How to Cook Your Daughter

by Jessica Hendra

“I just…it’s just that I don’t know what to say.” I poked at the cushion some more. “I guess I’m just surprised. I mean…I guess I’m just surprised.”

  “Well I was hoping you’d be happy for me. I thought if anyone could understand why I’m doing this, it would be you. I can’t talk to your sister. No one can. She’s too busy becoming a Republican.”

  He wants me to give this my endorsement? That’s what he wants. He wants to not feel guilty.

  “Dad, I’m just surprised. I mean….” I need to get out of here, to get away from him, from this conversation. “Maybe you’re right, but I don’t know…maybe it is better this way but….”

  “Absolutely it is.” As always, he seized on the part of the conversation that suited his agenda. “And believe me, it’s better for your mother too.”

  He drank again and drew on his cigar. I looked around the room.

  “I want you to meet my friend, Jessie.”

  His friend? I dropped my head and winced.

  “I really want you to meet her,” he went on, oblivious. “She knows how special you are to me, and she wants to meet you too.” Special? “Maybe Saturday night. You could meet her then. There’s a party Saturday night. Meet her then.”

  Not a question. More like a command. I sat there silently, sensing his eyes as I stared down at the carved-up table in front of me. I felt my seat for the cigarette holes and poked at them. “Jessica,” he said finally, “say something.”

  I thought of what this woman might look like. Dark? Blonde? Tall? Short? Then I imagined talking to her: “Nice to meet you.” Would I say that? Would I really say that? Or maybe I’d say, “I understand from my father that you guys are lovers.” Then I’d have to come home to my mother. How could I face her? I saw her as she had been only hours ago, reading on the brown sectional, unaware of what was about to happen. All the nineteenth-century novels in the world could not protect her from the reality that was about to hit.

  “Daddy, I can’t,” I said finally. “I have some stuff planned for this weekend.” It was the best I could come up with. I should’ve known better than to try to fool Tony Hendra.

  “Don’t tell me you have some fucking band you have to see.” He launched into me without a moment’s hesitation. “Some bunch of out-of-work morons.”

  “No, but I promised some friends…” I kept on.

  “Jesus Christ, Jessie. This is a little more important than spending the night smoking cigarettes with a bunch of screaming idiots.”

  I looked down at my father’s hand as it lay on the table. He was drumming his fingers on the fake wood. I remembered how much I had loved my father’s hands. How much I had admired the way his fingers tapped and rolled. When I was little, his hands had seemed so big, with long fingers, bulky knuckles, and round finger nails that caught tiny pieces of dirt beneath them if my father had been out digging in the garden. If he had been writing in his office all day, his fingers smelled of cigars.

  As I watched my father drum on the grimy table of Phebe’s, I did what I had always done with Daddy. I gave in. “Okay, Daddy. Okay,” I said quietly. “I’ll come Saturday night.”

  “Good, great. It’s all set then. Great.”

  He reached over the table and took my hand in his. I held it weakly, uncertainly.

  “Come sit over here, love. Come sit next to your old dad.”

  Slowly I moved around the table and sat down next to him.

  “I have some coke,” he told me. “Do you want some?” My father reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny tinfoil square. “Go on. Go into the bathroom and have a little snort. It’ll do you good.”

  “No thanks, Dad.”

  “Just a little snort won’t do you any harm.” He looked me in the eyes. “Just stay away from heroin. Don’t ever do heroin. And listen, if you want drugs, get them from me. It’s not the drugs that kill you; it’s what they mix them with. I know where to get pure stuff. Keep this. You might want it some time.” He put the coke in my hand. It was my father’s version of Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” speech.

  “Okay, Dad.” I stuffed the tinfoil in my pocket, and we sat there silently for a moment, me defeated and confused, him puffing his cigar, sipping his drink, and thinking no doubt of his new life ahead. Then he turned to me. “I love you, Jessie. Trust me. Things are going to work out just fine.” I didn’t answer, but I wondered: For whom?

