MR. INDUSTRY AND MISS REAL COOL by Jenn Scott
My mother took frequent trips to visit her ailing mother, and my father did not question how my grandmother’s sickness lasted an eternity without undoing her like the other truly sick people we’d known. My mother left for these trips with a flurry of obsessive angst, smoothing her hair, spritzing Chamade Guerlain on her pale wrists and neck, applying lipstick to her pursed, waiting lips. She plucked her eyebrows into thin angry lines resembling thin angry mouths, and she was woman enough, talented enough, to perform these tasks without a mirror.
During one of these trips, I saw my father dressed as a woman.
My father, quintessential man, did not make a beautiful woman, no matter he’d spent fourteen years proximate to one. My mother was a beautiful woman, and he’d slept beside her, eaten the terrible food she’d prepared, kissed her hello and goodbye every morning and night for years. He’d watched her birth a child, me, a hefty and alarming thing; had witnessed firsthand her elaborate beauty rituals. My mother took the business of womanhood seriously, aiding and abetting the gifts God gave her, showing them to their best advantages like the owners of poodles showing their animals’ best selves in heated competition, but my father and I saw her plainest self at home, Noxemaed and scrubbed, pinned and tucked until she resembled the human version of a dress about to be tailored. She attempted any rumored trend claiming the capability of making her thinner, younger, brighter. Not more intelligent – she didn’t care about that – but brighter as in cheery, ever-beckoning, like something scrubbed vigorously with vinegar. In public, my mother appeared always coiffed. Pulling up to the curb of my school, she admonished the mothers still wearing housecoats and hair-rollers, insulting them with a critical expression that skewed her beauty. She cared passionately about her appearance, but hadn’t gotten the memo that a positive attitude contributes fourfold to a person’s beauty while negativity simply kills it.
Weekly, my mother treated her hair with mayonnaise. She admired its conditioning proponents, but felt leery of its fat content in a condiment capacity, slapping my hand if I dolloped too much on a sandwich, or ate too many deviled eggs in quick succession at a picnic. She lathered mayonnaise into her hair, leaving it on for upwards of an hour while she remained inside the locked upstairs bathroom, paging through Vogue and ignoring our tentative knocks on the door. My mother had come “from money,” as people said, and thirteen years of marriage to a high school English teacher had not acclimated her to thrift. Though when the bottles of Hellmann’s went on sale at the grocery store, she snatched them up and into the cart, the glass clinking anxiously as she beelined to the checkout. Once, when my father could not find mayonnaise in the kitchen cupboards, he took his turkey sandwich to the upstairs bathroom, where he discovered a jar stashed beneath the sink beside various bottles of perfumes and creams, ointments. Sitting on the closed toilet, he spread his sandwich thick with mayonnaise and ate it, additional proof that my father adapted in ways my mother did not.
In the mid-1950’s, my mother had been a beauty queen, a raven beauty, beautiful but still possessing a girl-next-door quality, a wholesome affability, that pained her. She longed to be exquisite. Occasionally, from an accidental angle, negligible vantage point, her beauty appeared astounding, but typically it erred on the pedestrian side, ordinary enough to inspire countless mundane girls that they, too, with effort and discipline, with sheer strong will, might become beauty queens. They, too, might become Miss Santa Clara County, Miss Los Angeles, Miss America. There is a photograph of my mother surrounded by clamoring schoolchildren. In this photograph, my mother kneels, smiles as a little girl touches her crown. In this photograph, my mother’s features appear accessible enough to convince you that she is kind.
She kept her pageant photographs safeguarded in a velveteen box. When I was a young child, I lay in my parents’ bed, lingering over every minuscule detail of each. In my favorite photograph, taken just after she’d won Miss Long Beach 1954, my mother poses with the runners‑up, plain and gangly girls standing on either side of her like gargoyles, their presence exacerbating my mother’s beauty. Maybe this was the moment my mother realized ugly women were her best accessory, better even than diamonds shucked from mines and pearls dredged from the ocean bottom. (The exception to this rule, of course, was a daughter. A daughter, despite her unrelenting proximity, could not be ugly.) As a child, I squinted at this photograph until I felt dizzy, studying my mother’s dark hair, her china skin, her graceful hands folded just so beside a corsage placed in her lap. When I was older, I noticed what looked like an engagement ring on the ring finger of her left hand, though she had not at that point met my father.
