Tabloid Dreams

“Woman Loses Cookie Bake-Off, Sets Self on Fire”

The day my husband died, I baked a batch of cookies. Hold-Me-Tight Chocolate Squares. Bar cookies that took forever to eat, never going away no matter how long you chewed, sticking between your teeth and up into your gums and making your hands quake and your tongue feel like it was about to dissolve. I put in two cups of sugar. That was a different time in my life. The end of a time, and the only way I knew to enjoy it was in the terms I’d lived it. So I put in two cups of sugar and three cups of milk chocolate chips and ate the whole pan-full that night. I was still shaking from it three days later at the funeral and everybody thought it was grief.

Even Eva. Of course, she wouldn’t suspect it was anything else. Bless her heart. My friend Eva. She came up to me by the open coffin and she was smelling of lavender. She tried to make some lavender cookies once, its being her favorite smell outside of the kitchen. Lavender is in the mint family, after all, and I admire her now, thinking back, for trying that. She couldn’t possibly have had a real hope that lavender cookies would please her family. Or maybe she could. Still, her husband Wolf threw them across the room. She blamed herself.

So at the coffin she said, “My poor Gertie. I’m so sorry.” And she took my hands, which were having this sugar fit even then, and when she felt them, she rolled her eyes. “I know how you feel.”

Wolf had died almost a decade before. Barely turned sixty. Arteries stuffed full of her Butterball Supremes, I suspect. Not that she wanted it that way. At the time, I wept with her, thinking she was so dreadfully unlucky, thinking, Oh God, how could I bear this myself. But when the moment came for me, when Karl went all white in the face with my delft tureen in his hand at the dinner table and he put it gently down before pitching forward into the Wiener schnitzel, I began instantly to bear it, and my mind turned, as it so often has in my life, to cookies.

Of course Eva thought she knew how I felt. I can’t blame her. We’d spent the better part of forty years thinking we knew what each other felt. Most of my daughters were sitting in the funeral parlor at that very moment with stricken faces, and I figured I knew what they were feeling, though waiting now before one of a hundred electric ovens in the Louisville Fair and Exposition Center, waiting for our judgment at the Great American Cookie Bake-Off, I’m not so sure. Maybe I don’t know anything about anybody.

But Eva held my hand and she couldn’t even recognize what was really going on in me. We’d quaked like that together over our kitchen tables more than once, laughing at what we’d just done, baked a batch of cookies and eaten them all. We could do that together, our little unconscious thumb to the nose. But we’d go right back and make another batch before Wolf and Karl and our children came home. These sweet little things were for them, after all. First and foremost for them.

So when Eva held my hand by the coffin, I looked into her face and I felt scared. Both for my having this dreadful feeling of relief — that’s the only word I could find for what I was feeling about the death of the man I’d lived with for more than forty years — and for having this dear friend, my other self, so blind to what was really going on in me. I wanted to run away right then. Down the aisle of the funeral home and out into the street and home to my kitchen and I would bake more cookies — Peanut Butter Bouquets, those were the cookies in my head beside the coffin — I would make a batch of Peanut Butter Bouquets and I would eat them all and I wouldn’t even hear the clock ticking over the sink or the afternoon breeze humming in the gutters or the daytime TV coming from the open windows next door and I wouldn’t have to watch the laundry lifting on the line and snapping and falling and lifting again or the sun filling the empty lawn and then yielding to the shadow of our roof, sucked in by the shadow of our house like so much bright lint on the rug disappearing into the vacuum. Another sound. The vacuum. Roaring. And smelling like burnt rubber. My hands smelling of Lemon Joy. Or Lysol. Clean. Everything clean. Smelling clean. But all that was transformed by the turn my life had taken. I could bake cookies and sit and Karl would not be coming home that night and the girls were all in their own kitchens in various distant places and I would eat and eat and there would be no more batches to make unless I wanted to eat some more.

Eva expected me to be baking my Peanut Butter Bouquets in the Bake-Off today. Six months before Karl failed to finish his evening meal, she and I sat at her kitchen table and there was bright sun in the yard and sheets on the line — we neither of us liked the smell of the laundry when it came out of our electric dryers — and I could hear the sheets flapping. Eva and I sat at her kitchen table and there was a Good Housekeeping open between us and the full-page ad said that cookies were what made a house a home and now somebody was going to earn a hundred thousand dollars for baking her best cookies.

“Wouldn’t it be something to win that?” Eva said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Not that I need it. Wolf was so smart.”

That was apparently true. Eva’s life did not change in the slightest after he was gone. Like in the Bible the brother would marry the sister-in-law after she was widowed, Eva was married now to Wolf’s interest-bearing accounts. Even though there was just his money, she kept her house the same way she always had, and she slept alone on those sheets that always smelled of the sun and the fresh air. And I always admired her for this. With a great swelling of the chest and a catch in the throat, I would speak of Eva’s life to my other friends and my words would be full of admiration.

“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.

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.

I turned to my cookies and it was time to make the sugar mixture. My hand went out to the granulated sugar, but I paused. My recipe asked for one cup of granulated sugar. But I’d had enough of that. I put in one cup of brown sugar. Just one cup of brown. The judges will thank me, I thought. After the Macadamia Mud and the Cherub Cheeks, they will turn away from all the desperate cloying and my cookies will touch them like something real, something true, like a mother’s embrace. And they will chew and chew and the results will just have to wait because they won’t want to stop chewing, and I will go home to my house tonight and I will make another batch of cookies just like this and I will chew all through the night and then on until the sun rises.

I lay in bed when I was a little girl and it was in the mountains, in Baden, and my mother and my grandmother both tucked me in and I’d secretly wrapped a cookie in the sleeve of my nightgown and surely they knew, the way they smiled at me and at each other, and it was Christmas or almost Christmas, that’s how I remember it always, and it was no matter that my father was by the fire smoking and rocking and talking only to the other men, they did not even exist, there was no one in the world but these two women and me and there was the cookie wrapped in my sleeve that we three had just baked, and my mother and my grandmother pulled the covers over me and I wanted to grow up and be just like them, I would be large and warm and smart in the ways that women are smart, and under the covers, with the kisses of my mother and my grandmother still wet on my face, I ate my cookie and it was chewy and it lasted and lasted and it seemed that I would never even have to swallow, it would stay sweet in my mouth forever.

But of course I was wrong. Another life came upon me, and I know now that the cookie I had in my sleeve was good for the child but baked for the man by the fire, and if I go home tonight and make these very same cookies, the bed I will take them to is full of the smell of another man, even if he is dead. They are for him. They were always for him. This is what the two women I loved taught me. I have no doubt tried to teach my own daughters this same thing. I am nearly seventy years old.

And the winner has just been announced and Eva is weeping again, in joy. Her Cherub Cheeks have prevailed and I am happy for her. May she never wash her red hands clean. And now I have a match in my hand and I light it and my apron is made of paper and the cooking spray will grease my way home.