“I made cinnamon rolls!” Brittany waited only long enough for Pete to crack open his front door before blurting out her unexpected announcement. When he had pulled the door open all the way, he saw that she was smiling, and bouncing a little on the balls of her feet, and making little circles in the air with her hands. It was early afternoon. Pete had been up for at least fifteen minutes. Not quite long enough to really think about solid food, but long enough not to be completely confused by the idea. Brittany, on the other hand, was wide-awake and beaming.
Pete wanted to ask her why she had made cinnamon rolls, and why, having done so, she was at his door telling him about it. He wanted to ask if she was still mad at him, and if she maybe wanted to be friends again.
But when he opened his mouth, all that came out was, “huh?”
“Cinnamon rolls. Like the ones the wiener dogs ate before they went to Fawn and Chloe’s world. I thought we should experiment.”
“Eeh?” Pete realized that ‘Eeh?’ was probably even worse than ‘huh?’ but it was all that came to mind.
Pete’s father must have thought his son wasn’t doing such a great job of door opening, because he came down the stairs to look expectantly over Pete’s shoulder, and Brittany began again.
“Hi Mr. Meren. I’ve made a feast, and I think everyone should come over for cinnamon rolls, and my dad is going to teach me how to make latte, and espresso compana.”
“Everyone?” There. Pete could do it. He could manage an actual word.
Brittany kept bouncing, still too cheerful to look at for more than a few seconds at a time. “Parents. Little brothers. Everyone.”
“George?” This was from Pete’s dad. Pete realized that the adults must be worried about George too. He hadn’t really thought about that before. Their parents seemed to move in such a different world – a world of grading papers, and planning lessons, and making reservations for airplanes and hotels, and figuring out taxes and government paperwork. Obviously, George’s own parents must be worried about his odd behavior, but Pete suddenly realized that neighbors and teachers would have noticed too.
“Oh, George.” Brittany waved her hand dismissively. “George is at the orphanage again.”
“Do I have time to take a shower?”
Brittany protested that she was inviting Pete to walk two buildings away to eat cinnamon rolls, not to the Winter Formal, while his dad made politely pleased noises about George and the orphanage. Brittany slipped past them both to gather up Joey.
Pete’s dad was a counselor. He believed in spontaneous community-building gatherings, but it took a bit more work to convince Pete’s mom to leave the papers she was grading on the computer, and to convince Joey to leave the television where he was watching Star Wars for the twenty-third time. By the time Brittany and Mr. Meren had accomplished this Pete had taken his shower.
* * *
Prepare you a feast from Ghana, with Groundnut Stew, made with eggplant and plenty of ginger, or East African Sweet Pea Soup from Kenya, made with yams and cinnamon, and you complain. “It’s too weird.” “Why can’t you cook normal food?” “It isn’t fit for humans.” “Human beings don’t put cinnamon in their soup.”
Show you golden leaves tenuously attached to a colossal tree – golden leaves shimmering in the wind against a clear blue sky. Do you see the promise? Do you see the magic? No. You complain that it’s too windy.
Take you to a labyrinth fashioned from living, growing vegetation, a spiritual metaphor for the journey to the center of your deepest inner self, and my son wants to play hide and seek – crashing through the hedge walls, wreaking destruction, and my husband? He says that it’s boring and that he wants to go home – go home, and pay the bills.
You came through the front door one day. Anticipating your arrival, I had sparkled and polished the house. I had sparkled and polished myself. Decorated myself like a Christmas tree in earrings and curls, heels and cashmere. Organic cashmere. I waited, aquiver for your approval. This once, the house would be clean enough. This once, I would be good enough. It would be as it was in the beginning – during our courtship. Your eyes would shine with joy and with pride.
* * *
Both sets of parents, and Pete, and Joey were gathered in the Weaver’s small kitchen, eating cinnamon rolls, and watching Mr. Weaver demonstrate the making of delicious coffee beverages.
He began by pouring the cream from a plastic container into a small metal bowl. He started with the plastic cream container touching the bowl, then lifted it high, and then lowered it again with a flourish – creating, then snuffing out a tall, impressive waterfall of white. “Now, it’s important to start with the freshest ingredients. Whipped cream in a squirt can is for amateurs.” He started to whip the cream with a fork, but quickly realized that manual whipping would take too long for the attention span of his audience. “Of course, for premium quality whipping, we should use a hand mixer.”
Mrs. Weaver quickly pulled a hand mixer out of a drawer.
“Which we happen to have right here – handy – so to speak.”
Everyone in the room winced at the bad pun, except for Joey, who laughed.
Mr. Weaver turned on the mixer, and specks of white liquid flew everywhere – on the walls, on the counter, on the Weavers, and on the Merens. Everywhere. Brittany covered her face with her hands, and shook her head. Pete winced. Joey laughed. The adults smiled.
