by Ruth Reichl
Just thinking about it made me nervous. “I’ve got to stop this party,” I said.
“How?” asked Jeanie.
I didn’t know. I had four months to figure it out.
My best hope was that my mother’s mood would change before the party took place. That was not unrealistic; my mother’s moods were erratic. But March turned into April and April into May and Mom was still buzzing around. The phone rang constantly and she was feeling great. She cut her gray hair very short and actually started wearing nail polish. She lost weight and bought a whole new wardrobe. Then she and Dad took a quick cruise to the Caribbean.
“We booked passage on a United Fruit freighter,” she said to her friends, “so much more interesting than a conventional cruise.” When asked about the revolutions that were then rocking the islands she had a standard response: “The bomb in the hotel lobby in Haiti made the trip much more interesting.”
When they returned she threw herself into planning the party. I got up every morning and looked hopefully into the refrigerator. Things kept getting worse. Half a baby goat appeared. Next there was cactus fruit. But the morning I found the box of chocolate-covered grasshoppers I decided it was time to talk to Dad.
“The plans are getting more elaborate,” I said ominously.
“Yes?” said Dad politely. Parties didn’t much interest him.
“It’s going to be a disaster,” I announced.
“Your mother gives wonderful parties,” my father said loyally. He was remarkably blind to my mother’s failings, regularly announcing to the world that she was a great cook. I think he actually believed it. He beamed when someone mentioned my mother’s “interesting dishes” and considered it a compliment when they said, “I’ve never tasted anything quite like that before.” And, of course, he never got sick.
“Did you know that she’s planning it as a benefit for Unicef?” I asked.
“Really?” he said. “Isn’t that nice.” He had turned back to the editorials.
“Dad!” I said, trying to get him to see how embarrassing this could be. “She’s sending notices to the newspapers. She’s inviting an awful lot of people. This thing is getting out of control. It’s only a month away and she has nothing planned.”
“It’ll all work out,” Dad said vaguely, folding the newspaper into his briefcase. “Your mother is a very smart woman. She has a PhD.” And then, as if there was no more to be said, he added, “I’m sure you’ll be a big help.”
It was hard to get mad at my father, who was as baffled by my mother’s moods as I was, and just as helpless before them. They were like the weather: unpredictable, unavoidable, and often unpleasant. Dad, I think, enjoyed her energy, but then, he could always go to the office when he needed to escape. Which is what he did now. Disgusted, I called my brother.
Bob lived uptown in a fancy apartment and had as little to do with my parents as he could decently get away with.
“She’s planning to make my engagement party a benefit?” he asked. “You mean she expects Shelly’s family to pay to attend?” I hadn’t quite considered that aspect, but I could see his point.
“I guess so,” I said. “But that’s not the part that worries me. Can you imagine Mom cooking for over a hundred people in the middle of summer? What if it’s a really hot day?”
Bob groaned.
“Can’t you get called away on business?” I asked. “What if you had a conference you had to go to? Wouldn’t she have to call the whole thing off?”
Unfortunately my mother was not the least bit fazed when informed that my brother might not be in town. “The party’s not for you,” she said to Bob, “it’s for Shelly’s family. They’ll come even if you’re too rude not to make an appearance.”
“But Mom,” said Bob, “you can’t ask them to buy tickets to the party.”
“Why not?” asked Mom. “I think it’s just disgusting the way people who have so much forget about those who are less fortunate. How could you possibly object to raising money for underprivileged children in honor of your marriage? I can’t believe I have such a selfish, thoughtless son!” And Mom slammed down the phone.
She always managed to do that, always turned your arguments against you. And so there we were, 150 people invited to lunch on the lawn, a representative from Unicef and photographers promised from all the newspapers. In one of her more grandiose moments Mom wrote her old friend Bertrand Russell in Wales and asked him to come speak; fortunately he was nearing his ninetieth birthday and declined. But he did send a hundred copies of his most recent antiwar booklet, a sort of fairy tale printed on gold paper. It was called History of the World in Epitome (for use in Martian infant schools) and it was very short. The last page was a picture of a mushroom cloud.
