All That She-Crab Soup

The bloodhound, Juliet, with her powerful nose, navigated the Nylabones strewn over the oriental rug, each having been soaked overnight in chicken broth. I watched her from the kitchen and listened for the clicking of her teeth as she chose the Tyrannosaurus rex and brought it to the corner of the living room. She held it between her front paws, gnawing sideways.

I lived with my mother in a brick house in Rindge. The house was surrounded by square parks that looked like they’d been cut from green felt. There was a cathedral in the town center, which every road led to, and a sparse cemetery behind it, with tombstones around a leafless tree. White gazebos chipped paint onto the grass and teenagers drank and smoked on their memorial benches. Wellington Park on Bullet Pond kept all the sportos busy with tennis and ballgames. Cathedral of the Pines had no walls, just pews surrounded by trees, overlooking Mount Monadnock. Stone shrines, gardens, a veterans’ memorial, and a belltower stood over weddings and hikers looking for God.

It was the year the crabapples rotted off their stems, going from firm and tart to spongey, bad-smelling lumps, and the high school marching band did not advance to regionals for the first time in twenty-four years. It was the year there was a shooting in a department store sixty miles south in which a local boy was killed, then another one killed himself on the bay of Bullet Pond, and the weather was consistently bad.

“I want chin lipo,” said my mother.

“What?” I asked.

“Chin liposuction,” she said. “I want it.” She pinched her jawline up to her attached lobes.

“That’s not fat, mom,” I said. “That’s swelling.”

“Doesn’t feel like swelling,” she said. “Does it look like swelling? Do I look swollen to you?” I didn’t say anything. “It costs four thousand dollars.”

My mother didn’t work. She’d been my father’s secretary for a year and half before they got married. Their divorce, which rocked my childhood, left her with a considerable settlement and alimony. Still, she didn’t live well, or rather, didn’t take care of herself. She put aside forty thousand dollars for my wedding, into which she’d poured her heart vicariously, and which had fallen through months earlier when me and Albert both got scared, sold our house in Enfield, moved back in with our families and stopped speaking altogether.

That same year, my father got remarried to a thirty-nine-year-old ear, nose, and throat doctor from the Dominican Republic, who’d done pageants through college and started a charity having something to do with cleft palates. Then my mother’s mother was found dead in her kitchen, having been murdered by her neighbor’s boyfriend. Of course, that couldn’t have been the source of all the unhappiness, though it didn’t help matters.

* * *

At first, for many years, it was just dinner my mother couldn’t stomach. With time and tragedy, it got worse. She went out in the mornings to Sandwich Master, where she called ahead for onion rings, fried mushrooms, jalapeño poppers, macaroni cheese balls, fried green beans, fried zucchini, mini corndogs, shepherd’s pie potato skins, half a pesto chicken sub, half a pastrami sub, shrimp po boy on ciabatta, turkey BLT on a bagel, grilled cheese with tomato, a vanilla shake, and a mango smoothie. They wrote “Stacy” on every bag along with the last four digits of her phone number. She refused help getting the bags inside, and told me to go somewhere, (to my room, back to bed, for a walk), and she’d turn on the radio.

My mother was paranoid during the eating, which I watched from the crack of my door. She started with the sandwiches: the chicken and pastrami subs, the grilled cheese and po boy, pulling the tomato out of the BLT and eating it separately, then the rest of it together. She listened to WFCR on her black portable radio, which played classical music. In the middle of a 1953 rendition of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, Dave Sears said, “Funded by you and Sun Pow Solar. More about what the sun can do at Sun Pow Solar dot com.”

My mother hunched over the food, guarding it, and remained hunched even when she drank from the two-liter bottle of warm, salted water, which aided the vomiting. She excused herself, ran the bathroom fan, the sink, and sometimes the shower, over which she could still be heard.

She came back during the two horns solo, which hummed without pistons—the kind of horns that existed during Mozart’s time—over cellos and violins, and she started in on the fried green beans, potato skins, and mushrooms, stopping once or twice to choke or touch the left side of her chest where her painful heart slowed. More salted water and more vomiting. She came back and finished the rest of the appetizers, drank the vanilla shake and mango smoothie, mixing them by pouring them back and forth into each other’s cups, followed by another bathroom trip, then she called to me from the living room.

