You Can’t Let The Oven Get Too Hot

Everything about my mother speaks of neglect; a still, righteous dignified neglect frozen in the deep creases in her face. She clings to this engraved righteousness, insists upon it as proof of her sacrifice for all of us, showing up, day after day, staying married to my father, in this puzzling land that is mine not theirs.

“Mirna, don’t you want to see how I’m making the filling for the empanada? Have you ever seen how I make it?” Here we go again. No one likes Spanish food, it’s weird the kids used to say, the way they used to say my name was weird. Mynah bird mynah bird! Polly wanna cracker bird?

On the other side of the dinette set, I sprawl on the couch leafing through the latest issue of McCall’s, wondering how many recipes could be out there of croutons, Velveeta, and cream of mushroom soup. Still, McCall’s was my first guide to becoming an American, and I have the same warm gratitude towards it I have for my first grade teacher. It was how I learned Breck girls have golden straight hair and blue eyes, how to apply false eyelashes, that fishnet didn’t just catch fish but could become tights, and that dresses could be made of paper. I almost hoped to see the Betsy McCall cutout dolls for old times’ sake, but they were gone along with the quick and romantic recipes for coq au vin (“COKE-OH-VAN”) that were sure to bring the stars back to hubby’s tired eyes, along with the Maidenform bra ads in dreamy settings. After all, men were mysterious strong creatures who were worth ensnaring for unspoken obvious reasons. It was in the magazines. It must be true.

My father sits in the LaZBoy, his back to the gold-veined mirror-tiled wall, his Ronald Reagan calendar by his desk, reading the editorial page of the Miami Herald. The Spanish version, only a passing relation to the English version. Reading it turns his face into a red, frowning, straight-lipped and eyebrow-crevassed imitation of one of those dried out apple head carvings. Why does he keep having to obsess about how the Communists ruined the country and will ruin this one too if we aren’t vigilant? I wait for him to begin his tirade against the Kennedys, and hide behind the magazine.

Hoping to escape my brittle Manhattan cares, I arrived a few days ago, and found few physical souvenirs of the home I once knew. After three decades in Chicago, in retirement, my parents had reverted to the nomadic life we lived when we first left Cuba, trying out half a dozen new cities, only this time without the Labor Day school start deadlines, and near the relatives who whipped each other into a frenzy with the latest fantastical rumors from the island.

The Lemon-Pledged dark Mediterranean furniture and the Lladró collection are all in storage, no longer dominating the entry way. I almost miss them. Now, the furnishings at each new rental look ever more slippery and bright. At least at the last place I could see the brocade through the plastic covering of the French provincial furniture, with its distressed and gold-flecked light wood frames. This place is all shiny crinkle patent furniture, boxy, white with lime green piping. I stick to the Naugahyde when I wear shorts and slide off when I wear jeans. It reminds me of the go-go boots I coveted as a girl, the back seat of the large Chevys we all learned how to drive in, how to grope in.

In our old house, even on the most arctic Chicago nights, my father was thermostat warden, zealously guarding the dial at 60 degrees, leaving the rest of us to rub our hands and blow on our fingers, complaining loudly, shivering dramatically. Now that they are in Florida, I assume he left that behind in the snowdrifts.

No. No. No. He promoted himself to light and electricity warden. No matter that the rent includes electricity. It takes me hours to turn on a light here. Neither flipping a switch nor turning a lamp knob guarantee illumination. Switches on far walls control some lamps, while automatic timers govern others. Some lights are not connected to anything at all from what I can tell. Only my father, trained to design transmission lines and circuitry, understands his elegant system and appreciates its efficiency, heaping scorn on members of humanity who could not remember his algorithmic sequences. I’m the lab rat who can’t figure out which button releases the sugar.

The television is part of this conspiracy. When the timer clicks on, it flashes to life. I jump. Sometimes the screen shows the Mexican variety show with the feathered showgirls and plump bombastic emcee with the toupee, brass section blaring. Sometimes it shows CNN, or Fox, blaring without the brass. Sometimes it shows nothing at all if that night my father decided it wasn’t worth wasting the kilowatts. No pleading by my mother can get him to change his mind. He is the man of the house. As if he needs to bellow it out loud, as if our hearing was bad, as if it was a newsflash. When he isn’t looking, I turn the thermostat from 80 degrees down to 70, sure at some point he'll notice. I’m embarrassed that I still hope he’ll admit that the great and powerful Oz is a fake and laugh at the prank. That’s not really a prank.