“No,” she said when I asked about it. “That’s just a ring your grandfather gave me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Debra, I think I would know about an engagement ring!”
“I never called it an engagement ring.”
In this photograph, her neck and the pearls encircling it are gorgeous things, but the exaggerated sweetheart neckline of her bathing suit gives her breasts an angled, nearly alien expression just begging adolescent boys to wrench them, declaring, “Tokyo, Tokyo! Come in, Tokyo!” This photograph does not compliment my mother’s thighs. From the photographer’s awkward vantage point, they appear enlarged. Had the light been different, I’m certain there would have been evidence of cellulite. Still, her teeth and the whites of her eyes have a persuasive brilliance. Here she is: Miss Long Beach 1954. Wholesome, affable, sweet.
“That girl has terribly hairy arms,” my mother said once of the girl to her right smiling so forcefully her cheeks resembled a gopher’s stuffed with seeds. “Her front teeth are jagged.”
“What is she supposed to do about that?”
“That’s not the smile for her. She needs something less toothy.”
“She’s trying,” I said. The girl’s effortful smile suggested that happiness was elusive. “They’re both trying.”
“Probably,” my mother said, “they should have both tried harder.” She slid the photograph back inside the velveteen box.
My mother spoke with scorn of the lesser local titles a girl could have: Miss Sea Legs, Miss Frozen Food, Miss Home Freezer, Miss Letter Carrier. The winners of these pageants posed in kitschy promotional photographs depicting their titles. Miss Smog Fighter might gape, open-mouthed, at the ever-rising wisp of smog rising from the open jar she held, her mouth formulating a giant O. Miss T‑Square might be measured with a giant T‑Square by a dashing man in a bow tie standing, of all places, on a boardwalk. Miss T‑Square might wear a bathing suit and stilettos, and one might wonder if the bathing suit was worn to justify the boardwalk, or if the boardwalk was a convenient excuse for a bathing suit. Nothing justified the stilettos, except that every title holder, whether Miss Christmas Tree or Miss Tramp Steamer, wore them. In her photograph, Miss Shoetree might sit on a chair surrounded by countless pairs of shoes, some stilettos, some not, and in this way Miss Shoetree proved herself to be more well-rounded than the others, a girl willing to be associated with flats.
My mother sought bigger titles, those that could get a girl closer to Miss California. Miss California was a preliminary requirement for Miss America, and Miss America was my mother’s destiny. As someone who possessed destiny, she preferred to hold the crowns of places, not things. Miss San Fernando Valley was fine. Miss Advertising was not. Miss Southern California Motorcyclist was borderline. She preferred Miss San Jose, Miss Los Angeles, Miss Santa Cruz. She claimed never to win a local title, claimed not to be the sort of girl who won “Miss Real Cool” or “Miss Plumbing”, to pose in front of an open refrigerator beneath a sign declaring, “Gas is Dependable!”, the glint of her smile suggesting yes, it most certainly was. Years later, as a teenager, I referenced my mother as “Miss Real Cool” to my friends, not without a mean pulsing irony, the variety of which I’d learned from her. In my imagination, I crowned her countless times, titles I dreamt: Miss Facelift, Miss Inept Mother, Miss Impatient of Touch, Miss Mayonnaise, Miss Deny the Past, Miss Italian-Sauced Fish.
