Domestic Affairs (3 page)

Steve traveled light into our marriage. (Few childhood possessions remain. His parents moved often while he was growing up, and always, when they moved, held yard sales to dispose of excess baggage.) I move through life weighted down with possessions: every Barbie doll I ever played with, and all of their outfits. Junior-high poems. Letters from camp. My collection of fifty-odd salt and pepper shakers. The family Christmas ornaments, including a virtually shattered, nearly forty-year-old egg with a Santa face drawn on that my mother made in the first year of her marriage to my father. (When my parents divorced, the Christmas decorations all came to me.) Like her, and like her mother, I cannot bear to part with things.

Still, it occurs to me, it isn’t things, chiefly, that will be my inheritance (or my bequest). When I am most likely to think of my mother, when my mother is most likely to think of her mother (and when my children will be most apt to think of me, I suspect), is in the kitchen. Baking. Baking pies, especially.

I make a good pie crust. I make pies fast, and often; my freezer’s full of last summer’s berries, and I’m never without a backup can of Crisco on the pantry shelf. At six o’clock on a Thursday afternoon, if I suddenly get the idea to invite a couple of friends over for dessert, pie is what I’ll bake; forty-five minutes later I’m ready, and all the guests need to do is maybe pick up the whipping cream on their way over. I particularly like the moment when I take the pie out of the oven and set it on the table, cut the first slice, watch the steam rise.

Later, as we’re sitting with our coffee, picking bits off the edges of the crust to straighten it, or forking up stray raspberries from the bottom of the pan, someone is likely to ask for my pie crust recipe. I could write it down for them, of course, but the truth is, there’s no such thing as a recipe for good pie crust. There are the novelty crusts, made with cream cheese or spun up in a Cuisinart. There are the classic debates—vegetable shortening or butter?—and there are state-of-the-art tools: rolling pins you fill with ice cubes, acrylic slabs on which to roll out the dough. But really, the secret to good pie crust is all in the hands, and not something any cookbook I’ve ever read has properly conveyed. I guess it must be possible to make good pie crust without having had a mother who makes good pie crust, whose mother before her made good pie crust. It’s just a little hard to picture.

I use one of my mother’s rolling pins when I make a pie, and a 1940s Pyrex dish of a weight and design she has always claimed superior to modern equivalents, and a wooden-handled pastry blender meant to duplicate hers. In my mind my mother is inseparably linked with her pies—the smell, the taste, the score of little rules she laid out for me long ago, beginning with how she assesses the baking day’s climatic conditions, right on through to the unthinkableness of serving a cold pie or failing to have whipped cream or vanilla ice cream on hand to accompany it.

It’s sometimes a mixed blessing, this maternal heritage of flaky pie crust and soup from scratch. I remember a day, a few years back, when my friend Kate was up from New York visiting for the weekend, and we sat together on stools at the kitchen table while she sipped a beer and I made pie crust. She took notes, said she’d never been able to bake a decent pie, and when I asked about her mother’s cooking (because therein hangs the tale) she laughed, describing a childhood full of cold cuts and canned tuna.

We had spent the earlier part of that day climbing a nearby mountain—she and the man she eventually married, my husband, our daughter and I. There had been a moment, coming back down, when we were sitting in a grove of trees and Kate’s boyfriend, Greg, had picked her up, was throwing pine needles in her hair and down her shirt, and the two of them were rolling down the mountain, while I (in that early stage of pregnancy when one looks merely plump) sat watching, bearing a backpack filled with the remains of a seven-course picnic lunch. And our daughter, just three (but linked to me, it sometimes seems, directly through the nerve endings), put her arms around me and started singing “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah” with a faintly forced mirth designed to be contagious.

My friend—aged thirty-one, plenty of love affairs, and no children or pies behind her—swims a mile a day and plays championship tennis. Having had a mother far less domestically defined than my own—one who had positively neglected her children, it often seemed, from my friend’s stories—left my friend freer than I, in some ways, to define her self. At that moment, in my kitchen, she seemed to me, suddenly, to be not so much lacking a crucial piece of knowledge about cooking as she was in possession of a precious and enviable ignorance. She wanted to learn how to make pie crust like mine, she said. And I felt hesitant to teach her. Not out of any proprietary sense about my pie crust, only a reluctance to see such a free spirit with a ten-pound bag of flour on her shelf.

