Our Poor, Falling-Down Selves
In the Kitchen with Dicey’s Song by Cynthia Voight
Welcome! You have arrived at the third installment of my memoir in essays, At Home with Books. For the prologue and first chapter, go to the table of contents.
If you are here for my regular Teacher Lady stories or Obsession Posts, a new one will run next Friday. If you’re looking for a poetry reading, keep your eye out on Monday!
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our
children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as
we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
~ Joy Harjo, “Perhaps the World Ends Here”
A clear December morning brightened the antique glass in the casement windows above the kitchen sink in the Asheville family house. I stood on the painted rug and poured coffee into separate thermoses for the day, setting them side by side on the green counter, just as the mother of the house would have done.
It was the seventh month of my stay in that home. The parents were in England on an anniversary trip, and I was the one who had pulled the coffee grounds out of the freezer the night before; I had set the pots to brew, one caffeine-fueled and one not, for the teenaged children who had not yet descended the staircase to start their day.
“You’ll make a good mom,” the mother told me as we went over responsibilities. I had suggested that I would continue making a family breakfast on Sundays before church, just as she always did. “You understand that children need consistency.” She encouraged me about my someday, far-off own, and I felt that affirmation down to the tips of my toes.
I had crossed into my thirties only weeks before, still in this house that wasn’t mine, feeling every inch an imposter at life. Words of encouragement, even ones that had to do with a distant life I didn’t know would ever exist, went a long way.
Now I pumped my own coffee into a shimmery green ceramic mug made by a family member, twisted the stovetop knob till the clicking caught into flame, and set butter to melt in a frying pan. The kitchen never seemed empty when the parents were home, the whole family rotating in and out from early morning till night. I wasn’t alone now. A sinewy black cat purred a path in and around my legs, rubbing his deceptively sweet muzzle along my calves.
Meow. I cracked and whisked eggs into the sizzling pan. Meow. I pulled down the beehive-shaped honey pot and sweetened my brew. Meow, Meow. Holding my mug, I reached down to scratch between his ears, a privilege rarely bestowed by this creature called Rascal, who habitually lived up to his name.
“What is up with you this morning?” He was never this friendly. Love may hope and believe all things, but I wouldn’t say I loved this cat, and I should have known something was going to happen. I was in that misted land between sleep and wakefulness. I ran my hand along Rascal’s back, but he was having none of it.
I turned to move the eggs around in the pan, and a shooting, hot pain electrified my leg. Against the butter-browned egg curd, the sharp mingling of stovetop gas with hot coffee steam, against the satisfaction of standing here in this house, contributing something back to the family that had given so much to me, waiting to offer the children of the home their own mugs full of coffee and slide breakfast plates toward them across the kitchen table, Rascal, that slender, sneaky cat, flashed his extended claws and scratched me.
For all the belonging I had found while living in that home, this was something I didn’t understand: Rascal wanted his breakfast, too. I had forgotten that part of the household responsibilities, and the single claw scratch down the side of my calf would soon burn bright red and allergy-irritated, reminding me that I was actually only me, and not one of the family who would have known better.
Needless to say, cats were not part of the family profile when my husband and I, three years and five residences later, bought our first house, a Cape Cod with a long attic bedroom in which I first met Davita. When I think of our earliest days in that little gray house in a neighborhood packed with other such houses and postage-stamp yards, of my first time setting foot in that place as the owner, I begin in the kitchen.
“Are you sure you don’t mind going on your own?” my husband asked as we parted ways after signing away what felt like our lives at the realtor’s office. He was on lunch break and couldn’t join me for our inaugural entrance as owners.
“No, I want to go,” I didn’t add that I preferred to do this alone.
When I think of that day, I stand at the kitchen door. I inhale the musty, old-house scent as I push the large, tarnished key into the loose-fitting hole and snick the lock. Before passing through, I catch a narrow, triangular glimpse of the kitchen through an array of small, square windows, thick layers of cream-colored lead paint cracked and peeling around the framed glass edges.
The structure was built in the 1940’s to accommodate postwar families, part of a smart, efficient three-street neighborhood development for the men returning to work for the armory near Blacksburg, Virginia, and the size of the kitchen reflected the middle-class architecture of that decade.
When I walked through the door and up the single step into my new home that July day, I stepped into a short galley kitchen, eighteen inches of workspace and the sink to my right, the fridge and stove and a skinny sliver of counter to the left. The one small wall of cabinets hadn’t been updated in all the house’s years; their metal doors clicked open and closed satisfyingly, grabbed onto by old-fashioned interior latches.
There was a phone shelf under the cabinet closest to the dining room; I organized my spices in it. There wasn’t room for the oversized dishes I’d been gifted from my wedding registry one year before. I could make an entire meal standing almost in the same spot, turning in a fixed circle to reach now counter, now sink, now refrigerator, now stove. If my body were John Donne’s stationary foot, my heart was in my slicing, dicing, and sauteing hands, a give-and-take dance compassed by this small sonnet of a kitchen that, unbelievably, belonged to me.
I learned in that home that cooking can be done well in a tidy, confined space, as I practiced culinary hospitality on this man with whom I had just committed to spend the rest of my days: warm egg and spinach salads with roasted potatoes and homemade dressing; sliced vegetable and white bean quesadillas; cajun-spiced chicken with avocado. A friend during those early-marriage years joined us for a meal and commented about the compass-point kitchen, “Just think of the first woman who lived here, back in the Forties. I bet she felt like a queen in this house!”
I felt like a queen in that kitchen, and not just because it was mine. In that extra-small space, I learned not merely how to cook, but how to love the process of cooking, the slow, sensory enjoyment of slicing a pepper and leaving only the ribbed frame behind, or halving cherry tomatoes with a sharp knife, the insides looking like nothing so much as tiny, perfect pink mushrooms. I leaned into prepping dinner the way Robert Farrar Capon describes peeling an onion: he urges his reader to spend an hour seated at the table with the onion, a knife, and a cutting board, and he devotes an entire irreverent, reverent chapter to the experience in The Supper of the Lamb, his paeon to cooking and to paying attention.
“Man’s real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are,” he says. In that little, regal cooking space in Southwest Virginia, I laid the foundations for the way I would continue to cook as my family grew.
But other foundations had already been laid. I had left the Asheville home with the bustling family life, the cozy corners, the pulsing music, the warm kitchen, the bursting sideboard, the revolving door. Here in my own home in Blacksburg, I believed I could keep that time alive.