I said “Dad?” before I remembered where I was. My father had an old pickup so covered in rust that the rear bumper hung off like a broken jaw. When we left, the right headlight was smashed too. Everything he had was broken.
In the living room, there was a spatula wedged into the couch, the smell of butter and onion in the air, potato skins tracked onto the carpet, pans stacked above the lip of the sink. My mother shoved a steaming wooden spoon at me before I could say a word.
I tasted it. “More chives,” I said, hoping.
She nodded gravely.
For a moment, we were in cahoots.
My mother had gone to the best culinary school, won a James Beard, and had “quite a reputation” before she married my father and moved to Cow Hampshire. So when we moved to New York, she got a job faster than you could say vichyssoise. Head chef and creative director of Le Canard Capricieux. Zagat had given it a 27. That year, Gael Greene wrote that my mother had “restored the Croque Monsieur to its long-lost position of dignity.”
She found me a home tutor for the summer, a girl who insisted I call her by her first name, Neon. She smelled like skunk and she never stayed for as long as my mother paid her to. She’d say, “You know all this,” as she whizzed through the textbook pages.
I kept asking where I’d go to school in the fall.
“Sprout,” my mother said, “this is something I need to do.”
I hadn’t asked.
“Every woman should have a career. A life.”
I hadn’t asked.
“Your father made it so impossible.”
I didn’t want her to talk about him again.
“He demeaned my career. You can’t be a chef in New Hampshire. Everybody knows that. He knew that. But he liked New Hampshire. His roots. His roots. Blah-blah-blah. His stupid, trashy roots. It was New Hampshire or nothing. He kept saying I wasn’t trying hard enough.”
She would be just about yelling then. His roots were my grandpa, who lived in a home for the elderly, called everyone Linda, and smelled like scented toilet paper. I’d met him twice and both times my mother’s arms were wound so tightly around me that when I leaned forward to hug him, she came with me. She said he was uneducated, but I didn’t know what that meant.
“Do you think I didn’t try?” she asked but wasn’t really asking. “I tried harder than anyone.”
I nodded like crazy until it felt something like whiplash.
“It’s what I have to do for myself,” she said. “For women everywhere.”
She talked a lot about women.
“Here’s my credit card. I want you to sign yourself up for some ballet classes.”
“I just wanted to know where I’ll be going to school,” I said.
She threw her hands up. I tried to barricade the crying in my chest before it could get to my face.
The September after we moved to New York I started fourth grade at PS 84, where there were bars or chains on everything, a metal detector, and not a tree in sight. The security guard told me I better wear my red raincoat inside out if I didn’t want to be a target for the Crips, who were still active in the neighborhood, for my information. “Crisps?” I asked.
“Oh Jesus,” the guard said, shaking her head, putting her palms together in prayer.
Because I was white and Jewish and the only white and Jewish girl going to public school in our neighborhood, they called me Latke, but not in a nice way. Everyone thought I was a suck-up because I started talking about Federico García Lorca when the teacher asked me to introduce myself. A boy named Jesús yelled from the back, “Does poetry make you horny?” Everyone was in hysterics. It didn’t help that I brought an artisanal-cheese plate for lunch and the époisses stunk up the entire cafeteria.
On the way home from my first day of school, I wore no raincoat even though it was pouring. I treated myself to a ceramic knife at Williams-Sonoma. You could buy two for twenty dollars. They were delicate but they had the sharpest little tips. I’d use them whenever my mother was out too late, didn’t ask about my homework, didn’t kiss me goodbye when I kissed her, didn’t notice when I made her four flavors of ice cream from scratch on her birthday, with everything organic.
Eventually my teacher, Mrs. Weiss, called, concerned, just making sure everything was all right at home. I should have known she would. Twice she’d asked me why there was blood on my spelling tests. It was from my wrists. “Change in altitude,” I’d lied, touching my nose. She was no dummy. She’d looked around for used tissues and asked if we’d lived on a mountain in New Hampshire. “Mmm-hmm,” I lied. “Absolutely.”
