by Kelly Harms
This kitchen is a palace. It’s the Taj Mahal, and Versailles, and the Hearst Castle all wrapped into one shining shrine dedicated to the culinary arts. I am fairly sure that if I could just be left alone in here to my own devices, I would die and ascend to heaven. Where I would sit at the right hand of Julia Child.
First, there are the appliances. The vast side-by-side fridge that fits everything imaginable twice over. The two ovens, both of which can crank up to 550 degrees in fifteen minutes. The two-drawer dishwasher large enough for a family of seven—no, eight! And the stovetop. Six gleaming gas burners set flush into the counter like it grew right there in the granite. And over the stovetop is the best feature of all: a hood! I have never had a kitchen with a hood before, not ever. When I look at the hood I can actually hear the sound of sizzling meat, searing right there on a big hot grill pan, forming a delicious crisp crust and perfectly rare meat inside. Not filling the room with smoke, not setting off the fire alarm, just sizzling away like it’s nothing at all. A big juicy filet, a cast-iron pan, and a healthy wallop of brandy: Steak Diane, sans fire department.
Then there are the countertops. The gleaming blue granite countertops extend in every direction, as far as the eye can see. I’m not sure there is anything I know how to cook that could require this much counter space. Maybe if I was making pasta, pie, sushi, and fudge all at the same time—then I might use up all the counter space. But it’s hard to imagine that scenario coming to fruition, short of my opening some sort of fusion restaurant. And sitting on the countertops are all manner of modern convenience. Food processor, stand mixer, blender, espresso machine. I right away took the bread machine out to the garage where it wouldn’t be in the way, along with all the geegaws that the designers spread about to make the place look fancy—iron antler candlesticks, a bamboo cookbook holder, a glass trifle dish full of polished rocks. All things that would be hard to clean if covered in, say, a thin coating of splattered vichyssoise. But I must admit I have been eyeing the pressure cooker with some interest. What would happen, I am wondering, if I put short ribs in there?
I close my eyes and try to think of something I would want in my kitchen but would never go out and buy. Copper pots and pans? Enameled Dutch ovens? A diamond knife sharpener? They are all here, and they brought friends. Yes, I suppose I could have bought any of these things for myself in the past out of Ned’s life insurance money, but then how would I be sure I had enough in the bank for a lifetime of beef Wellington and paella?
Or, perhaps, more honestly, how would I keep ignoring that money and pretending it—and the reason for it—wasn’t there?
Now, for the love of this kitchen and Aunt Midge, I am going to have to crack that nest egg open. Though I have visited every bridal salon in a thirty-mile radius to deposit my résumé, I’ve received very little actual interest. I have to assume it has something to do with all my stammering. At a little storefront in Damariscotta, the elegant British owner took mercy on me and offered to let me take home a few bridesmaid’s dresses that need hemming and the straps shortened, but here is no way I can support the two of us (I am not counting Nean, as she will be leaving soon) and pay the enormous property taxes on this house with in-home hemming jobs. I just have to hope that they’ll see my good work and hire me full-time. Until then, I might as well enjoy my kitchen.
These thoughts pull me out of bed much too early in the morning. The wood floor in my little bedroom is cold, so I put on my shearling slippers and pad downstairs and find the kitchen exactly as I left it last night. Pristine. The sink is gleaming in the early light and the air smells clean and just a little lemony. The spotless blue counters and matching backsplash welcome me, say, “Good morning, Janey. How about some coffee?”
Thank you very much, Kitchen, I would like some coffee. And maybe some made-from-scratch cinnamon rolls. What day is it?
It’s Thursday, I realize with a start. Are you allowed to bake cinnamon rolls on a Thursday? I’m not sure you are. Thursdays are toast, or maybe a bowl of oatmeal if you’re ravished. Nobody makes cinnamon rolls on a Thursday. It’s against the laws of nature. I really need to find a job soon, or I’m going to lose all hope of order in my life.