In the end, she is the one who has relinquished her fight. Without me around, she can no longer argue that it is not right for a child to live like that, so cold in the winter, hot in the summer. The glossy black helmet of hair that she once donned every other week is now steel wool. She has stopped pulling out the grey hairs as soon as they appear. (“Knock, knock,” I would say, upon seeing her return fresh from Monsieur Yves’s corner beauty parlor. “You won’t have to worry about falling down and hurting your head, that’s for sure,” I would sing, bumping my fist lightly against the sticky springy bouffant. Her mouth turned down as she defended Monsieur Yves by how expensive he was and that he really was French.) I miss that helmet now, her bluster.

Red and green pepper brackets layer in the steel mixing bowl while she slices rings of milky onion to put in the frying pan that matches the avocado refrigerator that matches the tile that matches the cabinets. I never really liked avocado, but better a color than the real thing. The scent of onions lies heavy and sweet, not quite far enough from me that my eyes tear up. The tube lights overhead buzz like the blue mosquito lamps outside at night. All buzz, no zap. I still get bitten. Florida has always been one giant con game to me, an empty shell no matter which promise you pick.

I glance over the top of the Clairol ad, pretending interest in the dinner, the empanada. I would never have done this a few years ago, still too shaky in my grownupness, in my Americanness. But I am past that now.

“No molestes a Mirna. Don’t bother her.” My father pronounces without looking up from the newspaper, without asking me. Wait, now all of a sudden he tries to steer me away from something Cuban?

“No le haría daño aprender como hacer una empanada por la primera vez en su vida!” she shoots back, insisting that it would not hurt for me to learn how to make the deepdish meat pie for the first time in my life. My neck hairs stand on end, my shoulders hunch while I let the magazine float higher in front of my face. “I won’t be around forever to teach her.”

She says it was good to know how to make. I could make it for parties, impress all my friends, make it ahead of time and freeze it to have for dinner during the week when I came home too tired from work to cook and I never ate enough anyway, and if I ever got married again it would be something I could make for my husband for dinner and he would like it. Men liked empanadas. Maybe in whatever is the Spanish version of McCall’s I thought.

“Mirna doesn’t have time to bother with making empanadas,” my father announces.

“And who says if she marries another American he would like it anyway.”

I wince remembering my painful experiment with the Connecticut economist, who married me because I was exotic as his family put it, only to find that he craved a blond who played tennis and left him alone except for dressing up for Saturday cocktails at the club. No, craved is too strong an emotion for him. My mother begged me not to tell my cousins when we split up, ashamed that there was a divorcée in the family, that her sisters would blame her for the disgrace of it. I felt betrayed, angry, that she wanted me to save her reputation within the family, all while I was being dragged to court and my legal fees mounted. All while I tried to tell myself it wasn’t all Americans, just him, that somewhere I’d fit.

“Everybody likes empanada.”

“Why can’t you just give her the recipe?”

“There’s no substitute for watching someone actually make it. Why are you interfering in women’s business?”

That is all I need to hear. I slide off the couch, interrupting the rapid fire volleys.

“That’s okay, I don’t really remember how you do it. Show me. You’re the expert.”

She smiles and calms down. He grunts behind his newspaper, mumbling, “Ees up to you. Allá tú.”

Stirring the saucepan, fragrant with shimmering, hissing onions, she says, “First you take a little olive oil, not too much, maybe a tablespoon, and cook the onions.”

“How much onion should you use?”

“Maybe one is enough.”

“Maybe one? Does that mean one? Or less than one? Or two? How many?”

Her pitch rises. “I don’t know exactly. It depends on the size of the onion and how much onion you want to put. Maybe one and a half is okay too. It’s up to you.”

“How am I supposed to make this if I don’t know how much onion to put in? What kind of a recipe is this?”

A triumphant grunt comes from behind the newspaper.

She frowns. “I don’t know what to tell you. One or one and a half. It doesn’t matter too much. If it’s a big onion you need one, if the onions from the store are little, use two.” I nod. She smiles. Nods. OK Julia Child was like this too. My mouth turns up thinking of Mom hosting a cooking show.

