A Bag of Onions

Posted by Holly at September 29th, 2007

     I am still eating single.  I realized it this morning when I was telling Jim about a lunch I had at The Ice Cream Shoppe in Forest Grove that serves, guess what, ice cream in about fifty different configurations, all thick and frothy and whipped creamy and fattening; and, hot dogs, also in different suits of clothing that give them regional distinctions.  I was there with my visiting delegation of Russians through the Open World program of The Library of Congress, a program that was started right after Perestroika and designed to give emerging leaders in Russia some first-hand exposure to democracy and community American style.

          American style includes hot dogs.  Actually, the Russians were hoping for hamburgers and French fries and I thought they would get that at The Ice Cream Shoppe, which is styled as a typical 1950s place with the original soda fountain, slick red upholstered booths, lots of chrome and a juke box that plays Elvis and every other wonderful sound of that era.  Everything is real, though, not recreated so it’s possible to feel like an ageless teen-ager.  But, no grill, so we had hot-dogs and chips.  Well, they had hot-dogs and chips.  I ordered a Chicago Dog without the dog and without the bun so I would have a bowl full of onions, relish, tomatoes, pickles, olives, sauerkraut and some mustard.  It’s because I don’t eat meat or fowl and pretend to be a vegetarian – pretend because I do eat fish and shellfish.  I always tell people that I don’t let myself think about that too much or I will have to give up salmon and its sea and river relatives, all of whom I love.  I have no such concerns about and don’t particularly like their lake cousins, especially since I found out there is a deadly brain-eating lake amoeba. 

          So, anyway, I was telling Jim about how I ordered my Chicago dog, hold the bun, hold the dog and he said I should have gotten it with and brought home the meat and bun for him – or, at least, for Gemini, our dog who lives for treats like that from us.  Jim says it isn’t for the food as much as it is because he knows there’s love from us behind every doggie cookie we give him.  Jim taught me this recipe for the cookies:  a small container of liver (not calf; too expensive), thown in the blender or cuisinart with enough corn meal to make it hold together and enough garlic powder to be really noticeable.  Once combined, put in a microwavable baking dish and nuke it for about 8-10 minutes.  When it’s done and cool, cut into little squares.  It freezes pretty well, too.  Gemini loves these cookies and the other unexpected treats that come his way.  We’ve taught him simple directions like come, stay, heel, sit and paw using the cookies as rewards.  He’s so good at it that now he’ll sit and hand up his paw before we ask him for it.  Jim thinks it’s the love, which it might be but I’m sure Gemini also regards us as animated vending machines.

It does remind me of my son when he was three.  People always ask children their name and age and Charlie quickly detected the pattern.  Soon his answer became “Charlie” as he held up three fingers, dispensing with the second question.  Stupid question, really.  One that I still feel compelled to ask small children.

 Well, anyway, yes, I should have brought home the Chicago dog.  Jim also reminded me that I had paid for the meat anyway, something I never think about when precisely trying to avoid things I don’t want to eat.  And, in a flash, I saw that he was right and that, out alone and in my element as host of this group, doing the work that I do and he doesn’t, I was eating single.  I also sometimes don’t think to call him if I am out for longer than expected.

I am wondering about our coupledom.  Sometimes I look at Jim and have that feeling of dazzle and amazement that I am married to Jim Witte, the man I knew when I was his secretary over 40 years ago, when what he calls his myth was at its highest.  I see the same handsome face that was always so intense that the glower and the mischevious smile were almost the same, and I could be just as easily sitting at my desk – the lead desk – in the line of secretaries outside the doors of our bosses at TeleTape.  I had no romantic interest in him but he did fascinate me and scare me at the same time.  He was slim and wiry and so full of energy he bristled.  I always thought his desk was too big because it confined his slim body that wanted to be dashing from place to place, not seated and confined.  He’s still incredibly trim and, now, has these gorgeous farm muscles and sun and wind lines around his mouth and eyes.  Back then, the look in his eyes was so piercing that I didn’t even know he had blue eyes until I started dating him a couple of years ago.  I saw only the gleaming in his eyes in the early days.

I ate single then, too, but it was a different kind of single because I was young and metabolism ran high and I neither knew or cared about healthy eating.  I ate meat in those days and French fries – Pappas Fritas – at the favorite Greek deli a bunch of us girls would go to for lunch.  There were also plenty of recreational meals that were far more elaborate.  Like the series Mad Men currently on TBS, there was a lot of flirting and social misbehaving, of which I was a happy participant.  Asked to lunch by a handsome, approaching middle-aged, successful man in the TV business or advertising/pr world, you bet we went and ate fabulous meals at places like Barbetta and The Four Seasons and The Brasserie and Twenty-One.  And Sardi’s, of course, the theatre restaurant, on the first, second and third floors of the building in which TeleTape was housed.  I’d been going to Sardi’s since childhood, blessed as I was with a grandfather who was a press agent on Broadway, and by my own dream to be an actress.  When our son was born, his father and I took him directly from the hospital to Sardi’s for lunch. 

