A Place at the Table (23 page)

“The boy with the chicken,” I say, pointing to the photograph.

She looks at the photo, not saying anything, then returns to the kitchen, where she pulls a carton of eggs out of the refrigerator and proceeds to crack them open, one by one, separating them, the whites going in one bowl, the yolks in another.

“She was a hen, not a rooster,” she finally says.

“And the boy?”

She removes a bit of egg yolk that got in the bowl of whites, using the cracked edge of a piece of shell to scoop out the errant yellow. “He was my brother,” she says.

“He’s so handsome,” I say softly, not unaware that she said “was” and not “is.” “Did chickens just . . . flock to him?”

I roll my eyes at my own unintended pun. She smiles. “Lord, he was something else with animals. Best trapper on the farm. But that chicken. He loved that chicken like a pet. She
was
his pet. Rode around on his shoulder whenever he wasn’t working. Hopped off only when she absolutely had to, if James was going to play in a stickball game or something. Waited for him on the sidelines. I don’t imagine anyone has ever been as torn up over losing a chicken as James was over that bird.”

“What happened?”

“She disappeared one night. Mother told James a wild animal must have taken off with her, but we all knew what really happened when we learned Aunt Sadie served chicken and dumplings for supper that Sunday. Everyone knew Aunt Sadie didn’t have any fowl left in her yard and Uncle Sleepy was always getting on James about having a chicken for a pet.”

“That’s terrible.”

Alice shrugs. “Worse things happened.”

“To James?” I ask softly.

For a moment Alice doesn’t say anything, just keeps cracking eggs, separating the whites from the yolks.

“There was a lynching,” she finally says.

“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”

Alice places the final split eggshell, one half pushed inside the other, back into the carton, nestled with the other eleven cracked shells. She grabs a dish towel off the countertop, wipes her hands. “It was a long time ago. Sounds bad to say, I guess, but you move on.”

I feel tears push against my eyes, though they aren’t for Alice or even her brother. They are for me. One day the memory of Sebastian will fade, and I do not want that to happen. I do not want to move on.

For a moment neither of us says anything.

“What are you making?” I finally ask, needing to change the subject.

“Angel food cake,” she says, glancing up at me to smile. “That’s what I’m doing with the whites. And then I’ll make a big batch of lemon curd with the leftover yolks.”

“What a great Christmas gift for somebody.”

She shrugs. “I suppose I’ll give some jars of the curd away. The angel food cake is for me. I just love having one around. I always add extra vanilla. I’ll use some of that wonderful extract you brought. It’s such a simple cake; it’s a blank slate for whatever you want to add to it.”

“What can I help you with?” I ask.

She smiles, lets out a little murmur of pleasure. “It’s been a long time since someone asked me that. How nice. Why don’t you start by sifting the dry ingredients for the cake onto some waxed paper? The recipe’s written on this card here.” She taps the stained index card with her finger. “I always double sift the flour for this kind of cake. You want it light as it can be.”

I set about scooping flour from the canister and shaking it through the sifter. I love the way it falls in a white snowy drift on the wax paper. I think of the boy in the picture with the chicken, snow all around. I think of how proud he looks. How confident.

“Back when Alpheus was around, he would try to help out in the kitchen, but usually we would just end up getting in a fight. I swear we almost got divorced over the fact that he wouldn’t remove the green fibers from inside the garlic cloves he was chopping. We did get divorced, eventually, but not over that.”

Right. Alice was married. I learned that at some point, but I forgot, imagining her instead as a solo unit, a trail of discarded lovers in her wake. I must have given her a quizzical look, because she responds as if I spoke my thoughts aloud.

“Don’t go being surprised that I was a married woman!”

“No, of course not. It’s just, there’s so much about you I’d like to know.”

She smiles.

“So what happened between you and your husband? I’m sorry, is that rude to ask?”

“Alpheus was what you call a tortured soul. He couldn’t help but be angry. And for good reason. Not long after he was discharged from the army, having served two tours of duty, mind you, he was in Midtown, enjoying a cigarette before heading to work. A young officer approached, told Alpheus to ‘move it along.’ Called Alpheus ‘boy.’ When Alpheus didn’t move fast enough, the officer clubbed him. Split his head right open. This to a war hero.”

