Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen

by Matt McAllester

  He breathes in, turns the ignition key, and pulls out onto the highway.

  Early the same morning, I open my eyes and look sleepily around my bedroom at the walls that are colored somewhere between salmon pink and peach—my choice. My duvet is yellow, with white shapes like flowers. I roll over and stare at the weave of the gray carpet. I can hear my mother moving through the house and my half dreams. None of us usually gets up this early on a Sunday. I close my eyes and drift.

  “Jane, Matthew.” It is my mother's voice from the ground floor. My sister and I sleep in bedrooms on the second floor. I open my eyes again. “I'm going out for a bit. I'll be back later.”

  “Okay, bye,” we call out, and we keep our heads on our pillows and begin to sink back into sleep.

  Our mother opens the glass-paneled inner door and then the solid-wood main door, and she walks down the flagstone path my father has laid in a deliberately crooked line through the front garden. The blue mini is parked across the street, near the bank on the corner. She gets in, pulls away from the curb, and begins to drive through Edinburgh, the city where she grew up and met my father and then came back to in 1973 after their years in London. She drives through the elegant Georgian architecture of the New Town and keeps going east, until she reaches the volcanic hill known as Arthur's Seat, jutting out of the city. It's a place where people park their cars and go for short walks to take in the panoramic view of the city and the North Sea. She keeps driving and heads south, toward the King's Buildings, a campus that is part of the University of Edinburgh. She knows the city well, knows where she can find some solitude on a Sunday morning. Her first home in Edinburgh, after her family moved back from London after World War II, was a house on Blackbarony Road, which leads out onto the King's Buildings. She lived there until she was sixteen. Nearby are the crags and gorse and woodland of Blackford Hill, another of Edinburgh's many semiwild, often deserted parklands. This is where she played as a child and where she has taken us for a Sunday afternoon walk a hundred times. When she was a child it was an excellent place to play hide-and-seek. There was a small farm nearby, with chickens and horses. In those days, the quarry was a distant, largely deserted place. When she takes us to nearby Blackford Hill, we bring stale bread in brown paper bags to throw toward the ducks and swans and moorhens in the pond.

  Blackford Glen Road is narrow and runs alongside a stream next to the campus. She turns up the road and drives as far as she can, to a deserted parking lot. She turns the engine off and sits in the Mini, her husband driving home from his father's funeral, her children asleep at home. And she swallows all the pills she has brought with her. Before long she is unconscious, drifting away from her unbearable sadness for what she believes will be the last time.

  The fire brigade has a Sunday morning exercise scheduled at the secluded Blackford Quarry, near the rough ground where my mother has parked. One of the firemen notices a woman slumped over in the blue Mini.

  Do you know where Mum went to?” I ask Jane. We are in the living room upstairs, the TV room. It's on, but there's nothing much good to watch on a Sunday morning. Some hymns. I feel restless anyway.

  “No,” she says. “She'll be back soon.” This is an assertion from my older sister, not a statement of fact, and I pick up on the difference, but I say nothing. In the absence of Mum or Dad, when we can't reach either of them and don't know exactly where either of them is, Jane assumes a sudden authority in my eyes.

  Our mother has not left a message on the green plastic tablecloth. Always, she scribbles a note there if she's going out for a bit. She tells us when she'll be back and where she's gone. She never leaves for more than fifteen or twenty minutes.

  We wait some more and look out the window, hoping to see her Mini pull up. Or Dad in the Vauxhall.

  It's hard to concentrate on a game or a book. I pick up my white rugby ball and throw it in the air, spinning it around on its axis, catching it and turning my shoulder into the onrushing opposite team's players. And I go to look out the window again for Mum or Dad.

  No one comes.

  Eventually a car does pull up outside our front gate. It is a police car. We look down from the window, stepping back a little so that we won't be seen by the policeman walking up the crooked path. The bell rings. We are scared of policemen. They have the power to lock people up. Are we in trouble? Are they going to put us in jail? My sister goes to the door. I remain a few steps up the staircase.

