a good baking apple over a good lunchbox apple. They won’t take on as much fluid and mush down on you. I’ve even used the Granny Smith. They are tart but firm and get balanced by so much soft sweetness in the salad. The Golden Delicious is fine if you can’t find the Gala and don’t want the tart zing of the Granny Smith. But the Golden will get soft after a while.”
Mrs. Swindan only asked to be polite. She drifts off from the kitchen to get the three-tiered cake plate from upstairs. But. The young woman keeps listening.
Mrs. Hamel folds more napkins. “After the apples go in, squirt it with some lemon juice to prevent all those apples from browning. The orange juice just isn’t acidic enough. Then the maraschinos. Halves or quarters, whichever you have time for. Lastly, the coconut. Best to grate it fresh yourself from the meat of a coconut. But I’ll admit I’ve only done that once. It was such a mess getting into that thing! It took a screwdriver and a hammer and a lot of words that I’d rather not employ to get that sucker open. The blessed thing rolled off my counter so many times that I ended up on the floor with it. My legs holding it steady then hacking at it with that screwdriver and hammer. Awful. And the milk got all over my shoes and dress when I finally did get it open.
“So I do recommend the store-bought, fully-processed, shredded coconut. A quarter to half a bag. A good fistful is about right. And really it works out better than the fresh coconut because the dry coconut takes up the maraschino juice and the orange juice for blended flavor. But that coconut is mainly for texture and looks. You can leave it out if you must. It’s a great salad Christmas morning with breads and spreads. Stollen and cream cheese every year at our house.” She smiles. “The key is high quality oranges. A definite must. Not worth making with crap oranges.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Hamel. Someday I’ll try it out.”
“Well, not until you tell me how you come up with these beauties year after year.” Mrs. Hamel gestures toward the deviled eggs. It’s clear enough that Mrs. Hamel hates deviled eggs. But one’s recipe is never just given away. It must be exchanged for another equally as good. And everyone says that these particular deviled eggs are as near to perfection as Icarus ever was to the sun, which is much too close for Mrs. Hamel’s comfort. She slams the salt and pepper shakers down against the table in three different places. Nowhere seems right.
But. The young wife didn’t make the deviled eggs. So she shakes her head and points to a tray of cookies that she only had to bake in ready-made batches for eight to ten minutes. She says she thinks one of the neighbors made the deviled eggs and cranes her neck inside to ask. But the neighbors have their backs turned, still throwing the doll’s head, and are also distracted from her uninvolved incursion by watching the middle school boys’ well-matched race in a video game. So the story of the deviled eggs is never told.
Mrs. Hamel is glad not to have to listen to such rot about whoever thinks she can make the best plate of deviled eggs but also demonstrates a sort of disappointed disgust in the girl’s inability to assert herself.
The young new wife of one of the older grandchildren is not just a girl and doesn’t think it is her fault that the row of neighbors can’t hear her asking for the deviled egg recipe. And why should she interrupt them when Mrs. Hamel doesn’t even want to listen? Still, it’s true enough that she isn’t quite sure which one of the neighbors made them. So there is no one in particular to ask. She wanders away from Mrs. Hamel, opens the door to the basement stairs, and disappears.
Back in the kitchen Mrs. Swindan has come downstairs. She and Mrs. Roth are working away. “Doesn’t it seem unlikely?” Mrs. Swindan says it as if caught—an eagle in a tall chicken wire fence. A fight is useless. They are sisters. And so the reply from Mrs. Roth, “Mmm.” She preheats the oven and begins to pour a layer of rock salt into a jelly roll pan. The sound of the salt against the metal is muffled by jazz.
The sink is full of ice. The kitchen walls bask in the last of the afternoon sun. The white wine, in glasses lined up in the window, holds glimpses of the light. Leaning on the stove, hands on the aprons, sipping periodically, the sisters clean and straighten up nothing that needs to be done. They are waiting for the oysters.
The conversation dies easily. A pattern made by a thousand arguments not bothered with in the presence of guests, like this nosy young wife of one of the older grandchildren. The matronly sisters pretend not to notice that she keeps popping up every time they both turn around. Mrs. Roth might involve her but cannot remember her name. So instead she watches a group of children trample her sugar snap peas in the garden as they squabble about who should retrieve the soccer ball. Her children and her sister’s children and some children of friends are trying to be careful, but the soccer ball has wreaked havoc enough.
