Magnify

­I am hungry for one of my grandma’s enormous chocolate cupcakes, so sweet they made me dizzy. During the warm summer months, she stored them in the refrigerator under waxed paper. I would slide one out, take a huge bite, and gaze with intense satisfaction at the imprint made by my teeth as they had penetrated the thick layer of caramel icing. It’s a family joke that had Grandma written down her recipes, they’d all have started the same way: 1 C. lard.

I sat once at her kitchen table, pen in hand, ready to write down the secrets to her cooking, but she was vague. “How much cocoa do you use?” I asked patiently. She waved her hand. “Oh, some, not too much. You’ll know by the way it looks.” It went on like this for a while before I gave up. And now nobody knows exactly how she made any of her signature dishes.

I stare at the crumbling black and white photo of my grandma and me that I keep on my desk, taken when she was in her late 50s and I was about 10. We are standing in her backyard on a blazing hot July day. Grandma is holding a copy of Good Housekeeping, folded in half so she can fan herself. Despite the heat, she is wearing heavy, laced white shoes with chunky heels and sheer stockings. Her legs are thin, but her middle is round and solid. Her hair is mostly white, with a few shots of dark. She is smiling slightly, but she looks tired. She has her arm tightly around me; her hugs were as legendary as her cooking.

The day that photo was taken, she had undoubtedly prepared one of her huge roasted chicken suppers that we ate promptly at noon. Grandma raised the chickens, and I helped her catch and prepare them for cooking, which may be one reason I’m a vegetarian today. My mouth still waters at the thought of her thick homemade noodles, creamy mashed potatoes with salty, golden gravy, and fat lima beans swimming in butter.

I would have stayed the night and woken the next morning to the rich aroma of Grandma’s coffee. My parents did not want me to drink it; everyone knew back then that it stunted your growth and made you jittery, and I was neither naturally tall nor calm. Grandma worked around that rule with a breakfast concoction she called “coffee soup.” She crumbled Saltines into a soup bowl, filled one of her thick blue willow mugs with half a cup of the potent brew, and added fresh cream until it turned a rich, golden brown. She poured that over the saltines and topped it all with a generous layer of white sugar. It was delicious and, technically, I was not drinking coffee.

My desk holds another photograph of Grandma, taken when she was in her late teens, just before she married my grandfather. Her hair is dark and smooth, and pulled back from her face. She wears a scarf tied loosely around her neck, and she is tall and trim in a long black skirt with matching stockings and shoes. She wears a grin that suggests she knows a secret. A good one.

She was 19 when she married my grandfather, and her first child was born shortly after. Married women in our family seldom worked outside the home, so Grandma surprised me when I was visiting her while I was in college, by telling me that she’d once been offered a job baking pies for the diner at the small rural airport near her home.

“Your grandfather wouldn’t let me do it. I’d have been good at it. Made some money, too. Don’t you make that mistake.” Well, not likely, since I’ve never actually baked a pie, but I knew exactly what she meant. Still, my grandparents raised two children and their marriage lasted, more or less, for 60 years.

After my grandfather tried to start the car with a screwdriver, he was placed in a nursing home, and Grandma moved to an apartment. She got her first microwave and, when I visited, she took me by the arm and pulled me over to her refrigerator. She opened the freezer compartment, and it was filled with red-orange Stouffer’s boxes.

“I make one every night,” she said, with a huge smile on her face. “Unless someone takes me out to a restaurant.”

Later, she moved to an assisted-living complex, and her only complaint was that there was no food available after dinner. I began to send her tins of buttery cookies filled with sweet jams. She loved them, and hid them in her dresser drawer, underneath her slips, so she wouldn’t have to share them.

The last picture I have of her was taken in that apartment. I carry it in my wallet. Her hair is pure white, and she’s hunched over. She had resisted attending the exercise classes, insisting that she would be required to lie on the floor and put her legs over her head. I still recognize her smile, but now it is both private and distant. Early one November morning not long after that photo was taken, she died quietly in her sleep.

I still think about her almost every day. Once, on a lark, I went to see a psychic. Grandma showed up, called me “Honey,” and warned me that my thin dishtowels were a fire hazard. This made no sense, really, but the kitchen and all things in it had been her domain. The very next day I found myself at Bed Bath and Beyond purchasing the thickest dishtowels I could find. Just to be safe. ­

Melissa Ballard is a lifetime member of Weight Watchers, for reasons that should be clear after reading her essay. She works at Oberlin College and finds time to write personal essays in the evenings and on weekends, because she does not cook.