Summer/Fall 2015
Squash
As mother’s disease worsened, food became the benchmark of further deterioration. I was living then in Knoxville, Tennessee, so each time I visited, the devastation seemed more pronounced because I didn’t see her every day. At first the differences were slight. For instance, I came home to visit, as I had for the twenty-plus years since graduating from college, went to the fridge and grabbed a yogurt. Since I had once eaten a seriously out-of-date one that made me sick, I always jokingly asked about the freshness of extractions from that incubator for serious mold. As I held up the container, I asked, “So, Mama, who was President when you bought this?”
She looked from me to the raspberry yogurt and replied without smile, “Chester A. Arthur,” and walked away. I stared after her, not sure if she were joking or not because her sense of humor had always been offbeat. For my birthday one year, she took a Christmas card someone had sent her, crossed out the card’s message along with the sender’s inscription, to write, “Happy Birthday, Love Mama.”
Much later, on a visit in late summer, we went to our local barbeque haunt, a place open only on weekends, to get our South Carolina fare. She and I chowed down on mustard-based pork, hash, beans, and slaw until we both rolled away from the table, barely able to stand. Ten minutes after we got back home, she was in the kitchen wrestling up dinner. “Mama, how could you possibly be hungry after all that food at Hammy’s?” I asked.
“Oh, I wondered why I was so full,” she said as she continued to take out pans.
The next fall when I returned home for Thanksgiving, Mama was to bake the turkey, a feat my sister B.J. thought Mama might manage since it only involved putting the bird into the oven and taking it out several hours later. Before going to bed, she and I placed the turkey into the oven. We weren’t supposed to open the oven again until 6:00 a.m. However, at this particular junction when given a task, Mama would hyper-focus, so every fifteen minutes Mama came into my room to ask whether we should take the turkey out. After the fourth time, I said, “Let’s just take the turkey out now, and I’ll get up early and finish cooking it.” At that suggestion she obediently returned to her room for the rest of the night.
Always a good cook, Mama’s great specialty, which most good southern cooks share, was her biscuits. Try as we might growing up, we could never quite capture the texture and taste of hers. Some of my fondest memories include Mama in apron covered with flour, rolling out dough with her big wooden pin. With that memory still fresh, I found one of the saddest days the afternoon she tried to make biscuits but couldn’t remember having added flour, so she kept adding it over and over to create an escalating white mountain.
Before we had her institutionalized, Mama had people staying in the house with her. At this time in her life, she didn’t much try to cook. Instead, she derived joy from shredding newspapers. She, who once read two papers a day and worked crosswords, now tore words into incoherent syllables. I had come home for a visit that next spring and offered to cook dinner. Had she been at herself, she probably would have objected. Out of the four of us girls, I was never really taught to cook, possibly because I was the baby or because B.J. and Cami had already captured the chef slots. Instead, I mowed grass and cleaned house, but never really mastered culinary efforts. As a result, Mama passed her expertise for making fried chicken with just the right scald, tart pimento cheese, and chicken salad with pecans to my older sisters. However, the intervening years and the necessity to stave off starvation had forced me to learn a few dishes.
Since I had stopped to get groceries on the way in, I told her I was going to do my best to prepare a meal worthy of her efforts. First, I prepared to fry chicken, taking out a paper bag and filling it with flour and salt in order to place the chicken in the bag to shake, just as I had seen her do. Next, I soaked the chicken in warm salty water and then cracked an egg to rub on the chicken once it finished soaking so the flour mixture would stick to it. I then grabbed yellow squash and began to cut it to throw in a pot to boil. I needed two skillets, one to fry the chicken and the other to fry the parboiled squash in bacon grease. I said, “I’m going to make the squash just like you did with bacon and onion.”
Sitting at the dining room table with newspaper in hand, she asked, “Was I someone who liked squash?” I looked to Mama, a woman who, in her prime, had decided likes and dislikes, and who often said, “When the mind goes, if God is kind, the body will quickly follow suit.” As I watched her slowly rip another narrow strip of newspaper toward her chest, I thought of those birthday cakes, her only attempt in the kitchen that met with limited success. Whenever she baked a strawberry or caramel cake, the two favorite birthday requests, the cake featured fault lines. In fact, I teasingly referred to her efforts as the San Andreas baked goods. In other words, what began as a fissure capable of being camouflaged by icing eventually resulted in major divisions she tried to piece together with toothpicks. However, despite her best efforts, as the cake cooled, the cracks relaxed, gradually widening into two separate hemispheres.