Moms Don't Have Time To Page 9
My Mother Says No
ELISSA ALTMAN
At first, the deliveries were small and biweekly. A roast chicken and braised flanken from her favorite local kosher restaurant, which, after eighty years in business, shuttered in the early days of the virus, perhaps presaging end times. Then came the comfort food orders that I was able to phone in from my home in Connecticut: chicken potpie, lasagna, quiche. All freezable. And then, finally, there were the dishes I delivered to her when the basic food items upon which she depends—bread, eggs—started to become scarce in Manhattan: quarts of homemade chicken soup that I made late into a weeknight, waking the following morning at six to skim the fat from its surface, ladling it, bleary-eyed, into freezable containers; minestrone; sautéed broccoli with confited garlic that she could pick at in the middle of the night or fold together with some egg whites because, as she likes to remind me, yolks are fattening.
The next day, I walked into my mother’s Manhattan apartment with a restaurant-grade, heavy-duty insulated bag, plunked it down on her counter, unzipped it, and opened her freezer door to begin stocking it. There was no room: at one hundred pounds, she had eaten almost nothing I’d sent her in weeks, although she assured me she had.
I wasn’t hungry, she said, shrugging. Do you want me to be big and fat? I’ll never be a star.
She looked me up and down. She patted my stomach.
Also, she said, staring at my head, you need your color done.
My heart began to pound. I could feel the heat rise in waves off my face.
There would be peace and beauty amid the dark unknown.
In middle age and at the suggestion of my cardiologist, I had recently restarted a long-abandoned meditation practice. I shelved my beloved red wine—I have what they used to call a hollow leg, according to my late father—and instead attempted self-care, after navigating life as the only child of this stunning, narcissistic personality disordered mother, a former television singer and an anorexic who didn’t know she was pregnant with me for six months, and with whom I have such a codependent relationship that she often calls me fourteen times a day. A mother who said, when I went to cooking school in the late eighties, that I was doing it for spite because, as she put it, food is the enemy.
So I took a breath. I eyed the box of spigot Pinot Grigio I’d left in her fridge a few weeks earlier.
If this gets bad, I said to her, I’m going to have to come get you and bring you back to Connecticut for a while.
No, she said. I will not come.
You’ll have to—you’re eighty-four. You’re high risk.
Are you calling me old? How dare you.
I zipped up my insulated bag. I kissed her on the cheek. And I left.
For the next two weeks, my wife of twenty years—we call her Saint Susan—and I begged my mother to let us bring her to our house in the country, where we could care for her and keep her safe. And, of course, feed her.
No, she said, her television blaring in the background. I’m watching Play Misty for Me. It’s my favorite.
I could hear the bloodcurdling screams seventy-five miles away.
I want to make sure you’re eating, I pleaded. You need to stay strong, Ma.
I’m eating fine, she said. Did you get your color done?
Every day for two weeks, her answer was the same: No.
Until it wasn’t.
When can you get me, she asked one morning. I’m starting to get nervous.
These are uncertain times, and we have taken in this most difficult, complicated woman whose relationship with me sits at the traumatic core of my life.
Susan and I filled our refrigerators and freezer with the things that would keep us all healthy and fed: soups and stews, sourdough breads, whole chickens, pork roasts. Trained years ago in the art of restaurant repurposing, I could take care of us and feed us well for a few months. We would be okay. And then I drove into the city to pick up my mother and bring her home. Our little family would be together, under one roof, hunkered down. We would heal. There would be peace and beauty amid the dark unknown.
Our first dinner together was roast chicken and a salad.
My mother pushed the food around on her plate, making small piles here and there, and then fed bits of chicken to Petey, our dog.
You need to buy a stationary bicycle like the one I have, she said, out of the blue.
To keep the weight off.
And then she went to bed.
In the days that have followed, my mother has taken in roughly six hundred daily calories, most in the form of the miniature cupcakes that she picks at in the night when Susan and I are asleep. I called her doctor in New York for advice.
