Thank You for All Things

by Sandra Kring

  I can’t totally stop myself, but my anger level is lower. “Maybe I shouldn’t have snooped, but I just want to know where Milo and I come from. And that means knowing who our dad is, and who our grandparents used to be too, for that matter. I already know that Grandpa Sam was mean to you guys in the olden days, and that he had Nordine Bickett for his girlfriend, even though he was married to Oma. I just want to know the whole story of our beginnings.”

  Mom reaches into the closet, sets the notebooks she snatched from me on the pile, then lifts the whole stack. “Lucy, listen to me …”

  She stares at me for a moment, as though she wants to say something. I wait. But then all she says is, “It’s been a stressful day for all of us. Let it be enough for today, okay?”

  She sets the heap of notebooks on the edge of the dresser, then she reaches down to help me up. She presses her cheek against the top of my head and holds me for a while, her breath warm against my scalp, and she sways with me like we’re slow dancing. “I’m sorry,” she says in a whisper.

  She pulls away, gathers the notebooks in her arms, and says, “But you still have two weeks,” as she goes out the door.

  Later that night, still upset about Mom finding me reading the notebooks but with nobody to talk to about it, I slip down the stairs. Mom is at her laptop and doesn’t look up, and Oma is on the phone talking to Aunt Jeana. “No. No. There was just a problem with my apartment back home and I was waiting for a call on that … Yes, of course. He’s fine. Sleeping like a baby,” she says.

  I go to Grandpa Sam’s room, but I don’t go inside. He’s lying on his back, like he always is, a couple pillows under him because Oma says it will help him breathe better. He doesn’t look like a cute ugly baby to me now. He looks like a scary man who would kick boxes and be a cheater—which is what the rust-colored-haired woman on the stoop called her husband when she ranted at him that he should be castrated, after finding out he had a girlfriend on the side.

  I leave Grandpa’s door open a crack because Oma likes it that way, give Oma a hug, and go to bed.

  chapter

  TWELVE

  ON SATURDAY Oma spends the whole day in the kitchen, whipping up gourmet recipes she gets out of the cookbook written by her favorite chef. He’s some German guy with spiky hair and wacky glasses who has a PBS cooking show. She is cooking fancy today because we’re having dinner guests: Mitzy and Ray, and Marie and her husband, Al, who wasn’t going to come at first (because he’s in pain over a potential hernia—potential because, who knows? He won’t see a doctor) but he’s coming anyway, out of fear that he’ll starve to death before Marie gets home with his doggie bag. Mom doesn’t like to cook, but she breaks herself away from her laptop at intervals to wash dishes as Oma dirties them, and I sit at the table doing schoolwork, while Milo—Mr. Lucky—pedals his bike like a pro on the road.

  Oma is sipping lemongrass tea as she cuts parchment paper into heart-shaped pouches. “Oh, I’m making the most wonderfully balanced meal,” she tells me. “Sole en papillote on sautéed baby spinach with tomato fettuccini. But your mother couldn’t find sole in town, so I’m using flounder. The book says to use only sole, but what is a chef in Timber Falls to do? See? You butter the pouches and stuff the fish and vegetables inside.” She holds up a heart and points to the empty inside.

  Oma has her recipe book propped up and braced open on the table. On the cover there are three pieces of shrimp lying belly-side-up in a death pose, their backs crutched against a wad of greens. Two chives, grass-green and thin, are propped into the salad and stick up like antennae. I’ve seen the inside of this cookbook before, so I know that all of the dishes created by this chef, who studied in France, are arranged like this. When I first saw the food stacked up on the plates like Legos and Lincoln Logs, I thought of how unique cultures are. How here in America, if a child plays with his dinner, making tunnels in his mashed potatoes and towers with his broccoli sprigs, his mother is apt to scold him. But in France, if a child plays with his food, his mother is likely to say, “Look, Jean Pierre, our Paul Henri is a genius! A master chef in the making!”

  Oma has sticky notes marking the recipes she’s going to use. I ask anyway, rather than bother to look to see what else she’s making.

