by Sasha Martin
“But I don’t know how to write—”
“Nonsense,” she said and handed me a slip of paper and a pencil.
I filled the small sheet with graphite waves—my first recipe. Mom sat behind me and jotted down the basic instructions. To pay for the ingredients, we collected change in an old jelly jar, Michael helping me scour the sidewalk for pennies. A few months later, once we had enough, we bought the lamb and a one-ounce jar of mint jelly just in time for Easter.
I don’t remember Julia’s recipe any more, or if what we ultimately cooked even was her recipe—and perhaps that was never the point. The point was to get creative in the kitchen, and that’s what Julia Child inspired—what she always inspired. With Mom’s guidance we rubbed butter and fresh rosemary over a rack of lamb, pressed fat knobs of garlic into slits throughout the flesh, and blasted it in a 500-degree oven. We didn’t have white paper caps to keep the exposed bones from burning, or a fancy roasting pan like what Julia might have used, but we shaped the rack into a crown and the rosemary-encrusted meat came out tender and juicy all the same.
“Great work,” Mom said with a serious nod as she drew her knife between the bones through the buttery flesh, releasing a puff of gamy steam. Her words made me grin, showing the gap in between my two front teeth.
The three of us devoured the feast at the living room kitchen table silently, alternating between the soft meat and bright bursts of mint jelly. We hadn’t trimmed the thick, white fat from our roast; Mom said it was the best part. She showed us how to chew it and drink the blood pooled up on our plates. As she tipped the porcelain to her mouth, we watched in rapt horror as the swirling, red juices slid between her lips. The brine tasted faintly of metal.
“Waste not, want not. It’ll help you grow,” she winked.
After that Mom let me cook at her side whenever I wanted. She sewed me an apron from a scrap of bright orange fabric, and I paraded through the kitchen in that simple cloth with regal swagger, a wooden spoon for a scepter. And with Mom as my royal counsel, I learned that food never had to be pedestrian.
Instead of serving up plain hard-boiled eggs, Mom tucked whole raw eggs in a braided nest of challah dough; after it finished baking, Michael and I clamored to excavate and peel our edible treasures. And instead of feeding us uninspired bowls of Jell-O, she drilled into raw eggs and taught us how to blow out the insides. After we washed the shells, Michael and I took turns pouring Jell-O through a funnel, into the cavity. Peeling back the cold shell to find a quivering raspberry egg was magic we could create.
Fueled by Mom’s inventiveness, my imagination grew unchecked. No meal was beyond the realm of possibility. As time went on and I learned to write, I’d record recipes for such unlikely delicacies as Julia Child’s pâté en croute. If we lacked the time or the means to make a dish, Mom would hand me a pencil and butcher paper.
“No reason to go without,” she’d smile. “Draw it—make me hungry!”
When I was done, she’d feast her eyes on my crude illustrations as though the graphite lines formed an edible banquet. Her inevitable approval always came with one word, exclaimed loud enough to make me jump: “Yum!”
CHAPTER 2
A Lifetime Past
OVER THE YEARS, Michael would occasionally ask about our father. “Oh, what do you want to know about him for?” Mom would say, ruffling his chestnut mop. “That was a lifetime ago.”
But the two of us spent many afternoons swinging side by side at the park across the street, trying to imagine what our father might look like. Michael said he was probably a firefighter or cop, like Ponch on CHiPs. I secretly hoped he was Mr. Rogers.
In the absence of a flesh-and-blood father, Michael became my de facto protector. If someone suspicious wandered too close to us while we played, Michael would whack a stick, rat-tat-tat, along the underside of the swinging bridge until the offender wandered off. And if the neighborhood kids teased me during a game of kick ball, he’d give them what for, even if it meant he got kicked out of the game.
Though Mom continued to be tight-lipped about her early life, children absorb more than adults might like to admit. This much we knew: Our mother had once had it all—the American dream. And our father was the con artist who ruined everything.
Of course, I now realize that life is never so simple. There are many dreams in a lifetime—dreams that flourish or flounder for reasons much more complex than can be pinned down to any one person or situation. Such is the case with my mother.
