Prologue
Lillian loved best the moment before she turned on the
lights. She would stand in the restaurant kitchen doorway,
rain-soaked air behind her, and let the smells come to her—
ripe sourdough yeast, sweet-dirt coffee, and garlic,
mellowing as it lingered. Under them, more elusive, stirred
the faint essence of fresh meat, raw tomatoes, cantaloupe,
water on lettuce. Lillian breathed in, feeling the smells
move about and through her, even as she searched out those
that might suggest a rotting orange at the bottom of a
pile, or whether the new assistant chef was still double-
dosing the curry dishes. She was. The girl was
a daughter of a friend and good enough with knives, but
some days, Lillian thought with a sigh, it was like trying
to teach subtlety to a thunderstorm.
But tonight was Monday. No assistant chefs, no customers
looking for solace or celebration. Tonight was Monday,
cooking-class night.
After seven years of teaching, Lillian knew how her
students would arrive on the first night of class—walking
through the kitchen door alone or in ad hoc groups of two
or three that had met up on the walkway to the mostly
darkened restaurant, holding the low, nervous conversations
of strangers who will soon touch one another’s food. Once
inside, some would clump together, making those first
motions toward connection, while others would roam the
kitchen, fingers stroking brass pots or picking up a
glowing red pepper, like small children drawn to the low-
hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree.
Lillian loved to watch her students at this moment—they
were elements that would become more complex and intriguing
as they mixed with one another, but at the beginning,
placed in relief by their unfamiliar surroundings, their
essence was clear. A young man reaching out to touch the
shoulder of the still younger woman next to him—“What’s
your name?”—as her hand dropped to the stainless-steel
counter and traced its smooth surface. Another woman
standing alone, her mind still lingering with—a child? a
lover? Every once in a while there was a couple, in love or
ruins.
Lillian’s students arrived with a variety of motivations,
some drawn by a yearning as yet unmet to hear murmured
culinary compliments, others who had come to find a cook
rather than become one. A few participants had no desire
for lessons at all, arriving with gift certificates in hand
as if on a forced march to certain failure; they knew their
cakes would always be flat, their cream sauces filled with
small, disconcerting pockets of flour, like bills in your
mailbox when you had hoped for a love letter.
And then there were those students who seemingly had no
choice, who could no more stay out of a kitchen than a
kleptomaniac could keep her hands in her pockets. They came
early, stayed late, fantasized about leaving their
corporate jobs and becoming chefs with an exhilarating
mixture of guilt and pleasure. If Lillian’s soul sought out
this last group, it was only to be expected, but in truth,
she found them all fascinating. Lillian knew that whatever
their reasons for coming, at some moment in the course of
the class each one’s eyes would widen with joy or tears or
resolution—it always happened. The timing and the reason
would be different for each, and that’s where the
fascination lay. No two spices work the same.
The kitchen was ready. The long stainless-steel counters
lay before her, expansive and cool in the dark. Lillian
knew without looking that Robert had received the vegetable
order from the produce man who delivered only on Mondays.
Caroline would have stood over skinny, smart-mouthed Daniel
until the floors were scrubbed, the thick rubber mats
rinsed with the hose outside until they were black and
shining. Beyond the swinging door on the other side of the
kitchen, the dining room stood ready, a quiet field of
tables under starched white linen, napkins folded into
sharp triangles at each place. But no one would use the
dining room tonight. All that mattered was the kitchen.
Lillian stretched her fingers once, twice, and turned on
the light.
Lillian had been four years old when her father left them,
and her mother, stunned, had slid into books like a seal
into water. Lillian had watched her mother submerge and
disappear, sensing instinctively even at her young age the
impersonal nature of a choice made simply for survival, and
adapting to the niche she would now inhabit, as a watcher
from the shore of her mother’s ocean.
