Jane asks, “So what’s the new year coming up? Is it Ferret? Iguana? Year of the Miniature Donkey?” Not bunnies, not that small, Jane now thinking about the dust ponies nickering in her study.
“Year of the Tiger, dumbass. I’ve had my bath and washed my hair. Tomorrow, I’m having people over for New Year’s dinner and I’ve also volunteered to make pancakes for school.”
“Pancakes? Oh, right, Pancake Tuesday’s tomorrow.”
The Jane filter snares Shrove Tuesday in a public school? And, Pancakes cooked by a Helicopter Chef.
Jane swirls a piece of ice around the wall of her highball glass, as Pen describes the dishes she will prepare for her dinner guests.
“I phoned Mumma to find out how to steam a whole fish,” Pen laughs. “She was so mad that I called long distance for that. Of course you should know that traditionally, people serve fish for Chinese New Year’s, has to be a whole fish. Turns out I don’t have a pan large enough. I suppose I could wrap it in parchment and bake it in the oven. Or nuke pieces in the microwave. . .”
That’s uber traditional, Jane thinks, and then chides herself, “I thought you said the fish had to be whol —”
“Wait a minute,” Pen interrupts, “I have that fabulous stainless steel fish poacher I’ve never used. Oh my gosh, I forgot about that. Great, that’s what I’ll do.”
As Pen continues to describe her party menu, the Jane filter becomes clogged with woody broccoli and rubbery red pepper strips, chicken balls, crab and cream cheese wrapped in wonton wrappers, the whole mess covered in shiny thick sauce, the colour of a neon light. The pancakes and the words, Pig Pen, drown in congealing authentic ersatz Chinese cuisine.
Chinese New Year’s Eve. Jane feels a skiff of acid lightly coat the roof of her mouth — in a familial frenzy of end-of-the-year housecleaning, grade school Jane throws up after polishing the piano with aerosol furniture polish. The day before Chinese New Year’s Eve, the annual cleaning everything that wouldn’t move, and bathing everyone that would.
“What will Leo and I have tomorrow? Same as tonight, I suppose, leftover pasta with a salad,” says Jane. “I completely forgot.”
“Leftover pasta and a salad?” Pen laughs, “You kill me.”
No, You kill me, Jane thinks, Gut me like a fish.
Every year, the rules change. First, Mumma says, you can’t take a bath or wash your hair all day New Year’s Day, or you’ll wash away your good luck. Your house should be clean and tidy, and all your debts settled. You shouldn’t do any housework on the actual day, just stay at home with your family and try not to annoy each other too much. But one year, when smoky, beer-smelling Pen comes home from a date after midnight, the rule bends: you can shower on New Year’s Eve, even if it’s past midnight and into New Year’s day, as long as you haven’t gone to bed yet. Then, there’s the Eddie and Betty exception. When good friends, like Eddie and Betty Fein-Lo have a house party New Year’s Day and don’t know any better, especially when Eddie’s brother from Vancouver plans on bringing fresh prawns with him, iced in a Styrofoam cooler, you can go to their house, be modern and enjoy their prawns-in-winter hospitality. The rules change once more when Mumma finds out that Tom has been carrying a balance on his credit card.
“Mumma, how can there be an exception for credit card balances?”
When Jane confronts Mumma about how the rules always change, Mumma shrugs, “There isn’t a book. It’s just what I hear. You know. Different horses, different mouths.”
Jane has her own rules for Chinese New Year. It’s the one day of the year she doesn’t beat herself up for living at the bottom of a giant purse. Then, any New Year’s resolution that she had for the first of January she resurrects, fresh starts, the intervening period just a dress rehearsal. She also has an extra long and vigorous shower first thing in the morning, quite willing to risk washing her luck down the drain, if it means the chance to change her luck from bad to good.
“Pen, I guess my house will be the same as always,” Jane concedes.
“It sure the hell will be, with that attitude. You’ve got to step up. No wonder all the great cultural traditions in the world are fading.” The Jane filter catches, Like getting stoned in the West stairwell during study period in high school, Pen, that great tradition? And, So I’m on the hook personally for the crumbling of civilization because I’ve got stuff and a messy house. I like my stuff.
