Julia's Chocolates Read online

  “Good to see you, young lady. How is your womanly health today?” Aunt Lydia would say when she wanted to discuss women’s issues. This was my clue to the conversation topic of the day.

  During the egg-collecting I would get information on all sorts of women’s issues that Aunt Lydia had read about in The New York Times, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Forbes, Science Digest, and a whole array of obscure magazines. I would also get a lecture on the feminine healing powers of embroidery, cross-stitch, knitting, painting, and wreath-making.

  She was most fond of quoting some hippie friends of hers who published a monthly newsletter listing sage advice on how to rid yourself of toenail fungus, how to reach your inner monster, cook for ghosts, and do cartwheels naked to improve acne.

  Today’s topic was fear.

  “Fear will strangle the womanliness right out of you, Julia,” she announced, petting a chicken on the head.

  I had no argument for that. Fear had followed me for so long in my life. Being out in the country, among peace and gentleness, was making me well aware of how fear had guided almost every move in my life. And every mistake.

  “Fear will turn your instincts to mush, making you doubt the wisdom that springs forth from your uterus. The uterus, your womb, knows the truth. The uterus tells the brain. But fear interrupts that transaction.”

  She looked under a battered pink dresser, found a batch of eggs. “Fear will smush your ability to choose your life’s direction. Fear gets inside your brain like octopus tentacles and pokes into your brain cells.”

  I scooted my hand under a few ladies. No one pecked me today. I whispered, “Thank you, Hildy, Geranium, and Darth Vader.” Aunt Lydia’s funny way of naming chickens had grown on me.

  “Fear will smother your creative energy, shaking your passions into nothing but warts.”

  I was not so lucky with the next three ladies. They pecked at me, then clucked, a secret sister language all their own. “I have never liked you, Queen Titty, Dog Face, and Sabrina,” I said to them.

  “Fear will prevent you from seeing the success that can be yours.” Aunt Lydia shook her fists in the air. “It will blind you as good as someone with a fat ass sitting on your face will blind you.”

  Next she picked up a shovel. “Never, never let someone’s fat ass sit on your face, my dear. Never.”

  I nodded at her. She was right, of course. I would not want someone’s fat ass on my face.

  When we were done, the eggs collected, the chickens happy, the cats petted, Melissa Lynn and her piglets cared for, she said, as she so often did, “Let’s go and eat some pancakes, Julia. You look in need of some pancakes with lots of my maple syrup to get your secretions moving.”

  And then, as she often did, she pulled me closer to her as we walked out of the barn. But this time she said something different. “Sweetheart. There is one more way for you to conquer your fear.”

  I nodded, took a deep breath. Fear was killing me, day by day.

  “You must attend target practice more often. Stash is coming over soon to help you. We both feel that you won’t be able to hit this side of a cow’s butt from ten feet away unless you spit more bullets out of the gun I gave you. So far you’re a terrible shot. Don’t look at me like that. You are a terrible shot. You must get for yourself the killer’s instinct. My hormones are screaming that I’m failing you, my pelvic bones say that the child not of my womb but of my heart needs to protect herself better. Stash felt my pelvic bones the other day, and he feels the same.”

  I did not inquire into that particular statement on Stash and her pelvic bones.

  Aunt Lydia kissed my cheek, then whispered, “Shoot to kill, Julia. Always, always, shoot to kill.”

  I nodded.

  Shoot to kill.

  Lydia had dubbed tonight Getting To Know Your Vagina Psychic Night. Caroline, Katie, and Lara were all coming over within minutes. Lydia had cooked dinner. We were having tacos.

  “The taco shells are to symbolize the importance of filling your vagina with good health!” Lydia wielded two pans in the air as she said this, her gray hair pulled back into one long braid, stray curls softening her features. “We’ll be filling our tacos with meat to symbolize our oneness with Mother Earth, and finely grated cheese to represent the milk our breasts hold to feed our babies, and avocados for healthy wombs, and fresh tomatoes because I like tomatoes, and hot sauce to kill vaginitis!”

  I didn’t know that hot sauce could kill vaginitis, but I was certainly game to try. My vagina had been feeling much better—cleaner, I would say—since being away from Robert the last weeks. It almost felt as if it belonged to me again, and wasn’t just poised between my legs waiting for Robert’s intrusion.

