SCRAPPLE

Charles Deemer

 

            On Tuesday I walk into Mike’s Café for breakfast and quickly look around to see if Doris is working. Not working really. Overlooking. My ex-wife runs the place, as she reminds me frequently, and last night we got in a tiff on the phone because, one, I wasn’t planning to fly to Florida for our daughter Danielle’s wedding and, two, I wasn’t happy about Doris’ plans to redecorate the café. My dad started Mike’s Café three decades ago, and the photos of family and customers on the wall are part of the “home-away-from-home” ambiance that Dad worked so hard to establish. When I didn’t fight Doris for the café during our divorce, it was because I understood her to promise she wouldn’t change anything. Now she’s talking about how business is down since Dad died and how customers today expect gourmet breakfasts, something considerably beyond bacon and eggs or, what was Dad’s house specialty, scrapple and eggs. As for Danielle, I’ve already been to two of her weddings, and this was the remark that ticked Doris off more than the fact of my absence. As if the third time was the charm.

            At any rate, I’m relieved to find no sign of Doris, so I take my usual stool at the counter where Mabel already is pouring me a cup of coffee. I expect she has my usual order in as well.

            Except she doesn’t because the first thing she says is, “No scrapple today, Ray.”

            “How can I have breakfast without scrapple?”

            “Get used to it. Frank quit, and I’m not sure there’s another cook in Portland who knows what it is, let alone how to make it.”

            She’s probably right. My folks came from Pennsylvania Dutch country, the home of scrapple, which I grew up on. Scrapple, for the uninitiated, is made with pork scraps and corn meal, which set into a loaf that one slices and fries as a kind of substitute for patty sausage. Except scrapple is better than sausage. “Scrapple,” my father used to say, “shows how you can make something wonderful from nothing. Just like in life. You make something wonderful from scraps that most folks would throw to the dogs.” Of course, it’s almost impossible to find scrapple west of the Mississippi. When my folks moved to Oregon and Dad started the café, naming it after himself, breakfast scrapple was his gimmick to set the place apart, and when I took over the business after his death, I kept the tradition alive. So did Doris when she got the café in the divorce settlement. But now she’s talking about changing everything.

            I say, “Well, Doris just has to find another cook who knows how to make scrapple.”

            “You know how to make scrapple.”

            “Can you picture me working for Doris?”

            Mabel laughs, shakes her head and hurries off to bring menus to a table of new customers.

            The next time I go to Mike’s Café for breakfast is on Saturday. This time Doris is there, working the counter no less, and I see a new face in the kitchen, a tired-looking man with a red face. If she’d raise her wages, she could attract better help.

            This time I take a table so my ex-wife won’t be serving me. Breakfast out is a great joy for me, especially since I recently retired and have a fixed income. I’m still testing what my financial limits are. I don’t need Doris bringing up some redecoration idea and ruining my day.

            But sure enough she comes over and plops herself down before I’ve finished my omelet.

            “Frank quit,” says Doris. She brought along a cup of coffee, which tells me she expects to sit awhile. What will it be this time? Taking the family photos down so she can replace them with her quilt collection?

            “Mabel told me.”

            “When did you see Mabel?”

            “I had breakfast in here Tuesday.”

            “Nobody told me that.”

            What does she expect, her help to double as a spy system? I start eating faster so I can get the hell out of there.

            “I hired a new cook,” she says.

            “I noticed.”

            “He doesn’t know anything about scrapple.”

            “Doesn’t surprise me.”

            There’s a silence before Doris says, “You know how to make it.”

            I don’t reply or even look up at her.

            “You could bring in a batch every now and again.”

            I ignore her.

            “Your dad would like that. He’d want us to keep scrapple on the menu.”

            Us? Where was us when I was begging her to forgive me? I push my plate away, leaving a third of the omelet. I get up and hurry to the counter for my check. To my surprise, Doris doesn’t follow me.

 

 

            After that I avoid the place. I try different spots for breakfast on the two or three times a week I figure I can afford the luxury. But I don’t find a place that feels like home, the way my dad’s café used to, even under the mismanagement of Doris – at least it still felt this way when scrapple was on the menu.

