by Stephanie Kaplan Cohen
When Father was working late, or he and Mother were going out, we ate in the kitchen. I often had the company of a book. This night I was the last one. My two sisters ate while I was at a piano lesson. My older sister went off to a Girl Scout meeting.
I was deep into Nancy Drew and The Case of the Missing Marble Statue and couldn't wait to find out how she solved the crime. Finished with my dinner, I pushed the plate away and stayed at the table, head down, engrossed in the last chapter
"Clear the table," my mother said.
"In a minute, Ma. I just want to see how this turns out."
"Now," she yelled. "Now. When I tell you to do something, I don't want to hear ‘in a minute.’"
"Okay, Ma, I’ll be right there."
Her words registered dimly, as a background murmur to the excitement of the girl detective in terrible danger. As Nancy pushed the slumped over criminal behind the drapes in the museum, hoping the police would arrive before he came to, she began to scream.
Not Nancy, my mother. Her blue eyes flashed. Sparks came from her. Her whole body quivered. She screamed about how tired she was, how bad I was, how terrible all her children were. She screamed so loud I didn't understand all the words. But she did get my full attention. Especially when she said if I wasn't going to help with the dishes she knew what to do with them.
She picked up a red dish, one of a multi-colored set of Fiesta Ware, and hurled it across the room. It landed behind me against the beautiful soft blue tiles which were the walls of our kitchen. It shattered. I sat there, rigid, not moving, looking at my mother.
She was a windmill of fury, arms grabbing plates.
"Is this how you want to do the dishes?" she screamed, throwing two more.
I stood up as tall as a ten year old can stand. "Yes," I yelled. "This is a good way to do the dishes." I smashed my dinner plate and glass on the floor. Then I ran across the room and joined Mother at the kitchen sink which was piled with dinner things.
We threw plates and glasses toward the walls, the floor, the stove, until shards of bright pottery and glass carpeted the floor. The dishes were done.
The windmill shuddered, took a deep breath and turned back into my mother. "I'm going to the movies," she said. "Clean it up."
"I will not," I shouted. "I will not." I left the kitchen and went to my bedroom. I put on my pajamas, got under the covers with Nancy and tried to read. I couldn't. My body was shaking. I cried. I slid down in the bed, buried my head in my pillow and sobbed myself to sleep.
Next morning at seven, as usual, our mother woke us. I was as late as I dared to be before I walked into the kitchen. Everything was spotless, without a sign of the night before. We never spoke of it again.
A Note from the Author About this Story:
Thirty years after this story took place, my sister Margaret asked me how I thought she --- only four years old --- felt about this incident. I didn’t even remember that Margaret was there because, as she reported to me, she had hidden in the closet when the dish throwing started. It was traumatic for her as well. When I wrote this story, the paper nearly smoldered as I described what had happened. I expected the word processor to catch fire from the heat of the emotion I felt as I recalled that evening.
It was only when I committed the story to paper that I realized how terrible my behavior had been. Not only had I the audacity to smash my mother’s dishes, but I refused to clean up the mess when she asked me to. I was sure God wouldn’t let me make it through the night. After a fitful sleep, I woke up the next morning to find that the mess had been cleared. It was almost as if it never happened.
To this day, I sometimes feel that the entire ordeal might not have actually taken place. I have no external evidence: no shards of china, no bits of broken glass. Like James Frey, Lawrence of Arabia and other memoirists, I have only my own testimony to prove it occurred. As I wrote the story, the details came back as clear as a home movie.
Years later, when my mother was very old, she lived with me. We talked about many things from the past. But the one subject that neither one of us had the courage to discuss was the dish throwing incident. I do not write for the purpose of catharsis, but sometimes it happens.
This delicious story made me wonder about the houses on our block. Did each house have a thrilling story behind it? And what about the people living there now? What stories were unfolding after the children I knew went home for dinner. In this poem, I touch on some of the fantasies that my young writer's mind concocted.