“Anna?”

I went to the corner of my room to sound farther away, like I hadn’t been watching and listening, and called back, “Yeah?”

“Come out here, baby!”

She didn’t look how one might imagine. My mother was average weight. She kept a scale in the bathroom and in her bedroom and kept track of minor fluctuations in a leather journal, down to the ounce. Despite this, she looked bigger. She retained all her water, which made her afraid to drink any, which made the retention worse. Her mood corroded, her face and jaw swelled, and her skin paled, so that she looked like the moon—hazy, distant, and round. When she touched her arms, fingerprints stayed behind. She’d put flowers on the coffee table: a phallic, closed lily, blushing in its vase among oxeye daisies, lilac, and aster.

“Aunt Beth’s coming over,” she said.

“Today?” I asked.

“In forty minutes,” she said. “She’s been driving for thirteen hours.”

My mother’s twin sister, Beth, lived with her husband, Ernie, in Folly Beach. My mother picked her nails, then bit them. Juliet went into the bathroom, as she often did after my mother purged, and my mother yelled after her, “Hey!” Juliet came out, cowering, and went over to her bones on the rug, where this time she selected a rhinoceros, holding it in her mouth by the horn.

My mother inherited the bloodhound from her mother, who’d had bloodhounds all her life. For the most part, I cared for Juliet, soaked her thermoplastic dinos and rhinos and took her to parks where she sniffed carriages and defecated in loose, red piles. Sometimes, my mother got sick in the backyard or surrounding woods, and Juliet would find and eat it, so I had to keep a close eye. But she loved my mother, slept at the foot of her bed, and belonged to her, constantly pushing her nose into her sides and hands. Straight on, Juliet’s nose and flews took the shape of a soft, brown molar.

On the counter was a pair of saltshakers, which were painted to resemble Santa and Mrs. Claus. They, too, had belonged to my mother’s mother; in fact, she’d been murdered in front of them, and at times I thought I could see it in their eyes, full of grief and shock and Christmas magic.

“How long is she staying?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said my mother. “She’ll eat Rindge out of food.”

* * *

Beth arrived in a white Toyota 4Runner. When she got out, napkins and chip bags landed by her ankles, which were periwinkle from hypertension, and brushed by the hems of her ditsy print gauchos. My mother watched through the slats of a shutter and motioned for me to go outside to greet her.

“It’s too hot in Folly Beach!” said Beth.

“I bet,” I said, and hugged her.

“You’ve had a rough year,” she said. “Bag’s in the trunk.”

Beth waddled toward the front door, and I unloaded her damask polyester suitcase, which bulged, straining the zippers. I struggled to get it up the steps, and its plastic wheels were stuck, so I dragged it to the guest room, where my mother kept the elliptical and other miscellaneous things from their dead mother’s house.

“Haven’t seen you since the funeral!” said Beth, hugging my mother, who disappeared into her folds like a finger into dough.

“Ernie’s not with you?” asked my mother.

“Well, you know,” said Beth, “we’ve got the cats.”

She went over to the black leather couch, which was stuffed with checkered Sandwich Master wrappers. “Oomph,” she said as she sat down, putting her purple ankles on the coffee table beside the flowers.

“Long trip,” said my mother.

“It’s too hot in Folly Beach!” said Beth. “In New Brunswick, I saw—”

“Can I get you something?”

“No, no,” said Beth. “I’m taking a load off then going to the Hannaford’s. Ernie’s favorite sister showed me her she-crab soup.”

“Her what?” asked my mother.

“She-crab—” said Beth, “let me tell you, you haven’t lived.”

“Don’t cook,” said my mother. “You just drove fourteen hours.”

“Too bad!” said Beth.

“Anna doesn’t like seafood.”

“More for us!” said Beth.

“I’ll try it,” I said. My mother shot me a look.

“You’ll lose your mind,” said Beth. “The first time I had it, I creamed my shorts.”

“I had a huge breakfast,” said my mother.

“What’d you have?”

“Sandwich Master.”

“This’ll blow that out of the water,” said Beth. “You’ll be hungry when you smell it.”

