By
Rodney Merrill

I thought Ma was my own birth mother until I was about twelve years old. And why wouldn't I? When in one of her buoyant moods, she boasted that my good looks, smarts, generosity, even my willfulness was owing to her side of the family. When she said that, my heart always raced and my face flushed warm with pleasure. Later I would realize that this praise was as much a swipe at my father as a pat on my own sweet little head. My father later cudgeled me with "the facts of the matter" in a rash and spiteful act of revenge.

One day, while digging around in my bedroom closet, I noticed an unfamiliar box sitting on the top shelf. Opening it, I found old report cards, school photos, crafted Valentine cards, and traced-hand Thanksgiving turkey decorations. And a birth certificate for a Rodney Lewis Young, mother Francis Webster Young, father Otis Hugh Merrill. And an unfiled petition for Dorothy Merrill (Ma) to adopt me.

In a fit of nighttime despondency, I asked my brother Mike if he would feel the same about me if he found out I was adopted. A day or two later, my father commanded me to sit in the dining room, then bellowed these "facts" into my face: When I was about a year old and he was off to war, my birth mother took me to the babysitter and never came back. My so-called "real mother" was trash, he said, and if he ever saw her again he would rip her heart out just to spit in it.

I suddenly felt very alone. Ma and my oldest sister Mary were abruptly no blood relation to me at all. Mike, Dallas, Dolores, Timmy, and Patty were half related. And I found myself most related to my father, a man who could not stand the sight of me.

That was later. Before that awful day, when Ma would claim my pleasing qualities as her own, I would smile and watch my shoes etch shy circles beneath my feet. Those were savory moments.

When she was wounded in some way, though, Ma didn't remember all my lovely traits from her side of the family. She accused me, instead, of being "just exactly like that no good, drunken, half-breed, skirt chasing, son-of-a-bitch-of-a-father." It didn't seem to occur to her or to me how absurd it was to say such things to a little boy.

Ma lived in a world of extremes. Sunshine or total eclipse, buttercup oasis or endless desert, a 4th of July parade or a vigil for the dead. Hers was a brutish world of butting heads, of bullying and being bullied. She called us, her children, vile, accusatory names. She blamed us for her misery and slapped us and kicked us and broke our bones for it.

Funny thing: that isn't what frightened me most. It was when she threatened to run off while we were at school. "One of these days, when you least expect it," she threatened, "you'll come home and I'll be gone. Then you'll wish you'd treated your old Ma better."

When I think of it now, I have to laugh. Her harangue sounds like a Monty Python spoof on something from Dickens or Hardy. But it wasn't funny then, not in our small world governed by the whim of enigmatic giants whose desires and responses were too erratic for us to grasp. In this world, the wholly unthinkable might, and often did, happen.

You might think we'd gladden at her threat of leaving. Not so. At least she was somehow vested in us. Our father was not. He came home only after bar closing and then only to eat, to terrorize us, or to spawn. When he wasn't amply amused by us, he laid his coat and hat somewhere else. If Ma disappeared, he'd have given us away or swapped us for a case of Budweiser (except for Poop, my younger brother but my father's first "real man's" son).

But there was something more. If you could've seen Ma's swollen lobster hands, worn raw from scrubbing our laundry on a washboard, seen them pass over a bowl of flour, shortening, and milk, transforming it into two dozen puffy white biscuit babies. Watched the biscuits swell up and put on a cap of summer tan. If you just could've been there, you too might have forgotten yourself and stared, mesmerized, and believed for the moment that she could feed the multitudes and convince the doubter to walk on water.

It's not just that her biscuits were heavenly to a hungry boy; it's that she was heavenly while making them. Though she sometimes looked that way to me when she was making her homemade spaghetti and meatballs, scalloped potatoes, or macaroni and cheese, there was something special about baking powder biscuits. When I saw her setting up her magic table, I sidled up to her as close as I could and watched, spellbound, as she unraveled, step-by-step, yet another work of magic. It was the closest I'd ever been to seeing something made from nothing, a frog changed into a prince, or lead transformed into gold.

She laid out two large glass bowls, and, in one of the bowls, placed her biggest sifter-the one with the wire crank with a red painted wooden knob about the size and color of a cherry jawbreaker. Next to the bowls and sifter, she placed a tin of shortening, the box of salt, a measuring cup, measuring spoons, a long-handled wooden mixing spoon, a fork, and a large glass tumbler. Then she lit the gas oven.

