Fiction from The Literary Review
The night the parcel arrived, Gwen Miller could not sleep at all for the fever that took hold. Though normally meticulous, she overlooked the clutter of brown paper and snipped twine on her kitchen counter and stared at the heavy cast-iron pan apparently designed for the making of gingerbread. She fingered the smudges of lard and cracked bits of flour. She put her thumb to her mouth and tasted.
Gwen's own mother had died when she was nine and she barely knew the great-aunt who had sent the pan. But now a connection had been fired. Gwen realized that she had ancestors who had made gingerbread houses. She tried to imagine herself sifting flour, kneading dough, mincing fresh ginger, and soon became seized with the idea of keeping this wholesome craft alive.
After she put her daughter Katie to bed, Gwen got out her cookbooks. Her husband David, a man who displayed his wrenches in graduating size order on his tool bench, noted the fierce activity in the kitchen and retired early.
The first batch was discouraging. The mixer overheated, the molasses was foul and Gwen had to run to the grocery to replace ruined ingredients.
But several hours later, in the eerie warmth of her night kitchen, Gwen steadied the front wall of her cottage with the tip of her nose while she held the wobbly and rather ragged sides with her hands. With fear and faith, she prayed, "Please, let it hold this time."
The next morning, when Katie discovered her mother's feat of culinary architecture, her initial glow of wonder was followed by an urge to grab at the jujubes that lined the roof. As the day wore on, tension mounted between mother and toddler, culminating in a rather unattractive tug of war, in which feelings were hurt on both sides and the quaint little cottage was demolished.
Undeterred by this debacle, Gwen pursued the gingerbread house project with a religious zeal. She realized that the mold was only the beginning. She discovered the existence of baking supply shops and acquired an ever-increasing arsenal of professional equipment. Studying photographs and booklets on technique, Gwen experimented with different styles, and became increasingly resourceful, using shredded wheat to thatch a roof, pretzel rods to build a log cabin. She sent away for concentrated food colors and mixed them on a palette to create exquisite tones. As she struggled to perfect her craft, Gwen chose to work like a brownie at night, leaving the rest of the household to speculate on what magic must have gone into the fully realized creations that appeared on the sideboard the next morning.
But the time came when Katie begged to be included. Gwen provided a pre-assembled cottage and although she hovered, she kept her hands still and allowed the girl to do what she wanted with frosting and candies. Icing dried in clumps and wafers drifted out of alignment. Gwen stared as stubby fingers pressed shards of candy cane into marshmallow fluff in the front yard of the cottage. This was not to be a walkway, or a patio, or even a bush, but simply a swirling abstract mosaic with hard bits embedded in soft sticky stuff. Gwen realized that this kind of spontaneous creativity was precisely what had been missing from her own well-designed cottages.
From then on it became a mission to introduce this craft to other children. First there was a party for a few of her daughter's friends. Then the Girl Scout troop, and then everyone's neighbors and siblings, and with time the circle grew wider and wider.
David did his duty by setting up card tables, preparing dixie cups of nonpareils and expressing admiration for his wife's well-orchestrated pageant. At first he did not agree with those in town who felt that Gwen's good will was being taken advantage of.
The mothers were grateful, of course. "This means we don't have to do it," they said. And they contributed jars of jelly beans, or brought by extra folding chairs. Children wrote thank-you notes and gave her tree ornaments of candy cottages. Photographs were taken. Gwen Miller appeared in the local paper.
"Have you received your invitation yet?... We can't go away that weekend, that's when Gwen Miller does the gingerbread houses.... Does she really do it for free?... The kids all cram into her house and tinker away for hours like elves in Santa's workshop."
Folding tables, gingham cloths, each place set with an identical aluminum foil tray. Sugary smells and coffee brewing like at a church breakfast. And people moving through: even when she was alone, Gwen could feel the heat of their bodies like phantoms from all the previous years. And she could smell damp woolen sweaters piled on the couch, feel squashed gum drops and ground sprinkles under foot, hear the din of voices clamoring for another tube of icing or more rock candy.
But gingerbread was not a seasonal product in the Miller house, its influence limited to an intense flurry of activity during Advent. Somehow, the aroma of ginger and molasses permeated the house 365 days of the year. Gwen attempted to counter the lingering effects, opening windows, scrubbing walls, placing air fresheners in each room. But, like milk soured on car upholstery, gingerbread required stronger powers of exorcism than Gwen Miller seemed to possess. And it was not just a smell. The color of the air in the kitchen was golden brown, the surfaces all gave off a gingery tint.
David occasionally wondered if she might want to stop, after it began to get out of control. Surely this kind of mass production was not what her great-aunt had done with the mold. The great-aunt, a sensible woman, would certainly have kept the matter within the family.
"What about making it into a business?" he proposed.
"You mean charging for it?" Gwen asked.
"Yeah, like spaghetti dinners at the firehouse."
"Not now. How can I charge for what I've given away?"
"You could stop altogether, then."
"How could I face people? They depend on this. The children do."
"The children. What about Katie? Her Christmas kind of gets lost in the shuffle."
"If you think she needs more presents, go out and buy them yourself!"
And so it went on.
Gingerbread became the tag that identified Gwen Miller and the theme for all gifts. Without ever intending to, Gwen became a collector of gingerbread house artifacts. As a result, her house gave the impression of a small gift boutique forced to specialize in a single motif in order to stand out in a competitive market. Near Christmas, the hundreds of gingerbread house tree ornaments were on display. But on any day of the year, there were coffee tables burdened with slick books featuring award-winning gingerbread houses, walls covered with Hansel and Gretel lithographs and couches strewn with witch puppets and hand-woven candy canes. Even Gwen Miller's very person was not exempt: papier-mâché gingerbread children dangled from her ears and leaden ceramic cottages weighed down her hand-knit sweaters.