In 1970, she was still beautiful, and she whisked this beauty to Santa Barbara for long weekends to care for her sick mother. During this time, my mother softened like butter left too long on the counter, though she was not soft enough to appreciate a man’s being dressed in women’s clothes. She was not soft enough to believe that men were not, simply, men. Women were not, simply, women. In my mother’s strict parlance: You were a man, or you were a woman. You were beautiful, or you were ugly. You were a child, or you were an adult. You were nothing simultaneously.
I saw my father dressed as a woman late one Saturday night; or it was early Sunday morning. I’d been tucked into bed hours before by my father, who still tucked me into bed every night even when my mother was present. He knew I liked the covers tucked lightly, not suffocatingly, around me; knew I preferred the soothing thrum of a fan on the nightstand, a Jackson family tradition my mother turned her nose at. “Can’t sleep without his fan!” she said. “Ridiculous!” That night, my father kissed my cheek, bidding me to my sweet dreams, and his disappearing face in the lessening space before the door closed appeared sad, as if he understood his lack of control regarding the happiness of my dreams, of my happiness in general. He understood my dreams might easily be sad. Knew, in fact, I might easily be sad. There might be no joy to salvage.
All haphazard, damning discoveries begin innocently. In this case, discovery began with a haggard cough. I stumbled downstairs for water, should have turned immediately left into the kitchen, but sidetracked by the residual light of the television at this odd hour, I paused outside the living room. My father sat on the couch, the floor lamp trained on him like a spotlight trained on actors in a play. He wore my mother’s nightgown. My mother, claiming to be modest, wore a housecoat over her nightgown when, each morning, she ate her Stella D’oro breakfast treats and sipped her coffee, but I’d seen her wearing this particular nightgown as she whisked herself from her bedroom to the bathroom, or sat on the edge of her bed talking to her ailing mother in jagged whispers on the telephone. Yes, this was my mother’s nightgown, sheer pink and subtly floral with a darker pink slip beneath, cap sleeves edged in lace, a demure lace neckline with a neat little bow tied at its center. The nightgown did not actually fit my father. The lace-capped sleeves strained his biceps, the tightened elastic reminiscent of tourniquets used to stanch bleeding. Unable to button the nightgown’s delicate pearl buttons running down its front, he’d left them open, exposing his legs, crossed like a woman’s, and the quickest glimpse of women’s dainty panties. He wore a ladies’ brassiere, this brassiere grappling to hold an expansive foam chest, heaving slightly. He wore a dark unkempt wig, glittery eyeshadow, a careless smear of bright red lipstick, what looked like fake lashes. He wore one of my mother’s pageant sashes. Not Miss Santa Clara County, Not Miss Southern California. Miss Industry, it declared, red letters emblazoned on white satin, a local title, insignificant.
My mother would have been horrified by my discovery of this title, by the searing proof of her ability to lie over seemingly minuscule matters. Ever-attuned to the minutiae comprising womanhood, she would have been horrified on innumerable counts by my father’s inattention to detail: The ill-fitting nightgown, his too-rouged cheeks and crooked bosom, something resembling an inadvertent ink stain on his face, as if he’d worked a crossword with a leaking pen and had thoughtfully, forgetfully rubbed his cheek. Twelve, across: a five-letter word for a malicious, overbearing woman. The minutiae comprising womanhood gave my mother a feeling of largesse, and here my father had bastardized this largesse, rendered it the size of a postage stamp. I watched as he smoothed the pageant sash, petting it like an animal seeking solace in my father’s wide lap.
On the television, sounds and images rose up from a movie I identified, having once watched it with him on a bored afternoon. Attack of the Giant Leeches. Interminable seconds passed. I forgot my desperate need for water. Turned, nearly fell.