She had to get down on her hands and knees, light a match and place it near the oven burner (the pilot light was never fixed after it broke), then reach up with the other arm, stretching as far as she could to find the oven knob and turn it. There was a hiss, a startling whoosh, and the oven was lit. If I was there, I got down on the floor and placed the lighted match next to the burner. That way, all Ma had to do was turn the oven knob when I gave her the word.

It was important not to get confused about when to turn the knob. If it was turned too soon, the oven belched a huge fireball. More than once, I was flash-burned on my hands, arms, and face. It singed away my eyebrows and eyelashes and the front half of my hair. I reeked of burnt hair for days. My hands, arms, and face, especially the rims of my eyelids, smarted like an all-day sunburn. Before I started helping, this happened to Ma with some regularity.

Ma measured out, a cup at a time, 5 cups of heavy plaster-like white flour into the sifter; then, by cranking the little red handle vigorously, changed it into pixie dust before it fell into the bowl. She re-measured the flour by transferring it, one leveled-off cup at time to the other bowl, then set the remainder aside for later.

Next, she prepared two large baking sheets by scooping out a gob of solid white shortening with her hand and repeatedly rubbing it over them until it was persuaded it would be happier as a clear liquid. She sprinkled the surplus sifted flour over the baking sheets, then picked up each sheet in its turn, and, holding it at a slant, gingerly tapped the higher edge, turned and tapped, turned and tapped, until the flour dwindled from an avalanche to a thin even powder as it tumbled across the baking sheet.

Sometimes, we played a funny little game in which the principal object was not to let on that we were playing it. Ma would catch me watching her and, pretending not to notice, watch me watching her. She smiled then, oddly shy, and I knew that she knew how much I admired her. Once in a while, when I sensed that she knew that I knew that she knew, I couldn't resist smiling back.

I got the feeling, at such times, that Ma was a pathetic fairytale beast waiting for someone to see through the dragon with the lobster claws and the madhouse hair so that she could finally transform into.Into what? Donna Reed, I guess, or June Cleaver.

When my father caught me mucking around in the kitchen, he cursed at me. "Get the hell outside," he yelled, kicking me in the buttocks to help me on my way, "Spend some time with boys who want to grow up to be men." Or he pinched my buttocks hard and jeered: "You'll make someone a good wife someday, sweetheart." I harbored no illusions of him ever transforming into Ward Cleaver.

When Ma finished dusting the baking sheets, she measured three tablespoons of baking powder and a teaspoon of salt and broadcast each over the bowl of sifted flour. When she wasn't rushed, she ran the whole thing through the sifter again; otherwise she just reached in with both hands and tossed the mixture a few times. Then she scooped out a cup of shortening and plopped it in the center of the flour mixture, working it quickly with her fingers to break it into smaller chunks without melting it. She worked these smaller chunks with the large fork until only floured pellets remained.

Then she cleared away everything no longer needed and floured the counter. Then she sniffed the milk.

You had to sniff the milk. The refrigerator was off so often that milk might sour; though, with nine mouths in the house, it rarely did.

The refrigerator wasn't broken. In fact, it was in fairly good shape. It just wasn't paid off. When we fell behind on payments, as we often did, our creditor gave us the choice of having a coin-operated meter on it or having him repossess it. We had to feed the meter a steady stream of quarters or the refrigerator clicked off.

There were rats in our fire-gutted attic. Nine of us were stuffed into three bedrooms: one normal-sized and two closet-sized. Some of us slept on lawn chairs. Others slept stacked in army bunks like jerky in a dryer, breathing the gagging stench of fetid feet and farts, armpits and crotch, a humid stench so thick you could taste as much as smell it. But to me, that meter box was a symbol of our place in the world. A stranger brought it into our home. A stranger who entered our home at his will to collect his quarters. And to gawk.

I got the feeling that he saw us as just one in an endless series of mirror-to-mirror images of our neighbors and their neighbors and their neighbors. Children spaced about a year apart, each with a home-butchered haircut sticking up in the back and clothes a year behind their growth. A stubble-faced, slack-jawed man staggering around the yard in a filthy shrunken T-shirt that doesn't cover his hairy paunch or the bearded crack of his butt as it creeps from the back of his grease-splotched and tattered jeans. The sleeve, though, manages to secure a pack or two of cigarettes. The cigarette, always dangling from his face like a smoldering proboscis, allows him to gesture with one hand while sloshing a beer can with the other. It's only a matter of time before he thrusts the beer can to his face without remembering to first remove the cigarette. A haggard and disheveled woman, built wide and low, scuffing about the place in frayed slippers and a house frock so threadbare that her silhouette is cast in detail whenever sunlight enters from the other side. Because she rises at 5:00 each morning and seldom gets to bed before midnight, she totes a cup of coffee everywhere, even when she's sitting on the commode. Her face turns childlike when she recollects her last visit to the beauty parlor or how sweet her husband was to her when they first met. It's only a matter of time, though, before she gets a black eye "for saying something stupid." The kids will have to run to the corner market and beg the owner to call the police because they have neither a phone nor a dime.

