Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

by Gabrielle Hamilton

  Her home looks warm and generous, picturesque, aglow with soft lighting, interesting old brass reliquaries from Greek churches, a wood fire burning in a cast-iron stove, dried hay and grasses hanging in artful but not cutesy-craftsy arrangements from the open rafters of her wooden-beamed kitchen. The old windup clock that we had in the house when I was a child, a heavy, warped black steel box with a white-enameled face and black-enameled Roman numerals kept ticking by a hammered brass disc that looks like the sun—the whole contraption looking like an instrument that Picasso might have made when he devoted himself to sculpture—chimes nine times, and she doesn’t even hasten us from the table. Michele raises his eyebrow at me as if to say: This? This is the snaggle-toothed, fire-breathing dragon you’ve been cutting off?

  And he turns back to my mother, determined to enjoy himself, because he knows just exactly how to abandon me.

  My most relieving, comforting experiences surrounding my mother are when strangers meet her and later say to me, “Wow. She is one piece of work.” I never feel embarrassed or defensive on her behalf; I feel, rather, relieved to have my impressions of her confirmed by outsiders, not by friends whom I have persuaded to agree with me. But Michele, naturally, sees nothing but the soft sweater, the nicely seasoned crispy roast chicken, the obvious taste in the large open room we are sitting in. Being Italian, he also sees, if nothing else, a woman. And his tribal code requires him to charm and be charmed by anything female, regardless of the poisons they may carry. Besides, it would be unnatural by this point in the unraveling of our carelessly knit relationship for him to be my ally. He is already always my opponent.

  “Yes, I do eat at five o’clock!” she says, and Michele nods, appearing to be interested in their conversation. I excuse myself to check on Marco and as I am walking to the next room, I hear her say, “As a matter of fact, I listen to the Canadian radio station!”

  At last we get in our beds under deep piles of blankets and click off the reading lamp and with a little Italian wine in our stomachs, hit deep, deep, narcotic sleep, like Hansel and Gretel.

  Those trees the state is so famous for greet us, like a calamity, when we wake in the morning. Peak fall foliage—alarming yellows and rusts and browns and hazard oranges—roils on all sides of us and makes me panic as soon as I open my eyes. I lie still for a few minutes, checking everything out. I listen for the location of everybody. Of her. I did this when I was little. I would lie still and silent in my room, listening for a clue about where she was in the house. She had some blood sugar and rage issues of her own, and it was always a good idea to know exactly where she was as the combination often turned suddenly violent. And then finally, a rustle of the New York Times downstairs or a clank of a wooden spoon or her whistling along with the classical radio station and I had my answers. She was always home.

  My inventory on this morning tallies Michele still asleep in the next bed, Marco still asleep in the Moses basket on the floor between us, and outside, cerulean sky and peak fall foliage. I cautiously lift my head up from the pillow, and glance out the windows on the far side of the room and there, there in the flowerbeds bordering the house, her face pressed up against our window, shielded only by a thin lace curtain, there she is! I remain motionless. My mother, my actual fucking mother, is outside our room in the lily beds peering in through the lace curtains to see if we have stirred, she herself having been awake, and rubbing her six hairy legs together with hungry impatience, for hours.

  Michele and I are in two separate tiny twin beds, the beds my siblings and I had as children, with the same blankets and sheets, washed in the machine but hung outside in the air—which costs no money—to dry. Our feet hang over the ends but she would never throw away those “perfectly good beds” to replace them with something more suitable for visitors who have, in the intervening decades that have passed since we last slept in them, grown by at least thirty inches. Nobody visits enough to be worth it. Across the gap between the two short beds separated by a tiny bedside table with a reading lamp, I hiss quietly to Michele, “She’s right outside. She’s at the window! Don’t move!”

