by Amy Thielen
My mom held a paring knife, wooden-butt-first, in my direction, motioning me to help. I knew bare-nothing of chores at this point and had shown zero natural aptitude for anything householdy. I was a sniffly, snotty, allergy-ridden kid, known in school for honking into a Kleenex and then stuffing it up my sleeve, grandma-style, right in the classroom—and also a bit of a klutz. When my mom called to me from the shower for some shampoo from the bathroom cabinet, I reached in and the whole clutch of toiletries went down like a spray of tilted dominoes. The woman who prided herself on her economy of movement, a homemaker choreography so smooth it was nearly mechanized, popped her head out of the shower door and sighed. But miraculously, cooking was something I could sort of do.
I took the knife—an old one whose short blade had been sharpened over the years into the shape of a bird’s beak—and tried to copy the way she sliced apples for the pandowdy for the church bake sale. Never once did she tell me to be careful. “Cut it like this” is what she said. She held the trimmed quarter loosely in her left hand and deftly sliced, her knife passing through the apple to rest on the pad of her thumb. Through red skin to pink skin, and back again, without incident. Thick apple triangles fell in a blur into the bowl below.
“Or if you want, you can make chunks,” she said, steering the apple quarter this way and that, cutting quickly. Shiff shiff shiff, pyramid-shaped pieces fell into the bowl.
“The knife won’t cut my thumb?” I asked. The skin on my thumb looked thin and pink as it bulged softly around the blade.
“Never!” my mom said. “Trust me, I’ve been doing this for years.” She reached for another apple piece and lobbed the last two into my workspace. “My knives aren’t all that sharp.”
She ran her hands in the stream of the faucet, shook them off against the sink, her rings clicking reassuringly against the steel, and then wiped them half-dry on the kitchen towel. My mom’s hands were usually damp and water-chilled.
She dumped a hill of sugar on top of the mound of apples. It shushed on the landing, trickled down into the crevices, and let out a faint stink—white sugar’s peculiar processed funk. I knew to shake the cinnamon hard so that it whiffed out of the holes like a sneeze. My mom dribbled in vanilla extract from the cap and then gave it all a brisk stir. She worked from memory, with a knowledge that was housed in her hands. It was kind of like watching a veteran carpenter build a house. The crust flopped into the rectangular glass dish and her fingers deftly shoved the dough into the corners. She listened to my endless stream of middle-school drama, humming assent in all the right places, as she popped the apple pandowdy—more like a slab pie with a puffy, light pastry encasement—into the oven and started trimming mushrooms.
I never imagined that someday I’d have that same facility with a knife—although she assumed it. You give a girl a knife; that’s just what you do. Eventually, hopefully, she might learn how to use it. Someday she might even consider that knife an extension of her hand, as wedded to her finger as a nail.
“Amy, go get me the wooden salad bowl from the basement.”
Her voice was sharp, like a prod. I was annoyingly slow with errands. Prone to daydreams. And it was while doing just that, protractedly loitering on our split-level steps, salad bowl in hand, that I remember being paralyzed by the most unremarkable and vivid of childhood memories, one that illuminated nothing in particular, but yet somehow everything. There were dust motes floating in the sun coming in from the window, jigging in the air. I was ten—ten!—and I would never be ten again. But then I thought maybe I could come back to this moment someday if I tried to remember it. So I blinked my eyes, hard, including in the frame the steps and the junction where the three flooring treatments met: the brown patterned basement carpet, the tan foyer linoleum, and the green living room shag carpeting, its sea anemone arms waving, the air above it sparkling with bits of ordinary-like diamond dust. I’ve always wondered why I chose that moment to single out for memory, but now I know that the image didn’t matter as much as the place itself. Sitting on the stairway, the purgatory between floors, was a real time-and-space eraser. I was a split-level child of the ’80s; maybe I was fated by architecture to a future of feeling torn between two geographical places.
“Amy! Salad bowl!” (Also by design, the split-level required parents to project their voices, turning them all into hollerers.)
