Chapter 9
OPAL
The porch coffee with Louise sat with me all week.
She'd told me to my face what Gary had told her about — that she'd quit asking him fifteen years back, learned to catch me alone at the sink, known me better than her own son knew me for the better part of two decades, and made her peace with it because at least the truth ran clean from the source.
She held my hand across the little metal table when she said it.
"It was never you being quiet, honey," she said.
"It was him being a wall. I just learned to go around the wall. "
I came away from that porch standing a little taller. And the last Thursday before the qualifier closed, I drove out to the Grange Hall for the pre-state workshop and found out what standing tall in a room felt like when I wasn't even trying.
The county extension runs the workshop every year before state — canners from four counties come to fuss over set point and headspace and whether the new low-sugar pectin's worth the trouble.
Forty of us in folding chairs under the Grange Hall's tin roof, jars and hot plates on the long tables, sugar starting to catch in the air before nine.
I've come for years. I usually sit toward the back.
This year Tansy saved me a seat up front, which I should've taken as a warning.
Tansy's a dozen years younger than me, came to canning late, near quit twice. She grabbed my arm when I walked in and steered me to the front like I was somebody, and before I could get settled, Mrs. Pfaff was up at the front table with a pot of quince going stubborn on her.
Mrs. Pfaff's run this workshop twenty years. Learned it from the woman who ran it before her. When Mrs. Pfaff talks, forty canners write it down.
She was losing the fight with that quince. It wouldn't sheet. She had a thermometer clipped to the pot saying she was at temperature, and the jam saying otherwise, hanging off her spoon in a thin stubborn drip that wouldn't fold. She frowned at it, and the room watched her frown.
Then she looked up, out over the forty of us, found my face in the second row, and said, "Opal Deene. Come up here and tell me what this quince is doing. You've got better hands for a set than anybody in four counties, and my thermometer's lying to me."
The whole room turned. Forty faces. I got up — didn't decide to, my legs just took me, the way they do when the work calls — and went to the front and took the spoon out of Mrs. Pfaff's hand.
I didn't look at the thermometer. Never do. I dipped the spoon and lifted it and let the hot quince run off the edge, watching the last of it hang and not fold.
"It's not the heat," I said. "Quince has got the pectin, it's just slow to give it up, and your thermometer's reading the syrup, not the set.
Pull it off two minutes, let it settle, then test cold — saucer in the freezer, drop a spoonful, push it with your thumb.
If it wrinkles, it's done, and I'd bet it wrinkles the second you take the heat off it and quit chasing the number.
" I handed her back the spoon. "Trust the sheet over the thermometer.
The sheet doesn't lie. The thermometer's just guessing at what the sheet already knows. "
Mrs. Pfaff pulled the pot off the burner.
Fussed a minute, put a saucer in the little freezer under the demonstration table, waited, made the room wait with her.
Nobody breathed. Then she dropped a spoonful on the cold saucer and pushed it with her thumb, and it wrinkled up like skin, set clean and firm, exactly the way I'd said it would the second the heat came off.
She looked at it. Then she looked at me over the top of her glasses and said, to the whole room, "Write that down.
Not what the book says. What she just said.
Trust the sheet over the thermometer." She said my name again so the newer ones would have it.
"That's Opal Deene. You want to learn a set, you watch her hands, not a gauge. "
Forty canners wrote it down.
I went back to my seat with my ears ringing, but ringing different than they'd rung in the Piggly Wiggly baking aisle. That had been the ring of a floor dropping out. This was the other kind. Tansy was grinning at me like I'd hung the moon.
At the break we stood by the coffee urn with our little cups, and Tansy said, loud enough for the women near us to hear, "You know she's why I didn't quit?
Twice I about quit. Burned two batches of peach and cried in my kitchen and said I'm done, I don't have the hands for it.
And both times this one showed up with a jar and sat at my table and showed me the sheet off the spoon till I got it.
" She bumped my shoulder with hers. "Opal Deene taught half the young canners in this county whatever they know. Half of us would've quit."
The women nodded. One I didn't even know well said, "She judged my daughter's 4-H the year Marcy took reserve. Told her exactly what to fix. Marcy took the blue the next year on Opal's note. Kept it in her recipe box like scripture."
I stood there holding my little cup of bad coffee.
My name ran through that whole tin-roofed room and out into four counties on the mouths of women who'd sat at my table.
