Maman's Meringue

My maman could bake stars into her madeleines.

She taught me her secret recipe when I was eleven years old, and nodded and smiled and dreamed about blonde haired Samuel from school while she browned butter til it was flecked with gold and zested lemons so yellow they looked like sunshine. She folded butter and vanilla and eggs into flour white as snow, and tried to pass along magic to someone who did not care.

When they were finished, she called me downstairs so I could be the one to pull them out of the oven. When the door opened, the smell of butter and sugar and warmth flooded the little kitchen.

“Careful, ma belle,” she said, “You don’t want to startle them.”

I pulled the tray from the hot maw of the oven, and placed it on the counter. They looked like golden seashells, and I wonder what would happen if I did in fact startle them.

"Ils sont magnifiques,” Maman had said, and wrapped her arms around my shoulders. “Just like you.”

I had pulled away from her, tired of her smothering affection, of the way she called me beautiful when I knew I was far from it. I resented her touch, and how she expected me to want to be just like her, and find life’s purpose in butter and sugar and flour.

I was eleven years old and my arms were too long and my face too round and no matter how much I brushed my hair by the end of the day it was a mess of tangles. I was on the cusp on womanhood, skinned knees meeting the start of breasts and hormones and confusion.

I didn’t understand my maman and she didn’t understand me. When she was my age she was already beautiful, with ringlets instead of tangles and lips like rose petals. People would stop her on the street to exclaim that she looked like une mannequin, and that one day she surely would be walking down the red carpet.

As it turned out, Maman did walk the red carpet when she was sixteen, and was a model for a mid-level agency in Paris until one day she met an American professor twice her age in a cafe who saw right through her beauty and straight to her intelligence. This being seen was sexy enough for her to quit her fashion career before it had really begun, and moved to America with him when his sabbatical was over.

It was in America, and actually when she was pregnant with me, that she fell in love with baking.

Maman told me the whole nine months I was in her belly she couldn’t stand to eat anything that wasn’t made of flour and sugar and butter. When everything but the croissants at Village Bakery downtown made her sick, she realized in order to preserve their bank account she had no choice but to learn how to make them herself.

So began the saga that started as the hobby of a woman who went from the high velocity life of a model in Paris to a housewife flirting with boredom in America.

She baked all the French carbohydrates of her youth and my father’s belly grew right along with hers. In the old pictures of Maman, she was all collarbones and pearl-drop spine and cheekbones that could cut you. The Maman I knew was all pink cheeks and round hips and edges that seemed blurred, until it was hard to tell where she ended and where the space around her, that sometimes seemed larger than life, began. Maman was still beautiful, though. I knew that before I really knew what beauty was in the way that she was something I just wasn’t.

When I was five, and went to kindergarten, Maman would pack me peanut butter and jelly and fruit snacks and apple sauce. She packed juice boxes and notes that said je t’aime ma petite fille and, tucked into napkins, eclairs that were sweet as sin. She would drop me off with a kiss and a millefeuille as flaky and creamy as a dream. When she picked me up at 1:00, she would wrap me in her soft arms and press a fresh macaron into my little palm, just hours old.

Her love for me literally filled me, and it filled my father too until I think he became sickened by all the sweetness, and started spending more and more time away from home, or sequestered in his office working on lesson plans.

It wasn’t until I was an adult, and Maman was gone, that I learned about his string of affairs. That Maman knew about them, but stayed for me, even after I had moved away, just so I always would have something solid to come back to.

When my father told me about them, shamefaced across the table and holding the hand of the mistress he was going to marry, I threw my water in their face and left the restaurant. I thought about my Maman, who gave so much love to me and my father that maybe she became empty inside. Maybe that's why she baked and ate, to fill the void inside that was made by my father’s betrayal, and my indifference.

Maman swallowed a bottle of prescription pain medication early in the morning when I was twenty-five years old. She had a herniated disc in her spine, and had been prescribed medicine for the pain. When I first found out, I was convinced that it had been an accident, that she had been half asleep and mistook the dosage, that surely she would not do this horrible thing on purpose. My father found her, coming home, I would later find out, from a night out with a woman who was not his wife. She was lying in the kitchen, he would tell me, and in the oven a batch of chocolate croissants were burning, smoke peeling out from around the door and the fire alarm screaming.

