Pink

When I woke up this morning, I was somewhat alarmed to find I couldn't open my left eye along with my right. As I suspect is true with most of you, it is my normal routine to open both at once, but today, my right eye opened, while my left remained shut, cemented in place by unpleasant goop that had solidified to my eyelashes in the night. Unpleasant goop is, luckily, water soluble, so I was able to steam my eye open in the shower, a little like prying a stamp off of a letter. When I looked at the eye underneath it, I found it was pink, which, it turns out, is the first sign of pink eye. Yep. I'm a walking conjunctivitis bomb just waiting to induce plague.

In the meantime, I've been working on a couple of short stories for a friendly bet I have going with a friend from the program. Since neither of us had been writing over the break, we agreed on New Year's Eve to write a story in a week and then hand it to the other. Didn't have to be a good story or a long story or anything. It just had to be a story. So I wrote a story about a skillet. Here it is.

Skillet

Every night before my mother made dinner, my father would pull a copper skillet out from behind all of the other pans and wave it over the other kitchenware in an act of ritual blessing. The food processor, the stick blender, the metal and rubber spatulas, the Japanese knives that promised to julienne a tin can should we ever choose to include one in a salad, and so forth. Every cooking implement we had, dad would wave the skillet back and forth above them, his lips moving in slow, silent prayer. My father wasn’t religious in any other way. He loathed church and aspired to atheism (though I think a smidgeon of belief still lingered from his Catholic upbringing), but this one thing he would do with ritual exactness at the same time and in the same way every night.

The skillet was an ancient thing, thin looking and dented all over from years of use. If you glanced at it in a junk shop, this skillet, you’d take it for junk destined for the melting pits. But its weight in your hands had presence, the way a stone left by a glacier has presence on a landscape. The skillet was handed down from man to man on my father’s side for ten generations, and possibly more. It had been hammered out of a single chunk of copper that one of our relatives had dug from the ground and purified in his own smelting pot. The date hammered onto the underside of the pot read 12 February, 1706, and next to it, faded almost to the point of illegibility was his name, Lazar. You could just make it out by tracing your finger along the bottom. Since then, the skillet had passed from hand to hand in our family.

There were a thousand stories surrounding this skillet. The family favorite—not mine, but the family’s—was that the skillet had cooked Marie Antoinette’s last meal, a plate of savory crepes, when she was held away from the mob at the Tuileries. I always thought that story smacked of a tall tale. How would this skillet have escaped the mob in Lazar’s possession or his son’s or grandson’s after the revolution? And anyway, who the hell was Marie Antoinette that she should eat crepes while the people around her made due off root vegetables? The best story about the skillet was its inclusion in the accidental death of my great-grandfather’s cousin Albert. One October evening, while pregnant with their third son, his wife Alana woke in the middle of the night in need of something to get her back to sleep. She was bringing a pot of milk and sherry to a slow boil in the skillet when someone grabbed her from behind. She wheeled around, grabbing as she did so the only thing she could think to defend herself with, that being the skillet, and smacked the person behind her in the skull with it. Cousin Albert died of a concussion in St. Anne’s hospital later that evening. The impression of his head is still visible along the bottom edge of the skillet to this day.

Since that night, it was considered taboo in my family to use the skillet as a cooking implement. My great-grandfather refused to use it out of deference to his cousin (it was all he could do, in fact, to convince Alana not to sell the skillet for the scrap money), and the tradition continued after that. Stripped of common use, the skillet took on a kind of religious power. When family would come to visit, they would ask to see Lazar’s skillet and they would hold it up in the light and run their fingers along the name on the bottom and the dent and the spot of oxidation that people in my family insist is remnants of the sauce from the Widow Capet’s last meal.

There was only one meal I ever saw cooked in the skillet. Beef liver, thinly sliced and sautéed rare with red kale and garlic—allegedly Cousin Albert’s favorite meal, which I always thought spoke poorly of Cousin Albert—followed by crepes suzette. Dad cooked this meal once a year, on Valentine’s Day, and in the event that there was a birth in the family. Afterward, he washed it and dried it and held it out to us to inspect before he set it back into the place where it lived year-round, at the back of the cabinet.