It took forever to convince Grandma to record cooking videos. I tried not to use words like “legacy” and “tradition” since that would make her think about not being around forever, but I’m more uncomfortable with the idea than she is.

“Why do you a video?” she says when I arrive to tape another recipe. “Just learn by doing like I did with my mom and grandma.”

“You don’t have anything written down,” I say.

“It’s up here.” She taps her head. You know Grandma is old school and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I want precision, teaspoons and tablespoons and cups. I hope the videos will help me translate what she means by a palm, a pinch, a handful, how much flour she dumps into the bowl until it’s “enough.”

Her cookie and cake recipes are on index cards--remember the soft sugar cookies with the raisin on top, and how we ate around the raisin and saved it for last? Other things, like the coating for chicken parmesan, consist of sifting ingredients into her hand and grunting when it’s right. I don’t eat chicken anymore, went vegetarian after you left, but I like the tomato sauce she puts on top and want to use it on lentil patties. Grandma looked at me weird when I told her that, but she’s given up trying to make sense of me. She also gets irritated when I’m taping a recipe and ask questions.

“Why is there a pound of lard in the pie crust?” I say.

“It’s for four pies,” she says. “You want me to make it or not?”

My best tactic is to shut up and let her talk, which should have been obvious.

#

I think of you when Grandma makes porcupine meatballs. We loved that recipe. Your mom hasn’t given your address to me, says she’ll do that next time she sees me, but I worry she doesn’t know where you are.

I mention you to Grandma when we’re done recording. You and I could both eat ten meatballs at one sitting when we were kids. Grandma smiles.

“That’s when you still ate meat,” she says.

“Maybe Ev still eats meat,” I say.

“Maybe,” says Grandma.

“I’m sure Ev will want the recipe, too,” I say.

Grandma nods. Maybe she knows where you are and won’t give me your address because your mom would be upset. That’s her generation--sweep things under the rug, pretend they don’t exist, and ignore the lumpy rug. At some point I’ll lift a corner and maybe you’ll be underneath.

“Her parents took her car keys before she left,” Grandma says. I realize she’s talking about you and nearly lose my grip on my coffee mug. “They were paying her car loan, and she was paying them back, but they said they owned the car. She came over here and told me about it. We tried to talk some sense into her mom, but it didn’t work. ”

“Shit,” I say too quietly for Grandma to hear. She hasn’t said anything about you in a while, though I’ve poked for information. How is it that you’ve been gone for twelve years already, and why haven’t you written or called? I want to ask you so many questions, and I’m worried about the answers.

“A lot of that business with Ev was unfair,” says Grandma. Your mom took Grandma’s car keys away three months ago. I guess she figured that was her job since she’s the oldest kid. Grandma has been ranting about it ever since, even when I remind her that I don’t drive because of my vision. I’m okay walking, taking the bus, or hitching rides with friends.

“That’s good I suppose,” she says.

“The senior center has a van,” I say. “People do their grocery shopping that way.”

“Yes.” Grandma flips through her short stack of recipe cards to end the conversation. It’s a difficult change for her to be without a car, and it would be for you, too, but maybe you moved to an urban area where you don't need one.

I'm copying some of Grandma’s cookie recipes onto sheets of white paper in thick black marker. Grandma wrinkles her nose when I slide my recipes into protective plastic sleeves. Maybe she didn’t realize how bad my vision was until now, but another reason I want to record her is so I can play the video back on my computer and make everything huge so I can see her hands and check the measurements against what I imagine them to be.

#

You won’t be surprised to learn I work in a college cafeteria and bake dozens of cookies, muffins, and cupcakes every day. I have some recipes memorized, and I wear a magnifying glass around my neck to read ones I haven’t made in a while. Working in the cafeteria is easier than you might think. Mixing and scooping cookie dough and muffin batter doesn’t take a great deal of visual acuity, and I know by scent and touch when the cookies are done. Grandma says she used to worry about me in that kitchen, but she doesn’t anymore. I think that happened when her own vision started going.

Today I make graham cracker and pudding sandwiches with the extra chocolate pudding from lunch. I hide a tray of them in the walk-in freezer until they’re set. My supervisor looks the other way when I do things like that. The other cooks and our student assistants love the pudding sandwiches, but I’m thinking of you and me at eight years old, making them butterscotch pudding and chocolate chips when we had sleepovers at Grandma’s old farmhouse, telling stupid knock-knock jokes and listening for the ghosts we knew lived in the attic.