In the morning, he was my father again. Man, possessor of polyester pants and an Adam’s apple. In the kitchen’s dulled fall light, it did not appear that a lacy capped sleeve could fit around my father’s bicep. And yet, I’d seen proof that it did. When I slid into a kitchen chair, my father stood before the range making pancakes. He refused to believe Aunt Jemima’s cheerful urging that we should “just add water.” He used his mother’s recipe, which had been her mother’s before her, which had been her mother’s before her. He brewed for us dark cups of coffee and I drank mine black for the first time, needing the hard, dark edges of it, its bitterness cleansing my insides, and together we ate pancakes and glistening strips of bacon, listened as we ate to a football game on my grandmother’s old radio, the San Francisco Forty Niners vs. the Baltimore Colts. I cherished this ritual on the weekends my mother was gone, a ritual involving no one but my father and myself, except that on this morning, the ritual felt stained. I sensed something pressing heavily upon us, a dark sense of foreboding and of change.
I was unusually silent. My father pressed his large hand against my forehead. He pressed it against each of my cheeks but detected nothing, no notable warmness, no evident sickness. He seemed to want to say something. I waited for him to say something, but he said nothing at all and we abandoned ourselves silently to our pancakes and the shrill plays unfolding on the radio, the pretense that everything was exactly as it had been, though we knew, each of us, that it was not.
Months later, my mother came into my bedroom engulfed in a cloud of Chamade Guerlain. She sat on my bed, so near I felt claustrophobic, her face pinkened by the reflection of the pink canopy above her. Pinkened in the afternoon light, she leaned forward and closed the history book I was reading. I had a terrible feeling then, the feeling people must get immediately after someone tells them they should brace themselves for bad news. My mother had not mentioned bad news, only balanced herself on the edge of the bed, staring at me with a more thoughtful expression than she typically had. Her hair possessed an uncanny volume.
She said, “We’re leaving tomorrow.”
“Okay,” I said, and had no idea what she meant.
“I mean it,” she said, her voice shrill, sounding like something plummeting abruptly from the sky, or like a firecracker on its steady path to bursting. “We’re leaving. I’m done. Done.”
“Where are we going?” I asked this with the practiced patience of my father.
“Santa Barbara.”
“To visit Grandmother?”
She shook her head. “To live with her.”
“What about school?” I asked.
“You’ll make it up.”
“What about Father?”
A long period of dismal silence passed. Sounds amplified. Inside this deafening silence, I thought I heard the goldfish in the bowl beside my bed, breathing beneath the water. His gills wavered, turned inside and out. He nudged the bowl, nose meeting glass, and I imagined he felt relieved to find it there. I imagined goldfish released into the ocean where they swam for miles, expecting to meet glass. Never meeting it, they felt panicked, depressed. Their lives, refusing to be contained, had spiraled beyond control.
Time in this moment appeared interminable.
My mother broke the silence like a child breaking the Thanksgiving wishbone. “Your father isn’t coming. He doesn’t know we’re going. I’m only telling you so it isn’t a complete surprise.” She examined her fingernails while she spoke. My mother preferred red nails, but these were painted an anomalous fuchsia, a color I learned to hate, a hatred pinpointed to this precise moment in time.
“It was a complete surprise,” I said. “It is a complete surprise.” I swiped salty tears with the side of my hand while my mother regarded me with a leveled expression. Soon I wept soundlessly, a reaction I’d seen on television but had never experienced. I was twelve, but these were the tears of a forty-year-old woman, emanating from a place inside me I hadn’t known existed, tapping into reservoirs of sadness I’d stashed unknowingly. I felt an ache in the arch of my foot, in my right kneecap, my chin, all possible origins of this sadness.
“This isn’t the reaction I expected,” my mother said.
The swell of tears inside my mouth softened the consonants. “What did you expect?”
“I thought you’d be smart enough to understand that this is the best thing for us.”
“I don’t,” I said. “I do not. I am smart. It’s the best thing for you.”
My mother said, “You’re the child. There are things you shouldn’t know.”
“I’m twelve,” I said. “I’m no child.”
“Your father is an incredibly sick man. He isn’t safe to be around.”
“Is he contagious?” I asked, to anger her. “Should he be quarantined?”
“Sick,” she said, her face shifting, becoming ugly. “Here.” She tapped the side of her head. “Like your grandmother and great-aunt.”
