Simple Recipes (10 page)

The two girls pace the sidewalk out front. More than a year has passed since they lived here. Kathleen pauses, admiring the
flowers. The lawn is cropped nice and short and they’re careful not to walk on it.

“Let’s wait over there,” Kathleen says, “and see if she comes.” They walk across the street. While Lorraine sits heavily down
on the curb, Kathleen kicks her sandals off. She hops up and down on the dry grass, glowing with anticipation.

Lorraine tries not to think about school, or about what Liza, their Foster Mom, will say. Instead, she examines every house
in turn to pass the time. Red-shingled roof over here and, next door, deep-green curtains pulled tight. Lorraine knows now
what her mother meant when she told their father, “Without
you, I fall apart.” She knows what the words would mean,
I miss you.
The word
miss
encapsulates everything.

Her mother has three pale circles on her left arm, scars from an inoculation she’d had as a child. Lorraine once lifted the
sleeve of her father’s shirt and found the same three exact markings. She pictured her mother and father as long-lost twins,
sailing down the birth canal joined at the upper arm, pulled apart, the marks ballooning inward like buttonholes. Lately all
Lorraine thinks about is her mother: her shoes on the sidewalk clipping along, her muddy-blond hair cut short and left to
grow out slowly over months and months until it feathered up against her shoulder blades. When she was little, Lorraine thought
her mother’s hair was directly related to the passing of time, short in the summer, long in winter, in-between in all the
other seasons.

Mom and Dad, sometimes together, sometimes apart, are lodged in Lorraine’s head. Try as she might, Lorraine can’t make them
leave. She thinks she shouldn’t try. If they disappear, she doesn’t trust herself to bring them back again.

Before she left, her mother used to sing in the church choir. Sometimes she brought them upstairs with her and they’d sit
behind the pipe organ. The adult voices folded and hung in the alcove. Her
mother’s voice rang out, blissful. After church, they’d walk to the car and, if her dad was in the city, they’d pile into
his white pickup and go for brunch at Mother Tucker’s. In summer, the strawberries on the fruit buffet were bigger than Lorraine’s
fist. Once, her mother took a strawberry and sunk it in her beer glass, laughing. When she lifted it out, it spun gold and
sharp. Her mother laughed so hard she knocked the glass over and ruined everything, her father’s omelette, Kathleen’s French
toast. Lorraine couldn’t stop laughing. The way her mother’s face scrunched up and her eyes watered and her hair came down
tangled from its elastic band, Lorraine laughed along with her. Even when she saw her father’s face, she couldn’t stop. In
the car on the way home, her father drove so fast everything blurred, her mother singing out the car window, into the hot
breeze.

The morning her mother left, Lorraine climbed into her parents’ bed and sniffed their scents on the pillows. Eyes shut, she
walked into their closet, dresses and shirts waving together as she moved from side to side. She thought about sleeping there,
folded among the clothes, waking in a hundred years when her parents beat the door down and kissed her awake and told her
what she knew all along, that this was the bad dream.

Instead, her older sister Kathleen came and flung the closet doors open and pulled her out. Pulled her
right into her arms and kept her there. Kathleen, who used to take care of their mother, turned all her love on Lorraine.
She kissed her hair and Lorraine felt it all come together, what was real and what was not. As if she had been plunged up
into the cold air, clear as day.

Lorraine remembers lying face-down in the middle of an intersection last year. She was nine years old and screaming hysterically.
Her mother gripped Lorraine’s hands, begging and crying, and tried to drag her up, but Lorraine pawed at the ground. Cars
swerved around them, horns blaring. Lorraine had the sensation that she was dying. She was blind and everything was wet. The
world was ending here in the road, red leaves muddied on the concrete, people striding past, exhaust thick in her mouth. Her
mother, webs of blood vessels bursting in her cheeks, kneeling on the concrete. Then, somehow, the two of them were standing
on the curb, Lorraine tipped over against her mother, the two of them sobbing uncontrollably.

At home, her mom drank until her eyes were bulging. She lay down in bed and Lorraine watched the sheet float up, float down
with her breath. Lorraine climbed into bed beside her and held on, one arm circling her mother’s rib cage.

“We’re a pair,” her mother said, words running together. “How do you like that? The pair of us.”

