American Cookery

Chapter One The Douglass women had a long tradition of trouble. They had been known to borrow trouble as well as money and time. They often fed the many on a few beans and a hambone, on loaves and fishes. They wielded ten-pound fry pans and hoisted ten-gallon stockpots. Their instincts were to preside, to direct, and, when necessary, to defend. Woe unto the shiftless, the no-account stragglers, the thoughtless and thankless, the whiners and the weak. In that family, if you felt the surge of a strong tide, an all-but-lunar tug, it was always the women; they pulled people in their wake. Their men sometimes resisted, sometimes got distracted, misled by weaker, more pliable women, by religion, or drink, or get-rich-quick schemes, by great obsessions like Eden's father's Timetables, or great disasters like her husband's Westerns, sauced with dreams and debt. Sometimes these men gave up and made their exits. Some stewed in their own discontent. Some took braying refuge in a notion of patriarchy and the rights bestowed by an all-knowing God on wise men who were to be obeyed by submissive women who knew their place. The Douglass women just never did know their place. So when little Eden Douglass, hauled into the Fourth Street School office for a serious schoolyard infraction, and about to be sent home in disgrace, asked the principal to call her aunt, Mrs. Afton Lance, or her grandmother, Mrs. Ruth Douglass, rather than her mother, Kitty, the principal blanched. Mr. Snow said he would call whomever he wished. He picked up the telephone by its long neck, put the receiver to his ear, and rang Miss Moody, St. Elmo's operator and chief gossip. "Who are you calling?" Eden asked, more curious than truly humbled. "My aunt or my grandmother?" Mr. Snow glared at her, gave her a quick tongue lashing. Intuitively Eden knew what Mr. Snow wanted from her, so she feigned tears. His sense of superiority thus happily underscored, Mr. Snow said he would call Afton Lance. "You must leave. Go out into the hall and sit in the Miscreant's Chair by the door." Shoulders hunched, Eden shuffled out to the hall and sat down on the hard wooden chair outside the office door. Fans turned slowly, churning the smell of stale bread from a hundred lunch buckets, shoe rubber, long-spilled milk, and unwashed linoleum. In the high-ceilinged hall, the lights were off and the doors at either end were open to keep the building cool in the September heat. Eden pulled one knee up to her chest and rested her chin there, a posture forbidden to girls. She scratched at a flea bite through the hole in her black stocking. Eden Louise Douglass had short straight hair, thick, lusterless, dusty, unevenly cropped just below her ears. She wore a gingham dress, a hand-me-down from Bessie and Alma Lance, the blue and white faded equally into gray from drying in the hot California sun. She hummed under her breath the very songs that had gotten her into trouble, "Hot Tamale Molly" and "Keep Your Skirts Down, Mary Ann," and songs about creeping into tents late at night, songs she heard all the time on the Victrola at home, songs that everyone was singing in 1926. A teacher had overheard Eden singing in the schoolyard and snatched her elbow, marched her to the principal's office. Though naturally the teacher could not repeat the offending lyrics, she had alluded to their general nature, and Mr. Snow had declared that Eden's mother should be called in and apprised of her daughter's crime, and the girl sent home in disgrace. But Kitty Douglass was unreliable, and Eden knew this. Unpredictable. Kitty might laugh off the offense, and call the principal a pumpsucker, or, if she had been at the BowersKalpakian, Laura is the author of 'American Cookery', published 2006 under ISBN 9780312348113 and ISBN 0312348118.