by Ariel Levy
I loved the early mornings, though, sitting in the back of a Land Rover in the last of the darkness while the guide told us how to identify rhinoceros dung. The sky brightened. The leaves shook, and what at first seemed to be the shadowy gray of a tree trunk would become an elephant.
On the day that I first saw a pride of lions flopping on their backs in the dry yellow grass and licking each other so tenderly it was hard not to jump out of the vehicle to pet them, I made the mistake that would lead to my first real regret. Up until then, my regrets had been feathery things, the regrets of a privileged child. (I should have gone on semester abroad. I should have lost my virginity to someone nice.) But on that morning, I made the first of many real mistakes that would stack up on top of one another until they blocked out the sun.
I did not get mauled by an animal. I had not been mugged or assaulted in dangerous Johannesburg. I had not even failed at the unlikely task I had invented for myself when I insisted I could find my way and my story on another continent about which I knew nothing. The world had left me unscathed.
But the danger that we invite into our lives can come in the most unthreatening shape, the most pedestrian: the cellphone you press against your head, transmitting the voice of your mother, pouring radiation into your brain day after day; the little tick bite in the garden that leaves you aching and palsied for years. It can come in the form of an email from an old lover whom you have not spoken with for many years, which you receive when you are back at the lodge, sitting under a thatched roof drinking a cup of milky tea. It can come when, instead of writing to the person with whom you share a home and a history, the person you adore and have married, you write to your old lover. And you say, “Today I saw a family of lions licking each other in the yellow grass, and they looked like they were in love.”
3
My mother knew instinctively that danger could come in a friendly box from the grocery store, full of brightly colored cereal that gets inside your body and rots you quietly from the inside out. She had inherited from her own mother the immigrant’s mistrust for authority, and combined it with insurrectionary tendencies left over from her days as a student radical, and what it all added up to in the kitchen was a ban on Cheez Doodles. In the house where I grew up, in clean, leafy Westchester, nothing was artificially colored. Hot dogs were verboten. It wasn’t spartan: There were always apples and bananas in a blue bowl; there were Cheddar and Jarlsberg in the cheese drawer. There were all the ingredients you needed to make white bean soup from the Moosewood Cookbook. For a time, I think my mother really believed in right living through tofu.
I remember my maternal grandmother teaching me to make cheese blintzes when I was about eleven, an actual lesson: how much to beat the batter with a fork (until it’s frothy); when to pull the pancake out of the skillet (when the edge becomes a light-brown lace); and how to fold the filling inside (like a present that you fry). But mostly I learned to cook from my mother. There weren’t any blintz-style lessons. I absorbed her preferences and prejudices over the years the way that I absorbed her gestures and her speech pattern, until ultimately my cooking tastes slightly but unmistakably like hers. I sat around our Mexican-tiled kitchen and learned to love making pies, and to be vexed by other people’s dirty dishes, and to believe that if there is no salad, there is no meal. I don’t remember my mother telling me to stick a half a lemon inside the cavity of a chicken before you roast it, but I know that’s what you do. Or I know that’s what she did.
As far as I could tell, there were two modes of cooking: festive and obligatory. My mother prepared obligatory dinners for my father and me every night when she came home from work at the daycare center she had started in the local public school system. She attended a women’s consciousness-raising group for two decades—wearing sneakers or flat sandals, no jewelry, her dark, curly hair fluffy and free—but my mother did the cooking in our family, even when my father was between jobs. In regular rotation were meatloaf (not her best work, and consequently something I never make), a lovely pan-fried chicken breast dipped in breadcrumbs mixed with Parmesan cheese, and my favorite, noodle kugel with golden raisins, which is really more of a dessert if you’re honest about it.
There was a corresponding orbit of moods this obligatory food preparation induced in my mother: no-nonsense competence, spunky pride, and seething resentment. From my mother, I learned that you can make your family feel a wonderful sense of protected indulgence by cooking them something with jolly care. I also learned that you can launch a powerful campaign of resistance by mincing garlic like a martyr.
