fiction
- elichvar
- Apr 11
- 4 min read
Updated: 5 hours ago
by Jeffrey Wolf
Bev Thinks of Lineage
Aproned in the kitchen, bumping shoulders with her mother, Bev thinks of lineage. A cloud-darkened Saturday. Her mother’s apartment, the first-floor walk-up. Flour-caked hands and pale light through the windows.
Not the kitchen she grew up in. Years before on Humboldt Avenue, green and gold patterns climbing the wallpaper, those afternoons on her tiptoes peering above the butcher block counter, sneaking fingers into the mixing bowl while her mother pretended not to see. But this place too has its comforts. Wider rooms, spongier sofas. Her mother has nested here long enough now that every nook has her smell.
It’s just the two of them. Her father took the boys to the playground down the street. He brought work with him, a folder full of papers. Order forms? Sales leads? Who knows what he does these days. Her mother insists half his work is invented to get him out of the den when guests arrive. The boys would rather be with Grandma Tillie anyway. But his grandfatherly duty, giving mother and daughter their time. They get so little of it. Phone calls never enough. Attention divided, phone propped in one shoulder while the hands keep working. Even now, they’re both being useful. Baking for this afternoon. Cookies and strudel. Tillie’s recipes, which she got from her mother, which surely came from her mother’s mother back in Lithuania.
They get so little time, yet they stand here, shoulder to shoulder, not speaking. Whose fault is this?
Bev her mother’s only daughter. Raised without sisters to whisper with. Her cousins all off in their own houses, dotted down the block. The boys in the alley played kickball and yelled bloody murder until the sun reddened and fell. And she was inside, straining on a footstool, watching her mother’s every move. Too awestruck to ask, but sometimes her mother explained. You have to knead this way to avoid clumps. Always flour the roller and the dough. Slip in a pinch of cinnamon for flavor. The kind of knowledge that’s never written. Not that it’s meant to be secret, but if you sat down to write instructions, to write your daughter a book—in the immensity of life, so many details slip through the cracks. Lost in the writing, in the remembering, but there in the moment, doing. And isn’t that where life is, in the moments? Watch, learn, repeat for a lifetime. If it didn’t work that way, the earth might stop. Civilization would crumble.
Hand-rolling doughballs for the oven, feeling the stick in her palms, Bev is that same girl again. Has been baking on her own for years but feels tiny in the presence of that singular woman, her mother. And it’s not like Tillie’s demanding. Her mother so full of warmth, who draws grandsons to her like honey, who could only ever intimidate her own daughter.
(And Tillie knows, but cannot say, that she wishes Bev would breathe more. It’s never as bad as you think, dear. They grow up, but you never outgrow the need to parent.)
Bev is a good cook, a good baker, but she’ll never come close to Tillie, and she knows it. Even now, she doesn’t need to be here, is little more than a mannequin. Her mother taught her to mend socks and patch shirts, marinate a brisket, play mahjongg. She does them all, slightly lesser. The skills she doesn’t have are ones her mother couldn’t learn. How to drive a car.
What will she pass on of herself? As if the purpose of life wasn’t just to be a set of hands moving toward the future. What of her—just her—was even worth keeping? She was her mother, given more years, a younger body. Though maybe that by itself—
And her mother was her grandmother, her grandmother her great-grandmother. On past the Kovno ghettos, to Canaan, Egypt, women huddled in caves. Maybe this is dramatic, but it explains things. Why the sugar that gristles like sand between her knuckles tingles all the way to her scalp. Why heat from the oven glows deep beneath her ribs. It’s more than that, and it isn’t.
She still remembers her grandmother. Bubbe Rachel’s frilled skirts hiding a squishy lap, the way she enveloped a grandchild, not just with her hugs but with her voice, her encouragement. Just as her mother does now. Though there are differences. All of Tillie’s grandchildren are boys.
Then it dawns on her: all of this will end.
Her mother’s only daughter. The fruits of her womb only male. A line broken by chromosomes and indifference, and it’s her fault.
Bev did everything possible to make her second child a girl. All the wives’ remedies. Warm drinks only, no red meat, even how she lay while taking Fred’s seed. She told him the pregnancy was an accident. They could barely afford one child, but that final chance for a daughter. It felt like salvation, though she never knew why. But then out came Gene, another boy. And she loves him. And she loves Barry. But she is so alone.
There is no recipe for this, how to grieve something that’s still alive. How to regret the greatest parts of yourself, which is just regretting yourself.
Spent eggshells, crumbled baker’s chocolate, vanilla blotted like iodine tears. Her boys could care less where cookies come from, so long as there’s something to eat.
Bev frozen in her mother’s kitchen. Her mother at her side. Tillie’s soft warmth. It’s already gone.
Jeffrey Wolf’s writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Prairie Schooner, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He has received support from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Illinois Arts Council. He lives in Chicago.
