Jeanette Leaves Her Recipes  by Ann Claycomb

      The scent of tarragon-mushroom soup drives her from the kitchen.  It is her own recipe, honed over the course of several months one winter when her children were little, and the mingled fragrances it emits as it cooks—of sharp green leaves and the damp earth they grow in—recalls her to that first tiny kitchen.  She chopped and stirred and tasted while the children colored on pads of paper in the middle of the floor.  They were always underfoot, but she never once let either of them get burned.

They still live close by, Neal and his family in the suburbs and Catriona on the other side of the city.  And Neal and his wife are bringing the boys for dinner tonight, braving a driving rainstorm that has not let up all day.  It is the perfect weather for her mushroom soup, served with sourdough bread and a green salad—which reminds her that she still needs to whisk together the vinaigrette.  But she can’t bring herself to go back into the kitchen.  Instead, she sits on the edge of a chair in her office with her head between her knees.

Her office is a retreat now in more ways than one, because it is around a corner and down the hall from the kitchen.  Cooking smells have a hard time finding it.  When the nausea thickens in her throat so much that she cannot stand even the faintest whiff of food, she comes in here to wait until it passes.

But it is so hard for her not to think about food.  She once loved the idea that her cooking had worked its way into the very woodwork, into the fibers of the furniture, into the rugs.  And it has; people sniff appreciatively in the foyer and ask what she’s cooking, even on the rare occasions when she isn’t cooking anything at all.  Their eyes shine in anticipation of cinnamon, chocolate, roasted chicken and apples, potatoes mashed with garlic and cheese and—her secret touch—tangy Greek yogurt.  She does not know how to disappoint them, not when she can still work her magic.  She is consoled by the knowledge that her gift has not deserted her even though her appetite has.

But she has mornings now when just walking into the kitchen sends her reeling for the sink.  She can smell cinnamon, butter, and coffee and she knows that it is a trick of memory, nothing more, because she can still smell the same things if she leaves the kitchen window open all night.  They are the memories of twenty years of breakfasts, of muffins dropped into paper cups while the rest of the family showered, of weekend pancake-eating contests, of Cat as a little girl eating cinnamon toast made with rye bread for weeks because her brother dared her to do it.

So she has learned to steel herself for the kitchen, even as she is drawn to it every morning, every day.  She spends more time than ever in her office, though even here she is surrounded by food, by the books about food that line the wall. The titles of her own cookbooks tell the story of her life: Eating Like a King on a Shoestring was the first one, written when Neal was three, Cat was on the way, and she and Greg were barely scraping by.  Then Kid-licious: Tasty, Nutritious Foods Kids Love, followed by several low-fat, low-calorie books she turned out at her agent’s insistence, even as she was working on her first bestseller, A Piece of Cake.

Her last book, published just two years ago, still astonishes her.  It is hard-backed and paper-jacketed, printed on thick glossy paper and full of exquisite color photos.  She knew, even before this book was complete, that celebrity cookbook authors had taken the market to a new level, that cookbooks sold as coffee-table books.  But she was nonetheless bemused by the whole process, the photo shoots and conferences: how to light her balsamic-glazed strawberry pie, what china pattern set off a mound of her Thai-spiced shrimp salad to best advantage.  On the back cover she is depicted slicing into a roasted turkey and smiling at the camera, her head lifted from her task as if she has been momentarily distracted and delighted by the arrival of some guests.  She remembers this photo shoot in particular, because it had never occurred to her that she would get her hair not only cut but colored on the spot, or that a stylist would be on hand with a rack of clothes from which to assemble the perfect “warm, welcoming hostess” outfit.

Reading the recipes makes her feel sick.  She pulls the book out and looks at herself, only two years younger.  Her hair, side-parted and cut into a soft swoop across her cheek, gleams like silver from the blue rinse the stylist used.  The royal blue tunic she is wearing has turned her eyes to lapis.  Greg loved this picture.  He died of a heart attack last year, the sound of him falling against one of the posts of their heavy bed coming to her in the kitchen as a thump, startling but not alarming, not until he didn’t answer her, not until she went looking for him and found him on the floor, already gray.  It was an event that she experienced as a severing, a cleaving, Greg gone, she herself suddenly only half of a whole, sliced open and bleeding grief. 

When she got her diagnosis six months ago, her first thought was, Thank God Greg is already gone.  Then she thought of the children, of her grandsons, of her sister, of her friends.  They would have to watch her die, while she would have time to think about what she might have done wrong or said wrong, what she was leaving undone.  Greg had been spared all that.

