world, all grown up, and strangers.
My mother was waiting in the driveway. Like me, she’s tall, and heavy (a Larger Woman, I heard Bruce’s voice taunt in my head). But whereas I am an hourglass (an extremely full hourglass), my mother is shaped like an apple – a round midsection on toned and muscular legs. A former high- school standout in tennis, basketball, and field hockey, and the current star of the Switch Hitters (her inevitable lesbian softball team), Ann Goldblum Shapiro has retained both the carriage and the sensibilities of a onetime jock, a woman who believes there’s no problem that can’t be solved, and no situation that can’t be improved, by a good brisk walk or a few laps in the pool.
She wears her hair short and lets it stay gray and dresses in comfortable clothes in shades of gray and beige and pale pink. Her eyes are the same green as mine, but wider and less anxious, and she smiles a lot. She’s the kind of person who’s constantly being approached by strangers – for directions, for advice, for honest assessments of whether bathing suits made the would-be wearer’s butt look big in the communal dressing room at Loehmann’s.
Today, she was dressed for our outing in wide-legged pale pink sweatpants, a blue turtleneck sweater, one of her fourteen pairs of activity-specific sneakers, and a windbreaker accented with a small triangular, rainbow-colored pin. She wore no makeup – she never wore it – and her hair was in its usual air-dried spikes. She looked happy as she climbed into the car. For her, the free cooking demonstrations at Philadelphia ’s premiere downtown food market cum meeting place were better than standup comedy. They weren’t intended to be participatory, but nobody bothered to tell her that.
“Subtle,” I said, pointing at her pin.
“You like?” she asked, oblivious. “Tanya and I picked them up in New Hope last weekend.”
“Did you get me one?” I asked.
“No,” she said, refusing to take the bait. “We got you this.” She handed me a small rectangle wrapped in purple tissue paper. I unwrapped it at a red light, to find a magnet depicting a cartoon girl with squiggly curled hair and glasses. “I’m not gay, but my mother is,” it read. Perfect.
I fiddled with the radio and kept quiet during the half hour drive back to town. My mother sat quietly beside me, obviously waiting for me to bring up Bruce’s latest opus. On the way into the Terminal, in between the vegetable vendor and the fresh fish counter, I finally did.
“Good in bed,” I snorted. “Hah!”
My mother gave me a sideways glance. “So I take it he wasn’t?”
“I don’t want to be having this conversation with you,” I grumbled, as we worked our way past the bakeries and the Thai and Mexican food stalls and found seats in front of the demonstration kitchen. The chef – a semiregular I remembered from the Southern Favorites lesson three weeks before – blanched as my mother sat down.
She shrugged at me, and stared at the blackboard. This week it was American Classics with Five Easy Ingredients. The chef launched into his spiel. One of his assistants – a gangly, pimply kid from The Restaurant School – started hacking away at a head of cabbage. “He’s going to cut his finger off,” my mother predicted.
“Shh!” I said, as the front-row regulars – mostly senior citizens who took these sessions way too seriously – scowled at us.
“Well, he is,” said my mother. “He’s holding the knife all wrong. Now, getting back to Bruce…”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. The chef melted a gigantic glob of butter in a pan. Then he added bacon. My mother gasped as if she’d witnessed a beheading, and raised her hand.
“Is there a heart-healthy modification for this recipe?” she inquired. The chef sighed and started talking about olive oil. My mother returned her attention to me. “Forget Bruce,” she said. “You can do better.”
“Mother!”
“Shh!” hissed the front-row foodies. My mother shook her head. “I can’t believe this.”
“What?”
“Would you look at the size of that pan? That pan’s not big enough.” Sure enough, the chef-in-training was cramming way too much imperfectly chopped cabbage into a shallow frying pan. My mother raised her hand. I yanked it down.
“Just let it go.”
“How’s he going to learn anything if nobody tells him when he’s making a mistake?” she complained, squinting at the stage. “That’s right,” agreed the woman sitting next to her.
“And if he’s going to dredge the chicken in that flour,” my mother continued, “I really think he needs to season it first.”
“You ever try cayenne pepper?” asked an elderly man in the row ahead. “Not too much, you understand, but just a pinch gives it a really nice flavor.”
“Thyme’s nice, too,” said my mother.
“Okay, Julia Child.” I closed my eyes, slumping lower in my folding chair as the chef moved on to candied sweet potatoes and apple fritters, and my mother continued to quiz him about substitutions, modifications, techniques that she’d learned in her years as a homemaker, while offering running commentary to the bemusement of the people sitting near her and the fury of the entire front row.
Later, over cappuccinos and hot buttered pretzels from the Amish pretzel stand, she gave me the speech I was sure she’d been preparing since last night. “I know your feelings are hurt right now,” she began. “But there are a lot of guys out there.”
“Yeah, right,” I muttered, keeping my eyes on my cup.
“Women, too,” my mother continued helpfully.
“Ma, how many times do I have to tell you? I’m not a lesbian! I’m not interested.”
She shook her head in mock sadness. “I had such high hopes for you,” she fake-sighed, and pointed toward one of the fish stalls, where pike and carp were stacked on top of each other, open-mouthed and googly-eyed, their scales gleaming silver under the lights. “This is an object lesson,” she said.
“This is a fish stall,” I corrected.
“This is telling you that there are plenty of fish in the sea,” she said. She walked over and tapped one fingernail on the glass case. I followed her reluctantly. “You see that?” she said. “Think of each one of those fish as a single guy.”
I stared at the fish. The fish, stacked six high on the crushed ice, seemed to gape back. “They have better manners,” I observed. “Some of them are probably better conversationalists, too.”
“You want fish?” asked a short Asian woman in a floor-length rubber apron. She had a filleting knife in one hand. I thought, briefly, about asking to borrow it, and what it would feel like to gut Bruce. “Good fish,” she urged.
“No thanks,” I said. My mother led me back to the table.
“You shouldn’t be so upset,” she said. “That article will be lining birdcages by next month”
“What an uplifting thought to share with a journalist,” I said.
“Don’t be sarcastic,” she said.
“I don’t have any other way to be.” I sighed.
We sat down again. My mother picked up her coffee cup. “Is it because he got a job at a magazine?” she ventured.
I took a deep breath. “Maybe,” I acknowledged. And it was true, seeing Bruce’s star rise while mine just stayed in place would have hurt even if his first story hadn’t been about me.