Twirling in the reflection of the black lacquer rocking chair were the oak blades of the brass ceiling fan. It never seemed to make the room any cooler, but rather turned the heat this way and that.

* * *

My mother went to the guestroom where she began using the elliptical, balancing a book of yoga poses on the console, surrounded by Beth’s folded culottes and sleep apnea machine. I could hear the flywheel from the living room. Beth came back with no bags and said she got everything on her list. She found a soup pot and pie pans while I unloaded the 4Runner.

She opened a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips and propped it against the gray ceramic backsplash, eating three handfuls before pre-heating the oven and lighting the stovetop, where she rested the soup pot on the flame.

“Oh, boy,” she said.

“What’s it called again?” I asked.

“She-crab,” said Beth. “Watch how I do it and you’ll get another husband—”

“She-crab,” I said.

“It’s called that because you’re supposed to use the girl parts,” she said.

“Their vaginas?”

“Their eggs,” said Beth. “Crab roe, it’s called. I’m substituting it out.”

“With what?”

“Lobster base,” she said.

Despite Beth’s normal pace, she worked quickly, grating two celery stalks and half a yellow onion down to the nubs. She added a stick of butter to the pot, then salt and pepper from the Santa shakers, followed by spoonfuls of lobster base, which looked like jam. She stirred it with a rubber spatula, then added flour to make a roux, and cooked it off for a minute while she took out the store-bought pie doughs to thaw. She dumped canned peaches in one mixing bowl and cherries in another.

“Go ahead and pit those cherries for me,” said Beth.

“How?” I asked.

“Hold on.”

She added heavy cream and milk to the soup pot, whisking it, then added two bay leaves, brought it up to a boil, then down to a simmer. She gave it another stir, scraping the bottom and sides, then reached into the chip bag and ate three before joining me at the bowl of cherries. She pulled the stem out of one and set it aside, put the cherry on a cutting board, smashed it with the flat side of a chef knife, dug out the pit and tossed the cherry back into the bowl.

“Got it?” she asked. I nodded.

I worked much slower, and after only pitting ten cherries, Beth took my place and did the rest of the bowl. She added lemon juice, sugar, and cornstarch. She pressed the dough into the pie pans, filled one with peaches and the other with cherries, making sure there were no gaps, and asked me to cut the other sheets of dough into long, one-inch strips.

She returned to the soup, stirring, and added chicken stock, then sherry wine. She mixed in a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, and another of hot sauce. She shook Old Bay seasoning on top, which in its rust-colored mass changed the color of the soup from cream to apricot. She added lump crabmeat, claw meat, more sherry wine, then pepper from the Santa shaker who’d seen her mother get murdered. She fished out the bay leaves, sucked them clean and threw them away.

She turned down the flame then made the dough lattices on the pies, trimming the ends, crimping them closed, and brushed them with egg wash. She put tinfoil around the edges, shoved them into the oven and said again, “Oh, boy.” My mother came out of the guestroom, sweating through heather gray leggings and an oversized Keene State tee shirt.

“Smells good,” she said.

“I told you,” Beth said.

She emptied a box of cheese sandwich crackers into a bowl next to a plastic container of mustard deviled eggs, dusted with paprika like they’d sprung out of Holi.

“Hors d’oeuvres!” said Beth.

She set them on the kitchen table, and, to my shock, my mother ate. She ate a handful of sandwich crackers and three deviled eggs.

“Mom used to make these,” said Beth.

“Yeah, awful,” said my mother. “Overcooked. Too much mayo.”

“That’s why I just buy them,” said Beth. “It’s not like they weren’t made fresh. Look, I’m sure I could make them. I’m sure I could fenagle—”

“Sorry,” said my mother, and went to the bathroom where she turned on the fan, sink, and shower, but as usual, could still be heard. Beth took a breath and didn’t release it.

“That still going on?”

I nodded and said, “I guess so.”

“Poor thing,” she said. “As girls, we struggle with that. We just do.”

“She wasn’t always this bad,” I said.

“Hey, look at me,” said Beth. “I’m no walking popsicle stick.”

I watched the bathroom door, embarrassed. I could have kicked it down. I could have cut down its center like cake and seen my mother over the toilet bowl having what they call in speed eating “a reversal of fortune.”

