Kitchen Chaos (12 page)

My mom is a hotshot editor for a parenting magazine, so I'm used to her coming home from work stressed out at the end of the day. But when Mom walks in the door, shoves Cole in my arms, goes straight to her room, and slams the door without even taking off her jacket, it means she's having a
really
bad day. And today is one of those.

Luckily, Cole is completely oblivious to my mom's moods. As soon as I'm holding him, he
starts pulling my hair over my eyes and trying to play peekaboo while I stumble around blindly, hoping not to topple over and send us both crashing into the glass coffee table. My mom, the parenting magazine editor, has been meaning to “babyproof” our home since Cole started crawling a year and a half ago. It's one of many things she “means” to do but hasn't gotten around to yet.

“Hey, quit it!” I yell, which sends my brother into convulsions of wild cackling, making it even harder to keep us upright.

Unzipping Cole's sweatshirt is like peeling a banana that keeps slipping out of your hand, but I eventually manage to pin him to the couch and wrestle it off. Frankie and I made a deal that we'd get into exercising this year, but we haven't officially gotten started. I wonder if chasing a two-year-old all over our apartment for twenty minutes counts as a workout. I think about Frankie at home with her brothers and realize that she probably won't be impressed.

The one thing that calms my brother down every time is watching Elmo on my mom's phone. I show him the phone so he knows what's coming and am able to settle him into his high chair without breaking another sweat. While Cole sings along with Elmo, I poke around our nearly empty freezer for something to make him for dinner. We're out of hot dogs, so I heat up some frost-covered chicken nuggets in the microwave (they're organic, but they actually taste as good as the fast-food kind). I hope those reports you sometimes hear about microwaved food not being safe to eat aren't true, because I can't remember the last time Cole ate anything hot that was cooked any other way. There are no clean sippy cups in sight, so I pour some milk into a coffee mug and tell Cole he's going to drink like a big boy tonight. He looks at me, nodding, all excited cuteness.

By the time my mom comes out of her room, there's ketchup on her phone and a smashed mug on the floor. I should have looked harder for a sippy cup.
She stands in the doorway watching me sweep up the broken pieces and shaking her head. The part of the mug that says
#1 MOM
is still intact, so I hand it to her, which makes her laugh. “You keep it,” she says, pressing it into my hand. “You earned it tonight.”

Cole wails when Mom grabs her sticky phone out of his even stickier hands and hollers even louder as she wipes ketchup and grease off his face with one of our scratchier kitchen towels. “You said it, mister,” she tells him in a voice that says she feels like screaming bloody murder too, and then she scoops him out of the chair and heads to the bathroom.

I check the fridge in case there are any leftovers still around, even though I know we finished off the last crumbs yesterday. Believe it or not, it's been four days since we've ordered in for dinner. After cooking class on Saturday, we went to the food co-op and filled up our cart with “real” groceries—as in, things that don't come in a box in the freezer section—which my mom actually cooked. On Saturday night she sautéed
chicken with mushrooms—one of her old favorites—and poured it over our polenta. Mmmmm. And on Sunday she made a huge pot of chili—spicy but not too spicy—that we've been eating with the corn bread every night since.

It looks like it's back to the menu drawer for us tonight, though. I dig around for the one from the ramen place on Smith Street while my mom finishes up Cole's bath. When she's in a mood, Mom craves comfort food, and there's nothing more comforting than a big bowl of noodles in steaming, salty broth. Until a few months ago I didn't know there was more to ramen than the kind that comes in a plastic wrapper and costs a quarter at the corner deli. But the place we order from is a whole restaurant devoted to ramen, where the noodles are handmade and the soup is topped with crunchy vegetables and smoky bits of pork or chicken. My mom gets hers with an egg cracked on top, which sizzles and turns milky white when it touches the broth. I prefer mine
without the egg but with an extra square of toasted seaweed on the side. Ramen like that costs a lot more than a quarter, but it's worth it—especially if it makes my mom smile after the kind of day she must have had today.

I order our food and hear the froggy night-light switch on in Cole's room right after I hang up the phone. My mom comes into the living room wearing her sweatpants and carrying a big stack of magazines in her arms. She plops the pile onto the coffee table. Each issue has a rainbow of sticky tabs poking out from the top, bottom, and sides. It's sort of funny—“ironic,” my dad would say—that my mom works at a parenting magazine that's all about “family time,” creativity, and doing stuff together, but she's never had time to do things like make holiday crafts with us or hand-paint borders in our rooms or even put together a proper baby album. That's pretty much what the whole magazine is about. She tries hard to not bring work
home with her at night, but I know from experience that all those stickies mean there's a big issue coming up, and we'll probably be seeing even less of her than usual.

“Holiday double issue closes a week from Friday,” she says, flipping through the magazine on top of the pile. “And the bigwigs at the publishing company just asked us to change our entire editorial plan.”

“Ugh,” I say, looking through the stack of old holiday issues for the one that includes a picture of me as a baby, popping out of a green polka-dot box with big red bows tied in my pigtails. Apparently, it took a full hour to get me to smile for the camera, which is why that was my first, last, and only photo shoot.

“Ugh is right. Looks like I'll be working all weekend, which means I'm going to have to miss our cooking class on Saturday. Good thing I have Cammy booked to watch Cole. And she better not be sick this time around.”

“What?” I plop the magazines back down on the stack. “But you can't miss the cooking class, Mom. There are only six and you promised!”

