Chapter 2-2 The Kitchen
Rainwood House threatened?
We’ve met University of MD groundskeeper Marlie Mendíval and granddaughter Samantha, pondering how to tackle money troubles.
Marlie watches Samantha fondly, feeling a little envious at her granddaughter’s capacity to enjoy her own singing and dancing, even though most people would consider them terrible.
Gathering courage, Marlie tears open the hated blue envelope containing the third quarter water bill. “Due November 18, 2006,” it scolds in red print.
The shocking amount must signal multiple leaks, Marlie realizes, though she doesn’t really know. By never descending to the basement, she avoids the sight of Rainwood House’s miles of rusty pipes. “The ostrich method,” Blake used to say, with his indulgent smile—at least, at first, it was indulgent; for a while, it was a smile.
She lets her gaze travel over the profusion of plants and bright, fanciful paintings, wall hangings, and knickknacks from Mexico that adorn every wall and surface, and even dangle from the ceiling of the vast kitchen. Marlie wishes she could absorb their exuberance into her bloodstream.
She focuses on Samantha, still belting out her version of the Australian folk song. Samantha is exuberance personified, yet in the last few weeks Marlie has noticed signs of moodiness.
As if to prove this thought, the girl suddenly shuts off the player and flops down on the couch, her face screwing up in worry. “Abue, are we in the Depression, like Kit?” She grabs a book from the couch and hands it to her grandmother.
It shows a smiling girl in a cloche hat. “No, mi amor,” Marlie replies, “solo estamos un poquito short of funds this month.”
Samantha’s face clears. “I can work, like Kit did! Maybe babysit? Or…” She leaps to her feet. “Walk dogs!”
“Gracias, corazón, but you’re a little young.” Marlie moves to the couch and sits, folding an arm around the girl’s wiry shoulder. “Getting a job is a good idea, though. Keep thinking.”
Samantha bunches a fist under her chin in a theatrical thinker’s pose.
Marlie props her own head on her hand to ponder the second job notion for herself. Her bones deeply feel the forty hours she already puts in as a groundskeeper on the sprawling University of Maryland College Park campus—stooping to plant seeds and pull weeds, hoisting weed-whackers, leaf blowers, and bags of topsoil in weather usually too hot or too cold. Should she prolong her workdays with a part-time, like so many of her fellow immigrants do, including folks much older than Marlie?
She screws up her face. Even with a less grueling second job, could she bear to be a person who never sees her kid in daylight, like her own parents had become after the family moved from Mexico to Maryland when she was eight?
Marlie shakes her head. She rises and drifts around the outsized kitchen, gently picking dead leaves and brown bits from her plants, straightening knickknacks, inspecting the disintegrating window ledges. She should apply another round of putty against the cold air of approaching winter.
Marlie opens the old-fashioned round-shouldered fridge, breaks off a square of Rainforest fair-trade organic 70 percent dark chocolate. The cold chocolate makes her shiver. Hugging herself, she pictures her kitchen in the old days, full of union folks bustling, cooking, laughing, singing, arguing—everyone cozy in Rainwood House, though it had been just as poorly insulated back then as now.
Samantha whizzes over to the sink and opens the tap, which lets out an elephant trumpet-call. The girl screeches along with it, then reprises her song: “We’ll go a’waltzing, Matilda, for free!”
After a noisy gulp of water, she wheels around, face ablaze with her next idea. “Abue, how about giving musical house tours? Rainwood House will love that!”
As if in response, a droning starts up from the house’s lower depths, multiplying and deepening. Marlie pictures a tortured chamber orchestra of oboes and bassoons in the basement.
“See? Nobody else makes music like she does!”
“I know, chulita, but Rainwood House isn’t ready for public attention.” Marlie gives one of Samantha’s pony tails an affectionate tug. “Neither am I, a decir verdad. But you’re on the right track, I think.”
Samantha springs up and charges for the door. “I’m going upstairs to ask my animals! And Drunella!”
Marlie watches her granddaughter dart out of the kitchen. Was Samantha a bit old to have stuffed animals and an invisible friend as confidants?
She glances over at Sourpuss, her complaint clock. Nearly two in the afternoon. Dinner will come around in a few hours, as it does every night. Marlie can prepare two meals: boiled lentils with tomato sauce, and her rice dish, into which she also throws tomato sauce plus whatever vegetables she has on hand. She calls it Arroz a la Mexicana, though her mother would scoff. At least the sauce was from tomatoes grown and canned by Sra. Carmen, who still lived next door to where Marlie grew up in Edmonston, “Little Mexico,” a few miles from Rainwood.
Blake’s teasing voice sounds in her head, mocking her cooking. She argues back, pointing out how back then everyone liked her to sing and play the guitar while other collective members prepared the meals. “You first loved me for my singing, not my cooking, remember?”
Catching sight of her face in a little mirror framed in painted tin hanging near the sink, Marlie rolls her eyes at herself. “Still arguing with Blake, chica? You lost that fight a long time ago.”
Her eyes drop to the floor. An envelope from Samantha’s toppled paper house lies under the table. With a groan she bends to retrieve it, her sore muscles protesting the dozens of barrels of leaves she’s hefted all week. Just yesterday she asked Elmer, her supervisor, why they can’t let the fallen leaves lie there and decompose into natural fertilizer, instead of making the groundskeepers haul them away and then fertilize the grass with chemicals. He’d been so incredulous, you’d think she had proposed blowing up the university president’s house.
She straightens with a grunt and turns over the envelope. A throb traverses her temple. The handwriting is Blake’s.
She rips it open. “This is to inform you,” reads the text, printed in an elegant font on a thick, creamy sheet, “that I intend to sue you for full ownership and possession of the property known as Rainwood House, located at 45 Ruby Street, Rainwood, Maryland, under Statute…”
Marlie feels the old fog rush into her brain. She expels a fierce breath to push it away and makes herself read to the end. Staring at the letter, she shakes her head. After all these years, Blake is coming after Rainwood House, the one part of her life she has clung to after he took everything else.
She throws the letter on the floor and stomps on it in her slippers. “These chanclas are made for stomping,” she bellows, “and that’s just what they’ll do...” After a few hard wallops, she picks up the letter and tosses it in the recycle bag, its words already burned into her brain.
Yanking open the fridge by its floppy handle, Marlie spots the small plate of leftover lentils on the top shelf. Time for the rice dish.
“Sa-man-tha!” Silence. She counts to twenty and repeats her call.
Samantha's feet thump down the stairs. The girl enters the kitchen, clutching a book and a large stuffed rabbit with long ears and gangly legs.
Marlie hands her the rice jar. “Oye, chulita, ve al basement y llena el frasco. Por favor.”
Samantha drops her book on the table and grabs the big jar. “Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg!” she sings as she crosses the kitchen. With the hand holding the bunny, she nimbly opens the door to the basement and disappears.