Work in progress

(Please note the character “Noel” is pronounced No – elle, as in Christmas)

- 2 cups flower, 1 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon baking powder…or is it baking soda? ….Damn.

Instincts urge me to pick up the phone and call.

- Hey Noel, I am trying to recreate your famous cobbler; was it baking powder or baking soda?

Her professionalism provided the necessary patience for my elementary mistakes. Any real baker would know the difference between baking powder and baking soda. Yet she refused to acknowledge my lack of kitchen finesse.

- You and I are not so different. You create through the mix and matching of words, I mix and match food. Both produce pleasure.

Noel never spoke of pleasure’s close relationship to pain. Not opposites, but consequences of each other. Her pleasure, the stress relief, her career had led, as we are now told, to her termination.

- Baking soda, baking powder, baking soda, baking powder, soda, powder…

- What are you doing?

I look at him as a stranger. Questions pierce into my consciousness. My husband winces from my startled expression. He loved her too, my sister, and has traveled down this road of pain. But I have managed to remove myself from his stride, and carry the burdens in solitude. Only the anguish in his eyes pressures me to answer.

- Cobbler. I am making Noel’s cobbler.

He looks at the clock and back at me. The look is implicit; this is not the time to be baking.

Noel always encouraged me to dabble in her craft.

- They say when Sylvia Plath was deep into her work she would bake up a storm. It was a catalyst through the creative process.

Now I wonder if Noel finally understood Sylvia, whose death mirrored her pleasure - death by oven.

I stir the flour and sugar together while racking my brain for the correct answer.

- Powder, soda? – The cobbler uses what the cookie can’t…was that it?

At least Noel wrote down a Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe. Superstitions left the cobbler in her head.

I move into the study to check. I locate the old recipe book she made for me, her penmanship lovingly laid down in the leather bound book in hope I would share her love for the marriage of ingredients.

My husband followed. I feel his arms encircling my now empty womb. I ignore him, and the letter, now over a week old, written to Noel, who can no longer receive it, about a child that no longer dwells inside me.

- Have you packed?

He asks in a kind manner that is entitled to an answer. But my mind cannot wrap itself around the question, simplistic thought it may be. Instead I find the page for chocolate chip cookies.

- Baking powder.

- Sorry?

- Baking powder. 2 cup flour, 1 cup sugar, one teaspoon baking powder. I know now.

I return to the kitchen and carefully measure out the forgotten ingredient. My wooden spoon spins around the bowl as I mix.

Noel claimed a person could taste the emotions of the baker, just as a reader could feel the emotions of the writer. I wonder what I am stirring into the cobbler: sorrow, anger, pity, guilt?

I have tried to pray to God, but I am uncertain what it is that I desire? I hope Noel is with God, that she has found comfort there that she could not find here. That she has peace.

I also hope she feels guilt. Does she hear my father’s voice? Does she know how much she has aged him? Did she hear my mother phone me? I want God to immerse her in peace and I want all the saints to line up and slap her. She was going to be an Aunt, or maybe she still is, caring for the child now out of my reach.

The doctor said that intense grief can often cause a miscarriage when so early in pregnancy.

- Take heart, there is no reason you and your husband cannot make another.

Noel said that no dish could be made the same twice. Each cake, pie, or pastry is unique. A person can use the same ingredients, the same heat, and the same mixing bowl, yet there will always be a difference. A touch longer in the oven, a second less being mixed, a pinch more of an ingredient causes each creation’s uniqueness.

- The trivial details all result in the difference between good and brilliant.

I was out of stamps. Otherwise the letter would have been posted that day instead of waiting for the assumed tomorrow. I could have phoned, but wanted her to have the news by letter, so she could treasure the moment over and over again. She had so badly wanted to be an Aunt, a role in which she would have excelled.

Noel never failed at what she set out to do.

My mother had phoned two hours after the letter had been written.

- Summer you are not listening. She slit her writs very deeply. She meant to die.

I was oblivious of her business’s financial troubles.

I crack an egg and watch as it blends into the butter and cream.