There's no fooling the collection man. He knows normal people don't have meters on their refrigerator. Their hair doesn't stick up in the back. Their pants are long enough to reach their shoes. And their shirttails cover their asses.

So you had to sniff the milk. If it was sour, there was the whole business of how to get some fresh. Pockets to search. Pop bottles to gather and redeem. Neighbors to solicit. Grocers to beg.

If it wasn't sour, Ma measured out 13/4 cups of milk and splashed it into the dry ingredients, then briskly swirled the soggy mess with the big wooden mixing spoon. This part reminded me of a magician swirling a magic wand inside a magic hat. Presto! Chango! Rather than pulling a white rabbit from her hat, Ma pulled an immense white puffball of dough from her bowl. She mashed it into the flour with her fist, then rolled it around, mashed it again, quickly, three or four times, then dusted the top with flour. She grabbed a rolling pin from the drawer under the counter and gave the dough a quick roll to the North, a pass to the South, East, West, then dipped the glass tumbler into the flour bin.

Her clumsy ham-colored hands, the same ones that I had seen club a man to the ground with a single blow, now powdered with flour, became light and nimble. They flitted here and there like fireflies across a meadow's night sky. The tumbler seemed to nestle, voluntarily, under the thumb and first three fingers of her right hand, allowing her upturned pinky to direct it as it floated across the counter and insinuated itself upon the waiting dough with only a feathery twist of her wrist. As the tumbler fluttered upward again, it seemed to draw her left hand under it to break the baby biscuit's fall. While the tumbler returned to pick up another load, the left hand made its way to the prepared baking sheets, lightly tossing its biscuit from finger to finger to tap away any excess flour before tucking it into place and swishing back under the tumbler in the nick of time to catch another, again and again, until all 24 puffy white critters were placed in neat little rows.

If she wasn't in too big a hurry, Ma would take a half-step back and help me to help her cut some biscuits. They never turned out as nice as hers. I didn't dip the tumbler in flour often enough, I guess; they refused to leave the tumbler. The prying and shaking required to emancipate them distorted them into ellipses, parabolas, cysts, and hat-like objects: something you might expect to find cocked on the head of an exotic seaman ashore on leave.

"Never mind," she'd say, "A hungry stomach's none the wiser," and in they went. After a twenty-minute tanning, two dozen tall bronzed beauties and beasts emerged, ready to be smothered in butter or bacon fat, ready to be devoured, if there was a paycheck that week, in the company of corn-on-the-cob, mashed potatoes, and sausage gravy.

Forty years later, I bear upon my body and mind, the scars of Ma's blind rages. When she slung me toward a wall so hard that her grip ripped the clothes and some of the skin off my back, then kicked me while I lay crumpled on the floor, I could feel my back sting with the bleeding of torn skin and feel my brain swim around inside my head. Yet, I rarely cried out because of pain. After a certain amount and intensity of physical hurt, you numb to more. When I cried out it was because I could not grasp why she hated me when I loved her so much.

Forty years later, I occasionally make a pan of baking powder biscuits. And while I retrace her steps, I remember how the only mother I ever knew savagely beat me and assaulted me with hurtful names. But, almost as soon, I am overcome by the elegance and splendor that prevailed upon her while she was making biscuits. And the shy smile that crept across her face when she caught me being wowed by her. I remember that she let me cut a few biscuits and let me bake them even when they looked like sailor's hats and tumors.

I sometimes believe, perhaps because I need to, that when she was making biscuits, Ma somehow entered a special state of grace that lifted her above washboard-bitten hands, tattered frocks, and the alcoholic brutality of my father. In that elevated place and moment, she was more herself. And, for a moment, she loved me absolutely.

Rodney Merrill was born in 1950 in Haverhill, New Hampshire and lived there and in numerous locations throughout Worcester County in Massachusetts. After graduating from high school, he made a drive-for-ride deal and set out for California with $10 in his pocket. He is married to Kate and they live in Astoria Oregon. His second loves are writing and sociology. As you might expect, he specializes in capturing sociological truths through personal essay.

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