A while after I’d left the kitchen to reinstall myself on my favorite chair, my dad walked in the door and commenced his evening routine. After unpeeling the tight black overshoes from his wingtips—he called them his “rubbers”—and hanging up his coat in the coat closet, he stood on the landing and waved at me, his hand up high in the air. Shy with emotion, Dad felt more comfortable declaring his love for us in grand pronouncements, usually on a schedule: once in the morning before work and then again when he came home. “He-ya, Amy!” he shouted. “She’s the best girl there is! It’s love!” I leaned harder into the chair in preteen mortification.
My dad was a car dealer, as his parents had been, but he embodied a quieter version of the cliché: He had the sport coats and dress pants, a pocket protector of pens at his chest, and the cigar—but none of the stereotypical car dealer’s bluster. He spoke quietly and evenly, unless he found something to be excited about, at which point his volume rose, as if someone had bumped the stereo knob and unwittingly turned it up. We knew that he could carry dozens of eight-digit car VIN numbers around in his head, and that the bottoms of his wide feet were smooth and pale, almost custardy, having been worn to a rubbery softness in his wingtips as he pounded the asphalt car lot all day long. His fingertips were smooth and dry from pushing paper. As for the cigar, in lieu of smoking he merely chewed it, discarding the earthen black plugs in an ashtray.
When he came home at 7:00 after a long day, he was officially off duty. He didn’t mow grass or change lightbulbs, and he didn’t ever think to pull our heavy living room shades shut while he was watching TV, so that by the time darkness fell outside, the enormous picture window was like a television itself, broadcasting our wide-screen suburbanlike existence out onto the street. Every night my mom swept by and huffily tugged them closed.
At this hour, we fell into our roles. My brothers, hopped up on the snacks they’d stolen from the back candy table, played loudly downstairs. I twirled around the living room, practiced my splits, and watched TV as my parents canoodled over their drinks.
Reclaiming my usual post in the rust-colored chair, I jumped on the warm upholstered seat to work out the priest juju and then leaned backward over one of its beefy, bodybuilder wing arms, my support for going into a full backbend. Just as my dad eased his feet every morning into his stiff wingtips with a shoehorn, I used this chair to ease out. To unwind. As the tips of my hair brushed the floor, my gut rose into my chest and the throbbing in my belly lessened a bit.
I hung like that until it was clear that upside-down was no longer working. I was really starving.
—
From a kid’s perspective my parents were just a high-strung, dramatic couple and perfectly matched. When they got along, their tastes dovetailed. They squabbled over major details of their life, but the minor things—the dailies—they largely agreed upon: cocktail hour, vacations without children, and a pound of meat per person. They never, ever, fought about the steaks.
Steak was a weekly administered rite in our house, and on special occasions we ate surf and turf: rib eyes and lobster tails, lit by candlelight, with those little spitting butter warmers, the whole deal. Consuming this much steak was no common thing in our town; many people lived here because our proximity to state forests and open land gave them the opportunity to hunt and fish to their absolute saturation. Ground venison was a mainstay for many, and judging from the enormous display of ground beef at the grocery store, the town consumed a fair amount of that, too. But my dad had grown up the only child of car-dealer parents in a white stone house on the Mississippi River, eating prime rib roast and popovers, so steak was
what he knew. My mom had been raised in a tiny rambler eating cheap chuck roast cooked in slabs to mimic steak, wearing clothes her mother had sewn (“I didn’t even know my dress size until I got to college”), and was happy that they had the means to buy all five of us our own slabs of beef.
As was popular back then, we had an indoor grill, a wrought-iron-rimmed beauty tucked into the back corner of the kitchen. Standing in front of it was my dad’s honey spot. When he got to grilling, he had to turn on the fan, whose suction was so powerful that you could feel it gently pulling at you as you walked by. My mom, who tended to supervise any cooking taking place in her domain, trusted him with the beef.
To gauge doneness he didn’t poke the steaks, as a pro would, and he didn’t slice into them like an amateur; he watched them. As the steaks seethed over the flames, the heat drove its force from the edge to the center of the steak until the middle began, ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly, to bulge with juice. That’s how you know they’re done—when they begin to puff. My dad stared rudely at the steaks, never leaving his post. Sometimes I stood a few feet behind him and watched him watch them. Ever since, I’ve never understood how someone could put a piece of meat on the grill and walk away. Beyond the risk of overcooking, why would you ever want to miss the sight of the transformation?