As if to prove my point, Nean materializes out of nowhere. It’s not even 6:15 a.m. and the wanted woman I’m living with is awake. These last few days since we’ve given her the okay to stick around, she’s slept until noon and then come into the kitchen to eat everything that isn’t nailed down. But today the sun is barely up and she is standing in the wide entrance to the kitchen, wearing see-through cotton shorts and a skin-tight camisole. Her hair is sticking out in weird angles all over the place, including in front of her eyes. She yawns.
I’m annoyed. I was just about to commune with my new kitchen. In private. Maybe she will just get a glass of water and go back up to bed. Maybe she will go outside and be hit by a truck.
“Is there any coffee?” she asks.
“No,” I say. But I am holding a mug of coffee, plain as day, hot enough that the steam and fragrance are wafting all over the place like a Folgers advertisement. She ignores me and shuffles over to the coffeemaker to help herself. Then she crosses to the fridge and takes out the cream, sniffs it, and then pours half a cup into her mug so it is roughly the shade of a camel. Now go away, I think.
“Whatcha making?” she asks.
“Nothing. Go away.” I am irritated just looking at her.
“The oven’s on.”
So it is. I might have preheated it just a little, just in case someone needed some muffins or a frittata in a hurry. Definitely not for cinnamon rolls.
“I’m cleaning it.” I am a terrible liar.
Nean crosses over to the top oven and looks at the setting. “It’s not set to ‘clean.’ It’s set to three fifty.” she says. “Are you baking something without me?”
“What do you mean without you? This is my kitchen.”
“You said you were going to teach me how to bake, remember? When I made those cookies?”
I roll my eyes heavenward. “I said no such thing.”
“It was implied.”
It’s interesting that the person who is most annoying to me in the whole entire universe is also the person who shares my first and last name. “Go away,” I say. It comes out really whiney and petulant.
“Come on. Just let me watch. Think how handy it would be if I could bake things for you.”
Huh. She has me there. I love to cook, and cooks need baked goods from time to time, but I don’t actually love to bake. I like slopping and stirring and tasting and the smell of warming olive oil. I do not enjoy trying to figure out whether the item in my canister marked FLOUR is all-purpose bleached, all-purpose unbleached, cake, bread, or pastry flour. Good bakers use things like scales and pH strips and know what’s in cream of tartar. They are always standing around holding a pizza peel and looking world-weary. I eye the wall next to the oven, where an alder pizza peel hangs like wall art, then picture Nean, stooping over a 450-degree oven at five a.m., sweating and tired, hair covered in flour.
“Fine. We’re making cinnamon rolls, but then you have to leave me alone.” It’s a win-win, I tell myself. “This might take awhile.”
Cinnamon rolls use a yeast dough, so I take out the jar from the fridge and get Nean going on blooming. She stares at the Pyrex glass of warm water and yeast like she expects ducklings to hatch, and when I get that warm bakery smell that tells me the yeast are alive and ready to start their belching, I show her how to add them to the flour, and then the eggs and butter and buttermilk and absolutely embarrassing amounts of sugar. I give her the option of the stand mixer but she wants to knead by hand, so I set her to it on the large butcher block island and get a bowl oiled up for the dough to rise in.
She is just calling me over to check the dough’s elasticity when I hear a piercing series of screams from the other side of the house. They’re coming from the sliding glass door that leads to the pool. I race across the house in a p
anic, imagining as I run that Aunt Midge is drowning in the pool or has gotten her hair caught in one of those current jets or is otherwise deeply endangered.
So when I stop suddenly in the open sliding glass door and see her standing up on her own two feet unscathed and clutching a towel to her breast I am greatly relieved. Whatever has happened, she still has all four appendages. It can’t be that bad.
“What is it? What happened?” I ask.
Aunt Midge utters another piercing cry in response, so I make a move toward her, but before I can get very far she rushes over to me and pushes us both inside the house. “Close the door! Lock it!” she tells me. “There’s a perverted ax murderer out there!”
Well, I didn’t expect her to say that. “What?”
“A man with a chain saw!” She is panting hard and shivering at the same time, so I try to get her robe wrapped around her, but it is hard with her dramatic hand gestures. “He came out of nowhere! He must have been peeping on me while I was swimming! Naked!”
