We— my new boyfriend, Ernie; my mother; my father; my sister; and I (but not my grandmother, who lurks in the kitchen)— are seated around our dark mahogany dining room table. It is beautifully set, with a hand-crocheted white tablecloth (my grandmother's); silver-plate (not silver; we don't own any); good glassware (not crystal); and Mikasa china (bought at an outlet store in South Jersey, the object of a day-long excursion I refused to join).
The china is white, with a fluted edge, decorated with forget-me-nots. My mother is proud of it. She never puts the pieces in the dishwasher, never permits anyone else to wash it, certainly never allows me to wash it. She suspects that I would drop a piece because I'm careless or simply to spite her, to destroy something she loves.
I disdain my mother's china, having, during college, acquired a taste for Danish modern stoneware (Danish modern everything), which I imagine I will buy when I set up house. (Because of my disdain, my father gives the Mikasa china to my son Jason the year after her death, knowing how much he loves the china, knowing how much he has loved my mother. I have come to love the china, not because it's beautiful, but because it was my mother's, and because, in the years since her death, I have learned to love her.)
I remember the day as warm. All my recollections of my mother's good meals include this warmth, which is, perhaps, my happiness at being well fed, and not the temperature outside or of the room.
On this day, as my mother brought the dishes to the table, she was smiling. As usual, she didn't want any help from me; she chased me out of the kitchen though I wanted to help (I wanted to impress Ernie). Now I wish that my mother and I had cooked this meal together so that we could have shared time in the kitchen, which we never did— a source of grief now; so that I could have this memory of us cooking together on the occasion when my parents entertained for the first time the young man who would become my husband.
This was the first time my mother had suggested I bring someone— let alone a boyfriend— home for dinner.
"Why don't you call Ernie and invite him for dinner?" my mother asks. The night before, I had come home from a date later than I was supposed to, and very disheveled. And, though my mother had waited up for me, she didn't scold me, didn't say a word.
She wasn't the kind of mother who encouraged my friends to come to our house, to stay for dinner if they happened to be there at suppetime. She'd look at the clock, look at my friend, say, "Don't you think it's time to go home?"
I worried that, on the day of the dinner, my mother wouldn't be up to cooking, and that I would have to call the whole thing off. Or that something awful would happen at dinner— my mother would say something to show my new boyfriend I wasn't as nice as I seemed; she would insist that my grandmother sit at the table and the two of them would start arguing.
She was coquettish, my mother was, as she brought the meal to the table. Smiling at my new boyfriend, carrying a platter aloft as if it were a holy relic. This was an attitude I had never witnessed in her, this charm, this ebullience, this buoyancy of spirit. And it was because of this handsome Italian-American young man. He was going to be a doctor, after all, and this was important to her. She called it "having good prospects."
For the previous two years, since I'd been in college, I had been exasperating my mother by dating boys she considered unsuitable. (They were; but I didn't want to hear that from my mother.) An aspiring actor (uncertain future; unreliable; saw me several days in a row, then nothing). The son of a famous and controversial scientist (not good, to be in the public eye, and probably his father had ignored him). A gorgeous blond charmer ("Beware of charming men," she said, "they always lack substance; people of character don't have to be charming"). And there was Roy, always Roy, my mad passion from high school, who appeared and disappeared and reappeared, and I was miserable with him, and miserable without him. (Roy, I never took home; Roy, my mother knew nothing about).
I would come home from dates with one or another of these boyfriends, reeking of alcohol and sex. My mother was sure that, before I graduated college, I would ruin my life forever. I would have to get married, have an abortion, give up a child for adoption. But there was nothing my mother could do to control me; nothing I could do to control myself. I knew that I wouldn't be happy with any of them. But I wanted to get married. Wanted to leave my house. And so I persuaded myself that I loved each of them, that marriage to any one of them would solve my problems.