Lovely, long lunches with lots of Johnnie Walker Black or Dewars and water were what we did.  My two best friends and I, all Geminis, had this birthday celebration we conducted every year:  we would take each other out for our birthdays – from mid-May to mid-June – with the same ritual for each of us: Sardi’s for a planning lunch to decide where we would go for the birthday lunch.  We usually ended up at The Palm.  When we began to advance in our careers with less time to play, we abandoned the planning lunch and went straight for The Palm lunch.  These were days full of laughs, lots of drink and wonderful meals.  We never thought about taking any food home with us!  Years later I met a woman who made being single something of an enterprise.  She would be invited to lunch – or dinner – eat only half her meal and ask for the rest to take home.  A couple or three dates a week and she had food for a couple of weeks.  She said it helped her stretch her meager salary. 

My relationship to meals is so different now.  I struggle awake in the morning and guiltily think I should be up and preparing a big farm breakfast for my husband who works hard every day.  He brings me coffee in bed and, in season, artfully arranged plates with Asian Pears or something else delectable from our garden.  I know he wants me to wake up and put something together for him but, instead, he heads for the kitchen, cuts fruit into a bowl, makes toast and sometimes cereal, and waits for me to drift out of my haze and into the kitchen.  Actually, I bake the bread for the toast so I don’t feel wholly guilty.  One or the other of us will do lunch – more like we do it together; and, dinner is our time to dance around the kitchen putting together interestingly beautiful yet simple and health filled feasts.  Sometimes we literally do dance, too, if the music strikes us.  I like having him at the table for every meal.  I like waking up with “farmer Jim Witte”, as he calls himself, telling me I didn’t marry the myth, I married the farmer. 

It’s wonderful fun to play house here but the other night, while I was putting together one of the nightly dinners for twelve to entertain my Russian delegation , I was telling one of our neighbor guests that I had been alone for so long between husbands that I have forgotten how to be married.  He told me he wasn’t sure one ever really knows how to be married.  I know what he means but I did have a married feeling that I don’t have now – one of the reasons I think I can go out of here to do something in town and unconsciously slip into habits of singlehood like never thinking there was anyone at home to whom I should bring that dog and bun.  Part of me loves this single feeling and flirtatiousness it allows with my devilishly handsome myth husband.  I like the tingle I get when he walks into view and I realize he’s my husband!  I feel like he is causing all these italics in my life and that I am still approaching him as something of a single woman.  I also think that the intervening years have brought so much change to the way women transact in the world that the sweet young thing who worked outside of Jim’s door would never have made it in this world without becoming self-sufficient.  I think I’m the exact same person I was then with so much more knowledge of who I am, of what I am capable and of my effect on people.  I bring to this new marriage the young woman wonder but with a solid sense that I am also an independent unit walking this earth.  The independent spirit I am is so much happier being with him, it’s true even though, for the most part, I had a pretty darned good time most of the time before.  The changes I have to make are tactical – I’ll now make a point of bringing home the dog next time I excuse the meat from my plate.  I’m betting I can get my husband to sit and lift a paw….

Posted by Holly at September 7th, 2007

I lost my mother when I was three years old. The version I was left with, the woman who survived the bacterial meningitis, was not the version she intended to be as a mother; that much I know from my baby book and all of her loving entries before her illness. I don’t remember any of that woman and know of her only through heresy and what I have made up as the woman who certainly loved me. My memory life begins the day she came home from the hospital after a six-week stay.

The mother I was left with after that, and whom I have variously hated and cherished, has always been difficult and, now, has lost her mind again; this time because age has done its job on the fragile hold she’s had on reality all these 59 years since her illness. So the story goes, it was New Year’s Eve and my mother had been battling a cold for the few days before the party she and my dad were giving for their friends. Sometime after midnight, my mother collapsed. There was a terrible snow storm that year and the doctor had to trudge six blocks in heavy snow to meet her at the hospital. How the ambulance got through is still a source of amazement in our family. Sometimes I think I have a memory of standing at the front door of our apartment, behind my grandmother’s knees – we all lived together, my grandparents, parents and I (and then my sister, when she was born four years later) – but I don’t think it’s a real memory, just my recall of the family story.

My mother was very sick. In the late 1940s, there was little anyone could do compared to today and she really had to almost sweat out the illness in the hospital. It took six weeks and it left her weak and disoriented. She had bouts of amnesia, after, that sometimes lasted for weeks.

