Freezer Burn

 

by Paola Corso

 

Charlene mumbles something about freezer burn and begins chipping away at a coat of ice on the starter dough with a potato peeler as slowly as I imagine one chips away at fingernail polish. I wonder how something frozen burns as I move a throw rug from the kitchen to the living room and put it right side down so the tomato juice I spilled on it earlier doesn’t show.

Now Charlene’s melting away the Ice Age on the starter dough by running it through water so hot the steaming spigot looks like a dragon’s nostril.

“It’ll still rise, won’t it,” I ask Charlene.

“You didn’t wrap it too good before you stuck it in the freezer.”

“Did I ruin it?”

“Not yet, K.C.”

That’s short for kitchen catastrophe—a nickname Charlene calls me because the kitchen’s a dangerous place for me. She doesn’t understand why I insist on making dinner tonight when she’s a good cook and she’s offered to make it for me. She says when I burned the green beans, and they looked like cigarette ashes in a pan welded on the electric burner, it was the equivalent of melt­down. It happened right around the time of Three Mile Island, but I told Charlene that was just a coincidence. Then there was the sonic boom the day the eggs I was boiling exploded. Yolk splat­tered all over the floor. Charlene called it shrapnel. Said we were lucky we didn’t get hit in the eye. My third K.C. wasn’t a charm. It was a warning, Charlene says. It was the time the light fixture on the ceiling above the stove fell just after I walked out from under it. It was a good thing I didn’t take the time to stir my linguini. I was grateful all right. I didn’t care one bit about eating the half-cooked clumps of pasta on my plate after that.

Charlene wouldn’t be in the kitchen now if it weren’t for me asking her this favor to help cook. Normally, she does all the cooking. Every morning, she makes the Wheatena. I tried making that once and gave our sauce pan a case of alligator skin only a soak in hot water could peel off. But I tell Charlene this is differ­ent. I have to make this starter dough rise. It’d be a bad omen if it didn’t.

“Have you tried baking bread before?”

“Just once. Not with the starter dough though.”

“Did it rise?” she asked.

“No. I could swear it shrunk on me. The consistency of a brick.”

“The next time that happens, go out and buy a loaf of Town Talk. Nobody’ll know the difference.”

“Town Talk! My Aunt Josie made the best bread using the starter dough. She even shaped it. Crosses for Lent. Baskets at Easter time. Wreaths at Christmas. But my favorite were her sfingies, fried bread dough. I dipped them in molasses and had sticky fingers the rest of the day.”

Charlene looks at her watch. “What time’s Father Van Heuk coming for supper?”

“Six o’clock.”

“We better hurry then,” Charlene says, combining the ball of starter dough with a batch she mixed up for me. She takes my hair and puts it in a lopsided ponytail and says to start kneading the dough. I flip the loose strands she misses behind my ears, roll up my sleeves, take my birthstone ring off and touch the dough as if I were playing the piano for the first time. Charlene sprinkles flour on the counter and when I flop the starter dough over, the toaster nearby gets a dusting like a car after a light snowfall.

“It’s sticking to my fingernails.”

“Use the palm of your hand more,” Charlene says.

I press my palms into the dough and look to see if an imprint of my life line shows up before Charlene covers it with more flour. She beats me to it.

I tell Charlene how the starter dough first rose from the yeast in a wooden bowl that my grandma shipped over from Castroreale, a small hill town on the island of Sicily. She said it was hot in the boiler room of the ship where it rested for two and a half weeks, and that the steady movement of the waves acted like a pair of hands kneading the dough from side to side. It doubled, then tri­pled in size until it popped off the lid on the bowl. It quadrupled, then quintupled in size until it split open the barrel holding the bowl. My grandmother filled a dozen mop buckets from the deck with the starter dough by the end of the trip and earned her first dollar in America by selling loaves of bread. Each time she kept a small ball of the starter dough and added it to her next batch so it would always originate from the dough that rose from the yeast on the ship. She kept enough in her icebox to share with my mother and aunts, and my mom gave a piece of the starter dough to me.

“No wonder you want this dough to rise,” Charlene said.

I stopped to meet her green eyes. “I don’t want to be the one to end it. If I don’t get it to rise, it’s over.”

“Keep kneading.”

I figure a dinner for Father Van Heuk, the professor who rec­ommended me for an internship in Castroreale, was the right time to try, but I worry it will just add to my record of kitchen catastro­phes. I stare down at the starter dough. It looks like a deflated beach ball.

