4. Cold Cuts

Revenge is a dish best served cold.  At least that’s what people say.   

On hot summer days I like to stock the fridge with lots of cold cuts and summer salads.  A bit of sharp cheddar, Swiss, gouda, pepper jack or Colby cheese, add some salami or maybe some corned beef, thinly sliced ham or turkey then put it together on slices of rye bread or a Kaiser Roll. Then add some black olives, sliced avocados, cold asparagus spears, deviled eggs or pickles. As a side dish cucumbers in sour cream, macaroni salad, pasta salad or cole slaw are delicious. 

When it’s almost too hot to eat and certainly too hot to cook, a few ready to eat treats in the fridge will make the summer a splash. 

But I have no appetite for revenge.  

I have been on the receiving end too often to ignore its dangers, the unintended consequences, the collateral damage or friendly fire.

Some people live on the revenge scenario.  My estranged daughter says it’s like rocket fuel. When everything else is gone she says she can live on the dream of vengeance. It is a destructive cycle.  The need for vengeance creates villains where none existed.  It makes her a solitary soldier in her own private war.  Revenge can not nourish you and it turns my stomach sour.  Watching someone else suffer does nothing to diminish my pain.  It fact it does quite the opposite. It opens the old wounds and spreads the misery around like a hospital staff infection.  It will not bring back dead children.  It will not un-break a heart.  It will not mend a family.   

My method has been to ignore the tragedy, to close my eyes at the scary parts like it’s a movie and I can go home safe and sound after.  For a long time I believed that if I could pretend it never happened then I wouldn’t have scars. I took my children away from the pollution, the pedophiles and the poverty.  I took them to the mountains with clean water and fresh air and open doors.  I left it all behind I thought. I thought I could keep them safe but I failed.  My insistence on remaining naive blinded me to the danger and kept me a victim and it made my children targets. 

My subconscious could not forget the pain and it gave me external scars to remind me of the psychic ones.  I cut myself open until, as my mother used to say, “The meanness came out”.   So began my love affair with the exacto knife.  I have been cutting at myself ever since. When people noticed the supply of razors I changed to a small cuticle cutter.  With precision I could inflict just enough punishment.   When the physical cuts didn’t work, I cut myself off from my own life. 

It began here.  I was standing at the bathroom sink washing out my panties.  They were the new panties I got for my eighth birthday, one pair for each day of the week.   My teacher told me about washing out my underpants in the sink because I came to school in the same panties I had peed in the day before.  I peed in my panties a lot because it burned and sometime I couldn’t stop.  It felt like I was peeing razor blades.  One day as I sat in class, I just started to pee and it splattered on the hardwood floor and all the kids stared at me.  The next day the teacher asked if my mother had given me a bath.  I told her she hadn’t.  My big brother did the baths, the meals and the bedtime stories.  But he was sent away to stay with our Dad down south.  Mama’s new boyfriend thought he needed to go away.   That’s why I had no bath.  No one told me I needed one.  But the teacher told me about baths.  Then she told me that I should change my panties everyday and wash them out in the sink if I had no clean ones. 

 That’s what I was doing, standing at the sink with my legs apart so he could get his fingers inside me.   I didn’t like it, I hated it.  He had a hangnail, at least I think it was a hangnail, and it scratched me up inside.  But I wasn’t allowed to cry.  I had to stand there, legs apart and let him hurt me.  Mama said I had to mind him.  Mama said, “Be sweet” and I was. 

 He was the bartender from the bar below our apartment and my mother’s new boyfriend.  That’s the first home I remember, the apartment over the bar on Jefferson Avenue across the street from Belle Isle.  The neon sign for the bar – a little pink martini glass, tilted back and forth all night long.  It became our night light.  At night when Mama was working the late shift at the restaurant, we’d watch the glass dance back and forth and fall asleep.  We never knew the name of the bar; we just called it the “Martini Bar.”

 Sometimes when Mama was sleeping between shifts, we’d escape to Belle Isle.  Eddie the ring leader would navigate the busy street dragging his little sisters behind him and find his way to the fountain.  For three hillbilly kids on a hot summer day, it was heaven.  We’d splash in the water, stick out feet in and cure boredom and heat all at once.  Eddie was a great one for going on adventures and his little sisters loved to tag along.  He called us the Three Musketeers.  It wasn’t till much later I found out that he wasn’t calling us candy bars.

 My big brother didn’t like the city much.  He didn’t like shoes or being inside all day long.  He missed the wildness and the freedom of the mountains.  He got teased a lot about his accent and came home with lots of bloody noses.  Then they sent both of us to something called the Open Air school. There were other hillbilly kids there.  Still, Eddie managed to get bloody noses.  We had to ride a special bus down past the Vernors factory and the WonderBread bakery.  I rode for free because I was so small.  It was a great adventure for us.  As we rode my big brother would entertain me with great stories of heroic deeds.  He treated me more like a little brother, teaching me how to be brave, how to hide my fear and how to hold my ground in a fight.  I liked being my brother’s co-conspirator.

 Sometimes, when we were all very good, we were allowed to go inside the Martini Bar.  On those special occasions, we’d be dressed in our best clothes.  My hair, which insisted on being Cherokee and refused to curl in those Shirley Temple banana curls that looked so nice on Kitty, would be pulled back in a braid on both sides of my head and held firmly in place with barrettes.  I’d wear my patent leather shoes, white socks with lacy tops, the dress I got for my birthday and even white gloves.  The dim light of the bar was welcome after the harshness of the daylight. It was air conditioned and so it was always cool and dark, always clean and elegant.  There were red leather booths lining one wall and the sleek chrome Wurlitzer on the other.  I remember the first time I witnessed the magic of that machine.  As it slide one record off the rack and flipped it over and placed it on the turntable.  I was transfixed.  I sat, mouth open like a Detroit hillbilly, watching as the magic arm picked out just the right record and placed it on the turntable.

