'The Pantry' — a Short Story
A newspaper ad changed the course of Isabella's afternoon and, maybe, her life.
My right hand rested on my lap, on top of the folded newspaper open at the section which would change the course of my afternoon. The torrid August sun filtered through the floor-to-ceiling windows in front of me, reaching me up to my knees. The Murcian house was in complete silence, as it had been every afternoon since the kids left town for the beach with their friends. No dinners to cook, no sheets to clean. All the noise in the duplex home that afternoon came from my heart thumping in my chest.
I was surrounded by my entire family, yet I was all alone. My mother’s old chest with the darkened knobs and carved drawer doors now sat beside the window, holding some tablecloths and cutlery for a special occasion. A mahogany table with sculpted feet, where my grandfather used to write his letters, to my right. Above it, the wall was dotted with a dozen pictures, each in a rectangular white frame, showing my husband and kids, my brothers, my parents. I had placed the last photo with Raul three years ago, after he threw me that surprise 40th birthday dinner party. And right in the center, two photos of my grandparents, in old-school oval frames. My eyes fell on my grandmother, my yaya, the greatest woman on earth.
Yaya Felicia raised me, while my mother had her hands full with my three brothers. Widowed since her late 40s, she moved in with us and became my main parent. Grandma Felicia was an odd creature for her time. Her controversial opinions about women and their role in and out of the home remained inside the privacy of our walls. She knew better than to go around disobeying a carefully built society, but she was tireless in trying to voice her truth within her trustworthy circles. And helping to give me an education was her convenient way to mold me into the independent woman she didn’t get to be.
The rays of the sun reached my hand, the sudden warmth on my skin drew my attention to it. My eyes fell again on the newspaper. Right under my fingers, the tiny ink letters spelled out the ad on the Classifieds page. They advertised a new course for administrative assistants where they taught you how to use a computer for office jobs. I thought I heard Raul mention the other day that they’d brought one of those machines for his boss’ office. I kept staring at the ad, while thoughts from the past surfaced again. Every so often something would happen around the house that would remind me of my Grandma and my head would start spinning with her old words. Yaya Felicia’s warm voice reminded me again I should never be financially dependent on a man, no matter how loving he was. My breath, relaxed until then, started shortening and my stomach tightened.
* * *
Close to Christmas back in 1975, a little over 20 years ago, the whole country had been boiling for a month. The Generalissimo had died, leaving a society divided, eager for a better future. The women had higher hopes than ever that their lives would improve. Grandma was ecstatic. All her dreams of freedom she had whispered during afternoon siestas on close friends’ porches had a chance of becoming reality. The air felt odd, even the way people walked in the streets seemed to have changed. The shushed discussions over the morning coffee at the corner cafeteria became loud and optimistic.
But I wasn’t preoccupied with politics at the time. My mind was completely overtaken by this boy, two years older, whom I had met on a family visit to the house of the Lopez, a few weeks back. We had been sending notes to each other since then, expressive enough to keep my heart racing for days. In those times, it was all about Arturo’s deep black eyes.
‘What are you doing there, cariño? Daydreaming again?’ Grandma startled me as she walked into the kitchen. I was contemplating the leafless branches of the high trees reaching our kitchen window while fingering the paper note from Arturo in my skirt pocket.
‘Nothing’, I answered barely turning, to hide my look of surprise.
She took out the teapot and filled it with water, placing it on the stove she had turned on. ‘Let’s have a nice cup of tea, Isabella, will you?’
That sounded like trouble. Especially coming from Grandma. Or like another talk about the opportunity for women now that times were finally changing. She hadn’t stopped talking about that, ever since last month when Franco had died.
Grandma Felicia had been weaving tales about fierce women into bedtime stories for as long as I could remember. I was the only kid in the whole universe who couldn’t listen to Snow White without some lesson on how the tale reduced the princess to her looks only. Each bedtime story had its own female-demeaning faults in yaya’s opinion, and for each, she had a spirited comment. But that wasn’t enough, she must have thought, since at the time I was spending my days absorbed by expanding my big girl wardrobe for the next time I’d meet Arturo.