“Charlene, I can’t make this rise.”

“Keep kneading.”

I decide that Charlene is to convex as I am to concave. Every­thing about her reaches out. She’s got this outgoing personality—the kind that bubbles over—and a petite body that seems to ex­pand when she moves her hands, kind of like a card table when you unfold the legs. When she dries her hair, it’s as if a mountain of fluffy meringue grows on top of her head. She even wears a watch that pops out. Mickey Mouse in 3D. And she’s the kind of cook who doesn’t make any recipe she can’t double. She makes lasagna in a pan too big to fit in the oven. Her meatballs are the size of baseballs, and her birthday cakes are two whole cakes stacked one on top of the other so high that dinner forks shrink to miniatures.

Charlene tells me to stop kneading. The dough still resembles a deflated beach ball. She gently rests the powdery glob on her chest like a baby, lowers it in a bowl, covers it with a tea towel and then buries it in the back of a warm oven.

“Is that all?”

“For now,” Charlene says, walking into the living room.

“What do we do?” I ask.

“Wait.”

Besides a trunk and hutch that the last tenant left because it was too heavy to move, the two swivel chairs are the only pieces of furniture in the living room. When Charlene and I sit on them, we feel like the earth spinning on its axis. We turn ourselves to face north and look out the windows to watch buses stop and go along Forbes Avenue. We face south and smell the sweet fumes of ripe bananas in a wicker basket on the hutch. We face the wall and prop our bare feet against it so we can rest our books on our po­dium thighs. We turn to each other and talk in every tense but the present through the branches of eucalyptus on the trunk between us. It’s where I tell Charlene everything my grandmother ever said about Castroreale.

“My grandmother told me once that the direction a chair faces in Castroreale is very important. The men get to set up their chairs right outside the cafe and face the town square so they can watch everyone while sipping out of tiny espresso cups they hold with big, stubby fingers. The women in town set up their chairs in the doorway of their homes since there are no porches. She said they face indoors and knit, feeling a breeze on their backs if nothing else,” I said, suddenly remembering the dough. “It has to rise.”

“Rise . . . ise . . . ise.”

Because the room is so bare, it has an echo, a voice from on high offering back some of our words, the ones worth repeating. The ones that resonate. Sometimes we say words, just to hear them reverberate off the ceiling. It’s our way of being inside the cavernous walls of a Gothic cathedral, looking up to see rows of round beams as if we were inside a giant’s ribcage, wondering how long it will take for our words to touch bone.

I get up to walk to the kitchen.

“It’s not time yet. Besides, you have to knead it some more,” Charlene says.

“Can’t we take a peak?”

“No. Don’t open the oven door. A loud noise could keep it from rising.” Charlene explains that rising dough is as easily dis­turbed as a light sleeper.

“How do we know when it’s time?”

“Don’t you have a recipe for the starter dough? The instruc­tions tell you what to do after it rises.”

I tell Charlene my grandmother said the recipe is inspired by the wrath of the volcano, Mt. Etna. A little girl from the country­side was on her way to Castroreale to buy her hungry family some grain. Halfway there, she lost the coin her mother gave her while crossing a stream. She took off the shawl wrapped around her head and neck and cast it into the stream like a net, hoping to re­trieve the coin. She fished for hours but only pebbles and drift­wood were scooped into the shawl’s web. It grew dark. She was about to give up and return home when the lip of Mt. Etna began to quiver. Soon it opened its mouth wide and spoke to her with words spewed out on a tongue of lava. The words flowed out but she couldn’t hear the volcano in the distance so the tongue of lava followed her to get closer. Afraid, she ran to escape it. She looked back and saw that it was on her heels so she climbed a big rock along the stream. The lava stopped at the base of the rock.

“‘Eat my words,’” the volcano said to the girl, who sat still on the rock.

“‘Eat my words. They will fill your hunger,’” Mt. Etna re­peated.

“‘They are too hot.’”

“‘They are frozen now. They will not burn.’”

“The girl reached for a twig to poke at the lava tongue, waiting for it to bubble and boil and melt the branch. The lava was solid. She felt the twig. It was frozen.”

“‘Eat my words. I speak for you,’” the volcano said.

“The girl jumped off the rock and on the tip of the lava tongue was a white grainy substance, yeast powder from which the very first starter dough was made.”

“‘You will never run out again.’”

“‘Never,’ the girl said looking down at the handful of icy pow­der.

