Crazy in the Kitchen (23 page)

And then I remember how, before my mother went into the hospital to die, sick as she was, she cooked meals for my father,
packed them in little plastic containers, labeled each with its contents, froze them. She cooked a lot; she may not have known
that she was dying, but she knew that she would be away for a very long time. I remember how, after my mother died, I called
my father and invited him to dinner, but he tells me he's fine, he's going to have chicken scarpariello for supper.

"Chicken scarpariello," I say. "When did you learn to cook that?"

"I didn't cook it," he says. "Your mother did. You know, that chicken with sausage and peppers that she made that the kids
liked so much."

I wonder whether my father is seeing ghosts. Whether his unexpressed grief is causing him to hallucinate.

"Mom?" I ask.

He hears the horror in my voice. Laughs. Tells me it's the food my mother cooked for him before she died.

I try to imagine what it's like for your wife to die; what it's like to eat the food she's cooked for you before she dies.
It must be like inhaling the air trapped inside a balloon she's blown up and left behind.

Then I remember how, a couple of days after that, I call my father again, invite him to dinner again, how he says no again.
I wonder whether my father is again eating what I've started calling my mother's death food.

But no. A neighbor, Milly the widow from down the block, my mother's old friend, has come to visit him, and she's brought
over a casserole for them to share.

"Beware of widows bearing casseroles," I say, and he laughs. I already know he'll marry Milly, and that's fine with me. He'll
have someone to take care of him, and I won't have to worry.

I want to write about all these things but I keep making trips to the kitchen to check the
biga,
the consistency of the dough (/
have to keep
checking the dough or I'll fuck the whole thing up if the dough rises too much,
I tell myself for the thirtieth or fortieth time), to add the flour, yeast, figs, and nuts to the
biga,
to knead the bread and set it to rise, to heat the oven.

By now I realize that today it will be impossible to write about the trip to the cemetery, about my mother's death food, about
Milly's widow casserole, and I really don't want to write about the cemetery anyway. I want to write about how my father and
I have learned to get along. I've started out in the wrong place. But I have to write. I must keep my appointment with myself.
I can't sabotage my writing. I must provide a good model for my students. I can't use my craziness about food to get in the
way of my work because my craziness about food is supposed to help my work, not harm it.

So, I decide to write about how I'm making the fig nut bread on the day I want to write about going to the cemetery, about
my mother's death food, about Milly's widow casserole. I tell myself that showing the process of writing the piece in the
piece is a good thing. I tell myself I'm postmodern. I tell myself I'm full of shit.

By now, my hands are sticky; my keyboard is sticky; my desk has a little film of flour on it; my bread dough— which sits next
to my computer so I can keep an eye on it while I write— keeps distracting me. And my brand-new cookbook has a grease stain
trailing down the picture of the completed bread, which makes me sad because I've been doing two things at once (violating
this week's primary personal development goal, to focus on one thing at a time), because I've been moving too fast (violating
another personal development goal, to savor the moment and move slowly through life). But, I tell myself, the grease stain
isn't such a bad thing. Because in years to come, it will remind me that there has been this bread, that there has been this
day, and perhaps I will even remember that on the day that I baked this bread I also wrote these words.

I have asked my father if he needs any help, if I can do his shopping, bring over some food. But this resolutely independent
father of mine always says no, he's managing fine, and he enjoys shopping and cooking.

Each week, my father goes to the senior citizens' center in his town and helps cook meals for the "seniors," most of whom
are twenty years younger than he is. He has become known as the Spaghetti Man because no one else who works down there, he
tells me, knows how to cook pasta al dente, the way it should be cooked. He knows his way around a kitchen, a big kitchen.
And he's not afraid to experiment. "I throw in a little of this, a little of that," he says, "and
voila,
we have a meal."

My father still shovels his own driveway, cleans his own house, fixes his own car, repairs his own appliances. Last year,
he fell off a ladder when he was fixing the roof, lost consciousness, wound up in the hospital, pooh-poohed the whole experience,
and was back climbing ladders again as soon as he returned home.

"You gotta present a moving target," he tells me when I ask him why he doesn't hire someone to help him. He believes that
by keeping busy, he will continue to elude death.