  “We are also having strawberry daiquiris to release the fiery woman that lives in all of us, just waiting for a chance to escape and explore her sensuality!” She clanged the pans together three times, looking heavenward. “Daiquiris will let our femininity run wild as it should, the strawberries feeding our libidos and our lusts, since men so seldom do much for us with their teensies!”

  I almost laughed, but I was eating some of the white chocolate I’d made earlier and didn’t want to spit it out. Chocolate should never be wasted. It is a bite of heaven.

  But, I thought, Stash obviously satisfies Aunt Lydia with his teensie.

  Lydia and Stash spent quite a bit of time at her house, and often, when I came back from town or a walk, they would hurriedly rush from Lydia’s room. Stash would wink at me, and Lydia would immediately start throwing orders his way. “You aren’t to come over here again for three days, Stash! And get your tractor out of my driveway, and I need you to let me borrow your backhoe, and don’t eat all the spice bread I made you in one day again.”

  “All right, my beam of light,” he would drawl, kissing her on the cheek. “Not for three days, but I’ll see you later tonight. Be by at seven. Henry and Casey don’t like it when we’re late for dinner.”

  Or he would tell her to be at his house by six for morning omelets, or he would hug her and tell her he would call tonight as he had to go to the city for a couple of days, and then he would lecture her about locking her doors, keeping her gun by her bed, thanking the Lord at that point that I had come to stay so he didn’t have to worry about Lydia being alone. “Have you been target practicing, Lydia?” he asked on numerous occasions. “I don’t like leaving you alone, but knowing you have the thirty-eight I gave you makes me feel a lot better. Remember, shoot to kill, not to maim.”

  She would interrupt him, even as she was slapping his butt with one hand. “I don’t need you to tell me how to protect myself, old man. And I got better aim than you, and don’t think I haven’t thought about aiming a gun in the direction of your ass many a time!”

  Stash would hug me before he left, his eyes full of warmth, and admonish me to keep an eye on Lydia while he was in the city. They would kiss again, with Lydia barely pausing to stop giving him orders. “Drive slow. Don’t drive like the fires of hell are burning after your hide, Stash, you old man. I’ll see you Wednesday night for dinner. Do not be late!” She grabbed his face with both hands, tilting his head down. “Not one minute late!”

  Aunt Lydia would stand with her arms crossed tightly over her chest, and Stash would honk his horn periodically as he drove down the road. When she couldn’t see him anymore, Lydia would semi-yell, “Stash! He will not leave me alone for a second. He is one ripe pain in the petoosy. Now, what needs to be done?”

  And off we’d both charge. We’d fix a fence, clean out the Pigs Palace, as Lydia called Melinda’s pigpen, paint a shed lime green, cook up four different meals to be distributed to four needy families in town, sew new curtains, or hang flowers to dry to make bouquets and other pretty house things. Aunt Lydia let her art projects be auctioned off for various fund-raisers in the county, so she always had plenty to do.

  “When you’re sad or depressed, you might as well get something done,” Lydia always said.
“Pretty soon, you’re not sad or depressed, and darned if things aren’t done.”

  We had spent about an hour in the kitchen getting the Cheers To Vaginas Tacos ready and making a fruit salad. She called it Fruit Salad For Fruitful Women. The green salad, with shredded cheese, dried berries, and nuts was called Greens For Clean Secretions Salad.

  Like I said, it was Getting To Know Your Vagina Psychic Night.

  So, as usual, the lights were turned down low, and pink candles dotted the room. The day was warm, so a couple of windows were open, cool breezes swirling through the house.

  The dining room table was covered in a pink fabric. “Pink represents the inside of a healthy vagina,” Aunt Lydia had told me. Over the table was a centerpiece in the shape of a wreath made with red apples, dried flowers, leaves, a little hay, and a pink ribbon. Lydia had whipped it up in about an hour, and it was stunning, made more stunning by the fact that it hung by cranberry-red ribbons from the ceiling, coming to a stop about five inches from the table.

