What My Mother Gave Me (15 page)

Julia's Child

ELINOR LIPMAN

Th
ere are several things I know by heart, requiring no notes or source material, and they are mostly along gastronomic lines: You add a fistful of dried split green peas and a parsnip to the water that will become your chicken soup; you don't overbeat the milk and eggs lest your custard not set; and when making latkes, always grate the onion before the potatoes so the glop doesn't turn pink.

I don't know what other daughters learned from their mothers, but mine was a purveyor of homely domestic tricks, imparted not with formal lessons but by osmosis, by example at the stove, in conversation as dough was kneaded or liver chopped.

First, what you should know about Julia Lipman: She was single until she was thirty-six, but answered “twenty-three” when her daughters asked how old she was when she married. She gave birth to me, the second child, six weeks before she turned forty-one. My birth certificate lists “mother's age” as thirty-four, and it wasn't a clerical error. She was dainty. She wore housedresses and aprons and never flats. Her bed slippers were mules and her French twist required hairpins. She used Pond's cold cream on her face, Desert Flower lotion on her hands, and didn't like drinking water out of mugs. She loved the Red Sox, and mild-mannered British mysteries—Ngaio Marsh a favorite—in which crimes were solved calmly. She wore Estée Lauder perfume and never the colors red, pink, or purple. She did not drive a car, play tennis or golf, ride a bicycle, or know how to swim, nor did I ever see her pitch, throw, or catch a ball. She was a queen of arts and crafts: a Brownie leader, a Lowell Girls Club fixture for twenty-five years, sewer, knitter, wallpaperer, gardener extraordinaire.

I wanted to be like my father, who was neither dainty nor fussy in any department. He scraped mold off leftovers and burnt crumbs off toast, while saying cheerfully, “Just doing my duty.” I once heard him say, “Julia, what saves you is that slight streak of crudity running through you,” meaning the occasional off-color remark she'd murmur that made them both laugh. I once found a petal-shaped piece of sapphire-blue glass in her dresser drawer, and asked her what it was. “Oh, it's from an earring I once had. Daddy stepped on it and broke it when we were dating,” she told me.
Th
ey had met in December and married in March, thirty-seven and thirty-nine years old. A stranger had once stopped her on the street, an older man who asked, “Why is it that someone with a complexion as beautiful as yours isn't married?”

I'm sure she said nothing; I'm sure she shrugged and said, “Oh, I don't know.”

But my sister and I and our children, given the opportunity from within a time capsule, might have said to the gentleman, “It probably didn't hurt her skin one bit that she had a condiment phobia.”

You see, before there were official vegans, before the era of lactose intolerance and sprue, when the description “picky eaters” referred only to toddlers and children, my mother was famously finicky. I don't mean, if someone served her a hamburger with ketchup, she'd scrape it off and eat it close to plain
.
I mean, if some unfortunate hostess put ketchup on the bun, my mother would push the offending plate away, unable to eat the accompanying potato chips, and ask for nothing else, her appetite ruined. And maybe eat a shirred egg when she got home. It was like our mother had a condition. She refused to taste anything that came from the grocery aisle displaying the vinegary and the savory, the relishes, the mustards, the pickles of any kind; the salad dressings, the barbecue sauces, the Tabascos, the Worcestershires, or the A
1
s. We didn't even own them. If a visiting relative needed some such lubricant or flavor enhancer, he knew not to ask.

Maybe there are worse things. I am no fan of ketchup. I eat my French fries plain, my fried clams without tartar sauce, and my Reubens without Russian dressing. My favorite mustard is the powdered kind, ground from the seed. Ditto my sister.

Now I feel bad, concentrating on her idiosyncrasies. Our mother loved us dearly. Her chicken and fish, her stews, her meat loaves, her lasagna, kugels, and everything else were flavorful in their own, unadulterated way. Spices and herbs were fine. Lemon juice was a dear friend. She could bake like Julia Child, undaunted by recipes calling for yeast or breast of veal. She made a lemon meringue pie that a food stylist would envy. She baked challah, Irish bread, cinnamon rolls, babkas, Christmas stollen for neighbors, and four different kinds of custard (rice, coconut, Grape-Nut, bread). I have these recipes all on index cards, half in her handwriting and half in mine. She sewed us beautiful clothes—prom dresses of pique and velvet, and impossible little miniature outfits for our Ginny dolls.