I was sulky, sullen, distant, often drunk, always writing. Writing poems about these boys. About love and loss. About love and pain. Writing poems about good sex and awful sex. And poems about sex and food, the only poems I wrote that were cheerful.
My poetry, I am sure my mother read, because she always searched my belongings. But I didn't care what she learned about me. She couldn't be any more condemning of me than she already was. And besides, whatever she found would pay her back for her violation of my privacy by torturing her.
This one, I'm sure she found. Because, when I suggested we buy cannolis for dessert for that dinner because I knew that Ernie loved them, and because it would save her time, she said, "No, absolutely not; there will be no cannolis."
In Search of the Ultimate Cannoli Experience
For those of you out there in poetry land
who don't know what a cannoli is
lend an ear for a minute or two
while I describe to you this incredible tasty delight
Brought to you by the same folks
who brought you the meatball
and the pizza pie.
(Better still, take yourself
to anyplace you can find that sells the little buggers
and buy yourself two — one won't do).
Picture
a tube, an edible brown tube,
crispy from having been wrapped around
a metal thing
(that in its off hours could serve as the support system for a limp dick)
and deep fried with sweet cream inside
oozing from an orifice on either side
and the way you eat the little bugger is to hold it
gently in the middle
and put it into your mouth, any other technique simply won't do—
it breaks in the presence of too strong a touch
spewing forth its insides
before the mouth can take the inside and the outside inside itself—
the ultimate cannoli experience.
It is fellatio, practiced publicly,
perfectly acceptable,
taught to thousands of little Italian girls
in little Italy, in Hoboken, and even in Ridgefield, New Jersey.
Is it any wonder that all grown up
we are
such incredible fucks?
Then Ernie came along.
The meal.
A platter of lobster tails, expertly broiled, a tinge of paprika on the white, burnished flesh: paprika, my mother declared when my future husband complimented her on their splendid appearance, assisted the browning. (How did she know?)
A platter of double-baked potatoes, a time-consuming effort, involving baking the potatoes, allowing them to cool, scooping out the flesh, mixing it with salt, pepper, cream, eggs, and freshly grated Parmesan cheese, then stuffing this mixture into the potato shells, decorating the tops with the tines of a fork, then baking them until a crunchy crust formed on the outside. (As opposed to the instant mashed potatoes, lumpy, that my mother usually made for supper, and proclaimed were better than homemade.)
A bowl of Le Sueur tender tiny peas. (A premium brand that my mother never bought before.) With tiny onions, fresh ones, because she thought the canned ones were inadequate (a new development). As she blanched them, popped off their skins, I ventured into the kitchen. "Leave me alone; I'm in control here," my mother said. This was something new. My mother had never been in control before.
For dessert, Indian pudding with vanilla ice cream, a premium brand. Somehow my mother has learn
ed it's Ernie's favorite dessert and she's made it to please him. He thanks her; she smiles. A girlish, happy smile.
I want to learn how to cook well, though I know that, despite this meal, I will not learn from my mother.
And I do start to cook, and in my mother's kitchen, but not with my mother. With Ernie. Neither of us has cooked before, but we're eager to try.
We decide to throw a dinner party for two of our friends. We ask to use my mother's kitchen and our family's dining room. To my surprise, my mother agrees. (She really wants me to marry this guy, I think.)
Ernie and I develop our menu from a paperback international cookbook that I buy. I persuade Ernie to make boeuf en daube, a dish mentioned in Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse, which I have read in college. We will also make my mother's double-baked potatoes and tiny peas with onions.
Ernie's mother is no cook, he's said. She serves the same menu every week— veal parmesan on Monday; meat loaf on Tuesday; sausage and peppers on Wednesday; spaghetti with red sauce on Thursday; fried fish on Friday; pot roast on Saturday; roast beef on Sunday. Every night, there is a salad of iceberg lettuce with oil and vinegar. Every night there is cherry Jell-O for dessert.