As my dad grilled, my mom finished the steaks’ pea-pod-and-mushroom garnish, which had been perfuming the house and driving me mad for what seemed like hours. She cooked the white button mushrooms slowly with a ton of roughly chopped garlic and a grenade-size lump of butter, and when they’d shrunk to the size of brown flower bulbs and began to stick to the pan and caramelize, at least forty minutes later, she threw in the pea pods. The second the pods turned bright green, the mixed buttery juices of both were ready to be spooned out next to the meat.
At the age of ten I was considered a full person, due a whole steak, so I sat down to an entire rib eye splayed out across my plate. (That was my mom’s style: finding the space to put the potatoes and vegetables was your own problem.) Through some dogged knife work, you were expected to reduce the meat to scraps and to chew on the burned edges of the fat, too, which my parents rightly insisted was the best part. My steak was perfect, cooked just slightly—a mere shade—south of medium rare, at the point when the livid juices ran and pooled in the slash of your first cut.
When we sat down to the table, my parents were uncharacteristically quiet. My family mumbled the prayer. Bless us so lord and these eye gifts for what we are about to receive from our bounty through Christ by lord Amen. Mom looked at us expectantly, desiring our cogs to start turning and pass the food around while it was still hot. My dad wordlessly assisted by spinning his hand in a fast spiral from the wrist. Despite the cooperation, I could tell that their tempers were up. My parents were silently antagonizing each other, my mom’s every mundane comment an elbow to Dad’s ribs, his reticence gathering in pressure. This night would not end as some others had, with them rocking together in the living room to Neil Diamond booming from the hi-fi.
My brother Bob, whose overboiling enthusiasm was usually irrepressible, stared at his plate, disappointed. He was easily disappointed—unless he was happy, and then his optimism was so great it bordered on fictive. When we watched TV, he was startled to see the same actors in different shows and sometimes asked me if I thought the actor was really going through the same struggles in real life. How can you not know this? I thought, my grip on narrative reality never wavering. He was largely viewed as the honest one, the one all the women in our family considered our shining hope for the priesthood; I knew him as the one who pinched me slyly and never got caught. I was thought of as the craftier of the two, mostly because I never learned to hide behind my emotions; I was the perpetually naughty three-year-old who had bitten her baby brother on the back when he arrived to steal her spotlight, and I could never live it down. But—touché—I wasn’t as much of a believer as he was, either.
I looked at my brother Marc, his precocious youngest-kid wit now failing to crack up the table as it usually did. His smile waned, as if he just realized that not everything was funny. I ate my rib eye and chewed the last bit slowly, surprised to find that the growth of negative space in my gut hadn’t been resolved by twelve ounces of beef. I looked over at Bob’s uneaten steak, asked him if I could have it, forked it from his plate to mine, and ate most of that as well.
Up to this point, I’d never overeaten. Like a wild animal’s, my body met its need/use ratio and there wasn’t an ounce of anything extra hanging on my muscles. My legs were like smooth tan saplings with joints. I was starting to dabble with obsessive snacks like butter-logged bagels, scrambled eggs overcooked until they formed a brown crust, spicy giardiniera pickles, and canned black olives, but they were still aberrations in a mostly birdlike daily diet. But in this new uncomfortable fullness I could feel the shape of a second kind of hunger, one that reached past borders of appetite. In addition to need, there was this heavy sensuous thing called want, and it was both thrilling and terrifying.
That night after Bob and I went to sleep in our basement bedroom, I was woken by the sounds of my parents’ subsumed fight from earlier unfurling its flag. I opened my eyes in the buzzing blackness and crawled into my comfort cove of distant observation. I luxuriated in their voices, in the predictable accelerations, the well-worn volleys, the familiar notes of their outrage. Rubbing the husks of my dry heels together beneath my blankets, I listened hard and kept score, making notes on character motivations like a dramaturgist watching from the wings.
