Blue Plate Special (10 page)

Without my father’s child-support checks, we were suddenly very poor. Before, we’d been on the edge, but able to get by, but now my mother’s worries about money made her serious and quiet and abstracted. The house felt dark and sad.

Then the head of the psych department at ASU threatened to cut or at least decrease my mother’s stipend. At one psych department party at someone’s house with a swimming pool, she sat with the department head and his administrator at a table while we all played in the swimming pool, laughing and paddling around together, three little girls.

“Cute kids,” said the department head.

My mother was silent for a brief instant. Then she said, looking him in the eye, “They’re the ones who will suffer if you cut my funding, you know.”

Her funding wasn’t cut. But we still struggled. One day, an envelope containing two hundred dollars in cash arrived in the
mail, addressed to my mother. We didn’t know whom it was from. It was a big help, of course, but the anonymity of the gift felt ominous somehow. Everything felt ominous.

Our neighborhood was turning seedy. Wildermuth had changed. My friends Debbie and Beverly and Shelly Renee had all moved away, and now there were strange kids on the street, kids we didn’t know, older kids. Adolescence was suddenly in full swing on our street: the boys had faint mustaches and muscles; the girls had breasts, wore makeup. Hormones raged, teen psychodramas and sexual games; no one paid any attention to us skinny little girls. Our neighborhood felt even rougher and wilder. Our family was suddenly isolated there.

Early in the spring, a tall blond young man approached my mother after a classical music concert in Phoenix and told her, as an opening line, that he wanted to take care of her. He seemed earnest and kind and trustworthy. He was also handsome, sexy, and cultured. His name was Jim Christensen. He was the first man my mother had been with in any serious way since she’d left my father, so we got to meet him. He came over to pick her up for dates and tried to engage me, a ten-year-old girl, by tossing a ball back and forth and asking about school, as if he’d read a textbook on making conversation with your date’s kids. I thought he was overly eager and boring, but he was nice to us. He was nice to our mother.

I remember one night when my mother was getting dressed up to go dancing with Jim; she put on a slinky hot-orange halter dress and strappy hot-yellow high-heeled sandals and a chunky bead necklace. She looked so beautiful, so tan and strong and sexy, that I swooned and threw myself at her, kissing her neck over and over.

It was so clear to me, I could even have articulated it at the time: I was madly in love with my mother, and I was losing her to a man. Before Jim came along, on Friday nights, I got to stay up after my sisters went to bed to watch
Sonny & Cher
with my
mother, in her bed, just the two of us, laughing and chatting during commercials and sometimes, for a special treat, watching
The Tonight Show
—I was my mother’s standing Friday night date, and it was easily the highlight of my week. Now those Friday night dates were Jim’s, and I watched our TV shows with the babysitter.

Late in the spring of 1973, Jim moved from his apartment into our house on Wildermuth. I was not wild about this, even though we immediately felt safer with him around, and he adored all of us. And he was a catch: he was an architect, he dressed elegantly, loved jazz and classical music, smoked a pipe with Borkum Riff tobacco, and drove a Peugeot. He had a neatly trimmed beard. He drank a lot of wine, but he never got violent, no matter how much he drank.

And he liked to cook. The first time he made steaks for us, I came dashing into the kitchen demanding to know what that amazing smell was. It turned out to be garlic, sautéing with celery and onions while the steaks broiled. I stood by the stove, inhaling the smell as if it were a revelation.

And then we left Wildermuth. After my mother finished her course work and internship, she was offered a job as the school district psychologist in Glendale, on the other side of Phoenix from us. Jim, whom we now called Dad, had some money from the sale of a house he owned in Tucson, so they started looking for a house to buy together to be closer to her job. They found one on West San Miguel Avenue in Phoenix, and at the end of December, we drove away behind a packed-full moving truck. I felt nothing but relief: we were moving somewhere so much better, and life was going forward, and anyway, change was always an adventure.

ANADAMA BREAD

My mother often made this molasses and cornmeal bread. The story behind its name, as she told it, was that a husband whose wife, Anna, had just left him made a batch of bread in a fit of fury, and as he kneaded, he muttered, “Anna, damn ’er. Anna, damn ’er.”