In this new life, Lillian’s mother’s face became a series
of book covers, held in place where eyes, nose, or mouth
might normally appear. Lillian soon learned that book
covers could forecast moods much like facial expressions,
for Lillian’s mother swam deeply into the books she read,
until the personality of the protagonist surrounded her
like a perfume applied by an indiscriminate hand. Lillian
was never sure who would greet her at the breakfast table,
no matter that the bathrobe, the hair, the feet were always
the same. It was like having a magician for a mother,
although Lillian always suspected that the magicians she
saw at birthday parties went home and turned back into
portly men with three children and grass that needed
mowing. Lillian’s mother simply finished one book and
turned to the next.
Her mother’s preoccupation with books was not an entirely
silent occupation. Long before Lillian’s father had left
them, long before Lillian knew that words had a meaning
beyond the music of their inflections, her mother had read
aloud to her. Not from cardboard books with their primary-
colored illustrations and monosyllabic rhymes. Lillian’s
mother dismissed the few that entered their house under the
guise of guilt.
“There’s no need to eat potatoes, Lily,” she would
say, “when four-course meals are ready and waiting.” And
she would read.
For Lillian’s mother, every part of a book was magic, but
what she delighted in most were the words themselves.
Lillian’s mother collected exquisite phrases and
complicated rhythms, descriptions that undulated across a
page like cake batter pouring into a pan, read aloud to put
the words in the air, where she could hear as well as see
them.
“Oh, Lily,” her mother would say, “listen to this one. It
sounds green, don’t you think?”
And Lillian, who was too young to know that words were not
colors and thoughts were not sounds, would listen while the
syllables fell quietly through her, and she would think,
This is what green sounds like.
After Lillian’s father left, however, things changed, and
she increasingly came to see herself simply as a mute and
obliging assistant in the accumulation of exceptional
phrases, or, if they happened to be somewhere public, as
her mother’s social cover. People would smile at the vision
of a mother nurturing her daughter’s literary imagination,
but Lillian knew better. In Lillian’s mind, her mother was
a museum for words; Lillian was an annex, necessary when
space became limited in the original building.
Not surprisingly, when it came time for Lillian to learn to
read, she balked. It was not only an act of defiance,
although by the time kindergarten started, Lillian was
already feeling toward books private surges of aggression
that left her both confused and slightly powerful. But it
wasn’t just that. In Lillian’s world, books were covers and
words were sound and movement, not form. She could not
equate the rhythms that had insinuated themselves into her
imagination with what she saw on the paper. The letters lay
prone across the page, arranged in unyielding precision.
There was no magic on the page itself,
Lillian saw; and while this increased Lillian’s estimation
of her mother’s abilities, it did nothing to further her
interest in books.
It was during Lillian’s first skirmishes with the printed
word that she discovered cooking. In the time since
Lillian’s father had left, housework had become for
Lillian’s mother a travel destination rarely reached;
laundry, a friend one never remembered to call. Lillian
picked up these skills by following her friends’ mothers
around their homes, while the mothers pretended not to
notice, dropping hints about bleach or changing a vacuum
bag as if it were just one more game children played.
Lillian learned, and soon her home— at least the lower four
and a half feet of it—developed a certain domestic
routine.
But it was the cooking that occurred in her friends’ homes
that fascinated Lillian—the aromas that started calling to
her just when she had to go home in the evening. Some
smells were sharp, an olfactory clatter of heels across a
hardwood floor. Others felt like the warmth in the air at
the far end of summer. Lillian watched as the scent of
melting cheese brought children languidly from their rooms,
saw how garlic made them talkative, jokes expanding into
stories of their days. Lillian thought it odd that not all
mothers seemed to see it—Sarah’s mother, for instance,
always cooked curry when she was fighting with her teenage
daughter, its smell rocketing through the house like a
challenge. But Lillian soon realized that many people did
not comprehend the language of smells that to Lillian was
as obvious as a billboard.