  Oma proudly recites the exotic names of the dishes she’ll serve. “We’ll start with an amuse bouche to entice our palates: lemon-mint sorbet with red peppercorns. Our soup will be …” I tune out temporarily, because I don’t know what any of those dishes really are, then tune back in when her tone tells me she’s winding down. “… And we’ll conclude our meal with a delicious dessert, pumpkin pots de crème. A perfectly balanced meal,” Oma repeats.

  When she starts reciting which ingredients will refresh and invigorate our “pitta,” and which will reduce our “excessive dosha,” Mom looks up from her laptop, blinks at Oma, then turns to me. “What in the hell is she talking about?”

  “Ayurveda,” I say, enunciating the Hindi word as clearly as possible. “Ayur, which means life. Veda, which means knowledge of. It’s a holistic healing system developed by the Brahmin sages in India, some three to five hundred years ago. It—”

  Mom waves her hand. “Okay, you can stop right there. That’s more than I care to know.” She shakes her head in quick little jerks so it looks like it’s vibrating. “Was it too much to hope that her balanced meal would mean selections from the four basic food groups?”

  “Oh, no,” Oma groans. “I forgot to put walnuts on my list. Oh, Tess, you’ll have to run back to town. I need them for the dressing.”

  “Mother, I’m working.”

  “Please, honey. Please.”

  Mom grumbles, then gets her purse and leaves.

  “Oh, dear,” Oma says as she pivots this way and that, two bowls in her hands, and some odd kitchen gadget pinned against her waist with her elbow. “This kitchen never had enough work space. Honey, could you please take your books in the living room or upstairs? I need the table.”

  I close my books and stack them, and before I can get them gathered in my arms, Oma looks at Mom’s laptop, also sitting on the table, and she says, “Maybe you should take your Mom’s laptop up to her room too.”

  In the living room, Grandpa Sam is watching—or not watching—some western from about 1902, so I head upstairs. I go to the guest room first and set Mom’s computer on the nightstand, then head to my room, where I toss my books and notebook on the rolltop desk and sit down.

  I’m slouched over the desk, my head propped on my hand, my fingertips tapping against my temple. It’s hard to concentrate on my work with the good smells wafting upstairs—and with Mom’s laptop sitting in the next room.

  My pencil has rolled to the edge of the desk and is lying there. I hate writing with a pen or a pencil. It feels foreign, and my cursive hand looks like that of a five-year-old. I miss typing. I miss the soft click of the keys and seeing each letter nudge the cursor out of the way.

  I glance across the hall and into the empty room. Back home, our computers are lying like burned toast under a giant heap of rubble. We had our own desktops, HPs. Twins just like us. I miss my computer terribly. I miss my favorite sites, like the Jungian forum, where bright (and sometimes not so bright) nonscholars hash out Jung’s theories and play out the archetypes. I miss MySpace, where millions of nobodies like me have Web sites right along with the somebodies, and I can read Brad Listi’s attention deficit disorder blog, which keeps me abreast of the stranger cultural happenings, and make friends just by clicking add me.

  I miss PostSecret.com too, where people anonymously send in artistically designed postcards, revealing their darkest secrets. Once there was a postcard picture of Epcot Center, with a cutout picture of two babies pasted at the bottom. Two strips of white paper with typed fonts said, He went up the elevator, and I went out the door. It was the last time he saw his kids. For two weeks I asked Mom if she was sure Milo and I had never been to Epcot Center, but finally gave up because I never saw even one smidge
n of defensiveness in her body language any of the ten times I asked.

  I get up then and get Mom’s laptop, bringing it back into her old room and setting it on the desk. It’s hibernating, so I don’t have to boot it, which is good, since that would probably require a password.

  It’s my intention to open a Word document and type simply for the pleasure of feeling my fingers tap-dancing over the keyboard, but then my curiosity gets the best of me and I open her documents box.