Mom was raised in a Catholic immigrant home in Boston, with three generations and several branches of the family tree under one roof. She speaks of her Italian Grammie’s bubbling, sweet-sauced kitchen with the sort of giddy admiration some scholars have for the Roman Empire: Through her young eyes, that kitchen arena was as wildly entertaining as any amphitheater and filled with equally staggering feats of acoustical engineering.
On Sundays, Mom and her best friend, Patricia—a tall, redheaded cheerleader from the tenement apartments down the road—often convened around the kitchen table to watch Grammie make the kitchen sing. With a “click-click-click,” the stove would start the show, followed by hiccuping pots, a humming refrigerator, and the bombastic babble of a language the girls would never learn.
The ingredients were the true stars, wheeled home from the market in Mom’s old wicker baby carriage. Every time Grammie unloaded bagged fowl or severed artichoke heads from that unlikely chariot, my mother was thrilled. Not to be outdone, Grampie brought home the daily catch, wrapped in brown paper parcels from his tavern on Atlantic Ave.—fish so fresh it seemed to leap into the pan on its own. By lunch, the table would be a cornucopia: stuffed artichokes; a batch of “zucchini pie,” a crustless slapdashery of eggs, thinly sliced zucchini, Parmesan, and parsley; Grammie’s homemade ravioli; spinach with a wisp of nutmeg; or soft nubs of boiled potatoes tucked in nests of spaghetti. (This last was made by Mom’s magpie aunt Fina, who’d eaten the dish in Genoa as a young girl.)
And then there was the torta di riso.
I like to imagine the scene: Grammie frying onions in lard, dancing around the grease until the onions mellowed and she could beat them into day-old rice, eggs, Parmesan, and a ragged handful of parsley. Then she’d knock hunks of carrots and potatoes into a sputtering pot of fowl. Every few minutes when she’d push the bird’s bony feet back into the pot, Patricia would ask, “Does anyone actually eat those?”
Mom responded in her thick Boston accent: “No, but they’re good for flay-vah.”
Grammie always gave the girls three squares each of torta di riso and a few plucks of the once stringy bird. “Mangia, mangia!” she’d sing. “Eat, eat—too SKINNY!” Even as Patricia grew curvy, the savory rice squares never filled out Mom’s beanpole limbs.
For Mom, this was a spectacle of heritage; for Patricia, curiosity. The Italian food adventures were so different from those of her Irish upbringing. With her mother regularly resting her nerves, Patricia found comfort in her friend’s loudmouthed, hot-blooded brood.
By age 15, the girls discovered a different sort of attraction: dating. On Saturday nights, they went down to the local church hall to dance the bug with boys in letter jackets and slim-jim ties. The boys lined one wall, the girls the other. It always took forever for the first guy to muster the courage to cross the invisible divide. One night, too eager for formalities, Mom flounced across the room and asked if anyone wanted to dance. A boy named James, the only one with a sensible haircut in a sea of ducktails, stepped forward. After that he always took her to the Saturday night dance.
Five years later, Mom and James were married.
Mom went on to earn her B.S. Ed., double majoring in math and science, with credits toward a master’s degree in the psychology of adolescents from Boston State College. She worked as a math teacher at a nearby school, he as an architect.
By the time she turned 25, in the mid-sixties, they had three children—Connor, and the twins Tim and Grace. Mom quit her job after the
twins were born. I’ve seen pictures from that era—little Connor with a trim vest and a balloon of black curls, Tim’s ear-to-ear grin, and Grace, a blond angel in pink seersucker. But it’s Mom who makes me look twice. With her neatly styled curls tamed beneath pillbox hats, she resembled Jackie Kennedy.
Though Connor, Tim, and Grace were more than a decade older than Michael and me, I still remember how Mom would gasp if we deigned to call them our half siblings. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she’d scoff. “There’s no such thing as half family. Just call them what they are—your brothers and sister. Anything else is splitting hairs!”
Mom’s friendship with Patricia was a rudder in those early days. The women knit matching sweaters, received matching full scholarships to the Museum of Fine Arts certificate program, and were each other’s bridesmaids. After Patricia and her new husband, Pierre, had three daughters, the two took turns hosting playdates and potlucks.
