Stuffed (7 page)

I have her recipe for “How to Wash Your Face” written in perfect Palmer script:

Cleanse with Pond’s cold cream

Use toner without alcohol, i.e., Nivea, Avon, etc.

Night—Orlane Extrait Vitale on first, then Nivea cream

Day—Wash with water, use Orlane Extrait Vitale, then Clinique moisturizer. NEVER SOAP.

“You’ve got to fix that kitchen,” she says. “Your daughter will be bringing boys home soon.”

Does she mean, Gentlemen callers may one day look at my kitchen and think, How could I marry a girl whose mother has unevenly laid floor tiles and an uninstalled fridge?

Okay, so she’s right. The kitchen does need work. Okay, so it looks like a George Booth cartoon. Thanks to a flood upstairs, a cord dangles from the ceiling light fixture and plugs into a wall socket. The broiler hasn’t broiled in seven years. That’s why we bought the toaster oven, but now that broiler’s broken too. (“A simple wiring repair,” Dad diagnoses from Florida. “Expose the elements. Clean the contacts. You got a digital multimeter?”) My dream fridge arrived three years ago but why install it if I’m planning to redo the countertops and it would have to be taken out again? The inside of the G.E. dishwasher is so rusty I’m calling the internist to see if we need tetanus shots. Yup. Mom’s right. The kitchen looks like hell. But do I want my daughter to marry a man who won’t marry her because of my kitchen?

Mom stares at my auction find, a portrait of Lord Townley attributed to Romney. (
Attributed to
means
Definitely not done by.
) “You really should have that frame repaired,” she says.

Walking into my bedroom: “You still have those lampshades?”

Waiting for the elevator: “Your hair looks so much better today than it did yesterday.”

Something snaps. “I have no control over my hair, Ma. It does what it wants to. Every morning I wake up, look in the mirror, and say, ‘What the hell?’ I never know what’s going to stare back at me. I got this hair from you and Daddy. I didn’t luck out in the genetic crapshoot. Or maybe they gave you the wrong baby.”

“You have
beautiful
hair.” Mom looks at me like I’m crackpated. “Something happened that summer in camp when you cut one side off with manicuring scissors.”

Coming out of my bathroom where the tiles from the floor repair were never relaid, she shakes her head. “I don’t get it. I don’t get it.”

What I see as patina, Mom sees as worn. My mother has never owned anything faded. If it’s chipped, frayed, or dated, out it goes. She has twenty-eight filled hangers in her closet. If something new comes in, something old gets handed down. Dad cleans her sneakers with bleach on a toothbrush. You could eat off her floors if you don’t mind the taste of Pine-Sol.

My apartment needs work. Me too: “If you lose ten pounds, I’ll buy you a dress,” Ma says.

“You’re at an age now where you can’t go out without makeup anymore.”

“Get a face lift when you’re young, before you need it.”

Under the fluorescent lights in the supermarket, comparing pretzels, she notices a color anomaly in my hair. “I’m laughing so hard”—she grabs the display—“I think I cracked a rib!”

What she wants for me is an even cleaner, thinner, happier life than she has. Mom made me, and now she will make me better. I’m unfinished, something she can’t stop sculpting, something it’s her job to complete. It’s a sign of her abiding love that she never gives up. It’s a sign of my mental health that I never give in. For as long as she’s my mother, I am her work in progress. There should be a yellow traffic diamond over my head with the silhouette of a woman with her hands on her hips: DANGER— MOTHER AT WORK.

“You’re still wearing that watch?” she says. “You should have a good watch.”

I try to explain. “I don’t want a good watch, Ma. Someone will steal it. Remember Nana’s watch Ilene stole? Remember when you lent me your Lucien Picard for a blind date with Barry Goldwater’s nephew, and I left it on the sink at the Playboy Club? Didn’t I just lose my watch on a plane? I never want a watch I care about again.”