#

I’ve told some of my co-workers that I’m videoing Grandma making recipes. They say it’s a great idea, and they wish they would have done the same with their grandmothers. The process is more interesting on Grandma’s cantankerous days. She gets out of her chair with a long sigh like she’s stuck in quicksand. When I tape her making cloverleaf rolls, she tries to shock me and my vegetarian sensibilities. Remember when she told us how they made head cheese after her dad butchered a calf? Her mom simmered the head with spices, took the meat off the bones, and baked it in a loaf pan for a couple hours.

“We refrigerated it and sliced it thin, like lunchmeat,” she says.

“Ev and I were ten when you told us about head cheese,” I say. “She wanted to go to the butcher and get a calf head. You said you didn’t have a pot big enough to fit it.”

“Calf heads are bigger than you’d think,” Grandma says. She adds ingredients to the bowl and doesn’t tell me a damn thing. Dump, dump, stir, squint, touch, dump, stir, nod.

“How much salt did you add?” I ask.

“This much,” she says.

“I can’t see you well,” I say. “It’s one of my hazy days.”

“Oh,” she says. “About a teaspoon.”

Grandma and I have strong reading glasses and still get eyestrain headaches. Your eyesight was perfect, but your knee ached on rainy days after you fell off the gravel pile when we were kids. Did it shatter again when we were in high school? I remember you using a cane on bad knee days, and how we joked about the pieces of ourselves that had already turned seventy.

Today while Grandma is rolling the dough into small (walnut-sized) balls she pauses, winces, and peers down at her hands like she’s angry with them. Arthritis again.

“You want to take a break?” I ask.

“I’m fine,” she says and continues shaping perfect dough balls. Grandma may complain about making the videos, but she doesn’t complain about her body. At least not aloud.

#

At work I hide the day-old cookies we're supposed to throw away. After several hours under heat lamps they’ve gotten too warm or dried out and can't be sold, but I send them home with our student workers after the manager has left. Sometimes on break I let the students who work in the bakery tattoo my arm with ballpoint pen. They draw roses, dragons wearing glasses, sets of measuring cups. Maybe someday I’ll like one of the designs enough to get it permanent. I wonder how many tattoos you have now. You showed me the first two before you left—a cheshire cat and a siren--and you wouldn’t have resisted the urge to get more.

I want to know if you still have your sneaker obsession, if you bought a miniature dachshund, if you admire your tongue after eating grape popsicles and lip synch to music in your bedroom. I wonder if you remember standing on Grandma’s other side, peering into the mixing bowl while she let us take turns stirring cheese and sour cream into the cottage potatoes. I worry I’ll lose these memories, flavors from my childhood, and no one else will understand what has been lost.

We were going to share an apartment when we got older and have ice cream sandwiches for dinner. My apartment is small, which is helpful since it’s easier to keep everything in order, but I’m too adult to have ice cream sandwiches for dinner. I disappoint myself. Maybe you have ice cream sandwiches for dinner. You were bolder than me and I loved you for it, though I never told you.

When we were in high school you started to wear nail polish and dye your hair blue before everyone was dyeing their hair blue. I thought you were so cool, though I balked when you offered to bleach a section of my hair and dye it violet. After you borrowed two of my skirts your mom pitched a fit, but you hadn’t even worn them to school.

You called me from your room, more angry than sad though you were crying. I said after we got our apartment you could dye your hair any color you wanted and wear all my clothes since we were almost the same size. It was the wrong thing to say since you wanted an answer that would work right then, not in three years which was forever away.

My heart tore again when your mom called mine. I overheard the conversation while I did homework at the kitchen table and pretended to listen to music on my headphones. I knew it was your mom because my mom ducked into the living room and said, “Well, I don’t know what I would do… I don’t think grounding makes sense, but yes, I’d be worried about a tattoo... I wouldn’t allow that kind of language, but it’s just hair dye. It will grow out. No, mine haven’t done anything quite like that… Honey, it’s not delinquent behavior. That’s a little too far. You haven’t gotten calls from teachers, have you?”

I brought cookies for you at lunch the next day. I wished I could do something more, something daring, like sneak out of the house at night and visit you, but it was too far to ride my bike and the bus system didn’t go where you lived. I should have conspired with one of my friends who had wheels and was up for small-time rebellion. I should have invited you for a sleepover that never ended since my mom was more willing than yours to shrug at whatever I did. Grandma didn’t care what you wore or what we wanted to make in her kitchen, as long as we cleaned up.

“Your mothers don’t remember the grief they gave me when they were teenagers, and they turned out just fine,” Grandma said when we went to her new apartment to complain about your mother freaking out over your hair, my skirts, and that you had a new name.