By her standards, I was not a purist. As an adult, in my own kitchen, I once looked up from my lunch of leftover cooked vegetables, contaminated with vinaigrette, and found her watching me with a puzzled look.

“What?” I asked.

She shook her head sadly. “I never thought a daughter of mine would like to eat her food cold.”

To her, her daughters were food adventurers. My sister introduced guacamole to the family. Watching me dribble balsamic vinegar on a backyard tomato, she asked why I'd do that when it was so delicious plain. I countered, “Don't you put salt on yours? It's like that, Ma.” I might have bragged once that a squeeze of ketchup added just the right
je ne sais quoi
to my minestrone. And my college roommate's mother-in-law's recipe I make every time an occasion calls for a brisket? Ketchup again. But never when my mother was visiting. I never tricked her. I used some other tomato reduction because a daughter-hostess has to live with herself.

Th
e gift of her prejudices is that almost everything I eat or contemplate eating, or scrape off my roll, reminds me of her. She is there when I eat leftovers cold, dress a tomato, turn dry mustard into paste. Whenever a buffet lunch serves only tuna, egg, chicken and potato salads, I think,
All she could eat here would be a roll and a pat of butter.
I don't like to drink water from a mug unless I have to, and I've never tasted
Th
ousand Island dressing.

Before she died in 1998, I visited her in the nursing home every day. As I was registering her upon admission, I said to the woman behind the desk, “Above all else, she cannot have condiments. Ever. Could you write this down, please: No mustard, no mayonnaise; no salads
made
with mayonnaise; no ketchup, pickles, relish, or piccalilli. No tartar sauce. No Miracle Whip, either. No salad dressing of any kind. Not even on the side.”

Perhaps, in her diminished state, they could have tricked her. But, really, compared to what other grown children might be demanding, wasn't mine a small, benign request?
Th
e staff always said she was the sweetest person in the whole place. She'd lost her speech, so it was up to me to explain her religion. I had to make sure that this lucky institution observed the rules of Julia, and that no careless aide would let those poisons touch her lips.

Julia Lipman's Salad Dressing

Juice of a fresh lemon; salt, pepper, paprika to taste.

Th
e Deal

MARTHA M
C
PHEE

I was being thrown out of an illegal sublet on Claremont and La Salle in Harlem.
Th
e apartment belonged to Columbia University, and I was renting it from two professors who'd taken jobs elsewhere but hadn't wanted to let go of a low-rent rental in New York City. Columbia had caught on and I was being evicted. It was 1990, and I'd just been accepted to Columbia's MFA program in fiction, but it didn't come with housing for students who already lived in the city. A sister (I have four) referred me to a Realtor who had a knack for finding spacious, rent-stabilized apartments. Her name was Jan, and she worked with a partner who had just one leg.

Together they seemed to know all the deals to be had on the Upper West Side. But the apartments she showed me were decidedly not deals—enormously expensive, tiny (no roommate possible), smelling of cat pee and looking onto brick walls. I was twenty-six years old. I had an entry-level job in publishing that paid two hundred dollars a week and consumed most of my waking hours, and a nighttime job as a waitress (to earn extra cash) from which I was about to be fired because I was too exhausted to be charming. Even so, I was filled with ambition and dreams of becoming a writer—but still had nowhere to live, and time was running short.

“It will work out,” my mother said to me tirelessly over the phone. A blind faith is hers, and an imagination that allows for extreme cleverness; these are her gifts to me. I always believed her. As hard as it can be sometimes, I still do.