“Is this because he wore your nightgown?”
My mother looked momentarily askance before regaining her composure, something I am sure she experienced in pageants, that terrifying moment when the interviewer asked her a political question whose answer she had no comprehension of, the moment before she gathered herself and fumbled the answer by responding to a different question whose answer she’d memorized. The interviewer might ask her if she thought the role of family was important in today’s crumbling society, and my mother might confusedly spin something about the necessity of kindness, the bringing of baked goods to the neighbors’ houses, while the audience looked on, confused: This girl standing on the stage before them understood nothing about the importance of family.
“It isn’t natural,” my mother said.
“It’s nothing.”
“It isn’t what I signed up for.”
“You signed up to be married. ’Til Death Do Us Part. You can buy a new nightgown. Women wear pants. You’re wearing pants.” I felt defiant, like a bristling and rabid raccoon.
“Yes,” she said, her voice softer than I’d known it to be. This softness frightened me. At twelve, I did not understand that this softness was her last ta-da! in a bag of tricks, her final bit of arsenal, wheedling. “You’re too young to understand. There’s more to it. Your father drinks a great deal. You’ve seen this. And when he drinks, he’s dangerous. He’s violent. He doesn’t mean to be,” she said and began crying. I had never seen my mother cry. She had never been a crier. Perhaps she’d been trained not to cry, had had it ingrained inside her that tears ruined makeup, ruined chances. You didn’t get to be Miss California by crying your way to the top. My mother didn’t cry over babies, never cried at weddings or funerals, didn’t mingle happiness with tears. Mesmerized, I watched her cry. These were different tears than my own. These required delicate dabbing with a tissue, left dainty pecks of mascara as evidence on this tissue, reminiscent of a trail leading to certain ambush. Her right hand curiously held her limp left wrist, as if something had broken inside it. I remembered a bruise she’d had weeks before, a gangly blue and purple mark on her thigh akin to an image in a Rorschach test and which she’d dismissed.
“Has he hit you?” I asked, and years later I would be angry at myself for having bit, for taking the bait she offered.
My mother cried with a heaving breast. She’d been beautiful enough to be an actress but had settled for pageantry. I’d not known she possessed any talent in this regard; her pageant talent had never been recitation, though she prized elocution in general. My mother’s talent had been tapping. I’d seen her old tap shoes hanging in the closet, had run my hands over their beckoning bottoms. I’d looked at her in wonderment that the woman before me could have possibly tapped, could have ever been a tapping woman, could have possessed the remote exuberance to accomplish such a thing. This had been the origin of my not understanding the confused gaps between who people were and the people they’d once presumably been, the people they inexplicably became.
“Debra Marie,” she said in a voice constructed of tissue, a wisp, a voice capable of proving sound translucent. My mother took me inside her slight, pale arms, pressed my face into her chest and the approximate locale of her heart, whose beating I strained to hear. Her arms emanated a subtly vibrating tension.
Many people will tell you that an embrace is a demonstration of kindness. But it is also true that kindness can betray something lethal. Kindness happens when someone knows they must wrestle you into adequate submission. When someone, in fact, understands that kindness is their only trick for your defenses.
That night, my mother cooked a special dinner.
Typically, her cooking involved slapdashery, dishes assembled on a lark, thrown into the oven and forgotten until the timer jarred her from her reverie, reminded her that such quotidian things as casseroles existed, demanded consideration. Her skills involved combining and placing, adding and pouring. The distinction between simmering and boiling confounded her. Recipes instructing her to braise, poach, brine, truss, deglaze, caramelize, or sweat struck fear in her maligned heart. Occasionally she shaped various meats into balls never quite achieving roundness, got her soft hands messier than she liked. She avoided recipes asking politely that she chop onion or garlic, or else omitted these ingredients entirely, saying, “It’s just onion.” She had no use for Julia Child, at whom she stared with derision whenever she stepped into the television’s frame. “Doesn’t she have anything useful to do?”
