Approval Junkie

by Faith Salie

  There was always an entrance walk for each of the contenders—you’d do your frozen smile strut toward the judges down a rickety catwalk that stretched from the stage into the basketball court. And during that walk, the emcee would introduce you to the audience. That year, my introduction should have been, “Our next contestant is five foot five and ninety-five pounds. Faith’s hobbies include burning more calories than she consumes, trying to stay warm, and suppressing her menstrual cycle.”

  I was thin it to win it. Which is why I turned to Valerie Kennedy.

  Vocal coach Valerie Kennedy was the Béla Károlyi for pageant hopefuls. She could take your voice, assign you the perfect song and a few key moves, and turn you into Miss Anything. She was the wee-est woman in the twee-est home. She lived in a dollhouse painted Wedgewood blue and white. Inside was all porcelain figurines and toile. And a gleaming white piano where the magic happened. Valerie used long spoons she collected from Dairy Queen Blizzards as her secret weapon. When you’d sing, she’d make you stick the spoon into your throat to maintain ideal palate placement. Luckily, I was anorexic and not bulimic, so this exercise proved very helpful. But even more helpful was Valerie’s keen choice of song for me—Barbra Streisand’s “Let’s Hear It for Me” from Funny Lady. With lyrics that, at one point in the song, actually request a standing ovation, Valerie and I weren’t playin’:

  I’m the number one attraction to see…

  Come on kids, let’s hear it for me!

  To ensure I stuck the landing, Valerie taught me her signature Pageant Arm Raise. Please imagine this, and while you imagine it, visualize me with my crunchy curls piled atop my head, black patent pumps on my feet, and my bony body sporting a rainbow-sequined micromini I’d bought from the Avon catalog: I’m onstage, and for the very last note of the song, I turn to my right. The microphone is in my left hand—the one closest to the audience, the downstage hand, as theater geeks know. My right arm (upstage!) waits, straight down at my side, poised for action. As I wail the last word of the song—the “MEEEEE­EEEEE­EEEEE­EEEEE­EEE!”—I crouch delicately on my stilettos and rise up slowly while simultaneously raising my outstretched right arm from six o’clock to effing high noon. And I follow the arc of that glorious Pageant Arm with my entire head, so that as my jazz hand is raised sky high, I am looking up to the Lord. And at the end of it all, after I have held that note till queendom come, I yank that arm down dramatically, demonstrating that I have exhausted myself, that I have given you all of me right there on that gym stage, leaving you no choice, kids, but to hear it for me.

  I hope I don’t have to tell you it worked. Not to brag or anything, but no one stood a chance against my emaciated, spastic resolve. First runner-up was Tiffany Walker, who’d broken her toe in rehearsals, presumably due to a Fun Dip overdose. But like ’96 Olympic gymnast Kerri Strug, who taped her shredded ankle to bring home the gold, Tiff taped her toe and landed victory adjacent. The outgoing goddess, the indomitable Stacy, visiting from Florida State University, managed to wedge that tiara into my Aqua Net nest.

  High school obsessions seem so important at the time, the yearbooks full of senior superlatives—Best Legs, Best Smile, Best Dressed. I still have my tiara. It’s missing a comb to shove it into my hair, and some stones have disappeared. Yes, I’m like a character in a Tennessee Williams play, clinging to a symbol of my salad days—like literally just salad, y’all, with dressing on the side.

  About a week after I won, I received rejection letters from all the Ivys, and Jennifer Linde got to be valedictorian. On prom night, my dad took me out to dinner because no one had asked me. But for one brief shining moment, the Greek gods had smiled on me and welcomed me into their pantheon as Miss Aphrodite, Goddess of Beauty and Love.

  I love casually telling people I won my high school pageant. In the Northeast, in this century, it sounds positively exotic. I faux-brag about being Miss Aphrodite 1989 because it’s so ridiculous, but the truth is, I have a wistfulness about it. I remember it clearly as one of the last times I set goals—to dominate my body and to captivate the student body—certain I could achieve them through sheer determination. That’s a faith that belongs to the young, because you learn soon enough that life doesn’t work that way, and wishing hard and working hard don’t always stick a crown atop your ephemerally skinny body.

