Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen

by Matt McAllester

  I found another letter written by one of the professor's staff to another doctor at the hospital, recording more details of my mother's admission. Thank you for taking this lady. She took a mixed overdose of drugs while sitting in her car in a quarry. She had earlier driven to Arthur's Seat where she wanted to find a beautiful place in which slowly to die.… In recent weeks the patient has become increasingly depressed and has had a number of ideas of reference. She feels that people look at her and that if they were speaking about her they would be saying that she is a failure who has let down her family and her husband.

  The family went to the Highlands a couple of weeks ago for a few days break and when she came back she felt that the whole trip had somehow been arranged in every detail with special reference to herself. She has had difficulty sleeping at night and has felt her thoughts going round and round on unhappy themes. She has been thinking about how to kill herself. On the day preceding the overdose she went round to see her father but she felt somehow that he and her brother ignored her. Then she went to the cinema with a friend and had wanted to go to a cheerful picture but her friend insisted on going to see Ordinary People. The next day the patient made an attempt to kill herself.

  I wasn't expecting to laugh out loud while reading this stuff. Robert Redford and his Oscar-winning family glumfest—it was all too much for my mum. If only she had gone to see Private Benjamin. (Although these things are all in the eye of the beholder: Mark David Chapman found Ordinary People to have a calming effect, and it dissuaded him from killing John Lennon on his initial visit to New York in 1980.)

  My mother in our garden in Edinburgh

  And so that was the real beginning of the story that the huge pile of paper told. From May 5, 1981, the letters and notes came regularly.

  Her antidepressants worked for a few months, and both she and my father were hugely relieved that the worst was over. But by December of that year, the month that was always the happiest and most food-laden in my world, she was wobbling badly, and her doctor wrote:

  In December she noted that her concentration had become more impaired, that she was waking during the night and again had feelings of hopelessness and was contemplating suicide.

  The doctor's notes made me picture her, standing in the kitchen stirring the dried fruit and brown sugar and butter in a mixing bowl, making yet another Christmas cake, ordering yet another turkey from the butcher, taking me to buy the crate of satsumas from the greengrocer and the whole Stilton from the deli, deciding that making chocolate ice cream this year wasn't something she was up to in spite of my pleas, finding no comfort in this burdensome preparation for a feast she no longer cared about, sensing her old identity melting away like the chunks of chocolate she was heating in a mixing bowl that was sitting in a pan of boiled water.

  But my memory offers a different picture: I don't remember anything but excitement and warmth.

  Dominic and Uncle Paul come for Christmas dinner. Dominic is staying for several days, as he is traveling from his current home in Yorkshire—where he is caretaker on a country estate—to an island near Ardnamurchan. He has brought with him a brace of pheasants shot on the estate, and my mother and I hear shrieks and giggles and some rude words from the utility room off the kitchen as my father and Dom struggle to draw and pluck the birds, bolstering their efforts amid the guts and feathers with tumblers of Scotch. Having Dom and Paul there for dinner is a treat for Jane and me, and I remember no Christmas as fondly. But I know nothing of my mother's sleeplessness and desire to die.

  Within a few days of that happy night, my father and Dominic drive my mother to the psychiatric hospital. “The little electrical ‘gates’ in my brain are malfunctioning, and that's what's causing the problems,” she explains to Dominic, very lucidly.

  She is admitted to the hospital and a few weeks later one of her doctors writes: She began a course of ECT on 30th December, 1981 and when seen on 13th January, 1982 after six treatments she appeared much brighter and said that she had not felt so well for many months.

  I wonder why Mum is sad at Christmas and how anyone could get that fed up at the happiest time of the year, when there are piles of presents and that whole, impossibly creamy Stilton to dig the long-handled spoon into, with no limits on the amount I am allowed to eat, because it would all go dry and the sides of the cheese would crack unless it is eaten quickly.