“Make the slices not too thick, but they don’t have to be so thin either.”

This time I won’t ask, gauging they are about ¼ inch thick, or maybe ½ inch some of them. I watch the slices turn translucent, a ribbon at a time. How did I forget to notice that this transformation was magic, and it was a consistent, dependable magic. With the right heat, onions turned clear, then sweet. My eyes stop tearing up even as I get closer.

It is too peaceful. My father grunts again, this time rattling the paper. I know what is next. Before he taunts if I had learned it all yet, I say “Do you let the onions brown?”

“No. They should just be clear. Don’t let them get brown or burn. You have to watch, and be very careful, because it can happen in a second. In a second they can burn. In a second.” He clears his throat.

She takes the onions off the burner and sets them aside. Next comes the garlic (“maybe about three cloves”), brackets of peppers (“you can use red or green, maybe one each, it’s up to you”), then the green olives, and the contents of a small jar of pimentos, slices of chorizo, and the long pieces of already cooked chicken, with a lot of paprika sprinkled on top. Last of all, she pours tomato sauce over the mixture and stirs. She turns the gas flames down to a low blue line, a bright Rothko horizon under the weight of culinary expectations. We now turn to the dough.

“How is she going to know how to make this when she gets home?” he snorts. My neck hairs stand straight up again.

“Cállate! You be quiet! She’ll know from watching me!”

She hits the rim of the pan with the metal spoon, playing her timbale in a mambo beat, flinging off the last clinging vegetable bits into the sizzling mix, landing the cover on the pan with a bass thunk.

I turn my head around over my shoulder to face him. I won’t let him get to me, the way she lets him get to her. Maybe she will see it is the only way to deal with someone like him, like I learned to ignore mynah bird. If only. Maybe it is too late, but maybe not. She is smart. Why did she put up with all this? She could even get away now that I am all grown up, the way I’d hoped she would when I was little and the thermostat was cold.

“I’ve got the recipe anyway,” I say, remembering suddenly that it was at home tucked in the parents’ association high school fundraiser cookbook, written the way she spoke it. He went back to the paper. She shakes her head, we exchange eyerolls, her creases soften into relaxed triumph.

“How about some musiquita?” she says. He picks out an old album, one they’d bought not long after we reached Chicago, the latte and chocolate-skinned orchestra members in glittering tuxes on the cover, beaming behind gleaming brass instruments, the proud bandleader with baton in hand. My parents glance at each other when the song starts and her hips begin to sway as she begins to sing softly.

The dough is in a metal bowl in the oven, an orange and yellow flowered dish towel swollen over it as if it were a dress over a pregnant belly. She releases the ball of dough from the bowl. It lands with a soft plop.

Kneading had always been my favorite part. I loved pounding out the dough, folding the warm sticky end in front of me up and pressing it down hard with the heels of my hands, before giving it a quarter turn, hearing the sandpaper sound, the swish on the floured table, putting my weight into the heels of my hands as they sank in again, yeasted pillows springing up behind my wrists in lofty defiance. It was a rumba, urgent, best done to Quizás, Quizás, Quizás. So different from the cool, petulant Doris Day version anglicized to Perhaps. I always wondered how many yeasts I was crushing, and mourned them a little with each squoosh. Still the dough would always rise up again to dance. Each squoosh banished sadness, the tension between them, so long as I could keep the rhythm going (up squoosh turn up squoosh turn).

When she wasn’t looking, when I was little, I would take a bubblegum-sized ball of dough and pop it in my mouth. When she caught me, she would warn that there wouldn’t be enough dough if I ate more. I would scowl, certain there would be enough, as she tried to look serious.

Bésame Mucho is the next song. He sings along, serenading her, gliding over, taking her hand, pulling her in for a dance. She blushes, the flour in her hair indistinguishable from her grays, coyly turning from his kiss as she giggles. It used to embarrass me when they did that. All I could think now was I’d never meet someone who would serenade me, dance with me like that.

The next song, a fast chaotic one. They stop. She lets go of his hand. He stops. Waits.

“You know, I think your aunt is right,” she says, watching me knead. “I don’t think you have to knead the dough so much to have it turn out okay. It’s one thing if you have all the time in the world, but spending so much time on it is mucho maraña. Not worth it.”

“But it turns out so much better when you knead it a lot,” I say. “Your dough is always so much lighter and fluffier than hers.”