  My mother liked to bake for criminals. She’d be driving us to or from Woodland Elementary School or soccer practice or dance class and spot a work gang of prisoners doing some kind of road repair. Mom would zip home and whip up some pumpkin and cranberry walnut breads. Then she’d pull her copper Datsun 280ZX over to the side of the road and drop the loaves off with the corrections officer in charge of the gang. The prisoners, possessing appreciative but not overly discriminating taste buds, called her “The Gingerbread Lady.”

  It was a fitting moniker, since my mom was famous for her gingerbread houses. For a couple of days, right at the beginning of Advent (that’s the four weeks before Christmas for those of you without mothers who went to church every single day except Sunday, because going to Saturday vigil earns you one day off), Mom turned our kitchen into a delicious-smelling construction site. She baked turnkey homes, carefully covering the cooled burnt sugar soldering with royal icing piping. Sometimes she’d screw up and we’d hear profanities such as “Sugarfoot!” coming from the kitchen. She’d save one gingerbread house for my brothers and me to decorate and distribute the rest. My senior year of high school, she made and garnished five extra for all the teachers who’d written me college recommendations. She always dropped some off for her brothers’ families. I liked going on that delivery run with her—she’d ask me to sing her Christmas carols while we drove to Uncle Dick’s, Uncle Bob’s, and Uncle David’s. Mom would hop out of the car and quickly leave the naked houses in their garages along with all the gumdrops and nonpareils my cousins might need to adorn them. She didn’t want to make a fuss, so we’d pull out of the driveway before she’d get discovered.

  That was very my mom: wanting to spread deliciousness but not wanting attention for it. I may have inherited more of the first part.

  Usually her goodies weren’t on the fancy side, but birthday cakes called for preproduction meetings. Just as I would start discussing my visions in August for the Halloween costumes she’d sew me, we’d begin planning my cake around February for my April party. She took a decorating class and would practice making rosettes on wax paper at the kitchen table. As with any activity that required concentration, Mom stuck her tongue across her mouth so that the right side of her cheek stuck out for the duration of rosette crafting. (She also did the tongue-in-cheek thing when folding fitted sheets.) For most of my girlhood, she created some kind of doll cake where the cake was a massive skirt out of which rose a blond Barbie torso. I still dream of the fluffiest pale pink cake she decorated with glittery flowers made from marshmallows. Much later on, she figured out how to make me a completely fat-free Baked Alaska with angel food, frozen yogurt, and flaming meringue. (I have just now decided “Flaming Meringue” will be my name when I am reincarnated as a drag queen.)

  This is why I can’t buy a cake for my kids’ birthdays. My husband offers to “keep it simple” for me by picking up something at this famous bakery on Madison. The thought that he occasionally had to buy his own birthday cakes in that very store when he was younger makes me so sad that I forbid it. He also works down the street from the Cake Boss and could easily bring home a two-foot blue macaw cake my son has requested that would be two hundred times better than anything I could create, but I can’t do it. This kind of time-sucking sleeve rolling is part of what being a mother means to me.

  You may not really consider how much you’re like your mom if she’s still around. Before you enter middle age, you may be too busy building your own life to catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and notice how, at a certain angle or when you are really tired, you look like her. It may surprise you one day to see yourself with her smile in a photo or hear
yourself call your child “Pumpkin,” just like your mom called you.

  I surprised myself by putting on an apron.

  Baking was a way to be close to my mom when I was little. I didn’t really bake, though; I just stood beside her like an entropic sous chef. She invited me to measure and pour (implicit fractions lesson) and crack eggs. My master creation was a scrumptious treat called “Daddy’s pie crust cookies” which, as you may gather, were “cookies” made from unused crust. Mom would give me scraps and encourage me to roll them in cinnamon sugar. We’d pop them in the oven, and I’d proudly foist them on my father when he got home from work. He appeared to love them—he always had a bite right away! It wasn’t until years later that I learned he’d spit them into a napkin. I can’t decide if my mom was focused on burnishing my culinary self-esteem or playfully torturing her husband. That’s number 492 on the list of questions I’d ask her if I could. After, “What time exactly was I born so I can finally get a meaningful astrology chart?” and before, “Seriously, how is it possible you never used tampons??”

