Elizabeth Berlin

Peppers

Elizabeth Berlin

“Berta, I trust you with the salad,” Lily says as if she believes it, leaning closer to me and the kitchen chopping block.

I tell her how ignorant she is without saying a word – because I’m good at this. With an “inappropriate” middle finger I fast-poke the secret hots lying beneath my t-shirt.

Love me. Love me not.

“Inappropriate” is one of Lily’s favorite words with me, but she’s old, and I get it. Old and overeducated, verified the first time I late-night researched her wallet. Which was the first time I inventoried her cupboards for my Safety Stash.

“That’s hoarding,” Ms. Fator, my caseworker, told me.

“It’s damage insurance,” I said, my hands in fists, and she backed off. Way off.

My salad is the second course of Lily’s 1st Annual Adoption Celebration. “We’re celebrating you, Berta,” she said. And she said it because she’s like Jesus, trusting people who shouldn’t be trusted, including 16-year-old girls who hide lethals underneath their t-shirts. And have a plan to use them. Girls who can’t decide whether or not they give a shit about being adopted.

It was Fator who got me here to the chopping block and salad bowl, because it was Fator who first heard the story from the Waldo County sheriff about baby-me, snorting like a little piglet, hanging upside down from the straps of my flipped, forgotten stroller. Teenage Mom in a bedroom somewhere making different, happy noises with her boyfriend.

Maybe in the end, Fator and Lily were the best I could do. The young, married Moms, the pretty Moms, held out for newborns instead of older babies, and definitely not babies like the one I was, a biter with choke bruises around her neck like a Goth necklace; already a confirmed insomniac but still craving the dark. ‘Cracked,’ I once overheard an adoption aide describing me, although she was the one too mentally confused to get out the spackle-filler and start the repair. Idiot.

Lily was a volunteer mentor at our group home, an agricultural advisor for the state of Maine, which is to say a woman with a job you can’t picture and a long list of degrees instead of boyfriends. I was chosen for her Experimental Garden Team. This happened because of some “landscaping projects” I created around the group home. That’s what everyone called them, my “landscaping projects,” magnifying the importance of a few shrubs and some King Alfred daffodils.

When I was 13, I asked Lily why she threw away her weekends on weed beds for unwanted girls, and she said – loud – with her British accent, “It’s fun! And all of you have such good minds.” Lily always talks and laughs loud as if volume=sincerity. But here’s my theory about it: because of her smarts and lumpy face – not a helpful combination – no man would have her, because when a man is with a woman, he wants the lights on and he wants to look. At everything.

So, it didn’t happen with a man and Lily broadened her definition of ‘love,’ deciding I was the one. And when I was 15, “How do you feel about it?” Lily asked, with Fator, her silent conspirator, standing

close by. This was her asking for permission to adopt me, which seemed weirdly like asking for my hand in marriage, and by the stupid giddiness in her voice, I knew how she felt.

When I didn’t answer, Fator did, betraying confidences. “It’s everything she wants,” she spilled. Another idiot.

Today I need to make an Anniversary salad.

I chop. I do like to chop. I feel wider and taller at the scarred and immovable block. Most of our garden vegetables – Lily’s and mine – end up here, forced to prove their worth after months of our blisters and efforts at rehab.

But my sympathies are always with the vegetables and not with the knife: the red frilled lettuce; firm, cherub tomatoes with their sunbaked smell – I tear off stems to sniff some more. Red radishes with dried dirt still stuck to the skins – under the faucet they go. Sunflower seed kernels from last summer’s heads; shelled green peas. I’ve grated parmesan into savory flakes.

Sitting, waiting nearby is my favorite salad bowl: steely smooth, round and wide. Chills fast. Stays cold. No uneven edges to frustrate fingers.

The salad ingredients, the Good Girl ingredients, are not the ones Lily’s worried about. She’s smart enough to suspect something’s up, and she knows I know it.

Lily wants promises about things, reassurances. That’s why she’s loitering near me; she can’t trust my signals, but she does it anyway, again. Faking it like Jesus, betting on my transformation.

Humming her tunes, scratchy songs from old British and American musicals, today it’s a pile-up of “Getting to Know You” and “Shall We Dance,” from The King and I. PhD Lily’s alter ego is a dance hall girl.

Lily moves to the stove where her homemade pub cheese soup, the meal’s first course, simmers on ‘low’ inside the stock pot. She lifts the lid, sniffs and sniffs, and then smiles her Jesus smile. Replaces the lid. (She does cook food even I like to eat.) Next, she checks on her six-layer trifle in the refrigerator, to make sure it’s setting. That’s dessert.

