Mary was out on parole and not everyone in her new neighborhood felt about her the way her old neighborhood did. Her old neighborhood understood why she murdered her husband, especially the other wives. They applauded her bravery and were envious of her success. They wished they could murder their husbands too, and practically get away with it.
The new neighborhood ignored Mary. They read the headlines, following her case from beginning to end, and most of them didn’t find her very brave or successful. They just didn’t think that killing your husband because he ruined your career a very legitimate excuse to break the law.
But John was always messing things up in Mary’s life. It was as if he didn’t want Mary to have her own life at all, like she was supposed to just be his wife and mother to his three sons. Mary dealt with it for as long as she could until John’s sons were in high school and wanted nothing to do with her anymore. She didn’t even have to shuffle them around to football or baseball practices, they would bum a ride from older teammates. This left Mary with plenty of time on her hands and she wanted something to do with it.
She took up baking.
Actually, Mary worked at a bakery since she was sixteen years old. She only left after John convinced her Matthew, Marc, and Luke needed a mother to be there when they opened their eyes in the morning and closed their eyes at night. She was hesitant at first but when all three boys caught the flu and Mary took a week off to tend to them, she felt good nursing them back to health. The macaroni necklace and bracelet set they made her to say ‘thank you’ made her feel even better. From there on in she was a stay at home step-mom.
She baked at home too. Every dinner was followed up with one of her masterpieces: crème brulee, cherries jubilee, chocolate soufflé, baklava, and anything that could be made was, instead of purchased at the grocery store. John went to work with still-warm morning glory muffins, turkey clubs on soft sourdough bread, and fresh chocolate chip cookies. The boys loved coming home to sweet smells wafting from the kitchen and filling the whole house. They loved that Mary always smelled like cakes and cookies even after a hot shower. That was before John forced her to stop baking.
It was right after the boys annual Christmas Baking Extravaganza. Every year Mrs. Sims won the $500 cash prize with her creative bar cookies and frankly, the other moms were annoyed with Mrs. Sims’ gloating. They all tasted Mary’s sweets from the numerous times they visited. In fact, they were quite comfortable with asking her to bake for their parties or get-togethers. Mary baked something for every Sunday church service or fundraiser, the boys’ team parties, and she even baked a cake for Alyssa’s backyard wedding. Everyone was wowed by the five tier, white and lavender fondant cake. It took three groomsmen to carefully place it on the folding table without harming it. So, the other moms were confident that this year Mary’s sweets would take the cake.
But Mary was forbidden to enter.
Earlier that day John was sitting at the dining room table, glasses sliding down his nose, studying the finances. Something didn’t seem right.
“Mary,” he called over his shoulder.
Mary stepped through the arched portal, apron wrapped tightly around her slender waste, cake flour spotted on her tan arms and face. She knew right of way what this was all about. She twisted the thick gold wedding band on her finger, fearing what John’s reaction would be to their bank statements.
“Just how much baking have you been doing,” John asked trying to remain calm, but the vein throbbing in his neck was a dead giveaway that he was furious.
Mary’s dark eyes hovered over the floor and she answered in a soft voice, “Well, last week the Thomas’s requested a three tier birthday cake for Sadie’s first birthday, but the Jefferson’s needed a quick Thanksgiving dessert so I made them two pumpkin pies, and the Wolfstein’s had a bat mitzvah…”
John waved his hands frantically to stop Mary’s never-ending parade of desserts. “Did you accept money from these people?” His hands were on his broad hips. A few years of eating Mary’s wonderful treats helped him (and the whole neighborhood) pack on a few pounds.
Mary hesitated. She didn’t want John to overreact like he had when she bought a brand new, stainless steel oven without consulting him first. She shifted her weight back and fourth, trying to determine the best way to break the news to him.
“Well,” he asked, impatiently.
“Yes,” she almost whispered.
“Yes? Yes! You took money from people I have to see everyday for your stupid cakes?” John’s face turned scarlet.
“My cakes are not stupid,” Mary said, lifting her eyes from the floor. “My cakes have made us $7,000 in the last two months.”