  “Miss McAllester? Can I come in for a moment?” the policeman asks.

  We have been drilled not to let strangers into the house, but my sister decides that you don't say no to a policeman. Two of them are soon standing in the hallway.

  “Your mother has taken a few too many pills,” the policeman says, after he has ascertained that our father is out of town. He is wearing all black, apart from his white shirt. “Is there anyone you could call to come and take care of you?”

  My sister calls Fi, the mother of my friend Mike. When Mike and his mum arrive, Mike asks me if I'm okay. I start to sob and, like grown men or brothers, we hug. I don't really understand what is going on, but I know that for the first time in my life my mum is not able to look after me.

  My father arrives at the house. He has carried with him, since Abington, the same roadside conviction that something is wrong. He opens the front door and walks into the hallway. It is empty. “Hello?” he calls out. “Ann?” A note on the kitchen table from Fi tells him that my sister and I are at her house.

  In the emergency room of the Royal Infirmary, my mother is unconscious. She has her stomach pumped. She is put in a locked ward. After some days she comes home. My father does not ask her too much about what she has done, but he is sure that it was not a cry for help: His wife wanted to die.

  She is clearly not well yet. Her paranoia and delusions and sadness have survived the quarry and the hospital. She goes, for the first time, to a psychiatric hospital.

  My father drives us there in the sunshine of an early-summer afternoon. We sit on a wooden park bench on the lawn of the hospital, surrounded by trees. My mother speaks quietly and smiles. She seems less alert, less alive, as if she is not entirely paying attention to us. She holds our hands until we leave and stays in the hospital for weeks.

  When she comes home, she seems calm and happy. But my sister and I notice that our mother has odd gaps in her memory. She cannot, for example, remember the previous Christmas. How is that possible? Christmas is the family's most elaborate, most anticipated annual celebration. She had prepared for weeks, as she always did. I had gone with her for one of my favorite days of the year, the Christmas food shopping trip. To Herbie's deli to buy the whole Stilton, the sample passed over the counter to me on a knife, the mold-veined cheese melting and bubbling in my mouth. To the butcher, where the green-and-white-and-russet pheasants hung in pairs around the walls, to order the ham for Christmas Eve and the turkey for Christmas Day. To the greengrocer, where I could choose which kind of mandarin oranges—the ones with loose peels and no pips, always—to carry away in a whole box. To the supermarket, Safeway, where for the only time in the year we were allowed to walk down the candy aisle and cut loose, filling the cart up with Rose's, Dairy Milk, Chocolate Oranges, and bars of Bourneville. In another aisle I could pick out the biggest box of Twiglets, my favorite things in the world—crispy wheat sticks covered in Marmite-like brown stuff. And finally, the greatest treat, the straight-faced visit to a grown-up's shop, Oddbins. The booze shop. I stood on the wood floor and gazed up at the towers of red and green bottles, knowing that one day I could drink what they held and become as happy as my parents and other grown-ups did when they poured wine and whisky and beer into glasses I could only look at now. That was my favorite stop because it was full of far-off promise. For the rest, I would only have to wait a week or so. Then the feasting could begin.

  On Christmas Day, the four of us—and guests whom I no longer remember—had sat around the black-painted oak table and eaten our way through
smoked salmon, melon, prosciutto, turkey, a hundred roast potatoes, homemade chocolate and strawberry ice creams, and Christmas pudding with brandy butter. We had laughed and pulled Christmas crackers and watched a James Bond movie afterward.

  “What did we eat?” my mother asks me.

  “You don't remember?”

  “No.”

  “You did your strawberry ice cream. It was so good. Do you remember what presents you got?”

  “No, Matty, I don't remember a thing,” she says. She is not angry. She seems a little sad that she can't remember Christmas, but she is calm. “They gave me some pills in the hospital and it affected my memory.”

