More Than One

Prologue of Sorts

Things people collect:

Salt and pepper shakers

Bells

Books

Candles 

(Take note of order; take a moment to remember James Stewart and Kim Novak)

Shells

Dolls

Coins

Stamps

(Wondering: are collections classified by the sex - male or female - of the collectors? Do women collect matchbox cars? Do men collect bells?)

Collecting things ought to be the object of a serious study. Maybe it has been studied aready. After all, the ivory tower sorts - aka academics - are aways looking for new areas of research. 

Sometimes collecting objects is raised - lowered? - to a new level. Just look at Stephen King’s masterpiece, Needful Things. Not a lot of authors can take old stuff, often found in flea markets, and work it into a really good plot. All the characters are Faustian, they all sell their souls for a piece of carnival glass from the fifties or earlier, for a baseball card, for a chunk of petrified wood. None of these items is really worth giving up one’s most prized possessions. Leland Gaunt is obviously the Devil, Mr. King. We know you are well-read and know the classics. 

Why are people so needful? As the old story goes, nobody can take it with them.

Her story

She was by no means a fanatic about possessions and in fact lived rather modestly. Admittedly, she had quite a few books, even a number from childhood with fond memories attached. She had once had a stamp collection, but it hadn’t been pursued with any knowledge or money. Those were long gone, or maybe would resurface from some old box. She’d mostly liked the ones with pretty colors, often from tropical islands or countries that no longer are on the map. She’d not been interested in accumulating things, to be honest.

Except for recipes. Those were her passion, and she was always on the hunt for them. She clipped them from her mother’s old magazines, copied them onto index cards, even had found a whole shoebox full in an antique store. They were all marvelous treasures, some even splotched with ingredients from cooks’ fingers. 

The Betty Crocker Cookbook was the best, if not the only, cookbook she had seen while growing up. She didn’t know it was from 1950, and the red and white volume that always sat atop the spice cabinet, tall, white and blue, all dinged up, was a first edition. Worth a fortune decades later. She had inherited it, along with an odd, cobbled-together notebook in spidery cursive.

And two small metal file card holders, as dinged as the spice cabinet, but still serviceable. One a nondescript green and another with red, white, and black flowery design on it, reminiscent of Betty Crocker’s book. The metal boxes were full, but then her grandmother was no longer around to add anything to it. Nor was her mother, for that matter.

She felt a bit like an orphan, but the recipes were always good company. Just knowing there were there, on a shelf, was a sort of consolation. She felt so connected to them. It was as if her grandmother, so sweet and frail, were still around. Then something happened. 

Some people have no respect for others’ possessions. They think they’re trash, in the way, old, dirty. What they don’t know is that lives, years, often adhere to objects of no monetary value. They cherish their expensive cars or tools, but a bunch of little papers in a battered metal box are worthless.

And so her collection of her grandmother’s recipes had been destroyed. She had been fortunate enough not to see how it had happened. She suspected a certain person - who will remain anonymous - but knew she couldn’t prove it. An incorrect accusation would not do. Her loss had to be swallowed in silence.

She thought of all the good dishes that had resided in the cookbook, the notebook, the two homely boxes, and wept. It wasn’t clear to her if she would ever recover.

Why was the loss so upsetting? That was her question to herself, and she soon answered it, knowing she was the one person in the world who would ever remember the fragrances, the burned fingers, the full plates, the soft hand in an arm or shoulder that had been among the recipes. 

Nobody cared. Nobody could get them back for her. There was a big hole where they had been. Nobody should have gone to the little cabinet, taken them, and thrown them away. They could have waited until she was no longer around.

Something had to be done or she would lose her mind, overwhelmed as she was by the emptiness behind the cabinet door. There was only one solution.

She would study her grandmother, figure out who she was, or rather, who she had been. She knew it was the only option if she were to survive the loss of the recipes. It would not be simple and it would not be a quick process. 

She rummaged around in musty boxes that had been stored in forgotten places. In the attic she found photographs. It seemed that her grandmother had had good posture, was straight-backed as well as strait-laced. She had rarely smiled in photos, perhaps because when she did, her bony face looked like a Halloween skull. (She had, sadly, passed that skull down to her granddaughter.) She never wore bright colors, just black and navy blue that looked black. She hated red. 

It must have been painful to purchase the red and white Betty Crocker. 

Her granddaughter, desperately searching for what had been lost, located her crocheting. It was aged by now, yellowed yet not moth-eaten because she always used the same off-white, fine cotton thread. Incredibly detailed, perfect, straight, even stitches. Steely fragility. 

