Revertigo

by Floyd Skloot

  Then we went to Cornwall. After four days of driving around the region, we knew we had to avoid B-roads for the remaining three days of our travels. Even before Cornwall, the left front tire and wheel rim were scraped and scuffed from encounters with curbs. We were concerned that we’d have to pay for a replacement tire. So when B-3315 south of St. Ives couldn’t contain both the Giulietta and an oncoming caravan, and I was forced so far left that we nearly flipped as the wheels passed over a hidden bank of dirt, we were relieved that there was no further damage to the vehicle. But later that afternoon, heading back north on a slender vein of B-3315 near Penzance, when a gleaming black Land Rover suddenly filled the road, I veered away and smashed the same left front tire across a boulder jutting from the bottom of the hedgerow. The force was so great, the jarring so thorough, and the sound so loud, we were sure the car’s chassis or body had been mangled or the wheel destroyed. I pulled over and we got out to assess the damage. The impact had been confined to the tire and wheel, but the rubber was now profoundly gouged in two places, with flaps like torn skin revealing the inner tire wall. Beverly tried to nudge the flaps back in place but we knew they weren’t likely to stay. The wheel’s rim was dented and marred, shabby rather than sporty.

  We looked at each other, grateful to have escaped worse harm, understanding that we had to avoid any further contact between that tire and an obstacle. From now on, we’d stick to the dual carriage-ways and main roads as much as possible, inspect the tire and gauge its pressure every time we got out of the car, worry over every bump.

  We drove southeast to Dorset almost entirely on A-38 and A-35, fat trunk roads with only two digits to their name, true highways. Once there, we didn’t have to drive much because we’d planned to spend time on foot. We walked a windy, cold half mile from our B&B to Lulworth Cove, “the small basin of sea” where Sergeant Francis Troy staged his disappearance in Far from the Madding Crowd. Later in the evening, we walked the Weymouth shoreline. In and around Dorchester the next morning, we explored the town’s heart, where The Mayor of Casterbridge had been set and where the county museum had a vast exhibit of Hardy-related material. We spent over an hour at his Max Gate home and strolled the nut walk, the alley of bending boughs Hardy had planted himself. We walked a long wooded path over the heath at his birthplace in Higher Bockhampton, and spent an hour at his grave in Stinsford churchyard.

  Going to a small pub that catered to gluten-free diets, we followed a road through the Lulworth Firing Range, a Ministry of Defense zone normally closed to traffic. It was open now in honor of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee holidays, but few tourists seemed to know. We drove on an ancient ridge road, its view toward Dorset’s Jurassic Coast clear and panoramic, and as I came out of a blind curve a dozen shaggy sheep were spread across the road. I braked, thinking that after all I’d done to the tire it would be a perfect cartoon ending for a flock of sheep to cause the blowout.

  In late afternoon, and at the advice of our host, we crossed the road and began walking a mile across Hambury Tout. This large chalk hill leads toward the coast and Durdle Door, a natural limestone arch cut by the sea, which draws a quarter-million tourists a year. As on our walk in the Cotswolds, we found ourselves alone in the countryside. But then, as we crested Hambury Tout, we saw that the Coastal Path was covered by hundreds of tourists. Some were standing on a platform above Durdle Door, some were marching like pilgrims east toward Lulworth Cove or west toward Weymouth. Foot traffic was dense, the path was packed, and it looked like a pedestrian version of a B-road. Parked on the cliff, a Typhoo Tea truck did brisk business. We merged with the flow and headed toward Durdle Door before following the pilgrims down to Lulworth Cove.

  We stopped at a gas station near Heathrow to fill up the tank. Beverly went into the small market and bought a tube of Superglue. As I topped off the tank, she knelt beside the ravaged tire and glued the flaps of rubber back in place.

  “I know it won’t last,” she said. “But I had to try. It just looked so sad.”

  At the Avis lot, the inspector came over to evaluate our returned vehicle. First he checked the dashboard and noted that we’d put on 1,512 miles. He asked how we enjoyed our travels and, hearing our American accents, walked directly to the left front corner of the car, bending to study the tire and wheel. He made a few notes.

  “Did you hit a pothole?”

  The cost wasn’t as bad as we’d feared: £130. But we still haven’t gotten the final bill for my visit to the doctor, once we got home, for treatment for the rhomboid spasm behind my left shoulder. Apparently, that’s not only the muscle used for shifting a British car’s standard transmission, it’s also—according to my massage therapist and my chiropractor—where I hold my tension.

  14

  * * *

  THE FAMOUS RECIPE

  Cartwheels on the moon

  She might as well have said she had a photograph of my mother turning cartwheels on the moon. Instead, and no less implausibly, Joan said she had a recipe my mother contributed to a cookbook in the late 1950s.

  She’d been my brother’s fiancée forty-seven years ago, and knew my mother never cooked. She may not have known my mother used the oven as an extra cabinet for stashing pots, pans, platters, and dishes, all wrapped in plastic, but she knew how unlikely it was for her ever to have prepared a dish called Veal Italienne “Sklootini.”

