The Madhatter's Guide To Chocolate

by Rhett DeVane

  The procession that screeched to a halt in the departing flights lane at Tallahassee Regional Airport looked more like a parade on the Beverly Hillbillies show than an excited gathering of Alaskan-bound travelers. All we lacked were the shovels and buckets for road-kill collection hanging from the back bumpers. Stephanie had graciously volunteered to chauffeur Holston, Jake, and me over in Betty. The rest of the gang followed in a procession.

  “I still feel bad you’re not going with us,” I said as we pulled to the curb.

  Stephanie shrugged. “Someone has to hold down the fort. Besides, I start skin specialist school in Tallahassee end of next week.”

  As if we were missionaries heading off to some mosquito-infested third-world country, a large contingency of Chattahoochee citizens, as well as a few close Tallahassee friends, had turned out to see us off. Patricia and Rainey stood near Gate A-3 with Ruth. The Delta personnel at the gate commented that they didn’t recall a crowd of this size since the Florida State University Football team had returned victorious from the 1999 National Championship game in New Orleans.

  Ruth handed me a small red velvet box after I hugged her mother and father.

  I knelt down. “What’s this?”

  Patricia smiled down at her daughter. “Ruth picked this out herself. She was quite adamant that she be able to give it to you today.”

  I opened the box to reveal a delicate gold and porcelain daisy on a fine gold chain. I knelt down. “This is beautiful. Ruth! Thank you!”

  “It will keep the bad thing away from you until you come home, Mama chuntian.”

  I opened the minute clasp and slipped the pendent around my neck. “I won’t take it off for a second!” I held the small girl to me.

  The intercom crackled with the call for first-class passenger boarding. I hugged Patricia and Rainey goodbye.

  “First Class?” I asked when Holston approached and ushered the family toward the ramp.

  “Better for everyone. Larger seats, more room. It’s going to be a long day.”

  The gray morning had dawned with a light drizzle, and Aunt Piddie motioned for Jake to halt her wheelchair to gain assurance from the handsome, gray-haired captain that he could handle the plane in bad weather.

  “It’s clear in Atlanta, ma’am,” he said. “We’ll be up and over these few clouds in a very short period of time. I’ve logged many hours in weather much worse than this.”

  Since Holston, Jake, Joe, Bobby, and I had previously flown, we settled Aunt Piddie, Evelyn, and Leigh into the window seats. Piddie was immensely interested in the flurry of preflight activity surrounding the plane. The first leg of the trip spanned from Tallahassee to Atlanta. A commonly held notion in this part of the country held that when you died, you’d have to circle Atlanta before moving on. We watched as the procession of coach passengers filed past, lugging bulging carry-on bags. The sound of overhead bins being stuffed to capacity and snapped shut echoed from the rear of the plane.

  Piddie wrung her hands. “I sure don’t know how they’re gonna get this heavy thing off the ground with all these people on it!”

  Jake patted her. “Wait until you see the plane we take from Atlanta to Seattle. It will make this one look like it wasn’t big enough to be taken away from its mother. By the way, I saw you over there talking with Elvina Houston. Was she crying?”

  Piddie swatted the air. “Lordy-be! She’s such a drama queen! She wasn’t really all caught up in us leaving. She’s just upset she’s being left out of somethin’. I promised to bring her a souvenir.”

  The plane pushed back from the ramp and aimed toward the entrance ramp to the runway. The monstrous jet engines started to hum, then roared louder as the Boeing 707 taxied toward the head of the runway. Aunt Piddie held a white-knuckled grasp on the armrest.

  Jake reached over and put his hand over hers. “Hold on, Piddie. Here comes the best part!”

  As the 707 lifted from the earth, Aunt Piddie let out a loud “Whoo-eee!” and began to laugh hysterically. “Whew!” she said when we leveled off above the cloud ceiling. “That was faster than Carlton’s ’54 Chevy at top speed!”

  The trip between Tallahassee and Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport took less than 50 minutes, just long enough for the attendants to serve beverages. Everything about the experience fascinated Piddie: the beverage cart, the complimentary package of nine salted peanuts, and especially, the lavatory.