Perhaps, Lillian thought, smells were for her what printed
words were for others, something alive that grew and
changed. Not just the smell of rosemary in the garden, but
the scent on her hands after she had picked some for
Elizabeth’s mother, the aroma mingling with the heavy smell
of chicken fat and garlic The School of Essential
Ingredients in the oven, the after-scent on the couch
cushions the next day. The way, ever after, Elizabeth was
always part of rosemary for Lillian, how Elizabeth’s round
face had crinkled up into laughter when Lillian had pushed
the small, spiky branch near her nose.
Lillian liked thinking about smells, the same way she liked
the weight of Mary’s mother’s heavy saucepan in her hands,
or the way vanilla slipped into the taste of warm milk. She
remembered often the time Margaret’s mother had let her
help with a white sauce, playing out the memory in her head
the way some children try to recover, bit by detail, the
moments of a favorite birthday party. Margaret had pouted,
because she was, she declared stoutly, never allowed to
help in the kitchen, but Lillian had ignored all twinges of
loyalty and climbed up on the chair and stood, watching the
butter melt across the pan like the farthest reach of a
wave sinking into the sand, then the flour, at first a
hideous, clumping thing destroying the image until it was
stirred and stirred, Margaret’s mother’s hand over
Lillian’s on the wooden spoon when she wanted to mash the
clumps, moving instead slowly, in circles, gently, until
the flour-butter became smooth, smooth, until again the
image was changed by the milk, the sauce expanding to
contain the liquid and Lillian thought each time that the
sauce could hold no more, that the sauce would break into
solid and liquid, but it never did. At the last minute,
Margaret’s mother raised the cup of milk away from the pot,
and Lillian looked at the sauce, an untouched snowfield,
its smell the feeling of quiet at the end of an illness,
when the world is starting to feel gentle and welcoming
once again.
. . .
When Lillian reached the age of eight, she began to take
over the cooking in her own household. Her mother raised no
objections; food had not disappeared along with Lillian’s
father, but while it was not impossible to cook while
reading, it was problematic, and because of Lillian’s
mother’s tendency to mistake one spice for another if a
book was unusually absorbing, meals had become less
successful, if also occasionally more intriguing. All the
same, the transfer of cooking duties from mother to
daughter was met with a certain amount of relief on both
sides.
The passing of the culinary torch marked the beginning of
years of experimentation, made both slower and more unusual
by Lillian’s blanket refusal to engage with the printed
word, even a cookbook. Learning the ins and outs of
scrambled eggs, following such a pedagogical approach,
could take a week—one night, plain eggs, stirred gently
with a fork; the next, eggs whisked with milk; then water;
then cream. If Lillian’s mother objected, she made no note
of it as she accompanied Lillian on her quests for
ingredients, walking down the aisles reading aloud from the
book of the day. Besides, Lillian thought to herself,
scrambled eggs five nights in a row seemed a fair exchange
for a week otherwise dominated by James Joyce. Maybe she
should add chives tonight. Yes I said yes I will yes.
As Lillian’s skills progressed over the years, she learned
other, unexpected culinary lessons. She observed how dough
that was pounded made bread that was hard and moods that
were equally so. She saw that cookies that were soft and
warm satisfied a different human need than those that were
crisp and cooled. The more she cooked, the more she began
to view spices as carriers of the emotions and memories of
the places they were originally from and all those they had
traveled through over the years. She discovered that people
seemed to react to spices much as they did to other people,
relaxing instinctively into some, shivering into a kind of
emotional rigor mortis when encountering others. By the
time she was twelve, Lillian had begun to believe that a
true cook, one who could read people and spices, could
anticipate reactions before the first taste, and thus
affect the way a meal or an evening would go. It was this
realization that led Lillian to her Great Idea.
“I am going to cook her out,” Lillian told Elizabeth as
they sat on her friend’s front stoop. “What?” Eight months
older than Lillian, Elizabeth had long ago lost interest in
cooking for a more consuming passion for the next- door
neighbor, who, even as they spoke, rode and then launched
his skateboard dramatically from a ramp set up in front of
Elizabeth’s gate.