“$7,000 from people who wanted favors. If they wanted to pay a pastry chef they would have went to the bakery!” John shouted and Mary flinched. She didn’t want the boys to hear another one of John’s tirades.
“No, they wanted to come to me and it was them who wanted to pay me. I tried to refuse but they would put money on the counter and rush out the door before I could give it back to them. What’s wrong with me having a career?” Mary’s heart was pounding, that was the most she spoke to John about baking, ever.
“This,” John said, waving his hand up and down at Mary’s appearance. “This is not a career. Being a mother is a career, being a secretary is a career, baking is a hobby! And, I will not have some of the senior partners in my firm paying you for a batch of brownies.”
Mary was angry. Never once had she sought payment from any of her customers. Everyone always came to her; everyone always forced her into taking the money. Honestly, they needed the money. The boys’ extracurricular activities cost a fortune, not to mention the fact that they were all driving their own cars now too. She couldn’t understand why John was being so difficult.
John sighed. “Just stop taking payments Mary,” he said as he sat back in his chair and resumed looking over the bills.
“Fine, I will tell everyone that’s what I do, I do favors. But I’m still entering the school contest.” Mary’s dark eyes narrowed at John, as if daring him to object. She put so much love into her baking, almost as much love as she put into Matthew, Marc, and Luke. She refused to let him take this away from her again.
“No your not.” He said it as if the matter was already settled.
“Yes, I am.” Mary felt ridiculous arguing with her husband like they were in kindergarten but she wanted to stick to her guns this time.
John rose back out of his seat and faced her. “No you’re not. I’m calling Mrs. Walters tomorrow, she owes me a favor, and I’ll ask her to disqualify anything you submit.”
“Why are you so threatened by my baking?”
“You know Mary, most wives don’t even have time to make toast, that’s how busy they are. And, that’s how busy you should be. From now on, there will be no more baking in this house unless it’s some sort of holiday. Do I make myself clear?”
“No John, you’re not clear. I have nothing else. The boys are all grown up now, they don’t need me anymore. So why can’t I have a career? If you don’t want me baking here, for our friends, then I’ll go back to Sweet Something’s.”
John sighed and rubbed his temples. It’s like talking to a child, he thought. “You’re not going back to Sweet Something’s either. Just get a new hobby, that’s all I ask. Go to lunch dates with some of the other available mothers, join the gym, go to the spa, anything!”
Mary threw her hands in the air, the very same Italian gesture her mother made when arguing with her father. Except, John wasn’t Italian, he was of English descent. “I give up with you, John. I’m not going to stop baking but I am going to stop talking to you about it.” She walked through the archway and back into the kitchen.
She pulled Rice Krispie treats from the refrigerator and prepared to dip them in melted dark chocolate. As she worked silently she heard John huffing and puffing and squirming in his chair. She knew what just happened was brewing in his mind. She hoped that outcome would be in her favor.
Later that night, at dinner, John didn’t mention anything about baking and he didn’t explode over the Rice Krispie treats for dessert. The boys did, it was one of their favorites. John just watched as they scoffed down the marshmallow rice cakes, leaving only two behind. Mary nibbled on one and John stared at the other.
After the boys cleared the table and went to their rooms John laughed and laughed and laughed. Mary had never seen him react like this before. She watched him wide-eyed and nervous until the fit passed and John was dabbing at teary eyes with his napkin. He snatched the treat off the plate and looked it over slowly. Mary thought John had seen the errors of his ways and she attempted to get up from the table to clean. But John grabbed her wrist so tight her fingers locked in place.
“Sit,” he said as he pulled her back into her chair and let her go. Mary rubbed her wrist, it felt raw and bruised. “This is the biggest slap in the face you have ever given me and you have given me plenty of those in this marriage.”
Mary was confused. What slaps in the face? She always made sure everything was as John asked; she hardly ever went back on his requests or punishments. Except for that one time with the stove.
“You Italians don’t understand a goddamned thing. When we say ‘stop’ you hear ‘stop as you wish’ and when we say ‘go’ you hear ‘go whenever you want’. That’s not how things work, especially in a marriage! I have a reputation to uphold, I don’t need my wife running around like some servant baking for the whole fucking town!”