Aunt Lou grounded me, sent me to my room. “Why are teachers calling us?” she said, as if I’d revealed some big secret: we were breeding endangered species of birds or keeping hu-man body parts in the freezer. It was her house and she had a point, my mother said, shrugging as she fingered the newest Mario Batali book. “Listen to your aunt. She’s doing us an enormous favor, letting us stay here. The least we can do is not be a bother.”
“It’s my pleasure,” Lou said, but I knew the pleasure was only with regard to my mother.
We never moved out of Aunt Lou’s. Not after my mother got a raise. Not even after she got two. It didn’t take me long to figure out it had nothing to do with money. I wasn’t stupid. My mother loved that Lou waited up for her at night, a couple of glasses and a bottle of red wine resting next to her. It didn’t matter what time my mother got home. Or what time Lou had to be all business in a skirt suit at the legal-secretary job she’d never leave. Lou would drink an entire pot of coffee just to keep herself awake and prepared for anything my mother might want to talk about. The thing was (the thing that nobody cared about so much) was that I was waiting up too. I wasn’t tired. I didn’t need coffee. And I would have made her chocolat chaud just the way she liked, with a hefty pinch of salt.
Things pretty much stayed the same from then on. There were good years and bad years. My mother was warm in flickers and then very cold. All the while, I waited. Hope was lit and hope was extinguished incessantly. On and off. On and off. But my urge was constant. Like a band of moths stuck between the screen and the window but in my chest instead. I wanted the pain. Wanted it. Wanted it. It was the only consistent thing. It helped me breathe and sometimes more than that. Sometimes it gave me breath. And peace and comfort and something to look forward to. Come, it said to me. And I did. I raced. Come here and rest your head.
If someone had cared to search my room, this is what she would have found: painter’s razors in the cuffs of my old jeans, surgical tweezers—two pairs—tucked below the insoles of my old sneakers, lighters under my bed, and matches pretending to be bookmarks in a book that I hadn’t touched in forever. With a flame, I could make leisurely circles around my bellybutton until I just about died.
Now, home from school because of Kanetha Jackson, I heard my mother on the bedroom phone with Aunt Lou.
“You’re so right. I have tried my best. I’ve tried everything. I have to give up and let someone else step in.”
I felt more exhausted than I’d ever felt. I lay down. I thought of myself at boarding school and of all the stalls that wouldn’t lock. I thought of running three miles down a dark, windy road littered with wet leaves, just to get some quiet. Just to rip off my glove and make little cuts with a pocketknife on the tips of my fingers, like scoring dough. Then I thought of my mother, alone with Aunt Lou, who had no idea how to take care of her. I was the one who replaced her spices when they ran low. I took her hair out of the shower drain. I prepared a glass of cucumber water for her at night. It was always empty by morning.
I went into Lou’s room with two cups of steaming tea. My mother was sprawled on Lou’s dramatic bed amid one hundred rows of shiny, overstuffed pillows. Her feet were flexed and her hand was over her eyes as if she were blocking a glare. A sleeping mask was in the crook of her arm, defrosting onto the gold sheet. Wolfgang Puck was on TV, selling pans, aprons, and steak knives. I needed to convi
nce her it was the last time she would have to deal with this. I wouldn’t embarrass her again. But also, I needed to convince her that she couldn’t live without me.
“Please don’t start,” she said before I’d opened my mouth.
“I brought tea,” I said.
She sat up. I gave her the one with the nicer shade of brown. She took it delicately into her hands, as if she were very sick and frail, and sipped. Only I got to see this side of her, undone and vulnerable, slow-moving and weepy, a French lace cookie. In the world, she was something else entirely. She shouted orders at the restaurant. And as she walked outside she took long steps, so deliberate that each time her foot came to the ground, people looked to see if she was signaling something important in the concrete.