It should be possible, of course, to know how to make good pies without necessarily having to produce them. But in my case, at least, the one goes with the other. My domestic training brought with it a certain bondage to domesticity. If my mother is, in some sense, defined for me by her pies, well, so am I (not to my husband or my friends, only to myself) too much defined by what comes out of my oven. I can’t even say I’d choose another woman’s life over my own: The truth is, I like and feel at home in kitchens, I enjoy stitching doll clothes and sewing colored plastic animal buttons on children’s cardigans—and certainly I love to cook. What I don’t like is the sense I have, sometimes, that this was not so much a course I chose as the route laid out for me from earliest childhood, and one I have to alert myself to avoid laying out for my daughter. We spend some of our happiest times baking together. She has her own cookie cutters and a scaled-down pie pan and rolling pin, and already she knows some things about pie crust a person won’t find in
The Joy of Cooking.
She has heard my running commentary on the process often enough that she can, and does, instruct her brother.

The danger comes when a person invests too much of her identity in her pie crust (or her sewing, or, I suppose, her backhand), so that without those performances, at the stove or on the tennis court, she ceases to exist. I’m getting better, but it’s hard for me, still, to put a simple meal on the table for friends, or (as my husband regularly urges me) to buy a birthday cake or simply cut up a pineapple for dessert—which would allow me to spend more time swimming and rolling down mountainsides, for sure.

I have another friend, Betty, whose mother died when she was very young, and her father not long after that—leaving her, at around age ten, an orphan whose real life resembled pretty closely the orphan dramas I loved to act out with my dolls when I was that age. Foster homes, brothers and sisters wrenched apart, cardboard suitcases, a pair of socks for Christmas, and birthdays passing altogether unnoticed. No steaming pies on the tables of her childhood, no mother brushing floury hands on her apron. My friend asks me, now, how it is that I make that good pie crust, and I say I’ll show her.

What Betty had to do was piece together, from a hundred different women, and men too, a thousand little ways of doing things: which direction you put the toilet paper on the roll (the loose sheet in, or out); how you thread a needle, treat a burn; the rhymes you recite as you bounce a baby on your knee. I learned them all in a single kitchen, on one lap, at one woman’s side. Sometimes, as a result, her stamp upon me seems so indelible it’s hard to be as separate and new a person as I’d like. And still I teach my children the recipe for pie crust I learned twenty-five years ago, and my mother twenty-five years before that: 2 cups of flour to 1 teaspoon of salt, 2/3 cup shortening, ice water strictly by the feel of things. And that’s not the half of it.

My father was many things in his life. The youngest son of strict British missionaries, born in India, raised to believe the Bible was the one book worth reading. He was an artist. (And to his missionary parents that constituted a sin.) He was a radio announcer who courted my mother by reading poetry to her over the airwaves of Canada. After my parents married—and he had a family to support—he was a teacher who painted only on weekends and late at night, in our attic. He was fifty-one years old when I was born—a man who’d always claimed he never wanted children. He loved us with fierce, proud, and utter devotion.

My father was a lover of the outdoors who took my sister and me hiking and sketching nearly every weekend of our childhood, and always (to our mortification) carried a walking stick, in the best British tradition. He would sometimes raise his stick and point it dramatically at some bird or cloud formation, commanding us to freeze and observe. “I see it,” I would say, impatient. No, really look, he would tell me. And there we would stand, for whole minutes at a time, until he put down his stick and we could move on.

One day, walking across a field full of cows, I was attacked by a bull (or maybe just a large cow), and my father beat that cow so hard his stick broke. I have always remembered that day, not only because it was so scary (the animal looming over me with its hot breath and its swatting tail), but because that was just about the only time I can remember when I felt as if it was my father who took care of me, and not the other way around.

