by Heather Ross
I was impressed by the size of the broccoli and cabbages but more interested in the immediately edible things in my mother’s garden. When we were small, my sister and I had eaten the peas and the carrots as soon as they appeared. We were worse than any family of rabbits or deer and could decimate whole rows of young vegetables in a single day. The insides of our shirts where we wiped the carrots clean would be covered in a fine, permanent dirt. By late summer, there would be more watery spaghetti squash and zucchini than anyone could want, so much that we would start to pick off the new blooms to keep them from turning into vegetables and pull back their long, reaching tendrils, wrapping them into bunches around our arms and leaving them in confused piles. There were cucumbers, which rotted quickly if you didn’t find them first, and tall stalks of fennel used for pickling them. There were tomatoes, though never very many. Summer was short.
My sister and I were often hungry, because we were children and also because my mother wasn’t the type to stock groceries in the house. On most days, there was rice and spaghetti in the cupboards and usually but not always a jar of peanut butter and some bread, and some butter and milk, but that was often it. There was always coffee and always beer, and absolutely always cigarettes, no matter what else we would run out of between Fridays, which was the day that my grandfather drove up our dirt road and handed my mother a check for seventy-five dollars, which was what we lived on. My mother tried to spend as little as possible on food, which she considered a low priority. She was not that interested in eating, and did not live on a daily schedule anchored by meals.
She was extremely thin and kept what appetite she must have had at bay with said coffee and cigarettes. She was always bringing it up, this burden of keeping us fed, and seemed to understand its importance well enough but looked to resources that did not seem, to us, reliable or consistent. “You two are like my baby birds,” she would say, “always hungry, always needing me to find something to eat and stuff it down your throats.” I would think of the sparrows that nested in our eaves and of their new, blind babies, whom we would see stretching up their open beaks in unison, trampling one another in their desperate effort to be fed by their thin little mother, perched on the edge of the nest with a single worm, chewed up and ready to be split equally among them. This situation created an anxiety in me that lasts to this day. Even now, as an adult, I can only keep food in the house that requires cooking, because anything that can be eaten without preparation will disappear before I’m even aware that I’ve begun to open its packaging.
Our poverty drove my mother to resourcefulness. In the early spring, when her garden was still just dark and lumpy dirt, she hunted with spotty success for leeks and fiddleheads in the coldest, wettest, darkest corners of our woods, and we would go with her and whine as soon as our boots and socks had soaked through and become the same almost-frozen temperature as the thawing marsh. In the summer, she fished in the brooks and bogs, with just a simple rod and reel and no basket or tackle box, climbing upriver along the rocky bank in her tennis shorts and a bikini top and no shoes. I would follow her for a while, but as soon as I found a pool deep enough for swimming, I would stay there and wait for her because I didn’t like the part where you have to kill the fish, which she did expertly but roughly by bashing its head against a rock. Usually she would come back with one or two small trout in her string bag, and I would get dressed and walk downriver to the trail that led back to our car, following her and poking at the silvery fishes hanging at her side. It was a full day for maybe one fish, or two fish, or sometimes none. She would clean and cook them in a cast-iron pan, and we would eat them, picking around the bones that she had broken during the bashing—they are the ones that don’t easily come out when the guts and skeleton are removed—pulling out chunks of meat so fresh that it tasted not like fish at all but like the river with maybe just a hint of the Lucky Strike cigarettes that lived permanently in the string bag.
Most of my friends had fathers who hunted, and most of the boys and some of the girls I grew up with learned to shoot a gun before they were teenagers. I had friends whose families kept rabbits, which they butchered and ate on a daily basis, but none of these options were available to us for two reasons: First, my mother did not hunt, and second, I would not have eaten anything she killed if she had. As soon as I was old enough to understand what I was eating, I made two hard and fast rules: I would not eat anything that my mother had run over with the car (this was an option more than it should have been), and I would not eat anything that was cute, which rabbits most certainly were.
We may not have been the only family who ate what they killed or found or grew, but our methods, apparently, were an issue. My mother, despite her impressive skill set, was the subject of much criticism and very little acceptance within the small town where we lived. We were different, which, in a small town, is unforgivable. And—this is the hardest part—when the people in a small town, the ones who were there before you, know that you want to belong, to say that you are from that place, they recognize the power they have over you in denying you that, and they relish it and will point out the differences between you and them again and again and again. And they will do the same to your children, which is especially confusing. I could see from a very young age that my mother was strong and beautiful and talented. Weren’t these the things that people wanted to be? I wondered.
When I returned to Vermont from California, in my second year of high school, my mother had moved into an old farmhouse in town, among a population of three hundred. Lisa Reynolds was the first friend I made. Her mother’s house was across the street from my own, but it had also suffered a fire and was in a semi-permanent state of renovation. Once, when we were coming home from high school on the school bus—a forty-minute ride—and we stopped at Longley Covered Bridge to drop off Chris and Scott Longley, I saw the tail end of my mother’s car parked by the path that went down to the river, under the bridge. I couldn’t see her from where I was sitting, but Lisa could. “Looks like Tess is trying to fish,” she said, as though it was the most foolish thing anyone had ever done on a riverbank.