I tell Ernie the meal my mother made for him isn't what she usually cooks. I am one of those girls who just love the food at college, which tells you all you need to know about my mother's cooking— the homemade breakfast buns (coconut, walnut, both glazed); the lunchtime sloppy Joes; the dinnertime fried fish, served with lemon wedges and tartar sauce.
We are both eager to emigrate from our mothers' kitchens, to enter the world of good food. We vow that when we get married (though we haven't yet said "to each other"), we will eat magnificent food every night.
Poring over our little cookbook, shopping for food, we find, is more fun than most of our other excursions— to the Hudson Valley to see the leaves turn in autumn, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to the Modern. Reading recipes excites us. Sexually. And throughout our marriage the best sex we have is the sex we have after we've cruised our way through three or four cookbooks, reading aloud recipes that capture our imagination, that we'll soon try. Rustic freeform fruit tarts; blackberry crumble; Milanese-style scaloppini with peppery greens; baked penne with wild mushroom ragu and ricotta salata; coriander-crusted scallops in fennel broth. Food as foreplay.
Ernie is a superb, efficient shopper. He memorizes our list, decides to purchase an item without equivocation, isn't sidetracked, can shop for a meal (or, when we marry, for a week's food) quickly.
I am all indecision—" Should we choose this package of meat or that?" I get distracted by something I see that isn't on our list, a lovely plump chicken—" Maybe we should make coq au vin instead."
A few minutes into our first shopping trip, Ernie develops a strategy for dealing with me in food stores. (It's one of the reasons my emerging love for him deepens.) He suggests we shop separately and meet near the checkout counter when we're finished. He suggests I buy whatever I want. He tells me not to worry, he'll take care of what's on the list.
When I meet Ernie, my little basket contains
one can of green peppercorns, because I like the decoration on the can (they are not in our recipe, but never mind)
one bunch of parsley (I have examined each of the score of bunches in the store to find the best)
a few parsnips (they intrigue me; I've never tasted them)
Major Grey's chutney (I want to try a curry)
My progress has been slow because I am excited by what I see. I imagine all the wonderful things I can cook as soon as I have my own kitchen if I take up cooking in a serious way.
By the time we meet, Ernie has selected everything we need. He looks at what I've chosen, tells me to put back his parsley while he checks out— mine's better— and takes the little can of green peppercorns and the parsnips and the chutney without comment, putting them together with his selections. (The parsnips will rot in the vegetable bin of my mother's refrigerator, but the little can of green peppercorns and the chutney come with me to the apartment Ernie and I move into after our marriage. I use the peppercorns in a lovely sauteed steak with a green peppercorn cream sauce I make soon after we marry. The chutney, to accompany a chicken curry with onions and apples.)
My mother abandons her kitchen for the day of our dinner, and she bullies my grandmother into doing the same. She sets the table for us, then retreats to the TV room. (She really wants me to marry this guy.)
For two people who have never wielded a knife, skinned a garlic clove, or peeled or chopped an onion, the amount of preparation for one meal seems prodigious. But we proceed. Step by step. Magnificently. With one— major— glitch.
Our boeuf en daube calls for wine, a lot of wine. Which my father gives us from his supply because we're still too young to buy our own.
We pour the wine into the deep pot that has our beef, onions, carrots, and garlic, all nicely browned and glistening. Stand over it, looking at the magnificence we are creating, smiling with the glory of it all.
But we are novices; we don't know that wine throws off alcohol as it simmers. If you stand with your head over a pot of boeuf en daube, inhaling, for a while, you are going to get drunk. Shitfaced, in fact.
When our company arrives, we're staggering, in no shape to serve them. My mother, uncharacteristically, thinks this is funny. (She must really want me to marry this guy.) And makes excuses for us. My grandmother laughs. " 'Mbriaghi," she says.
My mother takes over, serves our meal. Through the haze of alcohol, we see how much our guests are enjoying the food. We know that what we have created is magnificent.
We make it through the meal. Through dessert— cannoli, which we've bought at the Italian pastry shop. We're not yet up to scaling the dessert mountain of food preparation. Neither of us takes a bite.