“That’s horrible.”

“It was. But my sympathy regarding his past only seemed to make him more agitated. And then he would attack me for what he saw as my complacency. He simply could not understand the ambiguities I lived with. Like how I loved cooking at Café Andres, even though I was uncomfortable being the token Negro. Or how I went to parties even though I knew I got invited just so that white folks could say it was an integrated evening. And the hell he gave me for being engaged to a white man once upon a time—good Lord. Even though I didn’t go through with the marriage precisely because my fiancé was white.”

I want to ask more but don’t want to pry. The music has stopped and a silence permeates the apartment. I walk into the living room, flip the record, and place the needle in the groove. And there is Nina’s voice again, filling the air.

•  •  •

The secret to angel food cake, says Alice, is not to let the whites get too stiff, to stop beating them while they are still a little loose and have just turned glossy. The curd is trickier. You have to get it hot
enough so that it thickens and turns to custard, yet not so hot that the egg yolks scramble. Alice places a metal cooling rack on top of the stovetop burner to further elevate the custard mixture from the heat, which she stirs constantly. I lean against the counter, glass of wine in hand—Alice quickly deduced that I did not like the hot buttered rum and immediately offered me an alternative—so we can continue talking while she stirs.

This is the best I’ve felt in a long time. It is like being back in Meemaw’s kitchen, except with wine to drink and better music playing in the background. (Meemaw never met a contemporary Christian album she did not love.) While Alice stirs, she, unsolicited, tells me more about her first almost husband, whom she met in 1948, when she was thirty-one and already making a name for herself at the café.

“He was Jewish,” she says. “Grew up in Queens. His mother hated me. His whole family hated me. And my family would have hated him, too, if I had ever brought him down to North Carolina. But how could I have? We wouldn’t have even been allowed to sit in the same section of the train once we were south of D.C., not to mention the fact that if we had gone through with the marriage it would have been illegal in my home state.

“When we first fell in love, we were so naïve. We met at the café and we tricked ourselves into believing that the world would react to us the same way that Gus and Randall and all of those crazy writers and artists and bohemians did. We made this little world inside Café Andres that didn’t match anything going on outside, and then we believed the force of our love could change people’s opinions. We believed the force of our love would right all wrongs.”

“But sometimes love isn’t enough,” I say. I wish I did not believe this, but it feels true. I think of the Edenic pleasure with Pete Arnold before my parents exiled us from the Garden, of Sebastian’s body, covered with lesions, and how neither my love nor Dahlia’s, no matter how strong, could save him. Of my pure yearning that morning
at the church and how once again I was refused God’s love, this time in the shape of a wafer.

“I tried to take communion at a Catholic church this morning. It was on impulse. I didn’t know what I was doing, and the priest, recognizing my ignorance, snatched the wafer from my hand.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” says Alice.

She dips her wooden spoon into the lemon curd. When she pulls the spoon back up, the curd clings to its back. “This is done,” she remarks, moving the pot off the burner.

“What was surprising was how much I wanted to be offered it. I grew up in the Church. Baptist, not Catholic, but still. And sure, looking back I can see how narrow that world was, but . . . I don’t know. I loved the way I felt about God when I was a child. The universe was good, and God loved me and I belonged. Like how you speak of the café back in its heyday, how it was this special place where life was elevated somehow. That was how church was for me, and I keep trying to find that place again, and I just—I keep getting smacked down. I’m like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football, and Lucy keeps snatching it away.”

She turns to look at me, and I feel a crackling of electricity between us, connection. “I’m not religious,” she says. “Not by a long shot. But it seems to me that the priest you encountered believes in a small god, a god that can be shrunk inside a cracker that was produced in a factory somewhere and sold in bulk. It seems to me that you need a God bigger than that, and I don’t think you should let your experience today stop you from looking for it. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say, needing to be a little boy again, comforted by this woman who reminds me of my meemaw, whose God, it occurs to me, was so big as to be uncontainable.

“Now look, Sunday is my bread day. I’ve got challah dough rising in the refrigerator. Do you know how to braid it?”

