Kitchen. Chicken. How alike they sound. The Baby can’t imagine one without the other. The bright kitchen is where Mommy lives and the Baby knows to look for her there. “Mommy! Mommy!” she cries as she runs in from the dark, empty rest of the house. She finds her and also the horror of the dead chicken left Koshering on the drain board of the sink. It’s Friday and all its blood has to run out so it can be cooked for Shabbos dinner.
Linoleum patterns the kitchen floor with big squares that improbable pink flowers are floating in, though black patches have been scrubbed out of it over the years. Once the Baby thought you could pick pieces of sunlight up off the floor, though she was never quick enough. The kitchen is her playpen. Mommy continues to cook or iron as she sits the Baby down on the floor before the sink and takes out the big pot and the little pot and some wooden spoons for her to play with. With a hollow, dull thud, the Baby hits the outsides and hisses circles around the insides, as if she too were cooking. When she is tall enough, the Baby can pull herself up to standing by holding onto the edge of the sink. Sometimes Mommy warns her, “Don’t get crumbs!” and makes her finish her bread and butter leaning over it.
Farther into the room is the big kitchen table, a slick red and white-checkered oil cloth spread over it. The table has its head against the wall. Boxes of cereal, salt, and sugar in a glass bowl are set here, whatever doesn’t fit in the cabinets above. Available only is a bottom and that belongs to whoever is eating at the time. The family comes and goes when they’re home, Mommy making different food for them all the time. The bottom of the table is where she, the Baby, sits down now with a white-bread sandwich on her plate. “Do you want an eggie?” Mommy asks but the Baby doesn’t.
A smaller white enamel work table, worn because it has been everywhere the family ever lived, is by the sink. Mommy cuts vegetables here and makes crusts for pies. She takes up a big rolling pin and rolls and rolls. The silky dough flattens as wide as a pillowcase, so elastic it folds over the wooden pin without sticking. The Baby likes to stay nearby. Delicious leftover dough sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon goes into the oven after the pie comes out, especially for the Baby. In the table’s single drawer is the silver they give out at the movies, a whole set though they don’t really match.
On Tuesday, ironing day, because Monday is washday, blankets and sheets are wadded up and spread over the enamel table, softening the surface for the hot, heavy iron to rest on or go over, smoothing wrinkles out of hankies and pinafores and shirts. When the Baby is older Mommy will show her how to iron a shirt, back to front because a man wants to make a nice appearance. The tip of the iron follows the points of collars and enters into all the intricate crevices as if the shirt might be the flattened insides of an ear. From experience the Baby knows how hot the iron can get and not to touch it again. A burn the dark shape of a triangle marks the top sheet from when Mommy stopped and set the iron down once in a hurry as water boiled over on the stove.
At the right side of the room is an open door and the curved stairway to the cellar where the ice box is kept, stairs the Baby fell down rocking the little wooden chair Daddy bought her. Later, a refrigerator with a pebbled surface will be wedged between cellar and pantry doors, and in their old age, Mommy will store in it the lamb stew or chicken soup meant for half a week’s dinners, fat congealing on the surface and oiling her and Daddy’s lips after it’s heated. By then the strong iceman will no longer be needed to heft a block of ice downstairs on his shoulders.
This afternoon as she runs in, the Baby tries to ignore the salted chicken on the drain board in its pimpled skin, blood running down the drain. When Mommy first takes apart the brown butcher paper, golden eggs are exposed, like glazed-over eyes that stare up at her, and giblets in their shiny tubes of guts. It has been explained that the eggs could have been born as chicks if the mother hen was not killed to make supper.
Before the horror of the Shriner’s parade the Baby never knew where supper came from. That day, and Mommy took her, a giant chicken with yellow and red feathers pranced down the street. But something was wrong. Something was missing. No eyes or beak, just flapping wings and feet going in two directions and a fat body in between. “Where is its head?” Gone, she suddenly realized, and felt for her own head as if it too might detach. She began to cry.
“Stop it. You’re a big girl now,” Mommy said. “It’s only a man in a chicken suit.” And the Baby knew she had been tricked about where supper came from all of her life so far.