“You always listen too much with your sister,” he says. “She thinks she knows everything, that she’s a big deal, the expert on everything. All of you think that you know everything. You’re just like her.”

“This is none of your business!” she shrieks. He grumbles that you could never tell her anything. With a glint in her eye, she mutters how she had fixed the thermostat in the oven at the old house when he, Mr. Engineer, said it could not be fixed and how he was the one who thought he knew everything.. “Maybe we can knead it a little more, okay? if you want.”

She presses the dough down sharply. “It’s better if I do this so you don’t get all full of flour and have to take another shower,” she says. I was disappointed but could not refute her logic. She went faster than I had, harder. I stirred the simmering, aromatic, and disintegrating brew.

Breaking the lull, my father calls out, “Are you learning how to make it yet?”

I head off another burst of anger from my mother when I chirp “Yes!” He grumbles.

“So how is Andrew?” Her voice cracks, not as casual as she had tried for it to be. My father rolls his eyes, back to his paper. My face burns. I focus on the dough, wanting to take it back.

“We’re just friends now. It’s better that way.” My voice is up half an octave. So I wasn’t all that casual either. I have no wish to talk about the latest fertility research, or hear about my aunts’ delight with their grandchildren.

My father puts his paper down and pronounces he is going for a walk, now that we didn’t need his supervision any more on the empanada. He laughs. This time I grumble, then snort. The front door closes as he points out how little cold air he’d let out.

“Sometimes it’s better to be friends,” she says, the house quiet. The stereo needle clicks back to its rest.

“I never liked how he figured out how much you owed every month, as if you were his employee and not his wife. Down to the penny. Locura. When you get married, it’s all one household. Who knows what he would have done if you’d had kids.”

I stop stirring and turn around. She keeps kneading. I remember trying to defend his approach, said I agreed with it. It was so logical, all those numbers. He was the economist, after all, so I thought he knew more than I did about finances. It bothered me, but I had never challenged him about it. Didn’t think it was worth the fight, and maybe this is just what American husbands do.

“Cover up the pan, you don’t want to let the juices evaporate,” she says. “Now we just roll out the dough enough to cover the bottom of the baking pan with a little extra, see? Then you put a little olive oil on the bottom. I don’t put as much as I used to because the doctor says it’s not good. Bring the pan over here and we can put the filling in.”

She ladles the sweet-smelling chicken, pepper strips, onions, olives and chorizo onto the dough, surveying to be sure it’s spread out evenly.

“When did you stop getting your hair done?” I ask.

“Oh I know. It looks terrible, doesn’t it. I was going to get it cut before you came but I got too busy and then your father didn’t want to drive me to the beauty parlor so I didn’t go. Now see how I’m putting the top crust on? You have to be careful that it doesn’t stretch too much because then it may burst in the oven.”

“You should go. There are all these cute haircuts now that would look really good on you. Did you see them in the McCall’s?”

“Not yet. I haven’t had time to read the last issue. Well if you see one that you think would look good show it to me, no? But pay attention to what I’m doing! Now see? You take a little egg white and brush it over the top of the crust. That makes the crust all shiny when it’s done and so it looks prettier.” She used to look so pretty.

Beautiful. It’s still in there.

“Maybe I can take you while I’m here, so you don’t have to wait for Dad to be in the mood.”

“No, no, no that’s okay. I’ll go next week after you’re gone, either with him or your aunt will take me.” She slits holes in the crust with a sharp knife, precise and determined, focuses on making a starburst pattern, the knife going in only just enough.

“Look how pretty this looks. We put it in the oven now and let it bake till it’s all done.”

A blast of dry heat hits my face as she opens the oven. She checks the extra thermostat, the one she took from house to condo to house. “I don’t trust the oven’s thermostat anymore. You can only trust your own thermostat.” She slides the baking pan into the oven’s maw, shuts it, sets the timer.

I clean up the kitchen. She takes a shower. The timer ticks. She does her own hair, puts on lipstick. The scent of Blue Grass perfume floats past the Ronald Reagan calendar.

Through the sliding doors, I watch a manatee swim up the canal behind the yard. An alligator follows it. Was it manatees who weren’t supposed to live in salt water, or alligators? A white egret stands on one leg on the opposite bank, then flies away.