Twilight at Blue Plate

Stacey C. Johnson

SILENCE

The front door is locked again, I am the only one left talking here.

Mama is in a mason jar beside the plant in a coffee can, between the window and the faucet of the sink, and this is the window I am looking through when I catch myself looking toward the doll grave, which rests near the BLM dumpster near the North side of the property. When you stand there, you can feel the rush of freeway traffic going over the bridge just down the road where the Shell station and the Jack in the Box, and all of the rest is open space and when we used to drive past here on the way to the hospital when it still made sense to use the phrase routine procedure I’d catch myself wondering about the kind of people that would live in such a place. I’d imagine that they must be people on the edge of something, but those were just words for a state I had no better way to describe at the time.

“You need the word,” Mama said, to make it real.

Like flour for bread.

“But the flour isn’t the bread,” she said.

WORDS

Maybe we feed one another in place of the words we’re still looking for, offering full plates and steaming mouthfuls instead of the explanations we can’t find, for all our missing parts.

“Ima getta place,” Mama used to say.

“Gonna call it Blue Plate,” she said.

“Just good food,” she said, “but real, you know?”

Out here again I am dreaming of hot soup and hearty bread against the chill of winds, and these tumbleweeds before me, rolling like a child’s loose ball across a street.

What I wanted to give you was everything but now here I am at the window again on the desert floor and you’re still a sea creature in a black and white photograph with your underwater heartbeat calling distant as whales.

One day when you find your own hunger scraping against the edges of all you still can’t name, then—

Once upon a time, there was a man who came walking from the land of fire, and he was badly burned. He sat on a rock by a cool stream and the woman of the river watched him with his shoulders stooped and she noticed how his eyes would blur so that he was not seeing the river, really, not seeing anything at all but his own broken reflection against the broken sky.

So the woman of the river sunk her hands deep into the ancient silt of the riverbed and she pulled from this a pair of wings, and she released these into the river’s rush, and as she released the wings, she slowed the waters of the river by inhaling a deep breath, thick and musical with time, and she pulled it inside herself sharp at the edges like freezing air or smoke. She held it within her, resisting the urge to cough against the pressure.

 Which comes first, I wonder: the story that suddenly burns its way through a long silence, or the moment when you find someone to tell it to?

RECIPES

“You feed them,” Mama used to say, “they stick around.” This regarding men.

It was an alchemy she believed in even after it failed. She said they’d know what they wanted if they knew how to listen to anything, but their blow-up heads were always too full of smoke.

Mama collected idioms like she collected recipes, altering the execution of both and improvising each according to the mood of the moment and what she had on hand. Her favorite expressions were terms of endearment, which she sprinkled as liberally as spices on canned soup, often blending various expressions and languages into one sentence.

“Still, matakia mou,” she said, “my little eyes, even a dreamer has to eat.”

BODIES IN FLIGHT

By the time Mama finally agreed to see the doctor about her headaches, it was too late for chemo. That was when we started touring new age bookstores near the hospital, the kind that smell like Nag Champa and patchouli. We bought books and anything else we could: vitamins, aromatherapy, candles of La Virgen de Guadalupe, and a font of Our Lady of Lourdes. We set up a makeshift sanctuary in the main room, which was the only part large enough for the bed. We had a little boombox from my old bedroom and we could play those CDs that weren’t music at all, but instead sounds of water and birds and whales.

These were supposed to be healing.

“We’ll open when all this is done,” she said.

One time in a waiting room she told me about the time she found me crouched next to a bird in the parking lot of our old apartment in South Los Angeles.

“I said to you there, ‘Don’t touch!’ But you looked up with those big eyes and you said, ‘Mama, he’s hurt.’ I think his wing was broken. I said, babygirl, don’t touch, birds have diseases!”

“But Mama!’ Oh beanpod, your eyes were so big.”

