Claudia's Blog

Even though I never met her I think of her often. Each time I use my old, red-handled egg beater or days like yesterday, a living room filled with men watching football while I was in my kitchen smashing ripe avocados with my red-handled pastry cutter. I try to imagine the woman who once owned these outdated kitchen tools. The grandmother of a husband I once tried on for size but decided to return in the end. A bad fit all the way around. The only things I took from my second marriage were the two utensils. He didn’t seem to care since he kept the entire house. I tend to pack light when leaving the scene of a crime.

After my first marriage ended with a whimper, I took a cookie jar filled with Green Stamps. Those sheets of stamps given out at the grocery store after the purchase was rung up. I had spent hours at my kitchen table with a damp sponge blotting the backs of the stamps and then fixing them to the pages of official stamp-books that could then be exchanged for merchandise at the Green Stamp redemption center.

Crystal vases! Hard-boiled egg serving platters! Hot rollers! Jell-O molds! I certainly wasn’t leaving my stamps. My wedding ring? He kept it. The furniture, who cares? But my stamps, are you out of your mind?

Yesterday I dug the pastry cutter from the jumbled mess in my kitchen drawer and as I untangled an electrical cord from the slightly bent wires I once again tried to picture this woman. I assume she baked pies. I assume she whipped eggs or cream with the beaters. I picture a flowered print housedress and apron covering an ample bosom. I imagine gray hair, curled in a Mamie Eisenhower style. But here is where the pleasant picture takes a turn. She was, according to family history, as mean as a bear caught in a trap who was as likely to beat her husband as to beat an egg.

As I pummel the ripe avocados in the bowl I see this nameless, faceless woman using this very tool to cut butter into flour. Then fling it across the room towards her husband’s head as he sits listening to a radio program.

He was a barber. He handed his pay over to her at the end of each week. She in turn gave him a small allowance. Rumor has it he arrived at the shop now and again bruised and slightly broken.

So I picture arms as thick as sacks of flour. And tree-trunk legs to support her rage.

As I squeeze fresh limes over the bright green mash, then add sea salt to taste and listen to the chatter coming from the next room, the men laughing and relaxing on a Sunday afternoon, rain coming down outside, I wonder about her husband. Did he have friends to spend time with? Did he listen to a game on the radio cheering for his favorite team?

Cleaning up my mess, trying to decide if I want to keep the pits and place them in water on the windowsill to grow I realize I will never know the answers to these questions. I am not the keeper of their story. Only the keeper of these two, very worn, kitchen utensils. And for some reason I am attached to them. To the mystery behind them. And if history clings to objects perhaps that is why I keep them. Use them to whip cream or mash avocados. Feeding my husband of 28 years.

I am trying to undo something. Attempting to give these objects a new story.