Behind her glasses, I could see that there was a black, tiny, pie-shaped wedge in the green of the iris of her eye.
“The neighbor ladies tell me you’re the friendliest person here.” She smiled. She passed the compliment over as if she were handing me a sticky butter knife, blade first. I accepted.
“Oh, I guess it’s just because I’m a good listener. Or something … Let me just go inside and get a few things, and we could come over for a while,” I said, and I ran in to wake up Toby and pick up the quilt squares from the floor. I decided to bring them so I’d have something to talk about, and I stuffed the squares into the back of Toby’s stroller, stuffed him into the front, and followed Debbie, who was humping along on a giant plastic inchworm that rose and fell, rose and fell, along the sidewalk. We all followed Maggie down the street to her house, and I didn’t care if I’d be gone when Jack called to give me his motel phone number – such is the strength of loneliness. Maggie was walking in longer-than-normal strides and carrying an armload of wildflowers.
Suburban life in the afternoon can be quite colorful and emblematic, I thought, squinting into the late sun, as we walked in parade formation. She was wearing a long red-and-gold paisley peasant dress, and she must have gathered up the flowers from the field behind our houses, where I’ve never gone because the path that snakes through it after the sidewalk ends is littered with beer cans and it has been said that one night a woman was raped there. In the daytime, you would most certainly get a cut and then lockjaw from such a field, at the very least.
Maggie’s big house was one of the last outposts before the wildflower field, and when she pushed open her coffin-shiny but now dog-scratched front door with her bare foot, it looked to me as if the field had already grown up and into her house. I parked the stroller in the big crowded entry next to a carton full of rubber boots and mittens, an unpainted milk can with umbrellas, and a long bent tube, several balls, ballet slippers, and a tennis shoe. I dropped my bag full of quilt squares there and decided it would be safe enough to let Toby crawl around, rather than hold him on my lap, as I would have done if the Avon Lady had invited me into one of her polished rooms.
“Let me just get these into water. I’ll be right back … come on in ..” she said, as she carefully and, I thought, daintily followed a trail only she could see through the cluttered living room and around the corner. The white walls of the room were covered with gigantic pale art prints in thin silver frames, and then, in contrast, there were tiny dark oil paintings in large, ornate, matted frames, and shelves and shelves of books making dark leather patterns on the remaining wall space. They were stacked together so massively they seemed to form an impenetrable wall. A sculpture of what looked like a kidney with a fist breaking through the top held down a leaning pile of magazines that were scrolled open, and Toby was crawling dangerously close to an ashtray brimming with pipe stems, which I pushed out of his way. Long, hanging plants curtained the windows, and a mobile of half-chewed straw birds tilted slightly in the breeze from the opened door, sending lazy bird shadows skimming across the blue shag carpet. A big gray cat watched for a while as the phantom wings dipped up and down across the carpet and then went back to chewing the end of a weed he had pulled out of a slender jug full of nodding field grass that was leaning close to a dimly breathing, shadowing fire in the brick fireplace. Toby began pressing down the brass pedals of a baby grand that stood in a dusty pool of sunlight, letting each one of them pop up with a satisfying thunk, when Maggie suddenly flew in from the kitchen and scooped him up and away from the piano before I had a chance to look at much else in the room.
“It’s the only thing I care about,” she said somewhat sheepishly, carrying him toward the kitchen. “I live in mortal terror that it’ll get broken.”
I realized that it was time, getting past time, for me to say something, but I was stunned by several things at once: by the way that the room looked, certainly different from any other house in this development, and by the way that Maggie came running in to shield the piano in spite of all the debris and mess in the living room, which had given me the impression she didn’t care particularly if anything got rumpled or touched, which was why I let Toby free in the first place. But, most especially, I was fascinated by the fact that she didn’t give the traditional clenched-teeth warning to a visiting mother and child: “I’m just afraid he’ll hurt himself.” I mean, I’d learned nearly perfectly all the oblique, invisible dishonesties with which people navigate when they are sailing along charted social courses, and so for a second I got the feeling that the wind was changing direction and that we were going to be coming about.
“I’m sorry” was all I could think of to say.
