Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

My mother had many schemes for businesses and many dreams about their success, and many of her schemes and dreams got as far as the dinner table. While my father and I ate, she would smoke and talk, nervously, laying out a plan for her audience of two, full of enthusiasm, until, in most cases, a moment came when her face fell, and she finished her proposal with her eyes down, as if the scheme were there on the tablecloth in front of her, falling apart before her eyes, shattering like the fragile ribbon candy that, at Christmastime, she liked to put out in dishes decorated with images of evergreen trees.

Sometimes, though, a scheme survived the dinner-table test. Some survived because they were the sturdy, boring sort of undertaking that my mother never would have enjoyed pursuing, like a window-washing service, and others because she put them back together out of the broken bits and held them together with the force of her determination, as she did with her plan to make ribbon candy, package it, and ship it far and wide as Ella’s Ribbons of Dee-lite.

I think it was obvious to all of us, even to her, that ribbon candy must be made in a factory by machines especially designed to extrude sugar syrup in a continuous ribbon, fold it back upon itself uniformly, and snip it off in lengths that fit into boxes. I know it was obvious to me, because I was a watcher of industrial documentary films, which were in those days purveyed to youngsters via television on Saturday mornings, as entertainment. I knew, to name the first examples that come to mind, how Coffee-Toffee soda bottles were molded, filled, and packaged; how the glass for the bottles was made; how the caps for the bottles were cut from sheets of metal and printed and fluted and lined with a thin disk of cork; and how Coffee-Toffee soda itself was made, though the films stopped short of initiating me and the other early risers into the mysteries of the secret process that gave the soda its inimitable flavor; and I knew that all of these processes required intricate machines with precision parts that were polished to gleaming brightness and operated with uncannily accurate timing in a handsome industrial dance.

Looking at her, smiling, tossing out ideas for a name for her ribbon candy, I felt the weight of her inevitable disappointment. I was certain that she was going to find out that she couldn’t make ribbon candy, but she certainly wasn’t going to find it out from me. Because I understood very well from personal experience the heavy emptiness that filled one’s heart when the words “you can’t” were spoken, I rejected after only the briefest consideration the thought that I might tell my mother that she was up against something that she probably could not accomplish without the aid of intricate machines. I would not play the dark angel of defeat. She wasn’t going to hear a discouraging word from my father, either. He had given up trying to dissuade her from her schemes because he couldn’t stand the aftermath. He had learned to let her fail rather than telling her that she would fail because the gloom that settled over the house when she merely failed on her own was a lighter and briefer gloom than the gloom that followed his telling her that she couldn’t do what she yearned to do, and so instead of saying “You can’t make ribbon candy,” he just shrugged and said, “Why not give it a try?”

TRY SHE DID. I came home from school one afternoon to find the kitchen glazed with sugar. Threads of crystallized sugar crackled when I pushed the back door open, and they webbed the room, running along the walls, across the countertops and the stove and the sink, across the faces of the white metal cabinets. My mother had spun a sugar cocoon like one of the sugar eggs that were sold at Easter.

(These eggs were molded in two halves, a top and a bottom, the joint cemented and concealed by a decorative squiggle of colored sugar paste, but before the halves were joined a tiny scene was constructed inside, made of images printed on stiff paper, cut and mounted with candy syrup that held them in place to make a diorama, sacred or profane, the buyer’s choice. I don’t know how all that was done; if there was an early-morning documentary on the process, I missed it.)

My mother seemed not to be aware that I was in the kitchen. She was drizzling hot syrup from a can in which she had punched tiny holes, waving the can over a strip of aluminum foil that she had rolled out onto the floor, making intricately layered swirls and squiggles along the foil. When the sugar crystallized, she would have an edible action painting.

While I watched, something came over her, something that I might, at the time, have called sudden inspiration — or a fit.

(Now, I think I would call it the untrammeled expression of her true self and her aspirations for that self, a girl who lived within my mother and still expected that someday she would actually become the woman she hoped she would become.)

She began swinging the can beyond the limits of the foil so that the swirls of syrup looped onto the floor. This seemed like an inspired idea to me. The completed candy, when trimmed around the edge of the foil, would seem to have no edge but the edge that had been imposed on it by the knife, would seem to have been cut from a candy composition without limits. I liked the artifice of it, and I admired her style. Her swings grew wider and wider, though, and began to go far beyond the foil. As she swung the can in wider arcs, she began to swing herself, to dance with the can, swinging and swaying with it.

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