“So that’s what this is all about, your reputation. Oh, cazzo la vostra reputazione, ciò non significa merda!”
“That’s another slap in the face to this family! Speak English, we’re in America, no one knows what the hell you’re saying.”
“Good, I don’t want them to know what I’m saying because half of the time I’m calling them imbecilli. These mothers aren’t busy; they’re good at pretending to be busy to avoid conversations like this! You men think that our jobs are menial and worthless because the house always looks the same and smells the same when you come home. But it didn’t look or smell that way before you left!” Mary slammed her hand on the table, sending shooting pains up to her elbow.
“Oh and what I do doesn’t mean shit then, right? I bust my ass ten hours a day to bring home enough money to keep this family going while you sit here baking your little brownies and cookies, talking on the phone, going to parties.”
Mary couldn’t take it anymore, John was irrational! Her heart was racing and blood was rushing away from her brain, filling her face. She felt dizzy and sick. How could she ever make John understand her love for baking and seeing the happiness her baking brought to others? She couldn’t, he would never listen. Her head got lighter and she became madder.
How could he be so stubborn and cruel? How could he just sit there with that stupid look on his ruddy face, like she was some kind of alien! His flat lips were contorted into a wicked smile. He already thinks he’s won the fight, he always wins the fights! But not this time!
Mary stormed out of the room and returned with her rolling pin. One word more and she’d hit him. All he had to do was…
“Mary, what the hell are you doing with that thing?”
CRACK!
Mary’s arms were strong; she could wield her rolling pin for hours without stopping for a single break. Now, John would know the strength baking had given her all of her life, physical and mental.
John fell to the floor and his once rigid, tense body slackened. His eyes began to gloss over. Mary stood over him, not sure if he was going to make it or not, and said a quick “Our Mother” for him. When she finished crossing herself and kissing her hand, she returned to the kitchen to wash her rolling pin.
Luke was dribbling his basketball down the hallway when he heard the loud blow. He peeked around the corner and saw Mary praying, holding onto the flimsy gold cross she had always worn since he met her. His father was sprawled on the floor, blood oozing from his head. He ran to the living room and dialed 9-1-1.
“Madison 9-1-1, how can I help you?”
Luke hugged the phone close to his face, scared Mary would hear him above the running faucet. He whispered, “Yes, my step-mother just hit my dad. I think she used something, the sound was really loud, and he’s bleeding and everything. He won’t get up from the floor.”
“OK sir, I’m sending the police to your house right of way. Is there any way you can check on your father to see if he’s still breathing?”
“Let me see.” Luke placed the phone on the glass side table and crept up the hall. Mary was still in the kitchen, he could hear pots and pans and things banging around. He slid across the floor on his socks and knelt next to his father. He placed an ear to John’s chest but he couldn’t tell if his heart was beating or if his chest was rising or falling. Mary dropped a metal spoon and Luke jumped up, running back to phone.
“Hello? I can’t tell if he’s breathing or not, I’ve never did this before.”
“It’s OK son, just hang in there, the police are almost there. How much blood is on the floor?”
“A lot, a puddle.”
“OK, can you find something to staunch the blood?”
“No, my stepmom is in the other room.”
“What is she doing?”
Luke strained to hear over his racing heart. Mary was no longer making anymore noise. He dropped the phone and tiptoed over to the kitchen entrance from the living room. He peered around the corner, Mary was watching the oven, it was set at 350 for 20 minutes. Luke could smell macadamia nuts and blueberries, Mary was baking muffins. He gulped and tiptoed back to the phone.
“She’s baking.”
The 9-1-1 dispatcher was taken back. “She’s what?”
“Baking, ma’am.”
“Can she see your father from where she is?”
“Yes.”
“Can she…”
Mary grabbed the phone from Luke and dropped it back onto the base, ending the call. Luke’s eyes widened in fear, he knew he could overpower Mary except she had her rolling pin dangling at her side. He swallowed hard and scrambled to his feet.
“You called the police?” Mary’s face was calm and beautiful.
“What did you do to my dad?”
“I asked if you called the police.”