The peas can handle it. She turns away from the window and tries to remember the name of the young woman Mrs. Hamel must have rebuffed, picks up her glass, and puts the back of her hand against the oven door, testing the heat.
“What’s Owen’s new wife’s name?”
“I thought you knew. She stood there hovering and I had absolutely no idea. I was about to ask.”
“Mrs. Hamel must have said something to her. She slithered down the stairs two minutes ago.”
“I didn’t see that. Are you sure?”
“Yes. You know how she can be.”
“Who?”
Mrs. Hamel overhears Mrs. Swindan and Mrs. Roth. She said, “Her name is Christa. And I didn’t say a word. The girl’s got no—”
But Mrs. Swindan doesn’t wait for her comment. She yanks the basement door open. “Christa!”
Christa hurries up the stairs. She stands close to Mrs. Roth who quickly hands her the salad tongs. “Just toss everything together. Be sure to get the tomatoes and olives off the bottom.” Mrs. Swindan doesn’t bother to remind her sister that three people asked for salad without dressing and that two others hate olives, which is why things were as they were with the dressing on the bottom.
But. Mrs. Hamel forgets nothing. “What do you expect Andre to do?” Christa looks first to Mrs. Roth, who has obviously forgotten, then to Mrs. Swindan, who shakes her head, and lastly to Mrs. Hamel who throws her hands up proving herself beyond all culpability. Christa says, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
Everyone is relieved by the sound of the garage door rising. Two men laugh heartily. One opens the door. The other backs his way up the stairs, slowly. They each hold one handle of an old metal tub. They carry it awkwardly through the door and steady it with slow steps, outstretched arms, and dictatorial statements. The women disperse like a flock of starlings that rises just a few feet and settles again on a different part of the lawn. Because they’ve arrived. Not the men but what they carry.
No one says a word. Everyone watches while the two men lift the tub, tilt it, slowly, slowly. One says, “Steady.” And the other wraps his lips around his teeth in a grimace. “Pull it back. Yeah. Okay. Now go.” They let the ocean water splash down into the sink. The oysters rattle, clatter, tumble, and fall, piling onto each other in a haze of the sea on ice.
The men tip the tub a few inches further, to be sure, to be absolutely sure. One of them grabs both handles, tips it all the way upside-down to be a hundred percent certain. Mainly for show, the other pounds the bottom of the tub.
But. Though no one expects it, one more oyster, one lodged in the crimp somehow, comes free and drops straight down onto the others.
One of the men says, “That’s about twice what we had last year.” Satisfied, the men retreat. The tub disappears, gets rinsed, gets forgotten again on the rafters in the garage.
The women do not hesitate to return. They talk and laugh. Their hands are deft as they wield flexible knives.
Mrs. Swindan’s nine-year-old son announces, “I want to do one.” The young man marries once. And his bride is Impossibility. He conquers her in time. “Let me. Let me try.”
His mother hands over her knife. “Find a good one.”
The boy takes the b
iggest oyster he sees.
His mother hands over the glove.
“I don’t want to wear that.”
“You have to protect your hands. It won’t let you cut your fingers off.”
The boy reluctantly puts on the wire mesh glove. He holds the oyster level to the ground knowing that the juice will run out if he does not. “Now what?”
“See how it’s thicker down here? That’s the cup. Across from that there is a sort of hinge. You want to stick the knife right into the hinge. A twist should pop it open and then you cut the bottle muscle.”
“I thought it was really hard.”
She smiles, knowing. “It is.”
The boy, concentrating, holds the oyster with the awkward glove. He finds the hinge and struggles to get the knife tip in. The knife slips and rams into his palm but is stopped by the steel mesh of the glove. His eyes are wide.
“See; we could be on our way to the emergency room right now.”
Understanding more, he tries again. He can feel it now. That place where the tip of the knife must penetrate. “I get it.” He doesn’t falter. The flat tip goes in. He holds the cup firmly but level in the glove and twists his knife hand enough to pop the shell open.
“Now get it loose underneath.”
He cuts hesitantly. He doesn’t want to lose the juice. He quits, offers up both the knife and the oyster. “I