But not with me. With me, she was different, softer, looser, which was only one of the many reasons I could never leave her. I needed to protect her secret side. If I couldn’t, it might disappear, and then what? I wouldn’t let that happen. That was my job as her daughter. That is what I told myself.
Now she smiled around the liquid in her mouth and I felt lifted. She could do that: make me feel like I’d lit up a room, if only for a second. Already I’d forgotten about boarding school. Now, remembering, I got a little frantic. I sat on the bed and put my bare feet next to hers so they were touching. I was casual about it, imagining that this was something we did often.
She moved away.
“Don’t make me go,” I said, only realizing once I’d said it that there was no way not to sound desperate.
“You’re a danger to yourself and to others,” she said, waving off an imaginary fly.
“I’m not—” I began, but stopped. I was better off quiet. If I’d learned anything in my entire life, it was that.
“You should see how they look at me,” she said. “All those administrators with their ironed pants.” She brought the mug to her face and inhaled. I waited for her to say something about the tea so I could run with it. I knew a lot about Earl Grey—she just needed to get me started.
“I had to give them comps to the restaurant,” she said.
She shook her head. I dropped mine. I gathered my feet beneath me and made myself into the tiniest ball I could, wanting to intrude less on her space but not desert her. She didn’t like to be alone. Sometimes, even when I’d made her mad, she’d ask me to sit by her—and then she’d pretend I wasn’t there. A half punishment, really.
“Can’t I just see the school psychologist again?” I asked. I’d done it before, but it turned my mother into a nervous wreck. She kept wanting to know what the lady asked me, what I told her, what she said in response. I knew there was a secret I’d better be keeping; I just wasn’t sure what it was. So I told the lady next to nothing. “It was just a phase,” she’d said in the end, signing a paper for me to give to my teacher. “And I do think you’re so much better.”
“Just a phase!” I’d exclaimed in agreement.
“Lorca, Lorca, Lorca,” my mother said now. “If that worked, would we really be here again? You’re in eighth grade. This is not a joke.”
I had been so careful. I’d gotten away with it so many other times. Hundreds of times. Gajillions, it felt like.
“Yes,” I said, pretending it was nothing at all. “Sure.”
My mother ignored me as she looked for the remote. She turned up the volume on the TV until she wouldn’t have been able to hear me even if I’d shouted. She watched intently with her back curled, the tea hovering at her mouth. Aunt Lou’s room reeked of artificial vanilla.
“I’m sorry,” I said into the enormous TV noise.
“I’m sorry,” I said louder.
“Mom!” I said, but still nothing.
“I’m so sorry!” I yelled. “Don’t make me go.”
She must have heard me then, but she did nothing about it. And I didn’t dare touch her, not wanting to scare her. Then she lowered the sound.
She lay down. I did too, but her face didn’t get weird and melted like mine. Her internal structure was made of something stronger, something that made her beautiful even in the mornings, in unbearable heat and cold, when she was upside down.
“I could live with Dad,” I said.
She made a noise like she’d been punched in the chest.
“Right,” she said. “Because he’s so effective. He’d let you kill yourself, for chrissakes, while he was outside whittling a goddamn tree into a stupid giraffe.”
It was just a suggestion. I knew she was going to say no.
“Why is everything so hard for me?” she said and turned her head away.
The truth was, my mother was a magician. She could make herself disappear. If I had any hope of staying with her, I had to find a reason for her to come back.
There was one thing that made my mother truly happy: food. In New Hampshire, to save money, she turned off the heat and kept on the oven while she made four varieties of roasted beet soup. She wore pomegranate perfume. At the supermarket, she was like an ant building a hill. At night, she slept with yogurt and honey smeared on her face.
Food was my mother’s life. Sometimes, I wondered if she’d married my father because of his last name: Seltzer. Her maiden name wasn’t really her own. She was adopted. So she took a last name that represented the only part of herself that felt true: food. And seltzer was her secret to delicate crepes, the perfect French onion tart, and fried chicken that actually glittered.