“Yeah I called the police. Is dad alright? Is he alive even?” Luke wiped his tears on the back of his sleeve.
There was a knock on the door. Mary and Luke both turned to face it but neither of them moved to answer it. The knock came again. Luke looked at Mary from the corner of his eye and she looked at John’s body from the corner of hers. Then, in a single moment Mary ran towards John’s body and Luke lunged for the door.
Two uniformed police officers rushed in, pushing past Luke and heading for Mary, who had John by his feet, and was trying to drag him away. They grabbed her by the arms and wrestled her to the ground. Her dark brown hair came loose from its clasp, sending black spirals all around her. Luke was trying to wake his father, spilling tears all over John’s bloated face.
Mary’s hands were cuffed behind her back and one of the officers walked Mary out of the house. The other picked Luke up from the floor and walked him into the living room. Soon a coroner arrived and covered John’s body with a sheet.
Mary was convicted of involuntary manslaughter after retelling the story of that night from her point of view. She told them about John’s strict rules and fits of rage when things weren’t as he asked. She cried into her lawyer’s white scarf as she recounted why she left Sweet Something’s to become a stay at home stepmom. Her delicate hands waved in explanation as she told the jury how she never meant to kill John, she just meant to stop him from coming at her. The icing on the cake came when, under her lawyer’s advice, Mary distorted John’s strong grip on her wrist.
“He grabbed it so tight that it sprained. Then he pulled me back into my seat with such force that I fell off the chair, which only made him angrier.” Mary looked down into her lap, counting twenty of the little red flowers on her dress before looking back up at the sympathetic jury.
Luke wouldn’t testify. No matter how much the prosecutor pushed him, he would not even return a phone call. The prosecutor urged the judge to subpoena him, but the judge thought he went through enough already. Besides, Luke didn’t see what happened, he only saw ex post facto.
Mary was sentenced to two years in prison. But she was paroled for good behavior after only 14 months of her sentence. She volunteered in the prison kitchen, whipping up her favorite treats for the other inmates. When word got around about her mastery, even the guards got on line in the mess hall. Mary saw how the guards marveled at her handmade chocolate frosted donuts and took extra care to make them just right. By the end of her stay the parole board and warden knew who she was by name. The warden even invited her to private lunches, so long as she brought something sweet with her.
Mary was released on November 15 and moved into Glenview Terrace with the help of the warden. He sought a residence for Mary, one where she would have enough room to bake and enough money to afford. But the neighborhood was different than her old one. In Madison everyone loved Mary and they were amazed by her fluency in Italian. But in Glenview Terrace no one smiled or laughed at her awkward American phrases. No one asked where she was originally from or asked her to say certain words in Italian. No one knew she baked, no one cared.
The men and women of Glenview awoke each morning at 5:00 a.m. and shuffled off to work, sipping coffees out of plastic cups and unwrapping breakfast from the convenience store. They didn’t hop on trains and head into the city for white collar jobs; they put on muddy work boots and were hauled away on construction trucks. The women donned handkerchiefs over their braided hair and went to work cleaning other people’s homes while their children took public transportation to public schools.
Mary was miserable. Who was she to bake for now? She walked around town until her heels were raw, looking for a bakery to work for. But there wasn’t one in town. A young Spanish woman in rubber clogs and a bleach-stained oxford told her the closest bakery was three towns over and that everyone just bought baked goods from the grocery store.
“Es mas barato,” she said. “It’s cheaper.”
Mary trudged all the way back home and collapsed in her secondhand, flannel recliner. She didn’t even have enough energy to make herself dinner, or dessert. She closed her eyes and fell asleep.
The next morning Mary paced the kitchen, her slippers scuffing the yellow linoleum tiles. Four bills came in the mail that morning and Mary didn’t even have enough in her bank to cover one of them. At home she would have already made triple the amount of her bills in two weeks. Now, she was running out of options.
She decided to walk the neighborhood and introduce herself. Tell everyone about her baking business and pick up a few clients. She knew the holidays were around the corner and now that she didn’t have the boys she could bake all day. She tied her moth-eaten pea coat around her waist and headed out into the cold wind.
