Stuffed Read online

  “I learned to live by myself, for myself,” Dad says. “I had no expectations.”

  We pass the Indian war canoe three times. We scour the basement. All we can find is Roald Amundson’s sled, the one he used crossing the Arctic via the North Pole. That and some threadbare gear from the Antarctic explorer Lincoln Ellsworth. No one can tell us anything about Admiral Peary’s sled. None of the guards or information people has heard of Admiral Peary. That does it. Standing outside at the top of the stairs behind J. E. Fraser’s statue of Teddy Roosevelt and his guides, staring into the marvelous scrotum of Roosevelt’s horse, Dad takes one last look around. “That’s it for me,” he says. “I’ve had it with New York.”

  The fact that Dad won’t fly up anymore doesn’t stop him from mailing envelopes stuffed with articles:

  MUSIC BOOSTS INTELLIGENCE

  LAPTOP PROTECTION

  TEST YOUR FINANCIAL FITNESS

  And just today, MICHELLE PFEIFFER: FORMER OUTCAST. Sometimes he sends them with a little note: “Thought this would be of service—Dad.”

  SLIDE WOODEN DRAWERS MORE EASILY

  WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT CAFFEINE

  BE A WINNER

  Four times a year now, Mom comes alone.

  “I have a new way of looking at your apartment,” she tells me after her latest visit. I’m driving her to La Guardia Airport so she can catch the three-fifty back to West Palm.

  “You do, Ma?”

  “It’s a ruin. It’s like visiting the Colosseum or Pompeii.”

  She’s sitting next to me on the front seat. Maybe I should say folding. Her body is curved inward, and her head is down so low it’s almost touching the seat.

  “Ma, why are you sitting like that?”

  “It’s nothing. I’m a little nervous the way you drive. Really, darling, it’s nothing.”

  The way I drive? The last time I was in Boca, Mom drove up on the median three times and kept going left when she meant to go right. “Why are people flashing their lights at us?” she said, ticked until she realized her headlights weren’t on.

  “When we get to the house,” I told her, “I’m going to kiss the driveway.”

  She gasped. “You think I’m not a good driver?”

  Mom aims for perfection. Most times she gets a bull’s-eye. She’d like to pump some perfection my way too. To that end, she makes lists. The latest one reads:

  MOTHER’S LIST

  Reupholster couch

  Take care of IRA

  Fix shelf in Polly’s room

  Get round kitchen table and six chairs

  Get large colorful object for coffee table

  I have her recipe for “How to Wash Your Face” written in perfect Palmer script:

  Cleanse with Pond’s cold cream

  Use toner without alcohol, i.e., Nivea, Avon, etc.

  Night—Orlane Extrait Vitale on first, then Nivea cream

  Day—Wash with water, use Orlane Extrait Vitale, then Clinique moisturizer. NEVER SOAP.

  “You’ve got to fix that kitchen,” she says. “Your daughter will be bringing boys home soon.”

  Does she mean, Gentlemen callers may one day look at my kitchen and think, How could I marry a girl whose mother has unevenly laid floor tiles and an uninstalled fridge?

  Okay, so she’s right. The kitchen does need work. Okay, so it looks like a George Booth cartoon. Thanks to a flood upstairs, a cord dangles from the ceiling light fixture and plugs into a wall socket. The broiler hasn’t broiled in seven years. That’s why we bought the toaster oven, but now that broiler’s broken too. (“A simple wiring repair,” Dad diagnoses from Florida. “Expose the elements. Clean the contacts. You got a digital multimeter?”) My dream fridge arrived three years ago but why install it if I’m planning to redo the countertops and it would have to be taken out again? The inside of the G.E. dishwasher is so rusty I’m calling the internist to see if we need tetanus shots. Yup. Mom’s right. The kitchen looks like hell. But do I want my daughter to marry a man who won’t marry her because of my kitchen?

  Mom stares at my auction find, a portrait of Lord Townley attributed to Romney. (Attributed to means Definitely not done by.) “You really should have that frame repaired,” she says.

