Dinosaurs and Pizza Pie

  

   Two and nearly weaned Arthur spends half day once a week in my mother’s care. She comes to our house and I go off to market or do the laundry, or do nothing except make myself scarce otherwise he cries and clings and her visit is for naught.  

     Most weeks they walk to Pizzatown for slices. The pizza man cuts Arthur’s slice into bitesized pieces with his rolling cutter thing while mom folds her slice dabbing excess oil. Between bites she holds a paper cone of water to Arthur’s lips then rests it in the dented metal cup holder. She sips root beer and lets Arthur have a sip. I called Arthur the other day--a quarter century gone by and asked what he remembers of this time; it is the root beer.  

     When Arthur’s face and hands have been wiped they linger by the painted horse that  sings ‘It’s A Small World After All’ and Arthur rides and asks to ride again and sometimes Mom lets him. She twists a quarter in a gum ball dispenser filled with superballs and Arthur open the little door and catches the ball and carries it back up the block grasped tight in his little hands, his hands to his heart. 

    Arthur naps, mom reads the paper, after nap they play their game. They collect all the pillows from all the beds, couches, kitchen chairs, up and down the stairs, and then Babu (what Arthur calls her) buries Arthur under the pillows on the playroom couch making sure every bit of him is covered. She waits and waits and talks about waiting and waiting until Arthur can’t stand it anymore and slowly wiggles under the pillow heap. A foot emerges, an elbow and my mother coos in quiet wonder, then roaring and gnashing his teeth, arms curled into Tyrannosaurus hooks, Arthur crashes out scattering pillows in his wake. “Oh my, oh my” Babu frights, “so strong, so brave” and then they gather the pillows and begin again. In this way they while away the afternoon, in dead seriousness, no laughter, only crashing and roaring and gnashing of teeth. 

     She let him repeat this to his hearts content whereas I would have gone crazy from tedium after two or three rounds, and every time as we are putting away the pillows while Arthur is watching a video or having a snack, she explains with delight how the game is 'separation and individuation' made manifest. “His fierceness,” she exclaims, “his earnestness, wonderful”.

     When I was little we played a game on her bed, tumbling in her pillows and covers. The aim was to kiss each other’s gillygilly, our name for bellybutton. The one being kissed used hands, shoulders, pillows and shouts, anything that would prevent the kisser from reaching this goal. Mom was stronger but still I got her, and she got me. I could play this endlessly and have hardly since laughed so hard or worked with such determination as I did during the game’s repetitions. I laughed till it hurt. This is the loudest I remember us. In the game my mother and I are matched warriors locked in battle, quite different from the hatchling Arthur on his path towards independence. I had not been encouraged towards individuation. I was rewarded for staying entwined. 

     I am remembering these games while thinking about why cooking above all engages me with the fervor of child’s play, where I want to do it over and over, never tiring of repetition because every time it is new. Of course colors, tastes, variations, gratification, but I think it is that every dish holds a promise, as if this dish on this day will be exemplary and my abilities fully realized, and sometimes it is, sometimes I do achieve that, but it doesn’t last. The next day comes and with it another dish and I am the hatchling, fiercely, bravely emerging. My joy lies in the process, in the making. I want to feel it over and over, and I get to in the next meal and the next, the food becoming my patient loving mother who allows me to emerge. 

     Writing these words I see how immature a desire this is, forever hatching, but never becoming a grown dinosaur ready for adventures, leaving my mother behind.

     My mother cooked for solace. She made affordable fresh food and took few risks. She wasn’t particularly creative, there were few flourishes, it was as if pride had no place. She made honest uncomplicated food she could count on. Today’s chicken which was as good as last week’s would be good next time too--it didn’t matter if it was flavored with lemon or soy sauce or any other variation. It was the steadiness that soothed her and it was what I came to understand as love.

     This project of cooking dishes to find her again, tasting foods I associate with her, I haven’t found the joy filled mother I long for, instead I keep banging up against her sadness. The sadness was in her, its cloud enveloped her. She couldn’t climb out of it. She didn’t explain it. She didn’t love me enough to let it go. I couldn’t rescue her.  Shame, hurt and rage got bundled together and tucked inside of me. Like mother, like daughter I suppose. 

