by Amy Thielen
I didn’t really know the answer to that. I was eating to fill a new and foreign space.
—
Our dad moved out to the cabin that winter, and eight months later, we’d move away, too. My mom had chosen our escape route, one that felt sufficiently dramatic enough to match the high tenor of her big life-changing decision, and planned a move to a suburb of the Twin Cities, a place we’d visited a mere double handful of times.
That August before my junior year of high school, we moved into a sprawling apartment complex that probably housed the same population as the town we’d just left. It contained all the coziness of an office complex. I’d had my driver’s license for precisely two weeks, had only driven dirt country roads and around the ten-block radius of Park Rapids, and had yet to master what for me was the hardest part—steering—when I launched myself as a hidden hazard onto the interchanges and merge lanes of the Minneapolis–St. Paul freeway system.
My Park Rapids friends and I burned up the USPS with dramatic, overly descriptive letters. Cara wrote that she often saw my dad driving around town with our dog, Buffy, in his lap. It’s so cute, she said, but also kind of sad. The dog’s paws were up on the wheel, as if she were steering.
I figured Buffy was better at it than I was.
I have just a vague recollection of going back to visit my dad at the house in town. The rooms were clean but painfully bereft of my mother’s housekeeping. Plastic bags of dry-cleaning from Modern Cleaners hung on his doorframes, indicating that my dad now ferried all his clothes to the dry cleaners, including all of the dress shirts my mom had previously spent hours ironing. He sat in front of the TV in the evenings with the curtains wide open, so that anyone driving past on Eighth Street could see him. And he ate out a lot, alternating nights among the four restaurants in town. The one thing he made at home was popcorn, which I knew because I saw the smaller of my mom’s two dedicated popcorn pots on his stove, both of which my mother credited with making her popcorn so irresistible. Golden and heavy, the exterior of the pot was covered with a flaky layer of oily black crud and so caked with it on the bottom that when you shook the pot against the metal burner, sparks flew. The inside of its lid was stained with brown oil residue, as sticky as pine pitch, and impossible to scrub off.
It was amazing how that smaller one, hardly more than six inches in diameter, could produce the enormous bowl of popcorn that it did; it was the clown car of pots—just when you thought everything was tipped out of that thing, the popcorn kept on coming.
Back when we used to sit at that counter, popcorn had always been the savory dessert after our lavish meal, but here in Dad’s empty house, it might have comprised dinner itself. Were the two precious popcorn pots laid out in the divorce degree, as in: I take the kids, you keep the dog; I get the speedboat, you get the house; I’ll take the big Club Aluminum pot, you keep the small? The minute I saw the small popcorn pot on Dad’s stove, the permanence of my family’s division descended on me all at once.
A few years later, while rooting around the cupboards at my mom’s place for stray stuff to fill my college apartment kitchen, I would snag the other one.
10
OLD FIVE-AND-DIMERS
I’m sixteen years old and I love my mom with an almost scary fierceness. It blooms in me like a mushroom cloud of seething milk right before the boil.
Her opinions seep through me until I am soaked with them. They make me feel full. I take everything she says as the last word on the subject, from the way she cleans raw pork chops by scraping off the bone grit from the saw with a butter knife, to the way she singles out the best romaine at the grocery store, her finger tracing the head with the curliest edge. I try to eat the way she eats: ever so slowly, sucking on a single square of chocolate for a long time as if it were a lozenge. I love how she pushes a grocery cart through the store and then out over the icy parking lot—with urgency and feeling.
I watch her assemble an outfit for a night out, lounging on the silky discard pile on her bed as she tries on each ensemble with this belt, then that one, this necklace, that heel. Her body is exactly like mine, but grown; her kneecaps are smooth and rounded, her ankles small and bony, her wrists too small for most bangles. I stand by as she drapes eye shadow onto her deep-pocketed eyes, the silver dust clinging to the wide awnings of her lids. I love the way my mother smells, how soft her skin feels just above the knuckles.
