The Storm After the Earthquake

My mother left the day before yesterday, when the roads were finally cleared and there were no live downed power lines in my immediate vicinity: the trip, which usually takes a little over an hour by car, took almost three.

A few days after the northeast had an earthquake, it was hit by Hurricane Irene. Parts of Manhattan were evacuated and so, living just one block from the Hudson River, Rita arrived here on Friday evening at our insistence, riding the train home from New York with Susan. Instinctively, I filled up the refrigerator, which was the wrong thing to do; whenever we have so much as a light drizzle, my town almost always loses power, very often for long stretches. But my mother, whose style of eating I define as picker — a gastronomical chiffonnier, she’ll wait until everyone is asleep and then she’ll graze as though eating doesn’t count calorically if no one actually sees her, but she’ll leave unwrapped bits of chicken or bagel sitting on the counter as telltale signs of her presence  — rarely eats decent meals unless I cook them, so I took it as an opportunity to feed her. I made comfort food, which is what you want in the days before a hurricane, when your mother is visiting: a roast chicken stuffed under the skin with a handful of herbs and sliced garlic, our garden’s Italian flat beans that I braised in a small amount of wine, and tiny new potatoes that I pan-roasted along with the chicken.

“I can’t eat this–” she said, gnawing on a chicken leg like she was Henry the Eighth.

“Why not?” I asked.

“It’s all too fattening—” she sighed, her mouth full.

“Fine,” I said. “Then don’t eat it.”

She put down the chicken leg and helped herself to a flat bean. One. Flat. Bean.

“Are these organic?” she asked Susan.

“Yes–everything on your plate is organic, including the chicken.”

“I don’t like organic,” she said, like it was the word that bothered her. She shook her head, annoyed.

“Why not?” Susan asked.

“Because it just means that everything is grown in shit. I don’t like it for the same reason I don’t like brown eggs. I once sent a dozen back to the grocery store when the delivery boy brought me brown ones. Call me a racist, but I only want my eggs white and clean.”

Susan went into the kitchen and brought out an Italian plum tart that she’d made with the two pounds of fruit she’d bought the week before at the greenmarket in Manhattan.  She sliced it into small squares with our pizza cutter.

“No wonder–” my mother said — her AHA moment — eyeing me dramatically. “You must have dessert every night.”

“In all the years that you’ve been my mother,” I asked her, “have you ever known me to have a sweet tooth?

“No,” she said, “but it’s still fattening. I won’t go near it—but that’s okay, honey, you can, if you must.”

“God, this is going to be a long visit,” Susan whispered to me in the kitchen, while I made tea. And it was.

My mother has never been particularly adept at conceptual, or mechanical things, and that’s okay; not everyone is. She doesn’t understand basic financial concepts — the difference, between, say, principal and interest. Although she claims to be gluten intolerant, she must have a slice of bread a day, and it must be Wonder. Recently, she developed an allergy to the color pink. Not the dye, though; just the color, as though being in the same room with a bottle of Pepto Bismal would make her throat close up.

“I don’t believe for a minute — not one minute — that there’s going to be a storm,” my mother shouted from the den on Saturday afternoon, where she was watching the hurricane coverage on television, along with the images of destruction all along the North Carolina coast.

“She’s like the Baghdad Bob of Greater New York,” I whispered to Susan. We were standing together in the nearby dining room, changing the batteries on three lanterns and a couple of old, battered flashlights.

“Never mind that–” Susan responded. “You know what she’s going to do when she sees the shoulder of pork you’re braising in milk? I don’t want to be around for it.”

When it was done, around seven that night, I sliced it and brought it to the table for dinner, where my mother was waiting with a glass of wine.

“Now this I can eat,” my mother exclaimed–“Because it’s not fattening at all. You can keep your vegetables—a big hunk of meat is all I really want.”

“Maybe if you actually ate some vegetables, you wouldn’t have had that case of gout you developed last year —” I said.

Don’t go there. Please. Just don’t, Susan pleaded under her breath.

“It was an allergy. An a-l-l-e-r-g-y,” she snorted. “You’re such a hypochondriac. Just like your father.”

And then, four hours later, when Hurricane Irene finally settled down over my town — flooding streams, uprooting giant trees, downing wires, ripping shingles off houses — we lost power, which meant no water, no electricity, no phone, no internet. My childhood friend from upstate New York — a Katrina survivor — lost everything, again. The farming daughter of a friend in Vermont lost $100,000 in crops.

“Is there anyone I can call to complain?” my mother asked, sitting on the couch the next morning, holding a flashlight under her chin.

I sighed.

Things happen slowly; they blur together like scenes in a dream. Your parents are getting older. You’re getting older. You have dinner with friends and the conversation migrates to discussions about illness and older age and the aggression that was always there but that seems to be getting markedly worse by the minute. You feel yourself getting teary, and you order a bourbon, and describe the meal where you took your mother out with a male friend from the midwest who has never met her, and she, dateless for years but still quite the looker, grows coy and flirtatious with him. And then, looking at you out of the corner of her eye as you take a bite of your bagel, she asks your friend-the-chef if he has a weight problem, and whether his wife, who works as his general manager, is thin or fat. She is so contemptuous of food — of the thing around which your life revolves both professionally and profoundly — and you want to crawl under the table and die.

When exactly did this happen? When did the slope become quite so slippery?

My father used to say that mothers and daughters weren’t supposed to have stormy conversations like this — filled with enmity and old sadness. And mothers’ arrows — pulled from the sheaths slung over the side opposite their hearts — weren’t supposed to have such perfect aim. And if they did, as they got older that aim was supposed to get worse; not better. People and things are meant to soften over time.

Irene was a long and deadly storm, punctuated by some calming communal meals with our wonderful neighbors, once the danger had passed: we brought the rest of the pork to our neighbor Sherry’s house, and sat with everyone on her deep farmhouse porch, eating the dregs of our refrigerators, sharing everything, while the kids entertained themselves in the playroom. Two days later, we repeated the meal at our neighbor Kitty’s house, and Susan and I grilled ricotta and zatar pizza with preserved lemon — a riff on one of the best pizzas I’ve ever had, courtesy of Brandon Pettit at Delancey.

We got home late, carrying our lanterns into the house, remembering to pour buckets of water into the toilets so they could flush. My mother took two bottles of Poland Springs water out of the case in the hallway to remove her makeup, and, we discovered the next morning, had left one of the lanterns on in the bathroom all night, and closed the door behind her.

“Does anyone want breakfast?” I asked, walking into the kitchen the next morning.

“Oh god no–” my mother said, grazing on a crumbling, sticky piece of leftover plum tart. “I ate like a pig last night.”