Tender at the Bone (2 page)

This was not a bad sign: the more odd and interesting things there were in the refrigerator, the happier my mother was likely to be. Still, I was puzzled; the refrigerator in our small kitchen had been almost empty when I went to bed.

“Where did you get all this stuff?” I asked. “The stores aren’t open yet.”

“Oh,” said Mom blithely, patting at her crisp gray hair, “I woke up early and decided to go for a walk. You’d be surprised at what goes on in Manhattan at four
A.M.
I’ve been down to the Fulton Fish Market. And I found the most interesting produce store on Bleecker Street.”

“It was open?” I asked.

“Well,” she admitted, “not really.” She walked across the worn linoleum and set a basket of bread on the Formica table. “But I saw someone moving around so I knocked. I’ve been trying to get ideas for the party.”

“Party?” I asked warily. “What party?”

“Your brother has decided to get married,” she said casually, as if I should have somehow intuited this in my sleep. “And of course we’re going to have a party to celebrate the engagement and meet Shelly’s family!”

My brother, I knew, would not welcome this news. He was thirteen years older than I and considered it a minor miracle to have reached the age of twenty-five. “I don’t know how I survived her cooking,” he said as he was telling me about the years when he and Mom were living alone, after she had divorced his father and was waiting to meet mine. “She’s a menace to society.”

Bob went to live with his father in Pittsburgh right after I was born, but he always came home for holidays. When he was there he always helped me protect the guests, using tact to keep them from eating the more dangerous items.

I took a more direct approach. “Don’t eat that,” I ordered my best friend Jeanie as her spoon dipped into one of Mom’s more creative lunch dishes. My mother believed in celebrating every holiday: in honor of St. Patrick she was serving bananas with green sour cream.

“I don’t mind the color,” said Jeanie, a trusting soul whose own mother wouldn’t dream of offering you an all-orange Halloween extravaganza complete with milk dyed the color of orange juice. Ida served the sort of perfect lunches that I longed for: neat squares of cream cheese and jelly on white bread, bologna sandwiches, Chef Boyardee straight from the can.

“It’s not just food coloring,” I said. “The sour cream was green to begin with; the carton’s been in the refrigerator for months.”

Jeanie quickly put her spoon down and when Mom went into the other room to answer the phone we ducked into the bathroom and flushed our lunches down the toilet.

“That was great, Mim,” said Jeanie when Mom returned.

“May we be excused?” is all I said. I wanted to get away from the table before anything else appeared.

“Don’t you want dessert?” Mom asked.

“Sure,” said Jeanie.

“No!” I said. But Mom had already gone to get the cookies. She returned with some strange black lumps on a plate. Jeanie looked at them dubiously, then politely picked one up.

“Oh, go ahead, eat it,” I said, reaching for one myself. “They’re just Girl Scout mint cookies. She left them on the radiator so all the chocolate melted off, but they won’t kill you.”

As we munched our cookies, Mom asked idly, “What do you girls think I should serve for Bob’s engagement party?”

“You’re not going to have the party here, are you?” I asked, holding my breath as I looked around at our living room, trying to see it with a stranger’s eye.

Mom had moments of decorating inspiration that usually died before the project was finished. The last one, a romance with Danish modern, had brought a teak dining table, a wicker chair that looked like an egg and hung from a chain, and a Rya rug into our lives. The huge turquoise abstract painting along one wall dated from that period too. But Mom had, as usual, gotten bored, so they were all mixed together with my grandmother’s drum table, an ornate breakfront, and some Japanese prints from an earlier, more conservative period.

Then there was the bathroom, my mother’s greatest decorating feat. One day she had decided, on the spur of the moment, to install gold towels, a gold shower curtain, and a gold rug. They were no problem. But painting all the porcelain gold was a disaster; it almost immediately began peeling off the sink and it was years before any of us could take a bath without emerging slightly gilded.

My father found all of this slightly amusing. An intellectual who had escaped his wealthy German-Jewish family by coming to America in the twenties, he had absolutely no interest in
things
. He was a book designer who lived in a black-and-white world of paper and type; books were his only passion. He was kindly and detached and if he had known that people described him as elegant, he would have been shocked; clothes bored him enormously, when he noticed them at all.

