Robert Butler - Tabloid Dreams

“You could do your Peanut Butter Bouquets,” she said.

“You should enter alone, Eva,” I said. “You win this year and I’ll win next.”

“It wouldn’t be like we’re competing,” she said, putting her hand on mine in the center of her tabletop. “We’ll root for each other. I want to do this with you.”

So we sent in our recipes and on the same Tuesday afternoon, Eva and I got our letters. I was sitting at my kitchen table and I always worked my way down the pile of mail one thing at a time. So after seeing what Lillian Vernon and Harriet Carter had to offer, considering for about the hundredth time buying 20,000-hour lightbulbs, I found the notice from the contest sponsors. I read how they congratulated me warmly, Mrs. Gertrude Schmidt, and were looking forward to my joining ninety-nine other cookie bakers in Louisville in the fall and they said that my wonderful Peanut Butter Bouquet recipe qualified me, but if I wanted to invent something brand new, I could do any cookie I wanted at the final bake-off. Once they had their special one hundred, they liked surprises. You could use anything you wanted in your recipe as long as you greased your pan with their brand of no-stick aerosol cooking spray. Sincerely yours. Then the phone rang and it was Eva and she was weeping with excitement.

“I will do something new,” she said.

“But I like your Butterball Supremes,” I said. “They were Wolf’s favorites.”

She was silent for a long moment, and I was afraid I’d just made her sad, bringing up Wolf like that. I punched my forehead with the heel of my hand and waited out her silence. Then she said, thoughtfully, without any throb of pain, “Do you think it should be like a tribute?”

“No, no. I was wrong. Do something new. That’d be fun.”

“You think so?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll pretend he’s alive and bake the cookie of his dreams.”

At the time, this notion touched me. Now it makes me sick to my stomach. Eva was assigned the oven next to mine this morning and she’s been baking for him, every moment. When we began, we all stood before our ovens, the auditorium so quiet I expected to hear sheets flapping somewhere, and our preparation tables were behind us and I glanced at Eva and her face was lowered and there was another face beyond hers and another and another stretching far away, all of us waiting to do our life’s work, and I looked again at Eva and she was thinking about Wolf, I knew, and she was trying to ignore me, it had come to that, and I should have been ignoring her too, but there we were, and on the day we learned that we’d made the bake-off finals, my own husband was still very much alive. “Yes,” I said to Eva. “I’m sure Wolf’s spirit is still somewhere there in your kitchen. Make the cookie of his ghostly dreams.”

I don’t know what came over me to say that. I think I wanted to reassure her that he was still present in her life or something. But I said it badly, and she took this idea with a long moment of silence and then she said, “Yes.” She said it with a throb of resolve in her voice and we hung up.

I sat for a while, thinking about breaking the news to Karl.

And it wasn’t just the sounds of this place or all the minute things I saw every day of my life or the smell of my hands or my sheets or my upholstery that were mixing in my head and heating up and getting ready to pop out of the oven when eventually Karl pitched forward into his food. It was him too. It was him. It was me sitting there and not knowing how to say to him that there was actually a reason for me to go to Louisville, Kentucky, and try to do something. Damn my misguided Eva, I thought. It was a sweet “damn” that I spoke in my head, sweet and with an arm around her, but damn her for the whole idea, I thought. I shouldn’t have to be facing this fact about my husband. I shouldn’t have to be sitting at my kitchen table trying to figure out — with a quake in my hands that wasn’t from too much sugar — how to talk to my husband about cookies that weren’t for him. And I wasn’t coming up with any answers.

As it turned out, I never did tell him. I put it off that night. He came home and he pecked a kiss into the empty air between us and he went to his recliner and he sat down and he opened his paper. Then there was dinner — pot roast and new potatoes and red cabbage and creamed corn and a tossed salad and Black Forest Honey Drops — a spicy little cookie that my grandmother taught me — and coffee, and there was no talk then either, not even a word about the cookies, though it had been some years since I’d made them and he ate them with obvious pleasure, dobbing the crumbs up with a wetted fingertip, and this was my test for the night. If he said nothing about these cookies, I would say nothing about Louisville. After the last crumb was gone and the last drop of coffee drunk, he leaned back and breathed deep and grunted the air out and said, “Good.”

That didn’t count. That was what he’d said every night for forty-odd years and he thought it counted, but it didn’t count. Not that night. Not any night. Though I can feel this heat in me now — my cookies off to the judges and the hundred ovens growing cool and me standing here with the vast, steel-webbed ceiling of the auditorium soaring above me like in a cathedral — though I can feel heat now about Karl’s monosyllabic approval, at the time I just let it go. I didn’t get angry. I was off the hook for the night, after all. I wouldn’t have to tell him about Louisville.

And the next night he was dead before the main course was through. And maybe he died from those cookies. Since they were from my grandmother, since they were from those days of my childhood in Germany — how far away they seem, but how clear — when my grandmother and my mother and I worked at a rough oak table with a coal oven heating nearby and the kitchen full of the smells of allspice and nutmeg and cinnamon and cloves and we made mounds and mounds of these cookies, maybe all the goodness that could come from the hands of three generations of women built up such a force of gustatory gratitude in the eater that if he did not vent it off with a lighting of the face and a warmth of the eyes and a tender loving touch and whole sentences of praise, the repression of that force would put a terrible strain on his heart and he would die within twenty-four hours. Maybe that’s what happened.

I’d like to think so. He died, and when the ambulance had gone, I laid out the ingredients for the Hold-Me-Tights and even before I could grease my pan I knew what I was going to feel about my dead husband. I can’t say I expected it, exactly, but it didn’t surprise me either. I knew I couldn’t talk about it. Anybody would take me for a hard, cruel person if they knew. Eva certainly would. It would shock her terribly. What did surprise me was what I began to feel about her.

She came to my house the next morning and rang the bell and I was still in the bed. I hadn’t slept a wink. I’d lain catty-corner in the double bed, cutting across both spaces, and I’d thrashed around from the sugar rush, but it was more than that. The bed was empty. I lay on my back and scissored my legs and waved my arms like making angels in the snow and I couldn’t get old show tunes out of my head and I hummed them in the dark and I moved my arms and legs in time. “Ol’ Man River” and “You Cain’t Win a Man with a Gun” and the one about the oldest established crap game in New York. It was a night filled with music and a kind of dance.

Then the sunlight came, and the doorbell. I peeked out my window at Eva. She had a plate of cookies. I figured I knew what they were. The fatal Butterballs. Sprinkled with powdered sugar. I had the same impulse myself the night before, but from Eva the sweetness of the cookies made me strangely restless and pouty and I let the curtain fall shut and I crawled back into bed and curled up and I didn’t answer.