One household in the whole state had never learned to say it, and I'd spent thirty years thinking that one household was the world.
Later, when the others had drifted back to their chairs, Tansy stayed by the urn with me and said, quieter, "Can I ask you something? You've had the hands all these years. The ribbons. You could've been up front at this thing a decade ago. Why'd you always sit in the back?"
I turned my cup in my hands. I'd been getting this clear all month, alone, so I could say it plain when the asking came.
"I kept them in a drawer, Tansy," I said.
"Thirty years I let the drawer do the arguing.
Never once put one on the wall myself." I looked down into the coffee.
"I waited to be announced. That part's mine.
I stood back and waited thirty years for a certain man to look in my drawer and carry it out into the world for me, like a prize is something somebody else is supposed to pin on you.
He never did it. But he didn't nail the drawer shut either.
I put my own ribbons in the dark and then blamed the dark for being dark. "
Tansy was quiet a second. "That's a hard thing to say about yourself."
"It's half the thing. The other half is his, and I'm done carrying his half. But the drawer — the drawer I chose. And I'm done choosing the drawer."
"You could've been Mrs. Pfaff," Tansy said. "You know that? Ten years ago. Running this whole thing, forty women writing down what you say. You had it ten years ago and you sat in the back."
"I know it," I said. It didn't sting the way she maybe thought it would; I'd already had the sting, alone, in my own kitchen, over a month of counting.
"I can't get the ten years back. But I can quit giving away the next ten.
That's about all the fixing a woman my age gets to do, and it turns out it's enough.
It's the drawer opened. It's my hip off the door. "
Tansy looked at me a second, then reached over and squeezed my arm hard, the way she does, and didn't make a speech about it, which is why I love her.
I drove home from the workshop but didn't go inside. I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop and the entry form for the state qualifier open on the screen, the fee sitting in my checkbook, the deadline three days off.
I filled it in slow. Entry class, strawberry preserves. Number of jars. The fee — thirty dollars, which I'd told myself for six different years wasn't worth it. I wrote the check out that night, my own hand, my own account.
Then I got to the line that said NAME AS IT SHOULD APPEAR IN THE PROGRAM, and I stopped.
For years, on every jar, I'd printed O.D.
Small. In the corner. My name folded down to two letters so it wouldn't take up room.
I looked at that program line a long time.
It's a strange thing, how heavy a name gets when you've spent thirty years shrinking it.
I'd told myself for years it was modesty.
It wasn't modesty. Modesty's a thing you do out of a full cup.
What I'd been doing was making myself small enough to fit in a house that only had room for one name, and calling it manners.
I typed Opal Deene. The whole thing. Then I looked at it and thought about the case in the front window and the thirty years in it, and I let it stand — first and last, the way you'd read it off a headstone or a marriage license, a whole woman's whole name going into a program that would be printed and handed to strangers down in the capital who'd never once mistaken my work for anybody's punchline.
Opal Deene.
I was reading it back to myself when I heard Gary's truck in the drive.
He came in fast, a little out of breath, holding my jar lifters up in one hand.
"You left these," he said. "At the Grange.
Mrs. Pfaff called the house, said Opal forgot her lifters, so I—" He stopped.
He'd heard something coming across the yard that made him come in careful.
"There's about eight women out there loading their cars," he said.
"They were talking about you. Somebody said, that's the Opal that fixed my quince, and somebody else said you're the best set of hands in four counties.
One of 'em said her daughter took a blue on your say-so.
" He set the lifters on the counter, slow.
"I stood out there a minute. Didn't want to walk in on it.
I just — I stood there and listened to a parking lot full of women say your name like it meant something. "
"It does mean something," I said. I turned the laptop around so he could see the screen. Opal Deene, full, in the program line. "I'm entered. Paid the fee. That's my name."
He looked at it, and for once he didn't reach for a word to cover it.
He'd been standing in the dark of our own front yard listening to the world say the thing he'd never once said, and I let him stand in it.
I didn't rush in to smooth the air the way I always have.
I let it stay heavy. He could carry his own share of a heavy room for once.
"State's in nine days," I said, and turned the laptop back around. I didn't ask him to come. I'd quit asking. I just let him hear it, and let him stand in the doorway with my forgotten lifters, on the outside of a room that had been saying my name without him for thirty years.