  My mother did, on occasion, make toast. She would open a can of fruit or a container of cottage cheese or jar of jam, cut a chunk of Cracker Barrel cheddar to eat with crackers, pour milk into a bowl of cereal, prepare a cup of instant coffee sprinkled with Sweet’N Low. But the oven and stove as appliances for food production? That was not her world.

  She loved to eat, though. She ate slowly, accompanied by dramatic commentary and gesticulations: Oh! This is divine! She liked rich, creamy, saucy, elaborate presentations in restaurants, or as a guest at someone else’s table, and she wanted everything—from her brandy Alexander through her standing rib roast to her chocolate sundae—amply proportioned. Except on weekends, and provided she didn’t have to do the cooking, she didn’t seem to mind eating at home, and her preferences remained intact until her death at ninety-five.

  One of the last memories I have of my mother comes from a moment a month before she died. Beverly and I were with her as lunch was being served in the solarium of the nursing home’s Memory Impairment Unit. Bathed in early spring light, her memory so shattered that she no longer knew who I was or who she herself was, limited to a diet of soft bland food she barely touched, my mother waited for her mushy meal to appear. Though she barely spoke anymore, and never seemed to know where she was, she leaned close to me and said, “The chefs at this restaurant are very, very good.”

  Lo and behold

  Joan also knew, firsthand, about my mother’s dedication to disastrous matchmaking, her zeal for bringing ill-suited partners together. This had resulted in my brother’s marrying someone else, someone my mother had found for him during his engagement to Joan. Before long, Joan married my basketball coach, without my mother’s help, and is still married to him.

  We’d lost touch until a few years ago, when we’d begun an e-mail correspondence. Now, she wrote, she’d been “digging deep to find a certain recipe and lo and behold I found a VERY OLD recipe book from The East End Temple Young Married Set and there was a recipe from your mother.” I think she understood the startling nature of her discovery, which is why she prefaced it with “lo and behold,” as in You’re about to witness the unimaginable! She concluded by saying the recipe was “very typical of her flamboyant personality,” and offered to send me a copy.

  The book, mimeographed and plastic comb–bound, was called 130 Famous Long Beach Recipes. Joan had photocopied the cover and my mother’s recipe, which arrived sharing a page with Frieda Schwartz’s Day After Tongue and Rita Mintz’s Stuffed Cabbage. I didn’t recognize Veal Italienne “Sklootini” as something ever served in my home. Or tasted elsewhere. I wondered where she�
�d found it and why she’d chosen it over such equally fantastical dishes as, say, Shashlik Sklootovich or Chicken Papriskloot, which we also never encountered.

  The recipe itself was like the script for a deadpan Bob Newhart sketch. You do WHAT to veal scallops? For HOW long? Look, Mrs. Skloot, is this some kind of joke? It looked and sounded like a recipe, it involved individually credible ingredients, but it read like a spoof.

  The very idea of my mother mincing four cloves of garlic, pounding and slicing raw meat, removing the lumps from two cans’ worth of Italian tomatoes, or enduring the possibility of tomato stains on the stove struck me as absurd. Then there was the math: two and a half pounds of veal, flattened and cut into two- or three-inch pieces, to be cooked for one hour and fifty minutes. I couldn’t imagine what would happen to thin strips of veal cooked that long. And what about the bay leaf listed among the ingredients but never discussed in the cooking directions? Those directions concluded with a serving recommendation: “I suggest that you make spaghetti, to serve an elegant Italian meal, as you will have enough extra sauce.”

  My mother’s recipe had seemed flamboyant to Joan, probably because of its faux French/Italian/Russian name alongside those traditional Jewish recipes for tongue and stuffed cabbage, its assertion of elegance, and the very outlandishness of its existence. But it was my mother’s audacity in offering a recipe, when she herself never cooked, that struck me as the wildest, showiest, most characteristic aspect of this magical news.

  But I had to wonder if I was remembering right. Did my mother really not cook, as I believed, or was memory deceiving me?

  So much as a toothpick

  I come from a large family of small families. My father was the third of six siblings who averaged two children each, so we were a dozen cousins, all of us close, visiting on weekends, dining together, celebrating holidays together, going to sleep-away summer camps together.

  After learning about Veal Sklootini, I contacted my surviving cousins and asked if they remembered seeing my mother cook. One wrote to say, “We never were at your house for dinner, so that would make me a distant observer on the matter.” Another said nearly the same thing: “I don’t think I ever ate in your home.” What’s more, she added, “I truthfully do not remember ever going there.” A third wrote that he smiled when he saw the name of the dish, but “I could never imagine her cooking it because I never saw her in the kitchen.” He might not be the best person to ask, he said, because—as my other cousins had also said—he didn’t “remember spending too much time in your house/home/apartment.” A fourth, my oldest cousin, said she didn’t even remember our apartment. And a fifth wrote, “I never heard of Lillian lifting so much as a toothpick.”

