Demerara

I still remember the first time Charlie let me behind the counter. He hadn’t married my mom, yet. In fact, so far as I know, they weren’t even breathing heavily in the freezer at that point, as I once caught them doing when I was nine. Although I admit, I’m mostly ignorant of my mother’s romantic life, and even then I was vaguely aware that if such a thing were happening, I’d prefer to remain ignorant of it.

In any case, it was only my third time at Charlie’s when he let me behind the counter. “Hey, Sunshine,” he said, “do you want to see where we mix the cookies?” Charlie’s only made one kind of cookies, back then: chocolate chip pecan cookies, not a bad recipe, even though they never got the shortening right until I took them in hand and remade them into Puritans’ Secret Sins. But back then I thought they were pretty good, and while I wasn’t sure what I thought of Charlie, who kept on calling me Sunshine instead of my proper name. I decided anyone who baked cookies couldn’t be all bad.

Behind the counter, and through the kitchen door, I was in awe. There was the aged mixing machine, Bertha, on her stand, like some sort of decommissioned rocket ship; the industrial dishwasher, empty and standing open like the mouth of a dragon; the three stove-tops in a row, covered in pans like a rookery, the two ovens, one great, one small, and most of all, the acres of great, glorious counter-space. I think Charlie must have been a little surprised by my awe in turn, because he took me all around the kitchen and introduced me to the people and appliances one by one.

“This is Maria, make sure you taste her cauliflower soup; no one else can do it quite like her. Maria, this is Sadie’s Sunshine. This is Bertha, she’s got her mixing hook on, but she has a paddle and a grater, too. Little temperamental now, in her old age, but she’s worth getting to know. Do you like spare-ribs?”

Somewhat dazed and feeling like I’d caught leprechaun by accident, I nodded before I realized that I didn’t actually like spare-ribs, and shook my head, squeaking out “No,” just to make sure he caught my reversal.

“No?” asked Charlie. Charlie listens well, especially to kids, and always has.

“It’s meat,” I told him, and I guess that was clear enough, because he never asked about it again, aside from asking if I felt the same way about fish the next time I was in on a baked trout day. (I do feel the same way about fish. and when he was eight, Kenny delighted in making me queasy by crunching on the bones, loudly. I got my revenge, a month later, in an episode involving a girl he wanted to impress, and the cologne he thought would help him do that.)

Two other things I remember; the first, Prometheus. Charlie opened the door of the oven a little way so that I could look inside, and I don’t quite know how to describe the fascination of that fire. Prometheus is large; Charlie can roast a pig inside, and does, about once a month, but I don’t think it was the size, or at least, not just the size. There was something about the great steel body in the center of the kitchen, stamped with charms, that awed me. It was unquestionably the center of the kitchen, and treated by everyone with caution and deference (since it has a tendency to get a bit warm after the first few hours). Perhaps it was the fact of its existence; that someone had made an oven that large seemed to me to say that there were people who understood how important baking was.

Then Charlie offered to let me put cookie dough on trays, and I was up on a stool washing my hands almost before he finished. He gave me a scarf to tie my hair back in, and I spend the rest of the day shaping cookies; every time I filled a tray, someone would whisk it away, and it would return in half an hour, warm from the oven and covered in halos made of crumbs.

Charlie says my mother came looking for me when I went missing from my table, but I don’t remember that. He convinced her that I was more help than harm, and she let me stay. When my mother’s shift ended I didn’t want to leave. The apartment mom and I lived in at that point was tiny, and dingy, and dim, and the kitchen was barely more than a hot-plate and an icebox; Charlie’s kitchen was everything a kitchen should be and the comparison was painful.

Mom was embarrassed and frustrated, but Charlie said: “How about you take those cookies out to the people in front, Sunshine, so that they can see what you made.”

I’m not sure if anything else he could have said would have budged me, but try telling a cook not to show off her work. Charlie gave me some cookies fresh from the oven and I marched out with them on a tray– only to stop, frightened, at the supper crowd that had gathered while I had been making cookies. It couldn’t have been more than twenty people; that was our capacity before we renovated, but I remember being a little nervous of all those people.

“Sunshine here’s made some cookies,” said Charlie, in his master-of-the-kitchen voice. “She’ll be bringing them around for anyone who wants to try them.”

And I did. I gave a cookie to everyone who would take one, and watched, I thought discretely, from the corner of my eye to see if they actually ate it, or were just accepting to humour me. I was a pretty cute kid, though, so it’s not really any wonder that everyone ate a cookie.

After that, I didn’t spend any time alone at the apartment. After that, I don’t think I could have escaped Charlie’s if I’d tried.