Lorraine stared at her mother’s slender hands, the nails soft and ragged. “I like it that we are a pair,” she whispered.

Her mom shook her head. “No,” she said. “Wrong answer.”

Late that night, her father called from Port Hardy where he was logging the Island. He always called her mother
darling’s
cajoling her until she blushed and giggled. “Jesus, I miss you,” she said, half crying into the receiver. “I can’t hold it
together without you.” Then she went up to bed, her face wrecked.

“I hear you threw a tantrum,” he said, when it was Lorraine’s turn to talk to him.

She nodded her head against the phone. “I did.” Lorraine didn’t know how to explain her actions. She only knew that once she
had laid herself down on the concrete, she no longer wanted to stand up again.

Her father waited. Lorraine imagined the phone cord tangling away into nighttime, her father’s big shoulders curved forward.
“Don’t we have enough money?” she asked.

“Of course we do.” Her father laughed cheerfully. “What do you want to buy?”

“Nothing.”

“Is that why you kicked up a fuss?” he teased.

“If we have enough money, why do you have to live there?”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I’ll be back soon enough. By Christmas, with so many presents you won’t know what
to do with them.”

She heard her dad smoking, the exhalation long into his throat. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t believe everything your mother says.”

“Like what?”

“Oh well,” he sighed, “sometimes she flies off the handle.”

Lorraine wanted to shake the phone. “She’s drunk all the time.”

“All the time!” he hooted. “You should have seen her when she was young.”

Summer was the longest season. It was the time when all the trees came down, felled by her father before the winter frost
set in. They wouldn’t see him for months. He might call, homesick from the camps. He promised to bring them up there one day.
They could watch the log lines, trees hoisted down the mountain, air full of sawdust. He promised he would get a job in the
city next year. Those times when her mother believed him, she gathered them up and put
Blue
in the CD player. Her mother loved to dance. She danced with the girls,
ice
cubes clinking in her glass. Their mother, the fun-time girl, with her short summer hair. Her pale white arms gone soft.

When she didn’t believe him, she’d lie in bed and sleep. She’d take her purse and say, ’Til be home in an hour,” and she wouldn’t
be home again until the night of the second day.

A weekday on a residential street is full of ritual. Sprinklers hum back and forth, pattering the sidewalk. Small children
bask
in
wading pools, laughing their bubbling laughter; the occasional phone is ringing and ringing. Lorraine and Kathleen pace the
sidewalk. Halfway down, there’s a sprinkler blocking their path, the water arcing over the concrete to hit road and a fringe
of grass, Kathleen scowls, “See that? That shouldn’t be allowed. It’s
waste!’
She walks around the arc of water, prim and proper, stepping out onto the silent baking street, Lorraine goes straight through,
the water speckling her clothes and skin. She blinks in the coolness of it and keeps on along the sidewalk.

The midday sun burns down relentlessly. They sit in the shade of a mailbox, heels bouncing up and down on the curb, Lorraine
sits with Kathleen’s head cradled in her lap. She absently rolls a strand of her sister’s hair round and round her pinkie
until Kathleen tells her it hurts. Lorraine lies back and watches the sky shift slowly above them, but her sister can’t sit
still. She scans the street, excited, happier than Lorraine
has seen her in a long time. She gets up and sprints to the corner store, and when she comes back, her hands are full of goodies
— a plastic bag of sour keys and two cans of pop. They eat the candy meticulously, one bite at a time, They work up a sweat
chewing. When they’re done, they throw the cans and wrappers down, watch them roll off the curb.

Kathleen lies back on the grass, legs tucked against her chest. “No one owns this grass,” she says suddenly. “All this stuff
between the sidewalk and the curb? It’s no one’s. So it’s mine.” She gets comfortable on it, sprawls out luxuriously, her
shorts riding high on her thighs.

A young woman in pumps steps past them on the sidewalk. She dangles a letter from her fingers and Kathleen dutifully rolls
over to let her pass. The woman drops her letter into the mail slot, then glances at them impatiently. “What are you girls
doing sitting around on a school day?”

“It’s none of your business,” Kathleen says, “but we’re waiting for our mom.”

