Irish Soda Bread

My Monday night writing group meets tonight.  I'm going to read this excerpt from Alice McDermott's novel and talk about the way the narrator goes in for close-ups of her characters.  She could have said, "I was never interested in cooking, though my mother tried to teach me."  But no.  She takes you into the kitchen where her mother wears an apron with rickrack, and you know it had to be the forties or fifties.  She lets you eavesdrop on the conversation.  Maybe she makes you remember when you learned to cook something.

I'm off now to buy buttermilk and caraway seeds.  I'm going to try my hand at making some Irish soda bread for tonight's group. 

From Someone:  

My mother called me into the kitchen….

“It’s time,” my mother said, “that you learned a few things.”

On the narrow corrugated tin of the drain board beside the sink, there was the flour bin and a bottle of buttermilk, the pale box of baking soda, a box of raisins, a box of salt, and a tin of caraway seeds. On the small table beneath the window, a bowl and a spoon and a measuring cup. There was as well a narrow card on which she had written in her careful hand the recipe for soda bread.

It was time, my mother said, that I learned a few things about cooking. 

I stood in the kitchen doorway, all reluctance. Why? I wanted to ask.

My mother tied an apron around my waist. “All right,” she said. She nodded toward the table, the bowl and the spoon and the recipe card.  I looked at her. The morning sunlight from the single window lit the down on her cheeks. It showed her brown eyes had some green in them, too. And that on either side of her tall forehead her dark hair was turning gray.

“Go ahead,” my  mother said.  “Get started. And when she saw me hesitate, she impatiently put her hand on my shoulder and turned me toward the table and the bowl and the spoon. “Read the recipe over and then gather your ingredients,” she said slowly.  “They’re all right here.  I’ll supervise.”

I looked at my mother in her housedress  and her apron trimmed with green rickrack, her wide soft breasts and her pillowed belly and her strong, firm hands. A body, a physical presence, more familiar to me in those days than my own, since my own was something I had only begun to consider.

“Don’t be dense, Marie,” my mother said. “Don’t stand there gawking at me like I’m speaking Chinese. Go.”  And another touch on the shoulder. “Read the recipe over once and gather your ingredients.  It isn’t hard.  It’s high time you learned.”

Why? was what I wanted to say, but I was certain without conscious thought that the question would get me into trouble. I turned reluctantly to the table, my feet feeling heavy in my shoes. I picked up the card.  It was my mother’s routine to make her soda bread on a Saturday morning while I went out to join my friends.  It had always been so. 

“Read it over,” my mother said. And I nodded, pretending to. The sun through the single window was bright in my eyes. “Now gather what you need.”

I picked up the flour bin and brought it to the table. I picked up the buttermilk and the raisins. I went back for the salt and the tin of caraway seeds and then stood before the bowl and the spoon and the measuring cup. Beyond the window, beyond the gray bars of the fire escape, the wash my mother had done this morning was waving on the line: sheets and pillow slips, my school blouses and my father’s shirts, which were hung upside down by their hems, their arms waving in a way that made me grow dizzy in sympathy.

“Haven’t you forgotten something?” my mother said behind me.  I looked at the ingredients I had lined up on the small table. The sun had turned the buttermilk a kind of blue. “No,” I said.

My mother took me by the shoulders and turned me around. “Are you sleepwalking?” she said. “There’s the baking soda.   You’ll have nothing at all if you don’t have that.”

I fetched the box of baking soda and then once more stood before the table. “Now what?” my mother asked.

I shrugged.  Beyond the waving clothesline were the windows and fire escapes of our neighbors, the dancing laundry of a dozen more families, the tall brown poles that held the lines, electric lines and clotheslines.

“Glory be to God,” my mother said. “Now you read the recipe, Marie.”

I looked down at the little card. The ink my mother had used was brown. Her handwriting was lovely and neat, the capital S and the capital B at the top of the card were striking,  My mother had learned from Irish nuns. “Marie?” my mother said.

The sound of her voice was more familiar to me than my own; I knew the end of my mother’s patience when I heard it. 

“You tell me,” I said softly.  “You tell me what to do.”

Behind me I heard my mother cross her arms over her rickrack apron….