“All this for what?” I asked myself, hands full of the stinging tomato juice. It wasn’t as if my parents knew enormous numbers of people or needed to entertain them. My mother didn’t really expect invitations to other people’s houses; she just kept inviting them to ours. And sometimes it was only our family who came, like Grandma, who had grown up in rural Newfoundland. When she saw all the activity in the kitchen, she’d say it was “a lot of fuss for no reason.” I sensed that my mother wanted Grandma to understand that things were very different in her house; that there was more to a meal than Grandma’s standard boiled beef and cabbage.
While you’re waiting for the tomato hulls to dry and every single drop of moisture to disappear, you can make the filling. Get the blender out—be careful, it’s heavy—and put in the cottage cheese, whipping cream, lemon juice, Tabasco and chopped onion. Well, that’s the way chopped onion is—it stings—don’t rub your eyes—now you’re going to have to wash your hands. Quickly! Quickly! That’s better. Puree until smooth, Really smooth, absolutely no lumps, No. Do it again, it’s still not smooth enough.
Tiny Tomatoes could never be made quickly, but I knew it was pointless to try and convince my mother that something easier would be just as good. I mentioned to her that at our aunt Elizabeth’s house they only put out cheese and crackers for appetizers and asked her why we didn’t do that. People appreciate it when you make things special, she told me, but I wasn’t sure that was the whole answer.
When the tomatoes are ready to be filled, you need a tiny spoon or preferably the melon baller. It’s in the bottom drawer. When you start filling the tomatoes, there are two things to watch out for. I know you’ve done it before but listen anyway. First, because the bottoms of the tomatoes are round, once you’ve filled them they tend to topple over. Ooh—watch it—like that one there. So it’s best to try and get the first three done quickly, stand them up against each other in the middle of the tray, and then have all the others lean against them. Second, try to keep the sides of the tomato clean. The filling is gooey and sticks everywhere. You’ve got to pay attention because the opening is not as wide as the tomato bottom being filled. Go slowly. OK—you’re almost finished. Cut up chives and you’re going to sprinkle them over each one. No, don’t toss. Try and get three or four chive pieces on each tomato. Why? Because it looks nice. There—that looks lovely. Now wrap the tray with Saran and put it in the fridge. Be careful. No—I still need you in the kitchen.
I was always needed in the kitchen. We only have a few hours to put this party together, my mother would declare if she was running behind schedule. I sometimes wished she could be more like Aunt Elizabeth, who never got behind schedule because she didn’t put exhausting things like Tiny Tomatoes on her menu. Or like the mother of my friend Ginny Buckle. When Mrs. Buckle had guests for dinner, she simply pulled out her extra yellow TV tables, and placed them around the room so that everyone had the good view of the set. On the same TV tables where they had dinner, Mrs. Buckle would sometimes help Ginny with her “fashion scrapbook,” cutting out pictures from magazines of clothes that Ginny might try on at the mall. I wanted a fashion scrapbook and shopping trips to the mall too, but my mother and I were both too busy with her weekend dinner parties to think about those things. If I wanted my mother to spend time with me, I had to join her in the kitchen. She wasn’t like Mrs. Buckle, or Aunt Elizabeth or even her own mother, and proved it Saturday after Saturday, one recipe at a time.
The quiet, purposeful preparation of the tomatoes and the rest of the cooking went on all afternoon, quickened only by my mother’s occasional announcements—One hour left! or, Twenty minutes and this has to be in the oven! By day’s end, we had completed half a dozen dishes. By the time the guests arrived, the kitchen was packed away and clean and my mother’s table set: the crisp linen cloth and napkins squared perfectly and the good cutlery and glasses glowing. My father was told to put on his best pullover and my sister and I were sent to get into our dresses. My mother took the last half hour to transform herself into a glamorous hostess; she had a bath, curled her hair and put on makeup, her dress, brand new pantyhose, high-heeled shoes and special ruby and emerald rings that she pulled from a velvet box in her top drawer. From her bedroom, over the noise of the blow-dryer, she shouted last-minute instructions to me. Bite-size pieces—tear the lettuce into bite-size pieces. If it won’t fit in your mouth, it’s too big!
