Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Pecan Pie & The End of Things

There was the sound of feet and voices outside on the jetty.
“Come on!” her brothers cried. But she stood, still and immovable and silent.
All around in the red-and-gray-and-green-moss world, everything was changing. The mist was taking over and she knew from all the childhood stories in the parlor that this was It.
“Come on, Juliet!”
But she stayed.

She was in both the kitchen and the living room, (the doorway between them very wide). The pocket doors were pushed in and she wondered what would happen to them when the time came. Would they remain standing, an entryway into a lost world, or would they rot and fall away like everything else? Would she?
Outside on the river, the motor sputtered and came to life—anxiously, it seemed to her; as if even the little metal boat wanted to leave the unnatural mist and the glades and all the uncertainty that clung to its damp shadows. Papa was already rotted in his wet grave down by the Cyprus tree, and Mama was surely gone entirely below the long dramatic tendrils of the willow. It had only been the children in the house, all grown, for so many years, waiting. Now the end of things was almost certain, and it would not be the end the family Christiane had hoped for. But there were still a few things to be done, and she hoped there would be time.
A low growl of thunder called from somewhere above the glades, a fly rose and battered the glass of the window. Juliet turned calmly to look at the oven, and a moment later, nearly drowned out by the roar of the river and the motor and her brothers’ last calls to her, the kitchen timer clicked back to zero.
“Done,” she said.
She retrieved the oven mitts from the counter; they were black and she had made them herself. The apron was already tied about her waist, a swath of gathered red and white that covered her skirt save two inches of hem showing blue below its checkered edge and reaching to her knees. She was wearing black heels to match the oven mitts as she always did when cooking, and her dark was tied up in a knot at her neck. Within the mitts, between the hem of her skirt and the patent leather of her shoes, and high up on the back of her neck where a wisp of hair curled in the damp, her skin was pale white and imperceptibly freckled. She smoothed her skirt beneath the apron and crossed the kitchen.

The oven was a great black and steel-gray beast, brought over from France by a relative on Daddy’s side, and the family secrets of brioche and crème brulée had been passed down through the generations that took their tutelage at its well-seasoned helm. Nothing had ever burnt in that oven, save one quiche made by Grandmère Rose years ago, but that was when Bonpapa had had his heart attack, and it seemed even the great oven had momentarily lost its composure from grief and shock. All the rich butter that Grandmère had insisted on using even through the Depression had taken its toll on the old man.
Grandmère had baked croissants furiously all through that long night, folding in the butter with angry, arthritic fingers. Her people had a streak of Flemish Belgian somewhere back, and so she did not speak but rolled and rolled in silence. Juliet had barely been ten years old then, but she was the only one Grandmère allowed to help her watch the croissants, when, after the sun began to lighten the sky she could take no more and fell asleep at the polished wood table, pastry still beneath her fingernails.
In the morning when the priest came to see the dead man laid out properly, the smell that met him struck him as heretical and ungodly. He had simply stood in the doorway and stared at them all, aghast, as they sat gathered round the table tearing creamy flakes of pastry with their bare hands, the butter running down their wrists and onto the tablecloth in oily, shimmering pools. He had not come back, and no Christiane had been buried in the Catholic cemetery since.
Now Juliet stood in the same kitchen and also baked to fend off death. Her heart pounded in her ears, but she thought of Grandmère, and her hands were still and steady as she pulled down the wide door.
The smell of roasted pecans and sweet brown sugar came tentatively first, breathed out like a sigh, a hint of chocolate lingering after it. Then the rain burst from the clouds and exploded on the house, pounding the metal roof and wrenching the gutters from the eaves. The syrupy smell of the pie matched it and poured out in a torrent of caramel, expanding, flooding, coating everything, even the mist that was now entering the house greedily, seeping in under the door jam and at the poorly-sealed window frames. The heat of the oven and the clammy cold of the mist reacted like an explosion and made a living corona of air currents around the pie and the woman who held it, steaming, in her hands.
“Ten minutes to cool,” said Juliet to the house and the mist and her own heart, beating loud and fast in her ears.
“Ten minutes, that’s all I need, and then it’s done.”

March, 2008