She began making plans, promises, lists of things she needed to do.  At night in her office, as she organized papers and wrote letters, labeled pictures with names and dates no one else would remember, she was reminded of the process of writing a cookbook.  It started out as a heap of food-splattered paper, many of the notes indecipherable to anyone else—“Add yog if n brmlk, makes thckr but stl gd.”  She would spend days just sorting through the pages, making piles of which dishes absolutely had to go in, which ones wouldn’t make the cut, which ones might need to be tested once more.  Then the sorting again, this time for balance: were there too many dessert recipes?  Too many using expensive cuts of meat?  Not enough casseroles?

Now the boxes on the office floor are marked “Will,”  “Health Insurance,” “House.”  She needs to tell Neal about them tonight, show him how she’s organizing things so he knows where to look when the time comes.  On the desk are several copies of her living will and DNR directive, all signed and notarized.  Her oncologist has one already, but she wants Neal and Cat to have it too.  She carries one copy back to the kitchen where she will not forget to give it to Neal tonight.  At the sink, she draws a careful breath, hoping to hold the ever-present nausea at bay.  She rinses tarragon, chops it fine.  The lemon juice stings a paper cut on the inside of her thumb, but the clean dry smell does not bother her.  Lemon needs to be combined with butter or sugar to smell like food.  Instead it is the rich scent of the olive oil that makes her retch.  She fumbles to set the flagon down on the counter, grips the edge of the sink as she vomits, feels the cords in her neck and jaw protest.

Afterwards, she  she goes into the bathroom for mouthwash.  It could be worse, she tells her wan reflection (where are the lapis blue eyes now?)  She recalls a magazine profile about one of the glossiest of the celebrity chefs, a woman whose husband had throat cancer, or stomach cancer, something that stole his appetite and his taste buds.  By the time he died he could neither chew nor swallow.  Even when she first read the piece, before Greg’s death, she could not finish it.  She could imagine the panic that poor woman must have felt, how she must have stood in her kitchen day after day, opened her stocked pantry and searched for something to feed her husband.  Bread, chewed slowly until it melted on the tongue, or soup, pureed and sipped through a straw, custard allowed to soften on the tip of a spoon: she herself has tried them all, but at least when she has had to admit defeat, bent over from the waist and gagging on her own best recipes, she has not had to contend with having failed to feed the person she loved most.

*****

She cannot sit at the table with them for dinner.  Neal, Virginia, and the boys eat their meal at the dining room table while she curls up on the sofa in the living room.  The two rooms adjoin, and they manage to keep conversation going through to dessert.  Neal is sharp with the children, though, which is unlike him.  When Ethan spills his milk and Neal’s voice rises, she closes her eyes against the serrated sound of her son’s grief.

“What did you make for dessert, Grandma?” Sebastian wants to know.  He is standing right in front of her when she opens her eyes.  She smiles at him.

“What do you wish I made?”

“Brownies!”

“They’re in a pan on the counter next to the stove,” she says, and then has to chase him with her voice—“Make sure you get your mother to cut them for you!”

Virginia follows her son into the kitchen and she hears the whispered admonishment that they will eat their dessert in the T.V. room because Daddy has to talk to Grandma for a few minutes.  Neal sits on the sofa beside her.

“How are you feeling?  Are you eating anything at all?”

“Not really.  The doctor says not to expect much, to eat whatever tastes good.”

“And what tastes good?”

Nothing.

“Have you seen the boxes I have going in the office?” she asks him.  “I don’t have everything organized perfectly, you understand, but still there’s not going to be too much for you and Virginia and Cat to go through.”

“Mom—” he says, stops, tries again.  “Isn’t there anything, doesn’t the pain patch help at all with the nausea and your appetite?  You have to eat something.”

She laughs, takes his hand, which is nearly as cold as her own.  He is her son, clearly, built like a racing dog, his high narrow shoulders curving in toward his bony knees as he concentrates on her, absently chafes her hand in his.  Greg was a big man, not lean and collapsible like Neal.

“You sound like me,” she tells her son, “always trying to get people to eat.”

“I think this is a little different, Mom.  I mean—”

“Neal,” she says, “sweetheart, leave it alone.”

She cannot tell him what his plea does to her, how it highlights what she already feels keenly every day, her life sifting out of her like flour from a sieve.  She envies Greg, crashing to the floor like a felled tree.

Neal and Virginia pack up to leave an hour later, taking the rest of the meal with them in Tupperware and packages of tinfoil.  She holds her grandsons close, though they are sticky with chocolate.  The smell makes her mouth feel gritty with a sludge that she quickly gulps back.

Virginia leans down to embrace her—“Don’t get up!”—then stops in the doorway.  “Oh, I almost forgot!  I meant to ask you—I made a quiche the other day and it came out just awful.”

“What was wrong?”

“Well, I followed the directions exactly.  I don’t have your instincts so I always stick close to the recipe, but still it was runny and the filling didn’t fill up the crust.  I kept putting it back in the oven and then the crust burned—”

“What size eggs did you use?”

