A surfeit of peppers – green, red, yellow — beg for purpose. I arrange them on my parents’ old roasting platter, passed down to me after Mother’s death, and smother them in minced garlic, kosher salt and extra virgin olive oil. Although the platter belonged to both my parents, I’ve always thought of it as Daddy’s. He scrubbed and scoured and cleaned and oiled it lovingly, for it was special, reserved, not exclusively, but primarily for meat — the Sunday pot roast, ground chuck patties doused in stewed tomatoes and onions, and pork chops first breaded, then fried, then broiled.
My parents acquired it for their first kitchen after the United States joined World War II. Daddy wanted to join as well but, crippled at the age of three from polio, he couldn’t pass the draft physical, even though he appeared to walk normally, cleverly concealing his limp with a built-up Thom McCann shoe. Disappointed, he and Mother left school teaching positions in rural Texas and moved to Dallas, the big city, to more effectively engage in the war effort. Daddy built airplanes while Mother worked in Customer Service at a large department store, replacing a man who, in Daddy’s eyes, was fortunate enough to go to war.
As teachers, they “roomed and boarded” in the small communities where they worked. When they gave up teaching, they gave up rooming and boarding and moved into a proper apartment with a kitchen. They had been married almost a decade, but one of Mother’s conditions for accepting Daddy’s proposal of marriage was there would never be a kitchen in their house. He kept up his end of the bargain throughout their teaching years.
Hence, the rooming and boarding.
But the war meant sacrifice. Daddy knew he must forego his promise and Mother surrender her aversion to domesticity. Besides, houses and apartments came with kitchens. It was difficult to find one without. During the war, food and supplies were rationed, in short supply but high demand. Dining out was prohibitive. My parents, after almost a decade of marriage, at last collected plates, bowls, glasses, flatware, pots, pans. Nothing fancy. Still, Mother found it difficult to reconcile herself to domestic tasks. The solution, Daddy determined, was to not burden her with such chores. He made a deal with her. If she would prepare the main meal of the day, he would do the rest. Grocery shopping, the other two meals, dishes, laundry, vacuuming, mopping, toilets, everything. She agreed.
Hence, the platter.
Did he buy it for her? Did they buy it together? Was it a gift, a gentle suggestion by their relatives that, indeed, cooking was not so bad? Food was, after all, a necessity for survival and besides, this platter was rather pretty, a striking work of World War II era functional art.
After I roast the peppers, I scrub the platter clean, as did Daddy after almost every meal Mother concocted. It is well used, its recesses smooth, its surface clear. Cast aluminum with ducks and rushes engraved upon its indented center, it measures 19 ½ inches from handle to handle and is equipped with bake lite handle covers which can be attached to either end so that one can more elegantly transport the contents – piping hot – from oven to table. Oval shaped, it is 13 inches wide with one end depressed, like a little bowl, a built-in receptacle for the “pot liquor,” as Daddy dubbed meat juices, to collect. Patented and created by the West Bend Aluminum Company in West Bend, Wisconsin in 1942, it is, indeed, a jewel.
Aided by this platter, Mother maintained her commitment and after the war, when she became pregnant with my brother and officially entered the realms of housewifery, she continued to create that one painful meal. Each afternoon of my childhood, she managed to have a meal in preparation as soon as Daddy arrived from work. While they settled down with coffee and cigarettes to review their day, the potatoes boiled, the can of green beans waited beside the can opener, and the meat roasted on the platter. Later, Mother completed the meal, chain smoking, scowling, moaning about how she detested preparing food, how it wasn’t in her nature, how she was an abysmal cook, how she hated it all.
She did it. But she resented it.
When at last we’d sit down to dine, Daddy dug in with delight, complimenting her efforts. “Good eating,” he’d say, taking the bread left on my plate and sopping it with the pot liquor lingering in the receptacle at the end of the platter.
In the evenings, after Daddy washed and stacked the dishes, sorted the laundry, washed it and hung it out to dry, he vacuumed. After that, he pulled out the work he brought home from the office (he had transitioned from schoolteacher to builder of airplanes to social worker) and sorted through his caseload. During my childhood, I never once saw Mother wash a dish, run the washing machine, or use the vacuum cleaner. To her credit, she did change the sheets on the beds every Saturday morning, a necessity to cleanliness she believed. She boycotted the grocery store although, upon Daddy’s request, she made lists so he could pick up whatever she required for those evening meals. Every six months or so, she cleaned the house. She tore the place apart and scrubbed it thoroughly – smoking and growling and yelling and complaining without pause. It was a frightening ordeal. We stayed out of her way.
