We are getting to a knotty part of the memoir, when I am cruising toward 40, and Mr. Landi and are I involved in a “commuting marriage.” Things get sticky, things get weird. There will be blood (metaphorically speaking). And I am not ready to go there yet.
So this week I thought I would write more about my mother.
My mom (who hated to be called Mom) was an unspoken subtext to the stream-of-consciousness musings under anesthesia last week. When I wrote about female competitiveness, admitting envy of writers who’ve gone on to greater glory, I remembered a phrase of hers: “Mee-ow! Pass the cream.”
Allow me to explain. If I had said to her, for example, that I didn’t think Maureen Dowd’s cutesy political jabs every week were worth $400K a year, she might have replied with the above. Meaning, “You’re not impartial. Your judgment comes from jealousy, and so you are being catty.”
I doubt a day that goes by, certainly not a week, without my having some remembrance of my mother, who died more than 20 years ago. She is woven into my psyche as inextricably as the cat hair on my sweaters.
And now I realize how little I knew about her, and how little I asked during her lifetime, and that feels like a huge failing on my part. Friday morning, I started going through my measly cache of old photos again (what happened to all these? Once there were boxes full of them—deckle-edged Kodaks, faded Polaroids), trying to reconstruct something of her girlhood.
She was born in 1920 in Pontiac, Michigan, and grew up in Detroit long before it was Motor City or Motown (and decades before it had race riots), in a tidy middle-class neighborhood called Pinehurst. Her father (William Lindall) was an auto mechanic, the last of a family of Swedish immigrants, the only child born in this country. Her mother (Genevieve Rogers) had a sad secret past, a first family wiped out by the flu epidemic and mustard-gas poisoning, which no one found out about till later (I wrote about this two years ago here). My mother was named Maria (pronounced Mahr-ee-a, not like Callas or Carey) and called Mary. She had a sister who was younger by two or three years, Joyce, from whom I get my second name, and everyone in the family said I most resembled her because of my blonde hair and blue eyes. A third sibling, Billy, was younger by a decade, and I’m guessing from photos that he was hugely indulged by the whole family.
My mother and her sister were close, so close that after my mom died I called Auntie Joyce to give her the news, and she replied, shocked, “Oh, I must tell Mary about this!” About their childhood in the Depression years, I learned very little during her lifetime, except that the family had coupons for food rations and margarine had to be tinted yellow to resemble butter. Surely there was some rivalry between the sisters, because Joyce was the first to marry at 18 before her handsome “black Irish” G.I. went off to World War II for four grueling years in the Pacific. She produced a baby girl soon after he shipped out. My mom went to college, the first in her family, and did not marry till the age of 22, which was probably considered late in those days.
in leafing through the old photo albums, I see they were in no way deprived as girls, though money must have been tight. There are black-and-white mementoes of summer camp and vacations at someplace called Budd Lake in central Michigan. I am shocked at how chubby she was at 14 or 15, round-faced and big breasted, when the joke was that neither of us was particularly well endowed. By 21, when she met by dad, she was a dead ringer for Hedy Lamarr.
(I have a shoebox of old love letters between my father and mother, which I have never had the courage to open and read. I can’t explain this, but even more than two decades after their death I still feel on some level it is an invasion of privacy. Perhaps one day when I tell their story more fully, I will dive in and reconstruct their whirlwind six-week courtship, mostly by mail. But not yet. No, not yet.)
After the war, Mary segued easily into the life of the suburban housewife, as I have chronicled earlier in this memoir. Never did I hear the resentments of Betty Friedan’s subjects from The Feminine Mystique, though she was as well-educated as any of them. “Your father takes such good care of us” was her constant refrain, expressed with gratitude and good cheer. She did volunteer work in libraries, but never held down a real job till she was 40.
Yet there was always about her both a little prickliness and a whiff of culture that set her apart from the other suburban moms. She disdained women’s magazines and popular fiction, preferring classics like Edith Wharton or her near-contemporaries, Mary McCarthy and Flannery OConnor. She had no use for fashion, but when I started copying illustrations from advertisements for Saks and Lord & Taylor from the Times, she was convinced that I had a great career ahead of me as a fashion designer or artist.