Hardly anyone answered their doors. There weren’t many stay at home moms and those that were looked too young to even have children in the first place. Most didn’t speak English and none spoke Italian. Mary kept trying though, frantically. Someone would need her, somewhere!
By the end of her trip Mary had only one promising client. Mrs. Daschle on Bloomfield needed a cat-shaped cake for Misty’s third birthday. She wanted it to look just like Misty and she wanted the layers to be separated by tuna fish salad. Mary scrunched up her nose at the idea. Mrs. Daschle was only willing to pay $10.00. She couldn’t even pay a quarter of her cable with that.
Mary took a deep breath and decided that she would have to get a job, like the rest of the women in the neighborhood and so, she applied for the Merry Maids cleaning service. The cleaning service required her to work ten hours a day with only one half hour lunch break.
By the time Mary got home she was exhausted and often fell asleep on the recliner with a warm cup of tea incurved in her hands. And, when the weekends came around she was too sore to bake. She couldn’t use her rolling pin long enough to properly lengthen the dough for the right amount of scones. Her soufflés kept sinking and all of her double fudge brownies tasted like singular fudge brownies.
Finally, the holidays arrived and Mary was extremely busy. Everyone needed their house thoroughly cleaned before relatives arrived and impressions had to be made. One client even gave her the white glove test. (That same client also dropped a $50 bill into her hand for passing the test.) This left Mary with no time to bake at all. She had just enough time to shower, scrub the bleach from her tender, blistered hands, and crash on her blowup mattress for five hours of sleep before she had to do it all over again.
Within a few more weeks Mary wasn’t even thinking about baking anymore. The days were flying by in a Clorox blur and the nights were heavy with Irish Spring scented sheets, which reminded her of John. Sometimes when she rolled over she could feel the weight of his sleeping body next to her. Sometimes she could hear the boys down the hall in the media room, laughing at whatever was on MTV. During these sometimes, she couldn’t sleep.
Instead she sat up with a cup of tea and in her mind she retraced every step she ever took in her old house. Where they had a media room, she had an extra bedroom where she kept any cleaning supplies she was allowed to take home. Where they had a second full bathroom, she had a linen closet where she kept a small amount of towels and plenty of handkerchiefs to tie over her braided hair before work. Where they had granite counter tops, a six burner, stainless steel oven in the island, and slate floors in the kitchen, she had beige Formica counter tops, an old, white four burner stove splattered with grease against the wall, and a yellow tiled floor stained with years grime. Where they had a witty Italian pastry chef stepmom, she had a worn out, bleached out maid.
When the holidays Mary stayed with her cleaning job as no clients arose with baking needs. At every job she left a small card she made at home with her name, phone number, and brief description of her capabilities. But she never received a single call. After two years of trying, Mary simply gave up.
She moved up in her job at Merry Maids and managed their team of cleaners, earning her a spot in the office. The neighbors forgave her eccentric behavior and she became close friends with Paulette, the young Spanish girl that first told her about the bakery three towns over. They got together on the weekends and watched movies or swapped stories about where they were originally from. Mary told Paulette about serving time in prison for killing her husband and Paulette told Mary about evading border patrol with two pounds of cocaine in her backpack, so that she could start a new life for her and her brother in America. They laughed at this. Life in America wasn’t as great as everyone thought it to be.
This made Mary cry because for the longest time she no longer considered herself an immigrant and she thought no one else did either. But Paulette helped her realize that the people in her old neighborhood did. When John said they wanted favors he didn’t mean as friends, he meant as superiors. They were asking the immigrant wife in the neighborhood to do their bidding. They paid her high wages so it wouldn’t look obvious to John or the other husbands. And, the other husbands laughed at Mary’s awkward American phrases and marveled at how she spoke Italian not because it was cute or sophisticated but because it was barbaric and foreign.
Paulette hugged Mary close and told her it was OK. She was where she belonged now, with people that would accept her for who she is and that being a maid wasn’t failure or embarrassing.
Mary cried even harder. She wasn’t a widow, she was married to John and she certainly wasn’t a maid, she was a pastry chef!
No comments:
Post a Comment