    That banished bundle bangs at my inner door, "Let me out, let me out." Whenever I speak I am talking over her noise. If you get close enough to where I think you might hear her too, I shoo you away. Like mother, like daughter I suppose. 

     I learned from my mother that making supper quiets the banging. The rhythm of the knife striking the cutting board, the sizzle of a sear. Scent and clatter soothes that beast. 

     Have my sons bundled their hurts inside themselves too? I can pick out behaviors in each of them that tells me this is so. Making suppers soothed me, maybe helping me to be a better mother. The way I fed them pleased and satisfied their hunger and it let them know my love, but it didn’t protect any of us from sadness. Will writing these words help open our doors? 

Pizza 

Once my boys were old enough to navigate the kitchen we made pizza once a week. Sometimes I’d make dough from scratch but I never figured out a recipe that was so much tastier than frozen supermarket dough to merit the extra work. Another possibility is to ask a local pizzeria to sell you a ball or two of dough. In our household instead of one big pizza each person rolled and topped their own mini pizza. One ball of store-bought dough can be divided to make three or four small pies. 

Patting, slapping, rolling, Arthur mastered throwing and spinning the disc in the air to stretch the dough. Whatever your technique, gluten in the dough seizes and the rolled dough contracts. To combat this roll the ball once (on top of a well floured board) let it rest 10-15 minutes and then roll it again. We like the crust rolled as thin as you can get it, and who cares if it come out round. Cover the discs with a clean dry towel so they don’t dry out.

Meanwhile, prepare the toppings, putting each one in a separate little bowl: sauté crimini mushrooms. Sauté spinach just enough to wilt it. Thinly slice some shallots. Slice a load of garlic and sauté in olive oil just enough to soften. Slice pepperoni or better yet tear strips of prosciutto. The list can go on and on: thinly sliced fennel, sliced fresh fig (or macerated dried ones), pitted olives, artichoke hearts, grilled strips of zucchini sprinkled with lemon zest, etc, etc. You want enough choices so each person can make a truly unique pizza. The thing to remember is to not overload your pie--you want each bite's ingredients to sing--you don't want a mountain of glop. 

Pull apart a ball of mozzarella cheese, the fresher the better. Drain some fresh ricotta. Shave a hard nutty cheese for balance; Parmesan, Manchego or even sharp cheddar. I use strained, pureed imported tomatoes but pretty much any sauce will do as you don’t use much of it, just stay away from ones that are full of sugar or additives because they taste bad, or ones that are too watery because you don’t want the dough getting all soggy.

Turn the oven up as high as it will go. Let it preheat a good half hour. If you have a pizza stone, great, if not, a sheet pan turned upside down will do. Let the stone or pan, or even a cast iron skillet get searing hot.

Transfer one disc of rolled dough to a rimless cookie sheet sprinkled generously with cornmeal. Shake the sheet back and forth to make sure the dough isn’t sticking. If it sticks, add more cornmeal. The dough must be able to slide with ease from the cookie sheet onto the burning hot pizza stone.  

Take a tablespoon of sauce and swirl it on to you dough, leaving a small un-sauced boarder. This is important because if the sauce dribbles onto the cookie sheet it will be harder to slide the pizza into the oven. Lay on some cheese—one kind or all three, or maybe you want a ‘white’ pizza, in which case leave off the sauce. Same thing with whichever toppings you choose. Use restraint. Distribute them equally across the surface. Wiggle the pan making sure the pizza still slides freely. Right before putting the pizza in the oven, guild the lily with a drizzle of high quality extra virgin olive oil. Sprinkle with sea salt and a few grindings of black pepper. 

Only top your pizza when you are ready to put it in the oven! If you top it too soon before baking the moisture of the toppings makes the pizza stick to the cookie sheet and it gets super hard to transfer onto the hot pizza stone. Open you oven door, pull out the shelf with the stone on it as far as it safely pulls out and then wriggle the topped pizza onto the stone. Don’t worry that cornmeal flakes fall in the oven, they will quickly burn up. Don’t worry about making a bit of a mess. Keep an eye on your pizza, in 5 - 10 minutes tops you will have some blistering and char. Push it another minute past that and then using an offset spatula, coax the cooked pizza onto a plate (which you should have in your other hand, right at the edge of the stove shelf… I say this because trying to balance and lift the pizza from the stone without the plate at the ready can easily lead to disaster!) Let the pizza cool for a few minutes, otherwise all the toppings slide off in a mess. While the pizza is cooling, ready the next round of dough for the oven.

