Robert Butler - Tabloid Dreams

I did talk to her on the phone later in the day and I lied.

“Honey,” Eva said, “I rang your bell over and over.”

“I was asleep,” I said. “I took some pills.”

“I understand.”

She didn’t, of course. That’s what I realized. I barely understood myself, at that moment.

“I brought you some cookies,” she said.

“I’m sorry I missed them,” I said.

“I put them in a Baggie and left them in your mailbox,” she said.

“I’ll get them,” I said.

“I’m oh so sorry about Karl.” She began to cry.

“Don’t cry,” I said, a little harshly, I think. But she didn’t seem to notice.

“We’re both bereft now,” she said.

“I better get the cookies before the mailman thinks they’re for him,” I said and I hung up.

They weren’t the Butterballs. I lifted them from the mailbox and they were red and round and fusing wetly together. She was experimenting. I opened the bag, and the smell — sweet and liquory — made my head spin. They were for Wolf. And Karl, not even buried yet, would have loved them too. I could see him licking the ooze off his fingers. I zipped the lock on the bag and carried the cookies through the house and punched the pedal of my stand-up galvanized trash can with my toe and the top popped open and the cookies were gone and the lid clanked shut.

I stepped into the middle of the kitchen floor and I found that I was breathing heavily. What was the rest of my life to be? That was the question of the moment. But I had no answers and I fought off the other question: what had all of my life been? I just stood panting in the middle of my kitchen and all I could hear was my breath. I couldn’t hear the clock. The wind was moving the trees outside and no doubt was humming in the gutters but I couldn’t hear that either. I could hear only my own breathing. In spite of the Hold-Me-Tights still coursing in my veins, I had to make some cookies.

Something basic. A simple chocolate chip. Chewy. I like them chewy. And I moved quickly to the cabinets and I laid it all out: uncooked oats, flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, unsalted butter, eggs, vanilla, cinnamon, milk chocolate chips, granulated sugar, brown sugar. And the Crisco. I’d use a lot of Crisco. When I was a little girl I always wanted my cookies chewy and I never outgrew that.

And my own daughters were the same way. We’d make cookies in this very kitchen, always chewy, and I was lucky, I guess, that Karl liked them chewy, too, and on the first morning of my widowhood, I could see those girls around me in this place and the cookies were shaped into balls and they were on the cookie sheet and I said, “Come, my sweet ones, come and make your thumbprints here on the cookies,” and they did, they came and pressed their thumbs into the cookies and these little images of my daughters went into the oven.

I was breathing hard again. So I made the chocolate chips, just the way I knew to do it. Two and a half cups of the oats. One and three-quarters cups of the flour. One cup of the granulated sugar. One cup of the brown sugar. And so forth. Going straight to the oven with the mixture — no chilling in the fridge — so that they would be chewy. And when they came out, I put them on the table and I could smell the sugar in them and my hands suddenly wouldn’t hold still and the thought of the milk chocolate made my teeth hurt. So I let them sit. I did not eat even one of them.

But those were the cookies I turned to today. The Grand Chef and his entourage came down the row of ovens and we were all standing there in our oversized paper aprons with the Great American Cookie Bake-Off emblazoned on them and the TV cameras were following along and he had his clipboard and he asked each contestant what they were going to bake this fine day and the lady on one side of me said “Macadamia Mud Drops” and he wrote it down and then they all came to me and I could feel Eva’s eyes on me from the other side and she was expecting to go up against my Peanut Butter Bouquets, but I said, “Chocolate Chip Cookies.”

The Grand Chefs pen paused over the clipboard. He was expecting a more exotic name, I’m sure.

“With capital letters,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, with an understanding nod, though he didn’t understand at all. I saw him print the name there all in capitals: CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES.

He moved on. I didn’t care. I felt I could win. Somewhere in the auditorium there was a panel of tasters and the world for them was what the world had always been for those of us about to bake cookies in this place: mounds and rows and tin-fulls of sweet little lies.

After the funeral I sat in Eva’s kitchen.

She was mixing cookie dough with a rubber spatula and she was weeping.

“I’m all right,” I said to her.

She stopped and turned her face to me. “You’ve been very brave.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Yes you have.”

“It’s not courage,” I said. This was true as far as it went, but I didn’t know how to say any more. Even for myself.

“Yes it is courage.”

“It’s crust,” I said. “Worse. It’s. . I’ve been in the oven too long. All the sugar’s crystallized, turned black, burnt up. There was too much of it to start.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I don’t either,” I said. “I’ve never burnt a cookie this bad in my life. Maybe the bottom blackened. Early on. When I was learning. But not this. What if you kept the oven on all day and night and then the next day and night and the cookies kept baking and burning and turning to a cinder. What happens to all the sweet things when they stay in the fire for years?”

“You’re scaring me,” Eva said, but when she said it, she didn’t put down her bowl and come to me, she didn’t come and give me a hug and tell me to go home and go to bed and take a cookie with me. She turned and began to stir her batter.

And I didn’t have a clue about what was going on in me. Not a clue.

I didn’t call her the next day, though it was my turn. Or the next. We didn’t talk again. How did we know not to talk again after all those years of talk?

The Grand Chef passed on and a local TV reporter, a young woman who I bet never ate a cookie in her life except from a grocery store package, stuck her microphone in my face and the bright light came on and she said, “Why are you here?”

It was a good question, I guess. But there was only the one answer. “I’ve always made cookies,” I said. “When you come down to it, people can’t change what they’ve always done.”

She and the microphone and the lights passed on, and I didn’t look toward Eva, who was next. But I heard her voice, clear and loud, announce her cookies: Cherub Cheek Cherry Charms. The Grand Chef cried out in pleasure at the very idea of such a cookie and I bent over my hands lying on the top of my preparation table. My Great American paper apron crinkled. Some things can’t change, but some things can. I’d brought the milk chocolate chips, but something had prompted me to bring semi-sweet, as well. Karl found them bitter, the semi-sweet chips. But Karl was also dead. He had another kind of bitter to deal with. I never much liked the semi-sweet chocolate either, but tastes change. Semi-sweet seemed right to me today.

And then we were all facing our stoves and the auditorium rang with the voice of the Grand Chef and he said, “Bakers, start your ovens,” and we did. And all the ingredients were before me and I laid them out, just as I had on the morning after Karl died. I sprayed my pan with their aerosol cooking oil and I mixed the oats and the flour and the cinnamon and the baking powder and the baking soda and the salt, and then I peeked at Eva. Her hands were scarlet. Whatever gave her cherubs’ cheeks their blush was all over her hands. I stopped and watched her and I think there were tears in her eyes, and I guess they were for Wolf.