by Jacqueline Goyette

Coffee cakes and rhubarb pies and oatmeal chocolate chunk cookies, homemade. Candy in my pocket, emptied out — wrappers unwrapped one after another. Cans of soda that are cracked open, that stain my teeth, that sweeten my blood. Give me more. All my childhood buying sugary things at the convenient store with my grandmother: suckers and gummy bears and Lemonheads. Red Hots and spicy cinnamon breath. Pink lemonade Jolly Ranchers like stained glass windows. Grandma leaning in and planting my cheek with Filipino kisses: pressing her nose to me, sniffing my skin and smelling of coconut. Brownies and pecan slices and mom’s old binder of Christmas cookie recipes, and the pages perfectly placed, glued on with a UHU glue stick, each cut out recipe pressed neatly on the black pages: Cherry Cordials and Rum Balls and Peppermint Patties and someone’s Grandma’s Pinwheel Cookies. Scribbled in the margins: Caky Baky Little Cake. All the smells of the kitchen when my mother is baking, the nutmeg and ginger and white chocolate all chopped up. A sweet tooth and a hankering and I wonder if my mother had a craving when she was pregnant with me for carrot cake and cream cheese icing by the spoonful and coffee sweetener poured into a styrofoam cup and all things that make your lips smack: persimmons unpeeled, one by one, avocados mashed with milk and sugar, sweet potatoes cooked until they turn syrupy, eaten over the sink in the evening light.

And the times I walked into the kitchen when she was leaning against the refrigerator eating halo halo by the spoonful, sticky sweet, big jellied cubes: this, my mother — and yet in those moments she was someone I didn’t know, someone whose childhoods had lived other lives somewhere else, somewhere made of islands and shorelines and mango groves and westward Pacific waves, nowhere near this small town in Indiana. I loved it, I loved the treasures I found on that shelf in the refrigerator, I sought them out: the stories she sometimes told, the way she ate the sugar beans and the slivers of coconut and jackfruit, sometimes made plantains cooked only for her, like a childhood bedtime story conjured up. The times I found her hiding mangoes away, placing papayas under the apples in the crisper drawer. The times she called her sisters and pressed the phone to her cheek to talk about the sticky rice puddings and the caramel flans, and she pulled out the recipes from her mother’s books, pages in looseleaf falling out, slipping from her fingers like autumn. 

And me not knowing then exactly why but knowing it all now, across the ocean, and sometimes wishing it wasn’t just gelato al limone or Tiramisu eaten with a spoon in this far flung corner of Italy, or the blackberries we pick that stain our fingers violet, but it was my mother’s cookies, her cakes, her shelf in the fridge, the persimmon pudding recipe that Aunt Carolyn gave her that I made for Thanksgiving in Italy in the new house — with this new family who raised their eyebrows at it, who poked at it with their forks. This is not home. This is not the gooseberries for pie that we picked and cleaned in the living room in Indiana and sometimes ate raw but they were so sour that they tickled our tongues, made our lips pucker. Or my mother’s pineapple upside-down cake, the one that we made together that year she found out she was sick and I flew home from Italy to be with her. Let’s make it on Valentine’s day, I say, and so we place the cherries in the middle of each ring of pineapple, and they are red and candied and delicious, and when she is not looking I eat just one of them — no one will miss it — sugary, candy apple, eat your heart out, watch the cake bubble over, lift itself up, one cherry missing underneath all of that batter and who really cares because these are the days that remain, and we will devour them each by the spoonful, finish them off in one sitting, straight from the pan, binge on crumble after delicious crumble, happy Valentine’s day, till our hearts ache and our teeth hurt and our plates are clean, we will lick our lips and press our fingers down to those sweet cherry crumbs, pick up every morsel that is left.