  On January 27, 1982, my mother comes home from the hospital after being there for almost a month. Her doctors have told her to continue on amitriptyline 150 mg at night.

  The first night she is home I ask:

  “Mum, will you come and play on the TV game with me?”

  My favorite Christmas gift is one of the first generation of video games, a primitive console that lets you play basic forms of tennis, squash, and soccer. I had roped her into playing game after game with me in the days immediately after Christmas, before she returned to the hospital.

  “This is fun,” she says, as if it's the first time she's played. She has no memory of playing the game before.

  The medical notes, and my father's memory, record that time as one of improvement in her health. But by that stage their marriage is beyond repair.

  It is a Saturday night in early October 1982, and we have gone out to a Spanish restaurant. It is my sister's choice because it is her birthday meal. That's the way it works. On our birthdays, we get to choose our favorite food. Then on the weekend we can choose a restaurant. I always opt for the burger paradise that is Bell's Diner. Jane is fifteen and has more sophisticated tastes. She wants paella.

  At the restaurant my mother whispers something aggressively to my father. I hear the words making eyes. They are sitting opposite my sister and me. My father looks embarrassed.

  “What are you saying, Mum?” I say. “Don't you know it's rude to whisper at the table?”

  “I was telling your father how the lady at the next table has clearly taken a shine to him. She's making eyes at your father. He's very handsome, so it's hardly surprising.”

  I sense that my mother does not mean this as a compliment. In the past couple of years I have heard this voice of hers, ever more frequently, ever more loudly. Sometimes I hear it at night, coming from the living room, rising in a crescendo that can't be hidden from my sister and me, as we lie in our beds behind closed doors. Sometimes it erupts in front of us. Once, it comes from the kitchen, and I hear the name of a woman I know and like very much and my mother is saying that this woman has been “in my bed.” I know that my mother and father's bed is meant to be only for them.

  The kitchen has, at times, come to seem less of a happy place than it once was. It was in the kitchen a couple of years before, when I was nine, that we had a family talk that changed our lives for a while, and not for the better. We were a family devoted to watching Dallas, every Wednesday evening at ten minutes past eight. So my father looked at Jane and me and reached out to Dallas, a place we all understood and shared, for help. “Do you know how on Dallas sometimes J.R. has affairs?” he asked.

  I sat on one of our orange plastic chairs. I stared at the floor. Jane sat nearby.

  “Yes,” I said, not liking where this was going.

  “Yes,” Jane said, in a quiet, brave voice.

  “Well, I've had an affair. But it's over now.”

  “Who with?” I asked, knowing the answer already.

  “That doesn't matter,” my parents said. But the affair clearly mattered to my mother, because my father explained that he would be moving out for a while to live with my mother's brother, Paul. He came back before too long because my mother missed him so much. I missed him more than I could say. And when he came back, he and my mother were happy again. But then came the spies from Moray House and the quarry and the hospital and her lingering anger at what my father had done.

  When we get home from the Spanish restaurant, my father tells my sister and me that we need to have a family talk. We sit in the living room. It is Saturday night, the most fun eve
ning of the week. But this is not fun. From past experience, I know that “family talks” never are.

  “As you probably know,” he says, “Mum and I haven't been getting on very well. So I'm going to move out again.”

  We are silent.

  “How long for?” I ask. I will miss him while he's gone, but we've done this before and it didn't last long.

  “We're not sure,” Dad says.

  My mother erupts. “Don, for God's sake, for once in your life can't you just tell the bloody truth?” And that is the end of my family.

  My father has moved out, and my mother is talking about a new start in a new house. After school one Friday in the spring of 1983, she and I go with a realtor to see a new flat. I don't want to leave our house.

  “Do you want to get those jeans?” she says as we leave, and I can't believe what I'm hearing I am on a pretty strict allowance and I have to buy my own clothes and records, but now she's offering to buy me my first pair of Levi's 501s. We drive to Cockburn Street in Edinburgh's Old Town. After we have completed the jeans transaction, we walk past a record store. I tell her that at my friend Mike's house I've been listening to the new single by David Bowie, “Let's Dance.” I had always considered Bowie to be too weird, not very melodic. But there's something about this song that I really love.

