I pour the milk into the bowl and whisk it into the beaten eggs, and then add the flour slowly so as not to create lumps. The batter must be smooth and glossy as the inside of the conch shell that sits on my nightstand. I’m getting ready to add baking powder when I hear a buzzing. A fly, I see, is throwing itself against the window pane and I hear that too, the tiny thud of its black body against the glass. I walk (limp) to the window to open it so the disgusting thing can fly away, but by the time I get there it’s dead. Sunlight shines through one transparent wing, its body the still, dark period at the end of a sentence. I step-drag my way to the counter and by the time I’m back at the windowsill, I have to use the towel I’ve retrieved to wipe the sweat that’s gathered along my hairline. I pick up the body with the towel and throw it, and the towel, into the garbage receptacle. I wash my hands, splash some water on my face, but when I return to my bowl, I see the milk has now curdled. I step-drag back to the receptacle and scrape every last bit of it out of the bowl. I wash the bowl, dry it. Then I go upstairs to lie down.
She hates her hair because it’s red and she hates her legs because they are useless. As much as she hates being a redhead though, Fannie hates Maddy Walcott even more. Maddy with her short hair that on any other girl their age would make her look like a boy, but on her is dramatic in all the right ways. Fannie narrows her eyes at the plate of cookies on the table next to her bed, brought by Maddy “to cheer her up.” They’re chocolate chip, but they’re weirdly salty and leave an aftertaste that is as bitter as Fannie’s satisfaction at her visitor’s failure as a baker. She hopes that she’ll bestow a batch of these cookies on Preston McPherson, a boy they both like, but who calls Fannie “carrot top,” and then goes silent and red-faced when Maddy passes by in the hall.
This is my life now, thinks Fannie. She’s a crippled red-headed girl who will never graduate high school, never get married, never have children.
After Maddy leaves, she eats all of the cookies. The joy she feels at their awfulness is savage.
“Someone’s feeling better!” her mother says when she sees the empty plate. “You girls were hungry.” Her mother’s voice starts out high and goes higher until she is out of breath. This is how she talks to Fannie now. Since her illness, her mother refers to Fannie as “we” as in “how are we feeling” and “we are very grumpy today.”
Her mother sits next to her on the bed and starts the afternoon massage of her legs, using the technique that the doctor, the one they moved to Boston to be near, prescribed. “Does this hurt?” her mother asks, her voice quavering near the top note of the upbeat.
“Yes,” says Fannie, although she doesn’t feel anything. Nothing at all. She’s half dead, so it doesn’t matter that she has red hair and will never again stand in the kitchen baking cookies with her mother.
“I’m sorry,” her mother whispers, lifting her hands away.
Frannie wipes the tears off her cheeks and says nothing.
But Fannie gets better. Much to her surprise, and her doctors’, the feeling starts coming back to her legs. Every day her mother and father take her for a walk in the Public Garden, wheeling her across Beacon Street in her chair, and then helping her to stand, one on either side of her. Every day they walk a little further, until one day they’re standing at the edge of the pond, watching the swan boats drift by.
That afternoon she bakes a batch of chocolate chip cookies. They are perfect. She sends her youngest sister out to deliver some to Miss Madeline Walcott of Brimmer Street on The Hill. The rest she eats by herself, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of Earl Grey and her cat asleep on the chair beside her.
“Miss Farmer!”
Fannie turns. She’s used to being approached after one of her talks by fans. This one is short and round and clutching a bundle of papers to her chest. One of the pages flutters to the ground and the woman swoops and picks it up without breaking stride.
“Miss Farmer! Fannie!” The woman stops, fanning herself with a fistful of pages.
Fannie turns, careful on her weak left leg. Over the years she has practiced a slow, stately walk, and she’d bet that no one can tell she has a limp these days. “Yes?”
“My name is Mary Harper Reed. My friends call me MHR. I’m your biggest fan, me and all my girls.”
“Thank you,” Fannie says, and reaches for one of the woman’s pieces of papers. “Do you have a pen?”
“Oh, I’m not looking for an autograph,” says MHR. “These are our recipes. Me and the girls. When they found out I was coming to one of your talks, they begged me to share them with you. We’ve got the whole world here: Ireland, Austria, even one from Russia. That one’s a dessert, I think.” The woman fumbles with her pages, which drop, autumn leaves, on the cobblestone walk.
“I’d love to see your recipes, but I’m late for an appointment.”
MHR continues as if Fannie hasn’t spoken. “I’m the president of the Louisa May Alcott Club. We’re located on Oswego Street? In Roxbury?”
“I’ve never been to—”
“I know you’ve done such good work for the poor of Boston, Miss Farmer. Fannie. But our girls aren’t looking for a handout. MHR clutches the papers to her chest and tells Miss Farmer about how she’s found a “tenement” for the Club with running water and “the only bathroom in the neighborhood.”
