Ray Bradbury - Dandelion Wine

When everyone’s mouths were absolutely crammed full of miracles, Grandmother sat back and said, “Well, how do you like it?”

And the relatives, including Aunt Rose, and the boarders, their teeth deliciously mortared together at this moment, faced a terrible dilemma. Speak and break the spell, or continue allowing this honey-syrup food of the gods to dissolve and melt away to glory in their mouths? They looked as if they might laugh or cry at the cruel dilemma. They looked as if they might sit there forever, untouched by fire or earthquake, or shooting in the street, a massacre of innocents in the yard, overwhelmed with effluviums and promises of immortality. All villains were innocent in this moment of tender herbs, sweet celeries, luscious roots. The eye sped over a snow field where lay fricassees, salmagundis, gumbos, freshly invented succotashes, chowders, ragouts. The only sound was a primeval bubbling from the kitchen and the clocklike chiming of fork-on-plate announcing the seconds instead of the hours.

And then Aunt Rose gathered her indomitable pinkness and health and strength into herself with one deep breath and, fork poised on air, looking at the mystery there impaled, spoke in much too loud a voice.

“Oh, it’s beautiful food all right. But what is this thing we’re eating?”

The lemonade stopped tinkling in the frosty glasses, the forks ceased flashing on the air and came to rest on the table.

Douglas gave Aunt Rose that look which a shot deer gives the hunter before it falls dead. Wounded surprise appeared in each face down the line. The food was self-explanatory, wasn’t it? It was its own philosophy, it asked and answered its own questions. Wasn’t it enough that your blood and your body asked no more than this moment of ritual and rare incense?

“I really don’t believe,” said Aunt Rose, “that anyone heard my question.”

At last Grandma let her lips open a trifle to allow the answer out.

“I call this our Thursday Special. We have it regularly.”

This was a lie.

In all the years not one single dish resembled another. Was this one from the deep green sea? Had that one been shot from blue summer air? Was it a swimming food or a flying food, had it pumped blood or chlorophyll, had it walked or leaned after the sun? No one knew. No one asked. No one cared.

The most people did was stand in the kitchen door and peer at the baking-powder explosions, enjoy the clangs and rattles and bangs like a factory gone wild where Grandma stared half blindly about, letting her fingers find their way among canisters and bowls.

Was she conscious of her talent? Hardly. If asked about her cooking, Grandma would look down at her hands which some glorious instinct sent on journeys to be gloved in flour,,r to plumb disencumbered turkeys, wrist-deep in search of their animal souls. Her gray eyes blinked from spectacles warped by forty years of oven blasts and blinded with strewings of pepper and sage, so she sometimes flung cornstarch,ver steaks, amazingly tender, succulent steaks! And sometimes dropped apricots into meat leaves, cross-pollinated meats, herbs, fruits, vegetables with no prejudice, no tolerance for recipe or formula, save that at the final moment of delivery, mouths watered, blood thundered in response. Her lands then, like the hands of Great-grandma before her, were Grandma’s mystery, delight, and life. She looked at them in astonishment, but let them live their life the way they must absolutely lead it.

But now for the first time in endless years, here was an upstart, a questioner, a laboratory scientist almost, speaking out where silence could have been a virtue.

“Yes, yes, but what did you put in this Thursday Special?”

“Why,” said Grandma evasively, “what does it taste like to you?”

Aunt Rose sniffed the morsel on the fork.

“Beef, or is it lamb? Ginger, or is it cinnamon? Ham sauce? Bilberries? Some biscuit thrown in? Chives? Almonds?”

“That’s it exactly,” said Grandma. “Second helpings, everyone?”

A great uproar ensued, a clashing of plates, a swarming of arms, a rush of voices which hoped to drown blasphemous inquiry forever, Douglas talking louder and making more motions than the rest. But in their faces you could see their world tottering, their happiness in danger. For they were the privileged members of a household which rushed from work or play when the first dinner bell was so much as clapped once in the hall. Their arrival in the dining room had been for countless years a sort of frantic musical chairs, as they shook out napkins in a white fluttering and seized up utensils as if recently starved in solitary confinement, waiting for the summons to fall downstairs in a mass of twitching elbows and overflow themselves at table. Now they clamored nervously, making obvious jokes, darting glances at Aunt Rose as if she concealed a bomb in that ample bosom that was ticking steadily on toward their doom.

Aunt Rose, sensing that silence was indeed a blessing devoted herself to three helpings of whatever it was on the plate and went upstairs to unlace her corset.

“Grandma,” said Aunt Rose down again. “Oh what a kitchen you keep. It’s really a mess, now, you must admit. Bottles and dishes and boxes all over, the labels off most everything, so how do you tell what you’re using? I’d feel guilty if you didn’t let me help you set things to rights while I’m visiting here. Let me roll up my sleeves.”

“No, thank you very much,” said Grandma.

Douglas heard them through the library walls and his heart thumped.

“It’s like a Turkish bath in here,” said Aunt Rose. “Let’s have some windows open, roll up those shades so we can see what we’re doing.”

“Light hurts my eyes,” said Grandma.

“I got the broom, I’ll wash the dishes and stack them away neat. I got to help, now don’t say a word.”

“Go sit down,” said Grandma.

“Why, Grandma, think how it’d help your cooking. You’re a wonderful cook, it’s true, but if you’re this good in all this chaos—pure chaos—why, think how fine you’d be, once things were put where you could lay hands on them.”

“I never thought of that . . .” said Grandma.

“Think on it, then. Say, for instance, modern kitchen methods helped you improve your cooking just ten or fifteen per cent. Your menfolk are already pure animal at the table. This time next week they’ll be dying like flies from overeating. Food so pretty and fine they won’t be able to stop the knife and fork.”

“You really think so?” said Grandma, beginning to be interested.

“Grandma, don’t give in!” whispered Douglas to the Library wall.

But to his horror he heard them sweeping and dusting, throwing out half-empty sacks, pasting new labels on cans, putting dishes and pots and pans in drawers that had stood empty for years. Even the knives, which had lain like a catch of silvery fish on the kitchen tables, were dumped into boxes.

Grandfather had been listening behind Douglas for a full five minutes. Somewhat uneasily he scratched his chin. “Now that I think of it, that kitchen’s been a mess right on down the line. Things need a little arrangement, no doubt. And if what Aunt Rose claims is true, Doug boy, it’ll be a rare experience at supper tomorrow night.”

“Yes, sir,” said Douglas. “A rare experience.”

“What’s that?” asked Grandma.

Aunt Rose took a wrapped gift from behind her back. Grandma opened it.

“A cookbook!” she cried. She let it drop on the table. “I don’t need one of those! A handful of this, a pinch of that, a thimbleful of something else is all I ever use—”

“I’ll help you market,” said Aunt Rose. “And while we’re at it, I been noticing your glasses, Grandma. You mean to say you been going around all these years peering through spectacles like those, with chipped lenses, all kind of bent? How do you see your way around without falling flat in the flour bin? We’re taking you right down for new glasses.”