Butter on His Shoes

I begged my mom to make another cake. It was the day after my little sister’s birthday and I had a brilliant revelation: every night should be cake night. So my master plan was to persuade my mom to let me help her make a chocolate cake. It was Friday night, after all. This meant “TV night”: The Twilight Zone and Dallas were typically on the agenda. It was quite clear to me that Duncan Hines chocolate cake was the perfect accompaniment.

At six years old, the kitchen counter remained an obstacle that was out of reach so I used the standby dining chair to prop myself up to my mom’s height. She rolled up my pajama sleeves and let me pour the heaping cup of water into the bowl of mix. She walked to the fridge and carried over three eggs in one hand – something I would attempt later that year and fail miserably – and a gallon of milk in the other.

“Oooooo! Can I break the eggs?”

“Erin, I don’t know. We don’t want the shells in the cake.”

“I know. I can do it. Please!!”

She reached into the drying rack and grabbed a clean bowl and cleared the counter in front of my chair. Setting two of the three eggs gently on the counter, out of reach of my arm’s length, she prepared for the worst. “Ok. Let’s try it. We’ll see how the first one goes.”

She stood behind me with her arms around my torso, her fingers wrapped around mine guiding the egg to the edge of the bowl, striking it against the glass and then slowly separating the two halves over the center of the brown mix. Her fingers pried mine apart and a perfect yolk slipped out with the white goo. I smiled over the bowl, like looking into a crystal ball and then turned to her, “Ok. Another!” And we repeated the process twice again.

In the adjacent living room, my dad was laying on the couch with Kirsten cuddled up by his chest and Tommy sipping on a bottle down by his feet. The television was getting louder, the background noise polluting our composed cooking lesson in the kitchen.

“Daddy, we are trying to bake a cake!” It seemed completely reasonable to me at the time, as it does still, that concentration is a challenge when the television is chattering in my ear.

“Erin, I think you should come see this. Priscilla, come here. This is that moonwalk thing!” My dad called to us from the living room and the atypical urgency in his voice convinced us that the trip to the next room was worthwhile. As I approached the scene, I saw my brother and sister rocking their torsos side to side. With a deranged kind of smile on his face, my brother’s teeth gripped his bottle and the milk sloshed around inside as he jiggled to the music.

“Erin, don’t eat that, you’ll get sick.” My mom walked behind me watching me lick the chocolate from my fingers. I stopped.

Standing between my horizontal dad and my vertical mom, I planted my two feet, pulled my fingers out of my mouth and held them in the air in mid-gesticulation. I recognized the music from the album that my parents recently bought me. It was Michael Jackson on the screen. He had a sparkly diamond glove on his left hand and wore matching socks. I looked from his hand to my hand, amazed that we were holding our hands in the exact same position. My eyes locked onto the figure gliding back and forth on the screen, not distracted by the snapping of my mom’s fingers next to me as she kept the beat.

“Do you think you can get onto your toes like that?” My dad asked me. “How does he do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can he just glide across the floor? He must have butter on his shoes.”

And then Michael Jackson moonwalked across the stage, across the screen, across my family’s heart.