Then we go to the theater. The play is slow. I press a little button on my Timex Indiglo, and it lights up green. “Nineteen ninety-nine at Ames, Ma.” I whisper, “You can’t do this with a Rolex.”

Once, I said, “Ma, don’t you ever wonder why I never criticize you?”

She looked shocked. “What could you possibly find to criticize about me?”

Where to start! How to begin! That I think you criticize me too much? I look at her carefully. I am stunned by her expression. She looks like the smartest kid in class, ready to absorb whatever information I can give her and act on it immediately.

“Well”—I think hard—“sometimes in the morning after you brush your teeth, there’s still a little toothpaste on the corner of your lip.”

“What? There is? Is there any there now?”

Mom looks in my closet. “You have no clothes,” she says, then adds, “Your sister thinks so too.”

The next morning my sister calls from Florida. “You have no clothes,” she says. “You need more clothes.”

What’s puzzling is some of the things Mom thinks are wrong, she winds up doing.

“When are you getting carpet?” she asks me. Now she lives in a house with no carpet.

“These windows need drapes,” she says. “Aren’t you afraid of people looking in?”

Now she lives in a house with no drapes.

“Only Gypsies pierce their ears.”

Now she has pierced ears.

As I come out of the shower, my mother asks me if she can fix my hair.

“Sure,” I say, and hand her the comb. Then I sit on the bed, like I used to once a week when I was little, on the night she sterilized the combs and brushes with Clorox, and we got our shampoos and she “did” me. It occurs to me that I have never had a Cloroxed comb and brush since then. That I’ve never Cloroxed for my kids either. Now she’s “doing me” again. She’s hard at it. The word “gusto” comes to mind as the woman whose hair looks perfect climbing out of a pool attacks mine. I feel like I’m five. It feels good.

She parts my hair, steps back, furrows her brow, studies me, parts it a new way, fluffs the ends with the comb, experiments with bangs, wipes it behind my ears into two letter C’s, squints, sets a wave with a chop from the side of her hand, slicks it all back, starts all over, reparts, rechops, refluffs, steps back again.

“See?” She yanks my chin toward the mirror. “It’s a look.”

Alfalfa stares back at me. Should I tell her that when it dries, it will frizz and go crazy and mash down when I sleep? Doesn’t she know that yet? Who on earth knows my hair better than my beloved mother? What can I tell a woman who believes she has the power to alter human follicles with her bare hands? Isn’t it time for her to give up?

Never.

So I say, “I get it, Ma. Interesting. Fascinating.” And for one minute more, before evaporation starts to take its toll, I am my mother’s image of what I should be, what I could be, her love-engorged vision—whatever, God help me, that is.

Mattie Sylvia Lee Myles Weems Watts at my sister’s wedding in a Larry Aldrich illusion-top dress. She was my New Year’s Eve date for fourteen years.

HASH

Two years before she died, Mattie told me I was her favorite. She had a favorite? Both of us got Mattie’s chocolate cake on our birthdays. Both of us played jacks on the kitchen linoleum while she read the sports pages of the
Daily News
. She took us both to the pedodontist, weeping and shredding her hankie while we squirmed in Dr. Adelson’s chair. She took us both to the pediatrician too, because my mother was afraid to “take his fire” when we stepped on the scale. Both of us she dressed for school.

Naturally, I tell my sister, “Mattie told me I was her favorite.”

“Really?”

“Did you write her from camp?”

“No.”

“Did you bring her food?”

“No.”

“Did you ever send her a check?”

“I could have been better to Mattie,” my sister says.

Mattie Sylvia Lee Myles Weems Watts came to live with us when I was one and she was forty-three. “I took one look at how crisp Mattie was,” my mother says, “and that was it.”

Mattie worked every day except Thursday and every other Sunday. She cooked, battled New York soot, and baby-sat. She did everything it takes to run a home except the wash. Wash was done by Lola from Freeport, who was so fat she had to come through the door sideways. Lola rang our back bell, then grunted and wiggled past the jambs while my sister and I angled to watch. The laundry was hand-washed in the pantry sinks, squeezed through a wringer, then pinned to a retractable rack lowered by rope from the kitchen ceiling. Eventually we got a washing machine. But until then Lola did it all by hand, even the sheets.