  My mom was the den mother for my brothers’ Cub Scout group. She found time for this, along with teaching Sunday school and making those terrifying dolls with shriveled apple heads, which is what twentysomething gals apparently liked to do in the ’70s. One day when I was home with her as usual while my big brothers were at school, she was frosting a cake she’d decorated with some Scout emblem and realized she hadn’t made enough icing. This posed a dramatic problem, since she was on a deadline and didn’t have enough time to steer her gigantic station wagon to the A&P to get ingredients. I climbed up on my kitchen helper stool and, for the solid two minutes she spent fretfully plundering our cabinets in search of confectioners’ sugar, I silently scraped up every last lick of icing I could find anywhere—on the side of the bowl, on the knife, on the spatula. I willed it to amass, like I was Jesus with the loaves and frosting. It made a nice lump. “Is this enough?” I asked her. Her eyes lit up, and she kissed me. We both watched, holding our breath, as she spread the icing to just barely, totally cover the cake. She must have told me and everyone how I’d “saved the day” for a week. My mother doled out generous servings of compliments.

  By the time I got to college, the only thing I was interested in whipping up was a fresh dollop of feminism. A room of one’s own was decidedly not the kitchen. Baking seemed retrograde, but what was worse to me at the time was that it involved fattening ingredients.

  Then Mom died. There were more pernicious things in this world than butter and egg yolks. Like cancer.

  Being the only daughter in our family, I inherited most of my mother’s “stuff,” for lack of a better word. I spent one of the bleakest afternoons of my life sitting on the floor of Mom’s walk-in closet as I went through her clothes, inhaling her scent in hopes of being able to summon it on future command.

  Her death was no surprise—thank you, cancer, for the heads-up—but my father still couldn’t deal. He imposed a hasty deadline to sell the Florida house into which my parents had recently moved. My assignment was to save anything I might want and quickly send it to myself in LA. My sister-in-law gently helped me as much as she could, but how do you decide what to keep of your dead mother? I scavenged Mom’s pockets as if I might find something worth saving when the only thing worth anything was gone. In her Christmas cardigan—because, yes, she was a mom who wore a sweater with gingerbread people appliqués—I found a shopping list. “Fiber One, bell peppers, 2%, berries, Metamucil.” I pictured her popping into Kroger on her way home from 7:15 a.m. Mass.

  I donated her clothes and saved her jewelry.

  Then there were her recipes.

  Mom wasn’t a collector (nor am I, a trait manqué that has served me well in my itinerant life), but she left behind a trove of recipes. Recipes she jotted down on index cards. Recipes on cards with, “From the kitchen of [fill in name of one of her tennis partners here]” printed on top. In her careful handwriting, she’d given all the recipes a grade. (Question number 499: “Why keep a recipe graded B?”) She’d made notes on the cards—things she changed or added. She always doubled, sometimes tripled, the vanilla extract.

  Returning to Los Angeles after she was gone, three thousand miles away from everyone who loved me most, left me in a dark, hungry place. I tiptoed into my tiny kitchen and pored over the recipes as if they were scrapbooks of my childhood. Her handwritten lists of ingredients filled a bit of the void now that I was no longer receiving her weekly greeting cards filled with chatty updates and twenty-dollar bills for a manicure. Baking was retrograde, in the most therapeutic sense: once again, it was a way to be close to her. I pulled out the serious KitchenAid stand mixer she’d bought me and stocked up on vanilla.

  I learned I love baking. And I learned why my mother loved it. Most people smile when you present them with something homemade. I love fulfilling requests—pumpkin bread for Kerrie, almond cream cheese bars for Mario, Kahlúa brownies for Uncle Juan. I’m no pâtissière; but I guess homemade treats are so rare in this busy day that the full-tummy, fulsome thanks I get seem disproportionate to my efforts. I have witnessed disciplined, chiseled homosexuals erupt into a gluten-free-for-all after a taste of my Fuzzy Navel cake with Peach Schnapps glaze.

  I once gave someone a cake on TV. I appeared as a guest on The Late Late Show, and I was very very nervous, largely because I knew no one in the audience had any idea who I was. So I felt that delivering my Coca-Cola cake on air to then-host Craig Kilborn would be a cute icebreaker.

  “I brought you a white trash cake!” I declared, thrusting it at him.

