I am a tidy cook. I clean as I go. I keep the sink full of hot soapy water and I wash the dishes and utensils as soon as I‘m finished using them. I also clean the pots and pans immediately and put them away. I never leave food out. It goes back in the refrigerator or cupboard as soon as I’m done using it. It’s a matter of economy as well as safety. Food safety is important to me. Before I’ve finished cooking, I wipe down the counters and take out the trash. By the time the food is served, the kitchen is spotless and you can’t even tell that anyone has been cooking. I leave no evidence behind.
While I’m cooking I take tiny tastes of the food but I cook mostly by smell. I can smell if the spaghetti has enough oregano or if the turkey stuffing has enough sage. I know when the bread is done by the way it smells. I like kitchen-cooking smells. I’m actually a pretty good cook, if not an inventive or exotic one. I don’t eat my own cooking; in fact I rarely eat at all. Cooking leaves me without an appetite. I cook because I love to watch other people eat.
My daughter’s kitchen is a jungle. The cutting board is camouflaged by yesterday’s limp and lifeless vegetables. The stove is buried under spills from earlier meals. The sink has lost beneath a pile of uneaten food and dirty dishes. But then my daughter enters the room it comes alive again. Yesterday’s dishes are cleared away and in their place are fresh vegetables and bottles of exotic oils and spices. Soon pots are bubbling over on the stove and her kitchen is again full of scrumptious smells from exotic dishes. Her food is noisy. It has crunch and punch and a dash of something forbidden. No safe brown beef and green bean – her colors are tangerine and eggplant. Her dishes have names that I can’t pronounce let alone spell. It can be Hungarian Goulash, Greek Avgolemono Soup or Traditional Carnitas done Yucatan style. They are foreign and dangerous and mouth wateringly delicious. When she’s finished making the meal her kitchen looks like a whirling dervish has done the cooking.
I suppose you could say that I cook to ease hunger and my daughter feeds her appetite. But that oversimplifies the differences between the two of us. Sometimes I wonder where this child came from. How did this wild creature come from me? I am amazed by her and frightened too.
When she was small she was my child – timid and soft-spoken. Her words stuck in her throat and her voice, which yearned to sing, could only squeak. She hid behind me when strangers came along and was only really happy when she played in the garden. She seemed to have an innate affinity with the natural world. Butterflies would gather around her head like a crown, whenever she went out to play. She would pick the wild blackberries and carry them home in her shoe. She hated clothes and left a trail of clothing behind her as she danced naked in the garden.
Then someone hurt her down deep. Somewhere I can only guess about. Somewhere I could never quite reach. She never told me about it but in my mother’s heart I knew. But I stayed silent and looked away. Like too many mothers, I couldn’t bear her pain and I tried to pretended it out of existence. It lived there, behind her eyes, punishing both of us.
The change came gradually as she discovered the illusion of strength that comes with anger. She became dependent on the anger to ease her fear. In time, like an addict she found more and more reason to use the drug till it was all she could feel. I felt her slipping away.
She never forgave me for the thing we never spoke about and her anger focused hard on me. I think she believed that if she could hurt me enough she would stop hurting. I took the beatings. I played the martyr mother of the ungrateful child. As unfair as it was, it was easier than facing the truth. I could not bear to see her in pain and know I had failed her. I preferred to see her as a monster.
It hadn’t always been that way. I lost my first child and I was terrified that I would lose her as well. She came early, sending me to the hospital several times before she finally decided to come out. She was tiny but healthy and her first smile went to her father who was waiting with open arms. For the first three years of her life, she was her “daddy’s girl” and he spoiled her with affection.
I hovered over her, afraid to let her sleep; afraid she’d never wake up. Sometimes I’d poke her just to make sure she was really sleeping. I covered her with too many blankets and pondered the content of every dirty diaper. I couldn’t bear to hear her cry so I ran to comfort every ache. I taught her that she should never feel pain. I wanted to keep her safe from everything that could harm her and instead I crippled her. I made this world an inhospitable place for her. I should have let her cry. I should have told her that tears cleanse the eyes and the soul. That pain reminds us that we are human and teaches us compassion. But she was my first child, my living child, my daughter and I made mistakes.
Now, its decades too late to hold the ten year old and let her cry till the pain eases. Too much distance separates us and we are forever estranged. We are making a final attempt at Thanksgiving dinner. It is a battle over every detail. I want the traditional dinner with all the trimmings. She wants to break that mold. She wants to put her imprint on the holiday. She resents me and revolts against everything I love. She has defined herself by being “not like” me. I am the ugly” before” picture in her family album.