“My mom. I’m going to cook her out.”
“Lily.” Elizabeth’s face was a mix of scorn and
sympathy. “When are you going to give up?”
“She’s not as far gone as you think,” said Lillian. She
started to explain what she had been thinking about cookies
and spices—until she realized that Elizabeth was unlikely
to believe in the power of cooking and even less likely to
see its potential to influence Lillian’s mother.
But Lillian believed in food the way some people do
religion, and thus she did what many do when faced with a
critical moment in their lives. Standing that evening in
the kitchen, surrounded by the pots and pans she had
collected over the years, she offered up a deal.
“Let me bring her out,” Lillian bargained, “and I’ll cook
for the rest of my life. If I can’t, I’ll give up cooking
forever.” Then she put her hand on the bottom of the
fourteen-inch skillet and swore. And it was only because
she was still at the tail end of twelve and largely
unversed in traditional religions, that she didn’t realize
that most deals offered to a higher power involved
sacrifice for a desired result, and thus that her risk was
greater than most, as it meant winning, or losing, all.
As with many such endeavors, the beginning was a disaster.
Lillian, energized by hope, charged at her mother with
foods designed to knock the books right out of her hands—
dishes reeking with spices that barreled straight for the
stomach and emotions. For a week the kitchen was redolent
with hot red peppers and cilantro. Lillian’s mother ate her
meals as she always did—and then retreated into a steady
diet of nineteenth-century British novels, in which food
rarely held a dramatic role.
And so Lillian drew back, regrouped, and gave her mother
food to fit the book of the day. Porridge and tea and
scones, boiled carrots and white fish. But after three
months, Charles Dickens finally gave way to what appeared
to be a determination on her mother’s part to read the
entire works of Henry James, and Lillian despaired. Her
mother may have changed literary continents, but only in
the most general of senses.
“She’s stuck,” she told Elizabeth.
“Lily, it’s never going to work.” Elizabeth stood in front
of her mirror. “Just boil her some potatoes and be done
with it.”
“Potatoes,” said Lillian.
A fifty- pound sack of potatoes squatted at the bottom of
the steps in Lillian’s basement, ordered by her mother
during the Oliver Twist period, when staples had begun
appearing
at the door in such large quantities that neighbors asked
Lillian if she and her mother had plans for guests, or
perhaps a bomb shelter. If Lillian had been younger, she
might have made a fort of food, but she was busy now. She
took her knife and sliced through the burlap strings of the
bag, pulling out four oblong potatoes.
“Okay, my pretties,” she said.
She carried them upstairs and washed the dirt from their
waxy surfaces, using a brush to clean the dents and
pockets. Elizabeth always complained when her mother made
her wash the potatoes for dinner, wondering aloud to
Lillian and whoever else was near why they couldn’t just
make a smooth potato, anyway. But Lillian liked the dips
and dents, even if it meant it took more time to wash them.
They reminded her of fields before they were cultivated,
when every hillock or hole was a home, a scene of a small
animal battle or romance.
When the potatoes were clean, she took down her favorite
knife from the rack, cut them into quarters, and dropped
the chunks one by one into the big blue pot full of water
that she had waiting on the stove. They hit the bottom with
dull, satisfying thumps, shifting about for a moment until
they found their positions, then stilled, rocking only
slightly as the water started to bubble.
Her mother walked into the kitchen, the Collected Works of
Henry James in front of her face.
“Dinner or an experiment?” she asked.
“We’ll see,” replied Lillian.
Outside the windows, the sky was darkening. Already cars
were turning on their headlights, as the light filtered
gray-blue through the clouds. Inside the kitchen, the
hanging lamps shone, their light reflecting off the bits of
chrome, sinking quietly into the wooden countertops and
floor. Lillian’s mother sat down in a red-painted chair
next to the kitchen table, her book open.
“I remember,” Lillian’s mother read aloud, “the whole
beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little
see-saw of the right throbs and the wrong. . . .”
