To shift back to surmise after all this wishful fantasy, Mrs. Teeters as an Easterner probably gleaned her kitchen tricks from Marion Harland’s Common Sense in the Household and then Mrs. Roper’s Philadelphia Cook Book, and finally Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cook Book. And as an American she preferred tomatoes stewed with a little butter and cloves and brown sugar to the vinegar and gravy that Mrs. Beeton advised in England, in her Book of Household Management.
As a self-appointed cook to desert rats, she knew how to get along without much but the plain preserves from her big jars, an onion if she had one, a handful of coarse brown sugar, a sprinkling of cloves and salt. Perhaps she put in a touch of drippings if there were any in her chosen hellhole. No doubt her brew was odorous and soupy, a fine thing to thicken with crumbled biscuits … and no doubt her cook-tent sounded as slurpy as a Japanese noodleshop when otherwise quiet men sat uninvited but welcome at the trestle table.
A Kitchen Allegory
Mrs. Quayle was an agreeable and reasonable woman—in her private estimation, at least—who finally lived alone after a full life of raising her own and other people’s families. Little by little, she slipped or propelled herself into somewhat eccentric habits, especially about eating. To her, no matter what the pattern was at the moment, it seemed logical.
For a time, for instance, since she was alone and could not puzzle anyone but herself, she arose early, made herself two large cups of strong tea, and then floated through the morning on a far-niente cloud of theine, which at noon she cut earthward by the equally deliberate absorption of one-quarter pound of raw chopped steak and a few stalks of celery. And so on. There were several other systems, which she followed with a detached fervor and dedication until something new sounded better, although she never really asked either “Better than what?” or “Better for what?,” being in excellent health.
Once, early in her culinary solitude, there was a period of mashing three ripe bananas with some agar-agar and milk into a pale porridge. Mrs. Quayle did not find out for several years that this was the way she had permanently alienated a close friend, who had had to face her morning consumption of such a chilly mess during a short visit. Her own intrinsic naïveté, Mrs. Quayle decided, was perhaps why people faded out of her life, and why and how, on one weekend, there was a final adieu to her two dearest—her last daughter and small grandson. She would never know whether she offered too much or, on the other hand, too little during those packed, bungled hours.
In her peculiar dietary pattern, it was a gastronomical event to plan for someone else’s hunger. By now, she was living on a salutary mishmash of green beans, zucchini, parsley, and celery, which she made once or twice a day in a pressure cooker. She drained the juices from this concoction and drank them when she felt queer, between bowlsful of the main bulk. She believed, temporarily anyway, that she got everything she needed—whatever that was—from this regime, and she lost pounds and felt rather pure and noble. But, in a pseudo-protective flutter, the day before her darling girl was to arrive for what might be a whole weekend, she went marketing in several stores she had long ignored, on a kind of spree.
She bought madly and stupidly, more than could possibly be eaten in a week by five people, in a masochistic flurry of wishful child-feeding. Her daughter was already set in her own paths of behavior, staying slim, abjuring fats-sugars-starches and unobtrusively watching her pocket calorie chart. Mrs. Quayle, who well knew this, bought cartons full of affront to her child’s philosophy, so that by the time the little family was together there was a newly dusted cookie jar full of strange rich temptations, all loaded with butter and sweetness; there was bread for toast, which she herself had not eaten for months; marmalade and strawberry preserves were ready to the hand. In the crammed icebox, there were bowls of freshly chopped beef, prawns cooked correctly (which is to say in the family fashion) and peeled and ready, fresh mayonnaise, and far at the back a lost bowl of her own mashed vegetables. Clean lettuces lay ready in the crisping drawers. Did the girl want coffee overroast, freshly ground, decaffeinized, powdered? It was in the cupboard. There was milk, both homogenized and “slim.” There were pounds of sweet butter, of course. And on the sideboard there were bananas and papayas and lemons and tangelos for the dear little boy. There was a box of Russian mints. There were little new pink potatoes to cook in their luminous skins. There was some really fine garden-green asparagus, which Mrs. Quayle’s daughter used to love, and then a block of excellent Teleme Jack cheese—something of a rarity. There were fresh bright strawberries in a bowl, ready to be washed at the last minute, but in case the girl’s old passion for tapioca pudding still waxed, four little Chinese bowls of it were ready, too, and a couple of bottles of white wine, the favorite ones, and a Grignolino on the counter when the time came for a bœuf tartare or a grilled hamburger. And in the freezer …
The whole thing was sad. What was Mrs. Quayle asking for? Whatever it was, she got it.
