Rosettes on the Church Steps

Three days of frying

We fried for three days. I took Thursday, Friday and Monday off from the bus garage, which I had not done in October in eleven years, and Arne covered the radio for me in the mornings before route time.

Mom’s kitchen is small. It has an old gas range with four burners, a linoleum floor with a worn spot in front of the sink, and a window that looks out on the alley. We kept that window cracked the whole three days.

We used two deep cast iron pots on the front burners, with a candy thermometer clipped to each.

Mom ran the left pot and I ran the right. We made the batter in her yellow mixing bowl, a double batch at a time.

The first morning I ruined a dozen before I got one right. I dipped too deep, the batter went over the top of the iron, and the rosette stuck like it was glued.

Mom took the iron out of my hand without a word and showed me again.

“Like you’re dipping your toe in the lake in May,” she said. “Just to the edge. Don’t be greedy.”

By the second hour I had it. By the second day I could turn out a rosette every forty seconds, iron after iron, and lay them on the brown paper sacks in rows like little gold stars.

We worked in the daylight, mostly. Mom does not like frying after dark.

She says you cannot see the color right under a kitchen bulb, and she is right. Golden looks brown at night and brown looks burnt.

Somewhere in the second afternoon, while the oil came back up to temperature, Mom told me about the first year she sold rosettes at the bazaar.

It was the fall I was twelve, the year the elevator cut Dad’s hours.

“We were going to be short on the taxes,” she said. “Your father was worried sick. So I fried. I sold twenty dozen at two dollars a dozen, and I took forty dollars to the courthouse window, and I came home and cried in the car.”

“Why did you cry?”

“Because I was proud,” she said. “I never told your father that part.”

I want to tell you about the powdered sugar, because I think about it more than anything else from those three days.

When the rosettes were cool, Mom would sift the sugar over them herself. She would not let me do it.

She held the little sieve high and tapped it with one finger, and she moved down the rows slowly, one rosette at a time, making sure each one was covered. She did it like she was tucking in children.

I stood at the stove and watched her, and I could not see the oil for a minute. My mother is eighty-one years old.

She has buried a husband and two brothers. And she was standing in her kitchen dusting cookies with powdered sugar like each one mattered all by itself.

“What?” she said, when she caught me looking.

“Nothing,” I said. “The oil’s ready.”

We packed them in clear plastic bakery trays, a dozen to a tray, with a sheet of wax paper between the layers, the way she always has.

By Monday night, which for us meant four in the afternoon, we had forty dozen.

Four hundred eighty rosettes. I counted them twice. Mom counted them once and said I had miscounted the first time, which I had.