  “Wonder where it goes when you flush it?” she asked. “Hah! Wouldn’t it be a hoot if it fell right on Elvina’s new hairdo?”

  I didn’t want to ruin her fun by explaining the holding tank to her, or the fact that we were, at thirty minutes into the flight, miles from home, probably over Macon, Georgia.

  After a forty-five minute layover in Atlanta, we boarded the plane for Seattle. As Jake had forecast, the Lockheed 1011 was the husky older brother of the smaller plane we’d taken from Tallahassee. By this time, Piddie was an old hand at flying. Taking both her doctor’s and Elvina Houston’s advice to heart, she stood and walked around at least every thirty minutes to prevent blood clots from forming in her legs.

  We circled Seattle, Washington, for a few minutes before gaining clearance to land. The impressive snow-capped peak of Mt. Rainer loomed in the distance. The first thing I noticed when we deplaned was the air quality. The lack of humidity made breathing easier and my entire body felt light. A short commuter flight with Alaskan Airlines connected us to our final destination of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The cruise line personnel had taken our yellow-tagged luggage to the awaiting shuttle buses. On the other side of customs, several smiling, nautically-clad attendants held block-printed signs for the major cruise lines.

  A twenty-minute bus ride through the clean, colorful streets of downtown Vancouver led us portside to Canada Place, Vancouver’s main cruise ship terminal, and the first sighting of our ship, the Regal Queen.

  “I gotta find a phone!’ Piddie said.

  Evelyn dug in her purse for the ticket packets. “Whatever for, Mama?”

  “I always call Elvina and let it ring three times, just to let her know I’ve arrived safely. She won’t rest easy till I triple-ring her, and she’ll have it all over town that we’ve been fallen upon by a band of thieves if I don’t.”

  Chocolate Baked Alaska—Heavenly Meringue

  Ingredients: 8 egg whites, ¼ tsp salt, 2 cups sugar, 2 tsp vanilla extract

  Preheat oven to 500º. In a large bowl, beat egg whites and salt until foamy. Slowly add sugar and vanilla and beat until whites are stiff but still moist. Put the chocolate cake on a cookie sheet, place the ice cream on top of the cake, and cover the cake and ice cream with a thick layer of meringue. Immediately place in the hot oven for about 5 minutes or until the meringue is slightly brown. Serve as soon as possible.

  Put any leftovers into the freezer before the ice cream melts. You’re sure to eat the rest!

  Chapter Twenty-four

  JUST CRUSIN’

  Holston had booked four outside rooms on the Caribe deck. Jake was assigned to the room with Holston, Aunt Piddie roomed with me, and the two sets of old married farts, Joe & Evelyn, and Bobby & Leigh, had rooms together. The mounds of luggage we hadn’t seen since it disappeared on the conveyor belt in the Tallahassee airport had been delivered into our respective staterooms.

  “Hey! Hattie! Come in here right now and bring that video camera you brought!” Piddie called from the small bathroom.

  “You okay? What’s the matter?”

  Piddie hooted. “Aim your camera on this sign, first off…”

  “Wha…?”

  “Just follow my lead, gal! This will be a stitch to watch later on when we get home.”

  I focused the video recorder on the illustrated sign above the toilet displaying a stern warning about closing the lid before pulling the flush mechanism.

  “Okay, now…zoom in on the toilet.” She began to gesture like a contest-show model. “You just push this little button—
here.” Piddie panned for the camera. “And, whoosh!” The vacuum toilet made a loud sucking noise. “It’ll suck your dang butt clean out of the boat!” Aunt Piddie cackled. “And, I thought the john on the airplane was fun!”

  I shook my head. “C’mon, Pid, we need to get ready for dinner.”

  “Is this one of them dress-up nights?”

  I flipped through the daily flyer provided by the hall steward. “Nope. That’s tomorrow night. Just casual tonight.”

  Following our 6:00 PM seating for dinner, we toured the ship to locate the casino, bars, viewing decks, and grand ballroom. The lighted shores passed slowly by as we headed north into the Strait of Georgia toward the entrance to the Inside Passage. Since we were all tired from the long day of travel, we turned in around 11:00.