  “We’re going to get half-naked and reawaken our vaginas,” Aunt Lydia announced to the four of us, who were happily relaxed in the overstuffed furniture, drinking our daiquiris to release the fiery woman who lives in all of us and is just waiting for a chance to escape and explore her sensuality. Aunt Lydia had poured all the daiquiris into these tall, pink, curvy glasses.

  “We’re going to do what?” Katie asked, munching on another hors d’oeuvre of stuffed mushrooms wrapped in bacon. When everyone had arrived, Lydia had told us the stuffed mushroom was to represent our privacy, the bacon the outer shell of protection we all wear around our privates.

  Lara sat next to me, again in a proper, red short-sleeved blouse, her blond hair piled in a bun on top of her head. She had dark circles under her eyes and a few flecks of purple paint on her face and hands. “Reawaken our vaginas? The way Jerry’s after me, mine hardly has any time to sleep,” she muttered, although not unhappily.

  On the other couch, Caroline, whose eye seemed to be taking a break tonight, with no winking, laughed. She wore a jean skirt, a blue T-shirt, and white sandals. She had brought with her an enormous bouquet of flowers for each of us. Caroline was always, always giving.

  I thought about all the times that I hadn’t given, and should have. The neighbors who were kind to me, the old lady across the hall in my apartment building, the people I worked with, my two ex-friends that Robert had made me dump. All had reached out a hand. Some had tried to warn me about Robert. They all deserved a great big bouquet, but I had never given them one, being too wrapped up in my own problems to reach back.

  I felt like crying, but I sucked it up. What a rotten person I am.

  “I really don’t think anyone wants to see me half-naked, Lydia,” Katie said. “I don’t even want to see my own butt.” She wore an overly large red sweatshirt and baggy jeans. Her mermaid hair was swept back into a ponytail like a mermaid tail.

  “Nonsense!” Lydia bellowed. “It’s men who have made us embarrassed about ourselves. A woman’s worth should not be judged by her bodily curves and valleys! That’s what men have done to us!” She held up both fingers in the air, giving us the signal. “Remember!”

  “Men are pricks!” Caroline, Lara, Katie, and I yelled back in unison. Soon we would probably have secret handshakes and rituals. Maybe we would sacrifice a man on a spit one night. I could think of one who would burn really well.

  “A woman’s form is merely what we’ve been given to get through this life,” said Aunt Lydia.

  “I think I know my vagina as well as I want to know it,” Lara said. “It doesn’t bother me, and I don’t bother it. We exist separately except when I have to pee or have sex with Jerry.”

  “See! You just did it, Lara!” Lydia said, handing her another daiquiri. “You said that you exist separately from your vagina, except that’s not true. Our vaginas hold our powers, our passions, our secret core. They are dear to us, and we must cherish them as we would our very best friend!”

  “But I don’t want to see my best friend’s vagina,” Katie said, flipping her red ponytail behind her back. “No offense to any of you, I’m sure you all have dandy vaginas, but I don’t care to see them. Especially when I’m eating.”

  Caroline finally intervened. “Well, I think we can come to a compromise here, a give-and-take. Why don’t we all sit down at the table and then take off our skirts and pants under the table and then we can be one with our vaginas during dinner, as Lydia suggested, but we don’t have to actually see anyone else’s vagina.”

  “Good idea,” said Lara. “Let’s eat. I’m starving. Naked or not, I gotta eat.”

  “Perfect! A perfect Vagina Plan, Caroline!” Lydia approved, clapping her hands together. “Now help me bring in the meal. We’ll celebrate our vaginas without making everyone else celebrate them, too.”

  “Well, I’ll strip down,” said Katie. “But my personal vagina does not deserve any celebration. It has only gotten me into trouble. Vaginal irritation, yeast, bad sex, a baby, bad sex, good sex, more bad sex, another baby, yeast, bad sex, another baby, bad sex, still another baby. My vagina and I aren’t speaking much, but I’ll eat some of that chocolate cake you have in your kitchen that looks like this house and hope my passion and my vaginal strength come back.”

  “That is not my delectable creation, although I wish I could claim it,” Aunt Lydia answered, turning toward the kitchen. We all followed her like she was the Piped Piper. “My brilliant niece Julia made that cake.”

