Boiling Point
(November 8-15, 2014)
Wendy pulled down the long driveway and parked beside her dad's truck in the yard of the Corduroy house—"Casa Catastrophe," as she sometimes called it—at about 10 PM on Saturday night. She got out of the Dodge Dart and winced as she heard banging and yelling from inside the house. For a moment she considered just getting back into the car and driving somewhere, anywhere, to spend the night—but she made a face, grabbed her work bag, and went inside.
"There you are!" roared Manly Dan as she came in. "Where've you been? Explain yourself!"
"Dad!" she said, closing her eyes as his thundering voice added to her headache. "I told you this morning! Soos and I had to do the yearly inventory and inspection! Just the two of us! I told you I'd be late!"
"You didn't say you'd be haulin' in at midnight!"
She looked at the mantle clock. "It's not close to midnight! It's barely ten o'clock!"
"Leavin' your brothers to go hungry!"
"What?" she asked. "Look, I left instructions on the table, all written out! All they had to do was boil a pot of spaghetti and heat the sauce!"
"Come and look at the mess!"
Well—when Dan was right, he was right. The kitchen was a mess. The pasta pot had a half-inch-thick layer of black char in the bottom. The microwave looked as if it were the scene of a bloody murder—but that was tomato sauce, splattered and spattered and dried to a crust.
After ruining the spaghetti and sauce, the boys had rifled through the pantry and evidently had decided to have breakfast cereal for dinner. Five boxes of various kinds had been spilled all over the table, and two mixing bowls still had remnants of soggy cereal and about a pint of milk each in them. The boys had also evidently had a soggy-cereal food fight: blobs of brightly-dyed wheat and oats and other grains still clung to the walls and even ceiling.
"I didn't do this!" Wendy pointed out. "All they had to do was fill the pot half way with water—"
"They told me they used half a cup! And went to play a video game while it boiled!"
"No wonder they burned it. Make them clean it up!"
"They're asleep! Growin' boys need their rest! Wendy," Dan rumbled, "you know it ain't no man's work to clean the kitchen!"
"Dad, please," she said, rubbing her eyes as her head pounded. "Look, I've had school all week and night school on Tuesday and Thursday! I went in to work at the Shack at nine this morning and put in more than twelve hours on my feet. If you and the boys had gone over to Roseburg to bowl, this wouldn't have happened. Don't blame me!"
"Clean it up," Dan said. "And you know the bowlin' alley in Roseburg's closed for fumigating this weekend!"
"Then go to the one in town!"
"No! Never! Not after what that slab-sided manager told me!"
"He just asked you to roll the balls, not throw them!"
"Nobody criticizes my bowlin' style! Until he apologizes, I'm not settin' foot into that bowlin' alley again!"
Wendy closed her eyes. They had been through this argument dozens of times. Mr. Samuelson, the soft-spoken manager of the Gravity Falls Bowl-Sum-More, irritated Dan because he was too small and frail a man to punch. And he had no idea that his mild suggestion had been a vile insult—in Dan's opinion. Mr. Samuelson would apologize in a heartbeat if anybody even suggested that he'd hurt Dan's tender feelings, but Dan wouldn't tell him that, and he forbade anyone else to tell him. And so it goes.
"Could I at least do it tomorrow?" Wendy asked. "I'm really tired."
"How you gonna fix breakfast if everything's all messed up? Get to work!"
Simmering with resentment, Wendy put away her work bag, took off her flannel shirt, and in her undershirt and jeans started on the kitchen: Scrub down the walls. Get a stepladder to pry drying chunks of Chocko Wocko and Merry Strawberry Oaties cereal from the ceiling. Scrape, scrub, sweep, and mop. Scrub the dishes in the sink—the dishwasher would have died if she'd tried to wash the black-crusted pasta pot in it. She nearly needed a chisel.
At 1:10 AM, she finished. She went straight to bed—no dinner for her. She couldn't have eaten it anyway, not with her stomach knotted up and churning. She muttered to herself: "Put the spaghetti in the pot. Boil it for ten minutes while you heat the sauce in another pot. Mix it and eat it. How freakin' hard is that?"
And lying in her bed, on her back, she felt hot tears boiling in her eyes. "It's not fair," she whispered. "They don't have to work! They don't do a damn thing but laze around and goof off and play video games!"
She didn't understand why Dad didn't lean on her two younger brothers the way he always had on her and Dan, Junior, her rowdy older brother, who was now off in Washington State, on his own, managing a lumber gang for International Woody Stuff Products, Inc. Wendy and Junior always had to learn lumberjack skills, compete in contests, take the lead in survival training every winter. Heck, Junior could even cook, after a fashion. He could manage to fry a hamburger or boil a damn pot of spaghetti!
Oh, Wendy had tried to teach her younger brothers how to do stuff like that, but they weren't interested—sissy stuff, girls' stuff, they called cooking and cleaning. Sure, they could sort of manage on camping trips now, in a half-assed way—they could cook a fish over a campfire, or mix up gorp for hiking, and after Dan had had to punch out a couple of hungry bears, they had at least got through their heads the fact that at a campsite they had to hang foodstuff high in a tree to avoid unwanted visitors at night. But anything beyond coal-baked potatoes, S'mores, or the simplest fried food was beyond them. And they kept it that way on purpose, too lazy to learn better.
"I oughta just freakin' leave," Wendy told herself. "I oughta just get up and pack some stuff and flat-out take off!"
She had money saved—some for improving her car, more for college—but she could drive over to Portland, find some job somewhere, and strike out on her own. Or maybe—maybe she could even drive down to California. There must be something she could do in Oakland, even waitressing, that would give her a living. And it would be so close to where Dipper and Mabel lived—
Damn.
