It’s all yours. Eat it.
How to make banana pudding
First: admit defeat. You will never make as good a pudding as your aunties did in Biloxi, MS for Thanksgiving when you were in sixth grade. You scooped up big globs of the stuff into your grandmother’s blue and white china and hid upstairs in the attic reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales and avoiding your mother.
Next: gather a large bowl. Yours are all from the thrift store because your husband got the bowls in the divorce, just like he got the respectability and the church, and the white Toyota Tacoma.
In the bowl, beat the cream cheese until fluffy. This would go much faster if you still had the Kitchenaid mixer your mother-in-law gave you at your wedding. Instead, you’ll have to use your hand cranked mixer.
When the cream cheese barely moves, and you get so frustrated you are ready to call the whole thing off, drive to Target and buy a motorized mixer. Not a Kitchenaid, you don’t have the money for that anymore. Buy the kind you hold in your hand, forcing your shoulder to absorb the vibration. It’s better than the hand cranked one.
Next, beat in the condensed milk. Leave a little in the can so you can run your finger through it and taste the thick sugariness, wonder if this is what breast milk tastes like. It can’t be. Your mother was never this sweet.
Add the pudding mix, which will feel like cheating. Surely when your grandmother taught your aunties she didn’t use pudding mix, but you can’t go ask them now because you spent your whole childhood hiding from them, so they know you barely at all.
Line the bottom of the dish with vanilla wafers, but squirrel a few away in your cheeks. They taste best softened.
Cut up two bananas in neat little circles then throw them in the trash. You never liked bananas anyways.
Add the whip cream, which dilutes the sweetness so you can eat more pudding. Then chill, the same way you did when you turned the air conditioner up and wrapped yourself in your grandmother’s quilts in the back bedroom, hoping no one would find you. Slid under the bed when you heard footsteps.
You were always hiding back then. Hiding from the aunties who would compare their children’s charm and accomplishments. And you, wearing the men’s pants you found on the road with safety pins and little pieces of fabric you attached to them— you, shy and bookish and angry, you were an embarrassment to your mother.
Finally, take the pudding from the refrigerator. Eat it all. You don’t have to share with your aunties who weighed you on a scale and found you wanting, or a mother who wanted an obedient Christian girl beautiful enough to outshine your cousins.
It’s all yours. Eat it.