Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins (22 page)

Such concentration, such focus. For six eggs.

Without my realizing I realized it, it occurred to me that Molly's semi-surly, quasi-crabby demeanor was a variation on a theme of my way of working through an issue. Aha! It was Sunday. She had a column due Monday. She had no idea what she was going to write. Slicing tomatoes, grating cheese, snipping and chopping chives, toasting brioche, and scrambling eggs helped clear the cobwebs and free the mind to receive an idea.

When Molly worked in the kitchen she occasionally talked to herself. Not as if she was having a complete conversation, though. More like she was rearranging thoughts in her head. Sometimes she'd just grunt. That's what she was doing now: Molly mumbles. I learned during her conversations with herself that it was best to be scarce. So, slicing done, I headed for the living room to read the paper and watch for the red fox family.

Honest.

For years Molly had a family of red foxes that lived in some hidden quadrant of her substantial corner lot. Foxes, she explained, mate for life and, unsurprisingly, have baby foxes. I saw them walk by her wall-sized picture window on two separate occasions. Once, Mr. and Mrs. Fox were out on their own for an evening constitutional. Another time, the Foxes strolled by with Muffy and Chip, their juvenile offspring. As Molly explained, the names she conferred were deemed appropriate for the creeping gentrification of her South Austin neighborhood.

When Molly overhauled her once-modest Travis Heights bungalow, the kitchen redo included a counter with suitable seating for two. The counter faced a picture window with a bird feeder centered smack-dab in the middle of the sight line, the better to see sparrows, cardinals, mockingbirds, blue jays, and other birds she frequently identified from a field guide kept close by, next to the cat's dish. She called all the finches by the same name: Atticus.

Little Kaye Northcat, Molly's cranky gray tabby, took her meals on the counter near the window because Athena, the naughty poodle of insatiable appetite, ate anything within reach. Athena could not, however, get to Little
Kaye's dish on the counter. A few feet to the left of the window hung a hummingbird feeder. Greenery to the far right was planted with lantana and milkweed to attract butterflies, especially Monarchs. I returned to the kitchen when I began to smell toast. Sitting in one of the two window seats and appreciating this urban pastoral scene abbreviated the wait for the world's longest egg scramble. Mimosas helped.

At last fluffy steaming scrambled eggs, lightly toasted brioche, orange marmalade, and café au lait graced the counter. Breakfast was lovely. Mid-meal, out of nowhere, Molly said, “It's truly amazing, if there's one thing those god-damned Republicans know how to do, it's take care of their own.”

I did what I do best with someone who clearly knows more about what she's thinking than I possibly could: I nodded, said something erudite like “Uhnh,” and waited for her to continue. She was, as usual, royally pissed with a Bush. This time it was Bush the First. It had something to do with the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Molly believed in the redistribution of wealth, just not the way Bush did. She believed it should go from the rich to the not-in-the-least-bit rich.

A forkful of eggs, a crunch of toast, a sip of café. Finally she spoke.

“We got a Congress that's useless as tits on a boar hog and a president who vetoed the first increase in the minimum wage in more than a decade,” she mumbled. “Duddent make a lick a goddamn sense.” After knocking off part of the second mimosa, or maybe the third, she stalked to her office. Presently the staccato sound of keyboard clicks began. The idea had gelled. I cleared the counter as quietly as possible, but apparently not quietly enough. “Just leave it,” a disembodied voice said from two rooms away. I returned to the couch to read the paper and, with any luck, to glimpse a red fox.

20

MOLLY AND I SPENT A LOT OF TIME REMINISCING
about family and food, hers served in the upscale River Oaks section of Houston, mine in the then segregated river city of St. Louis. As we got to know one another better, we discovered that to varying degrees, we had some things in common. She grew up Episcopalian; I was confirmed in the only all-black high Episcopal church west of the Mississippi. (Segregated housing forced everyone to live together, whether you were a teacher, doctor, lawyer, postal carrier, or welfare recipient.) Her father, by her description, was an unreconstructed bigot; my father was a publisher and a confirmed Republican, back when Republicans were, relatively speaking, the good guys who had freed the slaves ninety years earlier. Molly and I both grew up knowing a lot of people but having few close friends. We further had in common the fact that we were rebellious—she against a tyrannical father, me against a perfectionist mother. She loved to read. I learned to love to read because my mother's version of punishment was to send me to my room—where there were two well-stocked bookcases.

I got punished a lot. I was a congenital contrarian. I had a smart mouth. I got kicked out of the Girl Scouts for smoking and cursing. I disobeyed my parents when they forbade me to (a) play stickball with the boys and (b) to play in the Catholic schoolyard a couple of blocks away. I then lied when I hit a ball through one of the school's windows, where I went to play anyway. I hated shoes and walked around barefoot, which made my mother apoplectic. I questioned church teachings, I challenged my teachers and rolled my eyes and muttered under my breath when I disagreed with my parents. I spent a lot of time in my room.

My mother never told me I had to read from those books, but I didn't have a radio and no one had a personal television in the 1950s, and few had a smart-mouthed daughter.

Molly retreated into books too. And Margot, her mother, knew her way around a kitchen as well. Both of our families had someone who cooked evening meals, but left to their own devices they lived by the
Joy of Cooking
and
The Good Housekeeping Cookbook
, both reasonably informative culinary guides, but no competition for the wide range of ethnic, regional, and international options we have today. Well, there was one difference: Melba Sweets didn't have a Junior League cookbook in her modest collection.

Like Molly's family, we had a dinner schedule, even, surprisingly, some of the same dishes. In our house, Mondays were either meatballs and spaghetti or spaghetti with meat sauce; Tuesdays were calf's liver, sliced thick, with bacon and tons of onions. The liver had to be sautéed medium rare, never cooked all the way through. Wednesday's fare consisted of fried or baked pork chops and was anticipated with great enthusiasm in either incarnation.

Thursday at the Sweetses' was almost always a stuffed pepper day, unless eggplant was in season. Then it was eggplant stuffed and baked with either ground lamb or beef, unless we had it on Friday, when shrimp or crabmeat supplanted red meat. Otherwise Friday was a fried fish day. Saturday was pot o' beans day—chili, black, navy, baby limas, black-eyed, Great Northern. Sunday was chicken day: fried, baked, roasted, or stewed with dumplings.

My father said he belonged to the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which came as news to successive ministers who saw him only when he dragged my brothers and me to the annual Father's Day pancake breakfast.

Andy, Molly's beloved younger brother, remembers a weekly meal rotation in his house too. It included hamburger, steak, and, yes, liver and onions. Like Molly, he chuckles over his mother's turnip fluff, which, he says, was not as awful as it sounds. Mostly, though, he remembers Molly's love of the out-of-doors—and her stubbornness.

One of those memories revolves around a rained-out family camping adventure. Andy, his wife, Carla, and their three preteen children packed up tents, butane grill, and all the appropriate gear for a weekend on a small river in West Texas.

“It was either late fall or early spring, I'm not sure which anymore,” Andy said. “We'd planned one of those campouts where Molly'd be the cook. Well, that night it started to rain, then it poured. Carla gave up, got in the car, and
went home. I tried to tough it out, but it was raining so hard the tents were starting to leak. I finally gave in, packed up the kids, and tried to get Molly to come with us. Her tent was leaking too, but she refused to leave.”