I don’t know if she considered declining, but, in spite of the twenty years, she accepted.
So in October that year, I rented a car, gathered my infant son, my husband of two years, and my milky self and all of our shit into the Volvo wagon and hit the road for the eight-hour drive to her home in the Northeast Kingdom, where she lives, just an hour short of Montreal. Michele loaded the car with a case of very good Italian wines. He figured out the rear-facing car seat. He was ready only thirty minutes late instead of his more customary hour when I arrived to pick him up at his apartment. We were still then living separately. He had figured out our route on the computer and printed out the directions. He was really stretching himself.
By contrast, on the day that I went into labor I called him first thing in the morning when I realized that the cramps I had been having all night were accompanied by some sharp contractions at the end of each one and that there was a little bit of blood in my urine. He was not yet awake when I called at seven-thirty and had that funny sleeper’s defense where you pretend that you are wide awake in spite of having just been roused and you want to sound like you know exactly where is where, who is who, and what is what when in fact you are still wearing a narcotic brain helmet of cement and foam.
“ ’llo?” he grunts.
“Hey. It’s happening. Here we go.”
“Okay.”
“So, I’m going to shower and then take a cab to your house. I’ll be there shortly. This feels like it’s really moving,” I said.
“Okay. Okay. Ciao.”
But when I arrived at his apartment with my sister in tow and all of my phone calls to the pertinent people—including the doctor—already made, and my little bag all packed just so, he was just turning on the shower, letting the water run to get hot. He was standing there in his boxers and a T-shirt. Melissa looked around the apartment, saw the crib in a box in the corner, and said, “Hey, Michele, you’ve got to get a move on here, guy. She’s having a baby, like, right now. This is it. This is real. You’re having a baby, Michele.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, making that very Italian gesture of shrugging his shoulders high up to his long, low-hanging Italian ears and holding open both of his hands as if to say: What can I do?
“Take your shower, man, and let’s go,” Melissa directed.
He got in the shower and meanwhile my labor came on hard and fast. Major contractions, five minutes apart. I was on the couch clenching my teeth and mooing like an angry cow every five minutes. Melissa paced around, cleaned up the espresso cups and grounds in his sink, wiped down the counters, and tried to straighten up his apartment a little bit to make it look ready to receive a newborn. Finally the shower water stopped and the sink faucet was turned on and I knew that sound to mean he had now begun shaving, in a nice steamy room with his pores open, the water running the whole time in the sink while he lathered and razored and blew air into each cheek and meticulously drew the razor over the ballooned skin coming up from under the chin and working up toward the cheekbone. And then the chimpanzee face as he tightened his lip and blew air up under his top lip to get all the moustache and nose hairs. My labor, which would unbelievably continue a further thirty-six hours, appeared to be getting more acute by the thirty-second interval, making both me and my sister kind of agitated and antsy to get going to the hospital. Michele finally emerged from the bathroom and went into his bedroom to get dressed so Melissa and I gathered our bags and moved to the foyer, thinking we were now just a minute or a minute and a half from leaving. Michele reappeared in socks and pants and a shirt, unbuttoned, with a tie in each hand and asked, “Which tie?”
This was kind of a good, validating moment for me, in spite of the urgency of the situation. Melissa went gently off the planet and said all of the things to Michele that I long to hear someone else besides me say. Her tone was exceptionally polite.
“Hey, Michele,” she said. “Let’s get go—ing, my friend. Your tie doesn’t mat—ter,” and she split up go-ing and mat-ter in a way that sounded overarticulated, like you might speak to a child or a foreign person. I loved her ten times more than I already did for this. It is exactly how I feel in that moment but I am too doubled over in cramp hell to say so, and I felt so taken care of, so relieved that she was acting like me for me. Proxy me.
But on the day that we were leaving for Vermont to meet my mother, Michele was actually making an effort to get the lead out.
In spite of that effort, on both of our parts, we didn’t get on the road until close to noon, when we really should have left around nine, to be safe and leisurely. Poor Michele had been primed. I had been coaching him for weeks.
“Five-minute showers, Michele. Five minutes. Don’t shave and let the water run.”
“Don’t sit around like you do here, Michele. Don’t sit around at all. Do chores. Offer to do chores constantly.”
“Don’t be late. We can’t be late. She goes to bed at seven-thirty or something and her blood sugar falls at five. She eats early. She’ll be pissed and trembly if we’re late. We cannot be late.”
I remembered short showers and chores and punctuality and blood sugar crashes from when I knew her twenty years before. But Melissa, who had just recently made a trip up there herself, had called and generously guided me around a few potential snags that I never would have thought to anticipate on my own, which she had, unfortunately, navigated alone and unsuccessfully.
“Arrive with a full tank of gas, Gabs, or you’ll never get off the property. She won’t want to drive her car because she doesn’t want to buy gas. She’ll suggest going for a walk or something instead of letting you off the property.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “I’ll buy her a fucking tank of gas.”
“I’m just telling you how it was. And don’t forget to wash your hair before you go.”
