The Cookbook

Being a responsible adult is something at which I fail quite spectacularly each day of my life. If my efforts were evaluated on a graded scale I am certain I would get an F minus in every single category. Goes to bed at a reasonable hour? Fail. Manages time wisely? Fail. Picks up dirty clothes so they do not trip me on the way to the kitchen for a midnight snack? Double fail. That last one is fresh in my mind as I rub the smarting elbows that broke my fall. Could have been worse, I guess, could have been my face. Then I stub my toe on the edge of the couch in the living room and find myself splitting my attention between rubbing the elbow, clutching the aching toe, and hopping on one leg the rest of the way to the refrigerator. I suck at adulting and I am a little bit clumsy, too. Honestly, I think I am fortunate to have survived so long on my own.

It is not as though I had many great examples of what a responsible adult should look like as I was growing up. My own parents died in an accident when I was very young, each of my foster parents was a poster child for adulting gone wrong, and the crazy aunt who at last took me in is so eccentric that to find her shoes stored in either the ice box or the microwave each morning was an oddity I had learned not to question. In theory I knew what succeeding in life looked like but in practice I could only bounce from one disaster to the next while fervently hoping for the best.

Another example of my endless shortcomings? My abysmally understocked refrigerator. Without looking I knew my cupboards and pantry were more of the same. I stared morosely into the depths of the fridge while my stomach growled like a hungry bear. Exhaustion had overtaken me on the drive home from work and it was all I could do to make it home and crawl into bed before I passed out. Now I was regretting that I did not stop to pick up food.

Maybe it was the late hour, my empty stomach, or my musings over needing to get my fledgling adulthood in better order. Whatever the reason, I found my thoughts lingering on the family that I never knew. Not one for sentimentality, or for dwelling in the past, I never wondered about them. Tonight, however, I could not help myself.

There was precious little to think about. Few pictures existed of my parents, and even fewer of the relatives that came before them. They kept to themselves in our sleepy little town, and they had no close friends as far as I could tell, so there was no one left to tell stories about them. All that remained were family heirlooms given to me by the crazy aunt and she could not begin to tell me the importance of a single one.

Abandoning my search for food, I wandered to the closet in the spare bedroom. Inside was an old, dusty trunk that smelled like the past full to the brim of the things my family had saved for generations. It had followed me from house to house, school to school, and although it went everywhere with me like a lost puppy I had never brought myself to open it or even to look at it for too long. Since I never dwelled on it the past never caused me any pain, but for reasons I cannot fathom something about the trunk and its contents brought out in me habits of avoidance. What if I found something in there that changed my life? Worse yet, what if I didn’t? I might have chosen to go back to bed on any other night. In fact, I recall telling myself to abort mission and get back to sleep. Who knew it would become a night of curses and ghosts.

I knelt down in front of the old trunk and looked it over for a moment or two. Faded paint, scratched to hell, and big enough to hide a body. I liked to think that the family who brought my aunt into this world was not the kind of family to have literal skeletons in a trunk in their closet, but since I knew next to nothing about them I suppose it could be possible. I pushed that thought from my mind and reached with both hands for the latches on the front that held the lid closed. With deft fingers I flipped them up and then pulled them out and down to let them dangle freely off the front of the trunk. The lid was stuck firm after being close so many years and I had to shove it hard to get it open. At last it gave and, much to my own embarrassment, I stepped back as though something might jump out. Yet there was no spooky breath of air, no sensation of something having been released and, thankfully, no bad smells. It was a perfectly normal old trunk, and as I crept closer to peer over the edge I noted that the collection of dusty junk inside was just as ordinary.

Resuming my position before the trunk, I began to pull out its contents one at a time. No one could call the objects within treasure, not by a long shot, but in a way it still felt like unpacking something precious. These objects were last held by my family, maybe even by my parents. It did not matter what they were, it was all special.

Letters bound in twine, diaries full of pages written in a looping script, a pocket watch, an old pair of glasses, monogrammed handkerchiefs, and classic jewelry. One by one I extracted them, handled them with reverent hands, and arrayed them on the floor all around me. Before long I was encapsulated by pieces of my past and it was not lost on me that this was probably the closest I would ever come to being surrounded by family. Part of me wished I had done it sooner, but all things happen in their own time.

At last it seemed I had reached the bottom and all that remained was an old quilt with intricate stitches. As I brought it into my lap and rubbed my hands over it I marveled that this had been made by someone’s hands. How had someone I was descended from made something so fine? I could not even make a basic daisy chain on the playground when I was a little girl. Thinking it empty, I moved into a crouch and shifted my weight to give more attention to some of the most intriguing pieces. Then I noticed a book at the bottom, one last piece of treasure.