“So we went in, I couldn’t say no, and we wrapped the bird in a towel and tried to get it to eat. I found an eyedropper in the medicine cabinet and we tried to get it to take water. You went and looked for earthworms outside. ‘Look, Mama!’ you said, so excited, ‘I think he’s getting better!’ You made it a nest with leftover raffia from the Christmas gifts. ‘Do you think he’ll fly again, Mama?’ You kept asking.”

“I told you I didn’t know, because he still didn’t look too good to me. But you were so hopeful, you used to come check on it. In the morning once when you were still asleep I was taking out the trash and I saw that its body was limp. I prodded it a little with a chopstick. It didn’t move. So I wrapped the body up and took it out with me to the dumpster … What else could I do? We were in an apartment. We had no land that was ours. We couldn’t bury it.”

“What did you do, though? You saw the empty nest and you said, ‘Mama, he flew!’”

SPACE

After the last man was gone, and the back child support checks came in, when we drove back and forth from the hospital, we’d study the open spaces where you had to wonder how anyone could live.

As Mama saw it, that was perfect.

For one, it’s what we could afford.

“Plus,” she said, “all they got is gas stations and frozen burgers here.”

“There’s still people,” she said, “who want something real.”

“Right there,” and she’d point toward a place below the freeway with nothing around.     

We had left LA years earlier, and we were in Bakersfield then, in an apartment even smaller than the one before it, so it wasn’t like we had a lot to move.

SONGS

At one of our visits to the Nag Champa bookstore, I was putting my nose in the essential oils one by one when I looked and saw Mama on the other side of the shop, swaying under headphones, eyes closed.

I didn’t want to interrupt so I went on smelling: patchouli, lavender, sandalwood, African musk; frankincense, orange blossom, sage, citronella, pine, juniper, rose.

“Here,” she said, “close your eyes,” and what I heard was water rushing and then these repeating echoes of different squeaks. It called to mind a sound I associated with someone blowing through an ancient horn or maybe a conch shell, something I associated with a distant time and place, when a group might still be called together with a signal you could hear across some vast expanse of open space.

“Look,” and she held out the CD so I could see the cover, “it’s whales.”

When Mama stopped talking and drifted still with her eyes closed, the whales sounded over the soft chimes and synthesized notes with these back and forth calls and no words.

We had a pair of rusty folding chairs and when it was cool enough but not cold we’d sit there with the freeway on the South side, rushing through our ears like ocean except for the occasional moan of a large truck braking.

To the East was our new home with the large sign above it. The sign said nothing because we had yet to have the words painted, but we had spoken about it so long in that final year that the words seemed already blocked on its plywood face:

BLUE PLATE. Come. Here. Eat. Rest.

To the North, miles and miles of distance: dust and sage brush, punctuated by the spindly arms of ocotillo curling toward the sky as if to reach for rain. The mountains held the distance against the sky, but to the West it went on and on, into a vague haze that became color at the day’s end.

When she knew she was dying, Mama said, “Don’t try to stay here too long, not alone.”

“Sell,” she said, “and go.”

I nodded and we sat in the room with the curtains half closed and when she couldn’t talk anymore it was just the hush of freeway in the distance, and the whales.

SIGNS

The flying man licked his plate clean and asked for more enchiladas. He cried “Oh” sometimes, moments after the effort of hammering himself into some temporary peace. He’d float for a moment suspended and taut above me, and then give in, collapsing into liquid. I held him inside me, whispering, “Stay.” He used to cry out in his sleep.

“Here,” I would tell him, “eat this.”

“Is this what an omelette is supposed to look like, so soft?”

“Asparagus and goat cheese.”

He seemed to stretch his wings even as he rested.

“Try this. And this.” I only explained when he asked.