  Part of my strategy for making the weekend go faster is to go to sleep early and wake up late, thus shortening the days. Marco is, like us, wrapped head to toe in fleece and blankets because my mother turns the thermostat off at night or just down to the legal limit, if there is such a regulation, to the temperature where your lungs are still able to achieve shallow breathing but you have not yet died of exposure. You walk around the house all weekend, fully dressed in many layers and still your shoulders are hunched up around your ears as if you stepped outside without your coat to check the mail and got latched out by accident.

  Michele peeks out from under the covers and confirms that my mother is, in fact, peering into our room from outside through the lace curtains to try to discreetly ascertain if we have risen. He looks across at me with something vaguely resembling friendship for the first time in what feels like five years. She doesn’t even have to confess it; I know, for a fact, no matter how friendly and easygoing she presented herself to us when we arrived the night before, that she has already been to our door several times this morning, to press her ear to the rough-hewn wood, listening for sounds of movement. Finding none, she forced herself outdoors to do her chores, apprehensive that she might miss a moment of us. She has me in her clutches for only forty-eight hours and she is, like me, counting them. Though we are counting for very different ends. And if more hours than she can stand are being spent on sleep, she will start to hum and whistle louder and rattle the cooking pots a little more vigorously until she has made herself perfectly clear.

  But even she knows that seven-thirty is an unacceptable hour to wake the guests, and she exhibits this restraint, I am certain, in order to continue giving Michele the impression that she is benign and woefully misrepresented by her sullen and ungenerous daughter. So she mustered the discipline to let us continue sleeping and she pushed herself outside to pop the dead heads off the lily bulbs bordering the house, which is how she managed to spy on us from outside our window while just innocently “gardening.” She is wearing her prescription glasses under her wraparound sunglasses. My mother. My outrageously chic French mother who warmed the end of a wax kohl pencil every morning to apply her eyeliner is standing outside my bedroom window, thirty years later, wearing two pairs of glasses on her face at the same time.

  We remain still and wait her out. I decide to nurse Marco both boobs, until they are fully drained and my arm hurts from holding my body up for so long. I would rather have cramps and temporary paralysis of the upper body than get out of bed and face the day. We hear the front door open and close and now we know she is somewhere inside the house.

  Sure enough, Michele gets up finally to pee and shower, and when he opens the door of our room to cross the hallway to the bathroom, she is already there, alive with joyous over-friendly greetings from the state of Vermont, from her heart, from the Weather Service.

  “Can you pick ’em? Did you really pick ’em?”

  Her face, which normally has several discernible features, has become one giant, fantastically eager smile, ecstatic that the state of Vermont has provided us with peak fall foliage and the most beautiful day in all Octobers in memory. She is severely caffeinated on black currant tea, I can tell by the pitch and volume of her voice, not to mention the content of her sentiments, as she escorts him the scant three yards from the door of our bedroom to the door of the bathroom. I vow not to follow my immediate impulse to become heavy and silent and scowl like a furious teenager, clinging to the ground for dear life so as not to be hurled skyward by her ebullient, ballistic, nearly manic effervescence. I try to mimic some healthy, good-natured Vermont ski school instructor who might respond to this freakish bloodsucking life force with a hearty “good morning” and a total nod of full-fledged agreement at what a beautiful day it is. I only manage, in spite of my best efforts, a quiet “un-hunh,” and a deadly “very beautiful.”


  Holding Marco defensively in front of me, I try to head directly for the coffeepot. But she bends at the waist and proffers both of her cheeks for me to kiss. It’s an excruciating habit she’s had ever since we all—all of her kids—achieved parent-child separation more than thirty years ago. Instead of honoring our “oogey-meter,” which would buzz and wail and flash wildly when she sought these kisses, she bulldozed right over it and insisted on receiving compulsory, desultory kisses on both cheeks from children who felt they needed a Silkwood shower after the whole transaction.