Lillian, listening with half an ear, bent down and took out
a small pot from the cabinet. She put it on the stove and
poured in milk, a third of the way up its straight sides.
When she turned the dial on the stove, the flame leaped up
to touch the sides of the pan.
“There had been a moment when I believe I recognized, faint
and far, the cry of a child; there had been another when I
found myself starting as at the passage, before my door, of
light footsteps….”
The water in the big blue pot boiled gently, the potatoes
shifting about in gentle resignation like passengers on a
crowded bus. The kitchen filled with the warmth of
evaporated water and the smell of warming milk, while the
last light came in pink through the windows. Lillian turned
on the light over the stove and checked the potatoes once
with the sharp end of her knife. Done. She pulled the pot
from the stove and emptied the potatoes into a colander.
“Stop cooking,” she said under her breath, as she ran cold
water over their steaming surfaces. “Stop cooking now.”
She shook the last of the water from the potatoes. The
skins came off easily, like a shawl sliding off a woman’s
shoulders. Lillian dropped one hunk after another into the
big metal bowl, then turned on the mixer and watched the
chunks change from shapes to texture, mounds to lumpy
clouds to cotton. Slices of butter melted in long, shining
trails of yellow through the moving swirl of white. She
picked up the smaller pan and slowly poured the milk into
the potatoes. Then salt. Just enough.
Almost as an afterthought, she went to the refrigerator and
pulled out a hard piece of Parmesan cheese. She grated some
onto the cutting board, then picked up the feathery bits
with her fingers and dropped them in a fine mist into the
revolving bowl, where they disappeared into the mixture.
She turned off the mixer, then ran her finger across the
top and tasted.
“There,” she said. She reached up into the cabinet and took
down two pasta bowls, wide and flat, with just enough rim
to hold an intricate design of blue and yellow, and placed
them on the counter. Using the large wooden spoon, she
scooped into the potatoes and dropped a small mountain of
white in the exact center of each bowl. At the last minute,
she made a small dip in the middle of each mountain, and
then carefully put in an extra portion of butter.
“Mom,” she said, as she carefully set the bowl and fork in
front of her mother, “dinner.” Lillian’s mother shifted
position in her chair toward the table, the book rotating
in front of her body like a compass needle.
Lillian’s mother’s hand reached for the fork, and deftly
navigated its way around the Collected Works and into the
middle of the potatoes. She lifted the fork into the air.
“It was the first time, in a manner, that I had known space
and air and freedom, all the music of summer and all the
mystery of nature. And then there was consideration—and
consideration was sweet. . . .”
The fork finished the journey to Lillian’s mother’s mouth,
where it entered, then exited, clean.
“Hmmmm . . .” she said. And then all was quiet.
“I’ve got her,” Lillian told Elizabeth as they sat eating
toast with warm peanut butter at Elizabeth’s house after
school.
“Because you got her to stop talking?” Elizabeth looked
skeptical.
“You’ll see,” said Lillian.
Although Lillian’s mother did seem calmer in the following
days, the major difference was one that Lillian had not
anticipated. Her mother continued to read, but now she was
absolutely silent. And while Lillian, who had long ceased
to see her mother’s reading aloud as any attempt at
communication, was not sorry to no longer be the catch-pan
of treasured phrases, this was not the effect she had been
hoping for. She had been certain the potatoes would be
magic.
On her way home from school, Lillian took a shortcut down a
narrow side street that led from the main arterial to the
more rural road to her house. Halfway down the block was a
small grocery store that Lillian had found when she was
seven years old, on a summer afternoon when she had let go
of her mother’s hand in frustration and set off in a
previously untraveled direction, wondering if her mother
would notice her absence.