When the guests had arrived and were seated in the living room with their cocktails, my mother set the tray of the appetizer Tiny Tomatoes in my arms. Pass them around, make sure everyone gets a little blue napkin. “They look precious,” a guest would say. Gillian made them, my mother would answer proudly. And always, I was proud too. I watched our guests pop them into their mouths and kept passing the tray until they were all gone. At the dinner table, the meal delivered oohs and aahs, and my mother beamed as the conversation and laughter bubbled, the wine flowed and second helpings were served. Even my grandmother, if she was there, enjoyed the “fuss” and scraped her plate clean. Afterwards, as my mother and I did the dishes, she went over everything, giving a little critique or comment here or there. The potatoes were a little dry, I should have served them a bit earlier or, I think we could have had even more toasted coconut on the cake, don’t you? And always: Those Tiny Tomatoes are always such a big hit.
I know that a different mother might have treated me more like a daughter and less like a sous-chef. While I was helping her in her kitchen she spoke to me as if I wasn’t so much her child, but someone who worked for her and knew just as well as she did when the coconut was toasted or the cream whipped to perfect peaks. Maybe my mother was selfish, for I know it cost me other experiences to be the supporting act in the show of her life. Other mothers, like Mrs. Buckle, spent more time presenting options and helping their daughters discover their own pleasures. Mine did not. I lived in the full-force wind of my mother’s passion—there was no escaping it. I would know it intimately.
“Why does your mother make you work in the kitchen so much?” Ginny asked me one Saturday, after I had to turn down an invitation to join her shopping for a new, blue mascara. Then, I had no answer. I really didn’t know.
But I do know now. I realize how much I’m like my mother, and I am grateful for all those days of cooking lessons. Because of them, I would rather be in my kitchen than almost anywhere else. There, the demands of my life fade away, and I get lost in the experience that yields a soup pureed to a silky cream or a salmon poached a few seconds past pink.
I also know that she gave me a gift far greater than my competence in front of a stove. My mother insisted on bringing her own art and beauty to the few spaces she found in busy family life. By her example, I was able to learn to reach past what I was given and beyond what I know: to “make things special” for the simple joy of it. This, perhaps, was the “interest” she saw in me long ago.
Now in spaces not taken up by my home and full-time marketing career, I continue to teach myself new recipes and endeavour to write down the stories of my life. And when my mother and I cook together, we take turns as sous-chef, share recipes we discovered while apart and challenge ourselves to perfect and reinvent the ones we know well: my lemon chicken, her hazelnut cheesecake and one that belongs to both of us—the classic and beautiful Tiny Tomatoes.
WEST TO EAST
This morning as I run down porch steps to load the car, I shiver and my mind clears. Victoria air: not even July can dispel its salt chill. I absorb coastal crispness before my cross-country flight.
The minute I disembark, past midnight, Toronto air licks me, resists me like water. An oily sweat pools at the base of my throat. Skin bare and glistening, muscles spongy, I have come here to dance.
THE SCHOOL OF TORONTO DANCE THEATRE
In Cabbagetown, on a narrow street of tall, peaked-roof houses with bay windows and vine-hung porches, the Toronto Dance Theatre (TDT) occupies a one-hundred-year-old church of warm red brick. A stained glass wi
ndow filters sunlight into the main studio, where the choir loft has been converted into a sound booth, the pews into raked theatre seats and the chancel into a dance floor that doubles as a stage. St. Enoch’s is an apt setting for a four-week intensive course in the modern dance technique developed by Martha Graham.
We dancers rise when the teacher enters the studio and then, at a word from her, sit on the floor and draw the soles of our bare feet together. The torso contracts to initiate sixteen bounces. As the back rounds, nose points to navel, and crown aims for crotch. After the pulses, spine straightens in a diagonal; legs lengthen, then open to a wide V. Arms curve, wrists face the floor, abdomen hollows, and, again, sixteen bounces. We expel our breath as if sighing.