I used to wolf down almost half a loaf of this dark, sweet, soft bread straight out of the oven. I would jaggedly cut into the steaming-hot loaf and slather each piece in margarine and honey and chew it with ecstatic eye flutters and sighs, the kiddie version of a swoon, standing by the cutting board until I could eat no more. Then I drank a big glass of milk, pouring it down my throat
.

Grease a large mixing bowl with 2 tablespoons vegetable oil and set aside. Dissolve 2 packages dry yeast in ½ cup lukewarm water and set aside. In another large bowl, combine 2 cups milk, 1 cup yellow cornmeal, ⅔ cup molasses, 3 tablespoons melted butter, and 1½ teaspoons salt. Add 4 cups of flour and the yeast mixture and stir to form a dough. Add 3–4 more cups of flour a bit at a time, stopping when the dough becomes stiff enough to knead. Turn dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead until it’s smooth and elastic, about 10 minutes.

Place the dough into the greased bowl, turning to coat, then cover with a clean dish towel and let it rise until doubled in bulk—about 1½ hours. Gently punch the dough down, then let it rest for 10 minutes. Shape the dough into 3 loaves, then place them into three greased 9-by-5-inch loaf pans. Let them rise until just about doubled, then bake at 350 degrees until browned and cooked through, 35 to 45 minutes. Invert loaves to cool onto a wire rack. Eat piece after piece, slathered in butter and honey, standing at the counter.

FARMERS FRITTERS

On many Friday nights, our mother whipped up a batch of thin, crisp, tangy-sweet cottage cheese pancakes. She used to put her huge rectangular electric skillet in the middle of the table, and my sisters and I sat around it while she made fritters in batches, sliding them around onto everyone’s plates. While we ate stacks of them with homemade applesauce and Aunt Jemima syrup, we told a story, going around the table, with the sliding glass door open to the patio and a warm breeze making the candles flicker. Someone started the story, and then we took turns continuing it until it was finished
.

The original recipe was written in our aunt Aillinn’s handwriting on an index card, with parenthetical additions by our mother:

Place first six ingredients in bowl and beat well with rotary beater. Stir in flour. Drop by tablespoons on greased griddle. Serve with butter and hot syrup. Serves 4.

Although I didn’t realize it yet, the era of blue plate specials was over, and so were those golden (to me, anyway) years of being just the four of us girls, all together against the world. Now, my mother had a grueling, stressful seventy-five-hour-per-week job, and she still had to write her dissertation. She was gone from early morning until late evening, and when she came home, she was tired and preoccupied and busy.

Also, her relationship with Jim was never, not even at the beginning, the fun, romantic partnership she’d had with my father. She was with Jim for security and companionship; it was obvious to me even then that this was no grand passion for her, although it was for him. Where my father had been dynamic and intelligent and charismatic, Jim was passive and weak willed and devoted—in other words, boring.

To make matters worse, he was laid off from his job shortly after we moved; the recession hit architectural firms along with everyone else. After he was fired, instead of tootling off in his Peugeot every morning, wearing a tie, trailing pipe smoke, he became a constant, needy, fretting presence around the house. He was too eagerly interested in our lives, asking us kids questions that seemed designed to “get to know us.” He laughed too hard at our impromptu, over-the-top, silly variety shows, picked up on our private jokes a little too quickly, and repeated them a little too much. He was obviously trying hard
to fit into the family. He flat-out adored my mother, and it was not hard to see that he loved having stepkids. He’d asked us to call him “Dad” right off the bat, as soon as he moved in with us. But I was embarrassed for him; I tried to humor him, to give him what he seemed to need from me, to be kind to him. But I didn’t respect him. He struck me as pathetic, no matter how hard I tried not to think of him that way. It wasn’t fair. He was everything my father hadn’t been—gentle, fully present, doting. But being around Jim made me miss my father.

I also missed my mother now. I felt shortchanged, unfairly and childishly. I couldn’t understand why she had let Jim into our house and lives and family. What was the point of him? He took so much energy. I had never been demanding or needy with her. I was always her supporter, cheerleader, shoulder, ear, ally, and champion. I kept my own needs and feelings far away from our equation. I was lucky, I knew, whereas my own mother had had a poetically tragic childhood she’d had to overcome. I knew her story by heart; it was my favorite childhood fairy tale.

Now my stepfather was my competition for her attention, and in my opinion, he was totally unworthy. He had upset the balance of our foursome. This was my mother’s fault. I blamed her squarely. And I suddenly felt taken for granted.