The recipes were new to me. I still had to work a bit to act as though beef bourguignon and tomate tarte were the sort of phrases I had grown up taking for granted. These were the nights I dreamed inside recipe books in lieu of sleep. Tripas de leche. Liver and onions. Fried chicken. Baked macaroni and cheese with leeks. Gnocchi in gorgonzola sauce with baked apples and balsamic glaze. Tuesday it might be duck confit; Wednesday, spring rolls with peanut sauce; Thursday, quail pot pie.

He needed food heavy enough to keep him solid, but light-seeming enough to let him think otherwise.

I could make a salami sandwich and he’d make it disappear in two minutes and then look up like he thought he was still eating it and go, “Girl, this sandwich is —”

There’s never the right word, when it matters.

At the end, Mama rested in the bed and the only sounds were whale songs and the freeway outside. In the end, she would not eat, but I’d make soup anyway sometimes, to set it on the nightstand, so she could breathe its smell.

DOLLS, MOONS

In the time when the words were starting to leave her, we stood on the floor of the desert beside the grave of dolls and it was space all around. We spent a lot of time in those last months, looking and listening. One night Mama was walking in the yard, and I was shucking corn in the sink and watching her through the window. Halfway between the dumpster and the porch, along the back fence, there was a little swing set and one of those deep wooden boxes where you might put a raised garden. No one had ever removed these. She paused beside it.

“Hey bubbaloo,” she cried out, “come here!”

Inside the raised box, there were row after row of plastic figures, dolls, teddy bears, and various stuffed toys—all neatly arranged, all facing toward the sky. One or two of the dolls had those eyes that closed when you lay them on their backs; the others lay there, facing up. Some looked much more worn than others, suggesting they had been left at different times. A few looked relatively new. We wondered about the source of this graveyard, but it seemed like just another one of those things you couldn’t try to explain, so we took to pulling our folding chairs out there in the evening when it wasn’t too cool or too hot, us beside the dolls and the sky changing as we tried to name the stars against the moons.

Between here and the rising freeway is a Shell station and a Jack in the Box and Mama called this the magic time, when the sky goes from orange to pink to purple to night.

“Look, my eyes,” she would say, “it’s the crack between the worlds.”

Sometimes now I carry her out, and sit with the mason jar on my lap, and I try to name the moons and the stars like she used to, but looking for the right words is like trying to get back inside a dream.

HISTORY

“He loved the food, mija. He just didn’t know how to stay anywhere. I gotta laugh every time I make my mole. I always wanna ask him, ‘You hungry yet, fool? Bet you miss this.’”

Mama sprinkled her acquired language liberally, like putting capers in chunk light tuna, and she’d tend to blend and layer the expressions without worrying about linguistic continuity or excess.

“I don’t regret it, mijn bolleke; before he left I used to sometimes wonder how I was gonna tell him I thought it didn’t seem like he oughta stay anymore. He got mean sometimes; other times he’d just stare at the floor. It was too much. Sure, I wanted someone to hold close, but what could I do? When I felt you for the first time, which was just before he left, I thought, ‘I got you, mon coeur.’

“Oh, little mouse tooth. Part of me wanted to tell him; another part knew it would make it too difficult for him to go and he was one of those men who needed to go.”

When I asked too many questions, she’d stare off and wait.

“We want things a certain way, you know?” she’d offer, “But then, well —

BREAD IN WARTIME

“What do you wanna know?” she said. “In the beginning, there was light and I was a little kitten by my mother’s skirt and it was just like this,” and she moved her right hand as if to trace the smooth contours of gentle waves, “one day running into another, but then—”

Here she moved both hands as if to clap someone to attention, but instead of sounding her palms together she held them slightly apart and then flicked her wrists outward like throwing two handfuls of seeds.

“You are whole inside something once, just there, and then—”

“I don’t have a word for that,” she said.

I waited. Maybe she’d find it, and then I would know.

“You know what I remember, bug? I remember bread—”

“Like magic!” she said, “I would stand beside my mother and the tabletop like here up to my chin and she’d pull over a stool so I could see into the bowl and it was just gloop, sticky, and she used a wooden spoon at first and then her hands with the dough against the counter.”