“No,” said Mom. I exhaled. “In the country. We have more room in Wilton. And we need to welcome Shelly into the family properly.”

I pictured our small, shabby summer house in the woods. Wilton is only an hour from New York, but in 1960 it was still very rural. My parents had bought the land cheaply and designed the house themselves. Since they couldn’t afford an architect, they had miscalculated a bit, and the downstairs bedrooms were very strangely shaped. Dad hardly knew how to hold a hammer, but to save money he had built the house himself with the aid of a carpenter. He was very proud of his handiwork, despite the drooping roof and awkward layout. He was even prouder of our long, rutted, meandering driveway. “I didn’t want to cut down a single tree!” he said proudly when people asked why it was so crooked.

I loved the house, but I was slightly embarrassed by its unpainted wooden walls and unconventional character. “Why can’t we have the party in a hotel?” I asked. In my mind’s eye I saw Shelly’s impeccable mother, who seemed to go to the beauty parlor every day and wore nothing but custom-made clothes. Next to her, Mom, a handsome woman who refused to dye her hair, rarely wore makeup, and had very colorful taste in clothes, looked almost bohemian. Shelly’s mother wore an enormous diamond ring on her beautifully manicured finger; my mother didn’t even wear a wedding band and her fingernails were short and haphazardly polished.

“Nonsense,” said Mom. “It will be
much
nicer to have it at home. So much more intimate. I’d like them to see how we live, find out who we are.”

“Great,” I said under my breath to Jeanie. “That’ll be the end of Bob’s engagement. And a couple of the relatives might die, but who worries about little things like that?”

“Just make sure she doesn’t serve steak tartare,” said Jeanie, giggling.

Steak tartare was the bane of my existence: Dad
always
made it for parties. It was a performance. First he’d break an egg yolk into the mound of raw chopped steak, and then he’d begin folding
minced onions and capers and Worcestershire sauce into the meat. He looked tall and suave as he mixed thoughtfully and then asked, his German accent very pronounced, for an assistant taster. Together they added a little more of this or that and then Dad carefully mounded the meat into a round, draped some anchovies across the top, and asked me to serve it.

My job was to spread the stuff onto slices of party pumpernickel and pass the tray. Unless I had bought the meat myself I tried not to let the people I liked best taste Dad’s chef d’oeuvre. I knew that my mother bought prepackaged hamburger meat at the supermarket and that if there happened to be some half-price, day-old stuff she simply couldn’t resist it. With our well-trained stomachs my father and I could take whatever Mom was dishing out, but for most people it was pure poison.

Just thinking about it made me nervous. “I’ve got to stop this party,” I said.

“How?” asked Jeanie.

I didn’t know. I had four months to figure it out.

My best hope was that my mother’s mood would change before the party took place. That was not unrealistic; my mother’s moods were erratic. But March turned into April and April into May and Mom was still buzzing around. The phone rang constantly and she was feeling great. She cut her gray hair very short and actually started wearing nail polish. She lost weight and bought a whole new wardrobe. Then she and Dad took a quick cruise to the Caribbean.

“We booked passage on a United Fruit freighter,” she said to her friends, “so much more interesting than a conventional cruise.” When asked about the revolutions that were then rocking the islands she had a standard response: “The bomb in the hotel lobby in Haiti made the trip
much
more interesting.”

When they returned she threw herself into planning the party. I got up every morning and looked hopefully into the refrigerator.
Things kept getting worse. Half a baby goat appeared. Next there was cactus fruit. But the morning I found the box of chocolate-covered grasshoppers I decided it was time to talk to Dad.

“The plans are getting more elaborate,” I said ominously.

“Yes?” said Dad politely. Parties didn’t much interest him.

“It’s going to be a disaster,” I announced.

“Your mother gives wonderful parties,” my father said loyally. He was remarkably blind to my mother’s failings, regularly announcing to the world that she was a great cook. I think he actually believed it. He beamed when someone mentioned my mother’s “interesting dishes” and considered it a compliment when they said, “I’ve never tasted anything quite like that before.” And, of course,
he
never got sick.

“Did you know that she’s planning it as a benefit for Unicef?” I asked.