The Latin word spiritus means “a sigh, the breath of life, inspiration, spirit.” As I move through the floor work, my centre of consciousness drops into my core. Why was this hidden from me? Why do worldly pressures crush vitality and force us all into nine-to-five ruts? When we could dance first thing in the morning, dance all day …
I know it is a privilege to be here. One of my dear friends who loves to dance is now raising a son alone. For my brother, who suffers from severe arthritis, even walking hurts too much. I am dancing, not only for my own sake, but because they can’t. I can, so I must. Passion demands to be followed, it demands risk and change. By the end of the first class I am already burning to commit myself to a year of the full-time TDT program.
SCHEDULE
9:30 a.m. Technique class. The musician’s hands tap brisk rhythms on the skin of a drum to guide our “bounces,” “openings” and “long leans”: set floor work that limbers the body sequentially. Fibres loosen and lengthen as we spiral and stretch: sudden suppleness.
11:15 a.m. Barre class. In a continual about-face, we stand with first the right hand on the barre, then the left, as we execute demanding, balletic exercises. Legs warm, we clear the barres away for adage: the “working leg” quivers to support an extension while the “standing leg” bores the ground.
At last we can travel. We race across the floor with runs, triplets and hops, then progress to difficult combinations. Direction changes and intricate footwork complicate the diagonal journey from corner to corner of the studio. Drumbeats propel the dance—the percussionist inspires and pushes us, sets our hearts racing.
1:00 p.m. Lunch. We pull on shorts and line the sidewalk, backs to sun-warmed brick, legs bent into triangles, knees to the sky. Chestnut trees in full leaf cast shade. We eat sandwiches from brown bags or visit the old-fashioned corner deli to spoon lentil soup from thick, white bowls.
1:45 p.m. Back to the studio. Repertory class demands both spontaneity—we sometimes improvise to find movement—and persistence, as we repeat phrases over and over to polish them for presentation. The choreographer, a tiny woman with birdlike alertness, encourages wildness yet insists on precision. When we wilt in the heat, she urges us not to succumb. “Don’t sink into the floor. Find it in yourselves to pull up and push through it, and you’ll feel much better.” I respect her words: she knows what it means to be rehearsing tired, into your sixth hour in the studio.
3:15 p.m. The end of the day. Many head off to their wait-ressing jobs; I can barely exit the building. Today I hobble to Carlton and collapse on a park bench to drink iced tea. Riding home afterwards strains me. Although I believe in gritting my teeth through repertory, what am I trying to prove by cycling home? Tomorrow I’ll treat myself to the streetcar.
RAIN
I leave the Free Times Café on College and catch the High Park streetcar back to Roncesvalles, where I sublet a long, narrow apartment that overlooks Queen Street. Rather than transfer, I walk, so that I can buy Epsom salts, fruit and bread. The sky has clouded over, and I slip on an extra shirt. When I emerge from the drugstore, it’s drizzling. At the bakery a few doors down, braided clerks address customers in Polish. I point to a loaf of sourdough rye and raise my eyebrows hopefully.
As I continue south with my bread, the downpour redoubles. Eaves are dripping, puddles collecting, umbrellas mushrooming. When I stop for bananas and nectarines, the proprietor suggests waiting in the store. I decline the invitation and pursue my path, pack on my back, shopping bag swinging in my hand. With every step my shoes become more waterlogged. They squelch and the dye starts to run. Rain flattens the hair to my head, plasters shirt and shorts to my body with form-hugging transparency. Pedestrians have gathered under awnings and in doorways. Arms folded, they watch the storm—and me.
Nobody stops for rain on the West Coast, where the showers aren’t fierce and momentary but steady and relentless: you would wait all day. Unaccustomed to rain that halts the community, that draws people into neighbourly clusters, I resist when it would be wiser to conform. The price of my initiation: a soaking and a ruined pair of shoes.
REPERCUSSIONS
Body being worked so hard I’m pushed to some verge, of breakdown or breakthrough, exhaustion, despair, tears, exaltation.
Today in barre class, I couldn’t master the combination so I threw myself into it, channelled my frustration into intensity. A good way to cope, but it means that my body ricochets with aggression. My muscles rip and rebuild daily, an industry at the cellular level. Irritated flesh resents change, and I experience its mood: pugnacious.