I followed Maggie and Toby into the kitchen, beyond which I could see into the game room, where Debbie was bouncing in the bean-bag chair, next to a moving blanket stretched between two chairs. Kids of different sizes were crawling around under a Day-Glo-pink cartoon that was pulsing benignly out of a giant TV screen shaped like a four-foot curved spoon above their heads. It seemed as if all the kids, warmth, and sunlight of the neighborhood had puddled down into this brimming house at the end of the street, leaving my small gray house looking as empty and abandoned as a barnacle on a dock piling after the tide has gone out.
My eyes were eating at all the incongruities, all the broken rules that Maggie had committed in her house. It was dirty, of course, so dirty that Aunt Ruth would certainly think Maggie had sold her soul to the devil and this mess was her punishment; Jack would think she was hopeless, lower-class, and squalid to let a pile of cornflakes drift underneath her kitchen table, and the other neighbors must think of her as a blight to the street and that she would deserve it if she got murdered. If that happened, the reporters and police would take one long look at a house like this and then search it for drugs. Better Homes and Gardens would use her kitchen for a “before” shot. I knew that there was going to be trouble when I saw Aunt Ruth come in by the back door and start poking around the counters behind Maggie’s back. The kitchen walls were covered with black-and-white striped Con-Tact paper that she had pasted, going first one way and then the other, all over her cabinet doors, upside down, sideways, tilted, with little chrome handles popping up at regular intervals. The field flowers were already in a Mason jar, which was sitting in a circle of water on the kitchen table. The water was seeping into the opened pages of a book, Give Your Child a Superior Mind, face down on the table beside the jar. I watched her open a door in the maze and take out two mugs, and when she closed it, I couldn’t find the door again.
I sat down in the chair closest to the door, as a good guest would, and almost by design my eye went to the jug of flowers on the table, rather than where I knew it should go: following Aunt Ruth in her dirt-finding tour of the room. The yellows and oranges in the jar were very artistically arranged, even though I knew she had only had time to jam them in before Toby started thunking the piano pedals. The gentle colors in the flowers led my eye quite naturally up to the wall by the stove, where a big fabric collage full of similar colors filled the entire wall between the stove and the window. Scraps of fabric were formed into the shape of a sunburst rising out of two black-and-white cubes that could be dice, and the whole thing was framed in barbed wire. The words ESS IS ESS were spelled out in matchsticks and elbow macaroni. Out the window as a clever accessory was the real sun, and on the other side, in front of the stove, Maggie held a match over the burner until the flame whoomped out like a red-orange chrysanthemum, with enough force to send the fringes of the fabric dice waving gently.
Meanwhile, Aunt Ruth was ignoring the art and trying to inspect this strange kitchen I had brought her into. She felt in vain for the handles of the cabinets so she could look inside; abashed, she followed the baseboard back to the corner where the kitty litter, the garbage can, and the diaper pail had spread enough wet and dry items of a strong enough smell all over the floor so that she’d be busy sniffing and scratching there for quite a while.
“Tell me what you’re doing with all that fabric,” Maggie said. I watched her fill a glass dome with coffee beans and then turn it on. They jumped, and were gone into a fragrant brown haze that spread throughout the room. I wanted to stay here a while in this messy but cozy kitchen, regardless of Aunt Ruth’s mounting frenzy.
“I’m making a quilt,” I told her. She was listening, I suppose, while she measured the coffee into a glass tube and fitted it on top of another glass bulb full of water. Then she put it on the stove and set a timer for five minutes and sat down across from me at the table.
Now, I can’t ever seem to make a good first impression, and I have several theories why this is so, since it happens so often. On the one hand, I sometimes picture myself as one of those books Debbie has where you can change a character’s face by turning just the top third of the page, or change the body, or just the shoes, for a great variety of possible characters; so that while I sat across the table from Maggie for the first time, I could feel myself flipping through the several faces and poses I had acquired as protection over the years and discarding them one after the other as inappropriate. The mild, alert eyes of the respectful child; the imaginative, helpful look of the cheerful wife; the soft yet firm smile of the loving mother; the distant yet discerning poke and peer of the well-off shopper in the market; the slightly troubled would-be mental patient, disarmingly soft around the edges, yet stable in the center – all these faces I dismissed as I sat there. A slight twitching in my mouth was probably the only thing giving away my confusion. Because I got married when I was eighteen and then moved away from home, it had been five years since I had tried to make friends with someone my own age, and in that time they had all gone away to college and dormitories, revolted on TV, dropped out and been to Europe, leaving behind wistful songs about San Francisco and Boston that I listened to while I stayed home, saved coupons, and raised our two babies. Jack had gone to Vietnam without a fuss and had come back without a scratch, and when face to face with someone my own age, I don’t know whether to feel superior or inferior. You could say I had a head start, you could say I had a lot of catching up to do. In any event, I certainly felt different from the rest of the people my own age, as usual. I don’t want to complain, but I should have gone to kindergarten, because while I was home alone, I found a collection of dirty comic books in the milk box on our next-door neighbor’s stoop. The first word I taught myself to read was “aaaaaah,” and I thought “come” was misspelled in Dick and Jane until third grade.
