The Smell of Home Part 2: "Milk" of Human Kindness?"

Jean was gone. Greg and I were left alone after school to navigate our way through the afternoon, which for two adolescents from highly dysfunctional families was dangerous. No one was watching us. Mom was always asleep upstairs; and next door, Elaine was too drunk to care. We missed the cookies, we missed the smell, and we missed having someone who cared whether we were there or not (read: we missed Jean and the home that she gave us, however briefly). So we decided to take matters into our home hands and bake cookies ourselves.
We started out with chocolate chip. We'd bake batches of chocolate chip cookies until we thought we'd gotten them close to how Jean made them (although they never quite tasted exactly like hers...we missed that "special" ingredient she kept secret). When we thought we had the chocolate chip cookie recipe down, we moved on to another variety until we perfected that one. Oatmeal raisin,, peanut butter, oatmeal chocolate chip; with nuts, without nuts. We baked up a storm. Every afternoon we baked cookies. But we had a peculiar routine we followed. We wouldn't eat any of the cookies until they were all baked, stacked on a plate, looking all homey with the kitchen cleaned up. Then, we'd sit down with a glass of milk and eat the whole batch. Sometimes we'd give a plate to Teresa, Cindy or Mark before we'd eat our share. But not until they were all baked. Teresa would invariably come in while we were baking to try to steal some cookies and Greg and I would chase her out of the kitchen. But she'd still manage to run off with a fair share of them before we were done. For some strange reason, having a completed batch of cookies before eating them was important to us. Maybe we thought it looked more like someone else had baked them for us. And the house would smell like cookies again. Baking cookies occupied a lot of our time; but it did keep us off the streets and out of trouble...for a little while anyway.
Teresa made it a game to see how many cookies she could steal. Teresa, as little as she was, could eat a horse. She never got full. And she never gained weight. I could look at food 50 yards away and I would gain 5 pounds. I had to work at not gaining weight. Teresa could eat from morning until night, and still be hungry for dinner, with nary a pound to be gained. Mark used to like to play a game with Teresa. He would get a tape measure and measure Teresa's belly. Then he would feed her whatever he could find in the refrigerator and cupboards, periodically re-measuring her belly to see how much it had grown. Cindy and I always thought this was a little creepy, but helped out in the game occasionally mostly out of morbid curiosity. We usually ran out of food, or time long before Teresa ran out of room. It was truly an amazing skill she possessed, and I was secretly envious. As she got older, Teresa gave up the championship eating contests that Mark imposed upon her. However, even to this day, she can eat whatever she wants and remains slim, trim and gorgeous without breaking a sweat.
The cooking stealing went on for some weeks. So one day, Greg and I made her a deal. We told her we'd bake her a special batch of cookies all her own; she could eat the whole batch. Just as long as she stopped stealing our cookies before they were done, and stayed out of the kitchen the entire time. Not one to pass up food (especially cookies) voluntarily, she agreed.
Now, I wouldn't say that Greg or I had a particularly mean streak; we didn't hold grudges and we were not generally malicious. Just terribly misguided at times. Like this time. We baked Teresa an entire batch of chocolate chip cookies with a "special" ingredient: Milk of Magnesia. We weren't sure how much to put in, so we started out with a little, and kept adding more. When the batter got too runny, we'd just add more flour. To make it extra "special", we sat her down at the table with her plate full of cookies and a glass of "milk"...mostly milk with some more Milk of Magnesia added in for good measure.
Teresa ate the entire batch without blinking, downed the milk and was outside playing before we knew it. But she was back inside pretty quickly for a bathroom break. She ran back outside, but was back in a few more minutes. This went on through dinner, and into the night. I called Greg after we went to bed to give him status updates of how many times Teresa had been to the bathroom. It was terribly mean and cruel in hindsight. Teresa was miserable, and since we shared a room, so was I during the night (didn't take that into consideration when we hatched our plan!). Neither one of us got much sleep. After a while I felt guilty about the whole thing, but not enough to confess my crime. I didn't tell Teresa what had happened until we were adults. But she never stole any more cookies after that either.

