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Quoting The Dead
Maine, 1970
“Problem?” Phoebe walks into the kitchen, drawn by her roommate's cry of exasperation.
“I can't find the recipe I want...” Carrie-Ann is flicking desperately through her notebook, without any of the usual reverence that she displays when she holds it.
“What is it you're looking for?”
“New England Clam Chowder.” She tosses the book onto the table in frustration.
“It's no big deal, honey... I can do a run down town for soup if that's what you're craving.”
Carrie-Ann looks at Phoebe like she's crazy for a second, then calms down.
“It's not that,” she explains. “It's this cookbook – I wrote it with my mother. Everything in it reminds me of her, every recipe has a specific memory. I can read a list of ingredients and hear her voice, dictating them to me.”
Phoebe suddenly understands – Carrie-Ann's pregnancy, her impending motherhood.
“You must really miss having someone around to give you advice,” she says quietly, nodding to Carrie-Ann's bump.
Carrie-Ann reaches into her pocket and pulls out a slip of card. She hands it to Phoebe – she studies the dark blurs for a second before realising it's a scan photo.
“I got this yesterday,” Carrie-Ann whispers. “It just brought it all home, you know? This is really happening, and I have no fucking clue what I'm doing.”
“Why did you go alone, Carr? Why didn't you say something, I could have gone with you.”
“Don't know, really. I guess I thought it wasn't that big a deal. I was wrong, as usual.”
Phoebe looks at her friend's face, at the look in Carrie-Ann's eyes that she's never seen before. Then she picks up the leather-bound book from the table, hands it to her friend, and says;
“Right then, clam chowder. I'll help you look.”
Feeling suffocated during the wake, which was being held in her mother's house, she looked at him and for a second travelled back in time. They were kids playing on the swings in the park across the street; her mother was out of sight, but definitely there somewhere. Then she was brought back to reality with the touch of a mourner's hand on her shoulder; “I'm so sorry for your loss.”
Desperate to feel a little less alone, she dragged D upstairs for five and a half minutes of rushed, tearful sex. As soon as it was over, he vanished and she rejoined the grief party. Less than a month later, Carrie-Ann was sick one morning and realised with a sense of panic that she had missed her period. The one person she told (Phoebe) suggested that it was stress, that her body didn't know how to grieve. But her body knew.
Everything made more sense after that. The morning that her mother had brought her into the kitchen of the family home, and told her that she was going to teach her how to cook.
“Why?”
“Because you can't cook for shit,” had been Dorothy's reply. “You moved out months ago, and I bet you've turned on the oven less than half a dozen times.”
The truth in this statement made Carrie-Ann feel something akin to childish shame. So she agreed to come home twice a week for cooking lessons with Dorothy. Now she knows that this was her mother's way of preparing her for the loss – maybe the only way she knew how.
These days, Carrie-Ann looks to the cookbook whenever she is having a crisis or just feeling like shit. It's something between a Bible and a security blanket – while her culinary skills are still basic at best, and she rarely cooks at all, she finds comfort in re-reading the ingredients and directions. Today, in the midst of a particularly crappy mood, she digs through an old shoe box of photographs until she finds the one that has been visible in the corner of her mind for the last couple of nights. A picture taken by her father, of Carrie-Ann and Dorothy, during one of those cookery lessons. It's a candid shot; neither of the women knew that he was standing there, desperate to try out his new camera. Carrie-Ann stares at the Polaroid for what feels like forever, before sliding it between the slightly yellowed pages of the notebook, and closing the cover, running her fingers lightly over the dark brown leather like it is something sacred. Her very own Book of the Dead.
“What is this?” Carrie-Ann's voice makes Phoebe's eyes snap open. For a second, she imagines guilt in Phoebe's expression, a dash of contrition for lying on her bed, taken away somewhere, while Carrie-Ann cooks. Then she reminds herself that she insisted on making dinner tonight, and Phoebe doesn't do guilt.
“It's the Dead.”
“What?”
“The Grateful Dead. Oh come on, Carr... are you honestly telling me you've never heard of them?”
Carrie-Ann gives her a blank look. Phoebe rolls her eyes, and gestures for Carrie-Ann to join her on the bed.
“This is their American Beauty album. Close your eyes for a second.”
“I can't, I'm halfway through cooking dinner.”
“It's Thanksgiving for a few friends, not feeding the five thousand. You can spare a second.”
Carrie-Ann sighs, leans back further onto the bed to make herself more comfortable, and closes her eyes. At first she feels kind of dumb, sat in mock-meditation, listening to the soft voice of a man she will come to know as Jerry Garcia. Little does she know it, but three years from now she will meet a man who toured with the Dead as a roadie, and they will end up married in a Vegas chapel, him the stepfather to an illegitimate child, her the bride of an ex high school dropout. But for now, she immerses herself in the innocent pleasure of the music.
“Get up, you lazy little zoot.” Where the hell did that come from? Carrie-Ann sits up, eyes open now, but she is the only person in the room. That word, that nothing word, had only ever been uttered by her mother; a random sound she used to make when she was trying to avoid swearing. It takes Carrie-Ann a full minute to realise she had said it herself. Following her own direction, she casts the bedclothes aside and stands up. Her belly seems to be growing at the speed of light; she is definitely bigger than she was when she went to bed last night, and she hadn't even been able to stomach much of the dinner. Not that there'd been anything wrong with it; it was actually one of the first meals she ever cooked all by herself that was any good.
She forgoes a shower and settles for a thorough wash, then brushes her teeth briskly, humming the same nonexistent tune that had always drifted around on the warm air in the family home. Going back into the bedroom, Carrie-Ann puts on her new dungarees, the ones that resemble clown clothes but feel great around her swelling body. Then she picks up the leather notebook and a pen from the bedside table, takes them to the window seat, and sits down. She finds a blank page, about two thirds through the book, and begins to write.
Yesterday I cooked Thanksgiving dinner for a group of friends who less than a year ago were nothing but strangers to me. It's odd, how life can turn out nothing like the way you imagined it. The boy I fell in love with as a kid turned out to be a waste of space, and the girl who I thought was the biggest waste of space in the world turned into possibly the best friend I will ever have.
Last night, after dinner was over, I lay on my bed and listened to a record by a band called the Grateful Dead. When you are born, I will play it to you properly – but until then, maybe you will be able to hear it from where you are inside me. There's so much I can't wait to show you, so much I want you to learn about. I wish you could have met your grandmother. She was a hardass, but the best kind. I have another three months to wait until I can hold you in my arms. I'm going to pass that time by experiencing as much as I can, whether it's walking down the street in this beautiful town of mind, marveling in the colours of the autumn leaves, or driving through the countryside, listening to Johnny Cash on the car stereo and finding a little bit of beauty in everything.
Carrie-Ann looks down at what she's written, and concludes that it sounds a little hippy-ish. But she doesn't mind that much; she's never claimed to be a good writer, and this is the best way she can find to say how she feels at this exact moment. Maybe tomorrow she will read this and scribble it all out in favour of some more eloquent, moving passage. But it will do for now. She slips her scan photo between the pages, right next to the picture of herself with Dorothy. Then she closes the book, for a little while at least.
Author's Note: This story would never have been written if I hadn't heard the song 'Box of Rain' by the Dead and had my own hippy-esque revelation. Mine was brief, and this piece is the only result... I'm back to being my cynical self now. Carrie-Ann wasn't ever a character I particularly liked, I prefer the laid back Phoebe. This is almost definitely a one-shot - a series set in the Seventies does not appeal to me!