“‘Divide this and it will multiply.’”

“The girl put the powder in her pocket and ran through the countryside back home. She relayed the volcano’s instructions to her mother. ‘As long as you divide this, it will multiply.’”

My words echo. They flutter furiously above us like a caged bird that flaps from wall to wall, looking for an opening to fly out.

I follow Charlene into the kitchen. She takes out the dough from the oven, uncovers it and places it back on the counter. I tell her my hands are tired, and she shows me how to use my entire body when I knead. I end up standing on the tips of my toes and lean into the dough. I knead its gummy resistance two more times and Charlene puts it in the oven two more times before we’re fin­ished. I set aside three big balls, one for me, one for Charlene and one for Father. In case the dough rises.

Charlene seasons it with fresh herbs. I stuff chunks of meat, vegetables, and cheese to the blanket of dough until it stretches and bulges. I slide it in the oven. While the dough bakes, we lift the kitchen table to move it into the living room, but it doesn’t fit through the doorway. We hear the elevator wooden gate close, its motor hum a note getting higher and higher until it is cut off. The elastic elevator gate snaps.

“Somebody just got off our floor. What if it’s him,” I say about to panic.

“Turn the table on its side.”

“I can’t lift it that way. The wall’s in the road.”

“No. This way.”

We hear footsteps crumble from newspapers in the hallway be­cause the super is in the middle of painting the ceiling.

“It’s him. He’s an hour early.”

“Quick. Lift it up,” Charlene snaps.

“I can’t. It’s stuck.”

We hear a knock on the door.

“Let’s move it back into the kitchen.”

“We can’t. We’ll disturb the dough.”

“I’ll get the door.”

“Let’s move this first,” Charlene says.

“Just a minute,” I turn my head toward the door and yell.

“Not so loud. The dough could fall flat.”

We grab the table’s cold metal legs by the ankles, turn it upside down, angling it through and set it down on the throw rug in the middle of the living room.

I hurry toward the door, but Charlene makes me wait another minute so she can cover the bare table. She says it’s bad luck.

I open the door. Father Van Heuk’s face reminds me of geome­try. His goatee, a bunch of lines intersecting at a point just below his chin. His ears, perfectly round, about three-quarters of a circle. His nose, two sides of a right triangle, and his squarish cap with one side smashed in, a trapezoid.

“Come in,” I say in my calmest voice.

“I hope I’m not too early,” Father apologizes.

“Not at all.” He follows me through the hallway. The scarf he wears gets caught between the gears of my 10-speed bike stored in the corner. Father is jerked to a halt as he loosens the scarf’s chokehold around his neck. I seat him in the living room and take his coat and violin case. 

In the kitchen, Charlene and I check to make sure there are no bits of food between the prongs of the forks and no orange juice pulp on the glasses. I reach for the plates with the fewest scratches on the surface from the silverware. I put back the ones that look like a page from a coloring book a child has scribbled on for hours.

“Something smells out of this world,” Father says as we set the table. The bare apartment walls swallow his words and spit them back out like a mouthful of watermelon seeds.

“World . . . orld . . . orld.”

He looks up in wonder.

“The room talks back to us sometimes,” I tell him.

“So I hear. We better watch what we say,” he smiles.

“We just put it in the oven. It should be ready in an hour, Fa­ther.”

“Why don’t I play you a few songs before dinner.”

Charlene and I pull out our chairs to become his audience. He stands erect in front of his music stand with his violin resting on his shoulder and his cheek resting on his violin. He pulls back the bow ready to begin when the sheet music closes. He creases the fold and takes his ready position once more as he holds the bow back even further this time, ready for a sweeping forward motion. When his violin bow cuts across the strings. Charlene and I fight to keep from covering our ears. I sit on my hands and fidget. She folds hers and buries them in her lap. This is the only time we ever wish the room didn’t have an echo. Each note throws itself at the ceiling and explodes in our ears like a round of grenades. Each note, I’m convinced, pierces the dough, one pin prick after the other bursting a balloon.

Mickey emerges from Charlene’s wristwatch. She and I jump up from our chairs and excuse ourselves as Father puts his violin back in its case. Charlene hands me the pot holders. Rather than open the oven door, I look through the window but can’t see anything because it’s too greasy. I’m too afraid to look anyway. I hand Charlene back the potholders, damp from my sweaty hands. She reaches into the oven and slides out the starter dough. It’s a puffy mound, steaming through a small opening at the top where the edges of the dough don’t meet because it rose so much. It looks like a volcano just before an eruption.