In my mind I could not come to terms with the intentional nature of her act with the seemingly accidental scene that had been painted in my head. She had been dressed, my father told me, with a full face of make up. She had gotten up early to make croissants, the radio was on. Someone doesn’t just decide halfway through an ordinary morning that they are tired of being alive, and decide to hit stop, right then and there.

My father had grimly reassured me that there was no way it was accidental.

“She took the entire bottle, Paige,” my father said. “That doesn’t just happen.”

What doesn’t happen, I thought, was someone as happy and warm and full of life as Maman deciding to end it. In the days after, I thought obsessively about the croissants. I pictured her hands shaping the dough, I envisioned her putting the tray into the oven, setting the timer. I pictured her turning on her little radio that she refused to give up and sitting down, the smell of butter and dough slowly filling the room.

On the day she did it, the sun was shining and the sky was perfectly clear. Maman’s kitchen had huge windows that let in the sunlight, so that early in the morning the whole room would have been butter yellow, the wooden countertops shining gold. I couldn’t imagine being surrounded by that much beauty and making the decision to leave it all behind.

I wracked my brain for why she would have done it. The day before, she had called me, but I had been busy at work. I was a guardian ad litem, recently graduated from law school and filled with righteous excitement to help make sure children were protected by someone, even if that someone was not the people who should be the ones keeping them safe.

It couldn’t have been that though, because I had been declining her calls since I was eighteen, and went away to college. I would promise to call her back and never get around to it; in the rush of building my own life it was easy to forget about the person who made me.

Later, when I found out about the affairs, I blamed my father. Surely it must be over a decade and a half of knowing she was not enough to keep the man she loved from breaking his vows. Laying next to someone for years knowing they are betraying you would be enough to make anyone depressed.

That word, depressed. It was what my father said and my grandparents and my friends and my therapist.

Depression looks different for everyone, they said.

Depression is no one’s fault, not yours, not hers.

She might have been depressed for a long time, Paige, after all, how well did you really know her?

It was the last question, posed by my therapist with the graceful ability mental health professionals have to destroy you with just a few words.

How well did I really know Maman?

I had never shared her love for cooking, or folk music, or long walks on rainy days. I never made an effort to learn French after she had given up teaching me once it was clear I did not have an aptitude for the language, or the desire to learn. I never asked her about her childhood, or if she wanted to take me to her home country. When I was seventeen, I decided to go gluten free, and refused to eat the pastries she baked fresh every day. She eventually began to sell them at local coffee shops, and her business was successful, but in retrospect I am sure that her daughter eating a single pastry that she made would have mattered more than all the money and praise she began to acquire once people tried and fell in love with her goods.

I justified it in my head with the fact that Maman didn’t really share any of my interests either. She could have cared less about going to the gym, or shopping, or the legal system. She never asked to get her nails done with me, or walk around the mall on a lazy Sunday. She would, however, always ask me about my day, admire my nails, ask to see my purchases, and listen intently when I talked passionately about under-represented children in the courtroom.

She may not have really understood me, but at least she tried to fjord the river of differences between us, but there was only so far she could make it on her own. I pictured her knee deep in the current, waiting for me to see her trying, while I stood on the opposite bank, completely oblivious.

So how well did I really know her? I knew she loved dawn and bluebirds and flour and butter and sugar and guitars and me. I knew movies couldn’t make her cry, but music could. Before that morning I would have said that I knew she would always be there.

Maman was estranged from her parents for most of my life. They never forgave her for leaving her career, and them, behind for a man. Even the knowledge of a grandchild was not enough to convince them to visit us, and my father never could be convinced to take another sabbatical. Looking back, I wonder why Maman never took me alone and went back home to visit her parents. I wonder if perhaps she was ashamed. If they would see the round, Americanized woman with her selfish, bored American daughter who didn’t care anything about her culture, and not recognize their beautiful, disciplined daughter who left them all those years ago.

My father told them about the funeral out of respect and obligation, but I don’t think either of us expected them to come. So on the hot summer morning where the flowers wilted and the trees hung heavy heads while

I stood sweating outside the church next to my father, I was shocked to see my Maman, older and thinner and with less laughter in her eyes, walking towards me on the arm of a white haired man. I had blinked, sure I was imagining it, and when I looked again I knew it could only be my grandmother.