I tried to picture her like that, on tiptoes at the table.

“Just four ingredients she used when she had them all at once.”

“That’s all you need,” she told me: flour, water, salt, yeast.

“But then, out of the oven you take it and you crack it against your teeth and—oh, the steam in your face—”

“And that’s all, little pet. I remember the bread.”

MIGRATION

I read and she slept and then she slept most of the time, and the thing about whales is that no matter how hard you try to track them they tend to disappear for stretches of time only to reappear where the researchers don’t expect. The calves whisper to the mothers while migrating, and during these travels the mother will not eat. Instead she will wait as her baby feeds, conserving her energy for the trip.

“It’s how you cook it,” Mama would say.

“Having directions to someone’s house is different,” she would say, “from knowing where you come from.”

I made pasture beef bone broth and kale with carrots to help ease her anemia. I did white bean soup and red lentil dahl to ease her constipation, coconut rice pudding to ease diarrhea, stuffed acorn squash for fatigue, cinnamon ginger tea for nausea, chocolate banana smoothies when it was painful to swallow.

“Here, Mama,” I would say, “try this.”

They don’t know why the calves whisper, but it must be learned.

TERMS OF ENDEARMENT

At breakfast when she was still eating, she wouldn’t stop with just butter on her toast. After she fried the eggs over easy, she’d tilt the pan so that anything still in it would drizzle over a savory layer of salty, garlic-infused oil, to melt against the cold butter in her toast. Usually we had a jar of thick preserves from the discount gourmet rack, and she’d set that on the side just in case any square inches of crust managed to remain dry.

“Here, loverbird,” she’d say, “need some more?”

She blended modified idioms in with the other bits and pieces she managed to collect, but her favorites were terms of endearment.

“Come here, min guldklump—”

“My little golden nugget—”

“Mouse tooth, try this—”

“He meant to stay,” she said once, of my father. “Sure, we talked—kids, a place with a yard, he’d even build a fence. To keep you in, he said, like he was serious. I thought he was the best thing since Wonder Bread, but I learned to take what he said with a pinch of salt.”

Sometimes near the beginning of the month we’d get chorizo from the market to go with our eggs and call ourselves ladies of leisure, and linger over the brunch on our laps by taking it out to the porch to listen to the doves. Other times we’d mix canned tuna and discount capers with Miracle Whip and call it tapas when we placed spoonfuls on crackers. Le Toast Française was how we used day-old bread and it came avec les fraises in summer, and when it was too rainy and cold to walk to the mini-mart in January, we’d sauté onions in a pot and pour in cans of whatever we could find in the back of the cabinet and call it goulash. It was great with toast.

“But when you came, babygirl, we were like two beans in a pod. I strapped you in a little wrap on my chest and took you everywhere: singing, working, out for errands—I had to take you out when we drove to put you in your car seat but when we got there you’d go right back in the sling, right here,” and she placed the flat of her palm over her chest.

“I would catch myself wondering if he would return, you know. I thought, wow, if he could only see you he would never want to be anywhere else. But eventually I learned to accept: That ship has rowed away.”

Instead of photo albums and family, Mama had the echo of bread crust breaking against her teeth and a knack for balancing the bulk sale items from the Food 4 Less with whatever surprises we could find from the discount racks of finer stores.

“Honey-cake horse, you will like this—”

“Microbino mio, this is something new!”

The loss of her own history made her hungry to pretend one, even if it was just between us. She kept an oversized dictionary in a stand on her dresser like a holy book. Above this, taped to the mirror, was the single artifact she had from her own childhood, a yellowed photograph of her mother, standing in a dress beneath a tree.

She’d turn to a page in the morning, point at random to the find of the day, and write it down on a tiny paper to keep in her pocket like a grocery list.

“There is magic in words, baby,” she said. Or Mija, or Ducky, or Pea-pod.

