Even after Benny grew up and moved out, Christmastime baking with Ma remained an annual ritual. She would come back each winter for the blacking of the sugar, the rubbing of the butter, the sifting-in of the breadcrumbs. And each time, she brought the old measuring cup with her. Whenever her ma saw it, she would wrap her arms around Benny and kiss her on the neck, mwah-mwah-mwah.
Then came the big rift with her parents, that disastrous Thanksgiving Day, two years before her dad died, and Benny stopped visiting altogether. But by then, Benny had already evolved into a person who could smell the weather in a handful of flour and taste the earth in a spoon of cane sugar, and this is what had led her to take culinary classes. That, and dropping out of college. Which, Benny sees now, was what had started it all.
Benny’s decision to leave her elite university, years earlier, had caused the first tear in the fabric of their family home. The fissure had widened with her parents’ growing disappointment in her. They were irritated enough when she went to Italy to take the cooking courses but when she came back to the United States and moved to Arizona for art school, even her brother looked perplexed. The three people Benny loved most in this world no longer made any attempt to hide their doubts in her.
For Benny, the move made sense. Maybe it was the time she’d spent in the pastry-making classes, working with her hands and exploring the use of color and texture. Maybe it was being steeped for one year in the visual stimulation of an Italian city, the mustard-and salmon-colored fa?ades, the marble fountains, slick with water, the faces, the language. Benny only knew that she had come back to the States wanting to do more with her painting. She sensed that some combination of food and art in her life would help to ground her.
Benny didn’t want to work in a kitchen full time so much as she wanted to be surrounded by beauty and comforting things and decent people. She wanted to sit alone in her own café, before the first customers arrived, and work in her sketchbook, looking up through a glass window to see the morning sky turn metallic blue, then white gold. She wanted to use the café to teach children about culture through cooking. She wanted to do things her own way and have it work out all right. Benny wanted to have a safe space and a life that would always be under her control.
But Benny was Bert and Eleanor Bennett’s child and this was not the Bennett way. If you were a Bennett, you were expected to finish college, go on to graduate school, find a real profession, and do everything else in your free time. If you were born to Bert and Eleanor, you banked on your university degrees, you built your influence, you accumulated wealth, you quashed all vulnerability.
In short, you became Byron Bennett.
Benny turns the measuring cup over and over in her hands. The plastic has cracks here and there from repeated drops and house moves, plus the hot liquids that Benny’s mother had warned her never to pour into the cup, but which she’d done anyway.
Benny, plunking butter into the measuring cup and melting it in the microwave.
Benny, drinking mulled wine out of the measuring cup, sitting alone at a table set for two.
Benny, eating soup out of the measuring cup, the bruises on her face and neck aching with each spoonful.
Benny, sipping tea from the cup, feeling that her own brother had turned his back on her.
Benny hugs the cup to her middle now and runs a finger back and forth across the remains of the manufacturer’s label. In nearly fifty years, it has never fully disintegrated. Her mother’s hand would have touched that fuzzy gum every time she measured out a cup of flour or rice or beans or oil, every time she used it to cook for a birthday party, a holiday dinner, a fundraiser. She wondered, could there still be a bit of Ma’s DNA on this cup? Could her mother, perhaps, not be fully gone from this earth? Scientists have found DNA in ice dating back hundreds of thousands of years.
Benny pulls her smartphone out of her jeans pocket and dials up her voicemail. For the umpteenth time, she listens to her mother’s message from the month before.
Those four words: Benedetta, please come home. She lowers her head, swallows hard, hears the soft tap of a teardrop in the measuring cup.
Homesickness
Benny hears Byron calling to her from the other end of the hallway, but she ignores him. She’s not ready to go back to hearing her mother’s story. She needs to think. Benny looks around at the turquoise-colored walls of the room where she slept almost every night until she was seventeen. Her parents painted it this color because she’d insisted on it. She smiles at the memory. Why didn’t she come back to California sooner?