Which brings up the other problem: that of too much solitude. After all the hours and months of being alone, I felt as alien sitting in that dusty, sunny kitchen with another human being as if I were a giant squid, up from the deep, dripping all over her floor. While the timer was ticking, Maggie said, “I’ve always loved quilts. I consider them a primary expression of woman’s oppression. Those pioneer ladies were trying to tell us something, don’t you think?”
I thought for a second, another second, and then, just like on The $64,000 Question, I was too late: A mechanical “Time’s up!” broke in, with a click click, then a long, low buzz from the ticking dial and a cheery ping. On this cue, two of the invisible kids in the game room started fighting and the blanket tent collapsed. Toby looked up from the floor, startled, his mouth full of cornflakes. “I never thought about it that way,” I said over the noise and at her back as she jumped up and went to the stove.
Now, my stainless-steel rule for social discourse is that nobody ever wants to hear what you have to say. They really only want you to say something, anything, so they can get on with their next thought. I’ve never known it to fail, and once you get over the idealistic hurt, this rule can be very helpful. You talk anyway, of course, because people expect you to say something; the trick is to learn the right pacing, so you neither say too little and sound unfriendly or stupid, nor too much and sound, at best, boring and, at worst, crazy. Using this rule of thumb, I finished my comment on quilts by saying to Maggie’s back, “My aunt made me a really beautiful one before she died. I’ll have to go back and see what she might have been trying to say to me.”
I could see that the oblique compliment I’d just given Maggie’s taste and judgment had registered, because when she turned around, holding the steaming coffee maker over Toby’s curly head, I read on her face what seemed to be a small smile buried in the freckles. Her hands were freckled, too. Freckles always remind me of the pressed ham I used to have every day for lunch if Aunt Ruth was working, so freckles always mean security for me. One freckled slice of ham on the softest white bread in the world.
Aunt Ruth was soft and padded like the white bread, with serious muscle so far below the surface she looked indestructible. When she ironed in the evening for one of the two or three families on the block, her upper arm, thick and white as a padded tailor’s ham, swung back and forth, back and forth, over the ironing board. Her giant vaccination stood out against her skin like a slice of sausage. Each generation the vaccination gets smaller, I’ve noticed, like ethnic pride, the value of the dollar, or the worth of the person. I have my dime to Aunt Ruth’s half dollar, and Debbie has only a machine-made dot that you have to take on faith, like credit-card money.
Aunt Ruth would put one of her own sheets on the ironing board before she started a night’s work, so that when she was finished she’d have ironed sheets just as if she’d had her own servant, too. With her head bent down as she worked, her several chins were piled neatly one on top of the other like thick plates from the diner. Maggie, on the other hand, was very bony – her hands were the kind that remind you of your own mortality – they weren’t memorable for the flesh stretched across, or for her nails, or for the three or four rings she was wearing, but rather for the way they looked like skeletal claws when she picked up the bone handle of the coffee maker. Her knuckles were oversized and raw. The only other time I’d seen knuckles that exposed was on soup bones.
“What kind of coffee maker is that?” I asked.
“Ah, it extracts the coffee,” she explained. “If you’re a coffee freak, like me, it’s really worth the trouble. It gives you essence of coffee.” While speaking, she began to pour the liquid into the mugs, making it arch into two silky quilted brown parentheses, one for her, one for me, gathering us up to the table and enclosing my unspoken thought (But I never drink coffee).
I took it black, I said, because she made it sound so good I wanted to try it straight. I have always avoided it, since Aunt Ruth lived on stale coffee and cigarettes while she worked her 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzles, and since I wasn’t her real child, I swore to be as different from her as possible; and anyway, I had to keep drinking tea to get the Salada tea bags with their street-mail fortunes. My all-time favorite one was “When logic and intuition agree, you are always right.”