The string handle of the sling bag underneath my t-shirt hangs over one shoulder with the pouch resting just past one hip. It’s like a tic, the way I reach down to stroke the sweet little lumps, over and over again. The pepper pieces, all from my private garden, beg for release, tickling my thigh in their sexy, delicious way. They are Lily’s fault.

Days after I moved into her house, and after mapping her purse, I researched her office. From the bookcase with its neatly sorted sets of Horticulture: Reports from the Field, I lifted one of the copies, attention-grabbing with its neon orange cover and “Hot Splendor” printed diagonally in a loose, black font. The cover turned out to be a close-up photo of heaped-up hundreds of Thai and cayenne peppers. How I loved that title, “Hot Splendor,” and its story about “Scoville Weaponry,” a reference to the government’s secret experiments with capsaicin, the soul of every hot pepper.

I could not get the idea out of my head: peppers as a defense against enemies great and small. It disrupted sleep and sent me pacing and tumbling around my strange new house filled with British Lily’s dripping beads and fringe, and page after album page of faces: sisters and cousins, nieces and nephews, all in England and too many to ever remember.

In our shared garden, I’d grown the common green and red pepper poofs of the produce stores,

peppers passive and sweet, and I pretended to love them. But I graduated to the phallic world of the hots, sending away for seeds and cuttings, moving up and up the Scoville heat index, most of the way to the top, where the tiniest piece of pepper flesh whammed the mouth with excruciating pain. How I loved the musical names: Pablano, Cascabel, Serrano, Habanero. Delicious, smoky or sweet, bouquets like wines once you trained your tongue to taste beyond the heat.

And I did. Because I could take it.

Like this: In our group therapy at the Home, Fator liked to read out loud from Ineffable Wound, a classic in adoption literature, detailing the author’s view that there is little to no chance adopters and adoptees ever really, truly bond. This is because of the adoptees’ abandonment and the way that act alters the brain. Abandonment like some original sin.

“Why are you reading this shit?” I blasted one day, my fellow hopeless ones nodding their heads.

Fator said, sounding New York smug, the way she can, “To help you understand the worst of what the experts say about you.”

I said, “Why should I give a fuck about what some expert who never talked to me says about me?”

She said, “Knowledge is power,” or some sort of related shit.

And I said, in a head-storm so red I could hardly see, “Imagine someone stupid enough to think anything in life could be that predictable.” Which shut her up.

In my locked room this Anniversary morning, my blackout curtains drawn, I stretched out my arms and pulled on my long and black gloves, the velvet kind you wear with a gown, every finger hugged. I’d found them vintage after a long search: sweet, sweet pearl buttons at the elbows.

I laid the peppers out on my table, so perfectly clean and trusting. And ripe. Ready. I sliced with my knife, then chopped them. Into my pouch they fell: green bodies and orange, white and red, split wide open, fiery as gunshot. Girlie gunshot with a touch of girlie sugar.

They love me.

They love me not.

I have a happy vision for this party. Picture this: my hot pepper pieces inserted into my salad and ingested by the party guests. Then see it! The thump of Lily’s Waterford pitcher falling sideways and flooding the table; Royal Doulton shattering on the concrete floor; Fator and Lily, and anyone else with the bad timing to sit down as a guest, squawking like chickens, racing to the kitchen sink, fighting over the faucet and cold water. In one panicked moment, realizing that the water fixes nothing. Fator dialing 911, gasping my full, adopted name, as I escape into the dense Maine woods. A manhunt with rottweilers, the cornering, the arrest for Assault with Hot Peppers. The enhanced close-up photo of the Mental Girl against a tangle of dead trees…

I’m dressed for the party; Lily doesn’t know this. She thinks I’ll shower and spritz and change, but I will not be doing that. Sorry, “Mom.” I’m wearing these jeans and my tee, the clothes I slept in, the crotch smelling neutral in spite of me going commando. But my hair and feet and teeth are rinsed and the sleep goo picked out of my eye sockets.

Warbling Lily looks like she’s going to a wedding, with her long and baby pink, taffeta skirt and her hair pinned up all curly-girlie. With her white blouse and its ruffles like a fancy bird’s. Her body’s been

rubbed with an overdose of our homegrown and homemade lavender lotion.

“This party will be my favorite one every year!” she sings, big and loud. (And how can someone still have a British accent after more than 40 years of living in the States?)

Sometimes I watch Lily when she doesn’t know it, like now, from one edge of my chopping block. From the second drawer in the 100-year old buffet, she lifts out the placemats and doilies hand-crocheted by her British Mum in the weeks before her death. At the party table, Lily plants one placemat and one doily before each of the four seats then runs her blotched hands over each piece as if it were woven of pure gold thread.