“I don’t believe it. I made it rise!” Charlene hands me back the potholders to carry the dish into the living room. And the knife to cut portions, which I don’t really want to do. I’d rather we just look at it for awhile before we eat it.

Father nudges a helping of the dough onto his fork with a knife and washes it down with a sip of wine.

“My compliments to the chef. I never thought it was possible for this to taste even better than it smells.”

“Neither did I.” I test the dough with my fork.

“Don’t tell me you had doubts,” Father says.

“I didn’t think it would rise.” I take my first bite and burn my tongue.

“Look at it. Why it’s practically inches from the ceiling,” Father says, smiling at his hyperbole.

“It’s a recipe her grandmother brought over from Castroreale,” Charlene tells him the story while I fan my mouth and gulp down a glass of cold water.

“So it rose on the ship. Buckets full. You must have faith, child,” he says as he pulls out a newspaper clipping from his pocket. As he unfolds it, he says there was an earthquake in Cas­troreale and many people were killed. He says it wasn’t cause to cancel my internship, though, but was all the more reason for me to go. I’d be needed there. 

He hands me the piece of paper. It’s a picture of a girl’s toes sticking out of a mound of stones under a Roman archway of a collapsed building. One look at that picture and I know I’m going to have nightmares about those toes. I won’t go barefoot anymore around the apartment because of it. I’ll have to tell Charlene to hide the picture so I won’t keep looking at it. But it doesn’t matter. I can see it in my mind. All of Castroreale. The narrow alleyways where I lose my sense of direction until I spot Mt. Etna barely etched in a background haze and a blanket of golden patches spread out below it. I walk past buildings where all that’s left standing is an archway or a corner or a wall with vines still cling­ing to it and a row of potted plants leaning against it. I pass two men standing on a pile of rocks, reaching toward the sky with their hammers. I think to ask them where I can find the girl in the picture but see they’re concentrating on what must go up rather than what has come down. In the cafe, I ask the bartender for di­rections. He shakes his head, wipes his wet hands on a towel and writes in my journal the following directions: “Granite Limone. Acqua 1 litro. Zucchero gr. 200. Limone gr. 150.” I thank him and when I get outside, I discover he just wrote the directions for making lemon ice. 

At the water fountain in the center of the town square, I show the picture to three young girls dressed in pedalpushers and san­dals. One points to a poster on the fountain wall announcing a funeral procession. I hurry to the church but it’s empty. I walk back out carefully to avoid stepping on the marble tombs in the floor, skipping over them like hopscotch. In the distance I see an­other poster and a crowd of mourners nearby. I follow them until I spot a cat sitting outside a warped old wooden door with a ring through a lion’s nose instead of a door knob. I recognize the arch­way.

Everything’s the same as in the picture. Her toes are all that I can see of her. She faces the archway as if she were trying to run out when the building collapsed and buried her. I begin moving the stones off the mound one by one until she’s uncovered. Her extended arm is frozen, burning to reach for something that could save her. Her fingers are perfectly straight as if she were about to touch the lion on the door. She was about to touch her future.

Her skin, smooth and round, doesn’t bear the weight of the boulders that fell on top of her. On her dress there isn’t a single crease, not even where the fullness of her skirt would naturally form pleats. Her nose, the highest point on her reclined body, hasn’t a smudge from the powdery mortar between the stones. I look for a line on the knuckles of her feet separating the part of her body exposed from the part that was buried but there is none. Not even a difference in skin color.

I get down on my knees beside her and tug at her dress. She doesn’t move. I tap her on the knee. She doesn’t move. I shake her calf, then shake it again and lean forward to massage the muscle with all the strength in my fingers. I do this again and again and get up and do the same thing to her other leg before I cover her with a blanket.

Then suddenly, the door flings open. She rises from the dirt floor and walks through the Roman archway. The cat follows be­hind her. She’s too far along before I think to dust off the reddish brown streaks on the back of her dress from lying on the clay earth.

Father slowly pulls the picture of the girl out of my hands and asks me if I have doubts about going now. If I believe I can be of help. “After all, you didn’t even have faith in your grandmother’s starter dough,” he adds.

“I have faith, Father. It can even rise from the dead.” When my word touches the ceiling, it’s as though an angel breaks it into a thousand pieces and, like crumbs from the crust of bread, scatters them all over the room.