On that day years before, she had smelled the store before
she saw it, hot and dusty scents tingling her nose and
pulling her down the narrow street. The shop itself was
tiny, perhaps the size of an apartment living room, its
shelves filled with cans written in languages she didn’t
recognize and tall candles enclosed in glass, painted with
pictures of people with halos and sad faces. A glass
display case next to the cash register was filled with pans
of food in bright colors— yellows and reds and greens,
their smells deep and smoky, sometimes sharp.
The woman behind the counter saw Lillian standing close to
the glass case, staring.
“Would you like to try?” she asked.
Not where is your mother, not how old are you, but would
you like to try. Lillian looked up and smiled.
The woman reached into the case and pulled out an oblong
yellow shape.
“Tamale,” she said, and handed it on a small paper plate to
Lillian.
The outside was soft and slightly crunchy, the inside a
festival of meat, onions, tomatoes, and something that
seemed vaguely like cinnamon.
“You understand food,” the woman commented, nodding, as she
watched Lillian eat.
Lillian looked up again, and felt herself folded into the
woman’s smile.
“The children call me Abuelita,” she said. “I think I hear
your mother coming.”
Lillian listened, and heard the sound of her mother’s
reading voice winding its way down the alley. She cast her
eyes around the store once more, and noticed an odd wooden
object hanging from a hook on one of the shelves.
“What is that?” she asked, pointing.
“What do you think?” Abuelita took it down and handed it to
Lillian, who looked at its irregular shape— a six-inch-long
stick with a rounded bulb on one end with ridges carved
into it like furrows in a field.
“I think it is a magic wand,” Lillian responded.
“Perhaps,” said Abuelita. “Perhaps you should keep it, just
in case.”
Lillian took the wand and slid it into her coat pocket like
a spy palming a secret missive.
“Come back anytime, little cook,” Abuelita said.
Lillian had returned to the store often over the years.
Abuelita had taught her about spices and foods she never
encountered in Elizabeth’s or Margaret’s houses. There was
avocado, wrinkled and grumpy on the outside, green spring
within, creamy as ice cream when smashed into guacamole.
There were the smoky flavors of chipotle peppers and the
sharp- sweet crunch of cilantro, which Lillian loved so
much Abuelita would always give her a sprig to eat as she
walked home. Abuelita didn’t talk a lot, but when she did,
it was conversation.
So when Lillian walked into the store, a week after making
mashed potatoes for her mother, Abuelita looked at her
closely for a moment.
“You are missing something,” she noted after a moment.
“It didn’t work,” Lillian replied, despairingly. “I thought
I had her, but it didn’t work.”
“Tell me,” said Abuelita simply, and Lillian did, about
cookies and spices and Henry James and mashed potatoes and
her feeling that perhaps, in the end, food would not be the
magic that would wake her mother from her long, literary
sleep, that perhaps in the end, sleep was all there was for
her mother.
After Lillian ended her story, Abuelita was quiet for a
while. “It’s not that what you did was wrong; it’s just
that you aren’t finished.”
“What else am I supposed to do?”
“Lillian, each person’s heart breaks in its own way. Every
cure will be different—but there are some things we all
need. Before anything else, we need to feel safe. You did
that for her.”
“So why is she still gone?”
“Because to be a part of this world, we need more than
safety. Your mother needs to remember what she lost and
want it again.
“I have an idea,” Abuelita said. “This may take a few
minutes.”
Abuelita handed Lillian a warm corn tortilla and motioned
for her to sit at the small round table that stood next to
the front door. As Lillian watched, Abuelita tore off the
back panel from a small brown paper bag and wrote on it,
her forehead furrowing in concentration.
“I am not a writer,” she commented as she finished. “I
never thought it was worth much. But you will get the
idea.”
She put down the paper, picked up another small grocery
bag, and began gathering items off the store shelves, her
back to Lillian. Then she folded the paper, placed it in
the top of the bag, and held the bag out to Lillian.
“Here,” she said, “let me know how it goes.”