“How lovely,” says Fannie, “but I really must be—”
“At the Club,” MHR continues, “they get to take a bath once a week. Our girls come so they can learn skills to make some money.”
Fannie nods and opens her mouth, but the woman is still talking: about how they earn “five cents a week when working,” take “cooking, sewing, and English classes,” and learn to sew their own “shirt-waists and summer dresses.” She explains about their “piece-work-finishing of coats, the making of hats, of shirt-sleeves,” about how the girls give all their earnings to their parents to help with rent and upkeep; they have no money of their own (Oh my! Fannie says). She tells about the “candy-pull” and game night. “The Club’s goal is joyful service to the community, to help others so they can learn to help themselves so they can eventually help others.”
During this recitation, Fannie has been taking careful steps backward, but the woman advances until they are almost nose-to-nose, and Fannie’s back is pressed against the brick facade of the Parker House Hotel where she has just given her talk. She had hoped to run into the head baker and talk him into selling her his recipe for his yeasted rolls, but now here is this woman with her papers, the sweating, pressing bulk of her. So Fannie does as her mother taught her. She takes one of the woman’s waving hands and presses it between her own. “My dear,” she says, “Indeed, the soul is the bread of life.”
MHR stills.
In a voice so low, MHR has to lean still closer, Fannie thanks her for her service, for coming to her talk, for carrying the good word about scientific cooking to the people who need it most. At the end of this small speech, she is practically whispering and so it is that she is able to release the woman’s hand, step firmly around her, and make her slow, stately way up School Street to the corner where her carriage waits.
MHR returns to the tenement and tells her girls how charming Miss Farmer had been. “She insisted I call her Fannie,” she says. Then it’s time for their weekly cooking class. Each girl–there are seven–dons “a white cap and apron.” MHR gets the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book down off the shelf over the limp-legged table.
Its green cover.
Its pages stained with spills and splashes.
MHR opens the book to the section on braised meats and tells her girls how Miss Farmer–Fannie–had praised the Louisa May Alcott Club’s efforts to “learn to cook supper scientifically.” They hover over the picture of a cow, its body divided into sections. MHR points to one called rump, and Grete, the girl from Vienna, giggles. While Grete and Lillian prepare the meat, and the rest of the girls set the table according to The Book’s diagram on page 23, MHR reads to them from a collection of Louisa May Alcott’s poetry.
The braised beef, when they finally sit down to eat it, is stringy and tough, but MHR reassures them that they can only do so much with the butcher’s discards. She praises the table setting, the tablecloth with its tattered lace border, the daisies in the chipped vase Grete had found in a little shop on Blue Hill Avenue. Conversation is lively, if discordant, as they practice their conversational skills over the gray meat.
“The weather, it is blue today,” says Lillian.
“Nice. The weather is nice today. Or you could say lovely,” says MHR.
Grete agrees: “Yes. We are fortunate not to have the rain.”
Tonight is Hildy’s turn to choose from their small library. She hands a worn copy of Polly Oliver’s Problem to MHR. She starts them off, but each girl must practice reading English, no matter how shy she is. There’s much laughter as they stumble over the cranky English words that refuse to wrap themselves around their tongues, but the laughter is kind and their stomachs are full. Grete turns up the wick on the lamp and rests her head against another girl’s knees as Lillian takes her turn with the book.
Dr. Wallace makes her way down the center aisle of the cooking lab. She’s proud of the modernity of the space. Her girls will learn the ancient arts of keeping house, but with the most up-to-date aids, such as “pressure cookers and electric blenders.” The men can keep their chemistry labs, she thinks, but women have been scientists of meal preparation since men were still trying to figure out how to make fire. As a matter of fact, she’d bet a woman had been the one to do that too, all while holding a baby on one hip and another child by the hand. The girls stand at attention, shoulders back, chins up. She wipes a finger across one of the countertops and nods her approval at its spotlessness to the young woman behind it. At the front of the room, Dr. Dawn Nelson Wallace, director of Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery turns and faces her good little soldiers of the kitchen.
“Ladies, I have an announcement. Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery will hold a 50th anniversary “fine foods” exhibition to showcase our new location here at 40 Hereford Street.”
At this, a pulse of excitement, detectable only from the quick intake of breath, in unison, from twenty-four good little soldiers.
Dr. Wallace tells them, again, of her own humble beginnings as a student at Keene State Teacher’s College, her appointment as director of MFSC, and her fund-raising efforts that have resulted in the most modern, most technologically advanced, cooking labs in any cooking school. Even Paris. “My dear young ladies, remember that MFSC used to be for young ladies from ‘wealthy families,’ but has since attracted ‘brides, cooks, and epicures’ from all walks of life. In the words of our beloved founder, Miss Fannie Farmer—”
A clatter of metal against Formica interrupts the flow of words.