  All of us recalled being together and eating together at every other Skloot home. But none recalled eating at ours. Apparently it was accepted that we’d always be dinner guests and never hosts. I don’t know how my father and his family reached this level of acceptance or accommodation. Based on what I remember, and what my cousins remember of gatherings at my grandmother’s home, or at my aunts’ and uncles’ homes, for Skloots the kitchen was at the center of life. As I look back across more than half a century, it’s difficult to avoid the obvious conclusion: our home had no such center, no place from which the sort of nurturing or comforting or sustaining energy associated with cooking emanated, a locus where everyone gathered and connected and to which everyone was drawn.

  To check whether it was just a problem my mother had with my father’s family, I contacted other potential witnesses. I called my brother’s widow, Elaine, the loving woman he’d found for himself, and lived with through three decades after divorcing the wife my mother had selected for him. Even muffled by the phone, Elaine’s laughter when I asked if she’d seen my mother cook startled my cat and made him jump off my lap. “I never saw her do that,” she said, eventually. “When we ate with her, which wasn’t often, we either went out or she ordered in.” Elaine remembers a dinner for six people at my mother’s apartment, when all the guests had been told she would be cooking it herself. But my mother had secretly brought the dinner home from a restaurant, a fact revealed when her overcoat, hung hurriedly in the entry closet, was seen to be stained by fresh tomato sauce.

  My childhood friend Billy Babiskin remembered the occasional presentation of milk and cookies at my home. “But cooking, NO.” He also remembered a parody song his mother and mine created in honor of their culinary preferences. It was sung to the tune of Vincent Youmans’s 1929 classic “Without a Song,” and their revised lyrics transformed it into a celebration of canned foods: “Without a can, my day would be incomplete / Without a can my family would never eat / Things can’t go wrong as long / As you are not without a can.” While this may imply they at least heated a can’s contents on the stovetop, Billy reiterated that he didn’t remember seeing such an act take place in our home. Another childhood friend, Johnny Frank, told me a few years before he died that he never ate in my home. “Eat? I never touched anything in your home.” He said he thought of me as “the guy who lived in a museum.”

  Alice Sachs, wife of the doctor who delivered me in 1947 and who was my godfather, said, “I never saw her cook.” Though her husband was among my parents’ oldest friends, Alice said, “we were in your apartment maybe twice.” Theoretically, she thought, there could have been dinner served, but it wouldn’t have been cooked by my mother. “The Princess feeds,” Alice said. “Doesn’t cook, but feeds.”

  My stepbrother, Morty, whose father, Julius, had married my mother in 1966, was part of my mother’s life for forty years. When I asked if he remembered seeing my mother cook, he said nooooo in a way that combined “of course not” with “is this a trick question?” He also said that “any meals were take-out or eaten in restaurants,” and added, “I don’t remember her using the oven at all, except for storage.” The next day, Morty sent an e-mail elaborating on one particular memory that his wife, Bernice, had mentioned. She remembered eating a chicken that came out of my mother’s oven, “but neither of us could remember seeing it go into the oven so it may have been a take-out item. Try as hard as we could, neither of us could remember any other time that we ate anything that had been cooked in that kitchen.”

  And my daughter, whose memories are freshest, said, “Nope, never saw Grandma cook, not once.” She added, “Closest thing I ever saw her do to cooking was once she spread cream cheese on a bagel, which was memorable only because it was the only time I ever saw her do it. That was Julius’s job.”

  The consistency of these responses—even down to the wording—astounded me. I thought I’d find my memory was skewed, or I was exaggerating, and while my mother didn’t cook regularly, she’d been seen cooking by someone. But no, and it was as though we’d lived in hiding, too.

  By the time Beverly and I married in 1993, my twice-widowed mother lived in an apartment in Long Beach and made no pretense of cooking for herself. Dinners were delivered. Food supplies were limited to breakfast and lunch foods whose preparation required nothing more involved than toasting. But when she heard we were coming to Pennsylvania and New York, and bringing Beverly’s parents with us, she issued an invitation for Sunday brunch. It would be catered by the Lido Kosher Deli, whose original owners—the Schmaren brothers—had taught me as a teenager to eat hot dogs slathered in slaw instead of sauerkraut. It would also be the first and, it turned out, only meeting between my mother and Beverly’s parents. She’d ordered a lavish spread of traditional New York Jewish selections: fresh bagels, cream cheese, two kinds of lox, smoked sable and white fish, herring in sour cream and chopped herring, all surrounded on their platter by an array of lettuce, sliced onion, tomato. My mother was charmed by my tall, handsome father-in-law and he responded to the banquet with delight, saying it was the best he’d ever had. At meal’s end, my mother asked if anyone wanted coffee. I knew the correct answer, but unfortunately my in-laws didn’t. My mother went into the kitchen and, as the rest of us chatted, I began to wor
ry. After twenty-five minutes had passed, I found her slumped at her small round table in the kitchen, muttering about the stupid coffee machine, a thirty-cup percolator for parties, whose operation had been part of Julius’s kitchen duties for meetings of the Lions Club. She didn’t know how to use the thing, was unwilling to serve my in-laws instant, and, I imagine, was counting on them to forget their desire for coffee. When I asked if she’d like me to make some, she looked away and nodded. There was a can of Maxwell House deep in the cupboard, encased in two large baggies, untouched since Julius’s death.

  Cook: to prepare food for eating by applying heat