It was old, that much I could tell. It’s leather covers were worn smooth as though it had been handled by countless pairs of hands and they were warped by the obvious addition of new pages that had been added to it over the years. The Cook Book was scrawled on the front in the same looping script I recognized from some of the diaries and, refusing to be forgotten, my angry-bear stomach roared. Thinking I had stumbled upon a book of old family recipes, I dived right in.

This book’s pages had all been written by hand in what looked like heavy charcoal and each was completely covered with words and sketches. Any hopes I had of finding my great-great granny’s mouth watering recipe for chicken pot pie were dashed at once: it did not even look like this was written in a language I could read. This insight into my family’s past produced a flurry of questions and I was struck for the first time by my own unintended wisdom in having avoided my family’s past for so long. Where were we from? What language did we speak? How did we end up here? Where did we all go? Why was I the only one left? Well, me and my crazy aunt. All of these queries buzzed around with no real hope of being answered and already my head was beginning to hurt. Suddenly my habits of avoidance were more appealing than ever.

Since I could not read them, I turned the pages one by one and looked at them instead. It struck me as it often did that the way people from the past wrote and incorporated drawings was as much like art as the paintings they made and hung on the wall. Each page was beautiful and painstakingly executed. I remembered from a history class that people from the past would only go to such lengths to present and preserve information if they felt it was exceptionally important. I wished I could read what my long dead relatives thought to be so significant.

At last I turned the final page and what I found was incongruous with all the pages and the content that had come before. This page was not scribed in charcoal or with the familiar looping hand. Instead it was written in blue ink and the letters looked like they had been penned by someone with chicken scratch handwriting as bad as mine. No fancy ornamentations, no accompanying drawings in great detail, just a list of ingredients and some rudimentary instructions below. At the top of the page it said, “In Case of Emergency Make Chicken Soup.”

My stomach growled again; I love chicken soup. I got to my feet with the book in my hands still open on the last page and wandered back to the kitchen. None of the ingredients were in the house, but the corner store was still open and it felt like I was probably not going back to bed anytime soon so I might as well hoof it up there and gather what I needed. Soup was one of those things you could make one night and then eat for the rest of the week if you made enough. Seemed like a win-win situation to me.

In less than thirty minutes I was back in the kitchen with broth set to boil and a colorful selection of vegetables prepped for chopping. Always meticulous with directions despite my natural inclination towards chaos and disorder, I added the ingredients exactly as written. Before long the fragrance filling my kitchen was so delicious I thought my mouth might begin to water any minute.

Thinking my efforts finished, I placed a finger upon the page and began to read aloud the ingredients and the process one word at a time. I smiled to myself and closed the book with a heavy thud of thick pages, congratulating myself on a job well done. Now all there was left to do was wait. Then I looked at the pot and my contentment was replaced by alarm in an instant.

In a matter of moments, the surface of my soup had gone from fragrant swirls to a violent, bubbling maelstrom. I lurched forward and turned the stove off, but the ominous boiling got bigger and bigger. Was that light coming from the depths of my pot? Then it began to rumble and rock like a devastating earthquake and I took cover just in time. My chicken soup exploded, showering the walls and ceiling in noodles, vegetables, chunks of chicken, and broth. My mouth hung open in perfect shock; I was never going to get my deposit back.

Steam swirled around the kitchen in the wake of the blast, or was that smoke? I crept forward from my hiding place behind the door jamb between the kitchen and the living room, approaching ground zero on the tips of my toes one tentative step at a time. My heart nearly jumped out of my chest as the smoke cleared at last: there was a woman sitting in the middle of my kitchen floor. While the rest of the room was sporting a liberal coating of chicken soup, this woman was untouched. Her clothes were huge on her emaciated frame as though she had been starved for weeks and her hair hung in long tangles around her face. She looked up at me slowly, her eyes locking on mine, and I realized with a jolt that they looked disturbingly like my own.

She drew in a shuddering breath as though she had not breathed properly in ages and said, “you spoke the incantation.”

Finding my voice at last, I yelled, like an idiot, “you were supposed to be chicken soup!”

Her lips did not curl into a smile but I thought I noted a small sparkle of humor in her eyes. Locked as they were, mine on hers, I realized in an instant I had seen those eyes before, staring at me from a wrinkled photograph a foster parent had shown me long ago.

My voice emerged from my mouth, a sound caught some place between a gasp and a sob, heavy with incredulity.

“Mom?”

She smiled.