The first piece of furniture that my parents bought when they moved into the Laurier house was an old hoosier cabinet that they found at an auction. It was, so my mother said, in dreadful shape when they found it – the oak had dried out and splintered until it was the colour of dirty snow, and when they got it home and opened the cabinet doors they found a family of mice nestled beneath the flour dispenser. The enamel of the countertop had chipped in a hundred places, and the hinges of the roll-top were so rusty that fingers brushed against them came away covered in brown. But my mother loved it, had to have it, and so they spent half of their wedding money and then another hundred dollars just to get it transported back to the house.
My father knew nothing about wood. But his father did, and over the course of that first summer they polished the oak until it shone, fixed the roll-top, replaced the counter, and let the family of mice out free into Outremont grass. My mother, who had taken to Montréal’s curio shops and secondhand stores with gusto, found an old set of glass canisters that fit into the cabinet perfectly, their sleek silver tops lying flush against the new gleam of the wood. The merchant had wanted to give her the canisters for free.
“Your mother,” my father once said, “could have charmed the pants off a priest.”
By the end of August they’d filled the house with all manner of things, some of which they paid for and some of which my mother charmed away: tarnished mirrors for the halls and the bathroom; an old mahogany bed frame with three and a half posts; a dusty giltwood sofa with a hand carved back and thin cushions that I would hate as a child. A small brass alarm clock that sat by my father’s bedside and made their room sound like the set of 60 Minutes; a mismatched kitchen dining set, graffiti scrawled along the table legs. Blankets. Sheets for ten beds. A gilt-edged set of coronation china that my mother got as a wedding gift from the neighbour two doors down, even though there hadn’t been a wedding. Pill boxes. One hundred and fifty seven hats.
But the hoosier cabinet remained my mother’s favourite piece of furniture. Growing up, I loved it too; as a child, I would drag the dining chair in front of the cabinet and climb onto the enamel shelf, then open the cabinets and stare at the canisters, at the light coating of four that settled on everything like dust. I’d turn the crank of the dispenser and watch flour fall down in soft clumps, or unscrew the spice canisters and sniff the cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger until the world smelled of cookies. My mother hung her apron on the hook that rested at the side of the cabinet – when I was four years old I asked for an apron of my own and hung it on a peg that my father, who’d learned a thing or two about tools in the intervening years, placed just below the hook.
I learned how to bake bread at the hoosier; how to knead, how to sift, how to measure. When I wasn’t baking, I made dinners, or puddings, or acted as unofficial sous-chef while my mother worked the stove. Sniffing the spices in the cabinet was a habit that did not go away.
But when my mother disappeared, the hoosier cabinet became something else. A monument and nightmare all at once. I longed to bleach the doors and toss the flour out the window, to crack the spice jars against the tiled floor and rip the aprons from their pegs. I stopped baking. I made dinners at the stove, and bought a spice rack for the counter. The aprons sat untouched.
It still sits in the kitchen; Baby does not cook, so she has no use for the thing. But Frank will not let it go. Sometimes, when they are out, I come to the house and open the cabinets so that the smell of flour dances through the kitchen. You wouldn’t think that flour has a smell, but it does. The smell is matronly and soft and old.
It will never be okay that my mother is gone. It will never be okay.
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