Though he won't accept my help, I still feel guilty about my father having to cook for himself, so I show up at his house
with plastic containers filled with food cooked especially for him and Milly. I cook without too much salt, without any saturated
fat. He has a bad heart condition, and we're very grateful that he's lived this long. Still, he's a stubborn old bastard,
refuses to change his diet, says that if he's lived this long eating anything he wants, it's stupid to change now.

"I should have died in the war, should have died in a fire, should have died from my first heart attack— they pronounced me
dead, you know," he says, when I try to persuade him to watch his diet, "but I didn't. Don't worry about me. Only the good
die young."

That he's not young anymore does not seem to cross my father's mind. He lives his life as if it's charmed. For what he says
isn't exaggeration. Although he is not the kind of man who boasts of his past, who tells war stories, I know that he escaped
death many times in the Pacific, that he watched his friends die, that he watched ships go down a few hundred yards from his
ship. When he was a fireman, he eluded death by chance many times. But the closest he came to dying was when I was a teenager
and he was a fire chief and men from his company were fighting a fire in a bowling alley in a nearby town.

The chief in charge of the fire ordered men from my father's company to go down an alley, break open a side door and direct
water inside, an order, my father says, he never would have given.

There was no sign that this fire would be lethal— when they arrived on the scene the firemen saw only a few puffs of smoke,
nothing more. Still, my father's instincts told him this was going to be a bad one. And he was right.

My father followed orders, went down the alley, stopped for a moment and turned to see what was going on behind him, to see
where the rest of his men were. He saw a civilian, an elected official, far too near the alleyway, and he yelled at this man
to move back, to get out of the way.

As soon as his men broke down the door, there was a tremendous explosion; the roof blew into the air; the walls blew out and
collapsed. One wall came down just two feet from my father, crushing five of his men, the men he had been with until he turned
away from them for what couldn't have been more than fifteen, twenty seconds. That pause saved his life. But left him grieving
for a very long time.

I tell my father about Whole Foods, the great new market that has just opened. How it's spacious, with high ceilings and tile
floors, and food so beautifully arranged that shopping becomes an aesthetic experience. How it's right on the Hudson River.
How it sells prepared food: wonderful soups like Harvest Vegetable, beef barley, roasted tomato; roasted chickens; barbecued
spareribs; grilled vege- tables; sauteed chicken breasts; the works. And great bread. How you can buy your lunch there and
eat it at a table overlooking the water.

My father agrees to meet me. Tells me he'll bring along his shopping list. We haven't been together alone in a while, although
I see him every week with his wife, or with my sons and my daughters-in- law.

I suggest we meet, shop, then have lunch. I have vowed that I will protect him from my shopping habits. I will let him choose
anything he wants without making a comment or suggesting that he choose something else, and I will not choose something else
for him.

Still, I plan to show him all the prepared foods. I hope that if he sees what's available, he'll buy something already cooked
and spare himself some work. He's looking very tired lately from doing so much of the household work. But he doesn't. He tells
me he likes trying to replicate the foods his mother used to cook.

We enjoy our times alone together, talking about his past, about my mother, my sister, my grandparents. Until now, I have
been reluctant to hear his stories. But lately I've realized that he won't be alive forever, and I want to know whatever he
can tell me about his life, about the life of my grandparents, before he dies. I want to understand how my life continues
theirs.

So we establish a ritual of having lunch together and revisiting the past. How two people who spent most of their lives fighting
with each other have finally become friends is one of the great miracles of my life. And as we eat, my father tells me stories,
and my father's stories of our family's past break the logjam in my feelings about him.

Recently, I have told him how, when I was a child, he terrified me, have told him how angry I am at how he treated me.

"I never meant to hurt you," he says.

"But how could I know that?" I ask. "I was just a child."

"I'm sorry," he says.

My father fiddles with what's left of his meal. "I'm learning to express my inner feelings," he says. "We're the only ones
left now.

We have to learn how to get along."
To end with this,
I think,
that we have learned to get along.

Today, he tells me how Milly's been forgetting things, how worried he is about her because she won't take her pills and she
sleeps all the time.

"I have to wake her up every day," he says, shaking his head.

"What time does she get up if you don't wake her?" I ask.