I am looking at my great-aunt naked right this moment, and something about this scenario strikes me as odd. “Are you sure?” I ask her. “I don’t see anyone out there.”
“He ran for it when I started screaming.” She grabs my shoulders and shakes me hard. “I think he was planning to slice me up with his chain saw, and now he’s still out there somewhere!” A theatrical silence falls.
And then the doorbell rings. La Cucaracha, again. We have to find out how to change that if we’re going to keep having these dramatic moments.
“That must be him!” Aunt Midge cries. “Where do we keep the shotgun?”
I look at her sideways. “We don’t have a shotgun—that I know about. I’ll go see who it is. This is probably some big misunderstanding…”
Aunt Midge clutches my arm, terror in her eyes. “Be careful, Janey,” she tells me, before roping the sash of her robe tight around her like its a karate belt. “Don’t open the door unless it’s someone we know. If he threatens you, call the police.”
She scoots off, locking windows and doors around the house as she goes. I move to the hallway, preparing myself as best I can for human interaction, but find the door already standing open wide and Nean inviting in a young blond man wearing overalls, holding garden clippers and looking about as dangerous as Mr. Rogers. He is clearly incredibly spooked. This must be our chain-saw murderer. What a relief.
“Holy shit, Nean,” he’s saying, and I can tell they are not meeting for the first time. “She scared the living daylights out of me. I thought you told me no one would be awake at this hour.” Oh, hello. I should have known Nean was involved in this. I step back out of sight.
“I’m so sorry, J.J.! She doesn’t usually get up this early,” says Nean, and I find myself incredulous at her bald lie. “If I had known she’d be in the pool, I would have warned you to stay clear.”
That little capricious … bitch! I’m going to take away her cinnamon rolls!
“I was just trimming the hedges like you asked,” J.J. continues. “But then I heard someone in the pool and wanted to make my presence known so I didn’t scare anyone, you know? So I crawled through to the other side to give the heads up. I had no idea she’d be so … naked. And she screams so loud…” J.J. shakes his head, and I can’t help it, I start to giggle at the thought of this strapping suntanned youth innocently emerging through the hedges, garden shears in hand, to find a naked eighty-eight-year-old broad having her morning splash in front of God and everyone. The giggle becomes an unstoppable guffaw as I picture the look on Aunt Midge’s face when she told me he had a chain saw, and my hiding spot is exposed. Nean and J.J. come around the corner when they hear me.
Nean sees me trying to hold it in and starts laughing too, and her laugh is loud and snorty, and only makes me laugh harder, so Aunt Midge comes into the front hall to see what on earth is going on. She takes one look at J.J., with his dopey good looks and shocked expression and pretty soon the three of us girls are bent over with tears in our eyes howling. I can’t stop giggling and gasping for air until I realize I might actually pee my pants and run off to the bathroom to stop an accident. While I’m in there I hear Nean introducing J.J. to Aunt Midge through chortles and snorts, and J.J. stammering out a heartfelt apology that only makes them both laugh harder.
I’m so overcome by the silliness of it all that I almost forget to be afraid of J.J. Almost. But when I open the bathroom door I feel that familiar hesitance return and wish, not for the first time, that I could be like everyone else. No hives, no stuttering, just one normal person meeting another for the first time.
“J.J., this is Janey,” says Aunt Midge between giggles when I emerge. He sticks his hand out to shake mine and I feel my arms start to get prickly. “J.J. is our gardener, Nean tells me.”
I keep my arms at my side but give him a nice big smile. I’m sweating uncontrollably, but it’s a hot morning. Maybe no one will notice. “Nice to meet you,” I say, my voice surprisingly clear.
“Nean tells me he was employed by the Home Sweet Home Network until we won the house. I’m thinking we should keep him on. There’s just too much out there for us to take care of on our own, and he knows the place already.”
All faces look to me expectantly, and I notice Nean’s is especially bright. She’s already invested in this J.J. character being around a lot, which makes me want to say no, but the idea of mowing that vast lawn is slightly less appealing than the idea of annoying Nean.
“Sure.” I say. “But come the winter, there might not be that much for him to do around here.” Not to mention we’ll be broke by then.