How do I feed her? I asked.
She’s a miracle of modern science, the doctor said. Also, there is nothing you can do. You and your wife need to stay safe. Stay alive. And remember your blood pressure.
Twenty years ago, I fled Manhattan for New England; after a lifetime of acrimony and blame and the toxic knot of the maternal gone awry, I broke up with my mother because, a as a physician once told me, my health was on the line. I have not lived under the same roof with her since Reagan was in office. But these are uncertain times, and as Susan and I promised each other we would long before coronavirus was part of our lexicon, we have taken in this most difficult, complicated woman whose relationship with me sits at the traumatic core of my life, like the blazing sun.
We have to find a way to make it work, for however long.
There is one thing you can do, my mother’s doctor said, when I called.
I waited for her wisdom.
Feed her more cupcakes.
Elissa Altman is the critically acclaimed author of Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing and Longing, Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw, and Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking.
In Russia, Luggage Lost, Identity Found
NINA RENATA ARON
Without my clothes and belongings, I discovered a new version of myself.
In my mid-twenties, I traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia, for the better part of a summer to immerse myself in the language before starting a PhD program. I wrote nervously in my journal on the trip from New York City as the flight attendants, pretty blondes clad in baby blue, walked the aisles serving drinks. Though I arrived safely, my luggage did not. To the dormitory where I was staying—a mammoth cement block—I rode the metro unencumbered, carrying only my purse and its assortment of essentials: my wallet, a book, gum, lip gloss, headphones.
“The suitcase will be at your building,” an airport employee had told me roughly when I reported the missing bag, without even looking up, let alone looking up my name, address, or flight number. I almost laughed.
The suitcase never came, and for weeks, I couldn’t get comfortable. At first, nightly, I washed the clothing I’d flown in—unflattering jeans, a baggy black T-shirt, and clogs—in the tiny bathroom sink. I got to know some of the women in the dorm, and borrowed a couple of things, but they didn’t fit. I spent hours on the phone with the airline trying to track down the missing piece of luggage, as did my then-boyfriend in New York, but to no avail. Without my clothes, shoes, hair dryer, or beauty products, I didn’t feel like myself. But I was too broke to shop. So I wore the same outfit every day. On the long, breezy escalator ride down into the metro station, I locked eyes with passing commuters on their way up. Who do they think I am? I wondered, with the narcissism of youth. They can’t possibly tell anything about me.
I was a young woman, nondescript, alone in a dizzyingly foreign pastel city where the buildings looked like iced pastries and the sun never set.
Of course, I was not quite myself. Or I didn’t know yet just who I was, who I wanted to be. Hadn’t an element of self-discovery been baked into the trip itself? This was before marriage, motherhood, or divorce. I was a young woman, nondescript, alone in a dizzyingly foreign pastel city where the buildings looked like iced pastries and the
sun never set. St. Petersburg is close to the Arctic Circle, so for a couple months a year the city dwells in the perpetual pinky twilight of White Nights. At night, I sat on a bench in a small park and read by the baffling natural light of 10:00 pm or 11:00 pm. During the day, after classes, I walked the city and visited literary museums dedicated to the writers I loved most: Akhmatova, Dostoevsky, Brodsky, Nabokov. I practiced the Russian language in front of a mirror, as I’d been told to, trying to let my mouth go slack enough to sound natural. Vodka helped. My accent improved, but still sounded faintly foreign. Where are you from? Russians asked. Chechnya? Georgia?
As the days passed, I forgot about the things I’d intended to bring with me to distinguish myself as American, or alluring. As an individual. I forgot about the winged black eyeliner I applied every day at home, the lipstick colors I considered my signature. Those were in a cloth bag, tucked between a layer of tank tops and a stack of floral skirts in a suitcase, somewhere in the world. I couldn’t identify myself as cool with band shirts or my motorcycle jacket. I stopped trying to read others’ reactions to me and started to pay closer attention to the city, to people.