“If you were a mother, you’d get your act together. Like you’d have a choice. You’re not a baby anymore. Still need Mumma to bail you out? Grow up. Step up and get that damn house of yours organized. Look, I’m bringing the twins out this summer, you’ve got five months, and we’ll want to come visit on our way to the mountains.”
The telephone receiver transmits, blah, blah, sixteen to twenty for dinner blah, blah, sugar snap peas, blah, blah, promised to take the girls skating after school, blah, blah, will have to change the whole menu. Jane swirls her glass and thinks, what’s the secret Melting Ice Cube, why are you having more fun than me?
Pen annihilates the potential for any domestic disaster. She keeps her house, her life, and the twins highly organized. Jane pictures her sister giving each of the girls filing cabinets in the womb. File the man Stanley under D for daddy, cross-reference to mommy’s file H for husband.
“And because I’ve volunteered to cook pancakes at the school, I’m going to smell like pancakes all day long,” Pen whines.
Jane mouths, “Not after you’ve cooked fish,” then wonders whether that was out loud.
“Very funny.” Pen’s voice heats the blood in Jane’s face.
Oh well, Jane thinks, there’s bound to be errant outflow on a high volume day.
The phone’s ear piece radiates heat into Jane’s ear. Gotta go, blah, blah, Happy New Year, Jane hangs up the phone.
Quintessential Pen, that conversation. Jane tips her glass to lick the last drops of watery scotch from the nub of ice resting against her lip and the rim of the upturned glass. In Jane’s mind, Pen strives for and achieves perfect geometry — Pen’s double-pointed life stylus grounded at the exact point where she is at, the other end of the compass imbedded where she wants to be, Pen measures and draws the straightest line between the two points. She travels light and fast, keeping the line taut. Nothing gets in her way. Jane still feels the poke of Pen’s finger through the telephone, jabbing her repeatedly in the arm, get that, get that?
“Hi Mumma, it’s me, Jane.”
“Janie, what’s up? Why are you calling long distance?”
“Why didn’t you tell me it was Chinese New Year tomorrow when I talked to you last night?”
“What do you mean, why didn’t I tell you? Why didn’t I tell you it was winter? Why didn’t I tell you it was Christmas?”
“Well I didn’t know.”
“Hmmmm. Tomorrow is Chinese New Year.”
“Thanks. Thanks, Mumma. You know that Pen. She phoned me, wanted to know if I was ready, was my house clean, what I was cooking, was it authentic Chinese New Year food, as if she knows. Drives me nuts.”
“You’re not trying to cook a fish are you?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Good. Stinks up the whole house. So it’s traditional, p-u. Just remember, don’t do any housework on New Year’s Day.”
“Um-hmm.”
“And don’t try to clean up tonight either,” Mumma cautions. When Leo and Jane took Mumma for a drive in the country the last time she visited them in Calgary, the foothills made Mumma think of the piles of books and clothes and trinkyfussy junk all over her daughter’s house. How can Jane live that way, Mumma frowns, her baby who, to Mumma’s dismay, is still a tattletale.
“Believe me, I won’t.”
“And none of this bitch-bitchy-crap talk either. Everything you do and think on New Year’s Day is what’s going to happen the rest of the year.”
“I know. Hey Mumma, not to change the subject but, to change the subject, what are you giving up for Lent this ye
ar?”
“I don’t know,” Mumma says, “I think maybe lion taming, sabre dancing. Maybe horse jumping, I’ll think of something.” Rats, Mumma thinks, I thought she might forget to ask this year.
“I was thinking of giving up dog sledding this year.”
“Oh, that’s a good one. Maybe that’s what I’ll give up too. Lent right after Chinese New Year; that doesn’t happen every year.”
