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a ham steak with pineapple and brown sugar, a treat beyond imagining, although I seem to recall her overcooking it from fear of trichinosis, a dread disease of the 1950s that deviant Jewish pork-eaters dared not ignore. Fridays we ate broiled flounder, the rationale being that the fish had to be fresh for the Catholics. My sister reminded me that Fridays were the only nights my mother served bread with our meals; it was on hand to rescue us in the event a bone became caught in our throats.
None did, so I never learned exactly how white bread saves lives.
For more than twenty years, I’ve been visiting my parents at Wynmoor Village, a gated community with walls so low I assume they were constructed not to keep cat burglars out but to keep the less nimble occupants in. Their apartment is on the second floor of a four-story pink-and-white building. I remember when they stopped using the stairs and started using the elevator. I remember when I did, too.
When my parents left Philadelphia for Florida in the late seventies, my mother continued preparing meals much as before. Leaving the single-family, split-level house where she and my father had lived since the late fifties meant adjusting to a much smaller kitchen, which she managed effortlessly. Unlike the other great cooks of the late twentieth century, she was no prima donna who demanded state-of-the-art equipment before she would broil a veal chop. Nor was she dismayed by Florida’s heat and humidity. She was as tough as a steel-worker, having spent her life standing over a stove.
My sister and I each visit four or five times a year, mostly because very few others do. My father’s brothers and sisters, all of them still in New Jersey, have difficulty traveling. All three of my father’s golf partners, Larry, Irving, and Sidney, passed away. I enjoyed their company a lot, because they were sweethearts and I could outdrive them.
When I asked my father if he had seen my mother’s oldest friend, a woman from Somerville, he replied, “At some point, she forgot about us.” The last time I went down to see them, I learned that my mother’s closest friend from the building, a widow, had died, but she hadn’t been around for the previous five years. She’d been in a nursing home all that 2 4
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time. When I hear something like that, I do the math: five years in a nursing home equals 1,825 days at $185 a day, about a third of a million dollars. I asked my father to tell me what he knew of the life she led in the home. “She just lay there,” he said.
I always feel pain when I think about my mother. She can hardly use the telephone, and the television disturbs her. Because her legs are so weak, she can no longer stand outside the apartment on the terrace, watching over the parking area, hoping to see me drive up when she knows I’m coming for a visit. I’m not always sure she remembers when I’m coming for a visit. Having parents as old as mine is about knots in your stomach. People who have aging parents might think they understand, but a slightly dotty mother who forgets where she puts the car keys is different from parents who have reached their late eighties or nineties. I cannot think of a single advantage to being my mother’s age except one. She is now so old that her doctor has lifted all dietary restrictions and she is allowed to eat whatever she wants.
I don’t believe I missed a meal in my life. My mother cooked, day and night. “It used to drive me crazy,” said my sister, “hot food three times a day and meat and potatoes at lunch.” I’m sure I developed my contempt for salads and my need to toast or grill sandwiches from this childhood taboo on cold food.
The only time my father prepared food was when we had a barbecue—that’s what we northerners call food burned in our backyards. I would gather twigs, and he would twist newspapers, and we would finally get the briquettes to glow. For a long time, I found it impossible to understand how my father got permission to cook. It wasn’t like my mother to relinquish control of a meal. Only recently, when I spoke to my Aunt Dorothy, did I obtain an explanation that made sense. She told me that while my father was making burgers and hot dogs outside, my mother was in the kitchen readying brisket and chicken as a backup.
I didn’t resent my mother’s refusal to teach me to cook. I come from an era when parents did what they did and kids did what they did and F O R K I T O V E R
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the borders weren’t crossed. I played outside a lot, read a lot, and hated piano lessons more than any kid alive, which means I was a pretty standard fifties-era child, unexceptional in every way. Because I never knew hunger, my mother always found clothing for me in the
“husky” section of the children’s departments, and when I finally confronted her on that, she said, “You weren’t fat. Plump.” I know school counselors of today think this is a recent trend, kids desperately wanting to be thin, but I have firsthand knowledge that it wasn’t unheard of when I was growing up.
My mother represented what she had come from: industrious, Eastern European, rising-middle-class stock. I know she regretted not going to college, but she had no idea how to express such a lofty ambition and was held back by timidity. My sister, who went to graduate school, claims that my father had no desire to send her to college and that without my mother’s insistence it would not have