“I’m no walking popsicle stick,” said Beth, “yet, I’m perfectly happy.”

My mother came out blowing her nose into wadded toilet paper. Juliet went into the bathroom where the toilet tank was still refilling. “Hey!” said my mother, and Juliet came back out. Beth threw her a cheese cracker.

“You alright?” asked Beth. “You sick?”

“I hope not!” said my mother and laughed.

“What were you doing in the bathroom?” asked Beth.

“I don’t know,” said my mother. “What do you do in the bathroom?”

Beth poured Bloody Mary mix into a cup of chipped ice and vodka and stirred it with a leftover celery stalk. I’d grown up with a feminine mother who wore tanzanite to bed. Now, within her I could glean the remnants of a woman, screaming for a 7 and 7 and Dior from her mitral valve.

* * *

We sat around our soup bowls, which Beth had heaped with extra claw meat and garnished with minced chives. She added more Old Bay to hers, and my mother added hot sauce. Beth was on her second Bloody Mary and my mother was on her third vodka over ice. Juliet sat by our knees, drooling onto the rug, and watched every careful bite my mother took. I put some crab on the floor and Juliet lapped it up, her collar chiming.

“We’re eating like South Carolinians tonight!” said Beth.

“Thank you, Beth,” my mother said. “This is amazing.” She looked at me.

“Yeah, thank you,” I said.

“The joy of cooking,” said Beth, as though this was something she’d come up with. “It is a joy.”

“Well,” said my mother, “we reap the benefits.”

“When Julia Child wrote The Joy of Cooking,” said Beth, “she was—”

“I don’t think that was her,” I said.

“She was living in Paris,” said Beth, “learning to appreciate food. I think of her every time I’m in the kitchen.”

“That’s where we went on our honeymoon,” my mother said. She drank vodka between each bite.

My mother only ever spoke of my father when she was drinking. I looked over at the fridge covered in photos of my mother when she was younger and thinner in jacquard skirts and stiff, floral dresses, being a wife and mother in all sorts of photogenic places. There were photos of me, too, small and round in carriages with a variation of helpless expressions. My father—

“Screw your father,” said my mother.

“Ernie took me to Puerto Rico,” said Beth. “It was very dangerous.”

“Me and Albert were thinking about Aruba,” I said. Beth and my mother looked at each other, then at me, as this was a subject I’d been unwilling to broach.

“You don’t still—” Beth began.

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

Our network of silence suspended over Juliet’s constant panting. The house was hot from cooking. The pies were cooling on a rack, and Beth had cracked the oven to let the heat out. The cherries and peaches stewed from the channels of their golden lattices. She opened two windows in the living room and beetles came in, including a June bug, which Juliet caught and crunched in her mouth.

“Why don’t you have screens in your windows?” asked Beth.

The manner with which my mother ate shifted on a second-to-second basis. She ate ravenously at times, as if forgetting where she was; at others, she only filled half her spoon, and brought it to her mouth with great care.

“I could’ve put them up for you, mom,” I said.

“You’ll meet someone,” said Beth.

“Sure,” she said.

“All this feeling sorry for yourself,” said Beth, “is why you’re still struggling.”

My mother looked into her soup like it was her destiny, then stood, sweating down her collarbones.

“I need some air,” she said.

“Oh,” said Beth, “well, the windows are open.”

“I’m taking a walk,” she said.

My mother left and Beth reached across the table for her soup, dumped it into her own and continued to eat. She took cheese sandwich crackers from earlier and crumbled them on top.

“I do feel sorry,” said Beth. “All this drama.”

“I don’t think she actually wants to date,” I said. “She hasn’t talked about it.”

“Everybody needs someone.”

Beth put the lip of the bowl in her mouth and drank from it, choking on crab. From her brown eyes came tears, and I could hear the crab in her throat clogging and sputtering, tossing around between the various pipes, and eventually Beth quieted, chewed, and swallowed.

“Wow,” I said. “That was a lot.”

“Woo!”

“Are you okay?”

She coughed again. “When will your mom be back?”