“She’s cooking delicious food,” I said. “What’s more useful than that?”
“No human needs such fancy food. No human needs so many calories! Her voice,” my mother said, “pinches my skull.”
“Not your heart,” I said. “Never your unpinchable heart.”
But she was not listening.
My mother cycled through her daily recipes with neat alacrity, never veering from the alloted course, a recipe for every day of the week: Monday, Italian-Sauced Fish. Tuesday, Scalloped Deviled Ham. Wednesday, Yam and Sausage Skillet. Thursday, Oriental Casserole. Friday, Bologna Noodle Bake. Saturday, Smoked Beef and Macaroni. Sundays, she demonstrated a modicum of improvisation, wavering between Mexican Supper Casserole, Mexican Casserole, and Mexicali Casserole, minuscule distinction dependent on whether canned chicken or canned sausage had gone on sale at the grocery store. Occasionally, in a moment of either grandiose aspiration or residual guilt, having been raised Catholic and taught to rely on it like a crutch, my mother attempted Creamy Ham Towers or Seafood Bake, the latter providing sophistication by route of canned crab and shrimp, condensed canned cream of celery soup; but generally she stuck to the rotation, her life, our lives, ticking away in their dependable manners with the sound of a bomb counting down. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Many years later, I asked whether she might have effected change by simply cooking Italian-Sauced Fish not on Monday, but on Tuesday or Wednesday. What if she had not made Italian-Sauced Fish at all but made, for instance, the so‑called Dublin Dilly Hot Dish? My mother, no longer a beauty, stared at me with a hollow expression. I wanted to stuff something inside her gaping mouth, possibly the curried shrimp salad or scallop toss that had been the mainstay, during our previous lifetime, of Saturday company luncheons.
On this day, Monday, my mother made Pampered Beef Fillets. This selection seemed an admission of profound guilt since Monday was, actually, Italian-Sauced Fish Day. She’d made a side dish, Carrots Piquant, as well as dessert, the concept of which generally horrified her, a woman terrified of superfluous caloric consumption. She’d made something called King Kamehameha’s Pie. “Named after Hawaii’s last king!” she said with aluminum enthusiasm, a tidbit recounted in the cookbook’s blocky print and not knowledge she actually possessed. I’d watched too many episodes of The French Chef with my father, who believed Julia Child’s voice a lullaby, to appreciate King Kamehameha’s Pie. We’d watched the baking of apple tatin with its spiraling mosaic of apples, the careful preparation of mousse au chocolat and creme caramel. My mother’s King Kamehameha’s Pie looked pedestrian, its filling as brilliant as a noon sun, though certainly less beckoning. She nodded at its non-beckoning brilliance, pleased with herself. My mother, an ever-critical woman involving the most mundane things – the shape of a woman’s eyebrows, or the not-matching and thus problematic finishes on her gold jewelry – had turned her head to the simple fact that the syrupy filling in her King Kamehameha’s Pie had not thickened in the manner God intended.
To pamper beef filets, a home chef was instructed to first trim, then saute mushrooms in butter until golden brown and bubbling. She was then supposed to brown the steaks on both sides before placing the filets on heavy foil, topping each with “Royal Mushroom Sauce” and a single mushroom crown. (“A single mushroom crown?” I asked. “How very generous.” “Please,” my mother said. “I’m trying to concentrate. This demands concentration.”) The home chef was then to twist the foil around each steak, cooking it inside a very hot oven, 12 minutes to achieve a rare temperature, 18 minutes for well done, except that my mother forgot the timer and abandoned the steaks inside the oven for nearly an hour. By the time she’d realized what she’d done, the kitchen had filled with smoke. The steaks, when she opened the tinfoil to examine them, were dried, hideous things.
“You sure pampered them!” I said as my mother fanned the air with an oven mitt. I’d forgotten, already, her meager hug. Hatred for her sizzled beneath my skin, took up residence in the delicate places inside me: My spleen, my liver, my intestines. My pallid, malformed heart.