To make Lily suffer, do this: with scissor blades sharp enough to make her bleed, slash any of her mother’s placemats or doilies in half. For extra effect, pull every dangling thread until the thing unravels to nothing. Lily will not yell. Ever. “Oh, Berta,” she’ll whisper instead. “Your anger always surprises me.” Her 61-year old chin flab quivers and later, I spot her inside her closet enjoying a good cry.

I wonder: did Jesus have crying jags?

Sometimes the image of the quivering chin freaks me so much that, if I haven’t unraveled the whole thing, I sew the shitty little parts back together and Lily says, all teeth and smiles: “Berta, this is good. It’s a very good thing to think of others,” as if I were five instead of 16. And fixable. (She never moves the doilies to another location.)

The 4th chair at Lily’s party table is one of her weird household traditions: “a chair for the unexpected,” she says, for whoever knocks on the door during the party. (Like Jesus – the door is always open 24/7.)

Except I know and she knows it’s going to be filled by Agnes, the mail lady who imagines herself every man’s pal. Agnes is 50, never married, and hates anyone female who’s more than ten years younger than she is.

Agnes will knock with a strong sense of timing. Why? Everyone in the neighborhood knows Lily’s English cooking. Agnes will smell the pub cheese soup ten blocks away. Wanting that soup will be stronger than her fear of spending an hour in my presence – me, the Mental Girl – and she’ll arrive “unexpectedly.”

I toss and toss my salad inside the cold bowl, stopping to stroke my pepper bag and knead it against bare skin.

Lily’s silver spoons and forks clink their way out of a special mahogany box, and I hope this isn’t the day she notices the missing pieces: the ones selected as overage and now part of my insurance stash – I have a right. And then the Royal Doulton plates and cups are carried from the buffet to the table. I hear the distinctive snap and click of the cabinet’s leaded glass doors as they’re closed.

“I’m cutting flowers for the table!” Lily calls to me as she removes her garden shears from the bottom drawer of the same buffet. She heads outside, the screen door squeaking open and slapping shut behind her.

One English clock chimes two, while a second clock, a plastic rendition of Arthur’s castle, spits out a feathered cuckoo that squawks his own version of “2.” I admit, there’s something silly and soothing about the clocks, just like the family-style portrait of Queen Elizabeth hanging crooked on one dining room wall. (You have to be an insider to get it.) Sometimes with the clocks I deliberately hang around for the 12 o’clock show, noon or midnight.

I peek into the dining room and take it in: yellow balloons the color of pee; matching ribbon curls

raining from every light fixture in a crazy, British show. Presents, big and little, are on the table and wrapped in gold glitter-tissue, all tied up with huge and sloppy-floppy Lily bows.

Car tires crunch up the long, gravel driveway and a driver sounds a horn; I know the horn and the engine and the Fator recipient of Lily’s particular, “Hel-lo!”

I flick the stove burner to “off” – the soup’s ready – and I place my homemade croutons around the inside rim of the salad bowl, positioning the clean, wooden serving spoons. I finger my t-shirt with the pepper pouch underneath and wrinkle it some more.

Peppers want out.

Lily and Fator approach the screen door, and their voices grow louder as they small-talk, Lily in BritishEnglish and Fator in her New York version. Then they’re close enough that I see the champagne bottle in Fator’s hand and the big, brown, grease-stained bag holding the main course: the traditional Cornish pasties from Kathleen’s Irish Café in Bangor, Lily’s favorite dive, which then became Fator’s and mine, to make Lily happy.

Fator is wearing a short skirt, which should be OK at her age but isn’t – and I’ll tell her that later – because unlike Lily’s legs, Fator’s are bulk and muscle, as in Bulgarian-style bulk and muscle, as in women who really want to be men.

The 4th chair at the table remains empty until – what a surprise – Agnes the mail lady pops up at the door.

“I parked my truck in the driveway,” she says, blinking and twitching. “I hope that’s OK.”

Lily says it is. Fator pours champagne.

“When I smelled the soup, I saved you for the end of my route.” More blinking and twitching – she’s a weasel!

At the table with all four of us properly seated, Lily raises her champagne glass. “To Berta and Adoption day, the best day of my life.” The words come out with flab-quivering and eye-watering.

Am I moved? Maybe.

Lily, Fator and Agnes lift their flutes and drink while I bump my hand up my shirt for one last fat squeeze. Then I drink; Fator (with Lily watching) put enough champagne in my glass for one good swallow - as if they can turn my clock back to virginity.

“I’ll do it,” I say when Lily’s about to rise to do the soup, and in the kitchen, I ladle the pub cheese into the appointed Royal Doulton bowls, delivering them to the table, one by one. We eat.

Agnes, who pretended not to notice my scruffiness after she walked into the house, smiles at me, blinking and twitching again; it’s all to reassure herself that she can handle me, that she is handling me and that maybe I’m not as ‘mental’ as the word on the street.