  “Come on,” she says, and takes my hand in an excited way, not an embarrassing Mum way, and we're going inside the record store and she's buying me not just the “Let's Dance” single but the whole album.

  At home I sit on my bed, put my headphones on, and listen to the record. I save up to buy Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, and the “Ashes to Ashes” seven-inch. “My mother said, to get things done, you better not mess with Major Tom,” Bowie sings, and I have little idea what he's trying to say, if anything, but it thrills and comforts me more than anything I've heard before.

  One day I read in the local paper that Bowie is coming to Edinburgh to play a stadium show in the summer. My mother calls my father, who skips out of work to buy tickets. Their separation hasn't yet prevented them from coordinating good things for their children. I think they want to cheer us up with a treat or two. My mother's next call is to my teacher: Matthew will be leaving school early on Tuesday, June 28, she explains. As usual, she is telling, not asking. She picks me up that afternoon, and, after we have parked the car, the two of us make our way through the tens of thousands walking to Murrayfield rugby stadium. Once at our seats we wait for hours, listening to two opening acts until the darkness falls and the lights finally dim and I stand on my seat to work out which of the men coming onto the stage is Bowie. And then it's clear—he's not there yet. Moments later, the blond, blue-suited Bowie finally appears onstage, and there's no mistaking him—he seems to glow. My patient, mildly interested mother stands beside me, smoking cigarettes and watching the show without knowing a single song. The rain begins to shower down on the forty thousand people there, nearly all of them older than me and younger than my mother. “I could play the wild mutation as a rock ‘n’ roll star,” he sings in his opening song, and I think to myself that I've found a world through this music and this singer that offers me an escape, a way to change things. It feels like the most important day of my life. Within two years I have every record Bowie has ever made.

  Years later, at a swanky party in an Upper East Side apartment full of famous artists and paintings by famous artists, I was helping myself to roast ham at the buffet table when I realized David Bowie was standing next to me, filling his plate. I scrambled for something to say: “That ham looks real tasty,” or “Your music still provides me with a deep sense of comfort that will probably be with me for life.” I took a spoonful of potato salad and said nothing.

  On December 1, 1983, my mother writes to her doctor explaining that she is divorcing my father. Her lawyers, she says, have asked her to ask her doctor for an account of her illnesses.

  The doctor replies on December 7. The letter reveals more details about her depression in the 1970s and beyond.

  She is a woman of education and intelligence, charming and fair-minded, he writes. In 1975 she required treatment when pressure from her parents provoked depression.

  In 1978 she found herself drinking excessively. In 1980 the couple had a temporary social separation and Mrs. McAllester required treatment with mild tranquillizers.

  In 1981 she had further problems with her father and with her son, who had abdominal pain—a first symptom of development of behavioural difficulty later leading to problems at school.

  My own name seems to pop up now and then in my mother's records.

  Some years later the same doctor writes: 8/5/86. Worried re. son's behaviour—Matthew (16) does not talk and has been violent to things @ home. Apparently OK @ school and elsewhere.

  I am elsewhere described as rude.

  36

  If you walk out of our red sandstone terraced house, turn left at the front gate, and head down the road, you come to a small group of shops clustered around one corner of a crossroads. There's Bob's, the barber, where my mother until recently has imposed such short haircuts on me that older boys at school call me Spike. I'm thirteen now, so my freedom to choose is growing, and I choose not to get haircuts that make me an object of ridicule. Another store sells newspapers, cigarettes, stationery, candy, and cheap toys. I have been negotiating the delicate transition with the old man in the shop from candy buyer to pornography buyer, trying to look like I have aged several years in the course of a few months. On the corner is Haddows, the liquor store. One of dozens of Haddows stores in Scotland, its sign is in white letters on a green plastic background. Haddows is where I usually go with Dad when he doesn't have time to go to a better wine shop. As of several months ago, he no longer lives with us, so I am no longer taken there.