“It shouldn’t do that.” Mr. Weaver complained. “Why is it doing that?”
Mrs. Weaver got out a larger bowl, and deftly (but with less theatricality than her husband) poured the remaining cream into it.
Mr. Weaver forged boldly on. The mixer whirred. The audience leaned forward slightly, eyes on the congealing cream in the bowl, except for Brittany, who was surreptitiously wiping down the counters.
“What’s wrong with it?” Joey asked.
“Is it supposed to be getting yellowish, and chunky like that?” Mrs. Weaver asked, a smile playing around the corners of her mouth.
“It won’t behave!” Mr. Weaver pounded the hand mixer against the bottom of the bowl, without turning it off. “It’s supposed to look like cream, not like cottage cheese.” He turned the mixer up a notch. “It won’t thicken properly.” The pitch of his voice also raised a notch, as if trying to keep up with the mixer. He addressed the cream directly. “Thicken, you!” He looked up at the circle of watching friends and family, and wailed, “It won’t thicken! What do I do?”
His wife patted his back. “There, there darling.”
Pete took a step backward, out of the circle. He didn’t like raised voices, and it was only whipped cream. Properly whipped cream was not crucial to anybody’s existence.
Mrs. Weaver asked Mrs. Meren if she knew why they were all gathered in the kitchen. Mrs. Meren just smiled and shrugged. Also, she had a suggestion. “What if you just used the chunky yellow stuff?”
“No!” There went Brittany’s dad with the raised voice again. Everybody winced. “You don’t understand. It’s supposed to be cream, sitting delicately atop the espresso, to create a pleasing visual experience, not to mention an enjoyable taste and texture. This looks more like clotted butter. This won’t work! It’s all wrong!”
Pete took another small step backwards. Mr. Weaver’s reaction to his failed whipped cream seemed completely out of proportion. “Does your father always yell at inanimate food products?” he asked Brittany, under his breath.
“He’s usually very calm with people,” she assured him. “He has a stack of papers this high to grade by Monday,” she explained, holding her hands wide apart to demonstrate the size of the pile, “and I think some of them are pretty bad.”
“Darling, you’re frightening Peter,” Mrs. Weaver admonished, patting her husband soothingly on the back again.
Brittany agreed. “Dad. This is supposed to be fun. Do you have whipped cream out of a can?”
“No. They didn’t have any at the store. Why do you think I’m trying to whip it myself?”
“Here you are, darling.” Mrs. Weaver showed her husband one of the Chinese clay teacups that Brittany had lined up on the counter to substitute for the demitasse they didn’t have, and read aloud from the package insert that had come with the set. “This cup’s stylish contour and exuded grace impart a sense of tranquility to the ordinary.”
Brittany giggled, and took over reading where her mother had left off.
“It is fashioned from the remarkable material of purple clay of which it is made of, which is discovered only in a quaint compact town. This remarkable clay mater is all normal. The seclusion of the locality nourishes the land of this rare material and deprives the soil of common earthly foes like lead and chemicals, which are injurious to the healthiness and to the temple of God, the body. Truly a deity’s gift to mankind in the form of all natural virtue.”
“Now use your super-de-duper coffee maker to put espresso into these virtuous little tea-cups.” Mrs. Weaver directed her husband, still patting him on the back.
“You people don’t understand coffee,” Mr. Weaver grumbled.
They all hastily agreed that they indeed did not understand coffee. Brittany pointed out that her own lack of understanding was what had prompted her to ask for the demonstration.
Muttering that it wasn’t right, and that it wasn’t going to lead to proper espresso appreciation, Mr. Weaver pushed a button on the machine. Soon, all the cups were filled with dark liquid, and lumpy cream.
Pete put the cup to his mouth, and tilted it, letting one small cream-lump and a minute amount of liquid pass through his lips.
He liked the sensation of contrast. The liquid was hot; the cream-like substance was cold. The liquid was wet; the cream-like substance was more or less solid. His fears allayed, he allowed it to slip past his teeth.
Eeeuw! He had never tasted anything so terrible! The cream-like substance and the liquid were still a study in contrasts, but where their failure to blend together into a pleasing whole had been an interesting textural experience, it was a revolting taste. He clamped his mouth firmly shut to keep from spitting espresso compana all over the Weavers’ tile floor. Even after it had engaged with his taste buds, Pete realized that he wasn’t really experiencing a taste. It was so bitter that he felt it more than he tasted it. Like a burning feeling, but not exactly burning like a fire burns, or even like chili peppers burn. It was more like the sensation of something very unpleasant, and very caustic resting against the inside of his esophagus, and like it wouldn’t go away. Sort of like he imagined Drano would feel, if he were stupid enough to swallow it. He took another sip just to be sure. Yep. The stuff was certifiably terrible.