Mumma attended church every week, a regular church go-er before all her kids came. She taught Sunday school before she married Wing, met him at a Chinese United Church social function. Still, Mumma feels muddlish when it comes to church, and God. Mumma has tentatively concluded that something must get lost in translation. Not just something, though. Lots. For instance, although all the Ministers in the Chinese United Church take their studies in English, even if they intend to be good ministers, their English is often lacking; what if they’re just lousy translators? That aside, what if some beliefs or actions don’t translate, what if there aren’t quite the right words and phrases for the basics: not the platitudes (which Mumma thinks can be lazy, false and often harmful shortcuts to careful, compassionate thinking), but ground floor essence. The problem of translation goes deeper than ministers who struggle with English, since English wasn’t even one of the languages of biblical people. What about all the Bible translations, the different versions over history, let alone all the languages the Bible has been translated into all over the world, talk about different horses, different mouths. Why leave important stuff up to language skills, of all things, how does the real meaning sift out through multiple translations over eons, but when Mumma thinks about this, the muddle gets too deep. Oh wow. One good thing, though: the muddle motivates Mumma to be always on the lookout for inside information on how God works.
Just before Lent thirty-three years ago, Mumma’s next door neighbour, Mrs. Eileen Walker, persuades Mumma to go on a diet with her. Mrs. Walker, raised Episcopalian in Colorado Springs, has only found a rough equivalency in the Anglican church in Edmonton but better than nothing, and definitely better than the other choices on the denominational menu. When Mumma asks, Eileen says yes, fatty foods definitely something worthy of giving up for Lent.
During a trip to the grocery store together, to look for diet-wise, non-fatty food for Lent, Mumma and Eileen agree that the contents of their grocery carts look very similar. Mumma does not mention the grocery stores in Chinatown where she does some of her shopping. Eileen does not mention her downtown trips to Eaton’s food floor where she seeks and acquires comestibles not available in the average grocery store. That day, they take the long-course circuit, snaking through every aisle and then a perimeter search for perishables.
“Look, Mumma. Remember when the store ran out of food colouring last year to dye Easter eggs for church. Let’s get some now.” [Note: Eileen started calling her Mumma early on in their friendship. Although only five years younger than Mumma, when Eileen and her husband moved in next door, they had no children, and “knew not a soul” in Edmonton. Mumma and Wing and the kids became like family, and when Eileen asked if she could because she loved the idea of being part of a big family perpetually in motion, Mumma thought, Odd, but oh why not, everyone calls me Mumma.]
As they slip the cardboard sleeves filled with small glass bottles of Nutty Club food colouring into the carts, Mumma remembers how her cheeks ached, and that terrible taste of lips on egg shells, pricking little blow holes in the tops and bottoms, then blowing hard, expressing the liquid out of the shells of dozens of eggs. A few of the decorated eggs stayed home, but most were for the church. Many of those kids have parents occupied with daily survival, not the finer points of blowing out and dyeing Easter eggs. She thinks to remind Eileen of the rubber cheeks episode, then changes her mind. “Oh, I still have lots left from last year,” Mumma says, struggling for a moment while she persuades the baby to let go, then returning the food colouring package to the shelf.
“This food colouring reminds me of a Palm Sunday when I was a teenager in Colorado Springs,” Eileen says, moving her packets of sloppy joe mix to make room. “We had made all these palm leaves, big ones and little ones, but it was fairly humid and warm for that time of the year and the construction paper just limped right over. So some little genius bought all these cans of spray varnish. Stiffened up the paper, but the colour turned pretty vibrant, like this stuff. Mumma?”
Mumma’s working a Kleenex from her purse, wiping cookie crumbs from Jane’s mouth and hands, Jane trying to bat away every stroke with her free hand. Jane fiddles with the animal cracker box, almost figures out how to reopen the top, so Mumma slips it out of her hands and tosses the box into the cart. “I’m listening, Eileen.”
“Well, even though we cracked a window open in the church basement, I think we got, you know, we got what the kids call high.”
Jane starts to fuss, so Mumma retrieves the cookie box, and lays the string handle over the palm of Jane’s dominant hand.
“One boy, Jeffrey Graham, he kept spraying the same leaf over and over. The next day we were all sick. Sick-sick-sick-sick-sick. Even by that Sunday, all the teenagers still looked a little gill-y, waving those palm leaves. Beautiful pageant though, by God, we Episcopalians from The Springs sure knew how to put on spectacular pageants — jeez, look at the price of butter.”
They are still tut-tutting, those colour tablets in margarine boxes are pure poison, when Eileen stops in front of the upright dairy cooler with the glass door, filled with cottage cheese, sour cream, and aerosol whipping cream canisters.
