I picked my friend Rachael up from the airport after her flight in from where she lives in Denver. In exchange for driving her to Hot Springs, her family invited me to blog about dinner at their house.
The Coles live outside of town and it’s dark when we show up. Rachael walks in the front door of the large house. The floor plan is wide open. A balance beam sits in the middle of the floor. To the right there are a couple of chairs and a couch. In the back is a kitchen.
“Family?” she yells. A large Doberman named Abe runs up to us. Rachael’s mom Mitzi comes in offering a big hug. Then Anna. Then Neal. Everyone is happy to see Rachael, who hasn’t been home since this summer. After a round of hugs, Neal goes back upstairs to do his homework and Mitzi asks Anna to play something on the piano. She plays a couple of songs. Mitzi and Rachael dance to the first one, and we all sing along to the second—John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War is Over).” Something about Rachael coming home after months of being away makes the song feel relevant.
The Coles have lived in this house for a couple of years and they’ve been renovating it since they moved in. They’re doing nearly all of it by themselves. Mitzi asks me if I know anything about grouting tile as she shows me the master bathroom. Living in the house while renovating makes for interesting juxtapositions in places. In the bathroom there is a bottle of moisturizer beside a bottle of wood glue. Everything is under construction. They’ve knocked out walls, they’ve put walls up, they’ve painted, they’ve brought rocks in from the river that runs behind their house and used them to decorate the walls around the fireplace. Or at least where the fireplace will be.
It isn’t long before Steve and Grace come in the front door from gymnastics. Grace and Rachael hold each other for a few moments before Grace makes her way to the kitchen. She looks into the oven.
“Mom, the bread’s starting to get weird,” she says.
“Oh, I forgot about that. Take it out,” Mitzi says.
For dinner, we have roasted chicken, sweet potatoes, rolls, and a spinach salad. We fill our paper plates at the stove top and carry them to the dining room table. The conversation goes to a copperhead snake Mitzi killed and put in a jar. No one knows where it is, so I don’t get the chance to see it, but I am shown the two jars of fish heads Mitzi is planning to shellac for a commercial/artistic purpose I’ve been told not to reveal, lest someone steal the idea.
“Don’t eat the chicken bones, Neal,” Mitzi tells him. We all turn to face him. He bites down and there’s a crunch.
“I like them,” he says.
“Okay, then,” Mitzi says.
We talk about how some people suck the marrow from chicken bones. I remember my grandmother once telling me she used to suck the marrow. Grace wants to try it. She breaks a bone and puts it to her mouth.
After dinner, Anna and Neal sit at the table doing homework while Steve and Mitzi clean the kitchen. Rachael and Grace pick at the food that’s left, not because they are hungry, but to have something to do in each other’s presence. These people like being under the same roof, sharing the same space. The girls feed on each others' energy, and it empowers Anna to join them on the balance beam.
Even though they are triplets—sharing nearly the same life for 13 years—Neal has his own energy, separate from Anna and Grace. He sits at the table, undistracted by all that’s going on around him.
Mitzi makes everyone a cup of hot tea. She hands me mine in an oversized mug. When it’s cooled slightly, I sip it. It’s fruity and sweet and comforting. I follow Anna and Rachael upstairs to the bedroom closet. There’s a small hole in the back, under a shelf, just big enough for me to get my grown-man hips through. On the other side of the hole is a tiny carpeted room. Anna and Grace have written quotes on the ceiling in marker. They’ve drawn on butcher paper that hangs on the walls. Grace crawls into the room and she argues with Anna about whose quotes are better in the way siblings do. Or the way people do with their significant others when they are tired. Just because. Rachael’s presence keeps the girls from taking the argument further, it seems. They are so happy to have her here in their little room.
It’s a perfect place to read, and I grab one of the children’s books from the corner, but it’s too long. I won’t get through it without completely secluding myself from the community of the room. We decide I should look at the pictures and Anna will tell me what’s happening. It turns out to be the best way to read the book. It’s about a teacher who loses her cat and her class helps her look for it. The teacher is also looking for a husband. In the end, she finds both.
Downstairs, Neal asks me to help him look for a sheet of paper he’s lost. He tells me it’s in one of his notebooks, but he won’t let me actually look in them for him. Instead, he goes through each one.
“This is the one! This is where I put it!” He says each time he gets to a new folder. He never finds it.
Rachael, Steve, and Mitzi sit in the den after the triplets have gone up to bed. Anna comes back down to take the laptop from Steve because she needs to do something for her homework, so Steve goes to bed after acknowledging Anna always comes back down stairs to use the laptop.
"No I don't," she says.
When she finishes with the laptop, she goes to bed. Rachael moves from the sofa to the chair to sit with her mother. They talk about going to look at a house in Little Rock in the next few days. They're looking at houses on her phone. Something for Rachael. Something cheap, something broken, something they can fix together.
I spend the night in Neal’s room. When I wake up, there are chocolate chip pancakes and eggs. Neal has a hair dryer in his shoes. They are wet.
“What happened to Neal’s shoes?” I ask.
“Neal happened to Neal’s shoes,” Anna says.
As I walk out the door for work, Mitzi tells me to come back any time. She tells me she pays pretty well if I ever want to grout some tile.
Sweet Potato Recipe, as told by Mitzi:
I take sweet potatoes and mash them up and put butter and sugar and cinnamon. I don’t measure anything out. I throw them into a cast-iron skillet, cover it with aluminum foil and put it in the oven for a while.
No matter where you are, if you want to invite me to dinner, I’d love to come. In return, I’ll do my best to be a good conversationalist and document a small piece of your everyday life. I’m a fun dinner guest, people. Kids love me. I’ll give your pets a lot of attention. If you want to invite your weird uncle over for dinner, too, so he’ll stop bugging you, now’s the time! I’ll talk to him so you don’t have to.
I live in Little Rock, Arkansas, but I’ll keep a list and when I’m traveling in your area, I’d love to meet you and your family/roommates/cat and enjoy a home-cooked meal. Email me at gchoate17 (at) outlook [dot] com with the subject line: Dinner at Our House.