Every head turns toward the young woman who is now on her knees, gathering up the set of mixing bowls that crashed to the floor. She’s put the last bowl, the smallest one, in its place, when a pair of sensible navy pumps align themselves just beneath her nose. She raises her eyes until they meet those of the Director. She rises to her feet. Places the bowls soundlessly on the counter. Not even Dr. Wallace can detect the quiver of her chin.
“And what is your name, young lady?”
“Nell. Nell Goldstein.”
“Goldstein. That name is…”
“Jewish, ma’am.”
“Jewish.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Dr. Dawn Nelson Wallace’s eyes travel down the length of her. “You have a spot on your apron, Miss Goldstein. In fact, I detect a yellow cast to your whole ensemble, which, as we all know, must be kept pure white.” Her eyes, the washed blue of the morning sky, now alight on the plate of cookies next to the unit’s stovetop. “May I?” And without stopping to hear Nell’s murmured assent, helps herself to one.
The room holds its breath.
Nell tucks a dark curl back into her hairnet. She wipes the palms of her hands down the front of her stained yellowed apron.
Dr. Nelson chews. She swallows.
“Miss Goldstein. What leavening agent did you add to your dough?”
“Baking powder?”
“I think not. Check again.”
The room and Dr. Wallace wait while Nell crouches behind her island, scanning the bottles and boxes until she finds the one she’s looking for.
She sets the box in front of the Director. “Baking soda.”
The room erupts, a flock of songbirds calling to each other in delight.
The front of Nell’s apron is now wrinkled as well as stained from all the bending and groveling. She doesn’t tell the Director how she doesn’t give a hoot about baking powder versus baking soda, how she’s only here to please her mother, and how she had been daydreaming during her speech, about climbing out one of the lab’s huge windows, leaping onto the branch of that tree right outside, climbing down and running away from blenders and cookie sheets and expectations. Instead, she bends over her cookbook and crosses out the word powder and writes in soda.
Here is the white stove with its two black burners. Here is her new apron with a yellow chick for a pocket. Each day, Nell pours over her cookbook in search of enticing dishes to prepare for her new husband. She’s glad now that her mother had insisted on enrolling her in Fannie Farmer’s Cooking School, a pre-wedding gift she deemed necessary for a modern day bride. Today, she’s preparing Hungarian Goulash. Apple pie for dessert. She had woken that morning to snow-filled skies, but made her way to the corner market where she purchased her ingredients. Back in the apartment, she turns the radio to her favorite station and unpacks the groceries. After a short break to dive into her new favorite book, Atlas Shrugged, Nell reties her apron and sets to work. But now, hours later, the tiny kitchen is onion skins, apple peels, and an array of open spice bottles. Fine white flour dusts every surface of the kitchen and most of Nell.
And now here is Theo. His step in the hall, his key in the door.
“Hi, honey,” he says from behind the wool muffler wrapped around his face. He pulls off his hat and unwraps the scarf. He takes in the peelings and the dishes and his flour-covered wife. “Everything okay?”
Then she’s crying, sobbing.
Theo rushes forward and takes her in his arms. “Darling, don’t cry! Everything will be okay.” He pulls back, looks at her face, and then wipes it gently with the hem of her apron. “Here,” he says, taking out the white handkerchief she had pressed for him that morning. “Blow.”
She does as he instructs. Taking a deep breath, she wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “I guess things kind of got away from me.”
Theo pushes a strand of hair that had gotten stuck in a dried patch of flour back from her forehead. “It certainly smells good in here. What are we having?”
The tears, which have slowed to a trickle, return with a force that causes Theo to step back.
“What? What did I say?”
“I haven’t even put it in the oven yet!” She throws herself into the kitchen’s only chair and buries her face in her apron.
Then she’s in his arms and he’s kissing her and she’s kissing him back. His tie, her apron on the white powdered floor. They move, still together, into the living room, past the sofa and twin wing-backed chairs and into the bedroom. “My darling girl,” he murmurs as he pushes up her dress and unclips her girdle from her stockings. Nell wants to do something for him, but doesn’t know what, so she lets him slip the dress over her head, bury his head in her breasts. She sighs with want. He is inside her and she wants to move, but he whispers to her to hold still, hold still my darling. How beautiful he is, thinks Nell, watching her husband make love to her. Her husband!
Afterwards, while he’s in the bathroom cleaning himself, Nell is still filled with that want. Like she’s hungry even after eating a meal.
The meal! Nell sits up in bed.