“Mumma, what a blessing! Lord, this is such a good price for cottage cheese.” Eileen shares her recipe for Flagpole Salad, which, she says, “is light and refreshing and appropriate for our program.” She and Mumma check for the best dates on the tubs of cottage cheese while Jane holds onto the cookie box’s string handle and thumps the animal crackers like a punching balloon.
Still small enough to fit in a high chair, Jane can almost feed herself. The other kids will come home from school for lunch in a few minutes. Mumma sets four place settings at the table, leaving Wing’s place at the head of the table empty. Tom sits with Mumma, the two older girls on the other side, and Jane at the other end of the square table in the high chair. A bright green leaf of bibb lettuce lies on top of each plate, covered with a small mound of cottage cheese. Mumma has centred a ring of tinned pineapple on each cottage cheese serving. She busies herself cutting bananas in half, cross-wise, then peeling the skins off with the knife. She splits the maraschino cherries, and drains them in a little sieve. She recalls Eileen’s instructions: place half a firm banana upright in the centre of the pineapple ring, top with half a maraschino cherry. Mumma takes the chopping board of prepared bananas to the table. Her fingertips gently grasp a banana half, and Jane watches Mumma turn her wrist as if Mumma’s just discovered a banana for the first time, Mumma’s mouth a perfect O. The banana doesn’t fit, too large for the pineapple ring. With Jane as enthralled audience, Mumma’s fingertips rotate the banana in little half-turn pushes, she snugly wedges the banana upright in the hole. Mumma’s hands become a mask over the bottom half of her face, leaving only her bug eyes showing. She lowers the mask, reveals her tightly drawn fish lips. Mumma notices Jane mimicking her lips and eyes, so she deliberately relaxes her face by blinking and slowly moving her lower jaw in a sideways circle. Then, she picks up a shiny cherry half and gingerly places it on top of the banana. Hands flying, she becomes the masked Mumma once again, a high-pitched, breathy “oh” issues from behind the mask.
After washing their hands, the kids sit down to a leaf of lettuce, with a ring of canned pineapple half-submerged in a smeary blob of cottage cheese. Limp uneven coins of browning banana slices cover the entire surface of each plate. A bit of maraschino cherry juice bleeds pink into the curds of white cottage cheese in front of each kid. Their confused faces turn from their plates to each other, to their mother. The baby masticates the bottom half of a banana, the ski
n peeled back like a yellow gerbera daisy.
“Cottage cheese? Is someone on a diet?” Pen asks.
“Looks like something that’s been in and come out again,” Tom says, screwing up his mouth to seal the hatch.
“It’s Lent, a special Lent meal,” Mumma says, “special food, what God wants us to eat at this time of the year.”
Pen takes a forkful of cottage cheese, “I don’t think so. Tastes disgusting. Look at this,” she says, the tines of her fork catch the edge of a browning banana slice.
Mumma has tasted it. It is disgusting. Other than milk and the very occasional piece of cheddar cheese, dairy products do not figure large in the family diet. Mumma’s fingers interlace her left and right hands together in a ball as she leans her elbows against the table. Exactly thirty-seven minutes until the afternoon bell rings at school.
“Fine. There’s some leftover chicken in the fridge. But eat the fruit.”
“Hey, look at the baby.” Tom has moved his plate to the tray on the Jane’s high chair, and Jane takes a handful of cottage cheese and swallows slightly more than she throws on the floor.
The leaves of bibb lettuce make for a relatively quick clean up. As they run out the door, Mumma gives each kid a nickel to buy Life Savers after school.
“I thought I’d prepared a special Episcopalian Lent lunch.”
“Oh God no. Mumma, a Lent lunch? Now where would you get an idea like that? It’s just cottage cheese with a bit of fruit. Very light and refreshing.”
“It’s, you know. . .it’s Naughty.”
“What do you mean, ‘naughty’? Can’t be. I improvised it from a Campbell Kids children’s book, recipes for Cream of Tomato Soup and Flagpole Salad.”
“Eileen,” Mumma leans on her kitchen table towards her neighbour who sips quietly from a steaming mug of coffee, “The banana and a pineapple ring? The cherry?”
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