My mother did something then she’d never done. Throwing the oven mitt onto the counter, she stalked across the kitchen to where I stood and slapped me across the right cheek. This slap proved so gratifying to her she slapped it again.
“The other cheek feels neglected,” I said.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t you dare.”
“Don’t what?” I clutched my cheek, filled these words with mustered hatred.
“Don’t you dare mock me. I’m your mother,” she said. “Don’t forget this.”
“I’ve tried!” I said. “I can’t! I hate you!”
For the second time in twelve years, in a matter of hours, I watched my mother cry. The first set of tears had not prepared me for the second. These were not the carefully administered tears of a beauty queen, those slight, regulated things occurring when a large crown was placed, finally, on her head, delicate drops squeezed from the corner of an eye. These tears were actual, emphatic. She abandoned herself to them. I understood then why she never cried: Crying made her an exceptionally ugly woman. Her mouth contorted, unable to decide its shape. Her jaw stuck out, reminiscent of a horse’s mouth in the moment before it grabs a sugar cube. It appeared dislocated, as if someone, in a fit of anger and tired of her insolence, had finally just punched her in the jaw. Something about its abrupt angle made me join in. We cried together, the gnashing sounds of our tears filling up the kitchen until, exhausted, we sat in silence listening to the ticking of the clock and the steady dripdripdrip of the faucet my father hadn’t fixed.
“Why don’t you set the table,” my mother said finally.
“So we can eat together?” I asked. “Like a family?” My pronouncement of the word family contained a great deal of contempt, a pail set out to collect every drop of it.
“Set the table, please,” she said.
“Why? There’s nothing to actually eat.”
“You heard me,” my mother said, and I saw that unlike other women who cried, their faces appearing red and swollen, marking them as criers, there were no residual stains of her outburst. She cleaned up well for someone who cried so hideously. It suggested my mother possessed a secret life, a sad crying life, of which I knew nothing. Something strange, elusive, existed inside her. I studied her for an indication of it.
“Stop staring,” she said, “and set the table.”
My father came home to a still-smoky kitchen, the thumb-printed flatware lined neatly on the table.
“What’s all this?” he shucked his blazer into my mother’s receptive hands.
“I was trying,” she said, “to make something special, but it seems I’m incapable.”
“It’s Monday. What’s the occasion?” my father asked. He added, “I like Italian-Sauced Fish.”
“You’re the occasion.”
“She ruined it,” I said, my voice as dull as the flatware.
“Yes, well, I tried to pamper the beef filets!” She’d appropriated my joke, wrangled it into something useful. She laughed her airy laughter, gave a casual tilt of her head. I hated her. She said, “I guess I can’t really cook!”
“Of course you can cook,” my father said. “You cook every day.”
“She’s terrible,” I said. “We all know it. We all have tongues with taste buds. No one sliced them off in the middle of the night while we were sleeping.”
“Hey!” my father said. “If you can’t – ”
“I can’t say something nice,” I interrupted. “So I guess I won’t say it.”
“All right, then,” my father said. “In this house, we offend no one.”
My father salvaged the situation. He would have grilled burgers, but no meat had been thawed. Tomorrow was Tuesday. We could have eaten Scalloped Deviled Ham a day early, despite its half hour baking time; my father was a patient man. He opened various cupboards, opened and closed them again. The ingredients for pancakes appeared on the counter.
“This is how we fend when you’re with your mother,” he said.
“You know how to do this?” my mother asked.
“We eat pancakes every Sunday when you’re away,” I said with derision. “It’s what we do.”
My mother stared back with darkened eyes.
“We have our own secrets,” I said.
“Oh!” my mother said, this word plump with sarcasm.
“Not that many! Nothing important.” My father, concerned as always for my mother’s feelings, abandoned the mixing of dry ingredients to kiss her forehead. I watched the flurry of flour.