I am happily, completely, my mom’s spawn. She is my world or, more specifically, my country, and now, in the time of my parents’ divorce, the country is at war. My parents, who fought regularly but never seemed to hate each other, have turned into vicious adversaries. In a panic to assemble some foot soldiers, my mom shares details to get us to join her side—which we do, given that my dad’s influence in our lives measures just a drop compared to the ocean of our mother’s, and that my dad refuses to talk about the divorce with us, never presenting us with his defense. I feel guilt over this years afterward, but we were just kids; it wasn’t a fair contest.
My quiet dad grows even quieter. The invisible force field that has always surrounded him now turns so hard that I can almost see it, and because we’re not sharing a house any longer, I lose even the small bits of affection that I used to glean from just being in his presence. He makes regular, awkward trips to the city to take us to professional sports events or to formal dinners. By this point my mother has taken on a character role, the wronged woman, and she is “spitting mad”—even though we are pretty sure the divorce was her idea. Midway through their three-year court battle, my brothers and I lose interest in her character, and in his character, and for once in our lives feel a unanimous desire to flip the channel and watch a new show.
That the divorce’s eventual outcome takes my mother by surprise is an understatement. The judge does not seem to agree with her request for lifetime maintenance, and it turns out that in addition to raising us and ferrying my brothers to early-morning hockey practices and weekend tournaments, she will also soon have to get a job. When I come home from school, I sometimes find her in bed. It’s so unlike her that I worry. I crawl in next to her and listen to her rail against the evil cards our dad’s lawyer played that week in court.
Finally, one day she gets up early and decides to enroll in a college class to renew her teaching license. This does not mean that her fury has dissipated. It means it has solidified into a mantra.
“Kids! It’s time for a new family motto,” she says, as I riffle through my memory to recall any previous mottos.
“Fuck it!” She was referring to the divorce, to the move, to all our struggles to adjust, to our collective fear of an unfamiliar future. “Fuck! It!” she says, laughing, her new blunt haircut shaking. We look at her in shock, and then at one another with cracked conciliatory smiles, because even though the subversion was hers, she means for us to share it.
—
Somehow in all the fighting over monetary details, the big question—Why can’t you just get along?—was neither posed nor answered. We never did find out why they split up. Being kids, all we really knew was that we were now living in a new town.
After six months in the office-apartment complex, my mom moved us into a big beige house in a freshly constructed suburban neighborhood so twisting and dizzying that the developers must have been high when they plotted it. Our house was identical to two others in the neighborhood, and more than once I pulled into the wrong driveway. Driving in circles along the endless meandering snake paths of my new streets, I felt out of the bottom reaches of teenage lostness, not yet understanding that the visual sense I was missing in my environment was soul. My mom sought out only the freshest of Sheetrocked starts for all of us, but I couldn’t help but feel the lack of history there: Park Rapids could feel gritty, at times about as glamorous as carpet worn down to the plastic mesh, but it was nonetheless storied. And when we lived there, so were we.
My brother Bob shot up about a foot, grew out his hair in the back, and won a rare f
reshman spot on the varsity hockey team. A true northerner, he found his footing on the ice. The familiar, funky, dry-aged-beef odor of his and Marc’s hockey equipment thawing out by our fireplace, the fresh layer of animal-boy sweat drying into a shellac on top of the last one, remained the only reassuring indicator of our former home.
Marc, at only ten, was a powder keg, tossing off insults at every provocation, as if he were walking around with tiny sharp rocks in his shoes. Wielding my own wicked tongue and using my language abilities to full press, I appointed myself family judge and chief arbitrator. I spent lots of time telling everyone what they should be feeling so as to cover up the fact that I had no idea what to feel myself. Sometimes my brothers listened to me, and other times they sneered that I was just like Mom, walking around the house with a tissue lodged between coffee cup and saucer as she did, and about as bossy. Mostly, when I wasn’t eating bowls of oily leftovers, I drove around and got lost in suburbia, blaring the alternative radio station at top volume. My adolescent rebellion—“Smells Like Teen Spirit”—had been curtailed out of necessity, but it was still active, like a buried hot spring.
