Life From Scratch (23 page)

Excellent served at room temperature or cold for a picnic lunch.

Enough for 6 to 8

CHAPTER 14

Sizing Thi
n
gs Up

L
ESS THAN A MONTH
into the school year, Mom took a job as a live-in baker for a small order of nuns in Newton, on the outskirts of Boston. They needed someone to make their daily batches of bread: sandwich loaves, baguettes, the occasional raisin loaf. When the abbess gave my mother the job, she also gave her the key to a small room on the fourth floor of the convent, barely bigger than the twin bed inside. The communal showers were down the hall.

Mom moved in without hesitation, finally severing ties with our old apartment in Jamaica Plain. Looking back, I think she had kept that apartment on the off chance I would come looking for her. Now she was as ready as I was to get away from it.

Knowing I would never again step foot inside those apartment walls, I put the past out of mind and turned my attention to school. That’s not to say
Mom
didn’t focus on
me
. The seven years of self-induced isolation since Michael’s death seemed to make her ravenous for my time.

Every other week she’d send me a package, often including a few spices like dried Japanese chili peppers or half-sharp paprika, “just for fun.” She called my dorm room several times a day, starting as early as 5 a.m., to discuss such issues as the merits of trenchers, the hardened planks of bread used for plates during the Middle Ages. When I hosted an Arthurian Cooking Tutorial, she mailed me pages of research photocopied from books in the culinary collections at the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, then called at dawn to talk through the pages.

I always answered those calls with my arm draped across my still shut eyes. “WHY ARE YOU CALLING SO EARLY?”

“Aren’t you awake?” she’d laugh, “I’ve been up for hours—I can’t sleep past 2 a.m.”

Her efforts did not go unnoticed, but since Mom had shut down any real conversation about the past, her intense focus on me felt a bit disingenuous. Next, she started just “showing up,” regularly driving the three hours from Boston to my dorm unannounced. It felt like she was trying to get something from me, but I couldn’t figure out what.

Once Mom drove all the way to Connecticut with a bouquet of sunflowers and pureed carrot ginger soup, surprising me mere hours after I’d had my wisdom teeth pulled. With this simple, selfless act, I recognized a show of pure maternal instinct, much more potent than any stalled conversation we’d had. It filled my heart. But I still needed her to
talk
to me, to explain her choices. Until she did, I was afraid to trust her affections.

I made a habit of spending my holidays with John’s family or my three half siblings in New Jersey. I even spent a week or two with each of the Dumont girls, trying to maintain our bond. There just wasn’t a lot of time for Mom. I built a wall around our relationship—less to control her than to protect myself—though from what, I wasn’t sure. The intensity of her attention was the opposite of the way Patricia and Pierre had encouraged my independence.

Even though I kept Mom at arm’s length, my Russian roommate Katya and I had no trouble finding uses for the spices she sent. We made apple bread, apple fritters, and applesauce, all with the requisite shake of Mom’s cinnamon, still labeled “sin.” More than once, I found myself wishing I knew how to make Mom’s famous apple pie that Michael and I loved so much. But each fall I forgot to ask her.

By the time I was a senior, I realized that Mom had been right when she said that I might never get the chance to spend so much time with her again. That summer after my freshman year was the first and last time in my adult life that we spent three straight months together.

I’d been dating John for almost four years when his mother leaned over to me at dinner one night at an Olive Garden and grabbed my hand. With John and his father, we’d just finished off a family-sized platter of spaghetti and meatballs, John’s favorite, and were now enjoying tiramisu and wild berry Bellinis.

“I wonder what size ring you wear,” she said, sliding off her gold wedding band, a smile trembling at the corners of her mouth. “Want to try mine on?”

I scanned the room, willing a waiter to send his tray crashing to the floor, or for the kitchen to set off the fire alarm. No dice.

John’s mother slid the ring across the varnished wooden table. I smiled weakly and placed it on my finger. It felt cold against my skin.

“Interesting!” she said, and then took the ring back nonchalantly. “How are things with your mom?”

A week later, I broke up with John.

I was only 22, and though I loved John, I still had no idea how to
be
in love—to trust the feeling, own it as mine, and believe in it. Faced with the possibility of wearing that ring, I knew my only option was to run. This was more than fear of commitment: This was certitude that unconditional love could never exist—not for me. Good though John had been to me, his mother’s hint of a proposal pushed me to end the relationship—in self-preservation.

That night I called Mom to tell her about the breakup, but she had something else on her mind. “Listen, I’ve been working through some of the loose ends—trying to piece together why Michael … had such a hard time.” She lowered her voice. “Have you been following the sex abuse scandal in Boston?”