She was, in general, passionately dedicated to motherhood without getting sloppy sentimental about it (she despised Mother’s Day). And maybe she saw in it the great adventure I never could—there were trips to museums, to the zoo, to plays in New York (years later she confessed to me how much she hated the end of summers in the ‘burbs, “when my little playmates went back to school”). Both my parents were as active as possible in school functions. When I expressed overwhelming stage fright around the age of six at the prospect of playing Winnie the Pooh in the auditorium of the Mountain Lakes Elementary School, she gave me a firm shake and announced, “You are Pooh Bear. You can do this!”
When we moved to Manhattan in 1963, I was 12 and she was 43, and it was an enormous transition for both of us. As I’ve written, I didn’t do well my first couple of years, suffering ailments both real and psychological, and I’m guessing they were a hard time for my mother as well. The four-bedroom, three-story house shrank to a five-room apartment, the spacious green lawn and aging family dog both gone, along with my father’s beloved 1956 Mercedes Benz. The world for me became private schools, city buses and subways, uniforms. For her, it was time to lose some weight, get a better wardrobe, and, eventually, tackle a five-day-a-week job with a real salary.
But for the both of us it was a period of great closeness, as my father traveled so much, my math-genius brother was off at college, and we settled in on the couch in the evenings for “Bewitched” or “I Dream of Jeannie.” We had two cats, and we had each other. For a time we were buddies, allies, and now and then co-conspirators. And in a few years, we would both become die-hard New Yorkers.
I see I’ve written more than I intended, and so we will have to pick up next week. Mary’s too big to be limited to one post. Isn’t everyone’s mother?
Flounder Filets with Shrimp Sauce
My mother was, at best, an uneven cook. We had the usual 1950s and ‘60s fare as children—fish sticks, canned or frozen vegetables, hamburgers, TV dinners, Boy-ar-Dee spaghetti, Chun King chow mein (and if I go on any longer I will probably throw up). She had a couple of party dishes for grown-ups, like veal stew and boeuf bourguignon, but one of her favorites was a block of frozen flounder that came in a box (I think the brand was A&P White Rose), baked in the oven, with a can of Campbell’s cream of shrimp soup slathered on top. I will never make this dish, but I found a more sophisticated facsimile online, and I offer it here. I’m slammed for time this weekend, but I promise to tackle it next week. So stay tuned for feedback. (Adapted from food.com.)
Ingredients
2(6 ounce) flounder fillets
1teaspoon lemon juice
1tablespoon dry white wine
1 1⁄2cups water
1⁄2lb unpeeled small shrimp
2tablespoons butter or 2 tablespoons margarine
2tablespoons all-purpose flour
3⁄4cup milk
2tablespoons dry white wine
1 1⁄2teaspoons chopped fresh parsley
1⁄2teaspoon salt
1⁄4teaspoon whole dried tarragon
1⁄4teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1(3 ounce) can sliced mushrooms, drained
Directions
1. Place fillets in a shallow dish. Combine lemon juice and 1 Tablespoon wine; pour over fillets. Cover and chill at least 1 hour.
2. Bring water to a boil; add shrimp, and return to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, 3 to 5 minutes or until shrimp are pink. Drain well and rinse with cold water. Peel and devein shrimp; set aside.
3. Melt butter in a heavy saucepan over low heat; add flour, stirring until smooth. Cook 1 minute, stirring constantly. Gradually add milk; cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until thickened and bubbly. Stir in next 6 ingredients and the shrimp.
4. Drain fillets; roll up. Place seam side down in a lightly greased baking dish; pour sauce over top. Bake, uncovered, at 375°F for 25 minutes or until fish flakes easily, basting occasionally with sauce. Yield: 2 servings.
Note: When I make this, I will probably saute some mushrooms instead of using the jarred variety, which I remember are pretty blah.
Hi Ann, thanks for getting back to me. Sorry for the slow reply. I enjoy your blog including the recipes. I can't remember just the problem I had getting through to you but it seems to be working now. I look forward to reading whatever you choose to post. I hope your eye is better now.
It's interesting that in such a global social climate there is this energy for the particular . Our individual particulars .
two thumbs up and always engaging