My mother’s festive cookery was really something. Her repertoire magically expanded on special occasions, and she busted out with impressive roasts, time-consuming cheesecakes, and gleaming cornbread. She always managed to make enough food for the eight or ten or twelve guests who materialized. (Which to me is still amazing. When I triple or quintuple a recipe, I rarely just get more of it. I usually get something weird.) Then she set the table with blue spatterware and the blue-rimmed glasses my parents had schlepped home in bubble wrap from a vacation in the Yucatán along with the kitchen tiles, transforming our pigpen of a dining room into a snappy café.
There was another dimension of festive food preparation in my house. My mother had a friend, a special friend, who visited regularly. His name was Marcus. He lived with his wife and their two sons in Albany, where he worked as the administrator of a mental health facility. A very tall, handsome black man, Marcus had graying hair and a gut about the size and hardness of a bowling ball by the time I knew him, but when my mother—and father—met him at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the late sixties, I bet he was almost majestic. He was a basketball player then, already divorced from his first wife, whom he had left with two children in the South. (He rarely saw them and never spoke of them.) He and my mother had been involved on and off in college. Eventually she married my father, a history grad student from the Bronx who was funny, Jewish, and, at five feet three, even shorter than their only child would grow up to be. But my mother and this other, much taller man stayed in touch.
When Marcus visited, my mother whipped out the Mexican glasses. She made her cornbread. She grew giddy and animated and did not complain, in word or gesture, about clearing the plates after her family and her guest had eaten the meal she’d just prepared. Then we would go to the living room and sit on the blue couches, and Cat Stevens would sing on the record player, “I have my freedom / I can make my own rules.”
Marcus brought treats. He brought pot, which he grew in his backyard, and my parents would close the curtains and smoke it with him before consuming the rest of his offerings. He brought apricots dipped in chocolate. He brought pigs’ trotters in glass jars, which were never touched by the diminutive Jews in his company. Once or twice, he brought incredible cinnamon buns from the Ovens of Brittany in Madison, which he must have had shipped. He was a cloud of hedonism blowing into our household—which usually gloried in its own imaginary deprivation (in contrast to the indulgences all around us: Larchmont with its Lexuses). With Marcus’s coming, the rules and the ambiance and the cuisine changed. One night, it was determined that the best ribs in the world were in Philadelphia, so that is where we went. I remember sitting in the backseat of a taxi, hurtling out of 30th Street Station toward the Rib Crib, panicked. Events that would have been adventures with just my parents took on a different tone when Marcus was around.
When he came to visit, Marcus slept on a pile of blankets my mother carefully arranged on the TV-room floor next to the brown corduroy couch. But it was clear to me, from as early as I can remember anything, that his presence represented a grave threat to my father and me. Marcus had the power to change my mother from a stern regulator of all food containing sugar into a giggling nymph pouring giant glasses of 7UP, as carefree as if it were carrot juice. It was terrifying to see her so happy. When Marcus wasn’t at our house, he called frequently, and my mother would go into my parents’ bedroom with th
e phone and close the door and I would try to think of reasons to pound on it. She would go visit him, too, or they’d meet in Saratoga, where they bet on the horses. I was acutely aware of the possibility that someday, when she drove off in our rusted green station wagon, she might never come back.
Sometimes she brought us with her. There were Christmases at Marcus’s house in Albany, where the food was outrageously unwholesome and delicious—fried chicken, brownies, every kind of soda. He gave lavish gifts. His sons got Ataris and Dungeons & Dragons stuff and I got intricate, expensive furniture for my dollhouse. He gave my father a beautiful brown leather briefcase and the softest suede jacket I’d ever seen in Marcus’s favorite rusty shade. (Marcus was color-blind, and this reddish brown, I think, was what every color looked like to him.) A few days later, we’d drive home through the grimy snow and eat leftovers. My mother would seem deflated and my father would be short-tempered and gruff, prone to blowups over the strangest things.
