Back from the Salt Mines

For stay-at-home Moms, summer is not always a pleasant time. All those hours of school-provided babysitting suddenly evaporate, to be all but forgotten once the grueling round of kindertainment is underway. This summer was particularly cruel. The sullen and unhappy teenager had to be carted to a lot of places. Money had to be spent, for little benefit. Or no benefit. I booked an entire art class for her, one she could never attend because the class seemed to always conflict with some crony's arrival to, or departure from, New York.

Not only was it a stressful summer, it was a long one. She was out of her Texas school on the 3rd of June, but classes didn't start here until the week after Labor Day, on September 8th. But even on that happy day, the summer still wasn't over, not for me. I had one day of glorious freedom in my own home before it was time to again haul myself over to JFK (I can almost get there without the GPS now!), this time to collect Mother. For a fourteen-day visit.

I was dreading the trip because Dearest Mum had, without any regard to a doctor, decided to drop her anti-depressants. Because she was feeling better. And that's how it is with my Mum. You know how some people love Alice in Wonderland and others just find it unsettling? Some people revel in Carrol's startling, dizzying eruptions of illogic. But I'm in the other group, the one that gets deeply troubled by non-sequiturs and free associations. Mom's style of reasoning can best be labled, "oh-just-hack-your-way-to-the-conclusion-you-want-and-cackle-as-the-bodies-hit-the-floor."

Fortunately, she'd shaken off the worst of the anti-depressant's withdrawal symptoms by the time she arrived. We still managed our crash-and-burn moments, of course. I'd planned a trip to the Hamptons and had to cancel it at the last minute when it became clear that if I could not guarantee her a better time than she'd have watching television, I'd regret it. Well, then, I thought, I'll just keep her busy helping me in the garage. It was a beautiful day and she had complained of being bored (but not so bored that she wanted to make the 3 hour drive to Southampton and back). As I pointed to boxes that needed unloading, she became so filled with performance anxiety that she could do nothing but complain. I removed a dirty plant pot from a box and reminded her that she was good at cleaning things. She washed the pot, then came back to complain that she wasn't sure what to do now that the pot was washed. That's my mum. A normal person would just ask how they could help but she likes to cut straight to the whining. I sent her back to her TV.

Then there was the mad whistling that accompanies her every step in the house. Having lived alone now for four years, she finds herself incapable of doing anything noiselessly. She's always making tuneless little whistling sounds, little pips of startlement that almost drove me insane. And she's taken to brushing her teeth in the living room while others are trying to watch the telly.

All I could do was tell myself that this, too, shall pass. One thing I've learned is that your mother is not really your mother; she's your Siamese twin. Take a knife to her and you'll be the one that ends up bleeding.


As it turns out, Mother was right to have her doubts about the Hamptons, that region where the veddy, veddy rich of New York hang out in sprawling mansions with sea views. I mean, I can go gawk at ghastly wealth with the best of them, but on a recent 50 mile bike ride, I got pretty sick and tired of what you can actually see in the Hamptons: the backsides of vast estates, hidden by hedges. And more hedges. This particular hedge is unusual because you can actually glimpse the structure behind it. There were a few vistas on that 50 mile ride, but very few. Once I got away from the estates and the hedges, I rode through woods. And they were lovely. But not particularly special, not for Long Island.

Still, it was great to be on a long ride again, to sweat my way past the doubts that I'd make it, to finally conquer those doubts and get back to the ride's start. It was great to wallow in the bath later and to feel truly tired in the bones. At 14 mph, I'm still not at my pre-cancer-diagnosis peak, but I'm hopeful that my body can return to a kind of normal that I can live with.

And that will have to do.

Friends and relations

Earl, Janice, and Goddard.

They lived long and happy lives until, exhausted by the rigors of existence, they climbed gratefully into the pots on my stove. Or maybe it didn't happen quite like that. However it happened, we can be clear that on at least two occasions (she says as if reciting sins), I have done the unthinkable: cooked crustaceans that were neither shrimps nor crawdads nor crabs.

They were delicious. The first time, we ate them with just garlicky melted butter and the second time, I attempted a bearnaise sauce, which seized and turned grainy (any fool-proof tips on this will be gratefully received). In either case, you almost don't need sauces with flesh this sweet and opulent.

My interest in cooking and serving my own lobsters stems from two recent events. The first came from the knowledge, acquired in a restaurant in Maine, that I both love lobster and hate eating it when surrounded by fine diners. They are in nice clothes, and I'm in a bib. And the lobster served me in Maine was hard-shell and a complete b*st*rd to eat. By the end of the meal, I had butter in my hair. Clearly, if I was going to feast again on the succulent creatures, I was going to have to do it at home.

The second reason to eat lobster up here is the abundance of fishmongers. Back in Austin, we had Quality Seafood and that was it. On Long Island, there exists everywhere, in brick-and-mortar establishments and at farmers' markets on the seafront, places to buy fresh caught fish. Avoid the stuff sold in super-markets, I've learned, and seek out the tumble-down holes-in-the-wall. The lobsters come from the Long Island Sound (I'm told) and the chaps we've bought so far have had easily fractured soft-ish shells, the kind that make dining possible. My family refuses to look at them when they come back home in the cooler, preferring to let me function as judge, jury, executioner, and driver of the hearse. They won't even participate in the naming game! What spoil-sports!

I don't know if Jesse will ever be persuaded to try lobster, which is fine with me, given the expense. I've been waiting for her to ask me why I find it so philosophically unchallenging to toss live creatures into a hot pot, but so far, she's held the whole idea at a distance. The reason, I will be happy to tell her, if she ever asks, is that all life-forms displace other life-forms, by the very fact of their existence. Clear a field to plant wholesome grains for sprout salads, and you disrupt a food chain that had happily fed other mammals and which will now feed fewer of them. We should all eat less animal protein, for the simple reason that there isn't enough planet for all of us to party like it's 1998, but the choice to be absolutely pure about vegetarianism is an aesthetic, not a moral one. It's a fine, admirable choice, but not one that I can make.

***&&&***

After the Great Pander reported in my last entry, where Mike and I indulged Jesse's every whim, vainly seeking forgiveness for having ripped her from Texas, we've had more visitors: Dan the artist, Alison the marketer and Patrick the NYU student. The weather has been typically obstinate, affording beautiful, dry days when no one is visiting, then starting on a good round of rain for a few days the minute anyone we know touches down in JFK. We make plans to take all our friends to our favorite out-door spots, but end up going to greenhouses, again, where we can huddle out of the rain. Too much! I'm starting to see faces in the orchids. At least I'm not giving them names, not yet.

***&&&***

Aliens do exist you know and they have snatched our bodies and brought us to another planet entirely. I know this because, on a rainy morning when our darling 14-year-old couldn't possibly be asked to walk to school, I drove her, right up to the soggy parking lot a half-mile from our house. Ahead of me was a, wait for it, Maserati. It was new and it was shiny and possibly it was fast, though in the queue I was sitting in, one can't be sure of anyone's speed.

I was again gripped by the gravest doubts. The high school is said to be "great", but how can anyone know this? With such a population of kids, all beneficiaries of elite education since birth, with an education supplemented by private tutoring and having been wet-nursed by MIT post-docs, what school could possibly fail? What teacher could be so incompetent as to mess these kids up?

Jesse came home on the first day of school, all her grief fresh again, and cried. And I cried the next day. Well, I almost cried. My eyes glistened, anyway. We lobster-killers have hard hearts.