  When we got back to the loft, I said goodnight to my father and crept up to my bed. I sobbed into my pillow until I fell asleep. Women’s faces filled my dreams. The next morning I avoided my mother and left to get on the subway to school before my father was awake. I never made it to school that day. In fact, I never left the subway until well past three. I rode it from Astor Place to the Bronx and back again, lurching and swaying as the subway hurled itself up and down Manhattan. When I finally got off the No. 6 train around 3:30 P.M., I left the untouched tinfoil packet of coke on a seat.

  I still didn’t want to go home. I couldn’t face my mother, knowing what I knew. The thought made me want to scream. So I found a pay phone and tried calling Krisztina. No answer. Then Jessica. Her mother told me she was over at our friend Marla’s house and gave me the number. I asked Marla if I could come over. I didn’t need to say more than “I don’t want to go home right now.” All of us understood not wanting to see our parents.

  Marla and her mother lived in the meat-packing district on Fourteenth Street and Ninth Avenue. In open doorways on the way there, I could see cow carcasses hanging on hooks. The entire neighborhood smelled of steer blood or at least it seemed that way, considering that pools of it rested in the gutters.

  When I walked up to Marla’s loft, her mom was out, and she and Jessica were rolling a long Jamaican-style hash spliff. It was a delicate process that I found therapeutic, the sort of distraction that seemed better than any high. Besides, I only pretended to smoke it. I didn’t want to appear uncool in front of two girls who I admired so much. I had been at Marla’s an hour or two, chatting, rolling spliffs, and listening to Prince Buster when the phone rang. It was my father. How he tracked me down I don’t know, considering no one was ever able to find him.

  “Why aren’t you home, Jessie? I told you, you were not to go out tonight.”

  “I’m sorry. I forgot.” I didn’t feel like telling him the truth.

  “You need to come home. This is unacceptable. You cannot abuse all of us like this. You are so incredibly self-involved that you never think about how you are abandoning our family!” This from the man who told me the night before he was leaving my mother for another woman?

  For a moment I considered shouting that I would not be coming home, then or ever! That even if he stood outside Marla’s door, I would tell my friends to bolt it. Or I’d hide in Marla’s loft bed and stay there until I was ready to go, which would be never! He would have to tear me kicking and screaming from my safe haven of the blood-filled meat-packing district. But as usual, I said nothing of the sort.

  “Okay, fine,” I said coldly. “I’ll be home in a minute.”

  I told my friends I had to go, and Jessica and Marla made sympathetic noises about how shitty parents could be. All the way home I wondered how I would face my mother. Had he told her? And if he hadn’t, what could I say to her? I was angry that I had been summoned home, and as I walked back to the loft, I resolved that this time, I would have it out with him. This time, I would tell my hypocritical father just what I thought. I stormed up the stairs of Twenty-five East Fourth Street full of fire.

  9.

  MOM

  WHEN I BOUNDED INTO THE LOFT, I LEARNED FROM my mother—whose eyes I could not meet—that Daddy had gone out. As always, he’d be “home soon.” It shouldn’t have surprised me. He’d often summoned me home, only to disappear himself. From what I could tell, he hadn’t told her about the other woman. It would be another of our secrets.

  By the next day, I had lost my nerve to confront him. Instead, I gave in to my dad’s repeated
requests that I come to the party for his latest newspaper parody, Not the Wall Street Journal. That’s where I would meet his “friend.” It was a typical literary event at someone’s uptown home: a lot of wine, champagne, cheese, and probably coke if I had been looking for it. When I got there, my dad greeted me with a startled look, as if it were dawning on him that having his daughter and his girlfriend at the same place at the same time was not such a great idea. Left to himself, he never would have introduced us, and I would have gone home unsure which of the many women in the room she was. I must have been there for a half hour making small talk with some acquaintances when I noticed my dad in a corner with a pretty woman who looked about twenty-five. She was clearly bawling him out. Finally she turned around and walked toward me.

  “I’m Carla,” she said without a smile. “I was waiting for your dad to introduce us, but he’s being an asshole, so I’m going to do it myself.”