The best part is using the pizza wheel to cut slices for everyone to taste from each pizza. Before cutting, toss a few whole basil leaves on top of the warm pizza, or a handful of arugula, or a sprinkling of red pepper flakes. 

This is a meal we eat standing around, in fits and starts, everyone working and eating and talking, everyone contributing, everyone sharing each others pie.

Good side dishes include salad, sautéed broccoli rabe, seared Italian sausages (cook them in a cast iron skillet in the oven while the oven heats up) etc., etc.

Ashes and Kisses

  I head home for a break from my vigil. My mother is in hospice and unresponsive. It is only a matter of time. Putting my key in the door the phone rings. It’s Joe. He just says my name, and I know, and I turn around and get back on the train. Forty minutes to, forty fro and in that time nothing dramatic, nothing anyone can see. Just a pebble dropped in the ocean making ripples in the waves. The earth suddenly different. 

     I stand at the foot of my mother’s bed. The angle of sun sets the tangle of bed sheets aglow. She lies dead still, mouth agape, waxen, all the cliches that describes a corpse. I snap her picture and put it on Facebook and later take slack for having posted it. Maybe the picture was too raw.

     Five days later, on Halloween, I retrieve her ashes. She is in a box heavier than I’d imagined. The box is in a bag slung over my shoulder. It looks like any other bag except for the crematorium’s logo which is printed tastefully in gold. The streets crawl with ghosts and ghouls ready to parade, Instead of crying I am laughing at my secret package, walking to the subway carrying bones through the crowds.

     Joe tells me when his time comes he wants his ashes mingled with my mother’s and sprinkled in the water near the base of the Statue of Liberty. I’ll honor his request though dumping bones in a public place without a permit is against the law. I’ll treat it as a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation. I’ll charter a boat and pray the skipper doesn’t mind. 

     Joe doesn’t consider what I might want to mark my mother’s passing. Now she has been on my bookshelf for nearly two years. She sits in her green plastic box like she sat parked in her wheelchair, wishing to be free. I think of her while cooking and writing these stories, but forget she is tucked among my books. When I remember I feel how I felt after I left home when I forgot to call on her birthday, thoughtless and rotten and for a day or two I talk to the recriminating ashes. 

     It took seven years before my brother-in-law was ready to relinquish my sister’s ashes. He too didn’t ask what I might want to mark her death, as if we weren’t blood, as if my voice were of no concern. I know now—holding bones too long is wrong.

     The day before my mother’s memorial  gathering, a month after her death, my niece and nephew and my kids were in town, and because I pushed, Paul and his second wife who was my sister’s best friend, and the rest of us trekked to the Rockaways to put my sister in the ocean. My nephew wailed as the ashes drifted through his fingers. I watched him, hoping to learn by example. I haven’t yet let myself cry. 

     The sun was shinning white gold and silver cold. Wind whistled and sand flew on its breath, stinging our skin. Ashes gone, we walked to my sister’s favorite bar.

     When my sister was already quite sick she wanted to visit our father’s grave. We hadn’t been since we’d buried him in 1977. My half sister Lisa insisted she remembered where the headstone was but all the paths looked the same. We found the office and asked for help. The man opened a wooden drawer and pulled out a yellowed index card with my father's coordinates written in ballpoint pen. He unfolded a map with faded, illegible lines that showed us where to walk. Graveside Karen and Lisa cried. I kept my distance but then took a pencil and scrap of paper and made a rubbing of his name.

     Thoughts of one death stir memories of the rest. I’m reading a stack of mourning memoirs; everyone’s grief different. One author had her mother exhumed, had the corpse cremated and flown across the country. In the last chapter she carries the ashes into the ocean. Reading her words I decide to split my mother. I’ll take half and give Joe the rest. I’ll put my half in the ocean with my sister, or maybe half my half and put the rest in my garden come spring. 