I remember well the day she came home from the hospital. We had a big car, black, a Buick I think I’ve been told, and I was in the front seat next to my Dad. My grandmother was in the back. My memory begins with my Dad pushing a wheelchair down a very wide ramp toward the car. My mother was in the wheelchair with a steamer blanket over her knees and a basket of fruit on her lap. As she got closer, I began to turn around to move into the back seat but I was told to stay in the front and my mother would get in the back. I was puzzled by that but happy to see her and she was happy to see me. It was quiet.

The weight and substance of our mother/daughter and family relationships date from that time forward. The walking on eggshells we all did in order not to set off our mother – which had notable lapses and great displays of temper – began with that homecoming. The whole of our lives after that was directed by my mother’s unique new place in the universe; or, rather, as she was placed at the center of our universe. She became another daughter in the household but expected to perform some of the motherly responsibilities her three-year old required. When my sister was born, I became the middle child between my mother and my baby sister yet expected to act the daughter. And, of course, I was the daughter to my father who had no misguided role in that regard although it must have been strange for him to share the head of household spot with my grandfather. Both grandparents wielded power. Neither wanted the little family of four to leave and move to their own household – my grandfather would claim chest-pains when the discussion of that possibility moved too far forward into the realm of reality. My grandmother wanted us all close. And, in so many ways, it was lovely and wonderful to grow up in such a close and devoted family. But it did de-claw my mother substantially and might have regardless of her fragile state of mind. The family gave me a lot of power, too. It was in my power, and my sister’s, to set off our mother or keep her calm by not just our behavior but also our performance. We all had power: my mother to keep the attention directed on her, my grandparents to keep us intact, my sister’s and mine to keep the peace, and our father’s to navigate and facilitate all those moats being gouged out of our territory.

But this isn’t about the mother I grew up knowing. It’s about the one I always thought was still there inside her mind somewhere. I’ve often wondered if she remembered the way she used to be and if she lamented the loss of that woman. She talks about her childhood, her girlhood, and hasn’t lost the memory of her own growing up; but, there is never a sense of any insights she might have gained along the way. It’s as if she is reporting the facts of a life with a detachment because it isn’t really her own. I’ve never asked her about that. Now that she is part of the present and the immediate circumstances of her life as if she were a visitor here and unable to act with authority for herself, other sides of her personality are emerging – charming, girlish, funny parts of herself. While none of the other deeply abrasive, hysterical and demanding parts of her have disappeared, they have softened at least in my dealings with her and I suddenly feel as if I am getting to know the person who was my mother before illness hobbled parts of her. This is, at my age 62, staggering, sentimental and emotionally full. It is remarkable that she tells me daily, now, that she loves me so much and that I care so that she experiences peace and comfort considering that less than two years ago my mother’s behavior to me at my own wedding had crested to such a level of horrible that my sister nearly had a breakdown while pleading with her to stop and just love me; and this at the home of our neighbors at a party for our out-of-town visitors the night before my wedding.

There are parts of this woman I am so anxious to know. The entries in my baby book are not profound or out of the ordinary in any way – the usual height, weight information, what I said first and when, lists of birthday and holiday party attendees and gifts, sweet and lovely thoughts about the day I was born, written soon thereafter. “My darling little girl Holly was really mine! She has grown sweeter, dearer and more precious with every day. I love her with all my heart – and I just hope and pray that I can be a mother that my daughter will be proud of.” There are brief but steady notations for the first three years or so and then a gap until my fifth birthday, with just a few sweet remembrances and even my first Valentine, this from a little boy named Thomas in my kindergarten class. What there is about these entries is a softness and sweetness I never knew from my mother. The one I knew was more often anxious or angry and always on the outs with someone – including two different times when she didn’t speak to me for a year each. The first was when I left my first, mistaken, marriage to a young man I had dated from my age of 15. Seven years later, the night before the wedding, even my father knew we shouldn’t be marrying but it was too late, I thought, to turn back. Three years later, I left the marriage. I was always the first in our crowd to do anything – the good and the bad. That I was the first to leave a marriage and a Jewish doctor husband actually smoothed the way for some of my friends later on but did not sit well with my mother. She refused to speak to me for a year with the exception of a couple of phone calls I would just as soon forget. My dad not only continued to talk to me but came to see me every Thursday morning. Just on this last visit to Florida while sitting with my mother one day at the Rehab facility, she re-told the story of how my father stayed in touch with me. She recalled how he came home from one of our Thursday visits and took her firmly in his grasp and told her she had to stop her treatment of me. He warned her not to make him choose. I told my mother she did the right thing and forgave her. She told me she forgave me, too. It was as if we were settling something between us in a moment that came upon us suddenly and left on just as swift a shaft of air, its wake now stitched and patched. It is this easiness of bringing up the memory of something harsh, even talking about something harsh, and being able to do it without rehearsals of the best way to say something to her, the way that will invite the least misery. I like this part of my mother that can cope with an uncomfortable moment.