Virginia looks puzzled.  “Medium, I think.  I always buy medium.”

“Ah.  But almost all standard cookbook recipes refer to large eggs.  So medium eggs would have produced exactly what you’re describing, a quiche that didn’t set up properly and didn’t have enough volume.”

She sees her daughter-in-law beam, so pleased with the solution that she feels set up—could Virginia really not have known that you always use large eggs?—but after they have gone she tells herself that it doesn’t matter.  If Virginia was merely trying to console her by allowing her to prove her usefulness in the world, she is glad to be reminded of it.  And if the question was serious, well, what if she’d waited a year to ask it?

*****

 Cat comes over the next weekend, her difficult daughter, big-boned and aggressive even in her beauty, her blunt cheekbones and jaw seemingly designed to point out how interesting a face can be when it is all planes and angles, how much less interesting other faces are in comparison.

She is making chicken enchiladas, one of Cat’s favorites, rolling the tortillas around the filling and marveling at the absence of nausea she feels even as she looks down at the bright green mush of chicken and sauce and cheese.  Her fingertips are shiny with oil from the tortillas and the nutty smell of the roasted corn fills her nose when she takes a deep breath.  She can handle food again, just in the last few days, so long as she doesn’t put any of it in her mouth.  She is on new medication, she has explained to Cat and Neal, which is true.  It is also true that her appetite has declined even further, to the point that her body seems not even to respond to food at all.  This is, her doctor said gently at the last appointment, often a sign that it is getting close to the end.  She has a hospice nurse already arranged, someone who will come to the house.

“Don’t fry the tortillas too long,” she says.  “Did you get a sense of how long I had you holding them in there?  Just a few seconds on each side, long enough for them to soften up.”

“I’ll have to use a timer when I do it myself,” Cat says.  “Tell me again what’s in the filling.”

“Chicken, enchilada sauce, onions, cheese.  You can use leftover chicken, or just buy a pre-cooked one and chop up the meat.  That makes it much easier.  Do you see how I’m doing this?”  She holds a tortilla cupped in her hand, spoons filling into it.  “Don’t overfill the tortillas or you’ll have a pan full of mush, and always put them in seam side down, like this.”

“Why are yours so much better than any other enchiladas I’ve ever had?” Cat asks.  At her mother’s insistence, she held the tortillas in the hot oil with a pair of tongs, then pulled them out to dry on paper towels.  Now Cat is leaning against the counter watching the assembly process, drinking a beer that she brought over with her.  “I mean, I know all the ingredients, but aren’t they the same in every enchilada recipe?”

“Not necessarily,” she says.  “I use green sauce, not red, and dark meat chicken, which has a richer flavor than white meat.  And a lot of American recipes leave out the cotijo cheese because it’s not an ingredient they’re familiar with.”

“Well,” Cat says, “I think it’s the crack cocaine you secretly put in when no one’s looking, so we all feel compelled to keep eating even when we’re full.  I think that’s the secret ingredient to a lot of your food, actually, and you should just admit it.”

She laughs, shakes her head.

“Food is just fuel, remember?” she says, and slants a glance at her daughter.  When Cat was a teenage athlete, she threw this phrase at her mother as often as she could, a slashing rebuff to offers of homemade anything, especially subtly flavored or slowly cooked.  She would stand at the open refrigerator after soccer practice and drink Gatorade straight from the bottle, then refuse dinner because she had already eaten take-out pizza with the team.

There is Gatorade in the refrigerator now.  Her doctor told her to try it and she has found that the taste, like sweetened sea-water, is so unlike anything she thinks of as food that it goes down easily and stays down.

“God,” Cat is saying, “I was a jerk, wasn’t I?”

“You were a teenager,” she says.  “I’m just glad you didn’t decide to rebel by becoming anorexic.  I don’t know what I would have done with you then.”

“Force-fed me, I bet,” Cat says.  She takes a long swallow of beer.  “I can just see you doing it too, and I would have been so mad at you because you would have picked all my favorite foods to shove down my throat.”

The joke, the image, disturbs her.  She has a clear memory of Cat at that age, her elbows and knees always black-scabbed and her hair forever falling out of its ponytail.  There were times when she felt that Cat delighted in dragging her from her kitchen to stand on the edge of muddy soccer fields in the rain.  But she would never have forced food on her daughter, not like that.

“We did have our battles,” she says.

“What used to really get me,” Cat says, “is that even when I was pretending that I didn’t want to eat your food, it was just too good, and you made me feel like somehow I should try to be good at it, which I didn’t get.  I mean, for Chrissakes, Dad couldn’t even make an omelet.”

She smiles.  “I’m not sure your father knew how to boil water.”

