Jeanne Marie Beaumont is a New York-based poet, editor, and teacher of poetry.
When I am in the Kitchen
I think about the past. I empty the ice-cube trays
crack crack cracking like bones, and I think
of decades of ice cubes and of John Cheever,
of Anne Sexton making cocktails, of decades
of cocktail parties, and it feels suddenly far
too lonely at my counter. Although I have on hooks
nearby the embroidered apron of my friend’s
grandmother and one my mother made for me
for Christmas 30 years ago with gingham I had
coveted through my childhood. In my kitchen
I wield my great aunt’s sturdy black-handled
soup ladle and spatula, and when I pull out
the drawer, like one in a morgue, I visit
the silverware of my husband’s grandparents.
We never met, but I place this in my mouth
every day and keep it polished out of duty.
In the cabinets I find my godmother’s
teapot, my mother’s Cambridge glass goblets,
my mother-in-law’s Franciscan plates, and here
is the cutting board my first husband parqueted
and two potholders I wove in grade school.
Oh the past is too much with me in the kitchen,
where I open the vintage metal recipe box,
robin’s egg blue in its interior, to uncover
the card for Waffles, writ in my father’s hand
reaching out from the grave to guide me
from the beginning, “sift and mix dry ingredients”
with his note that this makes “3 waffles in our
large pan” and around that our an unbearable
round stain—of egg yolk or melted butter?—
that once defined a world.
I adore this, Becky. Thank you. This is particularly apt for me at this moment, as I drove to work with Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” on the radio. Not that the song itself is much to me, but it reminds me of the time, just over a year ago (or was it ten?) when the three of us “kids” (130 years between us) gathered at my mother’s place to help sort through our family’s history, her vault of treasures sublime and dull. She, ever more frail, lay on her bed resting while we sorted clothes and boxes of buttons and asked who those people were in those old photographs. I put my baby down in the bedroom with her, so she could watch him roll about and explore. She began singing, as she often did, whatever song came to her head. So many aspects of her had drifted away by then, but not that. She sang “I just called… to say…. I love you!” She stopped the words and hummed, as the rest of the words had flitted away. So I took up the refrain and continued. “I just called, to say how much I ca-a-a-a-are. I just called… to sa-a-ay I lo-ove you. And I me-ean it from the bottom of myyy heart. Of my heart. Baby, of my heart!” She smiled, and said “That was beautiful!”
It was a shock to hear her sing that song, as it was outside her era and her ken. But much later, I remembered that I had sung it in Glee Club in high school. And she was a sponge for songs, and would whip them out at opportune moments. Sometimes you didn’t even know how apt they were for a while, until it hit you.
She died a week later. That was our last song together.
The “our” that once defined my world.
I find myself singing now with my kids, all the time, at the drop of a hat. Free association songs. Sometimes I don’t know how apt they are until I’m part way through. I think she’s singing through me.