     On the night of my mother’s second yahrzeit I slit the golden sticker that seals the box and find I need a tool to pry off the lid. I’m burying my head in the toolbox looking for a screwdriver, praying no one catches me. I’m squirreling back to my bedroom and closing my door. I’m pouring ash into a brown paper bag, a little spills on my duvet.

     On that day on the jetty in the Rockaways, I’d grabbed a handful of my sister’s bones. The feel of her stayed on my hand a long, long time. No amount of washing would take away the feeling, so I am tiptoeing down the stairs and up again with the dust broom so I don’t have to touch the ash I’ve spilled on my bed, sweeping my mother into the dustpan like so many crumbs. 

     I empty the pan out the window. Her tiny spilled particles are flying towards the old Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower, by whose clock in the 40s she’d gauge her rush to be on time for Shabbos candle lighting. By whose clock in the 90s I’d mark time between nighttime nursings. Tonight too, the clock’s illuminated hands tick by.

     On this day the air is brisk. It is Halloween. Mom is packed inside my bag next to a towel and we are grabbing coffee on our way to the 8:05 to Bay Shore and from there, a taxi to the Fire Island ferry to Ocean Beach. On the smooth crossing I’m filled with the joy I felt riding that ferry as a girl. The deck hands would leap to the dock before the boat stopped moving and tie the ropes around posts to secure us. We’d disembark and load our bags on a wagon and I was lucky and would climb atop and my mother would pull me along. 

     On this off season day the shops on Bayview Walk are closed, but the swings where we licked Fudgsicles at sunset on the bay are right where we left them. I am carrying my mother and we wend our way to Midway Walk, then one more block to Oceanview where wooden steps climb the dunes. 

     Wisps of silver cloud startle against cerulean sky. The sunshine is cold and pale. Jeep tracks furrow sand as far as one can see. At shoreline, seagulls stand on one leg facing the wind while sandpipers scurry, pecking. Shedding shoes, rolling pants cuffs, and wading mid-calf, the water is warmer than the air. 

     Crashing fast at random interval, gunmetal waves roar. Beached sea foam deposits pulse like beating hearts. Wind tears apart the heart and quivering pieces fly. I bend to capture this up close and a gust blows my bag, which knocks my arm, which fumbles my phone, which sinks under an incoming wave. “Fuck” I say. Maybe this is a sign to be present in these fleeting moments instead of posturing for social media. But maybe it is another sign. When I find my phone  the underwater blur has been miraculously captured. Maybe my mother has rescued my phone. The phone now baptized and still working, is ready to immortalize her ashes as they wash out to sea.  

     With a pocketful of polished purple shells and sand between my toes I am rushing to catch the ferry; buoyant, rejuvenated, relieved. I have done the right thing. I know my mother would be happy. She was not happy for so long. She would be happy now. 

     My head rests against the window on the train, I am watching low warehouses speed by. The window is overlaid with reflections from inside the car; ghosts and goblins hunching over phones. My eyes drift shut. 

     Now I am in the station swimming against the stream of commuters dashing for rush hour trains. Now I am on the subway. Now, again, I am putting my key in the door.

     The tin of Barton’s Almond Kisses forgotten on my pantry shelf jumps into focus. Of course I would see these now, my mother’s favorite special occasion chocolate and almond caramels.

     I was so uncomfortable at her memorial, put off by everyone for their unconflicted testimonial. I was tongue-tied and wrestling with emotions I couldn’t name. I busied myself in the kitchen filling platters until the crowd thinned. I missed out on the Kisses. I’d taken such care to have them there. They’d been an effort to find. I had to go downtown to buy them. Weeks later after the memorial, I went downtown again and bought another tin but the proper occasion to open them never arrived. 

     Now I am greedily opening these stale caramels. Now I am tasting the candy and realizing it isn’t special, that it’s disappointing, that I could make these better. I can do many things my mother never did, including master caramel.  

     It is a crazy tiny margin of a few degrees between soft and hard that makes the candy right. Clipped to the pot the candy thermometer is difficult to read. Its numbers clouded by steam, and only a particular angle reveals the mercury rising. Maybe the thermometer isn’t accurate. Maybe you need to learn by intuition. Sugar boils furiously careening towards burnt. Added cream splatters and threatens to boil over. It is inevitable you’ll be burned, and sticky, so sticky, and that is a joy.