The Monday Night Cooking School - By Erica Bauermeister Page 0,4

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