In my late adolescence, before I left for college, I cleaned our house on a weekly basis. Daddy loved it. Mother took offense. The only time she slapped me across the face was once after I’d cleaned the house and begged for some word of appreciation and gratitude from her.
Actually, I probably didn’t beg. I probably accused her of being lazy, messy, and cranky. I was probably obnoxious. She slapped me and shut me up. I never cleaned the house again.
Mother loved to take me shopping. I was her dress up doll. Once a month on a Saturday, we donned our finest and drove downtown to shop at Fedways and eat an elegant lunch in the rooftop restaurant there. I both anticipated and dreaded those shopping excursions. Mother, crabby in the kitchen was – outside of the house – fun loving and generous, even though she often embarrassed me. Never reticent, she instructed the sales ladies to gather around and ooh and aah over her beautiful little daughter. “Spittin’ image of a young Elizabeth Taylor,” she’d say. I wasn’t, although I did have dark hair and light eyes. But Mother wanted to believe I was prettier than I was, and dressing me up was part of managing her desire. I found this humiliating and dehumanizing. Later I understood she never received such affirmation from her own mother. Rather, her mother, a classical beauty, bemoaned the fact her daughter was not as pretty as she.
Her mother was a domestic wonder. She cooked, baked, cleaned, sewed, managed a household with aplomb. Perhaps Mother rejected domesticity because her mother rejected her. She never said as much, but it was there, present between the two of them, and present between the two of us. So much passed unshared between us. No baking of cookies or cakes or pie crusts. No washing dishes together or folding the laundry just so. No sewing together, although she was able to sew, sort of. Each year she insisted on making my dance costumes for the annual spring dance recital. She locked herself in her bedroom, forgot the evening meal, spilled cigarette ash over the pink and lavender tulle, and complained bitterly throughout. It was worse than when she cleaned house. We retreated, including my father, who hauled out the platter and commenced to “fix” our meals, completing Mother’s one prescribed domestic duty. When I was in eighth grade, I enrolled in a Home Economics course and learned to sew. Mother joyfully moved the sewing machine into my room. Her sewing days were over.
Daddy was six years old when his father died suddenly, after which food was scarce in his large family. He knew hunger and fear and great love, as his mother kept her family of six children together in spite of persistent urging from the relatives to send them to an orphanage. As a result, my father appreciated the gift of food, of sustenance. Every bite of bread, every precious drop of “pot liquor,” every shard of meat or green bean or lettuce leaf, he considered a reward, a prize, a gift, a symbol of devotion, loyalty, warmth, and family. When he made the pancakes shaped as bunnies for my breakfast, or the bread and extravagantly buttered sandwiches for my school lunch, or the exquisite hamburgers which I requested of him (sometimes in the middle of the night), his love and care suffused every bite.
Mother couldn’t allow herself the pleasure of creating a meal for those she loved best. She believed she didn’t do it well. She felt she was forced to do it. She felt that cooking, an endeavor in which her own mother excelled, was beyond her range, as was the physical beauty her mother so abundantly possessed and which she believed she didn’t.
When I was grown and married, she confided to me. “People thought I was lazy. I wasn’t lazy, but your father wouldn’t let me do anything. He wanted to do it all himself, because he felt he did it better. The last time I went to the grocery store with him, he put every item I placed in the basket right back up on the shelf. Every last item. That’s the real reason I don’t shop for groceries anymore. Your father wants to be in charge.”
I was twenty-six years old when my mother told me this. I had been married for five years, and I was about to embark on a one-year journey abroad – away from people and places I had always known. I was hesitant to be separated from my parents, who were in their late sixties at the time. I was so attached to them, and so certain I knew them and their relationship, which seemed eccentric but rock solid, not perfect, but lovingly stable. Mother, outrageous with most people, was soft and vulnerable with my father. She complained of his lack of adventure, but she clearly adored him. My father, ever reserved, coddled and spoiled and indulged her. Similarly, he adored her.
Or so it seemed to me.
That day, my mother continued to tell me more about her relationship with my father, especially the loneliness she often endured walking through life beside him. He resorted to long silences, she explained, when she attempted to do what he felt he could do better or when she did something he didn’t like. Eventually, she decided to do nothing. Nothing at all, except that one humiliating meal.
I believed my mother. At least, I believed she believed what she said was true. I also knew what I saw, not only in childhood, but as an adult, as a young married woman. I believed primarily what I had always believed: that my mother did not want to be viewed as a domestic creature, that she felt domesticity did not suit her, that it belittled her, that she deserved better. She wanted to be a woman whose value as a loving wife and mother wasn’t based on her domestic proficiency. Her gifts existed outside of domesticity, which did not mean she couldn’t be a wife and mother.