  Walking into my bedroom: “You still have those lampshades?”

  Waiting for the elevator: “Your hair looks so much better today than it did yesterday.”

  Something snaps. “I have no control over my hair, Ma. It does what it wants to. Every morning I wake up, look in the mirror, and say, ‘What the hell?’ I never know what’s going to stare back at me. I got this hair from you and Daddy. I didn’t luck out in the genetic crapshoot. Or maybe they gave you the wrong baby.”

  “You have beautiful hair.” Mom looks at me like I’m crackpated. “Something happened that summer in camp when you cut one side off with manicuring scissors.”

  Coming out of my bathroom where the tiles from the floor repair were never relaid, she shakes her head. “I don’t get it. I don’t get it.”

  What I see as patina, Mom sees as worn. My mother has never owned anything faded. If it’s chipped, frayed, or dated, out it goes. She has twenty-eight filled hangers in her closet. If something new comes in, something old gets handed down. Dad cleans her sneakers with bleach on a toothbrush. You could eat off her floors if you don’t mind the taste of Pine-Sol.

  My apartment needs work. Me too: “If you lose ten pounds, I’ll buy you a dress,” Ma says.

  “You’re at an age now where you can’t go out without makeup anymore.”

  “Get a face lift when you’re young, before you need it.”

  Under the fluorescent lights in the supermarket, comparing pretzels, she notices a color anomaly in my hair. “I’m laughing so hard”—she grabs the display—“I think I cracked a rib!”

  What she wants for me is an even cleaner, thinner, happier life than she has. Mom made me, and now she will make me better. I’m unfinished, something she can’t stop sculpting, something it’s her job to complete. It’s a sign of her abiding love that she never gives up. It’s a sign of my mental health that I never give in. For as long as she’s my mother, I am her work in progress. There should be a yellow traffic diamond over my head with the silhouette of a woman with her hands on her hips: DANGER— MOTHER AT WORK.

  “You’re still wearing that watch?” she says. “You should have a good watch.”

  I try to explain. “I don’t want a good watch, Ma. Someone will steal it. Remember Nana’s watch Ilene stole? Remember when you lent me your Lucien Picard for a blind date with Barry Goldwater’s nephew, and I left it on the sink at the Playboy Club? Didn’t I just lose my watch on a plane? I never want a watch I care about again.”

  Then we go to the theater. The play is slow. I press a little button on my Timex Indiglo, and it lights up green. “Nineteen ninety-nine at Ames, Ma.” I whisper, “You can’t do this with a Rolex.”

  Once, I said, “Ma, don’t you ever wonder why I never criticize you?”

  She looked shocked. “What could you possibly find to criticize about me?”

  Where to start! How to begin! That I think you criticize me too much? I look at her carefully. I am stunned by her expression. She looks like the smartest kid in class, ready to absorb whatever information I can give her and act on it immediately.

  “Well”—I think hard—“sometimes in the morning after you brush your teeth, there’s still a little toothpaste on the corner of your lip.”

  “What? There is? Is there any there now?”

  Mom looks in my closet. “You have no clothes,” she says, then adds, “Your sister thinks so too.”

  The next morning my sister calls from Florida. “You have no clothes,” she says. “You need more clothes.”

  What’s puzzling is some of the things Mom thinks are wrong, she winds up doing.

  “When are you getting carpet?” she asks me. Now she lives in a house with no carpet.

  “These windows need drapes,” s
he says. “Aren’t you afraid of people looking in?”

  Now she lives in a house with no drapes.

  “Only Gypsies pierce their ears.”

  Now she has pierced ears.

  As I come out of the shower, my mother asks me if she can fix my hair.

  “Sure,” I say, and hand her the comb. Then I sit on the bed, like I used to once a week when I was little, on the night she sterilized the combs and brushes with Clorox, and we got our shampoos and she “did” me. It occurs to me that I have never had a Cloroxed comb and brush since then. That I’ve never Cloroxed for my kids either. Now she’s “doing me” again. She’s hard at it. The word “gusto” comes to mind as the woman whose hair looks perfect climbing out of a pool attacks mine. I feel like I’m five. It feels good.