“These will make wonderful favors!” said Mom smugly, pointing out that they were autographed. She was so pleased she sent out a few more invitations.
“What are you going to serve?” I asked.
“Do you have any ideas?” she replied.
“Yes,” I said, “hire a caterer.”
Mom laughed as if I had made a joke. But she was moved to call and rent some tables and folding chairs, so at least the guests wouldn’t be sitting on the ground. I suggested that she hire someone to help cook and serve, but she didn’t seem to think that was necessary. “We can do that ourselves,” she said blithely. “Can’t you get your friends to help?”
“No,” I said, “I can’t.” But I did call Jeanie in the city and ask her to ask her parents if she could come out for the week; she thought my mother was “exciting” and I needed moral support.
As the party approached, things got worse and worse. Mom went on cleaning binges that left the house messier when she was done than when she started, and Jeanie and I went around behind her desperately stuffing things back into closets to create some semblance of order. Mom mowed half the lawn; we mowed the other half. Meanwhile my father, looking apologetic and unhappy, conveniently came up with a big project that kept him in the city.
One morning Mom went to a wholesale food company and came back honking her horn loudly, her car filled to the brim. Jeanie and I rushed out to unload fifty pounds of frozen chicken legs, ten pounds of frozen lump crabmeat, industrial-size cans of tomato and split-pea soup, twenty-five-pound sacks of rice, and two cases of canned, spiced peaches.
“This must be the menu,” I said to Jeanie.
“What?” she asked.
“I bet she’s going to make that awful quick soup she thinks is so great. You know, it’s in all the magazines. You mix a can of tomato soup with a can of split pea soup, add a little sherry, and top it with crabmeat.”
“Yuck,” said Jeanie.
“Then I guess she’s going to cook those millions of chicken legs on top of rice, although how she thinks she’s going to cook them all in our little oven I don’t know. And the canned spiced peaches can be the vegetable; they’re easy because all you have to do is open the can and put them on the plates.”
I was surprised (and relieved) when she ordered a giant cake from the local bakery. That left only the hors d’oeuvres; I wondered what she had up her sleeve.
The next day I found out. Jeanie and I were playing croquet, but we put down our mallets when Mom’s horn started, and watched the car speed through the trees, leaving billows of dust in its wake. We ran out to see what she had dragged home.
“Horn & Hardart was having a sale!” Mom announced triumphantly, pointing to the boxes around her. They were filled with hundreds of small cartons. It looked promising. “It’s almost like getting it catered,” I said happily to Jeanie as we toted the boxes inside.
My happiness was short-lived; when I began opening the cartons I found that each contained something different.
“The Automat sells leftovers for almost nothing at the end of the day,” said Mom, “so I just took everything they had.” She was very pleased with herself.
“What are you going to do with it?” I asked.
; “Why, serve it,” she said.
“In what?” I asked.
“Big bowls,” she said.
“But you don’t have anything to put in big bowls,” I pointed out. “All you have is hundreds of things to put in little bowls. Look,” I began ripping the tops off the cartons, “this one is potato salad. This one is coleslaw. This one is cold macaroni and cheese. Here’s a beet salad. Here’s some sliced ham. Nothing matches!”
“Don’t worry,” said Mom, “I’m sure we can make something out of all of this. After all, everything in it is good.”
“Yes,” I muttered to Jeanie, “and by the time it gets served everything in it will be four days old. It will be a miracle if it’s not moldy.”
“I think it would be better if it was,” said practical Jeanie. “If people see mold they won’t eat it.”
“Pray for rain,” I said.
Unfortunately, when I woke up on the day of the party there was not a cloud in the sky. I pulled the covers over my head and went back to sleep. But not for long. “Nobody sleeps today,” Mom announced, inexorably pulling back the covers. “It’s party day!”
