Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from the short story "Mother" by Andrea Lee (©1984 by Andrea Lee).

It was easy for me to think of my mother in connection with caves, with anything in the world, in fact, that was dimly lit and fantastic. Sometimes she would rivet Matthew and me with a tale from her childhood: how, at nine years old, walking home through the cobblestone streets of Philadelphia with a package of ice cream from the drugstore, she had slipped and fallen down a storm drain accidentally left uncovered by workmen. No one was around to help her; she dropped the ice cream she was carrying (something that made a deep impression on my brother and me) and managed o cling to the edge and hoist herself out of the hole. The image of the little girl—who was to become my mother—hanging in perilous darkness was one that haunted me; sometimes it showed up in my dreams.

Perhaps her near-fatal tumble was responsible for my mother's lasting attraction to the bizarre side of life. Beneath a sometimes prudish exterior, she quivered with excitement in the same way her children did over newspaper accounts of trunk murders, foreign earthquakes, graves hidden in the New Jersey pine barrens. When she commented on these subjects, she attempted a firm neutrality of tone but gave herself away in the heightened pitch of her voice and in a little breathy catch that broke the rhythm of each sentence she spoke. This was the voice she used to whisper shattering bits of gossip over the phone. "When Mr. Tillet died," I heard her say once, with that telltale intake of breath, "the funeral parlor did such a poor job that his daughter had to wire her own father together."

At home Mama was a housekeeper in the grand old style that disdains convenience, worships thrift, and condones extravagance only in the form of massive Sunday dinners, which, like acts of God, leave family members stunned and reeling. Her kitchen, a long, dark, Inconvenient room joined to a crooked pantry, was entirely unlike the cheerful kitchens I saw on television, where mothers who looked like June Cleaver unwrapped food done up in cellophane. This kitchen had more the feeling of a workshop, a laboratory in which the imperfect riches of nature were investigated and finally transformed into something near sublimity. The sink and stove were cluttered with works in progress: hot plum jelly dripping into a bowl through cheesecloth; chocolate syrup bubbling in a saucepan; string beans and ham bones hissing in the pressure cooker; in a vat, a brownish, aromatic mix for root beer.

The instruments my mother used were a motley assemblage of blackened cast-iron pots, rusty-handled beaters, graters, strainers, and an array of mixing bowls that included the cheapest plastic variety as well as tall, archaic-looking stoneware tubs inherited from my grandmother, who had herself been a legendary cook. Mama guarded these ugly tools with jealous solicitude, suspicious of any new introductions, and she moved in her kitchen with the modest agility of a master craftsperson.

Like any genuine passion, her love of food embraced every aspect of the subject. She read cook-books like novels, and made a businesslike note in her appointment book of the date that Wanamaker's received its yearly shipment of chocolate-covered strawberries. Matthew and I learned from her a sort of culinary history of her side of the family: our grand father, for instance, always asked for calf brains scrambled with his eggs on weekend mornings before he went out hunting. Grandma Renfrew loved to drink clabbered milk, and was so insistent about the purity of food that once when Aunt Lily had served her margarine instead of butter, she had refused to eat at Lily's table for a year. My mother's sole memory of her mother's mother was of the withered woman scraping an apple in the corner of the kitchen, and sucking the pulp between her toothless jaws.

Mama took most pleasure in the raw materials that became meals. She enjoyed the symmetry, the unalterable rules, and also the freaks and vagaries that nature brought to her kitchen. She showed me with equal pleasure the handsome shape of a fish backbone; the little green gallbladder in the middle of a chicken liver; and the double-yolked eggs, the triple cherries, the peculiar worm in a cob of corn. As she enjoyed most the follies, the bizarre twists of human nature and experience, so also she had a particular fondness for the odd organs and connective tissues that others disdained. "Gristle is delectable, " she would exclaim as Matthew and I groaned. "The best part of the cow!"