Cadbury Memories

            “Hey, Bea,” I called upstairs, “the mail carrier’s done with next door—you got anything quick to give her? No?”

            It’s become routine that Bea stays upstairs this time of day—reminiscent of our mother twenty years ago, though I don’t want to believe the circumstances are so mortally similar. Bea still does the cooking, mostly, and all the intangibles that keep things humming in this hundred-year-old house too big for two spinsters. Nobody we know calls us that, of course, but joke’s on them—we quite like the unaggravated life. The neighborhood kids have all grown up and gone to suburbs of their own choosing, but when they were little, they came over for cookies and coloring and even helping Bea and Mom with the garden. I’d take the train downtown and get home pretty exhausted, but nothing beat sitting out on our screened-in porch with ice tea or cocoa, hearing about everything that happened on our block that day, our house in the middle of the curve that lets us see ten front yards at least.

            Retirement slows you down, naturally, but I do long for a return to those days when people dropped in and Bea, instead of making herself scarce, warmed to every occasion. She was always a little self-conscious that there was no official way for her to be ‘retired’—no one else was going to her job, and certainly I’ve been poor at sharing the load since Mother died. We joke that I’ve finally learned to cook for us—all those aluminum trays of chicken pot pies as evidence—and that I’m far better at facing the mail carrier and the bills she always brings with a reasonable ambivalence.

            “Don’t kill the messenger,” I heard from the distance just as I reached the front door. The mail carrier—new this year, we haven’t found out her name—didn’t hear the inside joke yet broadened her smile to see that I was amused.

            “Not a lot today,” she told me, digging into the canvas bag. “Can’t say ‘junk mail’—it all pays the rent, you know!”

            “Oh, I live for those coupons, to be sure,” I replied with open hands. She put one flyer from Jewel/Osco into my right and a rolled copy of The Pickwick in my left.

            “Now, take note of the insert there—behind the front page. It says—well, you can read for yourself. Looks like the township’s cutting costs.”

            I nodded as if it didn’t matter much. After thousands of these weeklies, I guess I owed them a little something. “Hmm. Won’t break our bank to subscribe—adds a sense of having wanted it in the first place all these years.”

            “Oh, seems most folks here appreciate what The Pickwick has to say.”

            “You think they’ll all subscribe?”

            “Some will, some won’t—isn’t my business, really, though I know my load on Thursdays will be a little lighter as a result.”

            I looked at the insert again. Ten years ago, the small print made sense at half a glance. “How much does it say? Like per issue?”
            “They say there are price options when you visit their website. PayPal is usually most cost-effective. Do you use PayPal?”

            I nodded the same way. “Bea does, I’m sure. I only live here—she runs the shop!”

            The carrier seemed bemused and made her way down our porch steps. “Enjoy your reading while it’s free.”

            “Bye,” I wanted to say, but that didn’t come out. “Bea—” was my mechanical utterance, and, to morph it to fit some sort of leave-taking, I followed it with “careful out there,” as if this were an episode of Hill Street Blues.

            Then into the labyrinth the living room had become—I promised months ago that all those things would find their boxes—and quick up the stairs to inform my sister of this news. She had the television on—that at least should remain free, provided the electricity bill would be paid, as it usually was. “Bea, turn that down a minute. You know what the mail lady just told me? The Pickwick won’t be gratis anymore. Can you fancy that?”

            “Why?” It was Dr Phil’s question echoing Bea—funny how we coincide our scripts.

            “Why?” I repeated, “Why the township isn’t funding ‘handouts’ anymore? Or the mushrooming of ads per page aren’t working? Why local news doesn’t hold much value, and newspapers are dying off without nostalgia?”

            “Okay, okay,” Dr Phil was evidently more listenable than my attempt at diatribe.

            “Well, it’s really not okay. I mean, you remember when Rotary Park had those hangings and everyone was spooked? It was The Pickwick that helped set up a neighborhood watch. And when you won 3^rd prize for the largest pumpkin, how else would the township know except that you were in that centerfold. Oh, don’t blush at that—where is that issue, anyway?” I rushed out despite her objections, sure I’d find it in the stacks near the old aquarium—maybe even in it, as I was storing some ‘best of best’ clippings there, to distinguish from the mélange of cardboard boxes. Bea followed me down, deciding it was time to start dinner.

            “Oh, and I noticed they’re having a sale on Cadbury eggs at Jewel—remember how much a hit they were at Halloween?”

            From the kitchen I was reminded: “certainly not for a couple years now. But, sure, we should budget for those back.”

            “Yeah. Kids like them. Good for Easter baskets, too. Kind of makes me wonder if Jewel is trying to get rid of their springtime stock!”

            I busied myself through the scrapbook that had taken the place of our guppies and snails all those years—tadpoles, too, if kids would bring ’em. I didn’t have to quip aloud how much of a rabbit hole this aquarium would be—Bea would accuse me of mixing metaphors—and truth be told, I didn’t really care to see that 3^rd place pumpkin again, anyway. I’d rather unwrap a Cadbury which, God forbid, might even be melted somewhere deep in some heap.

