When I think about myself as a young teenager in New York City, I marvel at what a mess I was and at the miseries I inflicted on my parents. I spent Sundays circling ads in the real-estate section of the Times, hoping we could move back to Mountain Lakes. I played sick as much as I could, pressing the mercury end of the thermometer against a lightbulb to nudge my temperature past 98.6. I had no friends at the Rhodes School, where I spent the eighth grade. Most of the kids were transients, sons and daughters of diplomats and actors, who had to be parked at some institution at the last minute for the academic year. (But the great thing about the school was that it was opposite the building that housed both the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, with its delightful garden, decades before both would become behemoths in the New York art world.)
If I was having adjustment problems, my mother was surely going through her own painful metamorphoses. What did a suburban mom with no job and no friends do with her time? She went on diet pills (aka speed) for one thing, and I’ve already recounted how I discovered her at three a.m. mopping the kitchen floor. She sewed, for another. And was an expert seamstress, who worked from Vogue patterns, turning out garments for us both that were maybe not cutting edge but certainly a notch above the denim wrap skirts and madras blouses that were our suburban staples.
And then she went to work as a librarian in private schools, which must have required some fancy footwork since she did not have a degree in library science and had worked only as a volunteer. After a couple of miserable jobs in miserable schools, she landed at the Buckley School on the Upper East Side, a prime conduit for Andover, Choate, and other preppy boarding schools, all boys, K to 9, and many of them from prestigious New York families, like the Rockefellers and the Roosevelts (and, sadly, the Trumps, though that was years after her time). She called herself a “teaching librarian,” and was very proud to be working in such a posh incubator.
It was during the New York years that I remember my mother gradually evolving into a particular kind of hybrid middle-age hottie, part Zsa Zsa Gabor, part Dorothy Parker. She shopped for knockoff designer suits at Loehmann’s (where I was first introduced to the varieties of adult female flesh—from muffin top to thunder thighs—in the communal dressing room) and wore a platinum mink coat, even to school, in cold weather. One of her favorite stories was of waiting at the bus stop for the 79th Street crosstown when a bum staggered up to her and declared, “You look so adorable. I just want to take you home and fuck you all night.”
We each suffered our separate forms of hair trauma during those years, as I progressed (or maybe regressed) from peroxide blonde to an ashy brunette shade and used all manner or rollers, from sponge to mesh with scalp-piercing picks, to attain a sort of insane hair style seen only on portrait busts of Roman matrons. My mother, whose hair was considerably thinner, always opted for a retro 50s look and turned blonde at some point in my college years. Even into my forties, long after I’d let my hair go natural, she was fascinated by my locks and would run her fingers through my curls, marveling that genes were so unpredictable.
We were closest during my teenage years, and you might think that because this is the time when hormones start to rage, we could have had some frank discussions about the opposite sex. Or just sex. But everything I gleaned on the subject came from my classmates and from the copy of The Joy of Sex I found when I babysat the neighbors’ kids. I had no dates with anyone, and certainly not with the four or five boys in my high-school class (except for the prom, when Morgan Kennedy’s steady squeeze punked out). If we talked about men/boys it was in the most generalized terms, and yet she seemed to know when I went on the pill my freshman year of college (“Sex without love is a sin,” she opined).
Of course she passed judgment on the boys I paraded before my parents in my late teens and twenties (a frequent response was “Throw him back,” if the guy fell short in her estimation), but when I brought home “the one” around the age of 26 she was ecstatic in her response (and a little too flirtatious for my comfort—see “Meet the Parents” from October 2022).
In memory my mother lives most vividly in her bon mots and snappy retorts. At one of her dinner parties, she famously remarked, “But if we have a nuclear holocaust, who will listen to Mozart?” When I came home from a date in my college years with an enormous hickey on my neck, she sniffed, “Nice girls wear scarves.” She also had a sweetly vulgar streak. One Christmas she announced that she was sending my sister-in-law a nightgown trimmed in fur, “to keep her chin warm.” She could be casually cruel, calling me “Bubbles” after I gained 10 or 15 pounds my first semester of college. But she also saved my life when I nearly died from complications following an inept abortion.
Some vital spark went out of her when she retired to Florida with my father at the age of 62. She loved her job and was far too young to be unemployed. Volunteer activities were not exactly her forte, and she became so depressed her doctor put her on Prozac. She retreated into books, hoping still I think for grandchildren but never pushing the issue. It seemed to me her main function was as enabler to my alcoholic father, who was drinking himself to death in the tropical sunshine (neither, I’m convinced, really recognized how dire his tippling had become—he was surprised, after a stroke landed him in the hospital at the age of 78, when the doctor informed he was an alcoholic.)
This morning I sat down to read three letters she had sent me from her one and only trip to Europe, when I was a freshman in college and she was 50. I hoped to remember her voice, but alas her handwriting is so faint and spidery, and has no doubt faded over the years, that I could not decipher the text even with a magnifying glass. And so I will leave her here, remembering the card she sent me on my 50th birthday: “We’ve had a lot of good years with you, kid.” We certainly did.
Black Bean Chili
It’s pathetic how few of my mom’s recipes I remember, and I regret I didn’t save her little green box of dishes carefully inscribed on index cards. For sure there was meatloaf, chicken divan, Boston cream pie, and other delights to send your cholesterol soaring, but I’ve already offered up a few of these and am trying to eat a more vegetarian kind of diet. So this week I highly recommend a black-bean chili I’ve tweaked from a site called skinnytaste.com. I made it on Monday, and let the spices blend for a day, but forgot to take one of my dreadful photos. Trust me, it’s great. And easy.
Spice Mix:
· 1 1/4 tablespoon cumin
· 1 1/4 tablespoon chili powder
· 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
· 1/4 teaspoon onion powder
· 1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
· 1 teaspoon salt
Chili:
· Two 15 oz cans black beans
· 1 tablespoon olive oil
· 1 medium onion, chopped
· 1 red bell pepper, chopped
· 10 oz can diced tomatoes (with green chilies if you want more heat)
· 8 ounces frozen corn
· 8 ounce can tomato sauce
· Optional Toppings: shredded cheddar, diced red onions, cilantro, diced avocado, sour cream
Instructions
· Mix the spices in a small bowl.
· Place 1 can of beans, not drained, in the blender with 1/2 cup of water and puree. Drain the second can.
· Add oil to a large pot over medium heat, add the onions and bell pepper and cook 3 to 4 minutes.
· Add tomatoes, corn, beans, pureed beans, tomato sauce, and remaining spices.
· Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and cover and simmer about 15 minutes, until thickened
You just gotta love "throw him back."
So vivid and lovely—your description of your mother, just as I imagine she was. Although I never met her, you certainly conjured the context of that world: Manhattan and its suburbs in the 1950s and ‘60s, which I grew up in. Thank you for the memories 😍