The bus arrived with the two beautiful young creatures on it, and then, after some communal intercourse or at least exchange of quiet talk, but not a great deal—perhaps six hours of it—the bus went off again, and the mother walked home and there was all that food, and although she knew that two people had been there, she could see little sign of it. In the icebox, the bowls of everything still sat. All the fruit, except maybe one banana, ripened subtly upon the sideboard. Once more, guests had come and gone, this time a last beloved child and her son, but often before a lover, a fiendish enemy, a mother, someone needed. They, too, had vanished, long before Mrs. Quayle meant them to. It was bewildering to her as she sat listening to the icebox that hummed in the kitchen. She wondered what started the whole business. How did it end? What did she want for supper?
She heard again the bus whining off into the dark, and saw through its blue window glass the tiny hand, like a sea anemone, of her grandson. Behind him, a more earthly flower, was her dear child, the purposeful shadow of a fine relationship. “Until soon,” she called into the glass. They made mouths back at her, compassionately. And then she returned to the confrontation with her stores of unwanted, uneaten, unneeded nourishment. She had bought them willfully. They would rot. Her girl had found the half-hidden bowl of mashed green vegetables, and eaten it with voluptuous fuss about its rare fresh taste, its good feeling within her. But the rest of the provender must be destroyed, before it could hurt other people with its quick sly decay. And Mrs. Quayle herself would return to her mishmash three times a day and the greenish broth between meals, and forget the finality of her adieus, for as if her bones were steel cold she acknowledged that the girl was leaving with the baby to join life again, far away, where other things would feed her.
The suddenly very old-feeling woman went to the kitchen to clean it out, to ready the dead supplies for the morning’s collection of refuse, to make herself a pot of vegetables and go to bed with a warm stomach and copies of John O’London’s and Vogue. Instead, she made a little drink first, and then, without paying any attention, she started the water for her special way of making asparagus on toast, somewhat intricate but worth the bother, and a meal in itself. She opened the bottle of Folle Blanche, and put it back in the icebox to wait until she finished her gin-and-It, and then set a place nicely at the kitchen table, with two wineglasses in case she wanted a little Grignolino after the white. She made a salad from the hearts of the lettuces she had cleaned. (She loved the hearts best, but most of her life had given them to other people because they did, too, and they were dependent on her.) Then she deftly put together a bœuf tartare as she had done for a thousand years. She would boil some of the little potatoes tomorrow, or perhaps tonight to eat cold.… All the time, she was thinking in a frozen way about saying goodbye … goodbyes.
As she chopped herbs and sliced asparagus and poured boiling water and added the magic dash of brandy to the mixed soft meat, she kept thinking, but not in a frantic way at all, about never seeing two more people again. She wondered with strange cal
m why her child had not told her before that they were going away, flying to a far land and a new life with a new husband. She felt sorry that they had been so hurried, almost evasive. It was odd: all she wanted to do was make them full of her love, her food, but they could not swallow it. Even the tiny boy ate almost nothing. Her girl drank tea, and smoked many cigarettes, and did not really look at her.