            I try making a batch of scrapple at home. It’s been years but I figure it’s like riding a bike, it all comes back to you, but the scrapple comes out terrible, with too little pork flavor (I used only neck bones) and too much sage and too fluid a consistency. I end up throwing the mess away.

            A few weeks later I walk into Mike’s Café for a cup of coffee and find the same red-faced cook in the kitchen. Mabel fills me in on recent changes, such as the new menu. At least the photos are still on the wall.

I look at the menu and am shocked. Doris has turned the place into one of those quasi-health-food places for vegetarians, with a new menu that has little in common with the old. You can’t even order bacon and eggs on this thing. The omelet descriptions sound pretentious, full of exotic ingredients like artichokes and capers and sun dried tomatoes. Not only has scrapple disappeared, but so has real sausage. In its place – if you can believe this – is chicken sausage! What the hell is chicken sausage?

            Mabel can see by my expression that I’m disgusted.

            “That new stuff tastes better than it sounds,” she says.

            “The old man is rolling over in his grave.”

            I leave my coffee unfinished and get the hell out of there.

            That evening my phone rings off the hook. I don’t answer, figuring it’s Doris calling to defend herself, Mabel having shared my disgust with her. As far as I’m concerned, Mike’s Café is dead.

            Later the doorbell rings. The goddamn woman doesn’t know when to quit.

            I open the door, about to give Doris a piece of my mind, and find Danielle. As soon as she sees me, she breaks into tears and throws herself into my arms. There’s two suitcases at her feet.

            Danielle tells me the whole story over brandy. I keep a bottle in the refrigerator, preferring it cold to heated. Doris and Danielle always thought this was weird when we were living together as one happy family, but tonight Danielle spares me the reminder. She drinks the cold brandy without complaining, too.

            Clyde, her new husband, hit her, a first in her vast marital experience. She packed up and left the next day. She’s divorcing him, which means marriage number three lasted just a tad over a week. I don’t know what it is about this girl and husbands. She keeps trying, I think, because she wants kids but in today’s society a woman can conceive and raise kids without a husband. Not that I approve, but it’s a modern option.

            I listen and nod and sip brandy. Danielle talks on and on and guzzles brandy. By the time the brandy is gone, she wants to know where her bed is.

            “You’re staying here?”

            “Of course. Mother would rake me over the coals if I went home.”

            “I have so little room.” When I see her expression, I add, “But I can give you the bed and sleep on the couch.”

 

            The phone rings early the next morning. It’s Doris.

            “I heard from Clyde,” she says. “Danielle left. He said she’s probably coming this way.”

            “I know. She’s here.”

            Doris goes on and on about what a strange thing this is for Danielle to do, to come to me rather than to come to her, why this-that-and-the-other and so on. The woman talks first and thinks later.

            I hold the phone a couple inches away from my ear, which is the position I’m in when Danielle enters the room in a robe, looking as bad as she must feel.

            “It must be mother,” Danielle mutters and continues into the kitchen for coffee.

            I wait until Danielle has showered, put on her face, and dressed before telling her she can’t stay with me.

            “Why?”

            We’re sitting at the small kitchen table, drinking pop.

            “Because I don’t have room, and it doesn’t make any sense. Clyde called your mother. She knows everything that’s going on.”

            “Oh, God. She wants me to go back to him, right?”

            “No, she’s already made an appointment for you with a lawyer.”

            “Really?”

            “Really.”

            “Wow. That surprises me.”

            That’s all it takes for Danielle to move into her mother’s fine Victorian home that used to belong to my parents, then to me. Doris got this in the divorce, too.

            I gave Doris everything in the divorce. I didn’t contest a thing. How could I when I felt guilty as hell? I didn’t want a divorce but after Doris found out about Melody, there was no talking sense to her. Melody meant nothing to me. In retrospect, she was a distraction to keep me from facing the pain of Ray Jr.’s death. We called him RayJay. He was only a sophomore in college when he died, in an auto accident after a frat party, and the tragedy turned my marriage on its ear. Doris acted as if it were my fault. Sure, all the fraternity brothers in the car had been drinking but RayJay wasn’t driving, he knew better than to drink and drive. Doris said I forced RayJay to join the fraternity just because it had been mine in college. Doris didn’t complain about fraternities when she was in college and we used to sneak upstairs at the frat house to do what in those days was called petting.