Right now, for example, my intuition about Maggie was that she was dangerous in some way – I could feel it in the air around us – she was giving off light but no warmth. She seemed like the kind of person who would tear the world apart to find something she wanted, the type who peels a banana for just one bite, or who opens cookies in the market and leaves them there on the shelf. My instinct was to protect myself from her, which I did by asking her questions about herself, even though, as these things usually balance out, the one invited over for coffee gets to do a little more of the talking, since she is the company. But as my aunt used to say, beggars can’t be choosers, and if I didn’t make a good impression on Maggie, all that was left for me was the gardening neighbor.
“How many pets do you have here?” I asked.
She stopped sipping her scalding-hot coffee to think. “Last count, two kittens left from Nemesis’s litter; then there’s Harvey Wallbanger, whom you see in that far corner with only one good ear; then there’s Hibachi, the fat cat; and Amanda’s gerbils – when they run on their wheel, they turn her crib mobile and she’s quiet for hours. Then there are the outside cats, and Hyacinth, the white mouse, which we hardly ever see any more now that Riva let him loose, but I keep this for him …” and she reached into the maze and flipped out a bread-box drawer, the kind I’ve always wanted to have, and then slammed it back, but not before Aunt Ruth looked up and tried to find where the bread drawer had disappeared to. “He gets in through our bedroom wall and that’s his own food drawer. Last but not least is my saluki, Samantha, who’s around here somewhere. My mother sent her to me as a reward for finally graduating.”
College – of course, she had gone to college. I knew that already, by the way she had been dressed at the bus stop when I first saw her. I’m rarely wrong about these things. The baby she was pushing was named Amanda Maggie Mae, and she was nearly two and napping upstairs at the moment, in a hammock. I didn’t tell her about the gardening neighbor’s cat, which strangled by falling through the web of the hammock – why upset her?
Perhaps it was the incongruities that the paintings and the prints on the living-room wall were giving out that were bothering me. Logic says that two different kinds of taste would seem to be having a war there. There was an immense difference between the giant swirly pieces framed in silver that looked like they belonged in a Las Vegas hotel room and the careful small oils that looked as if they belonged in a museum. I believe that paintings are the windows to the soul of the person who lives in the house: Look into them and you will see depths, or shallows, troubles, dreams; yet if there was a painting war on, I wanted Maggie to know I was on her side.
“I just love your prints,” I told her, although I was beginning to think that Maggie might be too odd a person to have as a friend. Who needs a friend, really? Maybe solitude is an acquired taste, like anchovies, or soft cheese. Maybe she really is as bad as the gardening neighbor hints.
She paused over her mug as if she was trying to focus on something. “Which prints?”
I pointed to one of the biggest in the living room, a yellowish, greenish swirl with what looked like red beach balls bouncing near the top of it.
“Oh! Those. My husband was friendly with Le Roy Neiman in college and so we keep them around just in case he honors us with one of his unexpected visits that last for a week. They’re really not my taste – that’s Chuck for you.”
“Chuck? Did you say Chuck?”
“Sure, Chuck, my husband, Chuck. Short for Charles Richard Matheson IV; little Dicky, aptly named. Do you know him from somewhere?”
Auspicious coincidences are also a form of street mail, I was thinking. God must want me to meet the Hunk, because here I am in his own kitchen. I was a little overawed by fate.
“Hey, wait a minute, you know who he is, I bet. He told me he saw a short lady at the bus stop this afternoon standing in the rain, with a baby in a blue stroller. It must have been you and … what’s your baby’s name again?” She slapped her knee and had a private laugh, with a “humph” in it. “What we both want to know,” she said, “is how did you manage to stand in those stinko ginkgo berries all that time? I nearly asphyxiated! And Chuck said that when he rolled the window down, he nearly reeled over backward from the stench! I think he might have gotten a funny impression of you – he said you looked so stoic standing there.”
At least I wasn’t invisible.
“He got it all screwed up, of course. I told him before he left for work today that she was on alternate, but his head is some place else. Riva’s his, not mine – she’s his six-year-old from a rotten five-year marriage. Chuck has custody of her and I try to adjust.”
“Adjust?”