Mr. Weaver, on the other hand, was smiling and nodding. Apparently it was more or less what he had been aiming for, and apparently he liked it. Was this something Fred the Wiener Dog actually enjoyed? Something he drank on purpose? Was this supposed to give them some kind of insight into Fred’s personality? Pete would rather drink the magically altered water.
Joey had found the sugar bowl, and announced that it wasn’t so bad if you poured out half the coffee and filled up the cup with sugar.
That’s when George walked in the door. His mother handed him her cup and told him to try a little. He took a nice, big gulp. Why not, after all? He didn’t know what it was. He handed her back the cup. He muttered “thank you,” and turned toward the stairs. Before he took his first step, however, his eyes got big and his cheeks puffed out, and he made gurgling noises in his throat. Shoving his assembled friends and family aside, he rushed to the refrigerator, grabbed a bottle of apple juice, and chugged. He gave his mom a dirty look, and continued on up the stairs.
They watched him until he was out of sight, then they turned back to Brittany. This was her party, after all. “Right,” she said. “So let's move on to a latte.”
Mr. Weaver gave a short lecture about the frothiness of the bubbles created by forcing air into the milk. It sounded like it should be good, but it was still espresso, and Pete realized that you couldn’t disguise espresso, no matter what sophisticated, elegant thing you did to the milk. The frothed milk felt good on his tongue, but he just couldn’t get past the taste. There was no getting around the fact that it was coffee – really, really intense coffee. He tried Joey’s trick of adding copious amounts of sugar, and found that while it fixed the actual taste a little bit, he still felt that oppressive, burning pressure when he swallowed. He decided that Fred the Wiener Dog was insane, and so, possibly, was Mr. Weaver.
The cinnamon rolls, unlike the coffee beverages, were really good. Brittany explained that she had been making them all morning, because the dough had to rise once when it was dough, and then again once it had been rolled up with cinnamon and sugar. Pete stopped eating when Mr. Weaver suggested that it would have been more sanitary to roll out the dough on a cutting board instead of directly on the counter, using a rolling pin instead of an old bottle of wine, but Brittany said that she couldn’t find a rolling pin, and that the cutting board wasn’t big enough, and that it tasted fine. Everybody else kept eating.
They all seemed to enjoy the impromptu party, and went back to their work, saying that they should do things like that more often. Pete smiled, and rolled his eyes. They did things like that all the time. Well, maybe not like drinking horrible coffee beverages, but like eating together, and going places together. Whatever. Brittany was happy with the results of her experiment, and she and Pete went outside to read.
She apologized for not coming over Friday. She hadn’t been mad any more. It was just that she had made a pretty big mess in the kitchen Thursday night, and her parents wouldn’t let the maid clean it because that wouldn’t have been fair, so Brittany had to come home from school right away and clean, because the maid couldn’t be expected make dinner, what with the mess. And once she had gotten started with the job, she had gotten interested in it, and she had wiped all the glop out of the refrigerator, and thrown away food that she couldn’t recognize, and emptied the cupboards, and wiped up all the old breadcrumbs, and fragments of ancient potato chips. By the time she noticed the time, the family had ordered pizza for dinner, and it was too late to do anything but go to bed. But the kitchen looked really good. And then she had the idea to cook the things the wiener dogs ate in the story, because maybe they were things the author liked, and maybe it would help them understand him a little better.
Brittany didn’t mind that Pete had read December 13th without her. She reasoned that if no one read, it might interrupt the flow between the author and themselves. But she was disappointed by how short the entry was.
“Let's hope for a nice long one this time,” she said, as they turned the page to:
December 14, 2004
The duck was accompanied by a goose and another duck, carrying a tray of pears. Fred launched into yet another explanation, "We are the Three Wiener Dogs Gruff, and--"
But no one seemed to be listening. They were all interested in the pears.
"Oh, my, those pears look lovely," said Chloe.
"Yum," said Fawn, who was hovering about annoyingly just at eye level.
"Help yourself, everyone," said the goose.
High-pitched voices from the log came,
"Mmmmm. Yummy pears."
"Pears, pears, pears, pears!"
"Hey, bring me some."
“Those smell good. Eeeek."
All the woodland creatures from Fawn and Chloe's universe descended upon the tray as if there had never been a food as wonderful, and as if they had been starving for days.
Fred, Akelmeyer, Malchisedech and Martin looked at one another in puzzlement.
"They're just pears," said Deck softly.
TO BE CONTINUED...
“I guess I should have had pears too.” Brittany said.
“You couldn’t have known there were going to be pears.”
“I wonder why everybody likes them so much.”
“I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.”
Brittany didn’t try to discuss deeper meanings.
Pete didn’t try to explain anything logically.
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