Popovers

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Eleanor was very heavy, but beautiful, rosy, sweet, and rolling with babies. She kept her triplet boys in the folds of her skin, all three at once, Edward, Dickey, and Tim, a little like kangaroos carry their young. She had a passion for popovers, and early each morning, before her other children woke, she watched the popovers swell in the oven by oven-light, her face aglow by the magic of heat and dough. As the morning dawn cracked open, the other children dropped from their bunks like yolks dropped from their shells. They lined up with their plates, butter and jam, and as they ate their sweet rolls and sipped juice between their little cracked lips, Eleanor pulled Edward, Dickey, and Tim from her moist skin and washed them in a plastic tub.

The triplets seemed to recognize themselves in each other which made them all the more playful when they were set out in their small triangle, and all the more indifferent to the other children as each child would come over and squeeze the baby boys, wanting to mistake the triplets for rolls, wanting to eat them with butter, it seemed, as the popovers went too quickly, and too sweetly. After breakfast, Eleanor pushed the children into the yard, and tucked the triplets away in her skin where they slept, warm and rosy and clean.

Eleanor’s yard, back then, used to let up sounds of a schoolyard, right up into the old poplars and oaks. The trees like schoolmistresses sent out their disciplinary hushes through their leaves, and, sometimes, Eleanor, too would holler from a window, or blow a little horn, but the children were relentless, and happy, so happy, too.

The babies grew, as babies do, but Eleanor wanted to keep them tucked, to continue wearing them as she would a favorite jewel, or a pretty barrette, as the babies upon her, it seemed, made her feel more womanly, more herself. She grew heavier to suit them. Edward, Dickey, and Tim, with their little hands atop their fleshy gates, watched the other children play and move about, from them they learned to talk. The triplets’ talk, which began as sweet as the warbling of birds, grew into hours of incessant chatter about all things. The triplets were quite political then.

One afternoon the conversation of the triplets swelled into such a heated debate, Eleanor began to take on the mood of a madwoman. She hollered and screamed, blew all her little horns, but could not hush the boys, could not pacify even one. She ran about the house as one would run from a swarm of bees. She punched and knocked and pulled at her skin, which seemed only to fuel the debate, and in her absolute fury, she entered the yard like a tornado, lifting and spinning, her black hair straight out around her. The triplets loosened. Edward flew toward the mountain. Dickey landed in the stream. Tim was thrown into the bed of a passing truck.

The other children dropped their balls and ropes and fled, under the fence and across the cow pastures, away from the quiet of the yard where Eleanor, slumped on a plot of dirt, watched them scatter like wild deer. The children disappeared into the wood line, and Eleanor, under the weight of her loss, crawled to the milking cows’ trough, pulled herself up over the metal rim, and plopped herself into it like she had a million times scooping dough into her muffin tins. The summer sun, as it moved across the mid-day sky, browned Eleanor like a popover, her sweat dripped over her like butter, and out there, in the middle of the wide green pasture, she looked like the most delicious thing, swelling as if by oven-light, and the children, looking out from between the trees, were all dreaming of jam.