My father mixed wet ingredients. He heated the griddle and oiled it, spooned batter onto it. I watched with sadness as he flipped pancakes with ease and I did not believe this was the last time my father would cook pancakes. I did not believe my mother and I were leaving in the morning, did not believe my father was a sick or violent man, or that my mother needed anything beyond attention. She could not have meant what she said; a woman couldn’t eat the pancakes of a man who’d hurt her. A woman couldn’t eat the pancakes of a man she was leaving the following morning. A woman couldn’t lead a man so astray, could not subject her daughter to the knowledge of a last supper. I watched as my mother washed the dishes my father had dirtied, turning them with whimsy inside the suds. Trapped inside some dreamy state, she scrubbed the bottom of the same bowl in meditation. She was, had to be, bluffing. A last supper could not be, would not be, pancakes and Piquant Carrots, King Kamehameha’s Pie. I considered death row, the final meals men requested to eat. Surely it was none of this. Last suppers didn’t involve an ever-ordinary discussion about moon flight, Apollo 13 floating in the dark night sky above us, carrying its three men to Fra Mauro. My father was entranced by all of it, but especially space flight’s most mundane details. How did the astronauts use the restroom? What did they eat?
“All this astronaut stuff is old hat,” my mother said, but when we finally sat down to dinner, my father served us pancakes and told us what he knew. He’d read, for instance, that on Apollo 11 the astronauts ate thermo-stabilized cheddar cheese spread and hotdogs, spoon bowl packets containing such precious delectables as sausage patties and pork with scalloped potatoes, chicken stew. They had, for instance, been provided fifteen cups of coffee for each astronaut on the mission, not quite two cups a day (not enough!). How did these men function, perform their difficult tasks, without caffeine? How did they perform such tasks without sleep? Because who, under these circumstances, could sleep?
On Apollo 11 there had been, my father told us, shrimp cocktail, the shrimp chosen individually for its ability to squeeze through a food packet.
“Shrimp cocktail!” My mother exclaimed, her voice a feigned shimmer of interest. I watched as she did not eat her pancakes.
“The very first meal eaten by man on the moon was bacon cubes coated with gelatin to combat crumbs!” my father said.
“Really!” my mother said.
“Even the moon men like their bacon.”
“Webster, love,” she said. “Bacon is terrible for us.”
“No,” my father said. “It’s essential to our happiness!”
“You can’t be happy if you’re dead.” My mother, gathering plates, kissed my father’s cheek en route to the sink. She said, “I want you to live for a long, long time, love. I want our lives to be long and happy,” she said, these words the most magnificent lie I’ve ever witnessed, and I knew it was true and we were leaving. Or perhaps it wasn’t a lie at all. She had not said, I want our lives together to be long and happy. She had not said anything about our collective lives, the whole of them. A shimmer of something I could not understand rippled through us; the time for action came and went. I have spent many years – thirty of them – wondering why I did not arrest this moment. Why didn’t I say something? I sat ripping my paper napkin into countless pieces that a bird might use to construct a nest. My father blithely took more pancakes, poured more syrup. He spoke of crumbs in space, their damning ability to seek small crevices, clog machinery.
My mother returned with King Kamehameha’s Pie; it seemed we no longer could avoid it.
“Beautiful!” my father said with a nod towards it, as if it were as precious as Julia Child’s apple tatin, apple tatin’s kissing cousin by the simple fact that it contained apples. My mother cut into it and the pie’s filling seeped out like lava, like its own natural disaster or liquid from a festering wound, making King Kamehameha’s precious pie nearly impossible to eat. My father plucked out the apples before performing the smallest bit of generosity that in its smallness possessed profound magnitude. He poured the phosphorescent liquid into a glass, scraping the plate to procure what he could. He held the glass up in a toast.
“To longitude and happiness!” my father said, raising his glass up, up.
“Hear, hear,” my mother said, because it seemed expected of her. “Hear, hear.”
Jenn Scott’s short stories have appeared in Bellingham Review, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Seattle Review, and Confrontation.