“No problem,” says J.J., very, very quickly. “Let’s just plan on me sticking around through August. Then we can take it from there.”
Nean grins, and dammit, but her smile is infectious. “Sounds good,” I tell J.J., and then excuse myself to the bedroom to put on a long-sleeved shirt and some itch ointment. The hives are killing me. As I leave I hear Aunt Midge tell him he’s going to have to stay clear of the tall hedges from 6:00 until 8:00 a.m. “That’s when I swim every day,” she says, and I smile to myself to think that Nean’s been so incredibly busted.
* * *
That afternoon, after Nean and J.J. have decimated a tray of cinnamon rolls and wandered off to some nearby put-in to cool their feet in the water, Aunt Midge starts working on me to go into town again. She wants to meet with someone at the homeless shelter about my cooking, but the whole thing makes me very uncomfortable. I’m usually cooking for eight, not for a hundred, and I don’t like the idea of these poor people being subjected to tiny portions of whatever it is I feel like cooking that day. More to the point, the whole thing feels like too much pressure.
But there’s no talking to her. I give in, making her promise to let me stay in the car, and we head north on the long cape, through the pine trees and past the stone wall where I had my little episode in front of Noah. Just seeing the spot makes my face turn hot with embarrassment, and I find myself hoping that I never see the guy again. It would be more than my epidermis could handle.
After we’ve been driving about twenty minutes, we pull into a little village called Little Pond. This town isn’t quaint like Damariscotta is, and, if not for Aunt Midge the human GPS, I might have driven right past it, it’s so small. Its tiny downtown is a crossroads with a stop sign and four bars, one on each corner. There’s also a bank, a Pizza Hut, and a little grocery store with about three cars in the parking lot.
Aunt Midge turns to me as we’re driving through and says, “World’s greatest fried clams.”
“Huh?”
“That bar,” she says, pointing to a place called the Drunken Sailor that looks absolutely disgusting. “They have a sign in the window.”
I look closely and see it: WORLD’S GREATEST FRIED CLAMS. $ 3.50 4.00 There is no visible substantiation for such a claim, nor are there any cars in the parking lot enjoying these famous clams.
“I’m skeptical,” I tell her.<
br />
“Let’s stop. It’s lunchtime, and I’m starving. And thirsty.”
It is indeed after one and we haven’t eaten anything but cinnamon rolls today. I don’t like eating out, though. It’s one fewer meal for me to cook, and there are usually too many people around, although that’s certainly not the issue here.
“I can fry clams,” I tell Aunt Midge, though I’ve never done it before. “I’ll pick some up on the way home from that fishmonger near the yarn store.”
“I’m hungry now,” she says. “And besides, no offense, but are you planning on making the world’s greatest fried clams? Because if not, it would be kind of a letdown, don’t you think?”
I sigh and pull into the parking lot of the Drunken Sailor. Inside, we find a surprisingly bright, cheery dining room with checkered vinyl tablecloths and faux Tiffany glass chandeliers from another time. My spirits lift. The place is completely empty.
“Sit down anywhere,” the pleasant-looking lady at the bar calls, so we move around to a table by the window. As soon as my butt hits the chair she shouts, “You two want clams?”
Aunt Midge looks at me and I nod, so she shouts back, “Two clams. And iced teas too, please.” She waits as long as it’s decent, then adds, “make mine a Long Island.”
I roll my eyes but smile indulgently. “Aunt Midge, are you going to drink yourself to death?” I ask. “You’re not getting any younger, you know.”
She narrows her eyes at me. “I’m as young as I feel. And besides, I haven’t held back from a tipple at any point in my life and look at me. I’m as strong as an ox.”
“No denying it. I just want you to stay that way for another thirty years.”
“Thirty years?” She shakes her head at me. “In that case I might need two Long Island iced teas.”
I’m about to tell her how many Long Island iced teas I’m going to need to get through thirty more years with her when the bell on the door jingles and who should walk in but Noah Macallister. All six feet of handsome and denim. I send a silent prayer of thanks that I haven’t had my clams yet. I think of how easily they would come back up if I had.