In the heavy heat of August, the summer before that last season, Gwen Miller found herself gravitating to Christmas shops at the shore. She would finger a small quilted purse with a gingerbread house design and think, oh look, here's something I might like, as if she were not wholly confident of her actual likes and dislikes, as if she were shopping, in fact, for someone else.
Gwen's production schedule, which was painstakingly outlined in a black-marbled composition notebook, called for her to bulk-mail the invitations on the Friday after Thanksgiving and to start baking the gingerbread on Monday. Katie and David had been enlisted to lick envelopes and affix red and white candy cane stickers as soon as the Thanksgiving dinner dishes had been cleared. And before Katie left for school the following Monday, sacks of flour, bags of sugar, and jars of ginger and molasses had been lined up, in recipe order, on the scrubbed counter behind the three large mixing bowls.
After Katie left, Gwen started the tediously elaborate process of her seventh season, tying on a clean white apron, greasing the molds, measuring out tablespoons of molasses.
And then there was the abrupt shock of being interrupted. A truck backed slowly up the gravel driveway. The doorbell rang.
And she was surprised of course. That was the whole idea. The drama her husband had counted on.
"Some mistake," she protested. "I didn't order..."
"Well, if you're Gwen Miller, we got something for you all right. Come and see." The driver, with his rolled t-shirt and baseball cap, snickered like a host on "This is Your Life."
Should she go out? It could be a trick. The kind of thing she tried to warn Katie about.
"Don't you know Christmas is right around the corner?" The driver grinned.
In the back of the truck was a gleaming, towering two-story oven with an enormous red ribbon tied around it like it was a box of roses. The card the driver handed to Gwen read: "A double oven, to cut your baking time in half. Merry Christmas! Love, David."
Gwen posed no objection to the men hauling the old appliance away and installing the "Mammoth Black Beauty," as they referred to it. She simply sat at the kitchen table staring and digging her fingers into the brown cake that she had taken out of the old oven, shoving crumbling handfuls into her mouth.
The cake was dry and tasteless. As she chewed it, something odd began to happen. Gwen thought she felt her teeth grinding against grains of sand. Then, as she swallowed, she felt her insides rebelling against the cake as if it were a clump of soil clotted with stringy ginger root. Of course, she thought, the stuff was more like mortar and bricks than food. It was never meant to be eaten.
As she spat the cake into the sink, it occurred to Gwen that the old oven was the source of it, the origin of the insistent aromas, the kiln in which diabolical transformations had taken place. And now it was gone.
Was she going to contaminate the new appliance? Risk getting in even deeper?
Gwen worked fast, struggling against her growing disability. She started in the basement, grasping the ornament boxes clumsily with hands that were beginning to resemble large oven mitts. Then she went from room to room, lumping along on her swelling extremities, methodically scanning the surfaces with her silver beaded eyes and digging into crevices. It all had to be ferreted out. She could not afford to miss a single item.
As she shoved the cardboard boxes out onto the driveway, a safe distance from the house, no one was there to observe the way Gwen's hands were turning a golden brown and beginning to glisten with loops of white icing along the puffy digits. And how masklike her face was becoming, with black licorice eyebrows and red candy hearts embedded at the grinning corners of her assertively pink mouth. Barely conscious of the transformation, but driven by some instinct, Gwen carefully placed all the gingerbread house pillows and books, drawings and jewelry, on top of the boxes. Then she returned to the kitchen for the six baking molds and what was left of the cakes she had made that morning. These she put on the ground, at equal intervals, a whimsical fence around the enormous structure. Then she doused it liberally with kerosene and, with great difficulty, now that her thumb and fingers could no longer be separated, Gwen touched the pyre with the gas-powered lighter she had given her husband the previous Christmas.
As the flames tore into the air, snapping the white winter sky to attention, children were arriving home from school all over town, and ripping cheerfully into small white envelopes decorated with red and white candy cane stickers.
When a neighbor rushed across the street to investigate, she saw something that she never reported to the police or firemen who arrived soon after. The neighbor stopped short at the sidewalk and squinted through the flames at the figure of a woman standing motionless on the other side. From the angle of the shoulders and the height, the neighbor knew it was Gwen Miller. However, in the tricky light of that overcast December afternoon, it appeared that Gwen had applied some of her gingerbread decorating skills to her own face. As the neighbor gaped, the stark edges of the garish confectionery features all began to soften, the black and the red and the pink and the silver melting and falling in discrete tears onto Gwen Miller's white apron.
But it was a fleeting impression, for no one corroborated the neighbor's version of events. In fact, when the fire chief approached Gwen, she was notably calm, almost radiant, and although she did toss a balled-up white apron into the fire, her face and person displayed not a trace of makeup or artificial color. Gwen Miller extended a languorous arm to the fire chief as if she were a hostess and he an invited guest.
"Into thin air," was what the people in town said. For Gwen Miller left without saying goodbye, without packing, without even taping a note of explanation to the bathroom mirror. But she did not run off recklessly, as some supposed. She did think about what she was doing that final night. With the lights off, she stumbled into the garage, found the garden trowel on its hook next to the rake, and walked into the backyard, to a spot about fifty paces from the kitchen window. Under the starless sky, she chiselled away at the almost frozen ground and into the pit she placed the one object that had survived the fire: the original cast-iron baking mold her great-aunt had sent her years before. On her knees, with hands raw and blistering, Gwen Miller buried the family heirloom under three feet of cold black soil.Copyright 1998 Maureen E. O'Neill All rights reserved.
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