She seethed inside. No, she couldn't run out, not having her pact with Dipper and all.
If she slept at all that night, she didn't remember it.
But she was up at five AM the next morning. She went to her brothers' room—they were both sprawled in their beds. She grabbed an ankle in each hand and jerked. They yelped as their butts slammed into the floor.
"Hey! What was that for?"
"Wendy, dammit—"
"Up!" she yelled. "Now! Bathroom and shower and get dressed, and I hid the Nontendo, so no video games! Kitchen in fifteen minutes!"
"But—"
"Now!" she ordered, and the tone of voice she used made them obey.
She went and pounded on her father's door.
"What!" he yelled, jerking it open. He was in his long underwear, his usual sleep attire.
"Get dressed and come to the kitchen!" she said.
"Wendy, you—"
"Shut up!" she snapped. "Dad, this is your last chance with me! Do what I say!"
Grumbling, he went back in his room and started to dress.
When they met in the kitchen, Wendy said, "You guys are gonna learn to cook your own breakfast. I'll tell you how, but you do it, and however it turns out—you are gonna eat every bite!"
"Aw, that's girls'—"
"Zip it!" She handed Dan a big bowl and a canister. "Flour in there. Dad, you're gonna make biscuits!"
"I don't even like biscuits!"
"Tough! Look, guys, straight up: I have had it! Last night I thought about moving out! You screw this up, and I'm gone!"
"You ain't grown yet!" Dan roared.
Wendy turned on him, eyes blazing. "I'm not a doormat, either!"
He stared into her eyes and then said, "OK, maybe I been a little bit hard on you—"
"No maybe about it! Here's a measuring cup. Measure out two cups of flour into the sifter!"
She turned to her brothers. "You—you'll scramble eight eggs. You—you're gonna fry up a pound of bacon. Sift the flour, Dad! Here, this will be the egg pan. This is the bacon pan. You'll melt a tablespoon of butter in the egg pan. You always start with a cold pan for bacon—"
She took them through, step by step: mix the flour, salt, baking soda and baking powder, and work in the butter; stir in the buttermilk, knead, roll out, and cut the biscuits; bake in the oven. Crack the eggs. Start over with another one because you do not put the shattered shell in with the white and yolk. Crack them all carefully, put them in a mixing bowl, stir in salt and a little milk. Meanwhile, start the bacon. Turn it. Let the crisp strips drain on paper towels while you start the next batch . . . .
They ate the breakfast and agreed it was OK, though Dan's biscuits could have served as hockey pucks. "You'll do better next time," Wendy told him.
"NEXT time?"
"'Cause I'm tired of going to school all day and night or working at the Shack all day and then coming home to a pigsty and having to cook for the pigs!" she snapped. "And I won't do it all by myself any longer! You know I can support myself if I have to—don't force me to prove it!"
"Well, the food wasn't too bad," one of her brothers said.
"Now where's our game console?" the other asked.
"Not. Yet." Wendy stood up. "We've got dishes to wash. And by the time we're done with that, it's gonna be time to get ready for church!"
"Aw!"
"You'll wash, you'll dry, Dad will put the stuff away. And I will supervise. Go!"
That was only the start. On Monday after school and her two hours in the Shack, Wendy made them clean the living room. On Tuesday night, while she was at night school, they made their own dinner—nothing spectacular, baked potatoes, a salad taken straight from a ready-made bag of mixed greens, and fried pork chops, but they somehow managed without getting food poisoning or burning down the house.
Through the rest of the week she and the guys cleaned the whole house a room or two at a time, though Manly Dan's bedroom took a couple of days in itself.
Then as Dan and the boys prepared to leave on Saturday afternoon to go bowling in the now presumably bug-free alley over in Roseburg, Dan said, "I reckon I was hard on you, Baby Girl."
"Yeah, little bit," Wendy agreed.
"OK, I shouldn'ta been," Dan grunted.
"Apology accepted," Wendy told him.
"You'll be OK? Me and the boys'll eat at the lanes."
"Go," Wendy said. "I'm fine."
Alone in the house, she took a deep breath. The place smelled . . . clean. Cleaner than she'd been able to get it in a year. She boiled an egg and added it to a salad, ate it, cleaned the dishes, and then went into the living room.
She kicked off her boots, peeled off her socks, stretched out on the sofa, and texted Dipper, who answered right away—this was their normal time for chatting.
He called her a few seconds later, and she smiled at his face on her phone. "Hey, man," she said. "'Sup?"
"I was worried about you," he said. "We missed our talk last week, and your texts have been so short! Are you sick? Your voice sounds off."
"Just real tired, dude. Been super busy," she said. "Soos and me did the fall inventory thing last weekend—what a drag. Then I had exams in school and junk and lots of housework to catch up on. Sorry."
"Don't be. You sound exhausted."
"Man, I'm about worn out. My brothers and Dad have been helping, but I think supervising them's harder than doing all the work myself."
"Watch out! That's a man trick. Be so incompetent at housework that somebody else gives up and does it. It's a trap," he warned, smiling.
She chuckled ruefully. "Yeah, and I fell into it too long. Don't worry, Dip, I'm climbing out of it now, I think. It just took a pot of spaghetti."
He tilted his head, like an adorable puppy. "Huh?"
She wriggled her bare toes, wishing that Dipper was really there with her—she could use one of his magical foot massages!
"Well, the thing about a pot of spaghetti," she said, "is—there's always a boiling point!"
The End