It is in contrast to how she is currently dealing with frustrations, changes and the alterations of her daily living. Anything that veers off a pattern can send her into an hysterical reaction that includes the desire to die and threats of hurling herself out of window. This can be anything from her aide not showing up at the appointed hour or her not wanting to take her meals in the dining room. She claims, later, that she never said the part about wanting to die but I’ve heard her. The first time she did it in Assisted Living, she landed in the psych unit of the local hospital for six days. Truly that was a nightmare. Mind you, she’s only been in assisted living for two weeks and only spent six of those days in her actual room.

She’s a mixture of the present danger and emotions and the girlish person who takes me on a tour of her room, by phone, describing the people and setting for each photograph I have carefully placed so she can see family no matter where she is in the room. She is quite literal, now, too. She told me that she had seen a doctor a day or so ago and I asked her which doctor. “Not a witch doctor,” she said, “a real doctor.” The other day I mentioned that there was a lot going on around her and she said she didn’t see anything around her, what did I mean. Of course it is the loss of intellect but it seems more like a child who hasn’t learned to differentiate between literal and figurative or whose mind hasn’t the experience, yet, to register the difference between which and witch; a mind that will later do it so fast that it doesn’t even know it’s happened. The child’s mind still has the capacity to learn these things. Now my mother has the child’s mind but it is going in the reverse direction and won’t learn subtlety. Still, there is something so charming about the interpretations and she does laugh lightly when they are pointed out to her.

My grandmother saved every letter my grandfather wrote to her. I brought them all back home with me after this last trip to Florida and have pulled out handfuls at a time to read. They aren’t publishable as a book because they are all the same – my life was blessed the day you came into it, I love you so much and I’m thinking of you every moment. He was head over heels in love with my grandmother and her family and never forgot that for a moment. I remember that. Every day he came home with the same words – Hi honey, I’m home. The relief to be back there, in his cove, was clear and always present. He wrote most of the letters in the early days of their marriage, when he was on the road as a press agent for the Schuberts, major producers of live theatre then and now. Interspersed in the loving words are enough details about the famous people he worked with to fascinate and mesmerize me. And there are details about his family. He was my grandmother’s second husband and raised her two children as his own – my mother and her brother. I never even knew until I was a teenager that he wasn’t my natural grandfather. (stupid of me, actually, because the family of my natural grandfather (divorced by my grandmother) was still in our lives. It never occurred to me to ask who they were or how they were related to us.) My grandfather commented to my grandmother whenever the children had sent him letters and he said, several times, that my mother’s letter were well written and well stated. He, who had several short stories published in the newspapers of the day, thought my mother had a career as a story writer if she wanted it. My mother, whose insecurities run inside her like live third rails and whose anxiety etched its track bed in her soul, wrote good letters and, later, good speeches. I took some to her assisted living residence just so she could pull them out and see how competent she is – or, at least, has been in her life. I would love to see this side of her flourish, the side that existed before the illness although I think logical thought in the form of creative writing is beyond her.

What may not be lost is her art. We used to laugh and call it her menopausal art since she started painting in roughly that decade of change in her life. She was good. When I was packing things for assisted living, I asked her what paintings she might like to have for the walls and she wanted only her own work. I’ve said to her that maybe there’s a painting class at Springtree and maybe she might consider art again. Yes, maybe, she told me with a little lift to her voice. My mother interested in doing something that springs from her head and is beautiful – that is exciting.

I am hoping my mother builds up a string of days that are without calamity, days she can enjoy more than just endure. I don’t expect any insightful conversations with her, any settling of old or unfinished business, although I will welcome more of them if they come. I think we’re beyond that, though. I’m here as the vessel now; whatever she wants to tell me – or ask me or hear me say – is what she will have. It breaks my heart to think of her being alone and frightened and if I can soothe that in any way, I want to. Still, and my sister and I have talked about this together, it is very hard to talk to her. It’s always been all about mom, even when she is talking about others. She talks about us all in terms of how good or attentive we are to her. At least it’s in the positive for the moment; it used to be that she talked about all that wronged her.

# # #

And what about my marriage? This is an unexpected rut in the road for this young marriage and I do wonder what will be the effect on it of the intensity of my involvement and the sheer number of hours I am spending on the phone trying to solve problems. On the other hand, isn’t this part of what marriages are for and about – the partnership, the security, the place beyond all others where the outside is allowed in because it’s safe here? Yes. Still, it produces anxious moments.