Her granddaughter felt she only knew her through the recipes. She needed those ingredients and their measured - carefully measured - amounts.

As hard as she tried, the aged photographs and doilies weren’t enough. Objects were insufficient when the woman, who had been as gaunt as Leland Gaunt in King’s masterpiece, had been little more than a grotesque skeleton at the end of her life. Eighty pounds of flesh and bone leaves little room for a person. But her daughter had loved her, even if her granddaughter had not.

She realized at last that her grandmother, ossified by the time she was sixty-five, was unapproachable via her few possessions. Grandma had had few things of her own other than albums filled with obituaries. She shook her head and shivered.

No, her granddaughter would need to learn about her life from marriage on. She would avoid the hollow-eyed images and too-high cheekbones. She would try to discern, recapture, reinvent the moments when recipes were written down. Those were the moments when life might have seemed worthwhile. All the others were too painful.

“Write them,” she ordered herself, surprised at her reaction. 

And she wrote, now a young woman not yet twenty, already wearing glasses, but winsome and prettily coifed. Clothing bright and ruffly, a twinkle in her eye, a handsome suitor who was her only love. Until, of course, there were plates flying and neither actually saw red, but there was always one saying black and one saying white.

The writing was only possible because there were two women in one. Or more than one. And because nobody else was there to watch it happen. The recipes were just little things, part of a life nobody really noticed while it was happening. Nothing much was left over from it, except the formulas for food. Home made catsup (the old spelling), tomato juice (really?), molasses cookies, mincemeat, stewed tomatoes (who eats those, especially with bits of bread stuck in the sauce?), tomato conserve.

Was her grandmother addicted to tomatoes like she is?

Writing the recipes from within a person she barely knew, rarely spoke to, feared, was far from easy, but it was an obligation. Something inherited from a strait-laced religion that never comforted anybody and did immense harm to many. At last she was finished, unable to excavate any longer from inside what she had only known as a hard, bony, flimsy body so empty of love. Except for one person.

After many years, the recipes finally stop appearing. They, like the body, have dried up. Grandmother is finally done. Her gaunt glare is gone. Her food notations are about the only remnant of a life perhaps not well-lived, not happy. The doubt was always whether the strictness in her smile and words was real or imagined. Had she been a poor, devout woman or a caged (by those obvious bones) monster?

 She had to leave that human prison and allow her mother’s recipes to take over. It was not at all a simple transition, because Mom had been different, happier, healthier. For a while. The problem was, her mother wore it all inside: the black and white, the plates that were thrown, the early departure from school. The usual. Happy in minimal ways, like finding, jotting down, preserving bits of food through lists of ingredients and their amounts. 

Recipes as promises. Of fulfillment. Sometimes it was necessary to sell one’s soul to find that, to acquire the pleasure offered by an object purchased or a dish prepared. Where had the soul of the grandmother been? Had she been the devil in disguise or incarnate? Had she tried to sing her way to consolation and kindness when she croaked out the melodies of “Church in the Wildwood” or “The Old Rugged Cross?” By then she had stopped eating and was living on air and Demerol.

The recipes were the antidote to that. To the reality and its memories, hard, broken, suppressed. The recipes were her grandmother, the only thing left. The only part of her life that had mattered.

She shook herself free from the reverie that could have been brief or extended, or maybe it wasn’t even a reverie. Still, she knew she had been somewhere else, and her own gaunt expression, her own sins and reflection and thoughts of dead children (more than her grandmother’s) looked back at her. Proof enough.

Only her grandmother had possessed one thing she hadn’t: someone to pass things down to. Things in cookbooks and scarred little metal boxes. Things someone would understand and know. She had none of that, and had only had the collection of edible hopes, none of them come true. Somebody had decided she didn’t deserve even that, but she was not done yet.

Then she turned away from the bag of bones that had been her grandmother, an image from DuMaurier and a title by Stephen King. It was quite a burden to bear, equal to that of an old rugged cross.

She turned away from the past, feeling it was dried up and fragile as parchment (often made from the skin of something). She went over to the little cabinet with the empty space it concealed and open the door. She expected to find nothing on the shelf where the destroyed recipes had once been, and was fearing the sadness the empty space would cause her.

She should have known better. Lives, no matter what they have been like, are more than a void. It doesn’t take strict Protestantism to teach that.

She looked at the shelf.

The recipes were there, waiting to be used. 

She hoped her soul was there, too.