            At any rate, after our son’s death and Danielle’s first divorce shortly thereafter, Doris retreated into herself, as if her dreams of being a grandparent had been overthrown by tragedy and poor choices. I was grieving as well, though Doris and I found no way to grieve together, and it was Melody at work who comforted me, first as a companion and later, only briefly, as a lover. I was sixty at the time, Melody twenty-four, and in bed Melody made me feel young and virile again. Then Jenny Witherspoon, a neighbor, saw Melody and me on a dance floor and told Doris, who refused to let me explain myself or offer a plan for reconciliation. I quit trying to do either and told my lawyer to let her have whatever the hell she wanted.

 

 

            After Danielle moves out, I slip into a deep funk bordering on depression. I stop going out or answering the phone. I stare at the television set for hours at a time, watching nothing.

            On Sunday – I know it’s Sunday by the size of the paper -- I remember I haven’t paid the rent yet, which is a few days overdue.  I’m writing a check when the doorbell rings and I think, Speak of the devil. But it isn’t the landlord, it’s Doris and Danielle, each carrying what appears to be a small sack of groceries, and they let themselves in before I can protest to stop them.

            They march straight into the kitchen and begin unpacking, taking out some TV dinners and eggs for starters.

            “These were on sale,” Doris says, stacking up the TV dinners, “and I know you like this brand. We were at the store anyway.”

            “I don’t need you to buy me groceries.”

            Doris ignores this. Out of Danielle’s sack comes a package of Rapa scrapple. This is the brand my mother always bought.

            Doris takes the scrapple from Danielle and holds it up to me, showing it off.

            “Since when can you find scrapple around here?” I ask.

            “I bought it off the Internet. Danielle showed me how.”

            “How much did it cost?”

            “Should I tell him?” Doris asks Danielle.

            “No.”

            “What are you doing here?” I want to know.

            “We’re fixing you breakfast, Daddy. Why don’t you go sit down so we can get to work.”

            “Um, um,” says Doris. “We’d better do the dishes first so we have room to work.”

            I don’t have the energy to fight them. I plop onto a chair at the small table off the kitchen, where I habitually eat. My ex-wife and daughter are full of so much energy I get tired just watching them. First they do the dishes, and then they start fixing breakfast, which consists of hashbrowns, eggs, toast and, of course, scrapple. The kitchen fills with appetizing odors and sizzling sounds full of promise. I realize how much I miss both, this proper symphony to start the day, even if it is already mid-morning.

            In no time we’re all seated around the table in front of the best-looking breakfast I’ve seen in months. I have no idea why they are doing this.

            “Don’t start yet,” says Doris when she sees me pick up my fork.

            She holds out her hands, one toward Danielle, the other toward me.

            “Let’s join hands.”

            I stare at her. Has she gone religious on me, is that what this is about? She’s saved her soul and has come over to save mine? Not even a great breakfast is worth this bargain, and I feel the urge to flee before it’s too late.

            “Daddy,” Danielle says, offering me her free hand. The other grasps her mother’s hand.

            When we have all joined hands, Doris looks and me and says, “You don’t remember, do you? What day this is?”

            What day is it? I know it’s Sunday, I can make a good guess at the date. It’s not when we divorced or when we married. It’s not when Danielle was born. It’s not the day I retired. It’s not the day I started my affair with Melody. Or ended it. What day is it?

            “RayJay’s birthday,” says Doris.

            My son’s – my dead son’s – birthday. He would have been … it takes me a moment to calculate it … twenty-four. In the prime of his manhood. Beginning a career. Maybe a young father, making me a grandfather.

            “Don’t you remember?” Doris says again. “His birthday tradition was to have a late breakfast with scrapple. That’s how he always liked to start his birthday. He was his father’s son.”

            I don’t know what to say. I can feel a deep regret rising to the surface, coming up through my body like some rejected foodstuff, something never digested, not quite food poisoning but no less incompatible with the vital systems of the body, and then I realize that my hands have been released, leaving my arms outstretched like the posture of a bird about to take flight, and I look down at the scrapple on my plate and find it the target of one drop, then another, of slowly falling tears that seem to drop from the sky in its weeping for my son, for myself, and I think of my dad and wonder what wonderful new recipe will come from all the scraps of my mismanaged life..

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