A reworking of a scene I posted earlier.
Everything about it is yellow: the bright formica counter tops, the floral wallpaper, the cupboards, the gauzy curtains, the aging refrigerator. It reeks of the sixties, when my mother was still a child, when it was still common to have a bright yellow kitchen. But at nine years old, I know nothing of that decade–only that I am here now, that this kitchen is bright as sunshine and butter, that it will surely always be this way.
I close the back door and set an old ice cream bucket full of raspberries on the yellow counter top. They are from the backyard bush, and are my favorite: some as large as my big toe, ripe, reddish-purple like bruises. I kick off my shoes and take in the yellow around me, my colored pencil drawings of foxes and sunsets magneted to the refrigerator and back door. My grandma comes into the room in her pink knit sweater, marvels at the fullness of the bucket. We wash the raspberries in a spaghetti strainer, then partition most of them into old cottage cheese containers to mark and place in a corner of the basement freezer. A small handful, though, are tumbled into a small white china bowl, then mixed with milk and three tablespoons of sugar. The result is a thick pink mixture, raspberries still huddling whole in the center: something I probably couldn’t turn down if my life depended on it.
My grandma’s kitchen was a lab for food. I’ll never know what she did in there to produce such wonderful concoctions–whether it was truly science or if fairies blessed the treats and meals with colorful dust. All I knew was sitting at the dining room table or on the living room sofa while she brought me snacks–sometimes without even asking if I wanted anything, or what, as if she knew intuitively when and what to bring me. I loved all of it: rainbow ice cream (white, pink and minty green) in sturdy, ornate wine glasses, cheddar cheese with crackers and salami, bags of pre-shelled sunflower seeds and barbecue peanuts, carrots from her garden with dill-flavored dip, the world’s sweetest pickled beets, homemade donuts, and of course, raspberries with sugar and milk. Her signature drink was grape Kool-Aid, which she’d always bring to me in a plastic, rabbit-shaped cup with ears protruding from the lid, the sugar never quite dissolving at the bottom: a sweet purple sludge ready to be carefully poured onto my tongue once I’d finished the liquid.
Some nights, my grandma would invite me and my parents over for a roast beef dinner, which to this day is my favorite meal: the smoothest mashed potatoes, the most savory, salty beef roast, fresh vegetables, and beef gravy–which tasted even better when she burnt it. When we had sleepovers, she would sometimes make popcorn–the kernels rattling into an old-fashioned popcorn maker, white fluff spilling out the chute. And of course, she canned: mason jars full of pears and peaches she’d bring from some dark, magic place in the basement. Almost as good as the raspberries, that syrupy sweetness in her white china bowls, the clink of spoons against porcelain.
Once, when I was seven years old, she was making me breakfast while I sat at the dining room table, kicking my feet, fidgeting with my silverware, waiting. She always made breakfast the same, and she knew I loved it–bacon cooked just right, toast with the crusts cut off, an abundance of scrambled eggs. Years later I would adopt her technique, cooking the eggs straight from the shell in the bacon grease, yolk and whites still somewhat separate. It was beautiful, the way she would lay it all out: orange slices on the side, a glass of milk, the toast cut into buttery rectangles. Her smile.
This time, however, I was impatient. Maybe some of it was out of boredom, but I found myself mimicking some cartoon I’d seen: fork in one hand and butter knife in the other, pounding my fists on the table, chanting repeatedly for my food.
After a minute, my grandma had had quite enough. She came to the doorway, her face flushed, brown curls grazing her neck. With spatula in hand, she yelled, “It will just be a few more minutes! You will wait.”
I was silenced immediately. She retreated back to the stove, and I laid my fork and knife back down on my napkin, quietly, stunned and instantly regretting my behavior.
I admit, I was spoiled. It wasn’t something I asked for, but it was the truth–tingling on my taste buds. Those moments of tension between my grandma and me were a blip amidst all the good memories of that kitchen: the color, the smells of cooking, the drawings, the doilies, the milkmaid figurines atop the refrigerator. But I would never forget those moments–the pull from warmth and light to a place of cold and quiet, like the corner of a basement freezer, the dark red sting of anger.