  “Now I see why they have these blackout curtains on the picture windows,” Piddie said. “It’s still good light outside. It’s a wonder these folks up here don’t wander around like a bunch of zombies.”

  The first full day of cruising was spent on the open water. Without the protection of land masses on both sides of the ship, the white-capped five to ten-foot seas as far as you could see tossed the boat in long rolling waves.

  Bobby pointed toward the pool in the center of the Lido deck. “Look at that! The boat’s rocking so much that it’s making an Alaskan wave machine!”

  “And there are actually tourists in the water,” Leigh added. “Man, we don’t go in the water in Florida until it’s at least eighty outside. It can’t be much over fifty today.”

  “It’s ’cause we got thin blood,” Piddie explained. “I bet their blood’s thick as pea soup up here.”

  Bobby hugged Leigh around the shoulders. “Hon, you still look kinda green around the gills. Breakfast didn’t help any?”

  “I thought it would. I’ve got these sea-bands on.” She pointed to the elastic acupressure bands around her wrists. “I think it’s because it’s so rough today. I feel like I’m walking around half drunk.”

  Piddie snorted. “I know what you mean. I forgot to set the brakes on my chair this morning, and I rolled backward into one of the waiters carrying a full load of coffee cups! He was fast on his feet, though. Danced around for a minute, but never dropped one thing.”

  “It’ll be smooth by tomorrow,” Holston said. “We’ll be on the Inside Passage with land on either side of us again to block the rough seas. If any of you start feeling too bad, the ship has a doctor and a full pharmacy. Leigh, why don’t you go on down and see if you can get something for sea sickness?”

  The group scattered. Holston and Jake left to sign us up for our in-port excursions, and check out the gym. Bobby and Leigh left for the infirmary, and Evelyn dragged Joe to the shopping decks. Aunt Piddie and I located a couple of lounge chairs blocked from the wind and sat in the bright sun.

  “Lordy, I’m havin’ a good time! I can tell right now that Joe and I are gonna be in withdrawal when we leave the boat and have to eat Evelyn’s cookin’ again!” She reached over and patted my hand. “You gotta a good man in Holston. I’m sorry about you havin’ to share a room with me. I know you’d a lot rather be with him.”

  “I wouldn’t want to send Evelyn into a moral outrage by shacking up on this vacation. Besides, I’m having a blast rooming with you!”

  We rested in shared silence. The singing of the stiff breeze against the Plexiglas windows surrounding the Lido deck muffled the noise from our fellow travelers.

  “I’m proud as punch to see your brother so happy, too. Your mama was pretty worried over his drinkin’ after the divorce.”

  “I didn’t know until recently.”

  “He’s on the straight and narrow, now. But, he had a time of it for awhile.”

  “I wish Mama would’ve let me know.”

  Piddie reached over and patted my hand. “She didn’t mean no harm by it, gal. She barely let on to Evelyn and me about it. I suppose she didn’t want it spread around. Bobby came near to losin’ his job over it, from what your mama said. He hit rock bottom, and looked up, I reckon. Anyway, he got hisself some help, and started goin’ to them Triple A meetings.” Aunt Piddie brushed a stray curl from her eyes. “That’s where he met Leigh.”

  “Leigh’s a recovering alcoholic, too?”

  She shook her head. “I believe she has some family member, maybe her daddy, that is. She goes to a supporter group.”

  “Guess that’s why he hasn’t touched even a sip of the wine they’ve served with the meals.”

  Piddie nodded.

  “Auntie, I need to ask you something…privately.”

  Always on the lookout for a secret, Piddie perked up.

  “I’ve been having some…um…bleeding.”

  Piddie studied my expression. “I thought you’d had all that taken care of with your hysterectum a few years back.”

  “No, I mean…rectal bleeding.”

  She jerked upright, her brows knit in concern. “Is it real bad?”

  “Sometimes. It’s happened a few times in the past couple of months.”

  Piddie fanned the air with one hand. “Probably just you’re ’roids raging. That comes with age.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Hemorrhoids? How enchanting!”

  “Then again, you might want to get yourself checked out. Your daddy had some plops removed from his colon when he was…oh…seventy, or so. As I recall, one of them was cancer. They took a piece of his bowel out.”