Walking around loose and unknown in my enormous new school, I had my first taste of anonymity. Despite this, I made deep instant friendships with an already established crew of theater goofs, and we spent a lot of time studying for our AP English exams, smoking loosies and drinking strong black coffee in Minneapolis’s late-night coffee shops. My mom insisted that I must be out partying, that there was no way in hell we could be hanging out that long in cafés.
But I was a good girl. And, suddenly, a very hungry one. At home we ate, with more sickly comfort than ever. Feeding hungry, emotional suburban kids—the three of us and, eventually, many of our friends—became my mom’s specialty.
To outsiders, every dinner looked like a holiday. The spinning wheel of my mother’s arsenal, which up to this point had always pulled in a fair number of ethnic outliers like stir-fry, spun tighter and tighter until it began to land each night on one of our richest Midwestern favorites: chicken marsala with mushrooms and spaetzle in brown butter; grilled pork chops served still a little pink in the middle and cloaked with horseradish sour cream; butterscotch bars caving beneath the weight of their thick chocolate tops. She began to make even larger batches in advance prep for the preteen raids on the fridge that so thrilled her. “Marc’s friends came over and ate that entire gallon of chili and all of those apple dumplings!” was a common boast in those days. I can’t remember her ever saying that she herself was hungry, but rather that it was “time to feed these kids.” The woman who made more food than a single family could eat had one wish for it: She wanted it gone.
Her cooking, and our belief in its eminence, was fast becoming the family glue. My abdomen-thorax regions grew permanently round and remained so, in a state of full-on satiation, for the next three or four years. To my mother’s credit, never once did she acknowledge my weight gain, even as my short frame skip-counted from size 4 to 10 and then 12, and not even when I begged her to admit the truth: “Agree with me, I’m getting fat.”
She dismissed this with a wave of her hand—“You’re absolutely not!”—and countered with the only words of eating wisdom I’ve ever needed: “If you feel that way, then cut out desserts, and don’t take seconds.”
She refused to ruin food for me, for which I’m forever grateful.
—
When it came time for me to apply to college, my main goal was to distance myself as much as possible from the fallout from my detonated family. I found a small liberal arts school in a village in Ohio—as insulated as Park Rapids but even smaller—called Kenyon, whose old stone buildings and ancient literary pedigree seemed like the perfect place to launch a small-town girl’s literary calling. Feeling hopelessly foreign, a Midwestern duck swimming in a pond of East Coast kids, I threw myself into my classes. To offset my social anxiety, I counterintuitively returned to my comfort zone: I got a perm. (I still believed the Midwestern adage that curls make round faces look thinner.) By the time summer break rolled around, I’d come to see my college foray as an indulgent, expensive escape from the family drama, a luxury that I probably didn’t deserve.
Moving back into the house in the cul-de-sac, I saw that they were doing about as well as I was—surviving but not exactly thriving. Marc wore his new angry-teenager costume 24/7; my mom began buying better wine but still in jumbo sizes—cheap magnums instead of boxes; and my brother Bob seemed to be taking the divorce the hardest. He’d been sending me long handwritten letters all year, some of them updates, some of them wildly inventive poems. One night we sat up and talked about them.
I thought his writing could have been really good if it weren’t for his syntax, a curious mixture of biblical and Middle English. While I had lost my Catholicism and my ability to pretend years ago (at around the same time), Bob remained in possession of both his Bible and the full scope of his imagination. In narrative terms, I was reasonable, boring nonfiction; he was fantasy fiction. The secular, liberal English major in me changed his every “morn” to “morning” and “ye” to gender-neutral “they,” and sent them back for revision. And now I was feeling guilty for having so mercilessly edited my brother’s work—little more than diary entries.
“I actually don’t think you need to change anything here,” I said.
“Whatever. The individual words aren’t as important as the meaning of the whole.” He sighed. I was the one in the family known for her achievements, her aptitude, and yet in his eyes I was often so dense. “Look at the last line.”
It said, “So be it.”
So be it? “Is that some kind of answer?” I asked.
“Yeah. When it comes to our family, none of them will ever change. Your problem is you expect too much.”
