Stuffed (8 page)

“You Yock-oz.” She’d trudge into our bedroom, brandishing her gray mop like a Valkyrie. “You leef in a peeg-sty!”

I wrote Mattie begging her to come back. “Anna Offerman is poisoning me! HELP!” We tried to make Anna quit by placing scissors on the sofa just before she plopped down. We refused to let her watch Liberace. Anna would turn the dial to the Liberace channel, then slump on the couch with her rough red hands folded on top of her belly. Then my sister and I would take turns jumping up to flip the station. Anna would lurch herself and flip it back. Eventually she’d give up. “Ach! You boat Yock-oz!” If we made Anna miserable enough, we reasoned Mattie would come back to us.

When I was eleven, I left our New York apartment for camp, and when I came home, it was to a new place in the suburbs. As I reached for the knob, the door swung open from inside. And there she was, Mattie! I hurled myself into her. I hugged her and sucked in her smell, part almond from Jergen’s lotion, part bergamot. I buried my face in the bright white perfection of her uniform. She laughed and patted me. A door opens, and the thing you want most in the world is there. This happened more than forty years ago. I can still feel it—the moment I got the thing I thought I could never have.

We never mentioned race. Discussing race would have been “in bad taste.” The words “Negro,” “segregation,” and, God forbid, “colored” were stricken from our vocabulary. “Africa” and “servant” were taboo too. If a guest said “black” within hearing range of Mattie, as in “Churchill called his depression ‘the black dog,’ ” we froze. Our eyes darted wildly until someone changed the subject. If a guest called a housekeeper “maid” or “the girl,” that guest was not invited back. It was a bizarre New York Jewish sensibility that we could somehow protect Mattie from prejudice by never acknowledging there was such a thing as color in the first place. We pretended to be color-blind, and yet my mother rang for Mattie with a crystal bell. Mattie wore a uniform. I’d study her face when Mom jingled her to clear. Mattie did not appear to mind. But I did. I minded big-time. My mother would not like to be rung for. How dare she ring for Mattie?

Three years ago a national magazine asked me to write an essay on someone who’d been important to me. I chose Mattie. The editor phoned after reading the piece.

“We love it!” she said. “I just have a couple of changes. Could you remove the reference to C.O.R.E.? Could you take out her other names and just call her Mattie? Could you delete her birthplace and that bit about giving her a subscription to
Ebony
for Christmas?”

“Why?”

“Our readers don’t want to know she’s black.”

Mattie and I spent fourteen New Year’s Eves together. She was my steady Saturday night date too. Our ritual was Swanson’s TV Turkey Dinners at the bridge table while watching
Route 66, 77 Sunset Strip,
then
Gun-smoke.
I learned about interactive TV from Mattie. “Watch out, Mr. Dillon!” she’d scream. And “Hurry, Chester! He’s got a
gun
!” We threw pillows at the set. That’s why they were called throw pillows. We believed we could influence the outcome. Because of our intimate relationship with the television, I waited for Mel Torme to call me at home. After school he had a show called
Mel Torme and the Mel-Tones.
I loved Mel Torme. He was beautiful but not so beautiful he couldn’t fall in love with me. I wrote our phone number on one of my father’s shirt cardboards and held it up to the TV. Every day while Mel Torme sang, I’d sit in front of the TV holding up “SC.4-3290.” When Mel didn’t call, it broke my heart until I realized the numbers probably looked like mirror-writing to Mel through the screen and he couldn’t read them.

Until I left for college, Mattie woke me for school the same way every day. “Get up!” she’d holler at the foot of the stairs, and when I didn’t, she’d drop a cold, wet washcloth on my face and laugh. Then I’d sit down to her idea of a balanced breakfast: two eggs sunnyside up, six rashers of crisply fried bacon, two pieces of buttered toast, a four-ounce glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, and an eight-ounce glass of milk. In the kitchen, she’d be eating Velveeta or leftovers, congealed spaghetti, chicken necks.

“Why are you eating that for breakfast?” I’d ask.

“My stomach doesn’t know what time it is,” she’d say, or “You think fish and onions and cream are any better?”—a slur on pickled herring.

