she grabbed a cookie and went back to her seat at the table with Lauren. 

“If you eat all of your carrot mush, I’ll let you try a bite.” She said to the baby, spooning the last bit of purée into the child’s mouth. Then she picked up the cookie, studying it for just a moment, but it was still soft in the center and began to collapse. She cupped her other hand underneath it and shoved a good deal of it in her mouth. It was a mess of sweet. There was chocolate on her chin, her hands, her fingertips, but although she could feel it, she didn’t give a whip. The cookie itself was toasted to perfection, still slightly fluffed, with a nutty caramelized sweetness. The chocolate elevated what was already delightful to something borderline sinful. 

Licking the chocolate off of her hand, and wiping off her face, Gail was left to contemplate not just the revelation on her plate, but the second conundrum this miracle introduced: how had she never had this before? What in the world was this cookie? How had her mother and grandmother kept this secret from her?

She put a nibble to the baby’s mouth, who gleefully giggled in response. She studied the child’s face. “Mom would know,” she thought to herself. Decidedly, she packed up the remaining six cookies, whisked up the satiated infant in her arms, and brought them both to the car.

To be continued . . .