Life From Scratch (10 page)

I knew he’d really settled in when he stopped calling Mom. Sometime before Christmas, it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard her voice in a while.

“Do you think we should call Mom again?” I asked hesitantly.

His eyes flashed darkly, and his right hand clenched. He looked at me a moment, then gave me a big push. I fell back against the wall. Tears filled both our eyes, but before any slipped down his face, he turned on his heel and shut himself in his bedroom.

Though I didn’t dare bring up Mom again, I still wanted to hear her voice. After Michael finally left for karate class, I slipped over to the phone in the hallway outside his room. Though I hadn’t memorized her number, I tried a few times to punch the right ones into the phone. Each time I was wrong. I called 411, but her number was unlisted. There was nothing else to do.

That was the end of it.

Increasingly, Michael locked up his pain inside his room. Toni once told me she used to hear him crying in there. When she asked him what was wrong, he simply said he missed Mom. I’ve learned over the years that a closed bedroom door can reveal a broken heart as easily as it hides one. By then it seemed Michael had resigned himself to our new lot, in which clothes didn’t come from the thrift store and we had our own rooms for the first time in our lives.

Where we had a
father
.

As we found out, having a father meant leaving muddy shoes at the back door, cleaning our rooms, and playing a pickup game of ball in the backyard. It meant stern scoldings, but it also meant belly laughs and high fives. We called Pierre “Papa,” just as his daughters did. The name felt easy, new. Michael soaked up every word he said and was desperate to impress him. On Saturday afternoons, Michael followed Pierre around the house, giving him mock karate chops to the back of his knee and telling him knock-knock jokes. On Sundays, he liked to slip Bibles on the pew behind Pierre when we stood in church. Michael laughed until he cried when Pierre sat on them, honking like a distressed goose.

Pierre worked long hours and went on lots of business trips, so having a father also meant missing him for days or weeks at a time.

Patricia was a fixture in her enormous kitchen. When I tried to call her Mama, the name stuck like glue in the back of my throat. Michael couldn’t do it, either. For a while, we just avoided calling her anything at all: It was “excuse me,” and “um …” and “hey.” When she picked up on our avoidance, she suggested we try calling her “Aunt Patricia,” but I scrunched up my face trying to say it. In a wounded huff, she said, “Just call me Patricia .”

From then on, they were Papa and Patricia, though no one seemed particularly happy about the arrangement.

When Patricia wasn’t shuttling us from activity to activity, she stood alone at the kitchen counter, head down, chopping, stirring, kneading, and pounding. Then she’d slide over to the stove and simmer, stew, braise, and roast.
A Prairie Home Companion
ping-ponged through the enormous house, along with a cacophony of clattering cupboards, jingling silverware, and rattling dishes. Patricia’s laugh was big and shrill, like a rogue church bell, and rang out in time with the jokes on the radio show.

On any given day, breakfast could be a scramble of eggs, lacy-edged French toast, or bottomless bowls of cereal. Cartons of milk and juice stood at attention each morning. Even weeknight dinners were three-course affairs. Patricia prepared feasts with garlic-roasted chicken, Brussels sprouts blistered with thyme and rosemary, a giant salmon fillet in an overcoat of hollandaise, and béchamel-layered lasagna. Sometimes Patricia made more exotic fare, too, like stewed rabbit or braised endives, and she wasn’t above adding several tendrils of bitter frisée to her salads. But it was her hefty ratatouilles that I couldn’t get enough of. Each bite was at once sweet and savory, nutritious and indulgent. Even seconds weren’t enough; I always took thirds.

Ratatouille

The key to ratatouille is the layering of flavor. A proper French cook browns each ingredient until the skin darkens agreeably, tasting of fire, garlic, and salty olive oil. Most popular in the south of France, around Nice
, ratatouille
actually means “to toss food together.” In this recipe, as with so many, don’t get hung up on cooking times. Just cook until the food is sweet and the appetite whets—an hour or so from start to finish
.

3 tablespoons olive oil, plus ¼ cup

1 large onion, chopped

1 red pepper, cut in 1-inch pieces

1 yellow pepper, cut in 1-inch pieces

1 teaspoon fresh thyme, chopped

Generous pinch fresh rosemary needles, chopped

6 cloves garlic, sliced

4 Roma tomatoes, chopped

1 pound zucchini, sliced into half-moons

1 smallish eggplant (1 to 1½ pounds), cubed

Salt and pepper

Heat a large Dutch oven or pot over medium heat. Add 3 tablespoons olive oil. Cook onions until deep golden and the home smells sweet. Add the peppers and continue cooking until softened. Add herbs, garlic, and tomatoes. Reduce heat and let bubble gently.

In a large skillet over medium-high heat, fry eggplant in remaining oil. Stir into the onion mixture when brown. Do the same for the zucchini. Once everything is in the large pot, season with salt and pepper, cover and bubble 15 more minutes, until all the ingredients are tender. Serve hot or room temperature with crusty bread.