After my mother revealed this aspect of her relationship with my father, after she blamed him for what we all viewed as her shortcomings, I left for a year. Contact with my parents was minimal. It was 1979, I was in the Soviet Union, and both phone calls and mail were painfully slow, if non-existent. When I returned in June, 1980, Daddy was diagnosed with prostate cancer, then lung cancer. Terminal. Hopeless. My parents, in my absence, had moved from one end of Texas to the other, back to the small town and tiny house they held onto through their years away. At the beginning of his illness, Daddy began to prepare Mother for life without him. He built a den and a second bathroom onto the house and, most importantly, he created a laundry room, replete with a clothes dryer, which he had never previously owned. When all was finished, he taught my mother how to operate the washer and the dryer. As he grew weaker, she made occasional forays to the grocery store and pulled together more than one meal per day. He had long since given up smoking, but she continued her four daily packs, her one concession to his illness to smoke in the room where he wasn’t, not outside, but where he wasn’t.
My mother and father — imperfect creatures, almost diametrically opposed in personality — loved each other from childhood, “from the cradle.” Mother was joyful, exuberant, sociable, ill-tempered, spontaneous, excitable and, in many respects, exciting. She inherited both the physical and personality eccentricities of her father – angular, thin, sharp, curious, a risk-taker, sarcastic, generous beyond measure. When my mother walked into a room, people turned and noticed her. She was not the dainty, feminine, “pretty as a picture” daughter she believed her mother wanted. Instead, her vibrant flair and energy drew others to her. Yet her mother consistently reminded her that she was not a beauty, therefore a disappointment. She suffered what children should not suffer – rejection from a parent, non-acceptance of her essential self. Mother, wishing to be what her mother wanted, rejected to her core what she could not be.
Daddy was crippled early and half-orphaned a few years later. His mother struggled to keep her family fed and together, so each family member, even the youngest, contributed to the survival of the whole. He grew up amongst five sisters, each of whom learned both traditionally male and female duties. A born domestic, my father – quiet, reserved, observant – learned how to plant and harvest cotton, how to saddle and ride a horse and shoot rabbit, how to bring that rabbit home and skin it and roast it as well as mix and bake the cornbread and fry the fresh okra to go with it. He suffered what children should not suffer – debilitating illness and the loss of a sterling parent. As a result, he was hopelessly fearful, opting for order and safety at every juncture.
My brother and I, viewing her inherent gifts as flaws, harbored resentment toward Mother primarily because she so vehemently rejected domestic duties and household engagement. We knew no other families whose mothers behaved in such a manner, or fathers who did everything around the house. In an era when women were expected to be domestic, my mother took a stand that she absolutely was not. She taught school. She worked diligently throughout war-time in a job for which she was overqualified. She delayed having children, and when she did, she returned to work, teaching kindergarten, then children with Down’s Syndrome, calling on her own mother for childcare, as childcare was simply not available as it is today. Later, when she returned to teaching kindergarten, she sent her mother packing and simply took me with her to work.
Yet Mother, despite her outgoing personality, her zest and joy in living, her relentless energy when she could muster it, was, tortured. Otherwise, she would not have tortured us so with her foul temper, her domestic lethargy, her complaints, her futilities, her never-ending desire to transform me into the china-doll beauty her own mother had been, and which she herself could not be. In her pursuit of gleaning her mother’s approval, she even gave me her name – Molly.
My father, on the other hand, did what he needed to do to live, to endure, to not lose what was most important to him, those he loved – his mother, his sisters, his wife, my brother, me.
My mother’s domestic failure was my father’s domestic success. When I use the platter I think of Daddy’s caring and kindness in preparing meals for me. When I use the platter I think of Mother’s obligation and dismay and the fact she cooked anyway, despite the searing pain that lived within her, that fought her every step of her life. She made that one uncreative but nourishing meal. She promised my father she would do it, and she did.
If my father had not been indulgent and controlling, if my mother had not been intent on rejecting domesticity, could there have been a compromise, an absence of prescribed jobs, rather an offering – through love – to do what must be done, to live, to provide without judgment or accusation? Well, yes. Yet somehow, it existed anyway. The compromise found its way out of the morass, out of my mother’s childhood hurt and ongoing anger, out of my father’s fear of loss and never-ending hunger for safety. Daddy did not judge or criticize my mother. He understood her pain and she softened in the cradle of his love. Daddy, led by Mother’s zest and curiosity, stepped beyond the boundaries of fear and merged his life with hers. That is what the platter is to me — a loving compromise, a meeting of hearts. When I cook with the platter, I see my parents, their love for each other, for my brother and myself. I see loss, sacrifice, fear, risk, commitment, comfort, joy, warmth and lost dreams. I see it all. I see life.