Mrs. Quayle smiled a little, recognizing that she seemed to have absorbed some of the passive detachment of the past hours and that it felt good. She went through the routine movements of boiling the asparagus three-times-three, an old trick, and all the little saucepans and pots were at their right temperatures on the bright stove. A plate arranged almost correctly in the Japanese style was at her place on the table, with five prawns, three halves of green olives, and a curl of celery upon it to amuse her. The bœuf tartare, bound with olive oil and seasoning, with the yolk of an egg in its half shell on top like a jaundiced eye, waited on the sideboard. There was buttered toast in the warm oven, for the asparagus. Mrs. Quayle poured Folle Blanche for the shrimps, and opened the Grignolino for the meat, perhaps between the two cold courses? And then there were the little puddings, still four of them—the ones her last girl had always loved. Or perhaps a bowl of cool strawberries? Later, she would make coffee, and eat one of the candies, a tricky little block of mint and black chocolate.
She thought that she would sit a long time at the table. There was no reason not to. There was nobody wanting to get up early in the morning except herself, and she did not want to, truthfully. There was nobody in the house with measles or a cold, to be listened for or to hear her. There was, in fact, nobody to cook for, not even herself. In all this facing of the situation, she did not feel any self-pity, which was a proof of something—perhaps her wisdom, or at least her sense of self-preservation.
Suddenly she wondered with real violence, like walking head on into a closed door in the dark, why her girl had not told her before about that new marriage and that new man and that leaving. It seemed very selfish. Mrs. Quayle permitted herself a few seconds of anger, and then she looked at the nicely set table and the simmering things on the stove, and she listened to the icebox humming to keep the other supplies dormant, and she decided, without further thought or doubt, to turn off the whole silly business and go to bed. This is what she did, in almost no time at all.
In the morning, after a good peaceful sleep except for one small dream about an anemone waving this way and that way in blue water and then turning into a mouth that wanted to eat her, she made herself a pressure cooker full of mishmash, salvaged most of the unused food to take to friends who were getting too stiff to do their own marketing, and read a new book about a system to hold off the aging process, or arthritis or cancer or almost anything, by the use of iodides in the diet. She must get some Japanese seaweed, she thought—go to the natural sources for her strengths in the battle.
A Delayed Meeting
Looking back from a vantage point on the experience, Alice Tomlinson felt that it was the best she had known out of a life devoted almost compulsively to living from one to another. For more than fifteen years she had waited for something like it, without consciously knowing so.
Her thorough enjoyment of “things”—the word she used for surroundings and events that had kept her fully occupied as far as she could remember (one of her many psychiatrists put that at about the age of four, but she herself clearly recalled sitting up in the bottom of a rowboat when she could not have been more than two and a half)—made even nasty or boring events important to her. Thus she could recall almost benignly being slapped once by a British soldier in Israel when she had laughed nervously at the wrong place during a silly interrogation about her passport. For a flash she had felt angry, but then her natural smile flooded back into the muscles of her face, and all was well. And she remembered dimly a few minutes during the birth of her child, Anne, when she had felt somewhat tricked; it was a long, hard labor, and for a fleeting stretch of time seemed dubiously worth the effort. However, the end result was perfection, and Alice forgot her cowardly doubts as she watched the girl turn into a fine woman.
Alice was sure of her practiced power to make people like her, and forgive her for seeming too trivial, too smiley, but since Anne’s marriage to Hubert, a famous doctor, coping with his disdain had at times been difficult for her.
The trouble, as she tried to define it, when in privacy and predawn she faced puzzlement, was that he did not like silly women. She was reputed to be one, because she laughed a lot and wore frills when other people did not, and tended to switch conversation from laser beams and plastic-lens transplants to the Dodgers. Truth to tell, for many years of widowhood she had managed to raise Anne and keep the two of them well housed and fed. But Hubert was basically unamused by her. Plainly, she bored him, and he was put off by her lightness when occasionally they met over a somewhat tedious dinner.
It made things difficult for Anne. She stayed rigid and attentive, alert to every subtle twitch from Hubert, while Alice prattled on. As she knew with deep thanksgiving, Anne and Hubert loved each other very much. That was rare, and she did not wish to do anything ever to crack the delicate shell of their relationship. And that was the reason she often stayed away when she was gently invited to spend time with the two younger people. They were better off without her, she knew. She would develop what her late husband referred to as a “rhume diplomatique,” or be called to the kennelside of a sick dog, or have to attend a board meeting.
