Craig Spence © April 2022
University was wasted on me, pretty much, but one thing I did learn was how to throw together a pretty mean Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie. That was my specialty, laid claim to as my signature dessert on the potluck circuit.
For those who’ve never tasted one, Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie can only be described in superlatives: scoop the concentrated flavour from a can of Eagle Brand sweetened, condensed milk into a bowl; add a squeeze or two of lemon from one of those plastic bulbs, shaped like the real thing; glop the whole concoction into a pre-baked Graham Cracker crust; top with canned cherries – glossy-red as Marilyn Monroe’s lips; shove your culinary creation into the fridge (not the oven, stupid) et Voila!
In my day that passed for an enlightened-male version of ‘adept in the kitchen’, that and – when occasion warranted – an easy-bake lasagna. Whenever I got invited to a potluck, and on the odd occasion even when I hadn’t been, I would bring along an Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie – usually one whipped up fresh that very afternoon.
Between potlucks I lived pretty much on coffee, Kraft Dinner and cognac – the three essentials of a wannabe bohemian diet. I rarely entertained. People would drop by, we’d sit around and ‘rap’ aimlessly, maybe eat out if we could scrape together enough moolah… but entertaining, I had learned after a couple of awkward experiments, was out of the question. My place was too small.
The kitchenette gave way with no clear demarcation to a combined dining-living-bed-study room. The bathroom, located at the other end of the kitchenette, just past the stove, I shared with Chloe, a second-year anthropology student, who rented the suite opposite mine. Instead of being fitted with locks, the bathroom doors – one on each side, opening outward – were secured when ‘in-use’ by a hawser, hooked to mine on one end, hers on the other… pretty much a failsafe system unless you both happened to be groping your way to the toilet at the exact same 3 a.m. instant to piss or puke or whatever.
Our experiences in student digs eventually coagulated into my dissertation on the nebulous quality of privacy, which I described as ‘a state defined by the negative space surrounding it, and the intrusions that ultimately destroy it, friends being the worst culprits…’ To that I would add, ‘…inconsiderate friends, who have confirmed me in the belief that the very notion of friendship is, in the end, self-contradictory…’ a sort of agreement intended to make pleasant the mutual annihilation we all engage in, trying – and inevitably failing – to achieve reconciliation en route to the ultimate vanishing point that is our common destiny.
As for society, that’s nothing but friendship writ large, riddled with lies and steeped in deception. At least with friends-in-the-flesh the possibility of innocence and occasional respite exists, something society does not permit. Even so, the likelihood of betrayal can only be avoided in the illusion of an afterlife, never in the here-and-now. In the here-and-now it’s quite likely better and certainly more productive to have more enemies than friends.
Chloe was one of the few exceptions to that somewhat skewed description of human relations. It’s hard not to be intimate – in a friendly way – when your bathroom doors are connected by an umbilicus of rope.
But I must continue to digress. Let’s take the sanctum sanctorum of dreamless sleep as an example of how evanescent the state of untroubled inner repose really is. Dreamless sleep can be exploded at any moment by: a telephone’s alarmed ringing; the fat guy next door firing up his flatulent Harley; the dog jumping up on the bed and scratching his fleas; a terrorist attack; the sudden manifestation of an uncalled for dream about things as impossible as they are horrific, or embarrassing, or both; the sensation of choking on your own vomit (which unfortunately did not awaken Father when his time came, a fact Mother interprets as divine retribution, even though she doesn’t believe in ‘all that crap’ about God).
There’s any number of irruptions that can burst the sanctuary of dreamless sleep. My favourite is Chloe spooning close, her familiar forearm and hand cradled in my waist.
As a for-instance from my BC (Before Chloe) past, I was wakened one morning to the sound of workmen jack hammering cobbles in the courtyard below my University Boulevard digs. Normally I would have accepted this intrusion with the intense equanimity of a Zen master, aware that the stings, itches and bites of existence are mere illusions within the equipoise of my standing cosmic wave. But I had a fucking hangover to sleep off and their harsh rattling reminded me painfully of the fact, so I jumped out of bed, marched over to the kitchen window and bellowed “Fuck you!” into the irritated dawn, then slammed the casement shut. The glass shattered, cascading into the netherworld, adding an ethereal, tinkling contrapuntal to the gruff laughter of the crew down there.
As another for instance, take the ever present threat of Aphrodite, of her bare footed dance and its accompanying music, insinuating itself into the folds of dreamless sleep. If you’ve never seen her, if you’ve only ever been enticed by her cheap, designer avatars, you won’t have a clue what I’m talking about. That’s okay, Mac. I don’t mind being considered crazy; quite the opposite… what scares me is the likelihood of becoming sane. Aphrodite is a sigh, a scent, a brilliance in your neurones, the antithesis of sleep. She has the peculiar and deeply disturbing quality of being able to awaken you even in moments when you think you’re already fully awake.