By the time they sit down to the goulash, it’s almost ten o’clock. They agree to save the apple pie for breakfast. They can scrape off the burned parts and have it with fresh cream.
At midnight, Nell finally finishes cleaning the kitchen. She hopes Theo doesn’t notice she hasn’t mopped the floor.
The next day, entering the lab, all the boys in their white coats, the professor. They turn and look at her, Nell in her shirtwaist and black pumps; perhaps she’s from the dean’s office delivering a message? But no, she takes her place at an empty table at the back of the room. And yes, here’s her name on the roster: Nell Smith. Her name in the professor’s mouth is like one of the sour candies she remembered from Joe’s Candy Shoppe. None of the boys look at her, but they’re all looking at her just the same.
Nell had been excited to take this class with Dr. Malcolm, who she had discovered on a recent reading binge. The days are so long while her husband’s at work and Nell, bored up to her eyeballs, has taken to braving the cold to spend winter mornings at the university library reading up on isotope separation and nuclear fusion. Malcolm, she read, had been one of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, and was now starting work on the potential hazards of the dumpsite at Love Canal in nearby Niagara. To her disappointment, however, he speaks of neither of these projects, but instead lectures them on safety procedures and proper attire (here he glances at Nell).
“Excuse me, Miss Smith,” he says after dismissing the class and the students file out of the room.
“It’s Mrs. Smith actually,” says Nell.
Dr. Wallace peers at her over the top of his glasses. He has gray sworls of hair that loop around the back of his head and end in bushy sideburns that extend down past his pendulous earlobes. “Mrs. Smith, are you sure you meant to take this class? Perhaps you misread your schedule.”
Nell nods her head. “I’m sure,” she says.
“You may well find, Mrs. Smith, that this course is academically rigorous. Perhaps you may be better suited for the home economics program. Cooking is really chemistry, you know, and your husband will benefit from your efforts.” His teeth, when he smiles, are like the piano keys of her family’s old upright.
Nell pictures the tiny kitchen with its balky stove, so different from the expansive cooking labs at Miss Farmer’s Cooking School where she had learned the proper way to pluck a goose and how to roll out a perfect pie crust. She thanks the professor for his advice and assures him that she is where she wants to be. He frowns, but erases some mark he had made next to her name in his grade book.
A bored housewife, Nell thinks as she trudges home through the filthy snow. I suppose that’s what he thinks I am. She sighs, her breath forming a skein of ice on the inside of her wool scarf that chafes her cheeks.
That evening at dinner Theo compliments her on the creamed chicken and stuffed tomatoes, but waves off her complaints about Dr. Malcolm. “I told you you’d be the only woman. What did you expect? You’d probably be better off dropping the class. You can probably still get my money back.”
“Drop it?” said Nell, picking up the empty plate he’s pushed in her direction. She stacks her plate on top and stands. “Never. I’ll prove him wrong. You know that my high school chem teacher said that I―”
Theo takes the plates out of her hands and pulls her onto his lap. He kisses her on the forehead. Then he places the dirty dishes back in her hands and the conversation is over.
Kira props her phone up against the stack of her mother’s cookbooks, which are grimy and kind of gross if you ask her, which no one is, but still: Yuck. She’s home this weekend from college and although she knows she promised mom she’d make dinner, she’s been craving something sweet. She moves the phone away from the worn spine of the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, the one that belonged to Grandma Nell and that for some reason her mother has “bequeathed” to her. She taps on the screen, and then her Pinterest “Desserts” board. She’s looking for the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe and she’s pinned about twenty of them. She debates between one with crushed Heath bars (too sweet) and another with walnuts (baked nuts; not a fan). She swipes and swipes and finally lands on a gluten-free, vegan recipe, sans candy, sans nuts, and she thinks, yeah, this is it.
They’re a little flat when they come out of the oven, but they’re saved by the dash of cinnamon that she throws in at the last minute. Kira makes herself a cup of Chai Rooibos tea with a splash of almond milk and then sips it, eating some of the cookies while looking at gifs of cats on her phone. She covers the rest with foil and leaves them for her mother. Then she picks up her phone and taps on Seamless to order in pizza. Or maybe Thai? So many possibilities.
Citations:
Hoover, Gladys. “She Wrote a Best Seller without Plot, Hero Or Heroine.” Daily Boston Globe (1928-1960), Jul 20, 1947, pp. 1, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Boston Globe.
“Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery Features Exhibition This Week.” Daily Boston Globe (1928-1960). Boston, Mass. Jan 27, 1952. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Boston Globe.
Transcript of notes of M.H.R. on the Louisa M. Alcott Club, 1896 or 1897; Louisa May Alcott Club, records; I-210; box 1; folder 1; American Jewish Historical Society, New York, NY, and Boston, MA.
