A CUISINE OF LEFTOVERS
Jonathan Pearce
On the Desert: Wilhelmina Runcible Crinkle, ne Kuhl
"I must get out of the house," Mama would say. Mama needed regularly to get out of the house. She said so to herself and to us any number of times, never to Papa.
She did not like the shallow wooden sink into which you put the dishpan and under which you put the pail for the slops and run-off. She didn't like Verrkter Ludwig, the pig, who didn't like her either, and jumped at her and made as if to bite her leg when she threw food into his trough. "I cannot stand it," she would say. "Decent people do not have a crazy pig by the door like this," she would say, but never to Papa.
"It is 1913 and civilized people now have outhouse paper you get in a nice box from the store," she would say, "not an old clothing catalog you have to tear pages out of." Mama did not like having to go outside and pump water from the well, either, since it took so long and required considerable labor, the well being so deep. "Civilized people do not have go all the way out in the yard and pump water and carry it back into the house," she would say, but never to Papa.
And she did not like the taste of the well-water, flavored with chalk and sand, water that almost made your teeth stick together every time you drank it, and always left a yellow-ochre ring in the pot when you cooked with it. "I cannot stand it," she would say.
We liked much better the taste of the water from the irrigation ditch, the water that came from a lake high up on the distant purple mountain. But the ditch was too far away from the house and the pail too heavy for either Sohny or me, and if we tried to carry between us a pailful of good water to the house, it got mostly spilled on the way. And, besides, Papa always said to stay away from the ditch. "I cannot stand it," I would say, and Sohny would echo me.
"Can we maybe get a pipe to take water from the irrigation ditch to the house, a pipe like Grandma Kuhl has?" we once in a while would ask Papa, possibly because Mama suggested that we ask him.
Papa's dark eyebrows would come together and he would close his agate-blue eyes with the long dark lashes while he answered, "The water in the irrigation ditch is not mine in the way my well water is mine." And he would tighten his lips and say, "I dug the well with my two hands, and the water from the well is mine;" and Mama would made a loud sigh and we could hear her mutter, "I cannot stand it." Papa would examine the palms of his hands for a while and then rub his face with them and get up and go outside and look at the desert for a long time.
Mama liked to go visiting, leaving us children to our own devices. Before she left the house for a visit she would brush her hair, counting aloud two-hundred strokes. She would pinch her face so as to make her cheeks quite pink, an act that always alarmed us, for pinching cheeks was something that Grandma did to us children when she thought we needed attention or when we had done something bad, like spilling a glass of milk.
After pinching her cheeks Mama would make a fat braid of her waist-length auburn hair and coil the braid around the top of her head, fixing it with the tiny tortoise-shell combs she had carried from the Old Country six years before.
She would examine her face in the scratched little mirror over the drainboard that Papa had fashioned out of leftovers from Grandma Kuhl's new yellow linoleum kitchen floor. Mama would pull her lower eyelids down and look deep into her cornflower-blue irises and sigh. She seemed to us to have been looking for something in the reflection, something she had lost and was never able to find.
Sohny and I thought she was the most beautiful person in the world, with her clear skin and dainty hands and feet and her graceful neck and long-lashed bright eyes. When I grow up, I told myself, I want to be just like her.
Mama liked to visit, but she also liked to be visited, especially by Uncle Franz, who brought her beer once in a while and made her laugh and hugged her a lot when Papa wasn't home. When Uncle Franz visited she sent Sohny and me outside. "Go play in the irrigation ditch," she would say, and we knew she was joking because Papa always told us to stay away from the irrigation ditch, since the ditch was more than half-a-man deep and almost two-men wide and full up to its top with the clearest, cleanest, sweetest water running swift and icy down from the High Sierra.
Mama had a few other likes besides visiting, mostly having to do with food, something all of us talked a lot about. She liked to eat red cabbage cooked with vinegar and honey and, since it was one of the things Papa also liked, and because Mama was able to cook it to his liking, we had a lot of it.
Mama said that she liked beef and described for us the beefsteak she had often been served for dinner in her big-city house in the Old Country. But Grandpa raised hogs at his place down the yellow-sand road, and so we had a lot of pork, and no beef at all. Of course we had Verrkter Ludwig in a sty close outside the back door, but we never thought about eating him. He was kept for consuming slops from the table, and we usually had a lot of those, since Mama's cooking was mostly not to Papa's liking, and Papa would often throw Mama's cooking in the slops pail without saying a word and go off down the yellow-sand road to Grandma's to eat his dinner or to have some drinkable coffee, as he once in a while would say.
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