The woman frowns. “You shouldn’t be sitting in the sun,” she says, sternly. “Didn’t your mother teach you that?”

Kathleen watches the woman walk away. “I said it was none of your business, anyway,” she mutters.

But Lorraine is watching the house. A woman is in the window now, peering out at them as she talks
on the phone. Her hand twirls the cord, reaches up to hold the bottom of the receiver, her head falling forward, nodding.
Then she turns away from them, back to the room, and then she is gone.

Kathleen stares at the empty window, then shifts closer to Lorraine. “I’d bet money on it,” she says, her face flushed. “Any
minute now, Mom will come walking up the street.”

Lorraine has no answer to this. She remembers something her dad said once. “It’s a kind of love,” he told them. “The way she
drank. It was like being in love.”

On her own birthday last year, their mother took them to Cipriano’s. She never drank like other people, in celebration. On
her birthday she stayed sober. Twenty-four hours every year, just to prove that she could. The restaurant was small and hot,
and they ate wedges of garlic bread and drank Shirley Temples and Luke Skywalkers. There were paper umbrellas tucked in the
drinks. Lorraine loved her mom’s face in candlelight, the way her hair fell straight as a turning page. They ate pasta from
heaping plates, mounds of spaghetti topped with red, crumbly meatballs. They lingered over hot chocolate. Lorraine and Kathleen
tried not to notice how their mother watched wine being poured at another table, how it stole her attention.
They said things to distract her but it was over too soon. Their mother paid the bill and they left, but there were no doors,
just a wide rectangular window that you stepped through into the humid evening.

Lorraine wanted to make it to fourteen. When she was fourteen, like her sister, she would have all this sorted out. Like Kathleen,
she would believe that their mother would come back for them. She would be able to divide her mom’s sickness from her mom’s
real self and she would keep them separate like glasses of water.

Back then, she couldn’t decipher when her mother was telling the truth. It changed from moment to moment, fluctuating like
an off-kilter heart. Those times when her mother emerged from the bedroom, eyes lit up and dancing, Lorraine knew she shouldn’t
trust her. This was her mother full of lies, the one who’d walk away and forget them.

“This thing that I do,” she told them once, “it does so much more good than harm.”

Then she combed her hair straight back off her face so she looked like a movie star, her blue eyes like saucers, and drove
to the store. Later on, after she had drunk the house empty, she lay on the sofa and wept, said, “What have I done? Ten years.
I just blew it all.” Lorraine never knew what to say. That night she dreamed her mother was laughing, a swooping sound that
reminded Lorraine of a seagull hoisted on the
wind, dropping fast. She dreamed her mother died. All morning she believed it was true, until her mother pulled up in the
driveway and ran into the house, the car still running and the door wide open, her mother swaggering heroically on the stairs.

The morning her mother left, Lorraine was standing on the lawn. Kathleen had mowed it once, months ago. The grass was knee-high
now, maybe higher. She and Kathleen used to stand in the grass blowing dandelion spores to the four winds. Now the yard bloomed
with them.

Her mother walked out carrying her purse in her hands like a loaf of bread, her fingers curled around the bottom. She was
wearing her coat even though the sky was cloudless and heat blared down. Lorraine sat camouflaged in the grass. She watched
her mother’s progress along the walk, one foot steady in front of the other. The sun on the back of her mother’s hair turned
it blond. That hair, the prettiness of it, made Lorraine think there was nothing wrong. Not in the way her mother walked or
the direction she went or her purse in her hands like a gift. She watched her mother and it might have been any day of the
year, neither here nor there, a nothing picture. Her mother walked away down the street, turned left, and disappeared.

Three nights passed. She and Kathleen stayed up late watching old movies on the television. “I’m not worried,” Kathleen said.
“Are you?” Lorraine shook her head.

It terrified Lorraine to wake up in the morning. She was used to finding her mother around the house, sometimes on the floor,
right beside Lorraine’s bed. Her mother’s mouth would be fully open, churning the air in and out, a lone swimmer.

On the fourth day, they called their father. Long distance, the telephone lines snaking across the water and up into the Island’s
northern tip. Lorraine tried to calm herself by picturing him, phone cradled against his shoulder, mountains and forest in
the background. He asked them over and over, “But when did you last see her?”