“Really?” he said. “Isn’t that nice.” He had turned back to the editorials.

“Dad!” I said, trying to get him to see how embarrassing this could be. “She’s sending notices to the newspapers. She’s inviting an awful lot of people. This thing is getting out of control. It’s only a month away and she has nothing planned.”

“It’ll all work out,” Dad said vaguely, folding the newspaper into his briefcase. “Your mother is a very smart woman. She has a PhD.” And then, as if there was no more to be said, he added, “I’m sure you’ll be a big help.”

It was hard to get mad at my father, who was as baffled by my mother’s moods as I was, and just as helpless before them. They were like the weather: unpredictable, unavoidable, and often unpleasant. Dad, I think, enjoyed her energy, but then, he could always go to the office when he needed to escape. Which is what he did now. Disgusted, I called my brother.

Bob lived uptown in a fancy apartment and had as little to do with my parents as he could decently get away with.

“She’s planning to make my engagement party a benefit?” he asked. “You mean she expects Shelly’s family to pay to attend?” I hadn’t quite considered that aspect, but I could see his point.

“I guess so,” I said. “But that’s not the part that worries me. Can you imagine Mom cooking for over a hundred people in the middle of summer? What if it’s a really hot day?”

Bob groaned.

“Can’t you get called away on business?” I asked. “What if you had a conference you had to go to? Wouldn’t she have to call the whole thing off?”

Unfortunately my mother was not the least bit fazed when informed that my brother might not be in town. “The party’s not for you,” she said to Bob, “it’s for Shelly’s family. They’ll come even if you’re too rude not to make an appearance.”

“But Mom,” said Bob, “you can’t ask them to buy tickets to the party.”

“Why not?” asked Mom. “I think it’s just disgusting the way people who have so much forget about those who are less fortunate. How could you possibly object to raising money for underprivileged children in honor of your marriage? I can’t believe I have such a selfish, thoughtless son!” And Mom slammed down the phone.

She always managed to do that, always turned your arguments against you. And so there we were, 150 people invited to lunch on the lawn, a representative from Unicef and photographers promised from all the newspapers. In one of her more grandiose moments Mom wrote her old friend Bertrand Russell in Wales and asked him to come speak; fortunately he was nearing his ninetieth birthday and declined. But he did send a hundred copies of his most recent antiwar booklet, a sort of fairy tale printed on gold paper. It was called
History of the World in Epitome
(for use in Martian infant schools) and it was very short. The last page was a picture of a mushroom cloud.

“These will make wonderful favors!” said Mom smugly, pointing out that they were autographed. She was so pleased she sent out a few more invitations.

“What are you going to serve?” I asked.

“Do you have any ideas?” she replied.

“Yes,” I said, “hire a caterer.”

Mom laughed as if I had made a joke. But she
was
moved to call and rent some tables and folding chairs, so at least the guests wouldn’t be sitting on the ground. I suggested that she hire someone to help cook and serve, but she didn’t seem to think that was necessary. “We can do that ourselves,” she said blithely. “Can’t you get your friends to help?”

“No,” I said, “I can’t.” But I did call Jeanie in the city and ask her to ask her parents if she could come out for the week; she thought my mother was “exciting” and I needed moral support.

As the party approached, things got worse and worse. Mom went on cleaning binges that left the house messier when she was done than when she started, and Jeanie and I went around behind her desperately stuffing things back into closets to create some semblance of order. Mom mowed half the lawn; we mowed the other half. Meanwhile my father, looking apologetic and unhappy, conveniently came up with a big project that kept him in the city.

One morning Mom went to a wholesale food company and came back honking her horn loudly, her car filled to the brim. Jeanie and I rushed out to unload fifty pounds of frozen chicken legs, ten pounds of frozen lump crabmeat, industrial-size cans of tomato and split-pea soup, twenty-five-pound sacks of rice, and two cases of canned, spiced peaches.

“This must be the menu,” I said to Jeanie.

“What?” she asked.

“I bet she’s going to make that awful quick soup she thinks is so great. You know, it’s in all the magazines. You mix a can of tomato
soup with a can of split pea soup, add a little sherry, and top it with crabmeat.”