  It's a warm, late-summer Friday evening, and school is over for the day. Maroon-and-white double-decker buses belonging to the Lothian Regional Council churn past me as I walk to the corner and cross the road because I see my mother moving slowly from the shops, back to our house. She's carrying a green-and-white bag.

  “Hi, Mum.”

  “Hi, Matty.”

  I put my hand out to pull open the plastic bag in her hands and she lets me.

  “What's the whisky for?” I ask. There is a half-sized bottle of Bell's in there. Full bottles are what get poured when we have guests around, when Dad is having an evening whisky. I have never seen half bottles in the house. Half bottles are what my friends and I save up to buy every now and then when someone's parents are away for the day—if anyone will sell to us. Half bottles are what the men who lie on the sidewalk drink. I have an urge to take the whisky away from my mother. I don't quite know why, but I know she shouldn't have it.

  “Oh, it's nothing,” she says. “Don't worry.”

  We walk on in our different directions.

  I know she is unhappy that she and Dad are getting divorced. She has been spending a lot of time in bed. She gets very angry at and about Dad. She takes sleeping pills.

  “Do they completely knock you out?” I ask her hopefully.

  “No,” she says, sensing my game. “They tip me into sleep, that's all.”

  I test this over the months and play very loud Bowie records to see if she'll wake up. When she doesn't, I quietly let myself out of the house into the summer evenings, and never once does she appear at the window to catch me moving quickly along the crooked garden path and out of sight.

  My mother indulges me with another treat: I am allowed to have a black Labrador. It will not be the family's dog, it will be mine. I pick out the smallest from the litter at a farm outside Edinburgh on a hot summer afternoon, and I call her, of course, Ziggy.

  She is my solace and friend. When my mother drinks and cries and shouts, Ziggy and I go and hang out in my bedroom and I talk to her. She's pretty stupid but she's lovely. A year later, when I'm fourteen, my mother drives Ziggy and me in the Vauxhall to a cricket match I'm playing in. Ziggy, who
could do with a little more training and discipline, is wriggling like a black seal in the backseat. It is a hot Saturday morning in May. After the long game, I walk back home in the evening through the park and along the wide avenues of North Edinburgh. My mother is sitting in the kitchen. She gets up from the wooden stool she's sitting on and puts her palms on my cheeks.

  “Matty, I've done something terrible,” she says. For a second I am not alarmed, because she often does terrible things these days, usually to people she is supposed to love, usually in the form of vicious words. But this time she looks afraid of something.

  “I left Ziggy in the car. She suffocated in the heat. She's dead.”

  37

  Mrs. McAllister [sic] was brought up to hospital by her ex-husband on the 29th April [1985] on account of her mood disturbance and inability to carry out simple household tasks, writes a doctor at the hospital.

  On the day of admission she rang him and said that she was going to Confession and asked him to look after the children. He wondered whether she was having a further episode of depression and when the children said that she was unable to prepare the meal he went to the family home and brought Ann to hospital.

  My father moves back in with us until our mother returns from the hospital.

  The doctor continues: Ann said that she had been drinking a bottle of wine or sherry a day for at least a fortnight prior to admission and that she had been taking an excess quantity of sleeping tablets. Initially these were temazepam but then I understand they were changed on account of the restrictions on prescribing that hypnotic. The new hypnotic, whose name she cannot recall, made her “Zombie-like.” On at least one occasion she took these sleeping tablets during the day.

  On admission Ann was unkempt, preoccupied and muttering to herself. Her mood was labile; predominately she was tearful and low in mood but at times she would giggle and laugh inappropriately. She expressed bizarre ideas such as the belief that she could be pregnant and that the baby was a monster on account of the atom bomb.