She came right up to me, flesh and blood who had never met but were inexplicably connected nonetheless. She wrapped me in her arms, and although she was all bony edges where Maman was soft warmth I melted into her embrace and began to sob. She held me for a long time, and when she finally pulled back there were tears in her eyes.

“Paige,” my grandmother said, “I’m so sorry.”

She might have been apologizing for the loss of my maman. She might have been apologizing for the way my tears made my mascara run down my cheeks like rivers and my grief was palpable. She might have been apologizing for the fact this was the first time she was meeting me, and I was already all grown up. I think though, that she was apologizing for something else, something I perhaps could not understand yet. In her eyes I saw a grief that matched my own, the pain of knowing that both of us, in our own ways, had abandoned Maman, even though in the end, she was the one who left us.

I had agreed to give a speech at Maman’s funeral, but when I stood in front of the roomful of teary eyed patrons of the coffeeshops that sold her baked goods, the women who were in her book club with her, my father’s colleagues, I forgot all the words that I had carefully memorized.

Instead, a memory rose up, as sudden and fragrant as steam from a mug of tea.

“Maman taught me how to make meringues after I had my heart broken for the first time,” I said, my voice shaking. “I was sixteen and my boyfriend cheated on me and I thought I was dying. I didn’t really tell Maman much about my life at that point, I was a teenager and thought that suffering in silence was cool. It was a mark of my devastation that I came to her in tears that day, and sobbed at the kitchen table while I told her how my life was over. She rubbed my back and kissed the crown of my head but she didn’t tell me everything would be alright. Instead she told me we were making meringue.”

I paused, took a breath, let the tears that were rising up settle back into my heart.

“Meringue is notoriously hard to make,” I continued, “It is also extremely simple. There are only two ingredients in the French meringues Maman taught me to make: egg whites and sugar. You have to add the sugar into the egg whites very slowly, in order to get the consistency right. The eggs have to be room temperature, and you can’t under or over beat the mixture. When done correctly, they should have perfect glossy peaks, like the countryside of Iceland in winter, or the hills of the moon. Maman told me that falling in love was like making meringue, that when done correctly and carefully, it is perfection, and almost too beautiful to touch. If you go too fast, or pull back too soon, it's bound to be messy, and not hold together.”

I can almost smell the sweet lightness of those meringues, the way it felt like eating a promise. “Maman said the key was to trust yourself. That you had to be confident that they were going to turn out perfect, and they would. That meringue could sense your uncertainty, and those peaks would fall down as soon as you stopped beating them."

"After the meringues were done, we ate them together at the kitchen table. We ate all dozen of them, one after another, and afterward, when I was filled with sweetness and sugar spun clouds, Maman had taken my hand. At that moment, I trusted her completely, I had faith that whatever she said was surely true, since she had shown me how to spin grief into something impossibly sweet.

"‘Ma petite fille’, she had said, ‘As long as you can make a perfect meringue, you can survive love and heartbreak and everything in between. You just have to remember to trust that although life doesn’t always turn out as we intended, there is always something we know will turn out perfect.”

When I looked up, a sea of misty eyes met mine. Even though my father was crying, I had touched the place where he fell in love with the beautiful French model in the cafe all those years ago.

“Maman wasn’t perfect,” I said, “But her love was, and anyone who tasted anything she baked felt a little bit of that love. At the end of the day, let that be her legacy.”

That afternoon, I put eggs on the counter to warm them. I measured white sugar, and turned on French folk music. I separated the yolks, and poured the translucent whites into a bowl, then, instead of using my electric mixer, whipped the eggs by hand until they were stiff. Little by little, I added the sugar, sweetness slipping in slowly but surely.

When the peaks were stiff and shiny as satin, I piped it onto a baking sheet, then put it in the oven, placing a wooden spoon in the door like Maman taught me. Finally, after nearly four hours, I took out two plates, and put the cooled meringues on them. I set them on the kitchen table, and lit a candle. The sun was setting, and the sky was red as sorrow.

I took a bite, and imagined wherever Maman was, she knew that I was here, carrying on her perfect thing.