When the teapot started hissing and the water was ready, Grandma poured it onto the tea bags, which filled the kitchen with the sweet smell of jasmine. She came and sat next to me at the table, warming her hands on the tea mug, looking out in space.
I did the same, waiting for her to start. There was no way out of this conversation. She surely wanted to lecture me again about Arturo, just like last week when she had also caught me staring out the window.
Turning towards me, she asked:
‘Do you remember when I told you that story about Lucia Sanchez?’
Confused, I tried to remember who Lucia Sanchez might be and a story about this woman, but her name was quite common and nothing came to mind. Knowing Grandma, I probably should have known, but I couldn’t remember anything. I looked at her with a sorry face.
‘Her second surname is Saornil’, Grandma said, raising an eyebrow, like that was supposed to be a useful hint.
Ah, that was a less common name, but still. No recollection.
‘I must have told you about her about 5 years ago when she died. But then you were more eager to try out dresses from señora Eulalia’s shop than with boring old ladies’, she said. When she realized that I had no idea whom she was referring to, a shade of discontent covered her eyes, her cheekbones getting tensed. It was not the first time she recognized I didn’t remember her stories and her efforts to present me with powerful women of our history. Every time that happened, her cheekbones seemed to be getting tenser.
‘Well, she’s one of my favorite women who stood up for her rights. And for all of ours, if you think of it.’
Grandma knew a lot about this woman and she made it her aim to tell me every single detail that afternoon. She counted how she founded a magazine called Free Women, how she had to flee to Paris for a few years because the Spanish regime didn’t tolerate her, and when she returned to Spain she had to abandon her hometown Madrid for Valencia, as she was seen as an anarchist. My yaya’s passion when telling me about Lucia Saornil made her forget about the tea in front of her, cooling in the mug.
I was struggling to hold in a yawn.
‘That sounds like a woman with no fear’, I remember saying at some point towards the end of the endless story.
* * *
As the sun moved through the afternoon, its warm rays reached my upper arm and chest making me look down and see the classifieds ad again in my lap. My own words as a young 20-year-old resonated in my mind: that sounds like a woman with no fear. They stirred something in my stomach and I ruffled the paper in my lap to chase away the bitter feeling.
I stood up abruptly, ready to shake off all those thoughts clouding my mind. The newspaper fell at the foot of the couch. I went to the window, opened it and drew in a long deep breath of air. It felt like I hadn’t been breathing for hours. Then I headed towards the kitchen, desperately searching for something I might have left unfinished, something that would need to be put in order. Standing in the kitchen door, I glanced across the room at the pantry. Inside it, the shelves were crammed with jars and cans, the tiled floor was surely dusty, the bottles of red wine untouched for ages on the bottom rack.
I decided it was time to clean up the pantry. It had been too long since the last time I’d done it; now seemed like the perfect time to take care of it. My new self-appointed task made me feel better, my lazy afternoon quickly gathering meaning. I started unloading the shelves, planning to reorder the jars by size and height. I placed them, one by one, in straight rows on the counter next to the sink. Looking at them all lined up, an army of jars, I realized I had been careless. If I wanted to check the expiration date on them, I’d better spin them with the back label facing me. Back to work, spinning the cylinder soldiers so I could see the expiration date. I was the Joan of Arc of my kitchen preparing my army for an important mission. Each jar needed to be in the exact spot I had envisioned for it.
Whatever you do, find something that’s just yours to work on, child. Don’t give all of yourself to your housework.
Grandma’s words hit the inside of my head unexpectedly. Frowning, for better focus to the middle shelf of the pantry, I clenched my knuckles on three more jars, to grow my infantry. My beloved infantry in my beloved kitchen where I raised my three beloved children. When the shelves were emptied, I took out a new sponge and the cleaning solvent, planning to wipe them fresh.
Don’t sit and wait for them to validate you. Think about where you’d like to work. You do want to work, don’t you?