“To another kid around here, when sometimes I want to be the only child. To the ghost of his ex-wife, who haunts me through Riva …”
“Is she dead?”
“I wish she was. God, – no, she’s a lawyer – brilliant, of course. Gorgeous, ditto – she’s a D.A. in Boston, Barbara Matheson – she kept his name, can you believe that?” She calls Riva between cases, giving me just enough time to paste the kid back together before she calls again. It’s a no-win thing we’ve got going here, and it’s anybody’s guess how long I’m going to put up with it. I don’t know what your politics are, but I really have a hard time condoning that woman’s neglect.”
My politics are unspeakable, so I thought it better not to mention them and instead to listen to Maggie, who was beginning to make me feel superior as she listed the ills of her particular situation. First conversations are usually spent reviewing one’s assets and liabilities, I’ve found. When it comes to politics, however, I’ve always been in the wrong place at the wrong time, so that I can never seem to play the right games. You know the one about where were you when Kennedy got shot? And everybody says, “In the classroom. I looked up at the clock on the wall and the teacher made us bow our heads …”
Well, I can’t tell anyone where I was because I had skipped classes, playing hooky for the first and last time in my life, and I was at a lonely ice-cream stand in the country long after the weather had turned too cold for ice cream. I was in the car of the really disreputable older brother of a neighborhood kid who was known for his ability to lie while swearing on the cross. I was vaguely considering, you know, sex or something, but first I was going to make sure I got some ice cream, and then, while I was eating, decide exactly what I was going to do.
Don’t get me wrong – I was still what you would call a “good girl;” I mean, I had never gone all the way. I liked to tease, however, and I think I had hoped to get myself on a path of no return with this older brother of the liar, because I was getting so nervous with the constant strain of preserving my saintly virginity that I couldn’t stand the pressure. I hate waiting. At least if he forced me, it wouldn’t be my fault. But when we pulled up to the ice-cream place, the radio was beeping news bulletins, and the girl inside was crying, pressing her forehead against the wire screen so that her skin was waffled through to our side of the grille.
There’s a very thin line between virtue and being bad, as thin as the grate in the confessional through which you squeeze your sins. I had thought I would just confess a sin against the sixth commandment of actual lust the next time I went on Saturday, instead of against the mere ninth commandment of wishful thinking. To order up something special, rather than my usual. So I have a hard time believing that innocence was lost for us all that day. For me, it was preserved, and the older brother became a Jesuit on the promptings of that one experience. So you see, it was an auspicious day for both of us, because I was still a virgin when I met Jack and I think he liked that best about me, and now that it’s gone, he’s not all that thrilled with me. “It’s never the same after the factory seal is broken,” he jokes. But the day that Kennedy got shot, Aunt Ruth thought I was in school, and all my friends, including Richard Murphey, my boyfriend, thought I was sick at home.
I’ve always, always, had a boyfriend. I’m not ugly, and except for Mary Anne Garibaldi and her stupid sausage curls, I was nearly the prettiest girl in my class, maybe. I don’t know – I’m on the inside – you can’t tell on Halloween whether you’re wearing the Snow White or the Wicked Witch mask unless you look in a mirror; life is no different. I’ve always had a boyfriend, except for 1968 when Jack was in Vietnam, and then I was totally celibate, a condition which contributed to my current problem, I think. A terribly thick, yet resilient crust has formed over me since that year, very much like the crust on pudding. It’s nice and soft, but you have to break through it to get to the pudding – an act of violence neither Jack nor I seem willing to perform. In 1968, when the whole world was watching, what do you think I was watching? Not the Democratic National Convention, in which history was being made in the streets, no. I was glued to the first installment of the Hawaii Five-0 series, the movie in which McGarrett is sealed off from the world.
And I rooted for the police, anyway, as I always had been taught to do. But if I had gone away to college, away from Aunt Ruth, with people my own age to influence me, there’s no telling – I might have been out in the street, getting my head knocked in, too. So let’s not talk about politics.
“More coffee?”
I thought, Does she want me to stay, or should I go? Should I stick my neck out and ask for more, which is really saying I’m asking for more company; or should I be cool and distant, polite and reserved, and say, No thanks, we’ve got to be getting on? She seems so unconventional, surely these delicate rules don’t exist for her. She’s probably only steering through life with a simple bit of honesty for a rudder, pure honesty. So I stuck my neck out.