Or am I? I smile and stare at the side of her head through the entire bowl of soup.

“Did you hear the story about the Greens, the family at my church?” she blurts, edgy from my staring. She looks at anyone and everything other than me. “They adopted a child from an orphanage in Russia, and he was such a brute that by the time he turned three, Mr. and Mrs. had had enough.

“So they drove the boy to LaGuardia – you know how far away that is – and they dropped him off at the international terminal with an unsigned note and money for a plane ticket.”

Agnes stupidly rambles on.

“And in no time at all – I can’t imagine how they did it – the police figured it all out and – boom – the Greens are in court and all over the news.”

“I’ve seen it,” Fator sighs.

“Goes to show you what a serious business children are,” Lily says. “Adoption, I mean.”

“Kids can kill you, adopted or not,” Agnes argues, so that I can understand the other point of view.

“Agencies don’t always do their job. Explaining the…challenges,” Fator sympathizes while reading my murderous mind.

I up and swipe the empty soup bowls from the table and clunk them into the kitchen sink. One crock split at the bottom. Lily says yes, Agnes can take some pub cheese home for lunch tomorrow – she has a carry-bowl Agnes can borrow. (She thinks Agnes’ question is a compliment rather than a cheap way to grocery shop.)

“Thank you, Sweetheart!” Lily sings from the dining room as if I did the table clearing to please her.

Maybe I did. But maybe I didn’t.

It’s Salad Time.

My plan was to prepare one, giant Royal Doulton bowl and carry it out, complete, but plans change.

Love me. Love me not.

I dig into a cupboard for our everyday cereal bowls, each one its own roadmap of fine, internal cracks. I place four on the countertop.

Next, I hand deliver to the party table the extra serving utensils and place them center perfect. Arrange them, the way a Good Girl might.

Back in the kitchen, the four bowls are moved to the chopping block and there, standing out of sight, I retrieve my long, black gloves from hiding and pull them on, finger by soft and lovely, tingling finger. I remove the pouch from underneath my shirt like removing a skin. Peeling it away. I’m lighter…

With gloves off and gone, I drop Agnes’ salad in front of her, “Oh!” she yips, her dull eyes come to life. “The colors! Oh, my…Remember those beautiful boxes of seventy-two crayons we’d get for Christmas when we were kids? Fresh, new Crayolas in a long, gold tray? That’s what this looks like – when you first open the box.”

“Thank you!” Lily says when I don’t.

Agnes stares a while longer, practically drooling before picking up her salad fork and stabbing a hefty portion. She carries it like a haystack into her mouth.

Lily tra-la-la’s around her own salad.

Fator goes last. She doesn’t bite until twenty seconds after Lily’s first nip, and she doesn’t bite much. The whole time she’s watching me with her mouth open. (Fator is not like Jesus.)

“Bits of spice!” Agnes giggles. “Ooooo. That one got me…oh. Ouch! A good one!” Some snorts and fanning with her napkin. More giggles. “It’s hot. Isn’t it hot?” she hollers to the table.

Lily is eating, and when she’s hungry, she eats like she talks.

“Mine isn’t…hot,” Fator says as she chews, with some suspicion.

Agnes’ face blooms red blotches. Sweat beads shoot out the pores above her lip. They wet her mustache, dyeing it black. Agnes’ chair scrapes backward and she pops up. Her eyes roll and “Another one!” she moans as her hands fly to her mouth.

“Agnes?” Fator panics. “Agnes?”

The mail lady smiles as her lips swell. “It’s so…” she says, giggling again. Sweat collects at her gray and black, crooked hairline.

Lily continues to happily munch, leaving the odd little scene to Fator. Her thin trust in me is growing branches.

But the salad’s for today only – if she doesn’t get it, I’ll find a way to remind her.

Same for Fator, though she acts like she hasn’t received my message.

Because today it’s only Agnes bumbling to the sink and on cue, I – so very surprised – find the proper antidotes in the refrigerator: the cold Greek yogurt, the coconut milk. “Which one?” I ask sweetly while at her side at the sink. In charge.

But Fator is behind me. “She’s compelled,” she throws at Agnes, apologizing for me, but Agnes is having an experience. She’s inside the peppers and champagne and yellow party streamers, laughing, burbling, snorting, her whole face underneath the water.

Fator grabs the can of coconut milk from my hand and waves it close up, where maybe Agnes can see it.

And in spite of Agnes’ dripping head and oh-so-sexy piglet squeals, in spite of Fator’s growling in my direction, Lily has eaten to the bottom of her untainted bowl. It’s a sign, she thinks.

“Seconds, please!” she calls to me, her assumptions too bright, her credit to herself for today’s limited crime spree unmistakable. And in very bad taste.