Tilly Washburn Shaw

Green Brownies

All during the war
father coasted our second-hand Olds down any
hill he could. The whole country on rationing,
he was saving gas, but it became a game. Suddenly
there'd be no noise and we were moving along
with the fields close by in the silence, the car slowing
each of us coaxing under our breath, please,
a few yards more. At the last moment, he'd throw
the clutch in and the motor would jerk, gag,
and begin humming again.

Those days I was
11, 12, 13, really too old to be a kid still, but I
hauled bundles of newspapers and loose cans
down the streets with the others, our beat-up
red wagon rattling over the macadam. We opened
the empty cans by their bottoms, smashed and
flattened them full weight, one after another,
then tucked the lids in and heaped them all up
into clattery piles.

Already too old but not old enough,
confused, working each Saturday now to
help my working mother, my mind often pulled
to my friends outside, while I cleaned the
downstairs alone. I dusted and oiled each piece--
my mother's desk with its secret
compartment, father's Steinway grand
from before the Crash--dawdling, making my
child's way at last to the kitchen.

In those years
of no butter or chocolate, I had to color the
oleomargarine for the family, playing with the
pinpricks of orange from the packet, that
bled into color streaks, my wooden spoon pushing
and slipping on the hard white fat, softening
it an interminably long time, until it grew
smooth lemony yellow.

Next, to mix up the batter for vanilla brownies--oleo, sugar, eggs, flour--
to which I once added on impulse
lots of bright green food coloring. This
turned them chartreuse, a shocking color, worse than
green hair, as the pan emerged fragrant
from the oven and cooled, soon to be
gobbled down entirely unnoticed by my
overgrown brothers. Unlike them, I gagged at
the lurid thing I'd made , but still I felt
proud of it--something peculiar that nobody
told me to do--that nobody scolded me for either--
come out of nowhere in the years I was still
idle, going up and down the hills
coasting, waiting for it both to begin
and to be over.