  There are several folders inside, including one that says, Latest projects. I click it open. Inside, there are chapters from Missy Jenkins’s latest struggle with Satan, and a file with Mexico in the title, so it must be another travel article, and the third document in the folder—the one that grabs my attention—is simply titled September 21. Just last night!

  I open the file and read:

  The house is quiet, the kids asleep, and Ma is in her room reading. I told her I needed to get some writing done, so of course she thought I meant on my novel. And I do need to work on the damn thing. I’ve got one month to make deadline, and Missy is still waltzing into the church hake sale, loaves of sourdough bread stuffed in her bag, horny Chase Milford sniffing her instead of it. She’s been in this pose so long that that bread has got to be moldy by now.

  I’ve got my travel article to write too, but Linda’s laid up with two ruptured disks, and the only photo she’s sent in three weeks is one of her lying down, taken by her latest toy from the foot of her bed, the bottom of her boobs spread out and showing under a shirt she cropped herself. She’s holding up a bottle of tequila, the thumb of her other hand pointed toward her head, like she’s too damn drunk—or too retarded—to figure out she needs to point it toward the ceiling if she’s making a thumbs-up while lying down. Hmm, maybe I could write about Timber Falls. Ma obviously thinks it’s a great vacation spot. For activities, I could list squirrel hunting and participating in the annual low-speed chase. And for the dining section, I could cite tuna salad croissants, stuffed with kettle corn chips and peppered with succulent dead skin cells.

  God, I’m sarcastic.

  I’m restless tonight. Distracted. I can’t seem to think of anything but Peter, who called last night for the first time since Dad fell on his ass. He was waiting for me to call him back, he said, then he told me that he must be slow on the uptake, because it took him a good twenty-four hours to admit that the crisis that made it necessary for me to hang up on him had to have passed and that I really had no intention of returning his call.

  I wanted to spill my guts to him. To sob and wail and tell him how messed up I am here and how badly I miss him. I wanted to beg him to come and hold me. To listen to me rant and sob and assure me that the past is over and that it can no longer sink me (which, considering he only knows a handful of my past, is an absurd wish to begin with). Instead, I gave him the vague excuse of my being too busy to return his call and muttered a quick “sorry.”

  It was obvious that he didn’t intend to talk to me long, and when I tried to keep him on longer—just so I could extract some comfort from the sound of his voice—by asking him about his work, what he was reading, and other banal things, he interrupted and told me that he wasn’t in the mood for small talk and that I could call him if I wanted to “really” talk. I hung up and avoided Lucy’s eyes for fear that she’d be able to tell from my expression that it was Peter at the other end of the line.

  I spent the remainder of the day wandering restlessly in and out of the house, trying to avoid thinking of anything but how I was going to maneuver Missy Jenkins through the next chapter. I came up with nothing, so I spent an hour with Milo, listening to his theories that support the concept of time travel. At least I kept my sardonic humor to myself, not saying out loud what I was thinking: that if science truly wanted to study time travel, they could skip the high-tech machines and just send a person back to their childhood home.

  Ma came out of her room for water a while ago. I minimized this screen and put my book up instead, leaning close to the monitor as though I was trying to think up my next line.

  She filled her water glass, and the rock sunk at the bottom—put there so the “energy” from it could be ingested—bobbled against the glass. I could feel her studying me. And finally she asked me if Peter was responsible for my mood today. Her leomongrass tea must not be working, if she needed to ask.

  I denied that my mood had anything to do with Peter, of course. I told her that I have more important things to think of than a guy who only serves as a reminder of why I vowed never to marry and to use a sperm bank if I decided I wanted kids. (At least I kept one of those promises to myself.)

  God, I hate when people stare at me. It makes me want to scream. I looked up at her and snapped, “Do you mind? I have work here to do.”

  She didn’t make a move to head back to her room, so I ignored her, hoping she’d go away. She didn’t. Instead, she asked me why I try to hide how I feel about Peter. And she asked me what exactly it is that I’m afraid of.

  I could feel my shoulders rise up and draw in—as if to protect my head and heart at the same time—when I denied being afraid of anything.

  Wrong answer.