The enchiladas are done.  She covers the pan with foil and puts it in the oven.  Behind her, she hears a smothered sound as though Cat has choked on a swallow of beer.  When she stands up she finds Cat crying, ferociously, as she does everything, bent double and clutching her middle as if she’s been gutted.  She takes the beer out of her daughter’s hand and strokes her hair.

“Sssh, darling, it’s alright.  You’re going to be alright.”

“But I never learned to cook!”  Cat says.  “I always told myself that someday I’d get you to teach me and I never did!”

She puts her arms around her daughter and rocks her, thinks of what Cat really ought to know, the essentials that she’s lacking: how to make a cream sauce, roll a pie crust, press on a steak with a fingertip and know that it is medium-rare.  How could she teach these things, even the simplest, most basic techniques, to Cat?  It would take months, years, and even then Cat would have a tendency to over-spice, to burn whatever was unfortunate enough to be in the pan.

She sees quite suddenly that she has failed her daughter—maybe failed both her children—in her insistence that hers is the only way, that sustenance must be worked for, that love is only valuable when offered by skilled hands.

“You’ll have all my books,” she says.  “I have faith in you.  You’ll be fine.”

*****

Several weeks later, when she is propped up on pillows in the four-poster bed, her nightstand pushed forward to make room for the I.V. drip, she pats the remote control that the nurse has left near her hand but does not turn on the television.  She closes her eyes and plays a game that she and Greg used to play when they were first married, when they had the luxury of lingering in bed.  She lists her five favorite places that she’s visited, then five places she would like to visit.  She lists Greg’s five favorite colors, his five favorite books.  She adds her favorite memories—of Greg, of Neal, of Cat, of the four of them together—and doesn’t limit herself to five.

She plans the menu for her ideal meal and finds herself using the visual images of the food to make her choices now, or the memories they conjure.  Lobster salad with fresh apricots and avocados to start, because the color contrasts will be so beautiful.  Chicken soup with sweet potatoes and cinnamon, the first dish she ever created.  Then a vegetable pot-pie, carrots and peas and pearl onions, all of them cut small and gleaming like gemstones under the crust.  She made that dish often when the children were small; she called it “Treasure Pie” and showed the children how to dig into the crust with their spoons and shout out the vegetables they had unearthed.  Cat loved the carrots the best and piled all the mushrooms on the side of her plate, a little heap of slag, while Neal foraged for the peas and corn kernels.

She can remember being hungry better than she can remember those few terrible months of nausea, thank God.  Now she feels neither, but still she cannot stop thinking about food.  She lists Greg’s five favorite foods, his five favorite restaurants.  She realizes that she has not been to a single one of them since he died.

The door opens and Cat comes in, pulls up the chair beside the bed.  She is expected, of course; both she and Neal have been coming by every day.  But she is tense with an urgency that she has not brought into this room before.

“Mom,” Cat says, “hey, it’s me.  I just came by—I was going to come by tonight but I wanted to tell you something quick before Neal got here—It’s not bad, it’s just—”  She swipes at her cheeks with the heels of her hands.
            “I went home last night, after I was here, and I decided to try to make lasagna, which I figured was easy enough, right?  They make noodles you don’t even have to boil first now, and so I got out all the ingredients and I started making it using a recipe, like a real recipe not just the one from the box, and—anyway—it had me melting some butter and adding flour and milk and as I was doing it I suddenly stopped because—you’re going to think this is so stupid but—I knew that I was making a roux, that’s what it’s called, isn’t it?  When you mix flour and butter together?  I knew that’s what it was and I thought, ‘how the hell did I know that?’ and then I realized that of course you must have told me and so I just wanted you to know that I was listening, that’s all—I remember things that I don’t even know I remember, if that makes any sense—”

Beside the bed, her daughter is crying, tears of sorrow and relief.  In the bed, her eyes closed, she sees her own hand dropping butter into a pan to start a roux.  She can hear her own voice telling the children what to do:

“You have to melt it completely before you add the flour, but not too hot—you don’t want it to brown. See how it looks now?  Now add the flour, gently, don’t dump, that’s right.  And now you stir, still gently, but don’t stop or the flour will burn.  Good.  A whisk is better than a spoon to smooth out lumps, and a minute or two is all it takes.  There, look at that.  You made a roux.  Now we can make anything: cream sauce, gravy, even pâte à choux—that’s another French term, it just means pastry dough.  But you don’t want to taste it yet.  It won’t taste like anything, really.”

I was feeding them, she thinks.  All these years, I was feeding them.

         She can feel the press of the spoon she lifted to their mouths, to her own mouth, to prove her point, can feel the roux slip between her lips.  It is warm but absolutely flavorless, thick and tender on her tongue.