“Many a Little Makes,” by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum - The New Yorker

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“Many a Little Makes,” by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum - The New Yorker Posted: 12 Jul 2020 03:02 AM PDT The third time Imogen dipped into the bowl, she presented the spatula to Mari. "No, thanks," Mari said lightly, and drew back. She deliberately did not say what she wanted to say, what was foremost in her mind, what was exactly the thing her mother had spoken ominously of: salmonella. Because her mother was usually wrong. Her mother, for instance, had assumed that, just because Bree was eight years older than her sister, there had to be "different fathers," as she put it. Something about the tactful tone she used made Mari want to strangle her. "It's the same dad," Mari had announced in a clipped voice. "And don't worry, him and her mom are married. And, yes, she will be at home the whole time we're there." "He and her mom," her own mother had answered, at which point Mari had covered her ears and let out a moan. Yet three large eggs had plopped glisteningly into that batter, three large raw eggs probably teeming with bacteria, and just the sight of the yellowness slicking the spatula was making Mari feel queasy. That and the sickly sweet smell. And the buzzy fluorescent lights in Bree's kitchen. And all the saliva being passed around freely. By now her friends were looking at each other and smiling. They'd seen right through her airy demurral. Panther-like, Imogen hopped down from the counter while Bree closed in on Mari from the other side. "Just try some," Imogen murmured. "You'll like it." She handed the spatula off to Bree but held onto the bowl, dragging the length of her finger along its interior and then extracting it, coated. She slid the finger into her mouth. "It's the best part," Bree said. She swam the spatula closer to Mari's face. "Trust us. It's delicious." "I don't want to," Mari said from under the collar of her T-shirt, which she'd pulled up over her nose. "Just a little," Imogen said. "Just a little tiny taste." Bree stuck out her tongue and delicately pressed the spatula to its tip. "See?" Imogen continued. "It'll be that tiny. You'll barely taste it." Mouth ajar, Bree darted her tongue in and out, in and out, in and out, very fast. Where did she learn to do that? It looked disturbing, like in a Prince kind of way. A yellow droplet sat at the end of her flickering tongue. Mari twisted her head aside. "You're pressuring me." Her voice was muffled beneath the T-shirt. "I don't like eating batter or being pressured or throwing up all night and getting hospitalized." "Who said anything about throwing up?" She yanked her shirt back down and glared at them. "Hello—salmonella?" Somehow it sounded less insane when her mother said it. Imogen and Bree stared at her, speechless. Then they both cackled. "Salmonella?" they repeated. "Salmonella?" Their eyes glittered. A look of silent understanding passed among the three of them. With a gasp, Mari shoved past Imogen and dove toward the TV room. They flew after her, unleashed, made swift by their socks on the linoleum. Over and around the leather sectional they chased her, careful to avoid the glowing fish tank, no one shrieking or laughing because, upstairs, Bevin was already asleep. Just their heavy breathing filled the room, and when the two of them finally pinned her to the floor, she could feel how all of their chests were heaving rapidly, in unison, like they had run a mile together with matching strides. "Chariots of Fire" was one of her top-five favorite films. Though she didn't like to run herself, the sight of British men running was very moving. Whenever they sang "Jerusalem" in morning meeting, she and Imogen and Bree would entertain themselves by surreptitiously acting out the words: they would mime the seizing of the bow, and the spear, and the countenance divine shining forth upon the hills, and they would attack the low note in "arrows of de-sire " with fake solemnity. But even as they joked around, Mari found the song unspeakably beautiful. That ardent phrase—"Bring me my chariot of fire!"—stirred her. When the cake batter touched her face, it was not cold, as she thought it might be; it felt only thick and wet. Her eyes were closed at this point. And her mouth, too, of course. Nothing—not Duncan Hines, or egg-borne bacteria, or anything not her own—would cross the threshold. Her lips were squeezed so tightly that they tingled. No one was getting in or out: she kept herself intact, impervious to the panting weight of Imogen and Bree on top of her. With satisfaction, she felt their bodies slacken, the energy dissolving—they were thwarted, and there was nothing to do now but smear batter on Mari's face. Even with her eyes shut, she could tell when it was Imogen doing it and when it was Bree. Like in "Chariots of Fire," where the two men ran extremely fast but for different reasons: the Scottish one because he believed so much in God, the Jewish one because he wanted to fit in and show that he was better than all the anti-Semites he met in college. The perfunctory swipes across her cheek—that was Imogen, having already lost interest in the whole thing—but in the precisely centered dabs on her forehead, her nose, her mouth, her chin, she felt the warmth of Bree's attention, her thoroughness and care. After they hoisted themselves off her, Mari made her way unsteadily toward the hall bathroom, eyes slitted and face sticky, and it was here that she caught a whiff of the cake baking in the oven. She had never smelled anything like it before. Initially, it reminded her of the cloying scent of Play-Doh, which she had always hated, and in fact hated so much that when she was small she'd refused to touch the stuff, but as she inhaled again she found something spreading underneath the sweetness, a smell similar to that of butter and eggs and vanilla and flour but not quite the real thing, a smell that was artificial but also intoxicating and somehow more intoxicating for being fake. She didn't have to taste it to know ahead of time how much she was going to like this cake. How moist it would be and how warm, how its faint chemical aftertaste would make her go back for more. Wiping off her face above the sink, she decided to tell her mother that from now on the only kind of cake she wanted for her birthday was yellow cake from a box. In the middle of seventh grade, Mari heard the Smiths for the first time, on a late-night radio show that played the day's most-requested songs. She had to spend extra money when buying the band's record, because it was imported from the U.K.; it had a Dutch-blue cover with a black-and-white photograph on it of a handsome man in profile, in a tank top—a man who turned out not to be one of the Smiths, despite a superficial resemblance to their bass player. Printed tinily on the inside record sleeve was every word to every song, which is how she learned that the correct words were "I am the son and the heir" and not "I am the sun and the air," as she'd originally thought. At first, she felt unsophisticated for having heard it this way, but then it occurred to her that maybe the ambiguity was deliberate, a mark of genius.

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