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Mom went back to the mental hospital many more times that year, always coming home for a few weeks or a few months at a time, and then ending up right back in the looney bin. It was especially difficult around holidays. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Mother's day and mom's birthday seemed to be the most stressful for her. By the end of the day or that weekend, she'd have checked herself back in to the hospital.
Cindy went back to cooking (albeit very reluctantly)since dad didn't hire Jean back. I think he kept expecting that each time mom came home, she would be "fixed". Thanksgiving rolled around, and this time mom was home. Ever since mom had her first "nervous breakdown" she never cooked again. So Cindy did, dad did, or later when I was older, I did.
Nana and Papa came over and fixed Thanksgiving dinner for us, with turkey, stuffing and all the fixings. I honestly don't ever remember my mother cooking Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner. Nana always came over early those morning to prepare the turkey, make the dressing (ALWAYS Mrs. Cubbison's dressing) and stuff the turkey. It was an event to watch her!
It was the day after Thanksgiving, Nana and Papa went home, and we were left to our own devices. Mom went to the beauty parlor to get her hair done. Her hair was a sight to behold. She would go to the beauty parlor once a week (if she was home) and have it all teased up into a ...well it looked like a bubble on her head; in fact Cindy and I would call her bubble head when she wasn't around. Mom's hair turned grey early in life, so by the time she was in her mid thirties, her hair was all silver. It was actually quite beautiful, if you could look beyond the bubble thing she had going on.
This particular year, dad put Cindy in charge of making the turkey soup, which was one of the very few traditions I can remember our family keeping. It involved boiling the turkey carcass until all the meat fell off (which now being a vegetarian in my adult life sounds particularly revolting), then adding vegetables and egg noddles. It was really more like a stew. Mom never made the turkey, but she almost always made the turkey soup. But this year, my father wanted to keep all the stress off mom, so Cindy got the job.
Cindy was a nervous cook back then. She had never really learned to cook, so it was especially stressful for her to be in charge of the after-Thanksgiving soup. Later in life she became quite a good cook, but it was a rough beginning!
So on this particular day, she threw Greg and I out of the kitchen, where we were of course baking our cookies, so she could have the space all to herself. Needless to say, this did not sit well with either one of us. So again, we hatched a particularly mischievous plan.
As Cindy prepared to boil the carcass, Greg and I were quite unceremoniously thrown out of the kitchen, chocolate chips in hand, into the hallway. A hallway that, unfortunately for Cindy (and later for us)gave us a straight shot to the stove top...
Yep, we did just what you might imagine young, really messed up kids would do in that situation. Every time Cindy had her back turned to us, we each took shots tossing chocolate chips into Cindy's already precarious soup. We thought it great fun until we tossed in that one chip too many and heard Cindy scream when she noticed her soup was brown. The screaming and ranting built to a feverish pitch until she got on the phone and called the beauty parlor where she proceeded to scream into the phone that she burned the soup! Greg and I slipped into the den at the back of the hallway laughing so hard we nearly peed our pants. My father finally came in the kitchen and tasted the soup. He didn't say anything except that Cindy should finish the soup and we would eat it burnt and all. And he insisted that Greg stay for dinner. I managed to choke down the first bowl (which I purposefully gave myself a miniscule portion). Still not saying a word, my dad filled my bowl 2 more times that night...full. Greg and I didn't think it was all that funny anymore.
That night pretty much ended our frenzied cookie making days. Up until then, Greg and I were strangely and fiercely protective of our cookie baking time. In hindsight,the cookies were just a symbol of something so much bigger. They temporarily filled a void that neither one of us had the emotional maturity or energy to voice out loud. We were both too consumed with maneuvering our lives at home, which seemed for all the world to resemble a fun house filled with mirrors that gave everyone on the outside looking in a twisted, distorted view of what life on the inside was like. Only it wasn't fun. We just hadn't figured out yet that it wasn't about the cookies.