She finished the rest of the bowl in one gulp and drank the bottom of her Bloody Mary. She was still catching her breath.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

I watched Beth realize what my mother was doing. She looked away for a moment, then back at me, and stood with great trouble, stomach sloshing with soup, and hurried to the door. She tottered outside and began calling out, “Stacy!” and I followed her, saying, “She’s probably by the woods,” which she was. My mother stood at the edge of the pines, bent at the waist over a puddle of she-crab soup.

“Stacy!” said Beth, again out of breath. “You idiot!”

“I’m sorry,” said my mother. “It was really good.”

“Mom?” I said, like I was just finding out.

“Go back inside,” she said to both of us, but mostly to me.

“I can’t believe you!” said Beth. “You idiot!”

“You want me to use the bathroom while you’re right there?”

“You’re not fourteen anymore, Stacy,” said Beth. “We’re not fourteen.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Kids do this,” said Beth. “Not women. Grow up. What are you doing this for? For a sense of control? You have a child!”

“I’m an adult,” I said.

“She’s a child and this is what you teach her?” asked Beth. “You—”

“I what?”

“You something!” said Beth.

“When they found mom—”

“Don’t make it about mom,” said Beth. “She was my mom, too, and you don’t see me hurling in the woods!”

“You’re eating yourself to death!” said my mother.

“I’m no popsicle stick,” said Beth. “I know I’m no popsicle stick!”

My mother stood in brown woven sandals on red dirt, her heel weighing down the end of a twig, so that it stood straight up in the air. The trees were tall and bright, and since the sun had gone down, there wasn’t the stink of asphalt or exhaust, just the smell of grass and pine.

“And Anna’s wedding—”

“Shut up!” said Beth. “It wasn’t your wedding!”

“And then that fucking woman,” said my mother, “with the cleft palates and the Dominican Republic!”

Beth stopped, shook her head and looked away.

“That fucking bitch,” she said.

“I know!” said my mother.

* * *

Back inside, Juliet had eaten both pies, and lie on her withers and loin under the lilac and aster. My mother worked quickly. She went to the bathroom, bringing back a brown bottle, and poured peroxide into Juliet, whose fluttering eyes had come wide, and chin jerked in resistance. My mother lifted her up—all ninety pounds—and put her on her feet while me and Beth watched in horror. Juliet staggered, and came the exact look of displeasure verging on torture, then she vomited golden latices all over the oriental rug. Four times. She dry-heaved twice, gagging over her ocean of cherries and peaches, then bent her neck like a corn stalk to eat it, so my mother said, “Hey!”

“Well, Jesus,” said Beth, “don’t yell at her.” She turned her attention to Juliet. “You were having yourself a picnic,” she said, patting the crest of her neck. “You were thinking, ‘how nice of Aunt Beth to bake me some pies!’”

My mother looked like she’d been hit by a train.

Beth changed into pajamas, and in their green frills, looked like a piece of dated furniture had come alive. She sashayed around the living room asking for an extension cord for her sleep apnea machine. Through the door, I heard it breathing for her. My mother went to her room and shut off the light; she closed even Juliet out, and cried.

I put the peroxide back in the bathroom cabinet, which had beiged from my mother’s sickness. Juliet stood behind me with a cocked, forgetting head. She stood behind me, too, while I scrubbed the carpet, and finally abandoned it when it looked like it’d had enough. Juliet turned circles by the front door, and I opened it for her, trailed outside and leaned against the house.

I looked across the street where, in my mother’s first year in Rindge, an old, meanspirited couple lived. According to my mother, they became nudists, and joined a gated community in Kissimmee where they were finally surrounded by endless cock and breast.

Juliet beelined for the woods and I ran behind her, yelling, “Hey!” She bowed over my mother’s she-crab soup. There was slapping of flaccid lips, and her curtains of ears hung just below them. Her forehead made her look in doubt, and under it, her eyes, which watched my mother with sadness, which saw my mother’s mother scream in front of the saltshakers that fateful day in Laconia, in her house made of plastic.

CAROLYNN MIREAULT

Carolynn Mireault is a Leslie Epstein Fellow and the Senior Teaching Fellow in the MFA program at Boston University. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Louisiana Literature, BULL, The Westchester Review, Cutleaf, Abandon Journal, Misery Tourism, and FEED, among others. Find her most recent publications at carolynnmireault.com.