Eventually I befriended Anya, a vivacious middle-aged Georgian woman who lived in an old train car at Moskovsky station. We met while browsing books. A couple nights a week, I brought her wine and brandy and she cooked me dinner. We made each other laugh, especially as I struggled to keep up with her rapid-fire questions about my life in New York. Hearing the story of my lost suitcase, Anya clasped her hands together, wincing and laughing, saying, “How terrible!” and really leaning into the word “terrible” for effect, as Russians often do. She began to loan me some of her own clothes, flamboyant, flowing, and diaphanous garments she thought were elegant but which were unlike anything I would ever have worn at home.
“Stylish!” she exclaimed, as I tried them on.
As the days passed, I forgot about the things I’d intended to bring with me to distinguish myself as American, or alluring.
I started to say perhaps this wasn’t really my style and then thought better of it. Anya gave me makeup too, including eyeshadow in that saturated late-Soviet blue color, which I decided—what the hell?—to wear when I went out in the evenings. It had been a month since I’d been legible as the self I knew back home, so I stopped trying. I leaned in to my discomfort and let my usual performance of myself unravel and become something different. By the time a new friend took me on a date to the opera at the end of my trip, I was speaking and feeling more Russian than I’d ever thought possible. And I was wearing one of Anya’s dresses, a semi-sheer number, cinched at the waist, in a bold, swirling black-and-white print. The lipstick was hers, too: metallic and cotton-candy pink.
Travel always has this effect, to some extent. It makes “the strange familiar and the familiar strange,” in the spirit of anthropologist Horace Miner. (I would learn that line later that year, in my graduate program). On this trip, without the usual markers of identity that kept me tethered to my sense of myself, the change to the texture of daily life was even starker, and ultimately more meaningful. I found a new freedom without those markers. I saw differently, noticed differently, and allowed myself to look out rather than constantly anticipating and managing being looked at.
It also felt like the universe might have designed the entire experience as a test. About two weeks after I returned to Brooklyn, my suitcase showed up on my doorstep. I didn’t know where on earth it had been, but everything inside was intact and folded nicely, just as I’d packed it.
Nina Renata Aron is a journalist and the author of the debut memoir Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls.
Hey, Food Network Addicts: This Is Our Time to Shine
DIBS BAER
What Guy, Giada, and Ina taught me about living in the moment.
Confession: I’m one of those annoying people on social media who posts pictures of all the food they’re making. I’ve shared photos of blueberry scones, grilled cheese, my grandma’s chicken soup, cake, cookies, pasta, sausages, even an ugly-AF egg salad sandwich. Oddly, I have not made the ubiquitous loaf of fresh-baked bread yet, although I’m hoarding plenty of yeast in my cupboard.
Don’t tell anyone.
I’m so invested in my new hobby that I even started a Facebook group called “The Self-Quarantine 15” (har har), though many people are saying that it should really be nineteen because . . . well, you get it.
Just where did I get the (matzo) balls to post all of my ambitious yet mediocre offerings? Well, I’ve been training for this moment for a decade—actually since the first time I laid eyes on the Food Network. Like so many other home cooks addicted to Guy, Bree, Giada, Ina, and all the others, the pandemic forced me to step up and put my prolific television watching to good use. Like Nuke LaLoosh in Bull Durham, I was finally being called up to The Show. My family needed me to cook ASAP—and a lot.
Luckily, I’d logged ten thousand hours of intensive study. I was ready.
If you would’ve told me ten years ago that I’d be obsessed with cooking during a global pandemic, I would have laughed (and then cried. WTF is happening?!?). Chef Dibs was never really in the cards. I lived in Brooklyn for fifteen years, had the stereotypical busy New York City lifestyle, and probably made myself a proper meal . . . oh, I’m gonna say . . . five times?