  As they entered the kitchen, Lara and Caroline gasped, then their heads whipped over to me at the same time, like a line of Rockettes, before snapping back to my cake. For long, long seconds everyone at the Getting To Know Your Vagina Psychic Night meeting stood and stared in wonder at my chocolate cake. I had even recreated tiny chocolate toilets and the bridge on the lawn.

  “It’s like looking at art. Chocolate art,” whispered Lara. “The pigs are incredible, Julia. They’re even wearing their names.”

  “I’m telling you!” Aunt Lydia announced. “This chocolate cake is better than foreplay. My niece makes Better Than Foreplay Chocolate Cake, that she does.”

  “Oh, Good Lord,” said Katie. “We’re not supposed to eat that, are we?” And then she burst into tears.

  Super. I had made Katie cry for the second time. I put my arm around her shoulders. A slice of chocolate cake would cheer her up. It had almost always worked for me.

  I learned as a child that baking with chocolate can take your mind off life. It started when one of the young mothers in our neighborhood, Renee, gave me an old cookbook of hers with recipes for chocolate cakes, candy, muffins, etc. She taught me how to bake.

  The walls of her kitchen were painted yellow. The cabinets were blue with handles in the shape of coffee mugs. Red tiles danced along the backsplash. She had a nice husband, three kids, two dogs, four cats, and a lizard that sat on the counter watching her all day. “I’m a hard-core Mommy, Julia. Hard-core. Want me to show you my new recipe book on making crepes?”

  Using money from baby-sitting, I started buying my own ingredients to bake when my mother was gone for days or weeks at a time. When Renee got sick on her husband’s birthday, I offered to bake the cake. I whipped up the eggs just so, melted the butter nice and slow, sifted the flour not once, but twice, mixed the dry ingredients with the wet ones a spoon at a time, then watched the cake as it rose in the pan in the oven.

  I doubled the recipe for a thick, creamy chocolate icing, then decorated the cake with swoops and swirls—not so much it would look tacky, but enough to give it style.

  Renee was so happy when I gave it to her, she blew her nose and cried. I had been sneaking out on Sunday mornings to go to church with her (her husband was a minister), and after that I started baking cookies, cupcakes, and muffins for their women’s brunches, and I became close to the women there. They, in turn, reached back out to me with clothes and friendship and food.

  And calls to Children’s Services
.

  When my mother found out what was going on, we moved again. “They think they’re better than you,” she told me, shoving a trembling hand through her hair, one eye swollen shut from where one of her boyfriends had hit her. He had hit me, too, but had used his fist on my gut so my bruise didn’t show. “You’re their project, nothing more, nothing less. They think you’re going to hell and they’re gonna save you. How could they like you, anyhow? You’re dirty all the time. You never smile. Your hair’s a mess….”

  I hid my tears as we drove away from that neighborhood, but the minister’s wife had given me something valuable to my heart and to my soul: a chocolate ticket to life.

  Baking with chocolate calms my nerves. There is something about melted, warm, gooey chocolate, and the memories of Renee’s red and blue and yellow kitchen with the ever-watching lizard that reaches deep inside of me. When I have felt despair crushing me into nothing, I have reached for chocolate with one hand, a recipe book with another.

  Chocolate, you could say, has saved my life.

  The Cheers To Vaginas Tacos, the Fruit Salads For Fruitful Women, the Greens For Clean Secretions Salad, and the hot sauce to cure vaginitis had all been eaten. The strawberry daiquiris had been drunk. I personally had three to make sure that the “woman in me” could escape and explore. We had filled our plates, slithered out of our pants and skirts under the table, and eaten, the candles flickering.

  Within seconds we forgot we were half-naked and supposed to be celebrating our vaginas and chattered away. After an hour, I let my mind swerve to Paul Bunyan. I hadn’t seen him for a week. I knew he had worked on Stash’s farm the day I met him, and the next day Stash and his workers were on Paul Bunyan’s ranch, and then Paul Bunyan apparently grabbed his great blue ox and went back to the city.

  “Got a big trial that’s going to start in a few weeks. He didn’t tell me what it’s about, but I read it in the papers. Man tried to have his wife killed. Hired a hit man. The hit man got to know the wife and liked her. Hit man told the wife what was going on. She called the cops.” Stash shook his head. “The plot is too stupid and too overused to even use in a movie but there it is, in real life.”