I didn’t get the meaning of this. “What are you talking about?” I asked.
“The shower takes longer—more water—when you have to also wash your hair and not just your body.”
I had to laugh it was so unbelievable.
“I’m sure she was in full rigor over that,” I said.
Melissa exhaled deeply over the phone. “My biggest mistake,” she continued, “was in trying to make up time. I left a little late, as usual, and so I decided to skip the stop into White River Junction to get a bottle of gin or something for my little cocktail.”
“Oh no!” I groaned. “You arrived without anything to take the edge off?” My poor sister, because she, too, was running late, like all of us with the multiple demands of kids and families and jobs, like all of us who are not unemployed and living alone on a hundred acres in the woods of Vermont are prone to be, my poor sister arrived after an eight-hour drive with unwashed hair and nothing to sand down the edges.
I made Michele wash his hair and shave twice, consecutively, before we left. I couldn’t possibly ask this man who sometimes showers twice a day, and who hand-blends his own cologne every morning before knotting his silk tie, to go a whole weekend without showering, but at least I got him into the mindset of a five-minute shower. My mother’s frugality can be so acute that it takes on an actual hostility, and I was trying urgently to protect Michele from catching the sharpest edge of it.
Between constant nursing and trying to run the restaurant with a baby attached to my boob, I had managed only a small case of Asian cooking ingredients for my mother’s pantry. Which he also packed securely into the back of the wagon. Michele drove and I sat in the back with Marco.
We inched up through New York and Connecticut, practically wordless. This was not uncommon for us, but I’d always hated it. I really like to talk. I thought those wordlessly shared sandwiches on wintery beaches were just the appropriately remote closeness of two people catching a quick deceit at three in the morning, but I’d since caught on that that was as much as we could find with each other. We were still living apart in our separate homes as we always had, discovering, harshly, all of
the ways in which a new child can really stress out an already fragile relationship, even though we had enthusiastically intended the pregnancy. But I think he felt complimented that I would introduce him to my mother. I think he saw it as a privilege. I, of course, for twenty years, had been more or less successfully sparing those I loved from the experience. But Michele, following his own internal logic, viewed it, I believe, as an honor. How close we must be getting, he and I, if he alone made it to the inner sanctum: my mother.
No sooner had we crossed out of the state of Massachusetts than I started to feel a certain lack of enthusiasm. I was not gladdened by the Vermont Welcomes You sign. Even though we were only minutes over the Massachusetts border, still hours from her house, still surrounded by fellow travelers, people like us who enjoy other human contact and human activity and who don’t need to be secluded on a hundred acres without even a house pet, we were nonetheless in the state of Vermont where she lives, and I started to feel like I was standing too close to someone phlegmy and contagious. After only an hour in Vermont, the last of the daylight disappeared and a crushing darkness fell, by four-thirty, nearly denting the metal panels of the safest car in the world, it felt, and buckling the hood and roof, and threatening to seep in around the closed windows. Marco slept, nursed, then slept again. And I envied him.
Driving in this pure pitch, with nothing to talk about with Michele and nothing but the back of his head and the surrounding blackness to see, it’s possible that I’ve never since known such isolation, save for maybe that one time when I couldn’t bring myself to get out of my car. Even a vaguely picturesque barn in the far far distance, with one light at the top of the phone pole to light up the yard and the tractors, where I could have imagined a taciturn family having dinner after a long and healthy day of outdoor work, only served to emphasize how much pasture, darkness, and solitude there was between them and there and us and here. I listened, apprehensively, to the thinning radio station, wondering how many more miles before we would lose the signal entirely. When another car traveling south, across the unnecessarily wide median, approached in the distance, my spirit lifted and I never took my eyes off it as it came over the top of the hill into sight and its headlights intersected with ours, but then it passed behind us—and my reticence re-descended, now in the distinct shape of dread.
We were left alone, abandoned by the southbound car, us speeding north, to emptiness. Black emptiness. The southbound car that had just passed us would soon enough be encountering lights, city limits, people, art, commerce, poetry, citizens living actual, messy fantastic delicious Life. But we drove on at impossibly harrowing speeds, toward the sticky netting of my mother—a black widow spider at the center of her one-hundred-acre web—and my certain poisoning. I am thirteen all over again.
Suddenly Michele swerved terrifyingly to avoid a possum in the middle of the road. I was in the backseat nursing Marco, without a seat belt, because I can’t nurse a baby while being so confined. Michele had been driving one hundred ten miles an hour, without even realizing it. The wagon of the car left the asphalt for a second and I lost my mind. A hot red ore of rage poured out of me in the shape of an unpunctuated curse of Michele, of my mother, of Italians, of dying brothers, lazy line cooks, crazy co-op officers, self-absorbed fathers, Vermont farmers, possums, raccoons, and deerflies. In just the two seconds of the tires leaving the asphalt we all discover, in a most colorful way, that I am an intensely stressed new mother with a new infant and a dead brother, a busy restaurant, an incompatible husband, and an uptight, ferociously rigid mother. Who is just a few exits away.