 But it’s the music that I remember best.  During the daytime I heard Country music on the radio, Patsy Cline and Hank Williams.  My mother often sang along with the radio. She had a good voice.  When my half -a- sister, Rayleen  was home in the summertime, all we heard was Elvis and the Everley Brothers.  The Wurlitzer in the Martini Bar played different music.  It was as sleek and sophisticated as the fancy machine that played it.  I heard instruments and rhythms that I’d never heard before.  These were new sounds to my young ears and I loved it.  I loved the horns and the piano; I loved the rich full voices and the cool rhythms of Dinah Washington and Nat King Cole.  In the Wurlitzer at the Martini Bar, blonde southern belle Peggy Lee’s “Fever” slid into place next to the Platters “At Twilight Time” and no one made a move to segregate them.

We felt sophisticated too as we sat at the bar eating potato chips one at a time, with white gloved fingers.  Then we would drink our cokes through these strange little red straws.  The next day, in the alley behind the bar, we’d collect those little red straws and make things with them.  We had no toys so we invented them.  Once we got a skip rope for a present and we played with it till it was threadbare.  We had no teachers so we explored the alley like Lewis and Clark. 

I remember when we first met the bartender; he was minding us while Mama worked.  He taught us to play the hide the hot dog game.  He laid down on the couch and covered up with a blanket.  One at a time he took all three of us under the blanket and had us hide his hot dog. 

Later he seemed to only want to play with me.  Maybe that’s why he kept me home from school so much.  He said I had a sore throat and he had medicine to fix me.  Sometimes he had to put the medicine in down there too.  That’s what he was doing when I was standing at the sink washing my panties.  Putting the medicine in with his scratchy fingers. 

Mama walked in and screamed.  Suddenly things were flying. She was beating on him and screaming.  I was confused.  I had done everything he told me to do just like she said.  Now she was screaming at me, “Don’t you know right from wrong!  Don’t you know right from wrong?”  I had no answer so I curled up in the corner and hid.  I don’t know how long the hysteria went on.  I just crawled inside to hide.   I never wanted to be ignorant again.  I decided then and there that I would learn the difference between right and wrong and I looked for places that you could learn such things. 

There were only two books in our house, the big Family Bible Mama owned and the “True Confessions” magazines my half-a-sister brought when she came to visit.  I realized quickly that right and wrong would not be found in the stories of the “True Confession” magazine.  I decided it must have been the Bible. 

Once when Mama was sleeping, the Jehovah’s Witness people came to the door.  They asked what religion we were.  We woke Mama up to ask her because we’d never been to church.  She started swatting at us and rolled over saying, “You’re a bunch a heathens, that’s what you are, all three of you!”  When we went back to the door and told the lady with the Watchtower magazines what our Mama had said, she turned white as a sheet and ran away.  For a long time, I thought heathen was our religion. 

I found out different from my school friend Linda.  She was a strong believer in the Baptist faith.  She told me all about baptism and how it cleaned away all your sins.  I knew that was for me, a sin bath. It worked for the dirty panties and maybe it would work for my dirty soul.  Maybe it would give me some magic knowledge to know right from wrong.   Linda went to one of those storefront Baptist churches where you could hear the singing a block away.  I went there one night and I got myself baptized.  For awhile, I was sure that my sins were washed away. 

Then one day Mama took me up in the attic where all of bartender’s clothes were in a pile.  He had lots of nice clothes, fancy suits and shirts, dozens of ties and handkerchiefs, all in a pile on the attic floor.  He ran out after that night in the bathroom.  He left so quick he didn’t even take his shoes.  Now what was left of him was in this huge pile of clothes in the attic.  Mama said, “I want to show you something.”  She sat me down and took out a razor, one of those straight razors that men use for shaving.  She started tearing the suits and the shirts and the pants to shreds.  With each slice she said, “This will teach you!  This will teach you!”  I sat too terrified to speak but silently I screamed “Teach me What Mama?  Teach me what?  Is this right from wrong?” 

 I figured the baptism hadn’t worked.  Mama reminded me that the evil was still inside of me.  So I began to try to cut it out of me and as she had shown me, I used a razor. 

A few weeks later school was out for the year.  My sister and I were taken to a small farm north of Detroit.  It was a nice elderly couple that we were told to call Grandma and Grandpa.  They were no kin to us.  But we had to call them that or the child protective people would come get us.  They lived in a trailer that had a little shed built off the side that was in the middle of a huge cornfield.  The people were nice enough but I felt abandoned by my mother, left alone to figure out my sins.  My sister and I played in the corn and I wondered if it was the same corn that my grandmother had on her farm. 

One day towards the end of summer my mother came and got me.  Not my sister or my brother but just me.  I felt so special.  I felt that maybe she had forgiven me.  Maybe she would teach me what the razor meant or what right and wrong meant. 

She took me to an apartment and handed me a rag and a broom.  She told me to start with the dishes and the kitchen floor.  I was confused but I went to work.  I am a tidy housekeeper and I am good at cleaning.  We worked for a few hours until the apartment was spic and span.  Then a man that I didn’t know came in.  He was my mother’s new boyfriend and later he would become my step-father.  My mother was all giddy as she introduced me to him and told me “Now you be sweet to him.” 

At nine years old, the cycles of my life were set.  I knew that I had to clean to earn my mother's love.  I thought that "Cleanliness is next to Godliness" must be the gospel truth.  I became an immaculate housekeeper, even obsessive. 

It was only later that I would abhor the idea of being sweet and cling to my sour disposition as a weapon. And much later, maybe too late, I realized that love can’t be earned.

Introduction to the Anorexic’s Cookbook

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.