Then she’d send me off to school with a ham and Swiss, carrot and celery sticks, fruit, and cookies. When I was sick, she cooked “Spit in the Ocean,” an egg fried in a circle cut out of a piece of white bread, a.k.a. “Toad in the Hole.” She introduced me to the wonder of peanut butter and mayonnaise on rye. She didn’t rat when I palmed string beans and brussels sprouts down my underpants to flush away later.

When Mattie turned seventy-five, she retired again. This time she didn’t want to, but Mom was ready for an invisible housekeeper, the kind that speaks a foreign language and doesn’t expect conversation. Mattie found an apartment on Edgecombe Avenue in her best friend Nita’s building. The place was so small the bed touched three walls. Then she got another job, cooking for a Mr. Ollendorf of the Ollendorf Art Moving Company. I’d gone to college with his grandson, Tommy Ollendorf, a smart, well-mannered guy, and wasn’t surprised when Mattie told me she liked Mr. Ollendorf. He was lucky to get her thoughtful care.

When Mattie’s legs gave out and she couldn’t climb two flights of subway stairs twice a day, she retired permanently. Her days were spent following the sun on the benches of Morning-side Heights. Mattie always knew where to go for warmth. I’d send money and bring food. She liked tuna, bananas, and bourbon. We’d call each other. She would tell me her dreams. In one of them she saw me give birth “to a big, screaming boy-child.” Nine months later Peter, weighing 8 pounds 12 ounces, was born.

Mattie died in the bathtub. She was eighty-two. Nita, whom she calls Bonehead, phones to tell me. I’ve known Nita for years, and we make a date to meet. She gives me two black dolls that belonged to Mattie. Chi-Chi and Carmen are dressed like Carmen Miranda, with gold hoops in their ears and fruit on their heads. Nita gives me a patchwork quilt Mattie made too. I used to sit next to Mattie on her bed and watch her piece a quilt. She’d have two brown paper bags: One was greasy and full of Spanish subway peanuts she liked to flick in my mouth. The other bag was stuffed with triangles of cloth she’d pull out and squint at. She had the habit of adjusting her glasses by wiggling her nose.

I am holding a quilt Mattie made. The batting is coming out in five places. There are rips and open seams. It doesn’t matter. I take it to Camille Dalphond Cognac, founder of the Quilt Restoration Society in Hillsdale, New York.

“Can you fix this?” I ask.

She unfolds the quilt on a large table. She gasps.

“Sometimes in this business you think you’ve seen everything,” she says. “And then you see a quilt like this.”

“What do you mean?”

She thinks for a moment. “Whoever made this was obviously very happy.”

“You can tell that?”

“It has joy all over it.”

“What else can you tell?”

“There’s a folk-art element. It’s a variation on Grandmother’s Flower Garden—three hexagons, added leaves plumbed on a square. The fabrics are late thirties and forties. It was made from the scraps of the scraps, housedresses, pajamas. Look”—she points to a place where an edge is cleverly stitched to compensate for a crooked piece next to it—“it doesn’t line up. It’s called ‘Make it fit.’ ”

“I’m surprised,” I say. “The woman who made this was a perfectionist.”

“For pleasure,” Camille says, “we do what we would not do in the front parlor.”

I ask Camille how much Mattie’s quilt will cost to fix.

“There are multiple-task activities on this quilt,” she says. “It’ll cost about two hundred dollars. But,” she adds, “if you want a quilting lesson, I could teach you how to fix it yourself for fifteen dollars, and you’ll be prepared for any quilt emergency.”

“You can teach me how to fix it?”

“I can teach a Mack truck driver in under an hour.”

A few months later I come back with the quilt. Camille reexamines it. “I have a quiet understanding of what’s going on here.”

Camille threads a needle. She observes my running stitch and backstitch and shows me how to improve them. She teaches me the ladder stitch. “It becomes invisible.” When by mistake I sew a piece on inside out, she says, “I give absolution for terrible things.” We spend the day together sewing and talking and laughing, and I tell her about Mattie and she tells me about her sons and I think, How wonderful quilting bees must have been, women coming together and making something beautiful and useful, that particular flow of conversation that happens when your hands and eyes are mindfully engaged.