My mom puts down her magazine and takes my hand, giving it a little squeeze. “I know I did, Liza, and I'm sorry. Believe me, I'd much rather be cooking with you than thinking up ‘Fifteen Things to Do with Leftover Christmas Cookies' and ‘How to Make Your Own Hanukkah/Kwanzaa Candle Crayons,' but I have no choice. A deadline's a deadline.”

“It's only two hours,” I plead, unable to control the whine in my voice. “You'll need to take a break sometime, won't you?”

“Two hours is a long break, Lize. Plus the time it takes to walk to and from the cooking studio. I'll do my very best to be there for the next one, sweetheart, but this week you're just going to have to triple up with Frankie and Theresa or Lillian and her mom. It'll be fun. It's just slicing and dicing, anyway. You don't really need me.

“Think of it this way”—she takes my chin in her hand—“I'm sure Theresa would appreciate all the help she can get.”

I make a weak attempt at smiling and am relieved when the doorbell rings and my mom gets up to pay for our food. While she's in the kitchen pouring our soup into bowls, I take a thick black Sharpie marker out of her pen cup and draw mustaches on the “cover moms” on every magazine in the pile. Immature? Maybe. It's not like I'm messing up anything important; the magazines are all old issues that have already been published. But my mom keeps her work things neat and orderly, so she'll definitely be annoyed.

Just like me.

This is so not going the way I wanted. Mr. Mac has let us have the end of class to work on our projects. If our proposals are accepted, we can move on to actual work. If not, he'll circulate and help. Much as I would have loved his one-on-one help, our proposal was
awesome
. His word, not mine. Written in big red letters across the top of our paper:
Awesome!

Sigh.

Now we have to transform the awesome idea into
awesome reality, and I am not liking the prospects for that. Liza and me, we're a dream team. We work well together, we work hard, and we usually agree on what to do. And we always have
awesome
results.

Today, though, Liza is down and not helping at all, because her mom is bailing on this week's class. No surprise there. I'm actually surprised her mom made it to a single class, but I don't say that. I know she's bummed—I get it—but the real point of the cooking class is to help us devastate this assignment, not bond with our mothers. And, anyway, right now we have to make a “blueprint,” as Mr. Mac says. A blueprint for our project.

“Guys,” I say, interrupting Liza and Lillian's ongoing heart-to-heart about Liza's mom. “We've got to get this project mapped out. Sophie, Carmen, and Oliver are already meeting at lunch every day.” This might not be totally true, but I want these two to focus. “Okay, I was thinking we want tons going on in our booth, right? Lots of variety, stuff for people to
look at and read so that ours is the best. So what do we think: at least two dioramas of immigrants with the food they introduced to the U.S.? Liza and I will make those. A couple papier-mâché pieces of food? All over it—I've already started hoarding newspaper. We'll need to write up the descriptions and maybe grab people's attention with some old photos or illustrations. We can handle that, right, Lize?”

Liza puffs out her cheeks to blow the little flyaway hairs that escape from her braids out of her eyes. “Frankie, look around the table. What exactly do you suggest that Lillian do?” She laughs sort of nervously and glances over at Lillian. “I think you forgot that there are three people in our group this time, didn't you?”

As if.
Lillian appears at lunchtime. She shadows Liza in the hallway. She is totally around
all
the time. Forget her? Not likely.

Liza goes on. “Have you seen the drawings Lillian does on the inside of her notebooks? Like the one
she's doing of the back of Mr. Mac's head right now? She just churns them out all the time. This girl is an artist. Lillian should do the illustrations for sure, since neither one of us can really draw. And we can make the papier-mâché pieces together at my apartment. But I'm warning you guys: Bring your own snacks, 'cause you won't find any in our place.”

“Fine,” I say, though I'm feeling anything but. I have to admit, I'd frame Lillian's sketch of Mr. Mac's ponytail, but I'm not about to let them know it. “Lillian can do the illustrations, and we can all make the dioramas together. Fine.”

“Good.” Liza smiles. “So that's settled. But what are we actually making? What kinds of food do we eat all the time and think of as ‘American' that people would be shocked to find out were brought here by immigrants?”

“Pizza?” Lillian offers. “Most people can't live without pizza. And that came from Italy, obviously.”

“Well, if it obviously came from Italy,” I say, “no
one will be surprised that it was introduced by immigrants, will they? It's supposed to be a cool, new, surprising fact that the food is from somewhere else.”

Lillian and Liza exchange a look. Can I help it if I'm right?

Liza scrunches up her eyes the way she always does when she's thinking hard about something. “What about tacos? I mean, I know they're originally from Mexico, but does everyone know that? We had tacos for lunch again today, and they're all over the place everywhere, right?”

“Lame,” I say, not even trying to be nice. “Lame, lame, lame. Everyone knows tacos are from Mexico, or at least some Spanish-speaking place. Haven't you ever seen a Taco Bell commercial?”

Liza looks hurt, and I feel bad. But whatever. Then she crosses her arms and says, “Okay, genius, what's your brilliant idea?”

Good point. I've been so busy concentrating on
how
we would make everything that I haven't
actually spent much time thinking about
what
we should make.

“Um, I don't know, exactly. I guess that's what we have to research.”

“Yeah,” she agrees. “I guess.”

Lillian looks up from her sketching. “This may be obvious too, but shouldn't we make some real food? I mean, that's what we're doing in the cooking class, so why don't we take something we learn in there and make
it
a part of the presentation? We can give everyone who visits our exhibit a little taste, like they do in the supermarket. Everyone loves free samples, right?”

Even I have to admit that's a good idea. Liza looks at me, grinning like Nicky does whenever Mom tells him he said something smart. I shrug. “Yeah, I guess. Now we just have to figure out what to make.”