Duly catharted, we all drive on in silence. Twenty deathlike minutes later, Michele says, in his thick Italian accent, his shoulders up to his ears as usual, “But, Gabrielle. It was only one hundred eighty kilometers per hour.”
As we take our exit, I ready myself. From here on in, we are on dirt roads, deep in the dark, under a canopy of trees. I mentally leave my body, swept and neat, exactly as I would leave my home before a journey of several days. I crawl deeper and deeper back into my impenetrable mind, until I am lodged so far back that I can see the periphery of my body as I peer out from it, like being inside an open, dry shed while it storms outside. I set a placid indecipherable half-smile on my lips and visualize what it will look and feel like to pause as long as I need to between anything my mother or my husband might say to me, no matter what, and anything I might say in response.
I vow to pause as long as it takes before answering to even a benign and harmless, “Do you want coffee?” let alone an incomprehensible European metric system defense of egregious speeding as if somehow, in Italian, if you translate it into Italian, it is not, any longer, one hundred ten miles an hour. I will let long minutes pass if necessary.
I will smile. Do what is expected of me. Unhook myself quickly from any disagreeableness. And fortunately, I have an infant that I can attend to. I will be absolutely fluid, pliable, malleable. If they want one thing I will want that, too. And if I need time, I will step away and pretend to nurse or nap or change a diaper. We get lost, now, on these country roads, and lost again, even on the road where she lives because I remember and recognize none of it, it’s been so long, but I feel cool and calm. If we are late we are late; I am in my mental shed.
Of course when we arrive, travel-worn and weary, our long journey executed with intense adrenaline at the end of already profoundly stressful and taxing workweeks fully dispensed, my mother is nothing as I’ve described her. We open the doors of the car and the crisp air hits us; it’s so clean it’s difficult to recognize as air. She emerges from the softly glowing house where wood smoke puffs from the chimneys, and she comes to the car, all wide grins, a soft sweater, soft brushed denim jeans, her apron, as always, around her waist. She is totally disarming. Even so, I notice her Kleenex tissue crumpled up and stowed under the cuff of her sleeve for reuse, where she used to make us as kids keep ours, too, until every single corner of that tissue was snotty and spent.
She greets us warmly, big kisses on both cheeks for Michele, whom she is meeting for the first time. She throws him a few words of Italian, nicely pronounced and in the right gender and syntax. He appreciates the friendly gesture. She gurgles appropriately at Marco in his little Moses basket. We also, without awkwardness, kiss on both cheeks as if we’d seen each other last week. It means nothing; it’s just a greeting. One we’ve been taught to use since we were able to stand up on two feet and greet any stranger, guest, or friend who would arrive at our house. Her posture is still, at seventy-four years old, erect as a ballet dancer’s.
She leads us into the house and we are hit immediately by the luscious scent of our meal. She has prepared a delicious dinner, with meat—which is way out of her budget—and she has stayed up way past her usual bedtime to eat it with us at the well-set table. She makes apologies to me, her chef daughter, in advance of the meal even though I am certain we both know that I learned to cook, exclusively, from her. There are two chickens. She has splurged. She uses a shallow, oval, glazed clay baking dish that she has had the entire time I have known her. It is cracked in several places and glued back together in those same places. It now has the beauty of an antique. Its edges are black and thickened with accumulated cooked-on crust and its surface is bumpy and textured now from so many years of use. The chicken is perfectly roasted with garlic and rosemary and Dijon mustard and lemons; it’s the same chicken I roast at the restaurant and at my own home.
I have washed that baking dish carefully and dried it and put it away, properly nested in its pile, not casually and sloppily set down in an indiscrimate tower in the cabinet, probably thirty times in my life. Considering I haven’t lived with her since I was a twelve-year-old, when our family imploded from divorce and relocation, that is a lot of young handling of this platter. I am sure I am responsible for at least one of those glued and reglued cracks.
“There are no accidents,” she’d say, sternly looking down at the eight-year-old offender with th
e two broken pieces of some dish in her soapy hands. “Only carelessness.”
I admit I have said the same thing to young cooks at my restaurant.
I look around the house and see many things from my childhood that I haven’t seen in so long and that it feels good and sad at the same time to see. It’s a marvel to see the things themselves but I am also stunned by how far back in time I have to carry myself to when these things were routinely in sight. She keeps her dish soap—pearly white Ivory Liquid, the only kind we ever used in our house—in a good-looking old clear bottle on the sink ledge. Her burnt orange Le Creuset pot is on the back burner of the six-burner Garland stove. She keeps her coarse kosher salt in a wooden spice mortar next to the stove. She has beautiful red enameled tin cooking spoons that she has been using to stir food in pots with for the full thirty-nine years that I have known her. My childhood is a lot further away and harder to recollect, I notice, than it used to be. Everything in the room seems to illuminate just how many intervening years there have been since the dish soap, the ticking and winding of the clock, the clay oval baking dish in the soapy water, and the kosher salt in the wooden bowl were all backdrop to my daily life.
Blood, Bones & Butter Page 19