At home, Lillian opened the bag and inhaled aromas of
orange, cinnamon, bittersweet chocolate, and something she
couldn’t quite identify, deep and mysterious, like perfume
lingering in the folds of a cashmere scarf. She emptied the
ingredients from the bag onto the kitchen counter and
unfolded the paper Abuelita had placed on top, looking at
it with a certain reserve. It was a recipe, even if this
one was in Abuelita’s writing, each letter thick as a
branch and almost as stiff. Lillian’s hand itched to throw
the recipe away—but she hesitated as her eyes caught on the
first line of the instructions.
Find your magic wand.
Lillian stopped.
“Well, okay, then,” she said. She pulled a chair up to the
kitchen counter and stood on it, reaching on top of the
cabinet for the small, red tin box where she kept her most
valued possessions.
The wand was close to the bottom of the box, underneath her
first movie ticket and the miniature replica of a Venetian
bridge her father had given her not long before he
departed, leaving behind only money and his smell on the
sheets, the latter gone long before Lillian learned how to
do laundry. Underneath the wand was an old photograph of
her mother holding a baby Lillian, her mother’s eyes
looking directly into the camera, her smile as huge and
rich and gorgeous as any chocolate cake Lillian could think
of making.
Lillian gazed at the photograph for a long time, then got
down off the chair, the wand gripped in her right hand, and
picked up the recipe.
Put milk in a saucepan. Use real milk, the thick kind.
Abuelita was always complaining about the girls from
Lillian’s school who wouldn’t eat her tamales, or who asked
for enchiladas without sour cream and then carefully peeled
off the cheese from the outside.
“Skinny girls,” Abuelita would say with disdain, “they
think you attract bees with a stick.”
Make orange curls. Set aside.
Lillian smiled. She felt about her zester the way some
women do about a pair of spiky red shoes—a frivolous
splurge, good only for parties, but oh so lovely. The day
Lillian had found the little utensil at a garage sale a
year before, she had brought it to Abuelita, face shining.
She didn’t even know what it was for back then, she just
knew she loved its slim stainless-steel handle, the
fanciful bit of metal at the working end with its five
demure little holes, the edge scalloped around the openings
like frills on a petticoat. There were so few occasions for
a zester; using it felt like a holiday.
Lillian picked up the orange and held it to her nose,
breathing in. It smelled of sunshine and sticky hands,
shiny green leaves and blue, cloudless skies. An orchard,
somewhere—
California? Florida?—her parents looking at each other over
the top of her head, her mother handing her a yellow-
orange fruit, bigger than Lillian’s two hands could hold,
laughing, telling her “this is where grocery stores come
from.”
Now Lillian took the zester and ran it along the rounded
outer surface of the fruit, slicing the rind into five long
orange curls, leaving behind the bitter white beneath it.
Break the cinnamon in half.
The cinnamon stick was light, curled around itself like a
brittle roll of papyrus. Not a stick at all, Lillian
remembered as she looked closer, but bark, the meeting
place between inside and out. It crackled as she broke it,
releasing a spiciness, part heat, part sweet, that pricked
at her eyes and nose, and made her tongue tingle without
even tasting it.
Add orange peel and cinnamon to milk. Grate the chocolate.
The hard, round cake of chocolate was wrapped in yellow
plastic with red stripes, shiny and dark when she opened
it. The chocolate made a rough sound as it brushed across
the fi ne section of the grater, falling in soft clouds
onto the counter, releasing a scent of dusty back rooms
filled with bittersweet chocolate and old love letters, the
bottom drawers of antique desks and the last leaves of
autumn, almonds and cinnamon and sugar.
Into the milk it went.
Add anise.
Such a small amount of ground spice in the little bag
Abuelita had given her. It lay there quietly, unremarkable,
the color of wet beach sand. She undid the tie around the
top of the bag and swirls of warm gold and licorice danced
up to her nose, bringing with them miles of faraway deserts
and a dark, starless sky, a longing she could feel in the
back of her eyes, her fingertips. Lillian knew, putting the
bag back down on the counter, that the spice was more grown-
up than she was.