Lisa’s mother, Linda, and my mother were friends, and even though they were just as poor as we were, they treated us as though we were beneath them. We had all once gone—Lisa and I and our mothers—on a trip to a lake not far from where we lived. My mother had tossed a package of hot dogs and a bag of bread with four slices, including the two ends, and some ketchup into a paper bag for our lunch. When we were all in the car and Linda asked her what she had brought for lunch and my mother told her, her tone was exactly like Lisa’s would be months later on the day at Longley Bridge, but louder and more cutting. “How the hell are you planning to cook a hot dog, Tess? You need to cook a hot dog!” I hated Linda from the backseat.
“I like mine raw,” I said.
When we got to the lake, my mother took her Lucky Strike cigarettes out of her string bag and pulled her mini Bic lighter from inside the cigarette package, where it always lived. She walked straight to the picnic area with her paper bag in one hand, and she found the small iron grill, which was on a stand near the wooden tables and metal trash cans. She pulled a few used paper plates from the trash can and picked up some branches from the ground, some of them with dried leaves still on them, and made a small pile right on top of the grill rack. She lit them with her lighter and then disappeared into the brush. I watched Linda’s face, looking for signs of shame—desperately hoping that my mother would not come out of the trees, as she had once before on a similar forage for burnables, with someone else’s used toilet paper in her hand—but Linda was a stone. At one point we could see some branches moving violently and heard some cracking. Again, Linda condemned her. She looked at the trees with her hands on her fat hips and shook her head, “Oh Tess, what the hell are you doing?” she asked nobody in particular. But even though I knew exactly what she was doing, I stayed quiet.
As the small sticks burned, they dropped as cinders through th
e grill and onto the ash pile left from someone else’s charcoal briquettes. In less than ten minutes, there was a neat pile of them, red and glowing. My mother appeared out of the bushes just in time with some larger sticks, plus a few long, thin branches. She added the sticks to the fire and handed me the branches. I turned to Lisa with one of them and asked her if she was having a hot dog. She proudly reported that she was most certainly not and would be having half the grinder that her mother had bought for them at the store. Then my mother ripped open the bag of hot dogs with her teeth and grabbed one of them, stabbing it with the tip of my branch as though it needed to be made lifeless. She had broken off a branch in a way that left a piece of the bark trailing off at one end, which makes a nice sharp point for stabbing hot dogs. I knew the importance of taking branches off trees to cook your food with, because the wood is green and will not easily burn when you hold it in the fire, but this was a new opportunity for Linda, whose tone made it clear that she was beginning to lose a little steam now, to mock her. “You should have used a dry, dead branch, Tess, this place is a state park, you know, not your backyard.” But by now we—Tess and I—were cooking our hot dogs, which required so much of our attention that we did not have time to hear her.
When mine looked done enough—I had burned it entirely, I remember—my mother took my stick from my hand and held it about a foot from the tip, where it was still quite hot. She then pulled a thick end piece of bread out of the bag, wrapped it around my charred hot dog, and, using it like an oven mitt, pulled the hot dog off the stick and handed it to me. I put some ketchup on it, too much because the glass bottle was hard to manage, and ate it in four bites. Then I ate my mother’s hot dog, too, which was more expertly cooked, while she sat on the bench next to me, smoking a cigarette and drinking beer from a can. Lisa and Linda sat across from us, eating their sweaty grinder with its soggy bread and stinky old onions, and when they were finished, Lisa and I jumped into the water and left our mothers behind to gossip and bitch and drink their beers. We swam next to each other as she corrected my stroke and complained that my kick was too close to her face, until I was tired of her old onion breath hovering above the water and began to swim completely under the surface, away from her.
We were friends, Lisa and I, in much the same way our mothers were. She commented impatiently and harshly about almost everything I did and said my name as though it carried the same weight that my mother’s did, as though we were beneath her somehow and not as clever. I knew that Lisa was smart, but I knew that I was smart, too. She knew more about boys; she had an older sister who was pregnant that summer and who talked to Lisa as though she were an adult. They would talk about the boys we knew, the ones who were just a little older than we were, calling them men—even Louis Snyder, whom I knew to dig extensive trails and highways in the sand pit behind his house and play with his toy trucks there, even though he was almost fifteen, and who I was sure was not a man at all but still a boy.
I was also sure we were still girls, even if we wouldn’t be for too much longer. Lisa smoked cigarettes in the open and often carried a pack in plain sight, and could expertly blow a perfect series of thick white rings. And I had to admit that Lisa was superior to me in the only ways that counted, in my mind, that summer. She could dive like a bird from the highest, most precarious ledge at Second Hole into the smallest deep pool of water, in a place where I didn’t even dare jump, much less dive, for fear that I would hit the rocks on either side of the pool. I wasn’t even sure I could spot the right landing spot from the ledge, even though the water was so clear that you could see everything under it. And she, unlike me or any other girl or woman in town, could wear a pair of raggedy little cutoff shorts so beautifully that the rest of us felt, in her presence, like scabby little short-haired boys. She walked and stood and jumped as though she knew exactly what she looked like, while I wondered—no, obsessed—during that particular summer whether the eyes of the boys that I swam with saw a child or a woman or anything in between when they looked at me.