“Injury comes to those who go for it,” I overheard in the change room. There was an odour of menthol.
Pinched hip and inflamed hamstring sear my left leg, and this wooden chair aggravates them. I shift in vain, much like my brother at family meals. His joints swell; his bones disintegrate. His habitual expression, a wince. Pain has come to him uninvited; some would say I asked for it. Still, my desire to train persists.
Later: Feeling better, no thanks to the Epsom-salts bath or the tiger balm or the cold pack or the tennis ball massage or the mild bike ride to High Park, or even the cathartic effects of writing—though I have done all these naturopathic things, have assiduously cared for myself tonight. No, I attribute it to the Tylenol I took half an hour ago. I don’t regret it. I can’t justify dancing full-time if it means I have to suffer like this.
PERSPECTIVE
Our technique teacher, Lynn, stresses that parts of the body oppose each other. When you draw in a leg in the openings, for instance, the torso does not simply turn toward it. There must be a fight. Lynn herself looks tough and sinewy as an animal that has been fighting for survival all its life. Her body resists itself to such an extent that it can express only private struggle. Never ease or pure affirmation.
But today she reminds us that the high lift in the floor work expresses ecstasy, and that at our level, everything we do should look like or, more importantly, feel like dancing. “You’re past the stage of forming letters of the alphabet between the dotted lines. Now you’ve got to write beautiful poems!”
She has us repeat a combination on single counts, fast, so that we’re forced to abandon ourselves to instinct. She keeps up a stream of exclamations: “Yes! Oh! Now that’s a different story!”
Lynn has danced professionally for twenty years—no one would dance that long without love. What appeared to be severity I now recognize as the capacity for work that sustains any intense endeavour. The Graham technique arrives at emotion through discipline, for even the desire to dance wildly cannot be realized without a vocabulary of movement and a strong, flexible body. Depth of feeling does not suffice: impulses need painstaking artistry in order to be rendered with power.
PROGRESS
Unseasonably cool weather means that early air stirs fresh against a moving form. Most mornings I cycle up the alley, turn on Sorauren, then follow College straight across town. As a cyclist I join the urban groove in a way bus passengers don’t. I thrill with danger when I signal a left turn and cross streetcar tracks in the rain.
Pain in my left hamstring and hip has diminished. And today I make a breakthrough in the floor work: as I rotate out of contraction, I feel my spine spiralling, twisting in segments like
something you manipulate with your hands. Achieving the positions requires so much effort that when their logic infiltrates my body, I am gratified. On almost everyone in class, I see the elegance and beauty of the neck long, the shoulders dropped, the chest and back wide and open, the head turning on top of the spine, energy rising up the torso and pouring into the ground behind. I can now understand those who maintain a daily practice for years. It is devotional. For dancers in this converted church, the ritual of Graham floor work serves as prayer, or meditation.
ZEST
A guest teacher, Viv, arrives to teach technique class ten minutes late and sets the clock back by five. She announces her age—sixty—with an irascible slur. Her demeanour unnerves me and my progress is lost. She torques my ribcage painfully on the spiral in second, preceding the long leans: “Take the ribs with you!” Such pulling and twisting make this technique feel taut and strained. My pelvis often hurts as the bones press the floor. Is this the kind of pain my brother feels as he attempts a normal range of motion? Is it worth harming the body to celebrate movement?
By the end of class, we are fifteen minutes over. I feel hot, tired, dehydrated and annoyed that we will have no break. Viv beckons to me and says, “You’ve got to shift your weight. You’re just stepping.” She demonstrates. To shift the weight, it turns out, is a good synecdoche for zest, urgency, emotional engagement—for making the sequence come alive as dance. When I repeat the combination, she says, “What a difference!” and raises a fist in tribute, elbow tucked to her side.
Last Christmas, after witnessing my brother’s rigidity, I had to throw it off in an exultant jog to the waterfront. To compensate for his loss of mobility, to claim motion for both of us, I swung from the gnarled branches of Garry oaks, leapt from benches, flew across grass into handsprings.
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