As a devout child of psychotherapy, I found that hard to accept, but the undeniable truth was that after that he dealt with our parents’ divorce, the move, and his own coming-of-age with the kind of finality and wisdom it would take me many more years to find. Unlike me and, to a certain degree, our brother Marc, Bob had no desire to return to our hometown to dig in our family’s wreckage for fossilized clues. He shut the door to the past and remained close to both of our parents, but never returned to Park Rapids for any length of time; I kept my door open, just a crack, and every time I went back I walked all over my past self, nose to the ground, sniffing for clues.
For my sophomore year, I transferred to Macalester in St. Paul, another liberal arts school—but this one was only twenty minutes away from my brothers, my mother, and her kitchen.
—
Macalester College pulled in lots of East Coasters from moneyed backgrounds, but I gravitated toward the more informal Midwesterners. I roomed with an enthusiastic social-activist lesbian-theologian from Milwaukee and a wisecracking poet from Minnesota who was deep into Sylvia Plath’s language of melancholy. The poet and I wrote endless pages of confessional poetry and smoked cigarettes until the silver ash mountain in the ashtray overflowed onto the floor. All three of us spent hours playing drinking games with the boys in the basement apartment, who then sculpted a living-room couch from our empty cases of cheap Wisconsin beer. (Huber Bock, to be specific, which in retrospect might have contributed to my thickening torso.)
Everyone in my family, save my mom, thought that my pursuit of an English degree in an expensive liberal arts college was pure extravagance, and told me so. “For that, why don’t you just go to a state school?” asked the ever-practical Grandma Dion. In a way, they weren’t wrong, for I basically spent my college years fine-tuning my god-given aptitude for procrastination.
I’d wait until the eleventh hour to start writing a twenty-five-page term paper, then drive down to my mom’s house and stay up all night long and write the thing in a single sitting, fueled by hefty servings of the food I revered. I came back toting bags of leftovers, which my hungry roommates leapt on.
Installed in my first apartment, I also started t
o cook on my own. Whenever the pressure of a writing deadline loomed uncomfortably in front of me, I’d dodge it by jumping into my car and driving to one of the nearby Asian markets. I’d happily plunk down forty of my precious work-study dollars at the Thai market to buy everything to make chicken coconut-milk curry and green beans with pork and fish sauce for eight of my closest friends—and another day’s reprieve from writing my paper on Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and the Southern literary consciousness.
I cooked outside of my mother’s arsenal. I did a good rendition of spaghetti carbonara, with an obscene amount of bacon fat and freshly grated Parmesan cheese. I cut carrots and parsnips lengthwise into spears and fried them hard in a sea of butter until the edges browned to copper and the insides gushed when pressed, and then poured the fat, burnished sticks over white rice. If I had a deadline the next day, I could be found at three in the morning crouched in the living room pureeing squash soup in a blender because the socket in the kitchen didn’t work.
But I also regularly overcooked pasta and spent long minutes peeling garlic and mincing it into minuscule cubes, returning to the stove to find my onions frizzled down to a crust. I stopped trying to replicate my mom’s chicken marsala, because the meat never turned out as velvety as hers. When stir-frying in my thrift-store wok, I particularly hated the metallic fumes that rose up when the soy sauce bubbled on the hot metal, burning upon contact. That wasn’t right. How and when are you supposed to add the soy? I fretted more about my steep learning curve with cooking than I did about my classes.
The disasters in the kitchen piled up. As did the dishes, because I so rarely did them.
—
The summer between my junior and senior years of college was a tremendous bust. Just three weeks after scoring my first job in food service, as a back waiter—beverage pourer, basically—at a high-end Italian spot in Minneapolis, I was fired. Not after breaking my sixth glass, or even after clownishly dropping an entire magnum of champagne on a guy at a very special table of four, but only after I nervously proceeded to pat him down hastily with my side towel—all the way down, into the crevice of his lap, not even thinking about where my towel was headed until I saw his wife’s burning expression. Shaking with mortification, I would never attempt to work front-of-the-house ever again. I left my white button-down shirts in my locker and ran.