There were two ledges that met underwater at Second Hole, forming a tunnel that we would swim through, about four or five feet long. Every summer, we would look forward to diving down at one end and disappearing from the sight of anyone standing on the high rocks above us, and then emerging on the other side, seeming and feeling very brave. This summer when I tried it, I had not fit as easily and had been forced, in a panic, to squeeze my hips through the smallest part of the tunnel, holding my breath. I had come out of the water with scrapes along the tops of my legs, both of them bleeding, and much more profusely because of the cold water. I climbed back onto the rocks and wrapped myself in a towel, still shaken but not wanting anyone, especially Lisa, to see what had happened. That night I cut my jeans into shorts, while I was wearing them, and stood in front of the mirror. I was no Lisa Reynolds, but if I put my weight on one foot and my hand on my hip, I could almost imagine myself trying to buy cigarettes.
Because we learn from our mothers how to treat others, Lisa did not hide her disrespect for my mother from me. Even though she slept at our house whenever she felt like it, and ate our food, which was scarce; even though she sat on my bed one night in tears because she had not seen her mother for days and because of this had missed yet another appointment with the orthodontist. I knew she had already been wearing her braces for a year longer than she should have been. She had, herself, pulled out all the wires because they had become so loose and worn, and now all that remained were the little brackets, one on each tooth. I convinced her to let me pull them all off using the oddly perfect hole in the top of an old car key, just like a can opener, and I never once mentioned that I knew exactly where her mother was, that I had seen her car parked in front of the same bar every day for the last week, that the windshield had that many days’ worth of dust on it, which was how long she had been with the man whose car she had left in, and that she was drinking, without stopping, with him. Lisa and I had this in common, these single mothers whose watchful eyes we had never thought we needed, until they turned away completely and left us terrified and alone.
After I took Lisa’s braces off, we climbed out of my bedroom window onto the roof of the porch below, smoked cigarettes in our nightgowns, and talked about boys. If I had tried that summer to imagine what my future would look like, it would have been as much a mystery to me then as my own reflection in those cutoff shorts. This is what I understand now but could not have seen then: When you grow up in a home where nobody goes to work, where nobody is married, in a place where there are few jobs and few opportunities, you do not stay up late whispering about weddings and college and careers. You live in that moment, or maybe in the next; you do not make decisions that will impact a future that you do not let yourself imagine; you do not make a plan beyond your next pack of cigarettes.
But Lisa wasn’t thinking about the similarities between us back when she saw my mother’s car at Longley Bridge, when she was making every effort to point out the differences. My stop was the next one, and I got off the bus without making a plan to see her later, which I would usually have done. I walked through my front door and scanned the fridge, which smelled sour and hollow, and found a chunk of stale butter and some milk, which we always had because of coffee, and the broccoli that was left over from the garden, which had been mostly left to the fall. In the cupboard, I found a single bouillon cube and I began to make a roux, which would become a soup. The recipe was one that I had learned in Mrs. Grandshaw’s home economics class, where traditional cooking and savvy coupon-cutting were the standard. When Mrs. G. announced that we would all be learning to cook a cream-based soup, I had recognized the ingredient list as manageable, even with our meager food supply, and I had memorized it. My mother came through the screen door with a bang just as I was adding the cut-up broccoli to the soup, dropped her bag on the floor, and put a tiny, speckled rainbow trout on the counter next to me. It was perhaps six inches long. It was dead but not cleaned.
“It�
��s tiny. I should have gone somewhere else; there aren’t any fish left under Longley Bridge,” she announced as she pulled a can of beer from the fridge and opened it. I stared at the fish.
“How do you clean it,” I asked, “when it’s so small?”
She looked at me sideways, taking a drink from the can. “It doesn’t make a difference, Heather, not at all.” Another swig, and then, “You have no idea how to clean a fish, do you?”
She was smiling now, triumphant, really. She put her beer down and pulled a knife from the counter. “A daughter of mine should be able to clean a goddamned fish,” she said loudly and gave me a thorough and disgusting recourse, through which she smoked two cigarettes. At the end of it, I was left with a tiny piece of fillet, which I gave mostly to the cats, and a pile of guts that I tossed onto her flower beds with her blessing. My mother and I had soup, which she complimented me on while finding a moment to roll her eyes over Mrs. Grandshaw. “Teaching you how to be a proper wife, is she?” she said, mockingly. But then she had more soup.
To make cream of broccoli soup, melt 2 tablespoons (30 g) unsalted butter in a large saucepan over low heat. Stir in 2 tablespoons (30 g) all-purpose flour. Add 2 cups (480 ml) milk, ½ cup (120 ml) at a time, stirring continually with a whisk. Add 2 cups (480 ml) vegetable or chicken stock, ½ cup (120 ml) at a time, until combined, then stir in 2 cups (455 g) finely chopped broccoli and a handful of minced fresh parsley. Finish with a pinch each of celery salt and white or cayenne pepper. Serve hot with good bread and beer, preferably an IPA.
HOW TO
make a very warm
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