In the beginning, the food was easy—maybe a quick noodle casserole, a garden salad, a pitcher of lemonade. But when Patricia moved to the suburbs, their gatherings evolved into sit-down dinners with cloth napkins and etched stemware. As she learned the exacting recipes of her new husband’s French family, Patricia began dabbling in velvety salmon mousselines and cheese soufflés. Mom once told me that, though the food was excellent, after a while, there was too much white porcelain. “Either Patricia’s plates were growing,” she said, “or the portions were shrinking.”
It wasn’t long before Patricia and her girls followed Pierre’s career out of the state—and, by the end of the sixties, out of the country. The women wrote letters, but the distance made visits few and far between.
Drawn in by the culture of the times, Mom transformed into a wild child, her knit sweaters and pillbox hats replaced with belted tunics and hair so big that it looked like an Afro.
Some might say they married too young. Some might say they should have lived a little before having a family. But by 1970, James and Mom were headed for divorce. When it finally went through, Mom was 29; the kids were 7 and 4. She successfully fought to get an annulment, to the bewilderment of her navy-man father: “How can you get an annulment? You have three kids!” he exclaimed.
Mom stood her ground: She and James had been too immature when they made their vows for the marriage to count. She wanted to be free to remarry, not just in the eyes of the state, but also in the eyes of God.
Although Mom was awarded custody of the kids, she agreed to transfer custody to James, since he was a good father and had a secure career. She knew it was better for the kids to have that stability. In the bitter turmoil of their split, James decided to move to New Jersey, so he could raise the children near his mother, sister, and her four children. Mom still gets mad when she talks about it. She says the six-hour drive might as well have put them on the other side of the world. From then on, she only saw them a week or two out of every year.
As Mom likes to say, “When it rains it pours.” By 1973, her brother and mother had both died, months apart: he, murdered by his drug-addict tenant, and she after succumbing to cancer. With the kind of blind, mechanical resolve that can only be mustered in the face of extreme grief, Mom opened a leather shop on Cape Cod with her new boyfriend, Ed. She used her savings and borrowed a couple thousand dollars from Ed’s brother, which she repaid in two months. Mom’s true talent and passion was sewing, learned at her Grammie’s side. It allowed her to express her creativity without the rigid rules that had come with working in the school system. But she still made good use of her math degree, setting the prices, tracking overhead, and keeping the books.
With modest pricing and creative designs, business boomed almost immediately. Within months, Mom and Ed had eight employees. Give Mom five minutes to reminisce and she’ll recount the time John Lennon ordered a custom leather suit from her. Dig a little deeper, though, and she’ll admit that the summer help turned Lennon away because he wanted the suit made the next day, a Sunday. The 16-year-old cashier informed Lennon they were closed on Sundays, explaining that it takes more than a day to make a custom leather suit.
Mom shouted, “You don’t say ‘no’ to John Lennon! You close the store for a man like that.” But when she ran down the street hoping to bring him back, he had disappeared.
Mom saved her profits to buy a few rental properties. In the summer, tourists filled the apartments and provided enough security that she could travel in the winters. Together, she and Ed explored Machu Picchu, the Amazon rain forest, Ecuador, Columbia, and the Galápagos Islands. They even stayed a few days with Patricia and Pierre, who were then living in Venezuela—their first reunion since Mom’s good friends had left the States a year earlier.
While abroad, my mother watched how the locals ate. South America never left her. Inspired by agua fresca, the blended fruit drinks made throughout Central and South America, she concocted smoothies well before the leotard- and leg warmer–clad ladies of the eighties. She kept avocados in a bowl and made fish a weekly affair. And there was always a piece of chocolate hidden somewhere in the recesses of her kitchen.
Three years later, on a blinding spring morning in the mid-seventies, a man named Oliver walked into the shop and introduced himself as an artist and an inventor. He wanted Mom to make wineskins for him out of her finest leather. He showed her his drawings and said they’d make millions.