When the three of them met, everything was pleasant and courteous; they were eminently well-mannered. But whatever anybody said, no matter how cautiously, was a potential bomb, triggered to go off on contact with the hidden resentments and mistrusts of people living on different levels. It was tiring. Alice wished passionately that she had never been cast in the role of the birdbrained twittering mother, but there she was, laughing nicely but uncontrollably at poor Anne’s dinner table when Hubert bent toward her and said something around his perfect teeth about the money appeal of eye surgery among young, promising medical students.
“Why not?” Alice asked, smiling widely. “Most people want to make money. Doctors are most people.”
Anne stiffened a little (was this a slur, a goad, a gaffe?), and Hubert nodded. “That is the general belief,” he said with heavy sarcasm in his deep voice, which Alice had once told him was perfect “bedside,” to nobody’s amusement. “However, even if we healers may occasionally be called human, we have certain standards that preclude exploitation of our natural gifts, and …”
Alice lifted her glass. She laughed lightly in the expected way and said, “Yes. Things like the Hippocratic oath always go over the side for capital gains—or, at least, usually.”
Her son-in-law looked sombrely at her and his wife murmured something low and loving to him, and Alice thought, Oh gord, I’ve done it again … played the fool … tried to be silly … said too much. So, deftly, they all talked about what to expect of the next year’s offerings of Pinot Chardonnays until things tightened up again and awareness and alertness crept into every move they made, every word they spoke.
After dinner, Alice sat in a corner of the big soft couch and wondered how long it would take to reach the man who for so long and truly had been her girl’s partner. She wished wholeheartedly that he could like her. She knew that she seemed basically independent but foolish to him, which did not really bother her; what ate into her like a gnawing rat was that perhaps he thought all women were the same, that even his wife, Anne, who loved him the way he loved her, was as foolish as her mother—perhaps as foolish as his own mother had been. This depressed Alice. She wished that she were young enough to be on a beach near Papeete, or old enough to be skipping through the snow in Petrograd, or anywhere but here in the rich room heavy with caution and impatience.
“Three-handed bridge? Television?” Hubert asked. “Or how about a brandy for you two? I have surgery at seven tomorrow.”
A
nne looked composedly at him, but her voice was too controlled as she said, “Why don’t you turn in, then, and Mother and I can chat here.”
When he left, Alice sat smiling but mute. She dared not say a word. She felt stupefied by her whole life: laughing, having a fine time, working hard at being human. And here facing her was this quiet woman who was her child! What did the child-woman have to say except that she was happy to be living with Hubert—a big, pompous, grasping, scheming, conniving stud who used her at his will and shaped her affections and her tastes and in general raped her spirit? Alice Tomlinson was angry. She looked calmly at her brandy glass in the firelight, and put it down. She decided to ask something that was not lightsome, and started, “I often wonder, darling girl, if you …”
She stopped. Anne was sitting in the soft light with her head cocked like a wary mother quail’s, while below, from the den or playroom or whatever it was called in that suburban area, there came the sound of execrable but brave violin music. Her face looked transformed, almost beatific.
Alice felt ashamed. She smiled again. “How beautiful,” she said softly. “Hubert is playing for you … for us both! I am truly happy he felt like doing this tonight.”
Anne, dazed with gratitude and admiration, moved quietly about the room, and then the women parted without any possible attempt at what Alice had hoped for—whatever that was. She did want to know if Anne was alive, she decided mockingly; was she the puppet of a partly bald, rich doctor or was this zombie really a sensate person? Could either of them talk? Could they ever say more than “Boo”? And why had she set the stage for them, so long ago? Why had she laughed and acted like a zany, when really her heart felt hollow under its warpings and she longed for more than casual amusement at her quips and frivolities? Had she created these two dullish shadows through her efforts to be bright and funny instead of lonely and scared and sad?
Sister Age Page 20