Mommy had a lot to do with chickens. Once she twirled one around her head three times. It was supposed to be alive to take on all the sins of the year at Yom Kippur, but she bought a dead one from the butcher and used that instead. In their old house, Mommy had a live chicken as a pet, but that was before the Baby was born, and she was sorry she never got to see it. She was told it laid dainty brown eggs and lived in the back yard. A little red Bantam hen, and friendly, and its name was Banty. It ate corn from Mommy’s hand. But it used to get out and scratch in the neighbors’ lawns. They complained, “This is America. We’re in the city, you don’t live in the shtetl anymore,” and Mommy had to get rid of it.
An odor of percolated coffee, raw fowl, even linoleum polish is thick in the air of the kitchen. And in the rain, the smell of softened paint on the white wooden chairs that you can scrape and pill with your fingertips. A slop bucket is under the sink where juiced orange halves are thrown after breakfast and later, the parts of the chicken they don’t eat, bills, feet, feathers. The Baby doesn’t like the odors from this bin and tries never to be around when it is opened.
The dregs of coffee are part of the bad smell in the bin. But early in the day the coffee has a delicious aroma. It’s what the Baby rises to. A coffee grinder is mounted on the wall of the attached, unheated pantry. Mommy wears the baby’s big brother’s red Spartans’ baseball jacket to go in there to grind the beans. The sound as she turns the handle of the grinder is often enough to rouse the Baby from her bed on the second-floor, without Mommy needing to come and shake her out of sleep. The pantry, sometimes called the shed, is an overhang with gray-green shingles, and the door has to be locked because from it, wooden steps lead down to the alleyway shared with the back of 11th St.
The Baby can stand on a stool, look out the narrow window, and see into other people’s pantries. At night when only dark is out there she is afraid of robbers entering secretly while the house is asleep, also ghosts or monsters. Even in the day, just a knock will scare her, but it’s only ever the neighbor next door needing something, or a peddler. For horse-drawn carts pass through the alley, and the loud cheerful voices of produce sellers hawking their wares, “Hey, I got fresh spinach, fresh tomato!” Or umbrella fixers who also sharpen kitchen knives on a big sparking wheel the Baby daresn’t get close to. One of the family’s two milkmen, Abbott, also approaches from the back alley with his wagon and clomping white horse.
But there is another milkman who comes on other days to the street in front of the house in the blue, early light. He drives a truck and parks it at the corner. Then he walks up the block, swinging the metal cage of glass milk bottles, and whistling so no one thinks he is a robber. “Yo, Martin!” Mommy calls in her loudest voice to get his attention and make him stop and bring us our milk, topped with its plug of yellow cream, or to take away the rinsed empty bottles from earlier in the week. Otherwise, if she doesn’t see him, she will leave empties on the top step, and he will make a trade.
For a long time the Baby thinks the name of the milkman is Martin. But one day he pulls up before their house in his clean white truck. By then she can read a little and sees that Martin is the name on the side of the truck, and that it stands for the company that makes the milk. Anyhow, this milkman has brown eyes and crew-cut brown hair. He wears a jacket and pants the white color of milk, and looks just like the chiseled wooden peg of a milkman who fits in the milk truck passed on to her from a neighbor boy. He is a neat, pleasant, perfectly shaped man like the toy figure. He is what Mommy calls “fine,” meaning very American-looking.
Because she trusted him, it was Martin Mommy asked to take her pet hen back to the farm where the cows are kept. Anyhow, Banty would have been too small to make much of a meal, so maybe she did get to the country and they allowed her to scratch and run around a big field in exchange for her little brown eggs. The Baby likes to think of her there still, living out her life.
The stove beside the enamel table, the one tonight’s chicken will cook in, is also white enamel. It is old-fashioned, pot-bellied like a fat person, with black burners, and it burps and the gas hisses when Mommy turns it on. A few times, the Baby remembers, when Daddy has been gone for a long time and Mommy doesn’t know if he’s ever coming back, or if the Baby has been very bad, Mommy runs to the stove with tears in her eyes. She says she will stick her head in the oven, “take the pipe,” as she puts it, and opens the door wide and does.
But then pulls herself out of it without turning the dial.
“Kitchen/ Chicken” appeared in The Diamond Cutter’s Daughter: A Poet’s Memoir (Princeton: Ragged Sky Press, 2021)
Elaine Terranova has published eight collections of poems, most recently, Rinse (Grid Books, 2023) and two chapbooks, as well as The Diamond Cutter’s Daughter: a Poet’s Memoir (Ragged Sky Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares and other magazines. Her awards include the Off the Grid Poetry Prize, a Pew Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, the 2024 Maurice English Poetry Award, and a Pushcart prize.