If I were normal I would have:
called Principal Hidalgo;
begged to be forgiven;
promised to see the school psychologist twice a week (and promised my mother I would not say anything incriminating about my home life);
written a note to Kanetha Jackson that looked identical to a sincere apology for having scared her;
composed a speech explaining that kids went through phases, tried things, stupid things, and after screwing up and learning valuable lessons, they returned to normal—like I would—and then recited that speech to my mother and Aunt Lou.
Instead, I went to bed early. I was hopeless. Earlier that evening, I’d made a wild mushroom quiche, just to see if it could prove to my mother that I was worth keeping around. I made the crust from scratch. When she removed a woody thyme stem from her teeth, she didn’t even say anything. She didn’t have to.
Because of a gnarly herb, I was still going to boarding school.
I tossed and turned. My mother and Lou were watching television in the living room, but not really watching, and they didn’t turn it down.
Aunt Lou said, “Nance, these things happen for a reason.”
And I heard my mother say, “What reason?”
Aunt Lou liked that phrase. She said it a lot. When she was angry—like if she lost her MetroCard or dyed her hair and it didn’t come out right—she closed her eyes and took a deep yoga breath. She called it that. She’d taken one class twenty years ago, but she acted like it had changed her life.
“Everything happens for a reason,” she always said with her back very straight, her thumbs and forefingers curled into Os. “Everything happens for a reason.”
And then, because I’d been practicing listening for years and years and years, I could hear Aunt Lou whisper, “Shhh.” I could hear the sweep of her hand running up and down my mother’s back. My own back began to itch. I tried to do the same sweep for myself but it was physically impossible.
I looked at the cut on my thigh, and the guilt made me sick. I flipped onto my stomach and shoved my face into the pillow.
When Aunt Lou had nothing to say to my mother, she played a game that she’d learned from me.
“If you could eat only one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?” she asked now.
“Country bread, buttered, with heaps of black truffles.”
“If you were on a deserted island, what item could you not live without?”
“A paring knife.”
“If you could have lunch with anyone, who would it be
?”
“Julia Child’s husband, because she obviously didn’t drive him nuts,” my mother said.
“What is the best thing you’ve ever eaten?”
Poulet rôti. I was sure that my mother was going to say the poulet rôti from L’Ami Louis in Paris because she’d sat next to Jacques Chirac there and he’d said that since she was a chef, perhaps she would cook something for him. And so she did. She went right back into the kitchen and whipped up something fabulous. After that, they used goose as well as duck fat when frying their potatoes, because it had been her way.
I mouthed Poulet rôti into the pillow. But my mother was quiet. She could have made conversation, little noises while she was thinking. But she didn’t. Lou didn’t care.
“Masgouf,” she said. “From an Iraqi restaurant that’s closed now.”
I sat up. I opened my mouth. I almost yelled, What? But she was still talking.
“I went there with her dad years and years ago.” I imagined her jerking her thumb in the direction of my room. “The company was like watching paint dry, but the food was fantastic. Out of this world.”
“And?” Lou said.
“And,” my mother said, “I went back a couple of years ago, just to see, and it was closed up. Totally empty and sad. One silver tray sat in the middle of the place, I remember. Broke my heart to pieces.”
“Masgouf?” Lou said.
I was already out of bed, sockless and by the bookshelf, zipping through the index of The Joy of Cooking, then Cook Everything, then, finally, Recipes from All Over. I found it. “‘Traditional Iraqi fish dish, grilled with tamarind and/or lemon, salt, and pepper,’” I whispered, shocked.
“It was heaven,” my mother said. “Literally heaven. I’ve tried to replicate it, I can’t tell you how many times.”
For a second, I saw spots. I would have bet my life on it—on the poulet rôti.
Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots Page 2