  My mother has forgotten a lot of things. She is quieter and doesn't seem to have as much energy as she had before she went to the hospital. She puts less effort into cooking, and I notice that her food isn't as good as it once was. In fact, it is sometimes bland. Fried lamb chops and boiled potatoes and frozen peas, sitting on a cold plate. Baked beans from a can begin to make more regular appearances. Bacon sandwiches. Frozen pizzas. Frozen reconstituted turkey steaks. Frozen french fries, warmed up in the oven on the same baking tray as the turkey steaks.

  She sits next to me on the bench as I eat one of her meals, poking the fried, unseasoned pork belly around the plate. I don't complain, but there is no joy in the eating.

  “I've totally forgotten how to cook, you know,” she says to me, matter-of-factly “I know I used to know how to cook, but I don't remember a single recipe. That all went away in the hospital. And I'm not really interested in cooking anymore.”

  Some weeks later she goes back into the hospital. And when she comes home she is even calmer than before. For a while.

  33

  MY MOTHER'S MEDICAL HISTORY COST ME FIFTY POUNDS. Ten for the fee, forty for the photocopying. After weeks of waiting and e-mailing and calling, the medical records had moved from whatever building they were kept in by the local authority to my mother's former doctor's office, which happened to be a five-minute walk from my house. I slid the check under the glass window and the office manager passed me a large brown envelope, which I carried back up past the pawnshops and hardware stores and bookmakers of Kilburn High Road and along the street to my home. It was a Friday afternoon, and I was on deadline with a magazine article. And then I was due to go to Spain on Sunday for another magazine.

  I don't have time to look right now, I told myself, throwing the thick envelope onto my desk.

  Moments later I slid my finger under the flap of the envelope and opened it up.

  My eyes raced over the pages, flicking through, reading letters from psychiatrists and handwritten doctor's notes. After an hour I picked up the whole pile of paper and slid it back inside the envelope, where it stayed for a month while I wrote about anything other than my mother—Somali gangs in Minneapolis, obscure crustaceans that attach themselves to the coastal rocks of Galicia. And I cooked. Christmas was coming. The envelope sat on a stool under an increasingly large pile of newspapers, magazines, and paperwork.

  34

  I BEGAN TO READ AND PLAN AND MAKE LISTS ON BLANK sheets of paper a month before Christmas. Lists of remembered dishes, family recipes, ingredients I would have to find, nibbles I would leave lying around the house as they used to be every Christmas in our house. I would pickle onions, bake my first Christmas cake, steam my first Christmas pudding, whip up my first brandy butter, roast my first turkey, make my mother's impossibly creamy chocolate ice cream for the first time, and give Pernilla a sense of what our Christmases had been like. I had not made Christmas for her before. In my mother's recipe book, which I approached for the first time since I had gone hunting for the ice cream recipe, I found two handwritten recipes for Christmas cake—“Sister Agatha's Christmas Cake” and another copied out from a newspaper. In Katie Stewart's Times Cookery Book, which would have fallen into a hundred sections if I had not cupped it delicately in my hand, I found the chocolate ice cream. Pickled onions may not have been particularly Christmas food, but we had made them every year, standing around in the kitchen peeling shallots by the dozen and letting the tears roll down our cheeks, laughing at the acidic stinging in our eyes.

  As I made my lists, I was surprised to find myself suddenly hesitating over the idea of re-creating my mother's food. I had not expected this reluctance just as I was preparing to produce in my own home the meal of all the year's meals, the meal that had once showcased my mother's talents and our appetites, the meal that had bound us together for so many years. Pernilla's mother and stepfather were coming all the way from Vancouver. Her stepbrother, his wife, and their baby would be here. My sister was coming, as were two friends—a brother and sister. This was my chance to piece together the sort of big family meal and celebration my mother used to make the focal point of our year. It was just that, well, this was my meal, not hers. I began to feel that I wanted her with me, yes, but I did not want her running the show. Meals are a source of life, not an echo of death, and while I still needed to capture my young mother's sense of joy in cooking for her family, I did not want to fall into a morbid, perfect reenactment of a feast from a time long past. I wanted to use some of my own cookbooks, some of the recipes I had found in food magazines and newspapers, some of the ideas I had been forming during my months of teaching myself to “cook properly,” as she saw it.