"Oh, about nine o'clock," he says, as if this is a very bad thing.

I remember my father pulling the covers off me and my sister on weekends, yelling "Up and at 'em! The early bird gets the
worm!"

"Nine o'clock," I say, "is a perfectly respectable hour for Milly to get up. She's worked hard all her life; she's entitled
to rest whenever she wants to."

When my father was courting Milly, he would drop to one knee and serenade her—" Some Enchanted Evening," "Danny Boy," "Ave
Maria"— until he broke down her resistance to remarrying after twenty years of living alone and doing things her way.

In the years they've lived together, she's asked me many times, "Was your father such a pain in the ass when he lived with
your mother?" I tell her something, not everything, about our lives and ask how she deals with him when he gets nasty. "I
love him. I ignore him. It's easier to be his wife than his daughter," she says.

A fog rises off the Hudson. We can see it through the windows as we eat. "At first," my father says, "I used to get mad about
how Milly was always forgetting things— the food on the stove, the laundry in the dryer, her pills. Now it's better because
I realize it's not her fault."

It has been hard for me to see my father today, though I am gladdened by our conversation. I have watched him walk toward
the store slowly, and he looks as if he is in pain and short of breath; the old jauntiness in his step isn't there, and for
the first time I see how very old he is and I realize that, one day, he is going to die. Still, as I tell him when he joins
me at the table, for an old bastard he's plucky as hell.

My father looks away from me, looks at the Hudson, and his eyes tear. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out his wallet, fiddles
with it, searches in one of its little compartments, retrieves something, and hands it to me across the table. It is my mother's
wedding band.

"Her fingers were bigger than yours," he says, when I hold up my hand to show him how the ring looks. I wonder why my father
is giving me this ring now, for he has cherished it since my mother's death, and I know that it will come to me when he dies.
Is he sicker than he says?

His eyes tear. "You know," my father says, "the older you get, the more you look like your mother."

It's true. There are moments when I glance in the minor and see her face, not mine. When I first noticed this growing resemblance,
I was disconcerted: I'd never wanted to be like my mother. Lately, I see the merging of our faces as a gift, this continuation
of her in me.

My father reaches into his pocket, pulls out his shopping list. I wipe my eyes.

"So," I say, "what do you have to buy?"

He tells me he doesn't have to buy much— some celery, some provolone, a few cans of crushed tomatoes, some garlic, some parsley.

We clean up our places, find a cart, start making our way towards the produce department.

"Your mother," my father says, "now, she was a great cook,"

I want to say that, no, my mother was not a great cook, she was not even a good cook. That my mother, more often than not,
was a really lousy cook. But I am grateful to him for giving me my mother's ring, and it seems important to him to remember
my mother in this way. And so I say, "Yes, I liked her pumpkin pie."

WIPING THE BOWL

Just after my grandmother fell out of bed one morning, tore her nightdress off, and crawled around the floor naked (me, having
come to watch her for a few hours so my mother could do some food shopping; her, refusing to let me help her back into bed;
me, unable to control her or summon help; my small son Jason, witnessing this, terrified), my parents decided that it was
time for my grandmother to be taken to a nursing home, that final stop on the railroad of life's journey.

She had been sick for months, but I was never told what her illness was. At first, she came downstairs each day, doubled over
in pain, cooked a little something for herself, and retreated to her bedroom for the rest of the day. After a while, she couldn't
get out of bed, and my mother took care of her— brought her food, changed her bedding, sponged her down, combed her hair,
emptied her bedpan.

Through these few months, there was a silence in the house that had never been there before. My grandmother was too sick to
fight. My mother was too exhausted. If my grandmother didn't want to eat something my mother had prepared, my mother shrugged
her shoulders, took the food away, and went back downstairs.

So my grandmother was taken to a nursing home, where no one would understand her language, where what she needed would never
be brought to her. She went unwillingly, the old fight resurfacing.

It took four men to subdue her, four men to hold her down, four men to wrestle her out of her bed, four men to strap her onto
a stretcher, four men to take her down the stairs, four men to load her into an ambulance.

