The Grand Chef passed on and a local TV reporter, a young woman who I bet never ate a cookie in her life except from a grocery store package, stuck her microphone in my face and the bright light came on and she said, “Why are you here?”
It was a good question, I guess. But there was only the one answer. “I’ve always made cookies,” I said. “When you come down to it, people can’t change what they’ve always done.”
She and the microphone and the lights passed on, and I didn’t look toward Eva, who was next. But I heard her voice, clear and loud, announce her cookies: Cherub Cheek Cherry Charms. The Grand Chef cried out in pleasure at the very idea of such a cookie and I bent over my hands lying on the top of my preparation table. My Great American paper apron crinkled. Some things can’t change, but some things can. I’d brought the milk chocolate chips, but something had prompted me to bring semi-sweet, as well. Karl found them bitter, the semi-sweet chips. But Karl was also dead. He had another kind of bitter to deal with. I never much liked the semi-sweet chocolate either, but tastes change. Semi-sweet seemed right to me today.
And then we were all facing our stoves and the auditorium rang with the voice of the Grand Chef and he said, “Bakers, start your ovens,” and we did. And all the ingredients were before me and I laid them out, just as I had on the morning after Karl died. I sprayed my pan with their aerosol cooking oil and I mixed the oats and the flour and the cinnamon and the baking powder and the baking soda and the salt, and then I peeked at Eva. Her hands were scarlet. Whatever gave her cherubs’ cheeks their blush was all over her hands. I stopped and watched her and I think there were tears in her eyes, and I guess they were for Wolf.
I turned to my cookies and it was time to make the sugar mixture. My hand went out to the granulated sugar, but I paused. My recipe asked for one cup of granulated sugar. But I’d had enough of that. I put in one cup of brown sugar. Just one cup of brown. The judges will thank me, I thought. After the Macadamia Mud and the Cherub Cheeks, they will turn away from all the desperate cloying and my cookies will touch them like something real, something true, like a mother’s embrace. And they will chew and chew and the results will just have to wait because they won’t want to stop chewing, and I will go home to my house tonight and I will make another batch of cookies just like this and I will chew all through the night and then on until the sun rises.
I lay in bed when I was a little girl and it was in the mountains, in Baden, and my mother and my grandmother both tucked me in and I’d secretly wrapped a cookie in the sleeve of my nightgown and surely they knew, the way they smiled at me and at each other, and it was Christmas or almost Christmas, that’s how I remember it always, and it was no matter that my father was by the fire smoking and rocking and talking only to the other men, they did not even exist, there was no one in the world but these two women and me and there was the cookie wrapped in my sleeve that we three had just baked, and my mother and my grandmother pulled the covers over me and I wanted to grow up and be just like them, I would be large and warm and smart in the ways that women are smart, and under the covers, with the kisses of my mother and my grandmother still wet on my face, I ate my cookie and it was chewy and it lasted and lasted and it seemed that I would never even have to swallow, it would stay sweet in my mouth forever.
But of course I was wrong. Another life came upon me, and I know now that the cookie I had in my sleeve was good for the child but baked for the man by the fire, and if I go home tonight and make these very same cookies, the bed I will take them to is full of the smell of another man, even if he is dead. They are for him. They were always for him. This is what the two women I loved taught me. I have no doubt tried to teach my own daughters this same thing. I am nearly seventy years old.
And the winner has just been announced and Eva is weeping again, in joy. Her Cherub Cheeks have prevailed and I am happy for her. May she never wash her red hands clean. And now I have a match in my hand and I light it and my apron is made of paper and the cooking spray will grease my way home.
“Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot”
I never can quite say as much as I know. I look at other parrots and I wonder if it’s the same for them, if somebody is trapped in each of them paying some kind of price for living their life in a certain way. For instance, “Hello,” I say, and I’m sitting on a perch in a pet store in Houston and what I’m really thinking is Holy shit. It’s you. And what’s happened is I’m looking at my wife.
“Hello,” she says, and she comes over to me and I can’t believe how beautiful she is. Those great brown eyes, almost as dark as the center of mine. And her nose — I don’t remember her for her nose but its beauty is clear to me now. Her nose is a little too long, but it’s redeemed by the faint hook to it.
She scratches the back of my neck.
Her touch makes my tail flare. I feel the stretch and rustle of me back there. I bend my head to her and she whispers, “Pretty bird.”
For a moment I think she knows it’s me. But she doesn’t, of course. I say “Hello” again and I will eventually pick up “pretty bird.” I can tell that as soon as she says it, but for now I can only give her another hello. Her fingertips move through my feathers and she seems to know about birds. She knows that to pet a bird you don’t smooth his feathers down, you ruffle them.
But of course she did that in my human life, as well. It’s all the same for her. Not that I was complaining, even to myself, at that moment in the pet shop when she found me like I presume she was supposed to. She said it again, “Pretty bird,” and this brain that works like it does now could feel that tiny little voice of mine ready to shape itself around these sounds. But before I could get them out of my beak there was this guy at my wife’s shoulder and all my feathers went slick flat like to make me small enough not to be seen and I backed away. The pupils of my eyes pinned and dilated and pinned again.
He circled around her. A guy that looked like a meat packer, big in the chest and thick with hair, the kind of guy that I always sensed her eyes moving to when I was alive. I had a bare chest and I’d look for little black hairs on the sheets when I’d come home on a day with the whiff of somebody else in the air. She was still in the same goddamn rut.
A “hello” wouldn’t do and I’d recently learned “good night” but it was the wrong suggestion altogether, so I said nothing and the guy circled her and he was looking at me with a smug little smile and I fluffed up all my feathers, made myself about twice as big, so big he’d see he couldn’t mess with me. I waited for him to draw close enough for me to take off the tip of his finger.
But she intervened. Those nut-brown eyes were before me and she said, “I want him.”
And that’s how I ended up in my own house once again. She bought me a large black wrought-iron cage, very large, convinced by some young guy who clerked in the bird department and who took her aside and made his voice go much too soft when he was doing the selling job. The meat packer didn’t like it. I didn’t either. I’d missed a lot of chances to take a bite out of this clerk in my stay at the shop and I regretted that suddenly.
But I got my giant cage and I guess I’m happy enough about that. I can pace as much as I want. I can hang upside down. It’s full of bird toys. That dangling thing over there with knots and strips of rawhide and a bell at the bottom needs a good thrashing a couple of times a day and I’m the bird to do it. I look at the very dangle of it and the thing is rough, the rawhide and the knotted rope, and I get this restlessness back in my tail, a burning thrashing feeling, and it’s like all the times when I was sure there was a man naked with my wife. Then I go to this thing that feels so familiar and I bite and bite and it’s very good.