  I wanted a lemon granita to take the edge off the heavy sweetness of ice cream and fruitcake and steamed fruit pudding with brandy butter. Not to forget the mince pies my sister would be bringing. Or the gingerbread men my mother-in-law would bake. I wanted to bake airy, irresistible gougères to serve as people waited to eat. I wanted a light, slightly surprising starter, and I had found a recipe for a salad of sushi-grade tuna, seared and coated in poppy seeds and sweet paprika, on a bed of leaves and segments of clementine, drizzled with a clementine vinaigrette. I had found an Italian-style turkey recipe in a Thanksgiving issue of Gourmet magazine, and I wanted to make its Italian sausage stuffing and its lemon butter, sliding the butter between the skin and the breast of the bird, a trick I knew well with chicken. I wanted to liven up my Brussels sprouts with small chunks of pancetta and chestnut. I wanted to glaze my carrots with cider, drizzle maple syrup over my roasting parsnips, and mix port and orange juice into my fresh cranberry sauce. I wanted to wrap the chipolata sausages with slithers of fatty Italian pancetta, not slices of British bacon.

  My mother never did any of that.

  But I figured she would approve of how I had learned to cook in my own way, moving quickly around the kitchen, cooking some things days in advance, timing the full eighteen dishes that were going into this meal so that on Christmas Day they would emerge smoothly from the kitchen and I would still have time to talk to the guests. Perhaps I still needed the book open, perhaps I still could not cook properly, as she saw it, but I was disappearing into my cooking, closing off the world so that my family could celebrate.

  Besides, in talking with my aunt Kata, a rather different version of my mother's cooking had emerged. “She always had her cookery book open,” my aunt told me.

  “No,” I said, “that surely can't be true—she told me over and over that it wasn't proper cooking unless you had the book closed.”

  “No,” Kata said forcefully, “she always used the cookery book to do anything.”

  “Oh, I see,” I said.

  On Christmas Day I woke up with a brutal flu, cooked through the morning, could barely hear what anyone was saying, and had to lie down for a stretch during the meal. I have no idea what anything tasted like.

  35

  WITH CHRISTMAS AND ITS FLU OVER, I SAT DOWN WITH THE pile of photocopies that had been waiting for me on my desk for a few weeks. The first document in my mother's medical records was a typed letter from an optician to my mother's doctor describing an eye exam. October 31, 1974. She has no complaints whatever as far as her eyes are concerned and on examination I found her vision to be normal.

  The banalities of medical burea
ucracy don't last long.

  In November 1978 her doctor conducted a physical. There are notes about her parents. Her father: Depression @ 60 (E.C.T. treatment). Her mother: Formerly alcoholic—now T.T [teetotal].

  There are a few hints. The doctor writes of her being uneasy about readiness to take drink, which has a stimulating effect, making her argumentative. She has no association with a church now, he writes, and sometimes feels guilty…. Would like more children but husband unwilling and both feel it is now a bit late.… Tense emotionality, probably ordinarily heightened.

  And then came a letter from a professor of psychiatry to her doctor, written on June 8, 1981.

  The above was admitted on 5th May, after I had myself earlier seen her in the Poisons Unit at the Royal Infirmary, the professor writes. You will remember that there is a very strong family history of mental illness.… At the time of admission and for the subsequent ten days the patient was extremely depressed and was pre occupied with a number of paranoid ideas, feeling that an arrangement had been made between her own brother, Moray House [a teaching college], and some people in the Highlands to put her to the test in some way by depicting her life and feelings in front of her when she had been away on a brief holiday recently in the Highlands. We had thought of giving the patient ECT, but persisted with [the antidepressant] amitriptyline, and after a couple of weeks on 200 mg nightly she made an excellent recovery and has gone home.