I sew through Mattie’s needle holes, replace some batting. It feels like spending time with Mattie again. Camille gets out a clear plastic bag. Carefully she folds the quilt.

“Can I come back if I run into trouble?”

“You’ll be all right,” she says.

“I will?”

“When in doubt, follow Mattie.”

I have only three photos of Mattie. When you pointed a camera at her, she put her hand in front of her face. One shows Mattie clapping at my sister’s wedding. One was shot on the beach at Brill Island—Aunt Dorothy’s place on Schroon Lake—where Mattie liked to fish for sunnies. In the third photo Mattie is five. Three neat children surround their long-necked mother in her black floor-length dress. Everyone looks serious except for Mattie, who looks sad. She’d begged her mother to comb her hair grown-up style before the picture was taken, and her mother had refused. The photo was taken right before Mattie’s father died. When I asked her about her childhood, she replayed the same stories each time: How she cried when her mother did her hair before the picture. How, when walking along the top of a fence after she’d been forbidden to, she fell headfirst into a steaming heap of dung. How she couldn’t eat duck, because she’d had to kill them. How her preacher step-father had sent her to church with the family picnic and somehow during the service her hand kept creeping under the lid and picked all the fry off the fried chicken and all the icing off the cake. How her mother died when she was ten, and she went to live with her grandfather in Riverdale, Georgia. How he sent Mattie to work in the post office and kept her salary, so she ran away to Atlanta with a girlfriend. How she married cruel men. How she never had children. “God just didn’t mean for some people to have them.” Then she’d laugh and say, “You’re my child!
Now!
”

I don’t know if Mattie and I ever talked about anything more profound than how to get bubbles out of cake batter once it’s poured into a tin or not to use Brillo on Formica. I wish we had. Regardless, she’s with me. I have three recurrent dreams. Two are bad: First, I am losing my teeth in a social situation and have to spit them out like watermelon seeds to keep from choking. Second, I go back to college, but no one knows me and there’s no place to live and my old boyfriend I was horrible to couldn’t care less. My third recurrent dream is good: It’s about a door. I am in a room, and suddenly there’s a door I’ve never seen before. I open it and something wonderful I couldn’t have imagined is on the other side. Sometimes it’s the Garden of Eden. Or an extra bedroom. Once it was a waterfall. When it happened in real life, it was Mattie. The four letters and birthday card I have from her I keep in my bureau tied with a red ribbon. “Dear Patty,” one goes. “Just a note to say hello and that I am doing fine. It’s still very warm here how is it there? How are you doing in school good I hope. Have you cleaned up your room yet I know you have not. I miss you very much. Hope to see you soon. What your new boyfriend’s name. Thank you for your letters. Thank your mother for the lovely card. Tell her I am doing fine. I will have my teeth before Christmas. Please write me soon. Love, Mattie.”

MATTIE’S CHOCOLATE
¹
CAKE

2 sticks butter, at room temperature
½ box powdered sugar, sifted
3 eggs
2 capfuls vanilla extract
1½ cups flour, measured AFTER sifting
1 teaspoon baking soda

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Grease an 8-inch tube pan 4 inches high with
butter and dust with flour.

Fluff butter with a rotary beater GOING ONLY
IN ONE DIRECTION THE WHOLE TIME.

Add powdered sugar a little at a time to the
butter.

Add eggs, one at a time.

Add vanilla.

Add flour mixed with baking soda.

Spatula the mix into the tube pan, smooth it,
and bounce the pan against the counter until
the batter is level. DO NOT OPEN OVEN DOOR
TO CHECK CAKE FOR FIRST HALF HOUR.
Then stab every ten minutes with the paper end
of a match till it comes out clean.

MATTIE’ S CHOCOLATE ICING

1½ cups granulated sugar
1 cup water
2 double squares unsweetened chocolate
¾ stick butter, room temperature
2 capfuls vanilla extract

Mix sugar and water together over high heat in
covered pot. Boil until syrup strings.

Melt chocolate without direct heat.

Stir chocolate into sugar, and turn down heat
for 3 minutes. Stir the whole time.

When mixture turns gray, stir in butter.

Add vanilla and BEAT WITH SPOON.

Add a little milk or more butter if it looks too
thick.

Knife icing onto cake.