Really, Abuelita? she asked into the air.
Just a touch. Let it simmer until it all comes together.
You’ll know when it does.
Lillian turned the heat on low. She went to the
refrigerator, got the whipping cream, and set the mixer on
high, checking the saucepan periodically. After a while,
she could see the specks of chocolate disappearing into the
milk, melting, becoming thicker, creamier, one thing rather
than many.
Use your wand.
Lillian picked up the wand, rolling the handle musingly
between the palms of her hands. She gripped the slender
central stick with purpose and dipped the ridged end into
the pan.
Rolling the wand forward and back between her palms, she
sent the ridges whirling through the liquid, sending the
milk and chocolate across the pan in waves, creating
bubbles across the top of the surface.
“Abracadabra,” she said. “Please.”
Now add to your mother’s coffee.
One life skill Lillian’s mother had not abandoned for books
was making coffee; a pot was always warm on the counter, as
dependable as a wool coat. Lillian filled her mother’s mug
halfway with coffee, then added the milk chocolate, holding
back the orange peels and cinnamon so the liquid would be
smooth across the tongue.
Top with whipping cream, for softness. Give to your
mother.
“What is that amazing smell?” her mother asked, as Lillian
carried the cup into the living room.
“Magic,” Lillian said.
Her mother reached for the cup and raised it to her mouth,
blowing gently across the surface, the steam spiraling up
to meet her nose. She sipped tentatively, almost puzzled,
her eyes looking up from her book to stare at something far
away, her face fl ushing slightly. When she was finished,
she handed the cup back to Lillian.
“Where did you learn to make that?” she said, leaning back
and closing her eyes.
“That’s wonderful,” said Abuelita when Lillian recounted
the story to her the next day. “You made her remember her
life. Now she just needs to reach out to it. That recipe,”
Abuelita said in answer to Lillian’s questioning
face, “must be yours. But you will find it,” she
continued. “You are a cook. It’s a gift from your mother.”
Lillian raised an eyebrow skeptically. Abuelita gazed at
her, gently amused.
“Sometimes, niña, our greatest gifts grow from what we are
not given.”
Two days later, Lillian headed straight home after classes.
The weather had turned during the night, and the air as
Lillian left school that day had a clear, brittle edge to
it. Lillian walked at a fast pace, to match the air around
her. She lived at the edge of town, where a house could
still stand next door to a small orchard, and where kitchen
gardens served as reminders of larger farms not so long
gone. There was one orchard she particularly liked, a grove
of apple trees, twisted and leaning, growing toward each
other like old cousins. The owner was as old as his trees
and wasn’t able to take care of them much anymore.
Grass grew thick around their bases and ivy was beginning
to grasp its way up their trunks. But the apples seemed not
to have noticed the frailty of their source, and were firm
and crisp and sweet; Lillian waited for them every year,
and for the smile of the old man as he handed them to her
across the fence.
He was in among the trees when she walked by and called out
to him. He turned and squinted in her direction. He waved,
then turned and reached up into one of the trees, checking
first one apple then the next. Finally satisfied, he came
toward her, an apple in each hand.
“Here,” he said, handing them to her. “A taste of the new
season.”
The sky was already darkening by the time Lillian got home,
and the cold air came in the door with her. Her mother sat
in her usual chair in the living room, a book held under a
circle of light made by the reading lamp.
“I have something for you, Mom,” Lillian said, and placed
one of the apples in her mother’s hand.
Lillian’s mother took the apple and absentmindedly pressed
its smooth, cold surface against her cheek.
“It feels like fall,” she commented, and bit into it. The
sharp, sweet sound of the crunch filled the air like a
sudden burst of applause and Lillian laughed at the noise.
Her mother looked up, smiling at the sound, and her eyes
met her daughter’s.
“Why, Lillian,” she said, her voice rippling with
surprise, “look how you’ve grown.”
Reprinted with permission from Berkley Books, copyright
2010.