The rest of the work in our two-bedroom apartment was left to Mattie. Mattie attacked dirt. She stabbed it with her broom. She pummeled it with her dustcloth. She vacuumed carpet till it was raw. “
Now!
” she’d say when something earned her approval, like a perfectly ironed shirt.
“Now!”
She’d stand back admiring the part she’d combed in my hair or roses she’d encouraged with roast beef drippings. “
Now!
” She’d knife the last swath of chocolate icing on her cake, the kind of icing that shatters when you rap it with a spoon. No matter how much we begged, she made it only for birthdays and graduations. The cake never lasted more than a day. Late at night, people bumped into each other groping downstairs for one last sliver. I licked the pot. I sucked the spoons. I scraped the bowl. When the cake was finished, I chewed the doily. This was Mattie’s Chocolate Cake, available only for big events.

“Are you going to make the cake?” we’d ask as our birthdays got close. “Promise you’ll make the cake?”

“Out of my kitchen.” She’d flap her hand.

Mattie was five feet five and so skinny her legs looked like spokes. She wore gold-framed glasses. The tips of her shoes touched when she stood. She had a raised mole in the center of her palm—exactly where my mother had one—that I liked to finger when she held my hand to cross the street. She was a passionate Brooklyn Dodgers fan, although she looked like Satchel Paige, the screwball pitcher for the St. Louis Browns, who said, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” They both had soft faces with full lips and heavy eyebrows. They both looked as if they were holding back a laugh. Mattie’s plan was, I’d marry Sandy Koufax, the only Jewish Dodger. She talked about taking me to Ebbets Field, how we’d work our way down to the dugout, and she’d find a way to introduce me, then tell him my good points. I didn’t push for it. He was too old. I preferred angry boys who hated their mothers.

Every Thursday, on her day off, Mattie took the subway to Flushing, Queens, to get her hair done. When I first met her, she had braids wound into a crown. As she got older, she blued her hair and wore it in an even roll around her head. Her favorite hairdo was a showstopper—three rows of purple hair snails held rigid in a silver net. She’d sit on a bridge chair while I poked my finger in their perfect coiled centers, row by row, three times around her head. Everything about Mattie said “neat.” She was so meticulous, she could train raisins. Half of us hated them, half loved them. Mattie could make a rice pudding in a four-quart bowl and discipline the raisins to stay on the raisin side. She put peas in mashed-potato nests for the sake of beauty alone. She never served bread. Bread was “filler.” There was too much other stuff to eat. The exception was Mattie’s biscuits. They tanned on the edges and had a texture like dry snow. She made biscuits only when she made fried chicken. We split them steaming, buttered each side to the edge, then covered the melted salt butter with a thick layer of Welch’s grape jelly decanted to a crystal jar. (Bottles products came in were verboten on the table.) You could argue that Welch’s grape jelly doesn’t go with fried chicken. That wasn’t the point. We treated the biscuits as an entity unto themselves, the best way to eat a biscuit. We maximized the pleasure of each bite. Old friends who come for dinner still say, “Remember Mattie’s steak?” Their eyes glaze. Always I give them the recipe.

MATTIE’S STEAK

Prime Grade-A 14-ounce sirloin
Cross sections of garlic sliced so thin you could
read the
New York Times
through them
Morgen’s seasoning salt
Worcestershire sauce
Peanut oil
A little salt butter

Dot the meat on both sides with the garlic.

Coat that with Morgen’s seasoning salt.

Coat that with Worcestershire sauce mixed with
a little peanut oil.

Turn and baste several times during the day.

Sear, then pan-sauté it in a cast-iron skillet
rubbed with the butter.

Slice at a forty-five-degree angle.