Grandma wasn’t on good terms with either of our mothers after they pressed her to sell the farmhouse. She was getting used to living in town but said she was still a country girl. It was easy to get her on our side.

“So your hair is blue as a peacock,” she said. “Who cares. You’re figuring out who you are. That’ll go on for the rest of your life. Plenty of time to try different colors.”

Three years later, after your parents took your car keys, I think you stayed with Grandma for a few nights before you left. She still hated the apartment, but it was good for us to have her close. I suspect she bought your bus ticket so you’d have temporary wheels, could get from Point A to Point B, but she won’t say where that is.

#

I bought Grandma two pairs of battery-powered socks for her last birthday. They were supposed to be for her feet, but when I visit she’s wearing them on her hands while she watches TV or turns pages in a book. She says the warmth soothes her arthritis.

Today I record both of us—she explains the cheese dumpling recipe and I mix ingredients while she tells me everything I’m doing wrong, gesturing with socked hands. This will be funny someday, but now it's frustrating.

“No, no, no, not like that.” She grabs the spoon and bowl while I sigh, but the cheese dumplings are very good. We simmer them in vegetable soup. Remember when we tried to make cheese dumplings and they were dense as bricks? We must not have added enough baking soda. That’s what I figured out on my walk home from Grandma’s place today. I might have teared up at a crosswalk. The process of recording Grandma makes your not-hereness more intense.

#

Grandma wants me to record the sugar cookie recipe she got from a neighbor fifty years ago. It’s the first time she’s made a request.

“We made them with rendered chicken fat,” she says. “They were the best cookies.”

“Wouldn’t they be chicken-flavored?” I say.

“No, they were good. We used everything back then.” Then she says we’re going to visit her cousin in Chicago next weekend. “To dig up recipes. You’ll need to buy bus tickets for us, but it’ll be worth your time. Cousin Lorraine has a recipe box like you wouldn’t believe. We baked together before she moved to be closer to her kids. She sold her family’s place too, you know.”

“I know,” I echo.

Grandma often talks to Cousin Lorraine on the phone and teases her like they’re sisters. They have the same cache of family stories, an easy friendship. That’s another thing I miss about you.

#

Grandma's neighbor gives us a ride to the bus station on Saturday morning. We’re on the five-hour journey west before I can blink. As the yellow pavement lines clip by I wonder if you live in Chicago, a space where it would be easy to find anonymity and friends who appreciate your style. I wonder if you finished your degree in psychology and earned that Master’s in counseling. There are many ways I’ve imagined you, while worrying over why you’ve never called. Forgive me the things I didn’t do that might have mattered--calling more often, getting rides to your house, demanding you come with me to see a movie. You haunt me, which isn’t fair if I can't find you and nobody will admit to having your phone number. Is it wrong to hope that I haunt you, too, and that you miss times we were together?

On optimistic days I expect you to appear in Grandma’s kitchen. I won't know it’s you at first because we'll both look different, but then we’ll hug and you'll tell me what happened during the twelve years you’ve been away. You'll promise to visit more often, I'll promise not to tell your family, and we’ll film another Grandma cooking video.

#

I expect we’ll sit and chat when we get to Cousin Lorraine’s, but Lorraine has butter softening in bowls on the counter. Grandma eases down at the kitchen table, then they argue over melting or creaming the butter for chocolate chip cookies, and using white or brown sugar. I fade into the videographer background while they fight over baking times.

We make chocolate chip cookies, molasses gingersnaps, sour cream chocolate drop cookies, then I flop on the couch, my head buzzing with measurements. Grandma and Cousin Lorraine chat while I doze off. I start when Grandma calls me a sleepyhead and says I should record her and Cousin Lorraine making cabbage and noodles for dinner.

In the morning Lorraine says we’re going to the coffee shop on the corner since they have wonderful scones. I mention you on our walk.

“Ev and I stole so much cookie dough when we were kids,” I say. “We made ourselves sick. Once you said you’d give us syrup of ipecac. We asked what it did, and you said we didn't want to know.”

“I used it when your mom ate a tube of toothpaste when she was three,” Grandma says. She peers at the traffic. I wonder if she’s looking at the rush of cars or looking for you. I harbor a bright worry and hope that you live nearby. Maybe you’ve been in touch with her.

I’ll walk into this coffee shop looking for your specter. My vision is too burry to know you on sight, but I could fling a knock-knock joke and maybe you’d lope toward me with your cane and a hug of recognition, your nails painted violet. We’d embrace and make everyone swivel around us as they walk to the counter in the crowded cafe, huffing at the bother since as far as they know we just saw each other last week. I cross the street, still dreaming.