  She parts my hair, steps back, furrows her brow, studies me, parts it a new way, fluffs the ends with the comb, experiments with bangs, wipes it behind my ears into two letter C’s, squints, sets a wave with a chop from the side of her hand, slicks it all back, starts all over, reparts, rechops, refluffs, steps back again.

  “See?” She yanks my chin toward the mirror. “It’s a look.”

  Alfalfa stares back at me. Should I tell her that when it dries, it will frizz and go crazy and mash down when I sleep? Doesn’t she know that yet? Who on earth knows my hair better than my beloved mother? What can I tell a woman who believes she has the power to alter human follicles with her bare hands? Isn’t it time for her to give up?

  Never.

  So I say, “I get it, Ma. Interesting. Fascinating.” And for one minute more, before evaporation starts to take its toll, I am my mother’s image of what I should be, what I could be, her love-engorged vision—whatever, God help me, that is.

  Mattie Sylvia Lee Myles Weems Watts at my sister’s wedding in a Larry Aldrich illusion-top dress. She was my New Year’s Eve date for fourteen years.

  HASH

  Two years before she died, Mattie told me I was her favorite. She had a favorite? Both of us got Mattie’s chocolate cake on our birthdays. Both of us played jacks on the kitchen linoleum while she read the sports pages of the Daily News. She took us both to the pedodontist, weeping and shredding her hankie while we squirmed in Dr. Adelson’s chair. She took us both to the pediatrician too, because my mother was afraid to “take his fire” when we stepped on the scale. Both of us she dressed for school.

  Naturally, I tell my sister, “Mattie told me I was her favorite.”

  “Really?”

  “Did you write her from camp?”

  “No.”

  “Did you bring her food?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever send her a check?”

  “I could have been better to Mattie,” my sister says.

  Mattie Sylvia Lee Myles Weems Watts came to live with us when I was one and she was forty-three. “I took one look at how crisp Mattie was,” my mother says, “and that was it.”

  Mattie worked every day except Thursday and every other Sunday. She cooked, battled New York soot, and baby-sat. She did everything it takes to run a home except the wash. Wash was done by Lola from Freeport, who was so fat she had to come through the door sideways. Lola rang our back bell, then grunted and wiggled past the jambs while my sister and I angled to watch. The laundry was hand-washed in the pantry sinks, squeezed through a wringer, then pinned to a retractable rack lowered by rope from the kitchen ceiling. Eventually we got a washing machine. But until then Lola did it all by hand, even the sheets.

  The rest of the work in our two-bedroom apartment was left to Mattie. Mattie attacked dirt. She stabbed it with her broom. She pummeled it with her dustcloth. She vacuumed carpet till it was raw. “Now!” she’d say when something earned her approval, like a perfectly ironed shirt. “Now!” She’d stand back admiring the part she’d combed in my hair or roses she’d encouraged with roast beef drippings. “Now! ” She’d knife the last swath of chocolate icing on her cake, the kind of icing that shatters when you rap it with a spoon. No matter how much we begged, she made it only for birthdays and graduations. The cake never lasted more than a day. Late at night, people bumped into each other groping downstairs for one last sliver. I licked the pot. I sucked the spoons. I scraped the bowl. When the cake was finished, I chewed the doily. This was Mattie’s Chocolate Cake, available only for big events.

  “Are you going to make the cake?” we’d ask as our birthdays got close. “Promise you’ll make the cake?”

  “Out of my kitchen.” She’d flap her hand.

  Mattie was five feet five and so skinny her legs looked like spokes. She wore gold-framed glasses. The tips of her shoes touched when she stood. She had a raised mole in the center of her palm—exactly where my mother had one—that I liked to finger when she held my hand to cross the street. She was a passionate Brooklyn Dodgers fan, although she looked like Satchel Paige, the screwball pitcher for the St. Louis Browns, who said, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” They both had soft faces with full lips and heavy eyebrows. They both looked as if they were holding back a laugh. Mattie’s plan was, I’d marry Sandy Koufax, the only Jewish Dodger. She talked about taking me to Ebbets Field, how we’d work our way down to the dugout, and she’d find a way to introduce me, then tell him my good points. I didn’t push for it. He was too old. I preferred angry boys who hated their mothers.