All the while she raved in dialect. Told the men that my mother was stealing her money. Sending her away so that she could
take her money from her. Told the men that my mother wasn't her blood. Called for her mother to help her. Called for the saints
to help her. Called for me to help her. But I wasn't there.

The nursing home she went to was not a fancy one with private rooms and a solarium and a music room and a beauty salon to
get your hair done up for company. No. The nursing home my parents sent her to was a bare-bones, piss-smelling, short-staffed
kind of nursing home, run by the county, where the very poor and the very unwanted came to end their lives in giant wards
cared for as well as the overworked, exhausted, underpaid nurses could manage. Which is to say, they were not cared for very
much at all.

My mother said that she did not have the money for that other kind of place. But I didn't believe her. And I was right. My
mother
did
have the money. She had economized all her married life, had bought stocks, had saved thousands and thousands of dollars.
She just didn't want to spend her money on my grandmother.

At the time, I did not have any money— I was in graduate school, with two kids, a husband in medical training, and lots of
debt. Although whether I would have helped my grandmother if I had had the money, I don't really know.

After I went to college, left the house, got married, had children, she faded from my life. When I called home, I never asked
to speak to her. When I returned home for holidays, we exchanged only greetings, never any conversation. Still, my presence,
my family's presence in the house cheered her. She dandled my children on her knee, crooned to them in dialect, played cat's
cradle with them, sat with them while they watched
Sesame Street
on television, kissed the tops of their heads, which she had never done to me or to my sister.

My mother went to see her stepmother almost every day that she was in the nursing home. And she always came home crying because
my grandmother wouldn't eat. She'd call me to tell me how my grandmother was faring, and would say she was upset because the
food in the nursing home was unfamiliar to my grandmother but that there were rules against her bringing my grandmother food.
After a while, my mother started to believe that my grandmother was refusing food to spite her. My mother couldn't let herself
see that my grandmother couldn't eat because she was dying.

"Go see her," my mother said to me after a few months. She was terrified of my grandmother dying, perhaps because having even
this
mother now seemed better than having no mother at all.

And so I went to see my grandmother, carrying carnations for her, on a day when the maple outside the window of her ward blazed
red, although she couldn't see it, because her bed was not near the window, and because she still could not get out of bed.
And on that day, I gave my grandmother a few sips of water to drink, and I fed her applesauce, a food that, so far as I know,
she had never eaten at home.

She didn't eat much, a teaspoon or two, from the small quantity I had dished out into a little bowl. Still, I told myself,
a few teaspoons of something was better than nothing at all.

I could tell that she was near death. But I did not feel anything about this, because I was too busy with my life to let myself
feel anything at all.

I could tell that she was near death because she could not pick her head up from the pillow, could barely lift her arms, and
couldn't speak. Still, she looked at me, and I could tell that she recognized me, and her eyes teared. And I told myself that
my coming here to feed her was a very good thing, and necessary; told myself that these few spoonfuls of nourishment would
prolong her life. Told myself, who hadn't yet been to see her, who wouldn't see her alive again, that it was the least I could
do for her, after all she had done for me. I remembered how she had taught me to bake bread, taught me how to knit. How she
had acted like I was worthy. How she had told me not to pay attention to my mother's criticism. How she had interposed her
body between me and my father.

I told myself that I would come to see my grandmother again, and again and again. That I could make the time for her. Should
make the time for her. But didn't.

When my grandmother was finished eating, weak as she was, she reached for the bowl. It took much effort, this reaching, and
I could not understand at first what she was reaching for, what she wanted, what she needed to do.

I gave her the bowl. She took it from my hand. Held it where she could see it.

And then she took the napkin that I had tucked under her chin to keep her clean. And she wiped the inside of the bowl. She
cleaned the bowl as best she could.

In dying, as in living, she cleaned up after herself, this Southern Italian woman, who wanted no other woman to make tidy
what she had messed.

It was, as I have said, the last time that I saw her. After that, my mother told me, she was in so much pain that she screamed
all the time, disturbing the other women on the ward. So she was given morphine. And more morphine. Enough morphine to ease
her pain. Enough to quiet her. Enough morphine to help her die in peace.

This is what I think about when I remember my grandmother. How she baked her bread. And how she cleaned her bowl. And how
I never thanked her for all that she had done for me.