As I got older, I badgered my mother many times for the truth about her relationship with Marcus. There was something wrong with it, but what? Wasn’t my mother entitled to have a close—even a “special”—friend? Shouldn’t her friend, like my friends, be allowed to sleep over?
When I first learned about sex, I was excited because it seemed like something that could prove useful for quantifying betrayal. Sex! With this one new idea, I had my whole case: If you were married, then you were only ever allowed to have sex with your spouse. (Why? Who knew. But those were the rules.) So if my mother was having sex with Marcus, then that was bad, open-and-shut. The problem was proving it, and I came up with only one not-very-effective strategy for that: I asked my mother.
ME
Do you have sex with Marcus?
MOM
Marcus sleeps in the TV room.
ME
Did you used to have sex with Marcus?
MOM
Marcus and I have always had a special connection.
She would grow defensive and I would get bewildered. Battering my mother with questions and accusations did not make me feel good. I felt cruel, abusive, but also paranoid, hysterical. It was as if I were a little girl again, afraid of shadows in the stucco walls of our hallway; they looked like monsters—were monsters, to me in my rigid insomniac sentinel. But you can never tell with shadows. You have to be vigilant, always, because maybe you’re crazy, but maybe you’re right.
I went to bed with the lights on every night as a child. It was fine as long as I could hear the muffled sounds of Johnny Carson on television down the hall. But after my parents had gone to sleep and the house went silent I came unhinged—turned into a cat tensed to bolt under the furniture at the sound of a footfall. What was familiar became fearsome. The walls that had been inert all day were possessed at night, vibrating with menace. I sat erect, struggling to keep my eyes open until sunrise, when safety was restored and I could sleep for a few ragged hours before school. My parents took me to see a child psychologist; I remember cutting pancakes out of construction paper in his office. He let me pour mucilage all over them, golden brown and viscous, perfectly maple syrup–like. It was nothing serious, he told them. Their daughter was just sensitive, overwhelmed by her perception of a world that seemed unstable.
I had been sleeping through the night—untormented, in the dark—for just a few years when my father moved to Washington, D.C., to take a job. For years, he’d written copy for a small company that did development work for various lefty causes—the antinuclear movement, the NAACP, Greenpeace. He would sit on the corduroy couch after dinner rewriting sentences on lined yellow pads, tapping a pencil against his mustache, and sometimes sighing and mumbling, “All right already,” when he finally got it right. That ended abruptly when my father got in a fight with his boss and told him to go fuck himself. A tense period of yellow-pad-free unemployment followed. (“See?” my mother said. “You never want to be dependent on a man. You have to make your own living.”) Then, when I was twelve, my father accepted a position at the National Abortion Rights Action League. It gradually became clear that we were not going to follow him to Washington once he settled in, as had been promised.
—
WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN, I had a shaggy sixteen-year-old boyfriend named Josh with whom I felt a desperate, precarious intimacy. Both of our homes were like embassies of the 1960s in the manicured foreign terrain of Reagan-era suburbia. Neither of our mothers wore makeup. Both of our sets of parents were sluggishly but obviously parting, and Joshua and I were paradoxically determined to assert our independence from them by mimicking the very expressions of rebellion they had taught us. We listened to Neil Young and Bob Dylan. We draped our beds with batik. We read On the Road and The Prophet and the poetry of Robert Creeley. When Josh and I started going out, I felt that I had been delivered from my isolation, my uncoolness, and my family. It did not occur to me that I got the ideas for my outfits from photographs of my mother taken at a time when she looked happy to be with my father.
Josh and I smoked pot whenever we could get it, and, one night at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, where we had come to see a band named after a song by the Grateful Dead, Josh and I ate little paper tabs of LSD. Panic set in quickly. I was desperate to go home, but once I got there the walls were swarming with monstrous faces, as they had throughout my girlhood, but now they were moving. Everything in my field of vision was moving—furniture and doorways fragmenting into squares that pulsated around one another: tick, tick, tick, tick, tick! I was convinced that I could hear the breathing of dead people deep in the ground.