“I’ve never done it, but I’m a quick study.”

“Well then, let me show you how it’s done.”

•  •  •

I learn a lot from Alice that afternoon, but one simple lesson is that, even though it slows down the process, letting bread dough rise in the refrigerator gives a more fully flavored, balanced loaf. But this means that after taking the challah dough out of the fridge we have to let it sit on the kitchen counter for about an hour while it comes to room temperature. In the meantime, I help Alice clean the dishes, pour the curd into little jars with rubberized lids, and pull the angel food cake out of the oven. As soon as it’s out she inverts the cake over an empty soda bottle so it will cool evenly.

When the challah dough is ready Alice dusts the countertop with flour, then divides the dough into six pieces and rolls each piece into a strand. She brings all six strands together, then shows me how to braid them, starting with an outside one and crossing it over two inner ones before tucking it underneath, then doing the same thing on the other side. The dough feels so good in my hands, springy and smooth and elastic.

“Did your Jewish fiancé teach you how to make this?” I ask as I tuck the longer strands under the end of a loaf.

“Lord, no. He was an eater, not a cook. That was actually one of the fun things about our romance: I got to cook for him. He did take me to the great New York delis, though, introduced me to all of the classic Eastern European Jewish foods. I can’t tell you how many bowls of matzo ball soup I ate when we ended our engagement. Only thing that comforted me.”

“God, me too. The month after Sebastian died, matzo ball soup was all I could stomach. I would go to Zabar’s every day, sit at the counter, eat the ball with my fork, then lift the bowl to my mouth and just suck down the broth. It got so that the guys behind the
counter would know to heat up a bowl for me the moment they saw me come in.”

“I have a good matzo ball recipe,” Alice says. “I use duck fat instead of chicken fat.”

“I can’t imagine you cooking anything that’s not wonderful,” I say.

She smiles. “Cooking is the one thing that has never failed me.”

•  •  •

It is late by the time we pull the loaves of challah out of the oven, one dotted with raisins, one sprinkled with poppy seeds. By then the sweet smell of honey and yeast has filled the apartment. By then we are on our second bottle of wine and have played album after album on the turntable. We listen to Miles Davis’s
Kind of Blue
as we wait for the bread to cool, just enough to handle. Alice pulls down two small white plates, painted around the periphery with sweet little pink flowers. She keeps her butter in a little pot on the counter, so it is room temperature, spreadable. She sets out a butter knife, and honey stored in a bear-shaped bottle.

She pulls open the challah with her hands. Steam rushes out, and the sweet yeasty smell intensifies. She hands me a strand of the warm loaf, puts it into my cupped palms.

“Here,” she says. “Take.”

I spread a thick layer of butter on the hot bread, pour honey on top of that. I bring it to my mouth, warm and dripping with sweetness.

I wait to swallow before saying to Alice, “This is divine.”

(Old Greenwich, Connecticut, 1989)

L
ate last night I returned home from my trip down to Atlanta, where I was helping our older daughter, Lucy, move into her freshman dorm at Emory University. Two weeks earlier my husband, Cam, and I dropped off Mandy, our youngest, at boarding school. Even though I was a boarding school kid myself, I was disheartened when Mandy asked if she could apply to Hotchkiss, then begged to be allowed to attend once she was accepted. While I had
needed
to escape my parents’ home, I liked to believe I had created a warm, safe nest for our daughters, a place I might have to give them a gentle push to dislodge them from. But that was not to be. Mandy flew out prematurely, and even our shy Lucy turned and headed back toward her dormitory before I had even pulled the rental car away from the curb.

Despite the melancholy I feel over the absence of our daughters, I decide to approach our first official night as empty nesters as a celebratory
occasion. I take a cue from the playbook of Taffy, my southern mother-in-law, setting the table with good china, cloth napkins, the sterling silver that Taffy insisted Cam and I register for when we got engaged, the Baccarat crystal. I light the long white candles in the silver candleholders. I prepare Cam’s favorite meal: steak with béarnaise sauce, twice-baked potatoes, green beans sautéed in butter with almond slivers, and vanilla ice cream with homemade chocolate sauce for dessert.