My father was an alcoholic. The word was never spoken in our house in all the years of my growing up. (Other words we avoided: Liquor. Drunk. Vodka.) We lived with the myth of my father’s delicate digestion, his artistic temperament, his tendency toward moodiness. If my father was tilted on his axis, it was our job (my mother’s, my sister’s and mine) to shift the rest of the universe so everything appeared to be in place. Enormous as that task was, it seemed more possible than changing him.

Now I know that’s a classic pattern in alcoholic families. Back then, I didn’t believe there were any other families in the world like mine. I spent hour after hour, watching reruns of
Father Knows Best
and
Leave It to Beaver,
confessing in my diary how much I wished I had a father like the ones I saw on TV. Someone who’d sit in a La-Z-Boy rocker and wear aftershave, instead of careening across our living room floor, conducting a scratched record of Mozart horn concertos in the middle of the night.

My father was my terrible secret. And it wasn’t just the midnight telephone calls he used to make or wild drives down the wrong lane of Main Street, or the unpredictable tirades against unsuspecting boyfriends or repairmen. My other, and much worse, secret (I believed) was that I had failed. I couldn’t make my father happy. If I could only be good enough, smart enough, funny enough, kind enough, he wouldn’t go up to our attic and take out the vodka. It was up to us, to me, to save him. And we—I—just couldn’t do it.

My father’s drinking shaped my view of him in all sorts of ways, of course. I knew I couldn’t count on him. I worried about him all the time. And I knew he would embarrass me. (Calling up my English teacher to rail at the mediocre poem she’d assigned us to study. Asking my sixteen-year-old boyfriend to give him a definition of Beauty.) The one thing I never did was to stop loving him. You don’t blame an alcoholic for getting drunk any more than you blame a pneumonia sufferer for running a fever. The blame is all with the doctor, who cannot make him well.

So the more my father floundered, the more I rescued, and the more I rescued, the more he floundered. And always, always, always, I worried about him, and always I held out the hope (like the King and Queen, parents of the infant Sleeping Beauty, burning every spinning wheel in the kingdom to keep her from pricking her finger) that if I could just get rid of every bottle, hide every pair of car keys, take him on enough walks, he wouldn’t drink any more. I might just as well have tried to hold back the tide.

When I was nineteen, and safely gone from home, my mother gave up and ended what all the rest of us had always imagined to be a marriage that would last (however unhappily) forever. A wife can divorce a husband, after all. Even if a child can’t divorce a parent.

There came a point, though, when I stopped trying to rescue my father—not because he was getting better, but because things looked so bad that there seemed no hope at all. I thought there was nothing more I could do to save him. He was seventy-five years old. He had no home, no money. His health was failing fast, and I thought he would die soon.

Instead, he got himself to Alcoholics Anonymous, and he got sober. He packed up the paints and paintings he’d put aside more than forty years earlier and headed back to Canada, where he’d lived as a young man. He lived five good years there, before a painting trip to Alaska laid him up with pneumonia that locked his joints, made it impossible for him to paint, and sent him off into one last, self-destructive round of vodka drinking, from which he never recovered. Nine months pregnant with my second child, I got a middle-of-the-night phone call, telling me my father was dying. I felt violently ill then and began to shake and lay down on our bed and didn’t know, until the moment Charlie’s head appeared, that it wasn’t simply my father’s death my body was registering after all. I had grown so used to thinking of my father as my chief source of pain. Lo and behold, this time it was my son. (Who came out, not dark like my daughter and me, but blond-haired and blue-eyed, like his grandfather.)

My father’s death, and my son’s birth, freed me, I think, to look at the man without guilt, or frustration, or embarrassment, or regret over all he never could give me. I think of my father very often, of course: sometimes when I hear a particular bird call, or catch sight of an interesting cloud formation, sometimes when I spot a field of cows. I hear him quoting me poetry or a line from the Bible, or instructing me on the correct cultivation of tomato plants. I hear him railing at mediocre art, immoral politics, and the way you can never find Scotch tape, when you need it. I think with regret of my loneliness, all those years not knowing the world was filled with alcoholic parents, and their children trying desperately to save them. And I grieve over how great his misery must have been—loving us, and knowing what his drinking cost us, and having to go out and buy another bottle anyway.