“What’s Morgen’s seasoning salt?” they ask. Their steaks never come out the same. The last store closed twelve years ago. Except for half a Heinz chili jar of it on my spice shelf, Morgen’s seasoning salt no longer exists. Every few years I’ll make a steak with my endangered supply, just to keep the taste alive. The closest I can get to a recipe is Dad’s vague recollection.

MORGEN’S SEASONING SALT

Salt
Onion salt
Garlic salt
A lot of paprika, to give the steak a good
brown color

I could have it analyzed by a lab

Mattie was a perfectionist. She sliced a sandwich on the diagonal, squinting to make sure there was no big half. When she cut leftover roast beef to make hash, each square was the same size. Every quarter-inch cube of beef and potato was browned on six sides. Roast beef was the Sahara of meat, a wasteland of flesh, each mouthful the same except for a paring of crisp garlicky fat crust on the edge. Roast beef was boring. Eating it, a sentence: Twenty bites of hard chewing. The only reason to make roast beef was leftovers for Mattie’s hash.

I was five at the height of the New York polio epidemic. No one was sure how you got it. “Never touch a banister!” teachers warned. “Don’t wipe your eyes if you wiped your nose first!” “Never swim in a pool!” Kids went to bed fine one night, then woke up unable to move their legs. Our neighbor Susan Brody got it. When we jumped rope in front of the building, Susan sat in her wheelchair with metal braces on her legs and watched. She sang “Fudge, Fudge, Tell the Judge” with us and “I Won’t Go to Macy’s Any More, More, More.” Then a nurse would come down and wheel her upstairs.

“It could be worse,” people said. “At least she isn’t in an iron lung.”

The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis gave out “Polio Pointers” at school:

DO
wash hands carefully before eating and always after using the toilet.

DON’T
play with new people.

What we didn’t know was that polio was a fecally transmitted disease. Ironically, improved sanitation helped it spread. Indoor plumbing shielded babies from early contact with the virus. When they were exposed to it later, they were more susceptible. The purer water got, the more difficult it was to build up immunity.

Before 1955 and the Salk vaccine, parents panicked. They sent their kids out of the city during the summer, hoping fresh air would protect them. There were cucheleins in the Catskills if you didn’t have a lot of money and family compounds by the ocean if you did. And in between, there were sleep-away camps in piney places. Public school ended on June 30, and that night Grand Central Terminal teemed with kids in camp caps and regulation shorts clutching turkey sandwiches and the newest Archie comics. Camp Red Wing met under the west balcony on the north side. The air was filled with the screams of girls who hadn’t seen their camp best friend in ten months. We’d board the sleeper in hot Manhattan, and when we opened our eyes, we were in the Adirondacks. Parents, who might have been exposed to polio in the city, were forbidden to kiss or touch us when they came up for visiting day.

Sleep-away camp was fine with me, but only if Mattie mailed her hash. I didn’t want to live two months without it. I took a stand. Mom said it was impossible to mail hash.

“Keep my thermos and mail it in that,” I said. Then I got to camp and loved the food. Willie and Frances, married French chefs from the city, made Poulet au Sauce Supreme, Boeuf en Daube, and Fried Fillet of Sole with capers, tarragon, and sieved egg in the Sauce Tartare. Toast was brushed with clarified butter, then baked in the oven. Royal icing dotted the Galettes Sablées. On visiting days my father would make a formal inspection of the camp kitchen, endearing himself to Willie and Frances, who then gave me extra marzipan roses on my birthday cake—the ultimate bargaining power at Camp Red Wing.