Janice, although less annoyingly intense than a pack of Neanderthals with jack hammers, and not exactly Aphrodite in the flesh, did invade my private space with her peculiar charms. The jangle of her bangles aroused me in waking and sleeping moments; I sensed the swaying of her hips the same way a shark feels the throbbing of a ship’s engines propagating through ocean undercurrents from miles away. She was enrolled in the same 100-level Sociology course as me. Turned out she lived just a couple of blocks away with a friend, and that the two of them were having a little get-together, and of course I was welcome… they’d heard about my Cherry-O-Cheese Pie, and asked me to ‘bake’ one for them.
It shouldn’t have been so easy. I remember thinking: There should have been some reticence shown by one or the other of us, even if the invite didn’t signify anything other than friendliness, politeness, perhaps even a wretched variant of pity. That I desired Janice on a visceral level couldn’t be denied, which in my case meant a form of atonement was required, a spark to ignite the sex laden vapour swelling dangerously inside my skull, into a poetic vision.
That she had responded to my incipient urge could reasonably have been predicted under the first law of sexual thermodynamics, which states: Chemistry asserts itself no matter how awkward the circumstance, and in inverse proportion to human resistance – all we can do is learn to manage its chain reactions with some degree of decorum and grace. Aplomb, I think it’s called. I would eventually do a dissertation on the relationship between misogyny and a pathological fear in some men of Aphrodite’s power. I got a fucking F for that effort, I think because my professor – a woman – felt it inappropriate for a being with a penis to express that kind of view.
Janice and her friend Corinne co-existed in a space not much bigger than my own, but with the addition of a bedroom, separated from the dining-living-study room by a tie-dyed silk curtain. “Whoever gets tired first, or needs some privacy, gets the bedroom; the survivor sleeps on the futon,” Janice said, patting the cushion between us. Aside from this musical-beds arrangement their mode of living seemed similar to my own.
The evening began with the two of them making a fuss over their new friend, then teasing me about my dessert offering – an anticipated segment of the Cherry-O-Cheese Pie ceremony was the amused commentary it invariably drew from hosts and fellow guests alike. Wisecracks about its caloric content, diabetic tendencies, and the level of culinary skill required to ‘bake’ it were de rigueur and I received them graciously, overplaying my hapless bachelor role shamelessly. I hadn’t cottoned on yet to the fact that savvy women – the kind of women I liked – might amuse themselves with a kitchen bumbler, but the day was dawning when they’d only get serious with a guy who could actually cook, or offer the reciprocity of dining out… frequently and preferably expensively.
Even before I knew I was serious, my romantic inclinations toward Janice had flopped, which tinged her acceptance later that evening of an invitation to dinner at my place with a hint of malicious treachery.
The centrepiece of their soiree was a chocolate fondue, which Corinne set on the table ceremoniously. I found fondue etiquette amusing. It evoked the image of a polite tribe, stabbing cubes of pineapple and wedges of strawberry with forks the length of surrogate spears then popping the boiled victims of their civilized savagery into their mouths between words, in the midst of sentences. These morsels they washed down with quaffs of wine, gulps of beer, or sips of coffee for the abstemious.
Conversation raged. “What’s your major?” “Did you catch the Joni Mitchell concert?” “He’s such an idiot, I hate his classes!” “Where did you get that scarf? It’s beautiful!” The dinner party babble drifted in and out of consciousness, filling the interstices between Janice and me, helping us ignore the tension. We chatted with each other, flitted about, engaging others, but no matter where in the room we were, we remained moths, locked in each other’s brilliance… or so I thought. Problem was we’d got beyond small talk too quickly and now things were getting awkward. The urgency of the situation couldn’t be broached around a fondue pot with a paper plate of no-bake cherry cheese pie balanced on your knees.
“Got to go,” I said right after dessert.
Janice looked surprised.
Who can say what triggers the question – what precise balance of mental and emotional self-delusion results in a positive read, leading to the conclusion that a woman is receptive. I’m not an expert in such things. I don’t have cause, or the need to brag. All I know is the moment seemed right, so before Janice’s look of surprise at my sudden departure morphed into a frown, I invited her to dinner at my place, then waited for her response with the unwavering anticipation of a male praying mantis.
She looked even more surprised, her eyes widening like a cat’s. She could simply have declined – mid-terms, fatigue, a previous engagement, no reason at all – but instead she said: “Sure, do you mind if I bring a friend?”
“Corinne?”
“No, he couldn’t make it tonight. His name is Paul, I think you’ll like him.”
~~~
The thing about Cherry-O-Cheese Pie was its simplicity. Everything needed to make one was listed on the labels of select tins of Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk. Mother stapled one of those labels to a page in the scrapbook where she collected her recipes – in a manner of speaking, she passed it on to me. I say “in a manner of speaking” because she still keeps that scrapbook on its shelf in the cupboard above the stove – the one where you can only fit odds and ends because the oven hood’s ventilating duct takes up almost all the room, and because the cupboard’s hard to reach, especially when you’re five-foot-four in circumference as well as height. Before Dad finally did get driven out of the house, to the room he rented on the other side of town, he took to calling Mum ‘the human beach ball’. Never to her face – except that one time – but for the benefit of us boys.