The horrors of my childhood were not, as it had recently seemed, the irrational—the amusing!—fears of an innocent. I had been right all along: The world was ugly and terrifying, nothing made sense, and, worst of all, I was alone in perceiving the truth. I had flashbacks for years. I was an insomniac well into my twenties.
—
I WAS OFTEN EXHAUSTED growing up, but I was very well nourished. Every day, my mother packed me a well-balanced lunch to take to school, until my teenage years, when I was too angry to allow her the satisfaction of doing that single thing right. Marcus came even more frequently after my father’s departure, and my distrust of him metastasized into loathing. Everything he brought that seemed good was bad for you. I had a brief but vocal flirtation with vegetarianism.
When I graduated from high school, my mother issued a proclamation: The kitchen is closed. She had delivered me healthy to a college with a cafeteria; her work was complete. There would be no more flank steak with Vidalia onions marinated in red wine, as there had been in the eighties, when my parents had friends over for long nights that began with crudités and dill dip and ended with Frusen Glädjé and marijuana. There would be no more dubious pasta creations, of the sort my mother favored after my father moved to Washington and she began asserting a preference for rustic furniture made of pale wood. (My father, left to his own devices, went immoderately Art Deco and rekindled an almost-forgotten love for Marlboro Lights. His apartment on Connecticut Avenue was as dark and smoky as an opium den on the Left Bank, circa 1930.)
Not long after my mother closed the kitchen and ceased both festive and obligatory cooking, she ended her relationships with both of the men she’d been feeding since her early twenties. My parents got around to legally divorcing just before I graduated from college, and during that same period, my mother stopped going on trips with Marcus. She stopped taking his calls. She ceased stocking his soda and lost interest in red meat, then chicken, and finally she gave up her greatest love, lobster. Marcus had only worked as a side dish.
My mother had become someone else—someone who didn’t need a man, let alone two. Someone who didn’t cook.
For several years, she ate nothing but frozen yogurt, toast, and takeout. She became a Shiatsu masseuse. When I visited, my mother would say, “Let’s get Chinese!” and then she would order spring rolls, Buddha’s Delight, and wok-fried baby bok choy. She went on an extended tri
p to Asia, where she drank yak butter tea in Tibet and saw the ancient terra-cotta warriors of Shaanxi. “It’s amazing,” she told me when she got back. “These people get to wear pajamas and eat Chinese food every single day!” I pointed out that she had pretty much just described her own life.
Then one day, on a whim, my mother moved to Cape Cod, after she saw a house she liked there with an apple tree in the backyard. She had never been fully comfortable in Larchmont—the houses were too close together, the women were too polished. In this new house, in this place of beaches and blueberry bushes, her kitchen provisionally reopened. She started making omelets. Next came the occasional soup. Lobster, naturally, was reintroduced to her diet. Eventually, she took up with Ed, a local man who makes eggplant parmigiana and mushroom caps with breadcrumbs, and whose worst fault as a human being is that he uses powdered garlic. They’ve been a couple for nearly a decade, but they live in their own homes, ten minutes away from each other; they do their cooking in separate kitchens.
My father remarried when I was in my twenties, to a gregarious woman with red hair from the South named Jennie Lee, who gave me an amazing recipe for pork tenderloin and a set of green Depression glass dishes on which to serve it. (You marinate the meat overnight in equal parts orange juice and soy sauce with a few smashed garlic cloves, some brown sugar, and a teaspoon of ginger. Then you put it in the broiler for twelve minutes on each side, and smear apricot preserves all over it while it’s cooling—people think it’s a complicated glaze and get very impressed.)
A few years ago, we heard that Marcus was being indicted for embezzling from the mental hospitals he ran. And that he’d been convicted of assaulting a pizza deliveryman. My mother mentioned that once, before I was born, he had tried to strangle her.