“Those kids suing the Catholic Church?” The story had been in all the papers, but I hadn’t given it much thought.

“They’re not kids,” she replied, “These are grown men now. But the ‘boy within’ never recovers—these men can’t hold down jobs, their emotions are all out of whack. Some never survived: When they hit puberty the trauma came flooding back. They get angry, depressed—many of them ended their lives. So it’s the
parents
who are suing for their lost boys.” She was quiet a moment. “The patterns are all there, Sasha.”

I thought back to Michael’s weekly counseling sessions with the priest he wouldn’t let me near.

“Sash? Are you there?”

I shut my eyes and sighed. “Yeah …”

“I’ve been going through old papers, some of his medical reports. But I could use your help. Is there anything you can remember—anything that seemed off, that might help?”

I was already nodding.

CHAPTER 15

Movi
n
g On

S
OMETIMES THE VERY ACT OF RUNNING
entrenches the spirit more than it liberates. Two years later, not much had changed except my age. I was 24, haunting Wesleyan as a web designer long after most of my classmates had scattered. Mom continued to crash into my life with exhausting persistence while we worked on Michael’s case against the Catholic Church, which by now had moved into arbitration. And—perhaps to insulate myself—three days after I broke up with John, I’d become involved with another man, a full-lipped Swedish weight lifter named Greg.

Mom hated his buzz cut, his motorcycle, our “shacking up” together, and how my years with him had turned me into a road-chasing GI Jane: “You’re never going to figure out who you are if you don’t get out from under these boys,” she scolded.

Perhaps she was right that I’d leaned too much on my boyfriends. But on this sticky summer day, I was on my way to attend an older cousin’s funeral in Boston. The highway propelled me into the city’s inner circle just 30 minutes before the viewing was scheduled to begin. Disoriented by the knotted roads, I parked the car, unfolded a large city map, and squinted over the tiny print until a spark of something red caught my eye.

Patricia was walking down the street.

Though Pierre and two of the girls had come to my college graduation, Patricia had phoned in her congratulations. That was the last time we’d spoken.

The six years since we’d lived in Luxembourg had been kind; Patricia was slimmer than I’d ever seen her. A pair of black-and-white tapered slacks skimmed along her hips, stopping just shy of her gold flats; an orange silk blouse draped loosely along her torso. The shirt only served to ignite her scarlet hair to an even more furious shade than I’d remembered.

I flung open my car door right into the honks and whines of busy traffic and narrowly missed a passing bus.

“Patricia!” I waved as I caught up with her, stunned by the coincidence of seeing her in a city teeming with more than a half million people.

When she turned around, I rushed her with an enormous hug.

She stiffened, her hands fixed to her side, and pulled back. I let go, embarrassed.

“I’m sorry …” I began again. “Hi! How are you?”

“Sasha … w-what are you doing here?” She looked at me with widened eyes.

“I’m lost,” I said, holding the map up high in my hand, “late for a funeral.”

Her eyes softened slightly. “I’m so sorry, what happened? Are you OK?”

“It’s one of my cousins—cancer. She fought for a long time but … yes, I’m fine.”

“Do you have someone who can help you?”

I paused. “I can probably call my mom.”

Patricia’s gaze flickered. I winced, wishing I hadn’t mentioned Mom. I flushed, too, as I remembered the gift Pierre had given me at graduation: a prepaid phone card. I’d looked at the plastic dumbly, wondering at what such a gift implied, but had been too uncomfortable to clarify its meaning.

I’d kept the card in my wallet for months, taking it out occasionally, trying to come up with a good excuse to contact the Dumonts. I must have done that a hundred times. When I got a new wallet, I moved the unused phone card to a drawer. One day I noticed it had expired.

Patricia looked at her watch, “Well, you’re in good hands with your mom. Take care of yourself, Sasha.”

“You, too …” I said, searching for the right words that would keep her there a moment longer. Suddenly, I realized we’d spent all the years since Michael’s death in some variation of this game: she trying to keep my ticking time bomb emotions in check, me fixated on the mother and brother I’d lost. I never saw
Patricia
. She pressed her lips together in an ironed-on smile, and then stepped briskly past me.

She hadn’t walked 20 feet before my shoulders shook and tears coursed down my cheeks. I knew better than to hope that our paths would cross again. Dozens of suits and skirts passed me by as I sobbed.

Though I felt the shame of their stares, I couldn’t make myself stop crying. I was 9, I was 12, I was 19—a lifetime of endings, a lifetime unmoored.