After seeing another collection of unlivable apartments, Jan looked at me as if an idea were igniting. “I have the apartment for you.” My eyes lit up. “But you'll never be able to afford it.” My eyes dimmed. “It's huge, sweeping city views, dining room, living room, two beds, three baths, sixteen hundred square feet, low rent.” We were standing on Broadway at 103rd Street, wilted from the last viewing, car alarms and sirens and horns, a shuffle of people. “Tell me more,” I said. And she did.
Th
e apartment was leased to an eccentric with long fingers, manicured nails, and wild gray hair, an aspiring pianist with a baby grand in his foyer. He wanted to move to Long Island, but he, like the professors, didn't want to let go of his deal unless he could get something for it. He wanted to sell the lease and was asking fifteen thousand dollars in cash. “It's called a key fee,” Jan explained. She had long stringy blond hair with red tints and a lovely, animated smile. She had two sons, a pager in her purse that buzzed away like a gremlin, and she liked to say that she was married to her second Israeli. “Let me know if you want to see it,” she said and slipped off into a cab, disappearing down Broadway.

“See it,” my mother said when I told her. I'd been doing calculations in my head.
Th
e rent was a thousand dollars a month.
Th
e tiny places I'd been viewing were the same price and more. If I rented out the second bedroom and the dining room for seven hundred dollars a piece, I could live rent free with income. But how would I come up with the fifteen thousand dollars? “It'll work out,” my mother said. “See it.”

My mother's name is Pryde Breed Brown, a beautiful woman with golden curls and a gap between her teeth. She's the daughter of a Montana cowgirl who had social ambitions that led her to the East and into a marriage with a blue-blooded Bostonian, Charles Mitchell Brown, heir to the Buster Brown shoe factory (which was all but defunct by the time they met) and Breed's pasture on which the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought. When my grandmother set her mind to something, she got it. She could handle any horse, bareback; she could kill a rattlesnake with just one shot; she could catch trout on the end of a willow switch. She chose the name Pryde to honor a girl from childhood who'd been kicked in the head by a horse and killed. She'd raised Pryde to be a lady, dressing her like a doll, sending her to Sweet Briar, a girl's college in the South, seeing she married a Princeton man within a year of graduation. She longed for Pryde to have the conventional life that she had had to fight for. So my mother had four babies all within two years of each other, a big white house in the woods, nothing to do all day but arrange our lives, sew us matching dresses from Liberty of London fabric, and dream up writing assignments my father, a writer, could pursue that would involve long trips with us, his family, to Europe.

“Dream,” my mother often said to her daughters. “Whatever you set your mind to you can accomplish.”

When, at thirty-two, my mother found herself alone with four young children, and very little knowledge of how to negotiate the world, she took to her bed and didn't get out for several months.
Th
at's how it felt to me as a four-year-old. My sisters and I took care of her. We brought her breakfast, creamed chipped beef that we made ourselves at the kitchen stove. We got ourselves ready for school, onto the school bus, home from school. My oldest sister made sure we did our homework each night. My mother had never written a check. She had never paid a bill. She had hardly shopped for clothes for herself. My grandmother was disappointed in her for losing her husband, for allowing the life she wanted my mother to live to shatter.

“It will work out,” she told me so many times.

After awhile my mother asked herself what she could do, what she wanted. She got out of bed and changed her life quite completely. She met my stepfather, a poker-playing Texan who drove a turquoise Cadillac. He was a feminist, organizing sit-ins in pubs that excluded women—anything but conventional. He wore ascots and a cowboy hat, had a Texas drawl. She joined a group called Women on Words and Images that was taking apart children's readers, to point out their inherent sexism. With the group, she wrote a book:
Dick and Jane as Victims: Sex Stereotyping in Children's Readers.
She bought a portrait photography business because she recognized that she was good at taking pictures, and started a business which, some forty years later, still thrives in her town of Princeton, New Jersey. She remade herself. She had a fifth daughter. My stepfather was a househusband.

Th
e apartment on the Upper West Side was in a building that was being held by a receiver.
Th
at meant it had no actual owner because the previous owner had gone bankrupt in the savings and loan fiascos of the 1980s.
Th
e city assigned a company to take care of the building until a purchaser could be found.
Th
at meant no one was in charge and no one cared, which translated to opportunities for shady deals.

June of 1990 filled in with gorgeous warm days. Jan took me up to the sixteenth floor, and there to greet us was the pianist with his manicured nails. He carefully showed me around the apartment, which was four times the size of the biggest places I'd seen, with sweeping views, just as Jan had promised: the Chrysler Building, the Pan Am Building, the Empire State and a glimpse of the Trade Towers. Six southern exposure windows overlooked the sea of Manhattan, spires and skyscrapers and water towers—a dream.
Th
e kitchen led to a formal dining room to a sprawling living room, and light was everywhere.
Th
e master bedroom had an en suite bath and floor-to-ceiling mirrors directly across from the king-size bed.