“Ah-hah!” she said once, like finding an answer to a long-held provocation. I walked to the stand where she pointed, toothbrush still in my mouth and hair still mussed from last night’s sleep.

I found her beaming at the mirror, index finger on a page.

“Look, baby!”

It was a word I had not heard of before or since except in the whispers inside my own mind. It meant nostalgia for a place that you’ve never been to. It had a hush sound, I think it started with an H.

And sometimes, sides pressed together in bed, she’d tell me the story of the flying man, and I would catch different parts in different tellings, in the space between listening and falling asleep.

The wings floated beneath the gaze of the man on the rock, and he bent at the banks of the river and reached one arm and then both, and then he entered the water: one leg, then both, and then he was up to his knees and then past the tops of his legs and then to the middle of his chest as he pulled on the wings. It takes more strength than anyone would think, to pull a pair of wide wings from a current, even when the current is slow. Eventually, he pulled the wings up the banks and set them on the rock where he had earlier been sitting. Panting and soaked, he had forgotten for a moment all about the land of fire from which he had escaped, and he sat and stared at the wings: large, black, and weathered—glistening beneath the dapples of sunlight pairing through the forest canopy above him. He stared at the wings as they dried and he dried as he stared at the wings, and then he fell asleep.

We collected the names for moons and stars, and the names of the plants nearby, never sure if we quite got them right.

Until there was no more to say but whale songs and she was no longer taking food and it was fading light and the rush of the freeway in the distance and this tug, and a new sonogram photo tucked between the pages of the dictionary left behind, and me still looking for the words.

NOW AND THEN

At the sink I am washing my hands again and it is ten paces to the box with the dolls and there are the questions that one day might come, and the stirring like a tiny wave behind my navel, barely a whisper, and there was a moment before this one when I dreamed of a child, but that was when he was still here and we did not whisper a future but shouted with delight when we saw the test because he was still working then, and Mama thought he was trouble, but she still said “Hello,” and later she said, “Watch Out, He looks like Someone Else I Once Knew,” and what is the word for the thing that we know cannot happen but we want so much that we shut our eyes and say it aloud?

We said “Baby!” like a spell and even bought bibs at Walmart: I love Mommy in purple and I love Daddy in green, along with cans of baked beans, fish sticks, motor oil, and duct tape. You work with what you have.

“People think they know what they want,” Mama said, “but they don’t know.” That was why we wouldn’t do a menu at Blue Plate. They’d come in, we’d talk, maybe we’d have a questionnaire.  

We were dreaming too fast and when we went for the checkup to hear the heartbeat there was nothing but a shadow on the face of the nurse and no looking up and then there was nothing but waiting for a week and tired hope until the blood came and then it was the cool linoleum against my face and him when he came through the door from work knowing and me in his arms and in the story I do not say aloud, this is the last I can remember of his chest. Then there are beer cans by the garbage in the kitchen, and then there is no work, and then one day there are no longer his shoes.

NIGHTS

After Mama’s funeral, I dreamed with cookbooks open on my chest. Also, I stood on the porch, listening and waiting to hear. I read books until I fell asleep and I made what I dreamed.

When the flying man walked in, the place wasn’t even open yet, and there wasn’t even a sign. I had been simmering onions for about half an hour and then there he was with his shaggy hair and high dark cheekbones under eyes not meant for this world. He wasn’t the kind to stay, that much was clear.

It was albondigas in red chile sauce that night, with sweet jalapeño cornbread, and the reserva from the back. He looked at me close the way that feels like the tug of a string at the base of the spine and he asked, “What do you do?”

I acted like I didn’t notice any tug. “What’s it taste like? I cook. What about you?”

“I fly.”

“Ha!” I said.

He had pictures. He looked like one of those flying squirrels on late-night cable, except no trees. It was rocks all around and a sliver of green valley to the right.

