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 t
he 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.
NO MORE COOKING, NO MORE FOOD
In the final autumn of her life, my mother could not move. Could not move her arms, could not move her hands or her fingers. Could not move her legs, her feet, her toes, her head. Could not speak, could not say anything. Could not move her jaw, could not chew, could not swallow. Hence could not cook, could not eat.
A tube inserted in her body was now her only means of sustenance. The tube, inserted against our will, against her desire, against the instructions that she had given us long before it came to this. For she knew, we all knew, that starving to death is not a terrible way to die if one has lived a sufficiently long life, if one is not starving to death before one's time, and that there is a euphoric delirium that precedes the dying, that eases it.
What my mother had said when she was still conscious, when she was having trouble swallowing, when she could no longer move her arms, when she was having trouble hearing, and seeing, was this: "Don't let them feed me through a tube. If it's my time to go, it's my time to go. And, please God, let me go quickly."
This, she said matter-of-factly, as if she were saying "Don't forget to take out the garbage; don't forget to unload the dishwasher; and make sure that someone takes the zucchini in the refrigerator and uses them so they won't go to waste."
The "please God" had astonished me, for my mother hadn't been to church, hadn't taken the sacraments, in a very long time, and I wondered whether, like so many others, she was turning to religion at the end of her life. But then I recalled that my mother had said "please God" frequently without intending to invoke any deity, as in "Please God, let these kids stop driving me crazy," as in "Please God, let Lou come home before this dinner is ruined," as in "Please God, let this old woman leave me alone."
We knew, and she knew, too, that providing nutrition through a tube prolongs the agony of dying, the final letting go, though of course we were not ready for that; at least, I was not— for this is not something that one can prepare for, this dying of the mother, this ceasing to be of the one who gave us life, this departing of the woman whose life is so entangled with our own, so that to lose her is to lose a part of ourselves that we never acknowledged belonged to her.
My mother, though, was ready. It had seemed to me that my mother had wanted to die ever since my sister killed herself. It had seemed to me that my mother had invited dying, had welcomed it: one day, a year after my sister killed herself, she told me that she had almost been hit by a car while crossing the street in front of her house to get to the mailbox to mail a letter to a friend; she said she didn't realize she was crossing directly in front of an oncoming car, but I wondered. And a little while before she entered the hospital, she deliberately stopped taking all the pills that were keeping her alive (without telling us; without telling her doctor, who had told her to stop only one; this we discovered later).
As my mother lay dying, I cleaned my refrigerator in a manner that would have pleased her, which is not something that I had ever done before. I drew up menu plans, made shopping lists, and spent a long time shopping for food at Fairway, my favorite food store at the time Now that it was clear that my mother could not nourish me, it became important to learn how to care for myself. I focused on trying to make good meals, and in my journal I recorded everything I was cooking for my family, everything that I was eating, as if my cooking could feed her, as if my eating could be her eating, as if my cooking and eating could keep her alive.
Steak, done rare; and ratatouille, and new potatoes boiled, then turned round
and round and browned with cumin butter, salt, and pepper
Pasta with caramelized garlic and onions, browned pignoli nuts and saffron
and nice golden raisins soaked in vermouth
Roast chicken, potato salad made with yogurt, sauteed pea pods
Italian burgers, pan fried with a vermouth sauce, tiny fresh carrots with lemon
and orange sauce; fresh corn
Scallops, pan seared, with fresh oregano, Parmesan cheese, green beans, a salad,
fresh strawberries with cannoli cream
Broiled lamb chops, lots of salad, fruit
Chicken and vegetable kabobs with brown rice
The last meal I had prepared for my mother at my house before she went into the hospital was nothing special, nothing fancy, nothing I had spent time planning or preparing. A brunch with store-bought bagels, smoked salmon from a local Jewish deli, freshly squeezed orange juice. We talked about my love of Paris as we ate, about how much I loved eating simple, perfectly prepared meals there in bistros where you could sit outside. My mother seemed interested, which was unusual for her, because very little had interested her since my sister had died, so I suggested that all of us— her, me, my father, my husband— should go to Paris together for her birthday, in August. She didn't say yes, but she didn't say no either.
But by August, my mother was in the hospital. And on her birthday, which she spent in the hospital, I made a party for her, because I feared (and I was right) that it would be the last birthday of her life. I bought the Carvel ice cream cake that she loved (made with extra chocolate-cookie crunchies and extra chocolate syrup), her favorite cream soda, party hats, party napkins, cups, and plates, party balloons, party noisemakers.
No one else from the family was there. My father, husband, and older son were working and would visit later that evening while I was teaching; my younger son was away at college. But several nurses (always on the lookout for sweets) wandered in. They all still believed that my mother would survive, and that we should have a real party when she came home. Somehow, I sensed that she wouldn't come home. And I was right. So I am glad that I made her that party before she died.
The nurses and I sang for her. And, as I lighted the candles, I sang "Happy Birthday, dear Mommy, Happy Birthday to You," although I hadn't called my mother Mommy for a very long time.
My mother seemed pleased with our little celebration. And as she opened my gift of special hand cream in a flowered china dispenser, we talked about how much she had enjoyed baking, how much she had disliked cooking.
"The first cake I made your father for dessert," she told me, "was a refrigerator cake. I made it with chocolate wafers, chocolate pudding, and whipped cream. You made it in the morning; and it cooled in the refrigerator all day. It was a refrigerator cake.
"When your father came home from work that day, I was so excited. I told him, 'I baked you a cake for desert,' and showed him what it was. Instead of saying tha
nk you, he said 'That's no baked cake,' and I cried. You know your father. He could be a real bastard."
I wanted to say "You don't have to tell me," but chose not to. I knew they loved each other still, for I had seen how my father dressed specially to visit her in the hospital, had seen her brighten as he entered the room, and so I didn't want, at this time, to speak of old wounds. Through it all— the depressions, the madness, the hospitalizations, the shock treatments, the suicide of my sister, my father loved my mother still.
Because she was awake, and still alert after her party, I read to my mother. Stories from Grace Paley's Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. I had chosen Grace's stories because I knew the working-class neighborhood she described would seem familiar to my mother, and because many of the stories were very short so that reading them to my mother wouldn't overtax her.
Through the next few days I read her "Wants," "Debts," "Gloomy Tune," "Living," "The Burdened Man," "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute," "The Little Girl," "A Conversation with My Father."
The last story I read my mother before she stopped hearing was "The Immigrant Story." "Isn't it a terrible thing to grow up in the shadow of another person's sorrow?" one character asks. And I thought Yes, it certainly is.
"What if this sorrow is all due to history?" I read. "I thank God every day that I'm not in Europe. I thank God I'm American-born."
"Amen to that," my mother said. "Amen."
After I had finished reading the book, I told my mother I knew Grace Paley.
"Oh?" my mother replied, interested, and I wondered why I had never told her things like this before; why I shared so little of my life with her; why I hadn't told her before about my trip to Barcelona to a writers' conference, where I had seen Grace Paley; or about the marvelous sweet shrimp I'd had there, and the spinach with pine nuts, raisins, and Serrano ham. I surely could not tell her now, for she was having difficulty swallowing, and my telling her would have been unkind, and it seemed that soon she wouldn't be able to eat at all.
Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family Page 23
