By Nora Robertson
1. Start by shaving bittersweet chocolate, not too fine. Maybe it’s L.A. 1960s. Hot, airless beyond the Santa Monicas, but cool up in the North Hollywood hills. My mother chops chocolate and melts it into liquified butter. She can’t get used to her new nose. Her Aunt Ruthie tells her you can put as much chocolate as you like, some people she knows use pounds. My mother likes it in great rough chunks she buys herself from bakers’ shops, Callebaut or Ghiradelli. It smells like far away.
2. One cup of sugar for each stick of butter. Remember, so there will be enough for what you need. At night, Mom needs a lot. My grandmother Rebekah can definitely get used to her own nose. They have mother and daughter noses now, a matching set of surgeries. They blend in, a straight high-yellow fall from the brow down to a waspy little tip guaranteed free of the Horowitz droop produced from years of curving right out in public. They never go to shul. In pictures, Becky’s waist is slimmer than two hands. My mother’s hair refuses to iron. She binges on her mother’s stash of Danish kept for company. She goes to the beach with thermoses of screwdrivers. She puts a sleeping platform in her powder blue Karman Ghia convertible and drives it without oil until the engine seizes up.
3. Stir in a tablespoon of unprocessed cocoa, so dark it coagulates, and the smallest pinch of salt for each cup of sugar. All that whiteness will become a brown thing. It will turn granular. She drives east alone in a new VW beetle to the wrong side of the hills. BBQs and “My Girl” at all-night dance parties. A musician takes her to racial integration meetings. She thinks she is saving the world one kiss at a time.
4. Fold the creamed mixture, tanned as skin, into the molten chocolate. Ruthie tells her there’s nothing wrong, just don’t marry one. She likes everything about him, his seriousness, his reading habit and love of ribs, except when he tells her he always wanted a white girlfriend.
5. Eggs are the glue in everything. Whisk in one at a time until nothing is separate anymore. Bodies, moving. The beat slow and smooth through every subversive curve of my mother’s thighs. Her eyes meet his, lighten into a smile. Neither one cares if anyone’s looking.
Previously published in Alimentum.
Tags: Body-Making Cookery, experimental, poetry | No Comments