            Might as well turn to the present—what this final, free Pickwick has to report. The usual articles do what they’ll do, like township elections, and how much the library will ask for and lose. That’s Pickwick’s way of saying, ‘hey, we’re victims, too!’ VFW is pretty active in our area—here’s another event they hosted, but it’s curious I’ve never seen any of them outside the five or six parades our town hosts each year. Shriners, too, go-carting in spirals that really should knock the fez off each of their heads. Haven’t seen a parade this year, though. It’s tough to go without Bea, and she hasn’t gone for years, even though the usual route is just four blocks west. I think she was put off when for Labor Day we were all supposed to bring some exaggerated prop—a plumber cuts a wrench out of a refrigerator box, a lawyer stuffs a briefcase full of papers sticking out, things like that; I just overdid my make-up and hair to look like Carol Burnett’s secretary for Tim Conway—thought it hilarious—but Bea had nothing, not even a medium-sized pumpkin. And no witty excuse at the ready, either. Gosh, that was—I won’t ask her, naturally… ten years, maybe, ago?

            But holy cow! “Bea,” this stops my blood. Better read it through first. I don’t like going through the obits—memories of Mother, whose own must be in that aquarium, but somehow more meta for Bea than for me—she’ll never look at them, even just to keep up-to-date. “I don’t know anybody anymore,” she’d rationalize, and I wouldn’t want to salt that wound, if it were one. Yet here is someone we not only knew, but gave Cadburys to. The bio spoke of service to his community in the county next door, ironic to think that he grew up literally next door, came over and colored, ate cookies, things like that. We lost him after junior high—spinsters can’t compete by then! But we really lost his family. It was when we had our Afghan hound—Baxter, who to his discredit never tried to behave and probably begrudged his exile to the back yard when kids came over. Including this now deceased man, whose cancer started even as a teenager, the obit says, when he was still our neighbor.

            The Pickwick didn’t have a way to link him back to this township except through a poem he’d sent in years ago, “for consideration—my fond recall of 2^nd grade, and failing show and tell!” Here the editor frames it as “the tongue-in-cheek that people knew him by, an understated sense of how we all are formed by serendipity, especially in the walkways of our childhood towns. His poem, then, lends a good-bye to our influence:

Some might say that second grade is

not too late to teach the skills of show

and tell; my case may be case-in-point:

I gathered nothing going to school

and thus had that to show; I told what

came to mind, and often that sufficed.

My brother and his bastard friend

advised me from fourth grade: walking

through the alley, empty-handed, they

saw my desperate need to have a thing

to show, and so they spied with me

a stone that, with imagination, glowed.

“It’s rare,” my brother said, “from Africa,

I’ve heard. When rubbed for hours

a certain way, it rivals gold”—with slang

and swears a ten-year-old conveys.

“They call it ‘rubbish’,” his friend straight-

faced. So I rehearsed that for my class.

My teacher didn’t find this funny, and

I was baffled twice as much for lack

of what the problem was. “It’s rubbish—

you’re supposed to rub it,” and I’d go

on that Africans—well, that would

have to be my brother’s piece to tell.

We slugged that out with pillows,

and he agreed that messing with my

education was not a laughing matter,

if ‘show and tell’ was dinosaured

by second grade. I asked him what

replaced, and he shrugged: “I can’t say.”

So when the neighbor’s Afghan hound

bit me on the head, and it happened on

another prep for show and tell before

my alley trek, I couldn’t say the audience

was second grade or—blast!—the nurse

who more than didn’t find this comical.

Long and short, they made their calls:

the dog pound seized the hound and

found it had no rabies, but also that

the gash behind my ear was grist

enough to call the creature quits. My

parents parried, but the cause was lost.

And now I wonder, years gone by, how

the neighbors judged my earnest show

and ad hoc tell; a million miles from

second grade (report cards disappear)

the luck that lacks some grace before

a random fall—and who recovers, after all.”

I read it lots of times—dinner won’t be ready for awhile. It doesn’t seem possible that for a final word, our jealous Baxter would come back to life to bite not only him, but us again. Even Mother, who was really quite alive and feisty, after all: she did not take that show-and-tell sitting down. I tried legalese, from what I knew, and that just made the whole ordeal worse. Bea, as I recall, retreated to the garden. She wanted to make a grave for Baxter, and even if the city didn’t give over the actual remains, there still is a marker under all those thistles.

            I tendered the chances to broach it anew, before dinner. I figured the best way to do so would be just to say: “Hey, Sis, this is interesting,” and act like a quiet town crier, editing nothing, saying all, and leaving the thing to speak for itself. I entered the kitchen and did just that. By then some of the lines I had memorized, so I could look up and inflect them as I thought would revive the memory. “I wish he’d put Cadbury memories in there,” I ventured a minute after all lines were read. Bea shrugged knowingly, I’m sure, and turned off the oven to go back upstairs. “Sleep well,” I bid her, if only an afternoon nap, and the shrug again showed me what she didn’t want to tell.

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2017)