- Dash of vanilla, a pinch of…then when blended mix the wet and dry together until the dough is…

Noel may have indicated her pain. My quest of a child had consumed my thoughts. Self-center in my own arena of pleasure and pain I had become deaf to concerns that I wished to deal with at another time. I could have phoned her the day before, and her ears would have still been able to hear the news.

- Would she have changed her mind?

My mother is making up a fiction of destiny that Noel was fated to die.

- Children born on Christmas are doomed to break their mother’s heart.

I dread having to face her. They wanted us to come down sooner. I have offered up work as the excuse for our delay. I have not told them of the other loss. Too difficult to converse with one that sees herself on the same plain as the Virgin Mary.

- I have turned the oven on.

Startled I glance up, as if he is a guest instead of a resident. His eyes betray the hurt. He is trying to help, to understand, whatever it is that I hope to accomplish with this task that borders between tasteful therapy and fattening torment.

The dough plops into the glass-baking dish, molding itself around the spiced fruit. Already I can see that mine will not be beautiful. Noel’s had the look of an old London road, cobbled to perfection. Many can create a dish that tantalizes the senses, but few can accomplish such success while pleasing the eye. Noel was an artist.

- Place in a preheated oven at 350 for …for…for… for...

- What is the matter?

He begins to walk towards me, but I don’t want his touch. His presence foils my attempts to burry my grief.

- I can’t remember how long it needs to bake.

- Why don’t you set the timer on twenty then check it every ten minutes after that. You can always leave it in longer.

His simplistic solution rings like prophet’s wisdom in my ears.

The cobbler slides into the oven, joining the heat, the catalyst, that will allow the dough to become a cobbler. My womb failed to bake.

- I am going to load up the car. I assume, unless you say otherwise, that the large black bag in the study is to come?

The question in his voice hurts. I assume what I need is in that bag. I tried to pack, clean clothes my husband folded lay before me, all I had to do was make the choice. Too difficult these choices are right now, too difficult to decide what I’ll need to wear days from today.

Noel believed in using fresh ingredients. Food stored for days would lose their flavor, their vitality. While a baker’s life could not exists completely in spontaneity, her impulse to add a touch of fresh apple, or a scrape of orange peel, is what caused her work to be so unique. In away, Noel embraced the day as its own without a tomorrow.

- There is not a tomorrow.

I thought I had a day to buy a stamp, but that time passed without ever actually existing. How can one assume an outfit will be required three days from now? It all just fell into the suitcase. Hopefully whatever it is that is required jumped in.

- I have set the timer. I estimated that it has already been five minutes.

- Oh, sorry. Um, Thank you.

- I have packed my suit, should I bring a black sweater as well?

I stare into the oven’s void. What does one need on such occasions? Some go by the old school book of black, but rarely is appropriate after the funeral. But black is the color that surrounds the survivor’s of suicide.

Noel did have brilliance in her life. It feels wrong not to acknowledge her positive presence.

- Perhaps we should adorn colors to celebrate the life?

To properly pay tribute to Noel one would have to cloth themselves in jeweled blues, canary yellows, plum purples, and fiery reds – all at once. She was known as a free spirit. This phrase now tastes bitter on the tongue. A free spirit, a soul with wings, would not need razorblades to fly.

- Come time to get in the car.

The hot cobbler is in my arms. Wrapped in a towel he has gently placed it into my embrace. My newborn creation is unharmed despite my forgetfulness. My husband rescued it from the oven.

When I woke up the day after I placed my hands on my belly and sighed with a smile. I thought my womb was still sheltering life. Less than twenty-four hours and I abandoned my child’s memory.

We walked out to the car with the warm buddle held tight. He guides me with the palm of his hand pressed to the small of the back. He walks me to the passenger side and opens the door. This chariot shall transport me to a gathering of sadness. I began to step in as dread grips my gut. It is pain, real pain, like the day when my body released my child.

- Are you ok? Summer, talk to me are you ok?

I have dropped the cobbler. The towel at my feet is covered in with the fruit; it looks like blood. I have dropped the cobbler.

- I am so sorry, but you have lost the baby.

I have dropped the cobbler.

- Summer stop it. What are you doing? Stop it!

I can’t put it back together. It won’t go back into the bowl. The towel no longer can hold it.

- I dropped the…