For months now, I have been working on a Christmas present for my daughter. It is a box that her father made for her when she was only five. It is a jewelry box meant to hold the treasures of a little girl. He made it from fine grain golden oak. He cut the corners with the miter box I gave him once. The top is gently rounded and the inside is lined with black velvet embroidered with butterflies. He worked on it for months. It was the last gift he made for her before the divorce: before he rejected her for a step-daughter. She lost it years ago. I found it recently when unpacking the Christmas decorations. It was a jewelry box for a small girl but she’s outgrown it now.
I’ve decided to make it into a recipe box. It’s just the right size. I’ve been working on this for months, designing the cards, finding the recipes. I want to fill it with the family recipes – the ones I’ve been collecting from across the country and across a lifetime. They are a kind of culinary scrapbook that I’m putting together. I have David (my friend Lynn’s first husband) Delicious Eggnog, Betty and Phil’s Hillbilly Lasagna, Aunt Jeanne’s whole wheat bread, the barbecue meat balls from the coworker in Texas, my mothers chestnut turkey stuffing and fried chicken, corn bread and peach cobbler acquired along the way from who knows where. I am very pleased with this gift. I am giving her my life’s treasure.
As I’m passing the bedroom on my way to empty the trash, I hear my daughter and my mother huddled in deep conversation. It seems they are telling each other about my gifts. My daughter is not happy that I have gone the “Homemade” route this year. She prefers the guilt ridden electronic presents. I hear her say “ Yea, great, the anorexic’s giving me a cookbook – just what I’ve always wanted” She leans over and pretends to whisper, “Never trust a skinny cook!” and walks towards the kitchen.
My mother grins in agreement. They are round women, the one before and the one after. I am the odd one, the one in the middle, the one who doesn’t fit in. I lean hard against the back door. I am stunned, not because my mother broke her promise and told my daughter of the present. It is the truth of my daughter’s words that stuns me.
I am a skinny cook. I am anorexic. I am all angles and elbows. No soft place to rest your head. I am like trying to hug a pile of wire coat hangers. My daughter is curvy like a woman. She is rounded at her corners without my sharp edges. She has soft shoulders to cry on and a lap large enough to give comfort. It is absurd for me to give my daughter cooking instructions.
I had worked for weeks on that recipe box. I refinished the box and replaced the velvet liner with more velvet butterflies. I was so shamed by her comments that when I gave her the box, I also gave her the too expensive, electronic guilt present. The electronics were received with polite appreciation, no surprise and no show of gratitude. It was as though it was the very least that I could do. The recipe box was immediately ridiculed. Later she took it out on the deck and smashed it with a hammer. Then she sent the fragments to me. She said, “You claim that you’re giving me something I need but it’s really something you need to give. I don’t need it.” Of course she was right. She’s convinced she can learn nothing from me.
I looked at the fragments of the recipe box. I saw more than a discarded present. I saw my life scattered before me. The torn page from an old cookbook cut out recipes from a newspaper, the pink phone message, the page from a yellow legal pad, the three by five cards and the fancy recipe cards I got for my wedding. These scraps of paper were more than recipes, they were Christmas cards, love letters, postcards from lifelong friends and bits of memory from here and there - the fragments of a life. In the wreckage I see other mothers, other daughters, other women who took me into their kitchen and taught me their secrets. I see good fathers who keep little girls safe and nourished their spirits. From these other mothers and good fathers, I learned the proper use of spice, how long to knead and how much is too much. From them I learned how to measure, sift and blend and how to let things ripen.
That’s what I wanted to give my daughter but again I have failed her. Her hammer is the true symbolism of my family’s traditions. It was meant to silence me. But I’ve been silent much too long already. If she can’t hear my words, then I’ll save them for when she’s ready. When she needs to hear them, they’ll be waiting.
These stories, these recipes, document my journey back through the lost memories of my childhood. The sexual abuse that happened when I was just a little girl not only changed my life but forever made me a target for predators. The wounds are deep and last a lifetime – it is a kind of death. I see now that my mother was a victim too. Her pain made her blind herself to mine. Like mother like daughter, I could not defend my little girl. With these stories, I hope to break the silence and shame the devils. Maybe someone will read my words and know they are not alone. Maybe some mother will read my words and rescue her daughter. Maybe some daughter will read my words and put down the razor. Maybe.
This is a book of the stories dedicated to all the women who were mothers to me. It is a book I give to other women’s daughters who share a kitchen with me. It is the kitchen wisdom that one woman hands down to another. It’s about food, or more precisely – about nourishment and appetites. It is a lifetime of memories and lessons. Celebrations and tragedy all punctuated with food. It’s a story started by a painfully skinny woman and ended by a round robust one. It is not enough for my daughter but it is all I have. It is an anorexic’s cookbook.
Pass it on.
No comments:
Post a Comment