  Every Thursday, on her day off, Mattie took the subway to Flushing, Queens, to get her hair done. When I first met her, she had braids wound into a crown. As she got older, she blued her hair and wore it in an even roll around her head. Her favorite hairdo was a showstopper—three rows of purple hair snails held rigid in a silver net. She’d sit on a bridge chair while I poked my finger in their perfect coiled centers, row by row, three times around her head. Everything about Mattie said “neat.” She was so meticulous, she could train raisins. Half of us hated them, half loved them. Mattie could make a rice pudding in a four-quart bowl and discipline the raisins to stay on the raisin side. She put peas in mashed-potato nests for the sake of beauty alone. She never served bread. Bread was “filler.” There was too much other stuff to eat. The exception was Mattie’s biscuits. They tanned on the edges and had a texture like dry snow. She made biscuits only when she made fried chicken. We split them steaming, buttered each side to the edge, then covered the melted salt butter with a thick layer of Welch’s grape jelly decanted to a crystal jar. (Bottles products came in were verboten on the table.) You could argue that Welch’s grape jelly doesn’t go with fried chicken. That wasn’t the point. We treated the biscuits as an entity unto themselves, the best way to eat a biscuit. We maximized the pleasure of each bite. Old friends who come for dinner still say, “Remember Mattie’s steak?” Their eyes glaze. Always I give them the recipe.

  MATTIE’S STEAK

  Prime Grade-A 14-ounce sirloin

  Cross sections of garlic sliced so thin you could

  read the New York Times through them

  Morgen’s seasoning salt

  Worcestershire sauce

  Peanut oil

  A little salt butter

  Dot the meat on both sides with the garlic.

  Coat that with Morgen’s seasoning salt.

  Coat that with Worcestershire sauce mixed with

  a little peanut oil.

  Turn and baste several times during the day.

  Sear, then pan-sauté it in a cast-iron skillet

  rubbed with the butter.

  Slice at a forty-five-degree angle.

  “What’s Morgen’s seasoning salt?” they ask. Their steaks never come out the same. The last store closed twelve years ago. Except for half a Heinz chili jar of it on my spice shelf, Morgen’s seasoning salt no longer exists. Every few years I’ll make a steak with my endangered supply, just to keep the taste alive. The closest I can get to a recipe is Dad’s vague recollection.

  MORGEN’S SEASONING SALT

  Salt

  Onion salt

 
; Garlic salt

  A lot of paprika, to give the steak a good

  brown color

  I could have it analyzed by a lab

  Mattie was a perfectionist. She sliced a sandwich on the diagonal, squinting to make sure there was no big half. When she cut leftover roast beef to make hash, each square was the same size. Every quarter-inch cube of beef and potato was browned on six sides. Roast beef was the Sahara of meat, a wasteland of flesh, each mouthful the same except for a paring of crisp garlicky fat crust on the edge. Roast beef was boring. Eating it, a sentence: Twenty bites of hard chewing. The only reason to make roast beef was leftovers for Mattie’s hash.

  I was five at the height of the New York polio epidemic. No one was sure how you got it. “Never touch a banister!” teachers warned. “Don’t wipe your eyes if you wiped your nose first!” “Never swim in a pool!” Kids went to bed fine one night, then woke up unable to move their legs. Our neighbor Susan Brody got it. When we jumped rope in front of the building, Susan sat in her wheelchair with metal braces on her legs and watched. She sang “Fudge, Fudge, Tell the Judge” with us and “I Won’t Go to Macy’s Any More, More, More.” Then a nurse would come down and wheel her upstairs.

  “It could be worse,” people said. “At least she isn’t in an iron lung.”