Watching Mattie, I learned the two most important rules of cooking: Patience and Clean as You Go. I also learned that because of my place in our family, I got a full-size bathtub while she got a New York maid’s-room half. I got a big bedroom, while hers was smaller than my mother’s dressing room. The leitmotif of childhood was an ever-burning fury that I had more than Mattie. Accompanying Mom to Ohrbach’s for a new handbag, I grieved to see it cost twenty dollars more than Mattie made a week. Mothers talked about salaries while they sat on the benches in the playground. They kept on eye on their kids in the sandbox and an eye on the mother who might pay a housekeeper more than the going rate. It was made clear that if you got a new housekeeper, you would pay what everybody else was paying or less. That way, no beloved housekeeper would leave you for a better-paying job. It was salary-fixing. A common refrain was, “Don’t ruin it for us.”

I was crazed by the injustice. If Mattie made forty-five dollars a week and she worked five and a half days and she got up at seven and went to bed at eleven, that was fifty-one cents an hour, and when she took the subway to Queens, it was a quarter each way, which meant she had to work an hour just to make enough money to get to and from the beauty parlor. If she bought me peanuts from the machine in the subway, that was ten cents, eleven minutes of hard labor. My mother said Mattie
chose
to wait in the car on road trips when we ate at Howard Johnson’s. When Mattie asked for one Saturday night off a month so she could see her “steady fellow,” my mother, who went out Saturday nights, said, “That would be quite impossible.” The rare times Mattie had a visitor, he came up the back elevator, entered through the back door where the garbage was, and went directly to her dark room.

Mattie had two kinds of breakfasts: leftovers, and when there weren’t any leftovers, Velveeta on a teaspoon dunked in coffee with cream and sugar. She’d sit on a stool with her back against the heating pipes sucking the warm softened cheese. Mattie sailed even-tempered and steady the eighteen years she took care of me. When I was banished from the dinner table and sent to my room, Mattie smuggled in a plate. The time she caught me in bed with a boy, she got a broom and chased him out of the house. She loathed Harry after that. But it was his fault for getting into bed with me, not mine for raising the covers.

Once I made her cry. My parents were on vacation. I hated my coordinated all-pink room with the butterfly wallpaper and matching butterfly spreads. I pulled out the carpet and pried up the tacks. I stripped off the wallpaper, lacquered my faux French bureau white, unscrewed the shutters, and sprayed the headboards black. I took the Long Island Railroad into New York and bought my first desk and talked my grandmother into a pair of army-green bedspreads from Altman’s.

“Oh, no.” Mattie sniffled from the doorway. “Oh, no. Your mother’s gonna
murder
me.” But she didn’t try to stop me, and I knew she would defend me. Mattie was on my side. She was the youngest in her family too. “We’re the underdogs,” she liked to say. She thought it was shameful we wore hand-me-downs. I liked hand-me-downs. I liked clothes with a past. I didn’t like to look primped. Maybe because I couldn’t look primped. The back of my socks wound up under my arches. My hair was berserk. I wanted to move the easy way boys moved. I wanted to bounce and jangle when I walked and not worry about clothes. Pinching my cheeks with rouge on her fingers before I left for a party, my mother would say, “Now don’t be loud!” I wanted to be whatever I was. Was I loud? If I was loud, what was wrong with loud? Hand-me-downs were fine with me. Less to worry about, and weren’t two used blouses better than one new one?

The summer I turned nine Mattie left for her birthplace, Rome, Georgia, where she said the best peaches in the world came from. While she was gone, my mother was thrown from a horse in Central Park. Dad carried her to the Ninety-sixth Street transverse and flagged down a car. Her back was broken. The choice was surgery or lying flat for six weeks. Mom chose flat. She called Mattie to see if Mattie would cut her vacation short and come up. But Mattie had decided to retire. She was going to get false teeth. Why couldn’t she get false teeth in New York?

At least once a day my sister and I saw her walking toward us down the street.

“Look! There’s Mattie!” and we’d both start running. Then we’d get closer, and it wasn’t Mattie.

In Mattie’s place Mom rehired Anna Offerman, who’d been my grandmother’s housekeeper when Mom was growing up. Anna had a heavy German accent, a frizzy white perm, and smelled like old onions. My sister used to fire her twice a day. She called us “Jackass.”