I suppose what he was trying to do in his underhanded way was warn us against the hardships of marrying the likes of our own mother – perhaps against the institution of marriage in any of its various forms, unless you happened to be such a prude that you considered it a pre or post-requisite to the ‘sex act’ in any of its diverse forms. “Jerking off; no hands” was my father’s final word on the subject, a pronouncement he also avoided repeating in front of Mother.
She never gave me her archetypical version of the Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie recipe but did pick through the tins of Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk, stacked on the shelf at Steinberg’s, and find a label with the recipe on it. “Here,” she said, plunking it down on the kitchen table during one of my visits home. “You’ve seen me make it often enough, all you have to do is follow the instructions. You can’t go wrong.”
Mother was right, too, as she usually is when it comes to things that simply require doing: washing a floor; hanging laundry to dry; picking kale from the back garden; making an Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie; taking out the trash. If Mum ever had an imagination, she got over it young, like so many other things children of the Great Depression had to cure themselves of at an early age. Dad used to talk about the Depression as if it was a thing of the past, only existing in faulty memories (‘brains like scratched records’, was how he put it) and dusty photo albums; Mum perpetuated it, lived it, the Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie fitting in as an ‘affordable luxury’ for us kids.
~~~
Funny, no matter how often I see a recipe I can never remember what goes into the bowls or in what order to coagulate into a Cherry-O-Cheese Pie. Mum never has to thumb through her book of favourite recipes; she just needs to know it’s up there in her cupboard, the yellowing formula for cherry cheese pie pressed between its pages, to carry out the Cherry-O instructions perfectly every time. I never got round to it, but did think of doing a dissertation on The Sanctity of Belief, inspired by Mum’s unerring certainty when it came to Cherry-O-Cheese Pie.
My shortcoming in that regard might possibly be considered an excuse for knocking on my side of Chloe’s bathroom door the day after Janice accepted my invitation to dinner – if, in fact, an excuse was needed. Maybe I really didn’t have all the ingredients it took to make an Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie in my cupboard.
“Hello?” Chloe said.
“Hi Chlo, mind if I disturb you?”
She laughed, just like always when I used that line, the same way a car starts when you twist the key in the ignition, so I pushed the door open and stuck my head into her kitchen.
“I’ve got company coming over tonight and I’m making cheese pie and lasagna,” I said.
The layout of Chloe’s apartment mirrored mine, but that’s where the similarity ended. She kept her place organized and tidy: pots and pans hung on pegs beneath the cupboard opposite; the sink standing empty, a washcloth folded neatly over its faucet; the linoleum countertops uncluttered and wiped clean.
Pictures hung in groupings on every available surface. In the kitchen, beyond the pots and pans, a collection of food and farm images: still lifes of fruit and vegetables; a medieval feast; Third-World farmers scratching at baked hardpan with sticks; a woman’s glossed lips about to kiss the rim of a steaming latte cup.
The dining-living-bed-study room’s south wall featured landscapes: a vineyard sunning on a steep Italian hillside; a lighthouse standing guard on a windswept British Columbia coast; a ruined stone cottage in the Peak District of England’s Midlands… scenes where only the evidence of human habitation remained, the occupiers of the land having been vaporized or beamed up en mass to some undisclosed Nirvana in somebody else’s dream. Chloe said she wanted to go to all the places on her walls.
The east and north walls, which bracketed her sofa-bed, formed a sort of shrine to the world’s religions: a poster of Salvador Dali’s Christ floating horizontally into the vortex of gravity; a gaudy bas-relief Krishna, seated on what looked to be a rustic throne, raising his pipe to his blue lips; Buddha, cross-legged, hands folded into his lap, above what would be the head of Chloe’s bed if the sofa was unfolded; Shiva dancing on the scattered bones of New York City’s Wall Street; Venus emerging from the Aegean Sea on her clamshell.
“So who’s coming over?” Chloe asked.
I stepped from the bathroom into the kitchen. She sat at the dining room table, surrounded by piles of books, a binder opened in front of her. Chloe peered out from the encircling literature as if it was a fortress, she being the guardian of its secrets.
“A friend I met in Sociology class the other day and her boyfriend.”
Chloe raised her eyebrows and smiled inscrutably – one of those smiles that might have said, I know something about you that you don’t… or then again, might have signified, I want you to think I know something about you that you don’t. The older I get, the more I’ve learned to love that enigmatic smile of hers. I see it all the time – am caught off guard by haunting memories when she’s not around – as if we were embracing, and she was smiling over my shoulder, her sigh a whisper in my ear, a sound imbued with deeper meaning than words can ever tell.
“Would you like to join us?” I asked.
“Do you want me to?”
“Yes!”
Her smile broadened into something more emphatic. I blushed. Could tell she knew everything – every fucking thing!
“Sure,” she said. Easy as that, as if neither of us had ever entertained a moment’s hesitation or tinge of doubt… as if there had never been a need for me to think up a hypothetical missing ingredient – the additive that was supposed to make my dinner with Janice and her beau complete.
~ The End ~
Hope you enjoyed Cheese Pie with Cherries on Top.
There’s more in The Feel of Gravity collection.