  Her directness caught me by surprise. I didn’t want to like this person whose very existence was going to inflict such damage on my mother. But I appreciated her “don’t-fuck-with-me” attitude. Maybe this was the kind of woman my father needed, someone who wouldn’t take the shit that had buried us long ago. I didn’t know what to say. “Hi, I’m Jessie,” was all I could manage. I left the party a few minutes later.

  I spent the next few weeks avoiding everyone. Kathy was graduating high school and busy applying for student loans. She’d need them. She had gotten into Barnard College. Daddy was gone almost every night, so he was easy to dodge. With Ma, I just stayed silent. I even managed to graduate the eleventh grade. But of course, I couldn’t stop thinking about Carla and the moment when my dad would finally come clean. How could he have put me in this situation? I must have asked myself that every morning I woke up, every time I walked past Mom. One night Carla even called the loft looking for him. I heard my mother talking to her as if she were just another acquaintance.

  I suppose there is no good time or place to tell your wife of twenty years that you are leaving her for someone almost half her age. But of all the possible situations, my father chose a “family” weekend in the country, a choice that seemed to me to be particularly sadistic. It would have been easier on my mom to tell her in the city and then let her make a fast exit out of the loft. As it was, Dad made a big deal about us all going to New Jersey to “celebrate” the Fourth of July weekend, and he invited some friends too. I wonder what my mother would have cooked for lunch if she had known what all those friends already knew—that she was about to get dumped.

  My dad told her after the baseball game on the lawn was over and the guests had started driving back to New York. Amid the empty wine bottles and French bread crusts that littered the lawn, he took my mom off for a “talk” down at the bottom of the garden. I went to hide in the barn and played with the woodchips from the winter logs that had been stored there, making them into piles and circles. I couldn’t witness what was happening outside.

  When I finally emerged, my mother was lying on the grass, sobbing and pulling huge clumps of weeds and earth from the ground. My father had begun packing up the house in preparation for the two-hour car ride back to the city. We would have to endure it together. What better way to make sure we were all involved in this mess than to pack us into a car. My mom sobbed in the front seat, and Kathy and I clutched each other’s hands in the back. Dad drove, stoic, silent, but I imagined him whistling Mozart’s “Jupiter Symphony,” just as he had the night that he’d told me.

  After the longest car ride of our lives, my father pulled up to the door of Twenty-five East Fourth Street. Kathy and I helped our mom out of the front seat. Dad sped away to return the rental car to Hertz, then presumably on to his new life on the Upper West Side with Carla.

  I fell into bed that night knowing my mother was pacing. The next morning Kathy and I awoke to her tears. Being the kind of woman my mother was, she did not take to her bed in a dramatic collapse. As Churchill might’ve said, she just buggered on, got dressed, and cried into the coffee she let cool in her cup. Then she cried as she swept up the grounds that had fallen on the floor. Then she cried as she and I walked to the grocery store on Bleecker Street. Then she broke down in the yogurt section as she tried to decide between Dannon and Yoplait. I ushered her out of the store and onto the street. Her despair built a wall around us that even the panhandlers refused to scale. I worried about Ma standing too close to the windows in the loft. Would she jump when I turned away? I worried if she walked too close to the curb. Would she throw herself under a bus when I let her out of my sight? It seemed as if the tears she had repressed for twenty years were flowing freely, that the dam had finally ruptured and the torrent would not stop. I looked at her red nose, her swollen eyes, her gray skin and felt overwhelmed by my inability to help her—to say one word that would assuage her grief. More than that, I had become painfully aware that I did not know this woman. I had come from her body. I had called her Mom for seventeen years. But I did not know her at all. My father, even in his absences, had taken up all the space in the house, and there had been no room for us to get to know each other or even to talk. I went to work at the clothing store (where I had increased my hours for the summer), leaving Ma scrubbing the counters with more tears on her sponge than water.

  Of course, I was in no shape to be of much help to her—neurotic as I was, anxious, bulimic, emotionally immature. I even had a dream that my mother and I were alone in an empty room. Before my eyes she got smaller and smaller until she was a tiny, crying baby. I picked her up and wrapped her in a blanket; she slid under the folds and shrunk so much that she disappeared entirely.