  She pulled out a chair and sat down and asked me if I knew what she thought of today. I told her she’s the psychic, not me, so, no, I didn’t know. She let my bitchy tone roll off her like a bad shar (or whatever in the hell it is that Lucy said she calls bad juju), and I knew I was in for one of her long-winded, heaped-with-New-Age-bullshit stories meant to teach me a life lesson.

  She asked me if I remembered the young woman, Sally Rutherford, who lived in the Norton place on Venison Drive the summer when I was about nine years old. The woman who painted the watercolor hanging in her bedroom back home, and did I know which painting she was talking about? I reminded her that she has only one painting hanging in her bedroom.

  Even though I’d just told her I knew which painting she meant, she described it. Talking about the woman emerging out of the water, the crown of her head barely breaking the water’s surface. She reminded me of the first time I’d seen it, when I reached out and touched it as though I’d expected the water to wet my finger.

  I typed a nonsensical sentence just so I’d look busy, hoping she’d keep her story short. She didn’t. She yammered on and on about Sally’s big, listless eyes. How she was so timid that the sound of her own voice seemed to spook her, but how she painted bravely, trying imaginative new styles, not afraid of color. Then she told me that she always thinks of Sally’s painting at times like this.

  I switched my tone from bitchy to bored as I asked her what she meant by “times like this.”

  She blinked at me like the answer was obvious, then she clarified it with, “Times like this, when somebody is too afraid to break the surface and spring out of the sea of whatever is drowning them. It always makes me wonder: What if they dared come up all the way?”

  I glanced up and Ma was staring upward, her eyes focused on nothing. Her face had that look again. The look that reminds me, on occasion, that underneath the persona of a wacky New Ager, some sort of wisdom lies there.

  Ma scooted her water glass aside, deciding on tea instead, and did I want a cup of chamomile? I shook my head. I kept my head down while she poured water from the Brita into the teakettle. While she set it on the stove and ignited the burner, Ma told me that we both know where things went wrong for me. With her, she said. Then she nodded toward Dad’s room and added, “And with him.”

  I pretended not to know what she was talking about, though I don’t know why. My feigned ignorance only served as an invitation for her to explain.

  She told me that it doesn’t take an eleven-year-old genius to figure out why I’m afraid to trust my heart, and men in particular. She recaptured the key events of my childhood, then told me that she hopes that while I’m here I’ll open my eyes and take a look at whatever has me gripped at the ankle, not allowing me to rise fully above the waterline.

 
She was speaking in riddles, but I didn’t bother telling her so.

  Ma caught the teakettle before it whistled, then poured us both a cup of tea, even though I’d just told her I didn’t want any.

  As she bobbed a tea bag into her cup and sat down, she talked about how Dad’s getting worse and how Marie thinks she should call a county nurse to come look at him. I couldn’t stand listening to her talk about him, her voice so soft with concern. I partially closed the lid of my laptop and told her how it bugs the shit out of me that she’s here—that any of us are here, but especially her—and that I hoped it didn’t mean that she still loved him.

  Ma smiled as she reminded me that there are many kinds of love and that while, yes, once she did love him, desperately even, he destroyed that love, and now the only kind of love she feels for him is the kind of love you feel for a sibling. She ended her clarification by saying, “You’d take care of Clay under the same circumstances, wouldn’t you?”

  The mention of Clay distracted her—thank God—and she suggested I call and give him an update on Dad, reminding me that he’s two hours behind us so he’d still be up.

  “You call him,” I said, my snotty tone intact. Ma reminded me that Clay doesn’t take her calls, and I told her that maybe then she needs to come up out of the water and deal with that situation.

  I felt guilty the minute I said it and saw her brows wrinkled with remorse. Ma has tried with Clay Many times over. So have I, for that matter. But every time I’ve managed to get a hold of him and dared to bring up the topic of Ma, he cuts me off quickly and tells me to give it a rest. I got pissed the last time he said this and asked him point-blank why he couldn’t give it a rest. And what exactly did he blame her for, anyway? For being afraid of him? We were all afraid of Dad.