We see our guests to the door, wave them away, rush to the bathroom, and vomit ourselves into oblivion.
Nonetheless, we are thrilled. We believe that we have joined a secret society of food lovers, and the pleasure we take in making food and eating it, sees us through many difficult times in our marriage.
For years, when I thought about the first time I ate lobster, the night my mother cooked for Ernie for the first time, I always became angry. I thought it was because what she cooked for him was better than anything she ever cooked for me. Which meant she knew what good food was. Which meant she could have cooked a good meal for me if she chose. Which meant that her not cooking a good meal for me was deliberate.
Now I see that I became angry because my mother was happy. I did not know my mother in this new manifestation. I had seen evidence of happiness, in photographs of her smiling, something she rarely did. But she only smiled in photos of her with other women (the women she called her girlfriends). Never in photos of her with my father, or with me, or my sister.
There they are, big-breasted women in bathing suits with little pleated skirts over sumptuous thighs, ranked together after what must have been an exhilarating plunge into a turbulent sea. (My mother, swimming? Facing danger?) Well-dressed women in tweed suits, stockings, pumps, long hair gathered into snoods, ranked together for the annual Kresge company portrait. (My mother, working, talking with customers, selling shoes?) Glassy-eyed women leaning into each other at parties while their husbands were away at war. (My mother tipsy, enjoying herself, telling jokes?)
With this young man seated across from her at the table (she had made sure of that), she seemed happier than I had ever seen her. That sinkhole of sorrow I knew had disappeared for this young man. My young man.
He had a wonderful, engaging smile. An I'm so glad to see you! kind of smile. An Aren't we going to have fun together? kind of smile. A Seeing you just made my day kind of smile. And so it was easy to smile back.
All that smiling had attracted me when we met while I was in college. But we had known each other since high school.
We despised each other. He rode a motorcycle (purple, with rusting wir
e wheels), wore a black leather jacket, hung out with hoods even though he wanted to become a doctor. He played the Italian American thug, which masqueraded his success in school, his quick and inquiring mind, his sweetness, his love of his mother— all liabilities where we came from.
He thought I was stuck up and collegiate, even though I had a bad reputation, spent most of my free time getting drunk at parties and sleeping with a boy I wasn't dating, who had a "real" girlfriend. And I was nasty. Whenever I saw him, I insulted him. He insulted me. Our banter was filled with mutual scorn and sexual innuendo.
We reconnect over a game of bridge at a mutual friend's, in the summer of my sophomore year in college. I'm surprised— and none too happy— to find him there. But since I've last seen him, he's turned (surprise, surprise) into someone nice, cute, smart, and funny, and he plays a mean game of bridge, finessing the ass off my partner. He's attracted to me (he tells me later) because of my wise-ass comments through the game (not, now, directed at him), my brains, my independence.
I wonder what's happened to the thug I used to hate. He wonders what's happened to the brat who used to give him such a hard time.
Later that evening, he comes to my house. We sit outside in his car and talk and listen to music. My grandmother shines a flashlight out the window at us, which is what she always does when I sit in a car, outside my house, with a boy. But he's not annoyed like my other boyfriends. He thinks it's funny. He knows the strange ways of Italian grandparents.
For the first month, we talk— about philosophy, existentialism, Sartre, Camus, psychology, religion. There is no sex.
We eat a lot of pizza (plain, extra cheese, well done) at Sano's Pizza Parlor. It sits on a plateau overlooking the Hackensack River Valley. And because we are besotted with each other, the sun setting over the industrialized wasteland built in the once pristine wilderness of the Meadowlands seems beautiful to us.
We talk about our future, our aspirations, our dreams. He's going to be a doctor. I'm going to be a high school teacher. Maybe teach college someday, write books. We both want to have children, travel, eat wonderful food. We believe our lives will intertwine.
Crazy in the Kitchen Page 19