The Cure for Death by Lightning by Gail Anderson-Dargatz Page B

carefully, and never, ever grease it. The folding was so important that my mother spelled it out under her recipe for daffodil cake:
Take spoon under batter and gently fold over.
The spoon is important: it should be large and flat. The gentleness is important: you want to keep those bubbles of air intact. One fold is usually enough to mix the two colors. My mother poured a layer of the egg white mixture into the pan first, covering the bottom, then added spoonfuls of yellow here and there, folding them in as she went; then another layer of white, and so on. To bake she used a moderate oven. To cool the cake, she tipped it upside down over a bottle on the kitchen table, so the tube in the middle of the cake pan suspended the cake. After a couple of hours, gravity would pull the cooling cake down, so removing it from the pan would be nothing at all. My mother would then decorate the cake with an icing of butter, icing sugar, a little hot water, and vanilla, and top it with a few spicy yellow nasturtiums.
    I laid out our best damask white linen tablecloth and four white napkins that matched, and the best dishes we had — a set of white teacups, saucers, and cake plates with tiny gold cloverleafs close to the rims. After arranging the plate of raspberry buns and the cake on the cloth, I put the sugar bowl with the bird on its lid at the center of the table, next to my mother’s large brown teapot and milk jug and a glass pitcher I’d filled with lilacs and violets.
    There was all our morning’s work laid out on the table, all wealth and good eating and joy. But I couldn’t enjoy any of it. During another visit, Mrs. Bell had shamed me, and my mother, by giving me a brisk lesson on sitting. She’d caught me on the bench near the kitchen door, sitting with my legs crossed, drinking a cup of tea. I thought I looked like the picture of Rita Hayworth in the magazine Mrs. Bell’s daughter, Lily, had brought me once, in the days when she still visited us with her mother.
    “Don’t cross your legs like that,” Mrs. Bell had said. “That’s how the worldly women sit, the women who smoke. You sit like that and you’re asking for something.”
    Mrs. Bell’s wire-rimmed glasses and her hair, worn rolled back, made her face appear much rounder and larger than it needed to. Nevertheless, her resemblance to my mother’s family was so uncanny that she could have been my grandmother come back from the dead. When she visited, she habitually sat with her back to the buffet, and I spent those visits looking from her to my grandmother’s grim face in that photograph, trying to figure what it was that made them look so much alike. Maybe it wasn’t her looks, exactly, maybe it was the way she held herself, or rather, the way her righteousness held her. The day she caught me posing like Rita Hayworth, she had taken me by the hand and had led me into one of the parlor chairs that pinched my thighs closed.
    “Don’t sit with your legs apart,” she had told me. “Whores sit like that. Don’t slouch. That’s for the stupid and lazy. Don’t hug your stomach like that.”
    I sat now at the parlor table as she had instructed, with my legs tucked together, feet firmly on the floor, arms on the arms of the chair. Of course there was no other way to sit on the parlor chairs. We all sat that way around the parlor table in those pinched chairs, my father atthe head of the table with his back to the kitchen, my mother beside him and I beside her, and Mrs. Bell at the end of the table with her back to the buffet. Billy and Dennis were out seeding barley; hired hands never ate in the parlor when there were guests. My brother was out in the fields with them to keep him from spoiling my mother’s time, to keep him from fighting with my father. Even so my mother and I waited for my father to come up with something, because he would come up with something, he always did when company came.
    Mrs. Bell was complaining about headaches this morning. She