  When my dead brother Todd—who became a voracious, virile Wall Streeter, a vice president at Goldman Sachs by the time he was twenty-eight or something unheard of, and where he was, in a certain way, running the entire world—he still, even at forty years old on his annual obligatory visit, would have to kiss the cheeks of our mother who would bend at the waist and mewl like a kitten, tapping her fleshy finger against her fleshy cheek. Todd, who was accustomed to holding two phones up to his two ears at the same time and altering the Fates by spitting no more than four staccato words through his unsmiling lips alternately into both of them, really used to grimace through that one.

  I was hoping, in vain, that glorious, fall foliage morning standing in the mere nine feet of hallway between the bedroom and the bathroom with my son and my husband and my mother, that the past twenty years of cutting her off might have sent a certain signal to her. I was hoping she would observe that I had become something of a full-fledged, self-possessed adult with rights and wishes regarding her affections, that I had become something other than her issue over whom she seemed to believe she had total proprietary access to bodily privileges.

  But with Todd dead, I realized, as she nuzzled up to me and made me kiss her on both cheeks while she made her little kitten noises, she had some capital—an unexpected windfall—with which to work. She was The Bereft Mother of a Recently Dead Son. It was just the license she needed to be maudlin and to leverage greater physical closeness than she had inspired. I was not strong enough or gracious enough to allow her this; she had, in fact, just lost a child. But somehow, that did not, as it might in a made-for-TV movie, suddenly sew up the twenty-year gap. Instead, I just felt physically trespassed upon, snared in her sticky web at eight o’clock in the morning, with a hairy spider bestowing and demanding indiscriminate wet affection.

  But now, as I’m trying to get away from her, and to endure the compulsory cheek-kissing, I notice her shoes, sensible sand-colored crepe-soled shoes from Payless. Made in China. And she’s wearing oatmeal-colored socks on which the elastic has worn out, which she is holding up at each knee with rubber bands. I’m so taken aback, I point at them. Mistaking me, she proudly sticks out her leg to model the shoe, with an insouciant little twist of her still outrageously elegant dancer’s ankle, which I recall my entire life seeing in a good Dior heel.

  “Pas mal, eh?” she boasts, about this ugly, sensible number that is one step up from a Velcro-closing sneaker.

  “Twelve bucks!” she continues, delighted, vainglorious, the cat who ate the canary.

  I observe, with not a little discomfort, that this is just the kind of thing I also do. When one of the twenty-year-old waiter girls at work admires my jacket, skirt, or shoes, I say: “Hey, twenty bucks at the Salvation Army in Buffalo!”

  When you have some style and taste, but you don’t have the cash, you brag about your “finds” from the thrift store. You sit in your chair with great satisfaction when you pull off a delicious dinner for ten people for only forty bucks, the same way my mother fed a family of seven on tails and carcasses and marrow bones. But seeing her now and how uncannily similar we are, I fear that it won’t be long before I, too, am so obsessed with thrift that I have manifested my own poverty and am holding my socks up with rubber bands, living alone in the middle of nowhere, estranged in varying degrees from all of my children who would rather not kiss me, given their druthers. How far down the path am I already if I make Prune’s dishwashers nest the bowls properly after they are washed and if I stop a cook from throwing away the onion tops because “these are perfectly good, and someone had to grow it, pick it, wash it, and then get it here and that someone wasn’t you and now you, you’re just going to throw half of it away?” I ask, incredulous, peeved, like a freaking lunatic who may as well wear two pairs of glasses at the same time, and who, I fear, will be working that same fashion statement before long. How can it be, after all this concentrated effort and separation, how can it be that I still resemble, so very closely, my own detestable mother?