The more I heard Grandma’s words, the harder I was scrubbing the shelves, one at a time, like a surgeon scrubbing her fingers before open-heart surgery. Focused on the job, the movements were rhythmic. I wrestled with a crack in a back corner, where dark lines of muck had formed. This was my pantry, and I’d make it the cleanest pantry in the whole wide world. I was doing my job better than any other housewife.
You see, Snow White’s beauty is what allowed her to escape death. She was reduced to her looks only.
I grabbed a chair, slammed it down on the tiles and climbed it, facing the pantry. The long-forgotten boxes on the top shelf were lying under a centimeter of dust. I took a dust cloth and started on a new sanitizing mission. My pantry would be just like new, and only I would know where I had put each jar and each can; I’d be the sole master of my own pantry.
A couple of hours must have passed when I dropped onto the chair, exhausted. Hands violet from scrubbing, back tight from carrying around my infantry of vegetable jars and my pain. Mind throbbing with Grandma’s old words. The fatigue didn’t prevent me from remembering the newspaper ad. It was lying at the foot of the couch, back in the living room, like a loaded gun waiting to be picked up.
I ran over the specifics again in my mind. It said the course was scheduled for two hours every day. I did have two hours to spare. Especially in the mornings when everyone was out and only back around 2pm for lunch. I’d have to take into account going there and coming back, but there would still be plenty of time to also prepare lunch for the family. The possibility started to take real shape. And I would probably meet other women who also had to take care of lunch for their families; no one would want to be late for that. Women who also had their pantries to keep tidy.
The smallest jars were still on the counter, the last ones to be placed back in the pantry. I reached for two of them, filled with peas, my husband’s favorite green veggies. My hands froze mid-way, holding the jars in the air, as I remembered him. I pondered what he would say if I told him I wanted to take that course. He would probably laugh it off and say it was a whim. He’d ask me what I planned to do with whatever I would learn there. Raul was a good, loving husband, but I couldn’t help but wonder, would he be mad? Would he think I was dumping the housework if I was thinking about getting a job? He loved Grandma and was tickled by all her nonconformist ideas when she was still around. And probably he didn’t mind that they remained just that, theoretical ideas. But now, now that the kids were grown up, what would be the harm? I slowly placed the jars of peas next to a can of beans, my heart racing at the thought of having to explain my idea to him that night.
As the advertised course was for administrative assistants, for the most part it was a job given to women. Housewives with supportive husbands and, ideally, children out of home. Tolerating the tight discomfort wich bothered my stomach again as I was preparing to tell Raul about my new interest, Grandma’s face reappeared before my eyes. That radiant smile of hers when she saw that she got through me and taught me a new lesson. I couldn’t help but let out a sigh of relief. She had always been right. Those never-ending stories she counted were finally playing out their part.
She wasn’t afraid to live her convictions, despite all the risks. She stood up for something, she helped us have a better life.
Grandma’s words of admiration towards the militant Lucia Saornil, the founder of the Free Women magazine, came back to me. I wasn’t going to change anyone’s life by taking an administrative assistant’s course and learning how to use a computer. Anyone’s but my own. I would learn something new, I’d see where that would take me. When he would hear it, Raul would surely arch up his right eyebrow, as he always did when I came up with strange new ideas, like an unconventional dinner menu.
A few jars were still untouched, waiting on the counter for their turn. I stood up from the chair where I had plummeted deep in thought, who knew how long before, and went back to the living room. Sitting down on my spot on the couch, legs crossed, I grabbed the newspaper and took a long look at the announcements page again. If anyone had entered and watched me, they would see me scanning the whole page, line by line. But I was just looking through the newspaper, knowing the ad by heart by then. The last rays of the afternoon sun reached a corner of the white couch, lighting it up.
In the still air of the empty living room, I put the newspaper down, I uncrossed my legs and stood up, heading towards the second drawer of the chest behind the couch. I pulled out a paper scissors, I returned to the couch and put the newspaper back on my lap. I cut the announcement in no hurry, following the marked black box. I double-checked for the phone number. I carried it across the room as if it were a fragile porcelain platter; I placed it next to the tall telephone table. The next morning I’d call and ask about enrollment.
I found my heart racing more and more as the story goes on! Love it!