Then I turn around to look at Tina and she must have gotten herself ready for this too because as soon as I’m facing her where she’s standing in the slant of light, she strips off her top and her breasts are naked and I fall back a little against the window. It’s too fast. I’m not ready, I think. But she seems to be waiting for me to do something, and then I think: she knows. It’s time. So I drag my hand to the top button of my shirt and I undo it and then the next button and the next and I step aside a little, so the light will fall on me when I’m naked there and she circles so she can see me and then the last button is undone and I grasp the two sides and I can’t hardly breathe and then I pull open my shirt.
Tina’s eyes fall on the tattoo of Elvis and she gives it one quick look and she says “Oh cool” and then her eyes let go of me and she’s looking for the zipper on her shorts, and whatever I’m thinking will happen, it’s not that. It’s not that. The secret of me is naked before her and I know she can’t ever understand what it means, and then I know why Mama is naked so easy and why the face of Elvis didn’t come upon her, why it come upon me instead, it was already lost to her, and then I’m sliding away and the shirt is back on me before I hit the warehouse door and I don’t listen to the words that follow me but I’m stumbling over the uneven ground, trying to run, and I do run once I’m out the cut in the fence and I hear a voice in my head as I run and it’s my voice and it surprises me but I listen and it says, “Once there was a boy who was born with the face of a great king on his chest. The boy lived in a dark cave and no one ever saw this face on him. No one. And every night from deeper in the darkness of the cave, far from the boy but clear to his ears, a woman moaned and moaned and he did not understand what he was to do about it. She touched him only with her voice. Sometimes he thought this was the natural sound of the woman, the breath of the life she wished to live. Sometimes he thought she was in great pain. And he didn’t know what to do. And he didn’t know that the image that was upon him, that was part of his flesh, had a special power.”
Then I slow down and everything is real calm inside me, and I go up our stoop and in the front door and I go to the door of Mama’s bedroom and I throw it open hard and it bangs and the jowly faced man jumps up from where he’s sitting in his underwear on Mama’s bed. She straightens up sharp where she’s propped against the headboard, half hid by the covers, and she’s got a slip on and I’m grateful for that. The man is standing there with his mouth gaping open and Mama looks at me and she knows right off what’s happened and she says to the man, “You go on now.” He looks at her real dumb and she says it again, firm. “Go on. It’s all over.” He starts picking up his clothes and Mama won’t take her eyes off mine and I don’t turn away, I look at her too, and then the man is gone and the house is quiet.
It’s just Mama and me and I have to lean against the door to keep from falling down.
“Woman Loses Cookie Bake-Off, Sets Self on Fire”
The day my husband died, I baked a batch of cookies. Hold-Me-Tight Chocolate Squares. Bar cookies that took forever to eat, never going away no matter how long you chewed, sticking between your teeth and up into your gums and making your hands quake and your tongue feel like it was about to dissolve. I put in two cups of sugar. That was a different time in my life. The end of a time, and the only way I knew to enjoy it was in the terms I’d lived it. So I put in two cups of sugar and three cups of milk chocolate chips and ate the whole pan-full that night. I was still shaking from it three days later at the funeral and everybody thought it was grief.
Even Eva. Of course, she wouldn’t suspect it was anything else. Bless her heart. My friend Eva. She came up to me by the open coffin and she was smelling of lavender. She tried to make some lavender cookies once, its being her favorite smell outside of the kitchen. Lavender is in the mint family, after all, and I admire her now, thinking back, for trying that. She couldn’t possibly have had a real hope that lavender cookies would please her family. Or maybe she could. Still, her husband Wolf threw them across the room. She blamed herself.
So at the coffin she said, “My poor Gertie. I’m so sorry.” And she took my hands, which were having this sugar fit even then, and when she felt them, she rolled her eyes. “I know how you feel.”
Wolf had died almost a decade before. Barely turned sixty. Arteries stuffed full of her Butterball Supremes, I suspect. Not that she wanted it that way. At the time, I wept with her, thinking she was so dreadfully unlucky, thinking, Oh God, how could I bear this myself. But when the moment came for me, when Karl went all white in the face with my delft tureen in his hand at the dinner table and he put it gently down before pitching forward into the Wiener schnitzel, I began instantly to bear it, and my mind turned, as it so often has in my life, to cookies.
Of course Eva thought she knew how I felt. I can’t blame her. We’d spent the better part of forty years thinking we knew what each other felt. Most of my daughters were sitting in the funeral parlor at that very moment with stricken faces, and I figured I knew what they were feeling, though waiting now before one of a hundred electric ovens in the Louisville Fair and Exposition Center, waiting for our judgment at the Great American Cookie Bake-Off, I’m not so sure. Maybe I don’t know anything about anybody.
But Eva held my hand and she couldn’t even recognize what was really going on in me. We’d quaked like that together over our kitchen tables more than once, laughing at what we’d just done, baked a batch of cookies and eaten them all. We could do that together, our little unconscious thumb to the nose. But we’d go right back and make another batch before Wolf and Karl and our children came home. These sweet little things were for them, after all. First and foremost for them.
So when Eva held my hand by the coffin, I looked into her face and I felt scared. Both for my having this dreadful feeling of relief — that’s the only word I could find for what I was feeling about the death of the man I’d lived with for more than forty years — and for having this dear friend, my other self, so blind to what was really going on in me. I wanted to run away right then. Down the aisle of the funeral home and out into the street and home to my kitchen and I would bake more cookies — Peanut Butter Bouquets, those were the cookies in my head beside the coffin — I would make a batch of Peanut Butter Bouquets and I would eat them all and I wouldn’t even hear the clock ticking over the sink or the afternoon breeze humming in the gutters or the daytime TV coming from the open windows next door and I wouldn’t have to watch the laundry lifting on the line and snapping and falling and lifting again or the sun filling the empty lawn and then yielding to the shadow of our roof, sucked in by the shadow of our house like so much bright lint on the rug disappearing into the vacuum. Another sound. The vacuum. Roaring. And smelling like burnt rubber. My hands smelling of Lemon Joy. Or Lysol. Clean. Everything clean. Smelling clean. But all that was transformed by the turn my life had taken. I could bake cookies and sit and Karl would not be coming home that night and the girls were all in their own kitchens in various distant places and I would eat and eat and there would be no more batches to make unless I wanted to eat some more.