  But what is there to detest? I am scrutinizing her, now seventy-something years old, alone on her hill. What is so detestable? She has splurged and generously bought half-and-half for our morning coffee. She roasted two birds for dinner when one would’ve stretched. She fetches and splits and stacks the wood by herself. If a bat flies in she chases it out. She is holding her socks up with rubber bands but she has her living will, her health-care proxy, and her estate and final years totally taken care of in a way that will never saddle her children with awkward and difficult decisions. And now, in the daylight, we go through the wines that Michele packed and the hard-to-find Asian ingredients that I packed, and we spend the morning talking, neutrally, about food and wine. It is unclear if either of us is going to mention the past twenty years. I am prepared to skip it because that’s not why I’ve come. She seems just as inclined. So we discuss the best way to store and cook Vietnamese rice stick. I see pinned above her little desk a cartoon torn from the New Yorker, in which a piece of rigatoni pasta answers the phone and exclaims, “Fusilli, you crazy bastard, how the hell have you been?!” and she and I laugh solidly three minutes over that one. Even Michele joins in.

  She speaks a little Italian that she has learned over the years to Michele but he answers in English, so mostly she goes on in an English heavily peppered with French. My mom grew up in a French-speaking home and spoke French to her parents until the days they died. Michele tries to answer her in the little French he knows but in an Italian accent so thick, he is just impossible to understand. I recognize this simply as the need that two people in a room who speak more than one language always seem to have—they need to demonstrate their ability to speak more than one language—but somehow it makes me want to inch back a little further toward the deepest wall of my mental shed while this little patch of rain falls. I am drawn to Marco’s simplicity. He just needs to eat and sleep.

  “Well, Pruney, how do you use this jar of Asian soup paste?” She is squinting at it, perplexed.

  It seems odd to be showing my mother a jar of tom yum paste and explaining its potential in soup and noodle dishes when she is the woman who taught me everything I know, pretty much, about eating, cooking, and cleaning. But she seems to be doing what everybody does when they age—becoming incrementally less and less competent. I expect this with her in terms of technology—the stunning rigamarole around an answering machine and cordless phone in the 1980s made it exceptionally clear that she was not going to join us in the computer age. But I am kind of taken aback by this confusion with the food.

  And now it’s me who’s staring at her sternly, like she’s an imbecile, much as she looked at me when I was ten, trying to understand what she was saying about slicing a corned beef across the grain. I remember being baffled by what the “grain” of a hunk of meat meant, but she was relentless in her expectation and unyielding in an explanation and so I figured it out in spite of her menacing gaze. And I began slicing clean thin planks of corned beef by sawing back and forth across the grain and noticing how it stopped shredding now that I had turned the meat. But I just cannot believe she doesn’t know how to stir a little paste into chicken stock or coconut milk or both. Is it possible that I now know more than she does about food and cooking? Have I surpassed her?

  I consider for a moment that it’s the “foreign” part of the jar that defies her. But this is the most sophisticated, snobbish woman in the world. Traveled. Exposed
. She regularly read the New York Times and the New Yorker. Listened exclusively to classical music in our house. Danced in the corps of The New York City Ballet. Saw Ballanchine in the corridors. Blew past the overweight tourists in our town as they trudged along the cobblestones in their white sneakers enjoying the quaint “historical” markers and the gas lanterns while licking ice-cream cones, and she’d snarl out the window of her antique Benz, “Gros cochon.” She gave us all Champagne at Christmas and taught us to flip the savoiarde ladyfinger biscuits from the edge of the table up high into the air and have them land—with a festive splash—in the flute. This same woman unable to navigate a jar of Vietnamese soup paste? Pas possible.

  At last, the afternoon has passed and it has gotten dark. Michele opens an aglianico, a real beauty, but my mom declines. She is accustomed to a little cocktail, she says, that she really prefers to anything else anymore. I watch as she pours some blackberry schnapps, white jug wine, and a tablespoon of brandy into a jelly jar over ice cubes. I am stunned. My mother is drinking some sort of shitty wine cooler. Torpedo Juice! My snobbish, superior mother. The woman who taught me everything I know—delectable and odious alike—has been shed and here before me is a new woman. A woman that anyone meeting for the first time would find perfectly lovely.