“What’s it like?” I wondered.

He paused for a long time. “Everything slows down,” he said.

“And then what?”

“Then you wait,” he said, “you hang on as long as you can, just try to stay inside the ride.”

Another night I asked, “Hey, danger boy, you ever had sweetbreads?”

“You mean like the dessert?”

“Wait a minute,” I told him.

The pupils of his eyes glowed like freshly stoked charcoal. I watched him as he ate, the way his body rippled as if straining to contain all its life. The fact that he would float away soon was something I was trying to take as a given.

IMAGES

I study the black and white photo of the new life within me, looking like something of the deep sea, and I want something to offer.

I stand by the sink, Mama’s ashes before me against the darkening sky, and my own reflection emerging in the window.

CALL AND RESPONSE

I dry my hands on my apron as the toast pops up and I take my two pieces dry because it’s all I can keep down and I walk across the yard to the dolls and sit.

It isn’t a far stretch to imagine other things: whale call, a child’s laugh, a question.

“How long, Mama?”

Then I hear laughing like a whisper and I know.

Now comes eyelids drooping and the overwhelming need to sink the weight of my head into a pillow.

In the morning, I will make something simple but more substantial than toast. Arroz con pollo, maybe, with extra chiles.

“Heat keeps you awake,” Mama used to say, before she couldn’t take any more spice.

“It burns and the fire makes your eyes water and it’s almost too much.” This is how she warned me when I bit into my first jalapeño while she cooked in the kitchen when she used to sing to help the spices blend.

“But you gotta feel it, turtledove. You gotta stay with it. Then you know.”

“Just wait,” she would say, “it’s coming.”

Stir it like a fairy tale then, with a light touch on low heat. It would have an ending that gave the story a sort of roundness, a shape you could hold inside a hand, warm like oatmeal against a morning chill:

When the flying man woke, he picked the wings up and he noticed that they were attached to a harness that he could fit through each of his arms like a backpack, so that the wings were attached to his torso. Then, wings attached behind each step, he walked through the forest, beyond the last tree, to the base of a great mountain, and as the woman of the river watched him, he ascended the great mountains, carrying the full weight of his new wings on his back, and he walked three days and rested three nights until he reached a cliff, and there stood before a vast green valley, and as he breathed on that cliff he looked at the river running through the valley, catching sunlight. He stood, looking, and the woman of the river stood also, watching him, and after several long breaths, various cloud bands, and several movements during which he witnessed in the valley a retelling of all that he had seen before in the land of fire, and against this, a re-dreaming of all that was to come.

The woman of the river released the breath that she had been holding, and the man above her opened his winged arms, and he felt her breath through his feathers.

He felt his feet leaving the ledge and he leaned into the current of wind now lifting him above the valley, above the river, above all that he had ever known and all he had yet to see—and he flew.

INVOCATION

Let’s go back, before the forgetting.

Come. Here. Eat. Rest.

“Taste this, my pulse,” and everything we want to say in one mouthful and none of it words, like whales.

“How deep was the river, Mama?”

I will whisper back, “Very deep.”

When I can stand long enough without spinning, I will uncover the sign.

Blue Plate, it will read.

The child not yet breathing will come, with arms and legs and a face no longer resembling a creature of the sea.

LIKE THIS

The child watches a bird leap from the ledge of the porch by the kitchen window where I stand at the sink, water running and Mama in a mason jar on the ledge and now, laughing, “Mama, he flew!”

I dry my hands on this apron and pull this small laughing body against my heart, so close it is hard to tell one set of beats from the other.

“What if?” and other questions return, but I hold.

For now, beneath the sky, beside the dolls, we swallow warm mouthfuls from secondhand bowls to weigh our maybes against the tides of wind throwing dust, and as it settles into the creases of my squint, now comes the child, so close but not yet named, twirling a fairy-tale wand, calling like a whisper in the distance:

“Go, Fly, Go!”