For weeks Oliver’s lanky silhouette moved, barefoot and shirtless, through warrior poses on the private lawn directly across from the shop. Soon, Mom was bringing her famous smoothies out to him, basking in his crooked smile.
Ed didn’t like all the attention Mom showered on Oliver, but found himself outmaneuvered in the face of his rival’s charisma. Three months later, Ed and Mom ended their relationship. Their business became a casualty of the breakup.
Once Ed moved out, Oliver offered to help Mom convert the garage of one of her rental units into an apartment, lining the walls with cedar planks scavenged from a construction site. Soon, they settled in together. Since Oliver didn’t believe in working for the man, they scraped by with Mom’s tenants’ payments.
Michael was born a year later.
Mom repeatedly asked Oliver to marry her, but there was no pinning this tumbleweed down. He was temperamental, prone to disappearing for days, even weeks or months at a time. One day he took their Volkswagen bus down to the five-and-dime for milk and ended up 1,200 miles away in Florida. Another time he vanished for three months, reappearing to explain he felt like camping in the mountain mists awhile. Mom used to say he probably had kids all over the country. Their relationship was explosive and, like a postcard of the seventies, riddled with drugs and chaos.
By 1979, Mom was pregnant with me, and had taken Oliver back several times. Eventually he convinced her to sell off her rental properties for cash. When he disappeared with the money, she grabbed Michael and the emergency funds she’d secretly stashed behind the kitchen stove and ran halfway around the world to Samoa.
Years later, I asked Mom why she went abroad while seven months pregnant instead of selecting cribs, stocking up on diapers, and knitting booties. She paused, then gave three explanations. The first was that she wanted to put flowers on Robert Louis Stevenson’s grave. The second was that she wanted to see the setting for cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead’s research on teenagers in Samoa. And the third was that she wanted a break from winter on the Cape. I soon intuited that the silence between her answers had everything to do with my father and their on-again, off-again relationship.
During this capricious adventure, my mother astonished locals. Not only was she unmarried and pregnant, with a small child, but she also immersed herself in the culture by renting a fale for six weeks. Fales are houses without walls, where crickets and spiders and cockroaches are free to wander in and out. At night, gauzy, white netting was her only protection from the giant mosquitoes.
Still, Mom says a life without walls is the most efficient and harmonious way to live. And it’s a
lso the only way to live in Samoa, where the sun smolders so deeply that it settles into a person’s very marrow. Without walls, the slightest breeze can work its way into the fale and bring a whisper of relief.
Whenever Mom walked through the village, the women along her path would ask her the same questions over and over: “Where are you going?” and, in the same breath, “Where is your husband?” Before she could answer, they’d scoop up little Michael, whose baby blond hair entranced them, and walk a ways with Mom. They soon learned there was no father, no husband.
The women fawned over Mom’s widening belly, bringing her roasted pork, breadfruit, taro, coconut crème in taro leaves—all cooked on brick and wood fires. They made Mom part of their community. Michael and Mom washed these gifts down with Samoan cocoa while I grew strong from within.
Mom planned to stay on those islands forever, wrapped in nothing but the traditional lavalava dress. But as my due date drew closer, reality set in. I was born back on the Cape, where Mom found a small apartment to rent with government assistance. She wrote to my great aunt: “I’ve been paying into the system all these years. Once this baby is born, I’ll need to be a full-time mom.” She certainly couldn’t count on Oliver, and she wasn’t about to put us kids in child care to work as a teacher. “There’ll be time enough for a career,” she added, “after I raise Michael and this baby.” It almost seemed as if she was trying to make up for the time she’d missed with her first three children.
Once she’d settled in, Oliver started hanging around again, only to vanish three weeks before the birth. When she went into labor, Mom sent all her friends searching for him. A buddy finally brought him back to their apartment. While she labored through the night, Michael played with blocks on an old mattress nearby while Oliver led a raucous game of cards with a friend on the other side of the bedroom door. The closest my mother got to him was the smell of his cigarette smoke trailing into the bedroom where she lay or the pop of his laughter through the papery walls. Sometimes his voice crackled accusingly when his friend would drop a beer bottle. Other times, he’d call out “Cheater!” when a questionable hand was played.