“Sure, I’d love some – it’s really rich!”
But I was wrong. She jumped up and said, “Oh, it’s getting late! Let me just check on Amanda – I’ve got to get her cleaned up before Chuck gets home. I’ll just be a minute … here – “ And she poured me some coffee, a little comma, and said, “Enjoy.”
Our beginnings of friendship seemed to be progressing like one of those handcars you see in a Charlie Chaplin movie in which one person pulls one way and the other person pulls the other way, and then the whole thing rolls forward, propelled by opposite pressures. While she was upstairs with the baby, I blew on my coffee to cool it so I could drink it and leave as quickly as possible. Aunt Ruth was trying to slide her good thumbnail under the chrome on the stove top to get at the black paste there. She always said your thumbnail is your most important cleaning aid. My breath rippled the shiny surface of the coffee so that it sparkled blackly in the sunlight. When I looked at the shine, I allowed my eyes to glaze over into a stare so I could lose the edges of the room and fall into the white light in the blackness of the coffee. Aunt Ruth used to hit me with the whipped-out edge of the dish towel when she saw me doing that – she said I looked like a nincompoop, and she was probably right. But what she doesn’t know is that I had taken one of her puzzle pieces so that she could never finish the damn thing as long as I was around. It was because of Winky Dink – I really wanted a Winky Dink.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a quiet bit of movement in the flowers on the table. A tiny brown spider was dipping into the dappled shade behind some goldenrod, and if I didn’t keep an eye on it, I knew it would drop right into my coffee. Then Maggie was back, carrying my bag of quilt squares.
“I think you’d better hold on to these – I just found Harvey Wallbanger in them. He must have thought it was some new litter. I hope he didn’t mess them up too badly,” she said, and handed them to me. “So tell me what your quilt is going to say.”
I wanted to say, “Nothing,” and just get out and go home and think about things for a while, but I swallowed that word with some of the bitter coffee and looked for the spider before answering. I felt as if it were crawling on me. Maggie poured herself some coffee, reluctantly, I thought, and sat down again. The spider had stepped onto a white fringe of Queen Anne’s lace and was moving toward the purple bead in the center when she spoke again. “You know, it’s funny. Chuck has been saying that I’m not going to like this neighborhood, that I’m not going to be able to get along with any of the women here because I’m half their age. He thought you were much older – he said you ladies would hate me because I don’t like to clean and I can’t cook worth a damn. I consider myself an artist, frankly, not a housewife. Actually, the only thing I’ve ever learned to cook is coffee and salad, but I don’t complain – I’m afraid if I get interested in cooking I’ll get so fat I’ll have to sit around and eat bonbons all day after that.”
☞ Note: Before you read the next paragraph, please check out the Introduction for an important message from me. Thank you.
Don’t be so quick to condemn bonbons, I thought to myself. It takes great courage to sit and eat them. Think about it – each one is completely covered with dark uncertainty, and you don’t know what’s going to be inside the next one any more than you know what a new day will bring. And the lady who sits and eats them is touching that uncertainty with her sensitive tongue, tasting, biting, swallowing, whatever comes along, sight unseen. And also, don’t forget that those chocolates are unique for their ability to hurt the teeth worse than anything else. So you get the cherry or instant, excruciating pain. It takes guts to risk those odds, believe me. I realized that there was no point in saying all this to Maggie. She was too interested at the moment in telling me what a unique individual she was, come here like a just-hatched nature sprite to breathe new life into this dying neighborhood.
“I admire you for doing something homey and substantial with your time,” she was saying, fingering one of the fabric squares, a piece of my wedding dress, in fact.
“Well, I believe in weaving a web of mystery,” I said in my enigmatic way, as I watched the spider move past the purple bead, off the flower, and then slide down a thread to the tabletop.
“But which is the mystery, you or the quilt?” she smiled.
The spider moved slowly across the table.
“Oh, God! I forgot to take something out of the freezer for dinner!” she said, and jumped up from the table again.
The spider crawled over the rim of her mug and disappeared. I waited until she sat down, and then I watched her drink her coffee before I got up to leave. I gathered up my fabric squares and kids and grabbed Aunt Ruth, who was trying with both hands to unstick the flour canister from the countertop by rocking it sharply back and forth, but it was glued there by inches of grease and peanut butter.
“It’s no use,” I told her, and we all went home. 🏠