Some of the food had acquired a thin veneer of mold, but Mom blithely scraped it off and began mixing her terrible Horn & Hardart mush. “It’s delicious!” she cried, holding out a spoonful. It wasn’t. Fortunately it looked even worse than it tasted.
I thought the chicken legs were a little dubious too; in order to get them all cooked we had started two days earlier, and the refrigerator couldn’t hold them all. But they glistened invitingly, and the oven-baked rice looked fine. We spooned the peaches into Mom’s big glass bowls, and they looked beautiful.
I wasn’t very happy about the soup. Mom had left the crabmeat out of the freezer to defrost for two days, and even she didn’t like the way it was smelling. “I think I’ll just add a little more sherry,” she kept saying as she poured in bottles of the stuff.
“People will get drunk on the soup,” I said.
“Fine,” she said gaily, “then maybe they’ll donate more to Unicef.”
My brother arrived, took one look at the rickety chairs on our uneven lawn, and headed straight for the bar. Mom had hired some local high school boys to be bartenders, and they were pouring whiskey as if it were Coke.
“You’ve got to stay sober,” I said to him. “You’ve got to make sure that nobody in Shelly’s family eats the soup. And they should probably watch out for the chicken too.”
Bob had another drink.
My memories of the party are mercifully blurred, but a yellowed clipping from the Norwalk Hour tells part of the story. My mother looks radiantly into the camera beneath a headline reading WILTON FAMILY HOSTS BENEFIT FOR UNICEF.
A family photograph of me handing a check to a grinning official in front of a sign that says SECURITY COUNCIL in both French and English tells another part of the tale.
But my brother owns the end of the story. Thirty-five years later his children can still make him turn green by asking, “Remember the time Nana Mimi poisoned everyone?”
“Ooh,” he moans, “don’t remind me. It was awful. First she extorted money from them. Then she gave out those antibomb favors; it was the early sixties, for Christ sake, and these were conservative businessmen and housewives. But the worse thing was the phone calls. They kept coming all night long. Nobody felt good. Twenty-six of them actually ended up in the hospital having their stomachs pumped. What a way to meet the family!”
I missed all that, but I do remember the phone ringing while we were still cleaning up. Mom was still exulting in the photographer’s flashbulbs, and saying for what seemed like the forty-seventh time, “Look how much money we raised!” She picked up the receiver.
“Yes?” said Mom brightly. I think she expected it to be another reporter. Then her voice drooped with disappointment.
“Who doesn’t feel well?”
There was a long silence. Mom ran her hand through her chic, short coiffure. “Really?” she said, sounding shocked. “All of them?” She slumped a little as her bright red fingernails went from her hair to her mouth. Then her back straightened and her head shot up.
“Nonsense,” I heard her say into the phone. “We all feel fine. And we ate everything.”
GRANDMOTHERS
I had three grandmothers and none of them could cook.
My mother’s mother didn’t cook because she had better things to do. She was, as Mom proudly told everyone she happened to meet, an impresario.
My father’s mother didn’t cook because she was, until Hitler intervened, a very rich woman.
And Aunt Birdie didn’t cook because she had Alice.
Aunt Birdie wasn’t really related to me; she was my father’s first wife’s mother. But she desperately wanted to be a grandmother, so when I was born she went to the hospital, introduced herself to my mother, and applied for the job. She was well past eighty, and this looked like her last chance.
Mom was happy to take any help she could get, and Aunt Birdie threw herself into the job. About once a week I would come out of school to find her waiting on the sidewalk. My friends instantly surrounded her, enchanted by standing next to a grown-up who was just their size. At four foot eight, Aunt Birdie was the smallest grown-up any of us had ever seen and when she said, “Let’s go to Schrafft’s!” there was a general moan. Everybody envied me.