When I turned over, I saw my brother Bob sitting cross-legged in the triangle of light coming in the doorway, his back straight and at attention. Having had to listen to this for two years and two months longer than he had, the dream of the perfect family had begun to fizzle in me; but it was still actively churning in Bob. I got up and joined him in the doorway, but I knew that we were sitting too close, paying too much attention, and that it was more tolerable if you closed your eyes.
A cloud of acrid grill smoke drifted in on their voices, smelling like a clump of rib eye had fallen between the grates to smolder into a petrified knot. The smoke in the house was a benevolent cover, the lingering symbol of their extravagant passion, the beauty that made their surges tolerable—and honestly, probably the only reason I remember this moment with such clarity.
Like the charred fat on the steak, like the mushroom juices that seeped into my potatoes, their dark nighttime emotions felt familiar, comfortable, and essential. Like a gold standard, their fighting provided a heavy counterweight to our mostly lighthearted childhood.
I wouldn’t fully understand the importance of sadness until later, when I learned to achieve a precarious balance in the kitchen, in the bowl in front of me. The joy of lemon cannot stand alone; it needs sugar or olive oil, something to bring it back to earth. Vinegar literally cries out for fat. Fat falls flat without salt or sugar. Chile heat sings with brown sugar. And bitterness, well, that needs it all: acidity, bacon, butter…and a little caramelized, crusty scudge from the bottom of the pan—a bit of sweet, dark sorrow—doesn’t hurt.
9
THE PERPETUAL POPCORN POT
Thielens work twelve-hour days. Six days in a row. Fifty-two weeks a year. With a hangover or without. Thielens, by nature, are not lazy.
Against this busy backdrop my childhood lassitude stood in dark contrast, particularly during my fifteenth summer, my last gasp of pure, uncomplicated leisure. I’d somehow been able to put off getting a summer job until it was too late. My mom, perhaps aware that my life as I knew it would soon be changing, let it slide.
As we did every spring on the first weekend of warm weather, we moved to our cabin on nearby Long Lake. It was just a fifteen-minute drive from our house in town, close enough to commute to during the last month of school. That summer I finally indulged my reading habit to its limit. What began in early childhood as a way to tune out my parents, to unplug my auditory sense from the familial
white noise, had become a full-blown fetish. Atypical in my family, the open book in front of my face was not only obsessive but, admittedly, also somewhat anti-family. Worst of all, even though it wasn’t technically lazy, it looked lazy.
And so I read like a sloth during the day, when I wasn’t swimming. I read books in bed late into the night, sometimes all night long, desensitizing myself to my hysterical fear of bugs until the thrumming of June bugs against the window screen no longer spooked me. I lazily brushed off the tiny gnats that keeled over on my pages, exhausted from their inability to penetrate my hot, glorious lightbulb.
One day my dad, watching me read in a chair, not moving for hours, threw me a book, one of the few I’d ever seen him read. “Iacocca. A good American story. You should read this.” I promptly sucked it up and its follow-up, Talking Straight, and forever after absorbed the commitment to Buy American. “We’ve really got to buy local, Dad!” I said, freshly convinced that his injunction that we buy everything in town—so that people in town would buy cars from him—was the only way to live. “The girl’s got it!” he shouted, admiring his budding young capitalist. “And remember,” he said, “every price is negotiable!” (Having watched him haggle unsuccessfully with a salesperson over the price of a sport coat, I knew it wasn’t always true.)
I was obsessed with books, but indiscriminate. Having little guidance in that department, my literary inhalation was akin to setting up a shop vac in the woods: the lightest materials flew in first. At eight or nine, I started plowing through my mom’s downstairs paperback library, which was chock-full of fat James Micheners and historical fiction series. By the time I was fourteen I’d moved on to a shelf of books that was similar but more sinful. Then I found some truly saucy books, like Scruples by Judith Krantz and everything by the chaste-covered LaVyrle Spencer (who changed my view of turn-of-the-century one-room-school teachers forever: Sluts, every one of them!) as well as the slim flight-attendant classic: Coffee, Tea or Me? I skipped the few real classics she had, like Anna Karenina.