iriam Rowe was in the kitchen, making ice cream. She had a large number of ice cream recipes that she experimented with, creating flavors from anything that happened to enter her mind.
After failed experiments with meat and poultry, Miriam had concluded that flesh was not a viable ingredient for ice cream, since heat was necessary for the proper psychical processing of flesh. Heat was diametrically opposed to cold, and since cold was used to process ice cream, flesh was an inappropriate ingredient. She failed to explain (and felt no desire to explain) why some of her other ingredients for ice cream were melted or cooked before adding, such as cinnamon apples.
Her experiments with fruits and vegetables were far more successful, and she created a surprisingly delicious carrot ice cream sweetened with honey. Not so surprising, but certainly successful, were berry, orange, and lemon ice creams.
On this particular day, Miriam was conducting an experiment with radishes. Her reasoning was that carrots were a root, and since her carrot ice cream was successful, roots were appropriate to ice cream. Radishes were roots, and moreover they were red. Red was close in color to orange (like carrots) and was also a successful color in ice cream (see strawberry, raspberry, rutabaga, and watermelon).
The trick lay in discovering how to prepare the radishes and what flavorings to add to them. Miriam had been testing radish ice creams all week, somewhat to her daughter’s dismay, but the flavor balances seemed to be improving. Miriam was not discouraged. Sometimes the most difficult combinations were among the most fulfilling.
She had settled on the combination of ingredients for tonight’s ice cream, and she had the radishes completely prepared. She reached for the milk and to her annoyance found that it was not where she left it on the counter. Looking around, she saw that it was pushed all the way back into the corner.
She reached to recover it and began measuring the milk into a bowl. As she was pouring it, something seemed to jog her arm, and she spilled milk all over the counter. Miriam looked around the room. She was completely alone.
“Nanette?” she asked, although in the past Nanette had never communicated except through Charlotte.
There was no response. The kitchen was still and silent.
Miriam cleaned up the spilled milk and measured the necessary quantity. Then, she took up the cream and began pouring it into a measuring cup. Again, her arm jogged. Cream spilled on the counter. Miriam banged the cream down on the counter in agitation and swung around to face an empty, silent kitchen. She frowned.
Again, she cleaned up the spill, and she measured out the cream. There was no disturbance. She successfully completed her concoctions. She loaded the ice cream maker with ice and salt, and pouring in her ingredients, she began to churn the ice cream.
The churning of ice cream was an occupation that Miriam Rowe found soothing. For a length of time, one sat on a fairly comfortable chair and moved one’s arm in a repetitive motion. While churning ice cream, one was clearly doing productive work. On the other hand, one did not need to think or exert any strong effort. After a while, the muscles in Miriam’s arm had grown so that churning an ice cream maker was no work at all. She would relax into a daze and let her mind wander over random thoughts.
Once she began to churn the ice cream, Miriam was pleasantly undisturbed. The sudden unorthodox behavior of her dairy products did not disturb her. It had passed out of her mind completely due to her unique ability to process only those things she felt were of importance to her.
In fact, Miriam’s mind was completely occupied with the radish, that crisp and brilliant red root with a snow-white center, like an apple. Radish and apple ice cream? Radish with cinnamon and brown sugar? She attempted to envision the psychic impression of a radish. Each plant or animal had its own psychic impression. Miriam had been quite impressed with some of the psychical research that had been done using photography, and she felt that preparing photographs of food so as to capture the auras of different dishes would be a worthwhile pursuit. Photography equipment was not inexpensive, though, and this idea did not seem to be practicable at the moment. She imagined the aura of a radish to be yellow, which was the color she most often attributed to vegetables for some obscure reason.
Visions of a yellow, globular, aural being were parading in her imagination when suddenly the ice cream churn came to a halt. It felt as if something was lodged in the mechanism, something that was blocking the handle. Since her radishes were boiled and mashed, she could not imagine what could be blocking it.
She gave an extra push to the handle, and the ice cream maker began to churn again. Just as she was settling down to her own thoughts, the handle began to turn faster and faster. It twisted out of her hand, and as she looked on in amazement, the ice cream maker continued to churn by itself, faster and faster.
While the previous interruptions in her ice cream making had been annoyances, this surprising occurrence seemed beneficial. Was this, then, the hand of God stepping in to help churn ice cream?
This thought had barely crossed her mind when the ice cream maker lurched off of its purchase and hurled itself across the room, spilling unfinished ice cream, ice, and salt across the floor. Miriam’s face grew red with anger, and her throat constricted. The wind was knocked out of her, as if she had been hit in the chest with a ball. She was thrown against the back wall of the kitchen with a crash. The feeling in her chest persisted, like an arm thrust right through her heart. She felt it pulling on her as her body rushed upward and crashed against the ceiling. Then it released, and Miriam crashed to the floor.
Blood seeped out of her mouth as she lay on the floor in a puddle of ice cream, red blood, the color of radishes, or strawberries, or rutabagas, or raw unprocessed flesh.
Miriam expired.
It was at this moment that Charlotte came running into the kitchen. She was pursuing a sweet of some sort, perhaps cake or bread and honey. She stopped dead in the doorway. She saw her mother sprawled on the floor, sticky with cream, blood flowing out of her mouth.
“Mother?” she said, but she already knew that her mother was dead.
Charlotte looked around the room, left and right, and her face became stern and hard.
“You,” she said to the empty room. “You vile beast. Go off wherever you go to, and leave us all alone. I said go! Go, go, go, go, go!”
In seeming response to this, the ice cream maker again flung itself into motion, crashed against the opposite wall, and dissolved into splinters.
Churning ice cream was a solitary occupation. Miriam Rowe spent hours and hours churning ice cream, separated from her family. The separateness had grown up over time, but in the end it was a definite fracture, a division that set her apart, alone.
While Miriam Rowe churned ice cream, her daughter was in study with her husband. Under hypnosis, he attempted to draw out some sort of ecstatic, ultimate truth.
That was Professor Rowe’s only desire—truth. Truth was equal to God.
The pathway to truth was guided by intuition. As human beings, each of us already knew the truth. That was the ultimate irony of the search. The truth was in each of us and around all of us but hidden behind the curtain of the unconscious mind.
Charlotte’s gift was to touch on those things that felt right, that seemed fraught with meaning and therefore must be fraught with meaning.
The nearness of such power, such truth would excite Professor Rowe almost beyond human capacity. The answer was so close, so tantalizingly close—the truth—God. He could feel it. He quivered in its presence, brought by this beautiful, burgeoning child. She was no longer really a child, but a young woman.
Miriam Rowe churned ice cream.
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