  Adding to my worries, I felt guilty. Unlike Ma, I was relieved that Dad had finally left. When I saw or spoke with him in the weeks immediately after, I had little to say. Then, again one night, Carla called the loft looking for him. Luckily I picked up the phone. I wonder if Carla would have hung up had my mother answered. “Do you know where your dad is?” she asked. “No, sorry,” I said cordially. My father’s whereabouts were Carla’s problem now.

  I knew if Mom could just get through her mourning—if she could just set aside her pride—she would see how much better off she was without this man who had so dominated her life—all of our lives—day after day after day. By the end of summer, Kathy had fled for a new life at Barnard College. Left alone in the loft with my mother, I suggested we escape too.

  “What would you say to getting out of the city this week?” I asked her.

  She studied the Tetley tea bag she was dunking. “I am not going out to the country, not the way things are.”

  “No, not to New Jersey. I was thinking Cape Cod.”

  “Cape Cod?” She looked up as if I had suggested a trip to Pluto.

  “Why not? I found out about the fares—it’s cheap. We can fly to Boston.”

  “You’re going to fly?” She knew I was terrified of flying.

  “Yes,” I said with certainty. “We’re going to fly to Boston, take another plane to Provincetown, and stay there for a few days to get out of this crappy city.”

  My mother made the typical excuses. She didn’t have enough time. She didn’t have a bathing suit. We couldn’t afford it. But I could see the idea appealed to her, and I think she understood how important it was to me. After all, I was offering to fly there, and she knew how much I hated flying. Besides, the whole jaunt had an air of bravado to it, as if it defied the fact that she had been abandoned. We began getting cautiously excited about going. I showed her the brochure that I had requested from the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce, and we perused possible bed and breakfasts, pictures of the beach and shop signs spelled ye olde English way—with double p’s and an e on the end.

  We left on Labor Day morning, and I felt more lighthearted than I had in months. My mom looked young, almost vibrant again, and we headed to the gate at the airport hand in hand, as if we were two college students on an adventure. I fell apart on the plane to Boston, nearly taking my mot
her’s arm off I was squeezing it so hard during takeoff. When the flight attendant asked me what I wanted to drink, I felt like screaming, “I am thousands of feet above the ground! What the fuck do I care if I have Coke or Sprite!” But I let my mom do the ordering and ended up with tea.

  Our B and B was a weather-beaten New England house with a shingled roof. My mother and I were to share a room, and I think the desk clerk assumed we were a lesbian couple on holiday until I said “Mom.” The assumption would follow us all over Provincetown and became a joke between us. How odd, I thought. When I went out with my father, he would joke that I was his date. And now, I was my mother’s lover.

  The first day, we walked into the early morning mist coming off the Atlantic and had breakfast at a local café. There, my mother asked the owner the best way to get around. “Well you can lease a car.” We shook our heads. “There are buses,” she told us, “but the best way to get around P-Town is by bicycle. They’re easy to rent. Just walk up the street, and someone will fix you ladies up.”

  My mother looked a bit pale.

  “C’mon, Ma, let’s give it a try.”

  “Jessie, I haven’t ridden a bike in years.”

  “Let’s just give it a try.”

  We walked up to the bike rental place. I picked a red bike; my mother chose blue. She sat on the seat looking as if she might lose the Golden Sunrise Granola she’d had for breakfast.

  “Don’t worry, Ma, you never forget how to ride a bike.”

  She frowned.

  “Just get going then you’ll be fine.”

  She looked down Main Street toward the beach, determined, pushed off the sidewalk, and put her feet on the pedals. But she hadn’t gathered speed, and she tottered and swayed so much that I was positive she would come crashing down and we’d be looking up bus routes around the Cape. Ma almost came to a complete stop before something miraculous happened. Okay, maybe it wasn’t miraculous, but it seemed like it then. Something must’ve clicked, some body memory or something, and she straightened and picked up speed. The pedals turned swiftly and smoothly, their metal catching the sunlight as my mother zipped off toward the beach. When I finally caught up, her face was flushed “This is great!” she called.