1976, Canton, Ohio

By Abigail Powell

“I want you to learn how to make this meal.” My mother is acting strange. I am 11 years old. “Pay attention, this is very important.”

She is teaching me how to make Wednesday’s hamburger noodle casserole. I am uncomfortable. This is not my job; this is out of order. I suppress a nagging suspicion that this lesson is a rite of passage for me. She is handing over the baton of wife and mother.

This suspicion proves astute several weeks later, when she walks out the front door, without her coat, into the January winter and doesn’t return. Shortly after her endless walk, my father will change the locks on the doors and discard anything that belonged to her, including the family dog.

“You use this skillet,” she informs me.

The skillet belonged to her mother. I later wonder if my mother realized that she had only two more Wednesdays to spend time with her skillet - and before she lost custody of her girls.

“Brown the hamburger until it sizzles,” she says. “Be sure to chop it up into tiny pieces; your father doesn’t like chunks.” She’s moved over to the cutting board and is peeling the onion. She runs the cold water while she cuts the onion, believing that it will stop the tears. “Now, your grandmother swears that chewing on a piece of white bread will stop the tears, but I think the cold water works.”

She seems happy today, content to move about in her dark-blue top. She wears only blue or black. They’re the only two colors my father chooses for her. He does all her shopping.

It does not escape notice that he chooses the colors of a bruise. Years later, after her escape, a visit to my mother will show her wearing a pink skirt. Pink? Who would have guessed that she had it in her?

Today, she is still subject to the rules of my father’s house. “Mix the onion in with the ground hamburger, then put the heat on low. Putting things on low, or better, turning things off altogether, are important activities in our house.”

When my brother’s friends come around to play, we all get nervous if they have to use the toilet. It upsets my father if they flush it. He goes through a period where he only tolerates the toilet being flushed once a day.

We are too embarrassed to tell the older boys not to flush. Each time we hear all that water swishing down the pipes, we mentally calculate the cost involved. Naturally, we include the toilet paper and the wear and tear on the linoleum. No cost is considered insignificant.

My mother is wiping down the counter; the workspace must be kept clean and germ-free. I feel that I should write all this down. I do not think I will remember the order. Why am I to be in charge of this meal? I do not want this responsibility. She pulls out the popcorn pan.

We have popcorn every Saturday night, after our egg salad sandwich dinner. Saturday is also our weekly bath day. So after we’ve spent our dime of shampoo and dressed in pajamas, we sit in the living room to watch Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.

My mother will make popcorn for the children, and my dad will eat Rold Gold pretzel sticks. These are forbidden to us. My father will lie on the sofa, munching on his pretzel sticks, and we will sit at the back of the room with the intention of not being noticed.

For many years, we do not have a television. During this period, we sit at our dining-room table and play cards. The snack distribution remains constant with either activity.

Today, my mother fills the popcorn pan with water. She places it on the stove and waits for it to boil. I am staring down into the pan, watching tiny water bubbles forced to the surface from the heat.

I am wondering why my mother chose me for this task and not my twin. I think that she must be afraid that my sister would refuse. She is certain that I will not, and she is right. I never refuse anyone anything.

“A watched pot never boils,” she comments, as she opens the bag of egg noodles that will soon meet their demise in the soon-to-be boiling water. “Just a pinch of salt, now - not too much,” she cautions. I know she measures everything in this kitchen, always calculating when she may run out.

I will add these things to my own worry list in a few weeks. I will attempt to make our weekly menu and fail more times than I succeed.

“It’s not that complicated,” my father will say, his beetle eyes staring at my budding breasts.

I am constantly substituting ingredients because the ones I need are not available. Later, I think he deliberately didn’t purchase them to see me falter.

My mother is opening two cans of cream-of-chicken soup. She holds them over the browned hamburger, and they hold fast to the insides of their cans. I don’t blame them for not wanting to come out. She shakes and jiggles, and eventually pries the contents out with a spoon.

She tells me to stir the soup into the hamburger and onions. I do this, tentatively, uncertain of what it all means. Our family is so scheduled that even the slightest variance is shocking.

The noodles are sufficiently drowned and allowed to rinse off in the colander. Once the hot water is off their sticky, limp backs, they are permitted to join the hamburger mixture. The entire ensemble is then placed into a casserole dish and baked until it’s dry.

We are finished cooking now. It is the first time I’ve baked with my mother, and the excitement overshadows the knowledge lurking behind it. I set the table, a comfortable and familiar task, and we wait for my father to return.

Once my mother takes her long walk, becoming a small dot on the horizon, I will finish dinner, set the table, and then sneak into my father’s room during this waiting period. It’s a dangerous journey because my father has set up booby traps to ensure his privacy.

Sometimes, a piece of thread or a strand of hair (a minor offense, if found in the dining room but a handy spy tool used in the bedroom) will be placed over the doorknob.

He is big on stacking coins to check for movement in his room. Several pennies will be placed on the bottom, with a dime slightly askew on top. Any small movement will tip the dime off the pennies and provide sufficient evidence of intrusion.

The stacked coins never work. Anyone who knows my father would see it as a ploy from the beginning. He would never leave anything slightly askew.

I don’t bother with any of his things when I go in. I simply want to look out his window, which exposes the street that my father’s red van will travel up to get home.

I pray all the time since I’ve been baptized. On the evenings, I go into his room, and I pray that he will be killed in a car accident.

I stand in front of his mirror, practicing looking sad when the police come to the door to inform me. It will be our little secret, just between me and God, that I caused his death.

I finish my prayer and look out the window. I see his red van driving up the street, exactly on schedule. Not a minute late. I raise my eyebrows in wonder to God. If I had known then, I would have looked around the room for where Jesus was hiding and asked him why he never answered my prayers.

Abigail Powell is currently working on her manuscript, In Search of Boredom, while attending college to (finally) get her bachelor’s degree. She has a dream of graduating before her children. She is using a pseudonym.

Posted by Common Ties on Monday, November 5th, 2007 | Email This Post

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