It wasn’t until eight years ago, when I moved to California, that I started to cook and bake, which I attribute to the fact that I finally had a real kitchen and a damn dishwasher. (From now on, I don’t care if I live in a toolshed. My home will have a dishwasher.) Suddenly, I could experiment and make a mess with a ton of pots and pans. I baked breakfast casseroles, pulled pork in the slow cooker, and made Mario Batali’s shrimp scampi. I tried to make things from scratch that you just assumed you couldn’t, like bagels and Ding Dongs, because why not? I even put a grill on my patio—outdoor space!—and became a barbecue master (in my own mind).
If you would’ve told me ten years ago that I’d be obsessed with cooking during a global pandemic, I would have laughed (and then cried. WTF is happening?!?).
Around this time, I started watching Food Network twenty-four/ seven. And today, I think it’s safe to say I’ve seen every episode of Beat Bobby Flay and the entire Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives series forty times. I’m not complaining. Alex and Sunny and Valerie, and even that Sandwich King guy, have become my cooking mentors. You can’t watch that much Food Network and not learn how to cook even a little by osmosis. Their happy, hungry voices invade your brain and seep into your consciousness. My meditation mantra is now “All my recipes have to be approved by cowboys, hungry kids, and me!” And I don’t even know any cowboys or have any kids.
All of this Food Network watching prepared me for two life-changing events.
When COVID-19 shut down basically everything, cooking for my mom and myself morning, noon, and night wasn’t intimidating: it was my calling.
First, five years ago, my dad passed away and I decided to move in with my mom in her Palm Springs retirement community. We needed each other and it just made sense. And that’s when my cooking went to eleven—in terms of frequency, not skill.
Due to a number of factors—including efficiency and my being “bossy,” as my mom called it—I became the grocery shopper and main cook in our new household.
Also, my mom didn’t like herbs. That’s literally what she told me one day: “I don’t like herbs.” That was, um, limiting, given my new cooking prowess. So, to have more control over what I’d be eating, I staged a kitchen coup.
My mom didn’t mind . . . too much. We both loved Food Network and had it on all day, so we’d see a dish on our favorite shows and give it a go, like Bacon Cheddar Twists with Soft Boiled Eggs from Brunch at Bobby’s or a peach crumble by The Pioneer Woman. I made sure to make things I knew my mom loved, like shrimp and grits or eggs Benedict, though it took me way too many times to be able to not only poach an egg but get it out of the water intact.
My mo
m’s a tough customer, so when she liked something, like my blender hollandaise sauce, she’d announce it was an “A+.” She also told me repeatedly, “You make the best grilled cheese in the world,” and I beamed every time, even though it’s not that hard. (Room temperature butter, people!)
We also cooked together. Even though I’m more a savory fan and my mom has the sweet tooth, baking bonded us: I absolutely loved baking with my mom. It felt like we were mad scientists whipping up magic potions. Neither of us had any idea what baking powder or baking soda actually did, but we loved mixing all these random things into a bowl and . . . poof!, an hour later we were eating cake. How? Why? Didn’t matter. It was all about the journey.
Nothing could prepare any of us for the second life-changing event—the devastating global pandemic we’re in right now. But in terms of cooking? Who knew all that television watching would pay off? Because of my continuing education at Food Network and the fact that I was already cooking a ton, I was able to easily go from armchair chef to first string. When COVID-19 shut down basically everything, cooking for my mom and me morning, noon, and night wasn’t intimidating: it was my calling.
As I write this, we are still trying new, often complicated recipes, because we have endless amounts of time to do so. I make mistakes—big mistakes—like the other night I messed up Trisha Yearwood’s potato gnocchi so badly I actually spat it out and popped a frozen pizza in the oven.
But I will always cherish these memories of cooking with my mom. Of course, I cannot wait to get back to normal and have our world be safe and healthy again. I cannot wait to hang up my apron and let real culinary experts make outstanding food again for me in their wonderful restaurants.
And if that means Chef Dibs is sent back down to the minors, so be it. I’ll happily take the demotion.
Dibs Baer is a New York Times bestselling author. Her most recent book is Lady Tigers in the Concrete Jungle: How Softball and Sisterhood Saved Lives in the South Bronx.