Th
e pianist patted the bed and told me to sit down: “I only do business on my bed.” I sat down.
Th
e deal involved the fifteen thousand in cash in exchange for the lease.
Th
e lease would be drafted by a lawyer and given to me as soon as I handed over the money. He told me that I wouldn't really be buying the lease: “
Th
at would be illegal, of course.” Rather, I'd be buying a floor lamp, a chandelier, and a dishwasher.
Th
e 1980s burst with such deals, the downside of rent stabilization laws. But by 1990, they were drying up and cash in paper bags for a lease was a rarity that involved even more risk than it had a few years before. But to stumble into such a “deal” was a stroke of good fortune . . . or so I was told by Jan. Of course, there were plenty of stories about being swindled. Only a fool would agree to such a ploy. “How do I know I'll get the lease?” I asked the pianist and then later, Jan. “Don't worry,” was all they said. It was one of those times where you just had to trust. I wanted this and needed this so much that I was willing to take the leap, willing to believe. And the possibility of the deal made my blood hot, made me hungry and curious. Somewhere, somehow I was sure it would work out. But still I didn't have the cash.

“Is it really great?” my mother asked over the phone. I described it for her, detailed my plan of living rent free with income, and even imagined that I could use student loans to pay back the fifteen grand, if only I could borrow it from somewhere. My father was not a risk taker of this sort, but my mother, who was, didn't have that kind of money. Yet I could almost hear her scheming on the other end of the line. “I have an idea,” she finally said.

Her idea was a man named Barry. A wealthy and bearishly handsome man who wore a diamond pinky ring and a floor-length white fur coat. He owed my mother a favor. He'd been accused of being a peeping tom, of spying on a woman as she undressed, from the window of his home into the window of hers. He hired my mother to take photos that would prove the angle of the windows made it impossible for him to see into his accuser's home.
Th
e pictures settled the case in Barry's favor. My mother has a way with people.
Th
ey fall in love with her. Young, old, it doesn't matter.
Th
ey are inspired by her charm and her ability to make the impossible seem like the most natural thing in the world.

She arranged for lunch with Barry at the Peacock Inn in Princeton. It was summer so he didn't wear his coat, but the ring glistened on his pinky. He listened to me intently, a negotiator parsing a transaction, as I spelled out what I needed and why. Hearing myself tell the story to a stranger gave me a start—it seemed more than a little crazy. But my mother, seated across from me, nodded and smiled through it all, as if fifteen grand in a paper bag for a lease was nothing unusual. I explained to Barry that I had a grant from Columbia so I wouldn't need student loans, but that I would take them anyway and pay him back within a year. He heard me out, advised me against what I proposed to do, but gave me the money anyway—a check that I would cash. One hundred and fifty hundred-dollar bills—newly minted, crisp, and filled with possibility. I gave Barry my word: no matter what, I would pay him back within a year.

I was warned by a lot of people. My sisters said it was foolish. I didn't dare tell my father. My best friend told me that it wouldn't amortize, even if it did work out, because I'd fall in love with a rich man and end up on Park Avenue. But I went forward, cash in a paper bag handed over to the long slender fingers of the pianist, a twenty-four-hour wait in which I did not sleep, fearing homelessness and ruin, fancying where, in that huge space, I'd put my desk, feeling at once foolish and clever and eager and the high of the high roller—that gorgeous, terrifying rush of adrenaline.

HERE I SIT,
 twenty-one years later. My desk overlooks the city. I have watched the Pan Am Building become the MetLife Building. I saw the Twin Towers go down and the plume of smoke slowly turn with the winds and drift north. I saw the Time Warner Center rise, and I watch the Empire State Building change the color of its lights like a woman changing her dress. I never met a man who would take me to Park Avenue. I met a poet instead. We have two children and have written some ten books between us. Here in this apartment, the rent still low, we have been able to live our dream, to be artists and parents, because my mother taught me to take the impossible in stride.