You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas Read Online Free PDF Page B

evaporated and the pot fused to the burner of the stove.
    Had they actually tested this recipe on a fool?
I wondered.
    But this was no pot of boiling water. This was only gingerbread! And gumdrops! It was just plain silly to be
worried
about candy canes. No, the gingerbread house would look exactly like the one on the magazine cover. I knew it would.
     

     
    I loved to experiment in the kitchen and if I ever used a recipe, it was only for inspiration. Recipes, I felt, were for the unimaginative. However, with this particular project I would do my best to follow the recipe to the letter. And where that wasn’t possible, I would at least stay true to its spirit.
    Molasses, whatever the hell that was, sure wasn’t in our cupboard. But I knew it was a liquid because you were supposed to “gently pour” it into the other ingredients, so I used some of my mother’s cooking sherry—something she herself often incorporated into fancier recipes.
    We had flour. Because the gingerbread house was gingerbread colored, I used the brown flour made out of wheat and not the other flour made out of white.
    And wasn’t baking
soda
the same thing as baking
powder
? I thought so, so I used the latter.
    As for the spices—cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg, ginger, fennel—I skipped them all. Because right there next to the Tabasco sauce and peeking out from behind a bottle of my mother’s saccharin was a little jar of allspice. Just the name tasted like gingerbread. It was all the spices I needed plus the rest of them. It was all of them; allspice!
    Briefly, I worried about the spectacular mess I had somehow created. I had managed to use my mother’s entire set of six white mixing bowls, her electric beater, a number of pans, each of which I had greased with corn oil, and assorted spatulas, knives, forks, a cheese grater, and my father’s hammer from the basement.
    It was just a shame that I wouldn’t be able to help my mother wash all these dishes, but I couldn’t get all my Band-Aids wet so she would have to do them herself.
    I smiled.
    She always said that art was born from chaos. “The creative process can be very messy. You have to be comfortable with that.”
    I was comfortable.
    I poured the thick, gluey batter onto trays and baked it stiff. Prying the gingerbread, which was nearly black, from the cookie sheets, I set about to assemble my Gingerbread Dreams Fantasy House.
    Gloomily, I came to accept the fact that it was a structural impossibility to create a steep, peaked roof, like in the picture. The gingerbread kept breaking. The instant coffee I had added for color must have made it brittle.
    So I gave the building a flat roof—like the modern house down the street that my mother often admired—and then spent an hour applying white frosting from a can for snow. Which looked nothing like mounds of snow, but like piles of insulation left behind by a work crew that had gone on strike. It looked, actually, just like the house even
farther
down the street; the one built in the center of a dirt field. With plastic stapled to the outside in place of siding and asphalt nailed here and there to patch holes. My mother hated that house. “It ruins the entire damn street.”
    I had made
that
house, in black gingerbread. If only I had two miniature flat tires and an upside-down swing set to place in front.
    I cut out more windows. Two rows of them. Immediately, this looked wrong. It looked
nonresidential.
    The deeper into the project I tumbled, the more dire the results. The colorful gumdrops I’d attached randomly to the front façade didn’t look
cheerful,
they looked like what they were: an easy, colorful ploy to manipulate the eye and distract it from the wanton ugliness right before it. The more I did to try and decorate my way out of the monstrosity I had built, the worse it looked.
    By not even the most elastic stretch of the imagination was this a gingerbread
house.
    Four walls, a flat ceiling, rows of windows, four stories