The Lost Art of Mixing by Erica Bauermeister

Author:Erica Bauermeister [Bauermeister, Erica]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

The WALKABOUT

Christ, Abby sighed, looking at the glacial impasse of her mother’s closet, she’d never get her moved out of here.

She’d heard stories from her friends—they were all facing the same thing—about the endless negotiations, a mother’s refusal to give up a silver chafing dish or jars of coriander or cayenne pepper so old and dusty that their contents could have been interchanged without any impact on flavor. Attics and garages packed with bassinets and badminton rackets, hand-painted bird feeders, six-packs of Bud Light for a husband who had died ten years before—boxes of now grown children’s artwork pushing up through it all like underbrush among trees.

“Every forest needs a fire occasionally to be healthy,” Abby’s friend Janey had said to her own mother, only to be proudly shown a collection of Smokey the Bear paintings Janey had created when she was seven.

It had become a favorite topic of conversation among Abby’s female friends at parties. And it was the women, Abby thought. While the men were discussing sports and gadgets, the women talked about their children, their parents—the way as soon as one set grew up, the other started falling apart, just when you had finally spotted a clean and unencumbered horizon.

“Every damn safety pin has a thirty-minute story attached,” Janey had complained to Abby after a weekend at her parents’ home. “It’s like trying to move a freaking elephant.”

Abby nodded. She’d seen it with Isabelle, the way things could become so permeated with memories that story was more important than function. She’d watched her brother listening to Isabelle’s meandering tales of the china that had been used once, on a great-grandmother’s wedding day, before her husband ran off with her sister. The way, after the story had made its journey from the china to Rory’s ears, the plates themselves seemed to take up less space, become almost expendable.

If she could just get some interesting stories, Abby thought, it might be bearable. But Abby would pick the seemingly most innocuous item in a drawer—a rusty garlic press, a third bottle opener—thinking it might be a good icebreaker, the easy thing to pitch into the trash or charity pile and give her mother the rush of weightlessness that came from getting rid of things, a feeling that just might steamroll them through a whole shelf, a drawer—only to be sucked into an endless explanation of how that particular opener was necessary to open the special bottles of soda Rory liked to drink in the summer. And Abby would close her mouth against the desire to tell her mother that they didn’t even make that kind of soda anymore and that Rory, when he visited, if he visited, always came in the fall or spring.

Where had all this stuff come from? Abby wondered, looking at her mother’s closet. Isabelle had taken almost nothing to that cabin when she’d sold their family home. She’d moved into the city only ten years ago. And yet, she had managed to accumulate quite a pile.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.