  He was completely nonplussed. “You made this?” he said, not like, “Wow, you actually made this?!” but like, “That’s really weird.” Because it was.

  “It’s a Bundt!” I cried, desperately willing it to be a catchy punch line.

  He put it on his desk, and I’m sure one of the camera guys took it home.

  I food-pushed successfully, however, in the hospital after I’d given birth to my daughter. Just as I’d done for my son’s birth, I’d arrived at the hospital towing a bag laden with tons of homemade desserts to give to the nurses during my stay. (Technically, I didn’t arrive with that bag. I arrived with my eyes closed, leaking amniotic fluid and vomiting. My husband actually arrived with the bag, since I was busy wanting to die.) I wanted to thank those strangers who enter the most important, dramatic days of your life. These are ladies who check stitches you can’t even see, change bloody sheets, and genuinely care that you produce a soft stool, ladies whom you’ll never see again. The day we had to leave the hospital, one of the administrators came into my room and said he wanted to talk to my husband. Crazy with exhaustion, I decided that meant I was in trouble for waving away the one nurse who kept barging in to take my blood pressure just at the moment I’d been able to shut my eyes because my daughter had taken a short break from sucking the life out of me. Turned out, I wasn’t in trouble. The staff was so appreciative of my baking that they wanted to thank us by giving us one free night, like a special offer at Hampton Inn.

  Sometimes when I shuffle into work balancing Tupperware full of white chocolate Congo bars, I like to think I’m like my mother. I don’t think my mom sought anyone’s approval but God’s. She didn’t crave attention or a number on a scale. Her goals were modestly specific—volunteer to teach ESL, get her master’s degree in comparative religion, don’t eat a single peanut M&M until her son returned safely from a sojourn in immediate post-Soviet Russia. She simply lived to make other people happy, and by doing so, made herself happy. That was enough for her—more than enough, as she repeatedly marveled at how “blessed” she was.

  “Vanilla” generally describes something or someone as ordinary or conventional. But if you think about it, vanilla is anything but. Vanilla is spicy—it’s literally a spice. (The world’s second-most expensive one after saffron—fun trivia fact for your next drunken cookie swap.) It comes from something as exquisite as an orchid. The Book of
Spices characterizes vanilla as “pure and delicate.” Too classy to beg for attention, it supports other ingredients. Vanilla doesn’t need to be the star, but it enhances everything.

  My mom was vanilla, extra vanilla at that. She brought warmth to any situation. She was supportive to the point of being deflective, always focused on encouraging others. And she was spicy. Yes, she read a Bible chapter a day, usually from the miniature Good Book she pulled out of the console in the 280ZX during long stoplights. But she also kept Penthouse in her bedside table. (I thought I was the only child who knew this until my brothers and I compared notes a couple decades later.) Once, when I was in college, we had a phone call that went like this:

  ME: Hi, Mom, whatcha doing?

  MOM: Hi, my darlin’! I just put in some Ben Wa balls and I’m making dinner.

  ME: I’m sorry, what did you say?

  MOM: I’m making din—

  ME: No, before that. What balls where?

  MOM: Oh, the Ben Was are these balls I put in my vagina to strengthen my pelvic floor. They’re supposed to make sex even better! I just walk around with them in me. It’s quite a workout.

  Such was the flavor of my mother.

  And just as vanilla gently infuses the whole dish, Mom was the sine qua non of our family. She still is…her redolence fills the family we have become without her.

  I don’t bake so much anymore. I don’t have the time. There’s not enough room on our kitchen counter to leave out a mixer, and the thought of squatting and lifting the thing, then cleaning and putting it away again after lifting and cleaning and putting away children all day exhausts me. It would make too much noise to bake when kids are supposed to be sleeping. I also don’t know how to cook for my family, so I feel vaguely guilty that the only things I ever make for them are on the apex of the food pyramid. But mostly I don’t bake a lot because I don’t feel compelled to. What started as a way to connect with my mother grew into a way to feel like I had something to offer. My life is fuller now. When it wasn’t so full, I was trying to fatten everyone else up. These days, I bake because it’s an occasion, or I really want to thank someone, or I have bananas that are so close to expiry that they’re screaming to be transubstantiated into banana bread. I bake because it’s meditative. I like the whir of the mixer, the taste of the batter, the smell of my efforts.