Enough for 4

Though she was American, Patricia’s cooking style showed an in-depth knowledge of French cookery that she absorbed from Pierre’s family. In many ways she reminded me of Julia Child, both in what she made and how removed she seemed from the rest of us. It was as though a screen separated her world from ours. Whenever I’d wander into the kitchen to see what she was up to, she ushered me back out with a cheery refrain: “The kitchen’s no place for a child! Go find something
fun
to do!”

I heard from Toni that Patricia’s mother had died after falling off the roof of their tenement when Patricia was still in high school. So Patricia cared for her little brother and kept house to help her father. Other than the certificate course she took with my mother at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Patricia didn’t go on to higher education. In the 1980s, even as women flooded the workforce, looking down on those who stayed home with their children, Patricia resolved that her job would be the cooking and cleaning, so that we kids could focus on our studies and get an education. Though her daughters would go on to have careers in medicine, linguistics, and neuroscience, none cook much.

But I wanted to cook. I
needed
to cook. Mom had raised me with the implicit understanding that cooking is the answer to all life’s vicissitudes—not just the antidote to boredom, but also a way to ward off the darker realities of grief, separation, and loneliness. If I could just get my hands on a ball of dough or a pot to stir, I could work my way through this new life and be OK. And like a grieving spouse who sleeps in the shirt of a lost loved one, I thought that by cooking—handling ingredients again, breathing in their aroma as they bubbled—I could somehow be reunited with my mother again.

It would take two more decades to admit to myself that there was another reason I wanted to cook in Atlanta: I was desperate to connect with Patricia. Whether or not I could call her “Mama,” for all intents and purposes, she was my mother now. I needed her.

Patricia reached out in her own way, taking me clothes shopping or organizing elaborate birthday parties for me, but nothing I could say would convince her to let me help in the kitchen, and I didn’t know how to tell her why it mattered so much. Sometimes I’d wander into that giant room while the rest of the house slept and run my fingers along the oak cabinets, wondering what treasures laid inside. I missed the feeling of shaping the dough into whatever I wanted—that feeling of creativity, control, and, above all, closeness with my mother—
any
mother.

About a year after we moved in with the Dumonts, when I was 11 and Michael was 13, I had a fit of inspiration and convinced Michael and Toni that we should make Patricia and Pierre breakfast in bed. It’d be the perfect way to thank them for all they’d done for us, and I’d be able to get into the kitchen without being in Patricia’s way.

There was just one problem: Patricia and Pierre were always awake before us kids. Since we had no idea when they woke up, we felt we had to stay up all night. It was the only way to be sure we could serve them before they made their own breakfast.

During dinner, Toni winked at Michael and me when Patricia asked us what we’d like for breakfast. The plan was to wait in our own rooms until we heard them go to sleep. When Toni sent out two owl hoots, we were to head downstairs.

I waited and waited; each minute crept by more slowly than the last. Eventually I nodded off. At 2 a.m. I awoke to several low, haunting hoots. When I opened the door, Michael and Toni were already tiptoeing down the hallway, their shadowy forms softly lit by a night-light.

I hurried behind them. Michael flipped on the light switch. Thrilled, I peeled back the cabinet doors for the first time and saw neat stacks of pots and pans, orderly rows of biscuits and jellies, and dozens upon dozens of spices. The three of us set to work.

Because Toni was the oldest, she baked the tube of refrigerator croissants, while Michael sliced up an orange and I poured two glasses of apple juice. I used the fanciest glasses I could find, skinny tumblers with delicate etched roses and gold rims. As an afterthought, I dusted the rims with cinnamon.

We set the treats onto a shiny black tray, along with two kinds of jam, blueberry and raspberry. Michael folded a napkin to look like a fan, and Toni filled a small, blue vase with three white daisies plucked from the back flower bed. By 2:34 a.m. we were finished.

The croissants were still warm, steam swirling into the air. The house smelled like a bakery. “Why don’t we wait a bit longer before we bring the tray to them,” said Toni, “We don’t want to wake them too soon.”

We decided to eat the warm croissants while we waited. By 3:15 a.m., when the second batch was ready, our eyes were drooping. We would fall asleep right there on the kitchen floor if we waited another second.

As Toni carried the tray upstairs, Michael flashed me a dimpled smile. I glanced nervously out the window: The sky was still inky, and there was no sign of sun. Toni knocked on Patricia and Pierre’s door with Michael close behind her. I hung back several feet, waiting.

After they disappeared into the room, there was a moment of silence: I held my breath. I couldn’t wait to hear Patricia and Pierre’s reaction to our labors. Suddenly, a jumble of words slapped through the air, too indistinct to comprehend.

Seconds later, Toni and Michael emerged ashen faced. Toni still held the tray, untouched. She set it on the floor outside of the room and mumbled, “We better get to bed. They’re pretty mad.”