We always ordered the same thing. Then we ate our chocolate-marshmallow sundaes slowly, watching the women ascend the restaurant’s wide, dramatic stairway and commenting on their clothes, their hair, the way they walked. Aunt Birdie always acted as if I were the world’s most fascinating person. I wondered if she had been this way with her daughter, the one my father had once been married to, but each time I said the word “Hortense” she pretended not to hear me. Everybody did.
Afterward, Aunt Birdie always took me back to her house. After the long bus ride I’d run into the kitchen, throw my arms around Alice, and beg her to let me roll the dough for the apple dumplings she made every time I slept over. “Well now,” she always said in the soft Barbados accent she had retained after sixty years in America, patting me with her floury hands. She was a handsome old woman with brown skin, short black hair, and a deeply wrinkled face. She smelled like starch, lemons, and if she was baking, cinnamon as well.
I loved helping her, loved feeling the fresh buttery pastry beneath my hands, loved the clean way the core came out of the apples. I loved carefully wrapping each apple in a square of pastry and pinching the top shut, just so. We’d arrange the dumplings on a baking sheet, Alice would put them in the oven, and we’d both go into the living room to watch The Perry Como Show. This was a big thrill too; my parents didn’t own a television.
Alice always left as soon as the show was over. Then Aunt Birdie and I ate whatever she had left simmering on the stove for supper.
On Saturday mornings we ate the remaining apple dumplings. We brushed our teeth. We made our beds. And then we went into the kitchen to make potato salad for my father. It was the only thing Aunt Birdie ever cooked. “Alice is the cook in our family,” she said.
My mother would have pointed out that Alice was not really in Aunt Birdie’s family. She did not consider herself a particularly prejudiced person and she often pointed out that she and Dad were married by a black minister. “He was the husband of Dorothy Maynor, the singer,” she’d go on, bragging about the beautiful music. But I had noticed that, with the exception of celebrities, Mom’s world was entirely white and that she referred to whichever brown-skinned women happened to be cleaning our house as “the girl.” Dad was different: he was totally without prejudice, a fact he attributed to having been brought up in Germany. He understood Alice’s position perfectly.
And so each time Aunt Birdie handed him the jar of potato salad he would fold his tall frame until he could reach her cheek, kiss it, and say gently, “Alice is a fabulous cook. But you make the world’s best potato salad.”
AUNT BIRDIE’S
> POTATO SALAD
3 pounds small potatoes
Salt and pepper to taste
1 tablespoon sugar
2 onions, sliced
⅓ cup vegetable oil
½ cup white vinegar
2 tablespoons water
Boil potatoes for 15 to 20 minutes until just tender. Drain and let cool slightly. Peel and slice into even rounds.
Season with salt, pepper, and sugar. Add onions. Add oil and mix gently.
Dilute vinegar with water and bring to a boil. Add to potato mixture while hot and mix well.
Serves 6 to 8.
ALICE’S APPLE DUMPLINGS
WITH HARD SAUCE
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
¾ cups shortening
¼ cup ice water
5 apples, peeled and cored
¼ cup sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 tablespoon butter
Mix flour with salt. Cut in shortening with two knives until the shortening is the size of peas. Add water slowly until you can gather the dough into a ball with a fork.
Roll out dough and cut into 5 squares. Put an apple in the center of each square.
Mix sugar and cinnamon. Fill the center of each apple with the sugar mixture. Put a dab of butter on top of each. Bring pastry up around the apple to make a package, dabbing edges with a bit of water if necessary to seal. Chill 30 minutes.
Preheat oven to 350°.
Bake for about 40 minutes, or until apples are tender. Serve warm with hard sauce. Serves 5.
HARD SAUCE
¾ cup unsalted butter at room temperature
1½ cups sugar
Dash of salt
2 teaspoons vanilla
Cream the butter until soft. Gradually add sugar and salt until creamy and light. Add vanilla and chill.
Makes about 1 cup.