  I vaguely remembered him telling me about having his hemorrhoids repaired.

  “Why didn’t I know about this?”

  “Your daddy and mama were bad about not wantin’ to worry you kids.”

  “That’s true. They’d call up about two weeks or so after something happened and say, oh…your daddy cut his leg off. We didn’t call ’cause we didn’t want to bother you. The doctor sewed it back on.”

  Piddie chuckled. “Yeah, that was my little brother, all right. He’d have to be near to death before he’d let on anything was wrong. Your mama wasn’t much better.”

  Piddie’s blue eyes reflected the perfect Alaskan sky. “You given up on bein’ a mama, gal?”

  “No… maybe…I don’t know. I had given some thought to adopting a baby. Actually, I thought about doing it alone. That was before I met Holston.”

  “I think you’d make a good mama. Why, look at the fine example your own mama set up for you!” She reached over and patted my hand. “Don’t you worry none. If it’s meant to be, the good Lord will find a way. There’re plenty of younguns out there with nothin’ to call their own.”

  A waiter appeared beside our chairs. Piddie and I ordered hot chocolate with whipped cream. What the heck, we were on vacation.

  Piddie licked the foam mustache from her upper lip. “A person could get spoilt easy. Someone’s always there bringin’ you something even before you know you want it. And none of them have made me feel like I’m older than dog dirt!”

  I sipped the creamy hot chocolate. It was obviously not the lite variety, thank the heavens. “It feels so good to finally relax. It seems like so much has happened.”

  “We had ourselves a cluster, now, didn’t we?”

  Aunt Piddie had a theory worked out for almost any situation. I suppose by her age, you’d have studied life’s subtleties long enough to see the underlying patterns.

  AUNT PIDDIE’S CLUSTER THEORY

  Life is full of bad and good. Things happen in clusters—both bad and good. Like, for example, death comes in three’s. When you’re in a cluster, you just have to keep your head above the surface and tread water like the dickens till the cluster passes you by. When the bad cluster goes away, you’re due a period of smooth sailin’.

  Another theory she held as honest-to-goodness truth was the Southern Bootist Theory.

  AUNT PIDDIE’S SOUTHERN BOOTIST THEORY

  Whenever you say the words forever, never, ever, and always, and especially in combinations like always and forever and never, ever, this big boot comes right dow
n outta the sky and kicks you into the situation you were never, ever, always, or forever gonna be in…or out of…

  Made perfect sense to me. The one time I received a traffic ticket was immediately after I’d bragged, I’ve never even gotten a speeding ticket! The God in charge of moving violations almost broke his neck to park a trooper running radar in the median in front of me.

  The cruise line planned the formal dinners for the evenings following a day at sea. Most of the nights after we were in port would’ve been too hectic to spend the extra time dolling up for the occasion. I was reserving my long black gown for the second formal evening. For tonight, I planned to wear a sky blue cocktail-length dress.

  I tugged at the off-center seam. “Now I remember why I hate panty hose so damn much!”

  “That’s one of the joys of getting on up there in years.” Piddie pulled her caftan up to reveal ankle-length hose under her sparkly gold sneakers. “Everyone’s so busy marvelin’ at the fact you’re still alive, and they don’t much care how you look. It’s very freein’.”

  We left to meet the rest of the family on the Promenade level, where a three-deck-high cocktail party with complimentary drinks was underway. My breath left when I saw Holston enter the room in his formal attire. Not one to be outdone, Jake strolled in behind him, pausing briefly to case the room before making a sweeping entrance.

  “My, my! You boys are handsome! Both of you clean up real nice!” Piddie said.

  Holston held my eyes and smiled seductively. “I’d say the very same about you, ladies.”

  How many days would it be until we could be alone again?

  Joe and Evelyn spotted us from across the crowded room. Evelyn wore a clingy scarlet mid-calf dress. Joe slipped his arm proudly around his wife’s waist.

  Piddie whistled. “If it’s not the Harlot of the Hooch.”

  Evelyn blushed. “It’s too much. I knew it! I’ll go change.”

  Joe squeezed her. “Don’t you dare!”