Hunger
1.
My grandmother was a phenomenal cook, better than anyone in her generation of the family, or my mother’s, or mine. In fact, my mother and I could not cook an egg any better than chickens could fly, and that seemed the only thing that we shared in this wild, wearying world.
But my grandmother, as I’ve said, was a force in the kitchen. She cooked so much and so well that she had to open a canteen, else the food would overwhelm the entire household. But this was in the early fifties, right after the war, when everyone was so haunted by the ghost of lack that they ate even if they were not the least bit hungry.
You cannot claim to know the full, monstrous feeling of starvation, my mother liked to say, though she herself had been born after the war, and had no recollections of ever getting hungry, thanks to my grandmother’s culinary genius. In my mother’s stories, my grandmother, who had been dead decades before I was born, was perpetually whipping up a full day’s supply of stews and desserts before the break of dawn. A woman should know how to cook, my grandmother uttered in a vanished voice. Sacrifice makes all the difference in keeping a family happy.
My mother, too, was a believer in taking care of things in a way that was close to magic: when the family got up in the morning, the platters of their wonderful breakfast had to materialize, and vanish after they were done.
But how my mother compensated for her lack. As a young woman married to a man of too many appetites, she slaved away in the kitchen, but my grandmother’s blessed talent did not emerge no matter how hard she tried. Her cooking, mediocre at best, disgusted her husband, who characteristically spiced up his life for many years elsewhere. I remember barely being old enough to speak and frightened out of my wits as she raged over a pot of languishing soup, cursing my father. When I presented the memory to her years later, she waved it off as a false one. By this time, my father had arthritic knees and no money to spend on his escapades. You should learn how to cook, Cara, my mother said. It’s how you’ll keep a man.
I remember her agonizing over our meals and dinners so much that she herself barely ate. My childhood was a procession of exasperated cooks who could not stand her scrutiny. She stalked them in the kitchen, pouncing on their every movement. She possessed the impossible standards of a teacher who was not a practitioner, and anyhow, everyone knows that all cooks need to be left alone.
All of this because hunger, my grandmother was said to have been fond of saying, is the worst injustice of all.
In the midst of all this, I was there, a student in the kitchen, just as my mother had been in my grandmother’s time. She would die before I turned out to be an equal failure, she declared. Of course, I could not fry a sausage to save my life, and since then, I’ve lost count of so many deaths she and I have died because of each other. The cook, a wise, earnest woman my mother disliked for her wisdom and for her beautiful ringing laughter in the kitchen, told me, You will never learn to love something you have no heart for.
2.
Growing up, my brothers and I had to wipe our plates clean at every meal. The cooks cared little about our reception of their dishes, but my mother lived for this vicarious pleasure—to her it made up for the one flaw in her impeccable service to the family. My father went home less and less, and my brothers were becoming indolent young men. They devoured everything with the appetites of sharks, but I took the food and swallowed, downing with it, unnoticed, my simple child’s dignity until I was incapable of rejecting anything my mother put on my plate, not my early pursuits, not the beliefs I were to carry, not the eventual career as a teacher in the same high school she had taught in before she married my father.
I hate you, I wrote, and the hatred assumed a startling simplicity, like a perfect echo across a vast room, clear, resonant, and beautiful.
My mother was a child of her era, a religious, conservative product of Catholic girls’ schools, in public displaying the right degree of charm and modesty that won friends and admirers for a woman. However, and for as long as I can remember, she had possessed a potent wretchedness, as if she were seething inside with some hidden anger, which none of my brothers nor my self-absorbed father could sense. No one, except me.
I was her only daughter, her only helper and the heir to her great misfortune—or so she made me feel. I was bound to her by a baffling womanhood that existed in the service of the men in our lives. No other fate was so resigned from birth, sweeping away complaint like the dust that settles in the corners of the house. But only among ourselves do we know how stubbornly it keeps its faith throughout the long hours of each day. Womanhood spoke to me with my mother’s secret, bitter voice, hissing at me even as we washed dishes and clothes, fed, cleaned, and dressed the boys, bit our lips when my father stumbled into the house at dawn reeking of spoiled sheets.
Everywhere in my small world I encountered her disapproval, her mercurial temper. Misfortune is only satisfied when it encounters equal misery. You are too slow, too lazy, too selfish, it chanted endlessly. Kill me, my mother demanded. With a daughter like you, who can’t be prevailed on to help her poor mother, I might as well be dead.
Sometimes, ammunition spent, she would throw up her hands and stare at me for a long time, turning over in her mind the inconceivable notion of a daughter who did not—or refused to—understand her destiny.
Small things that dug into my insides and stayed there, inextricable and lost. If anyone challenges the evidence against my mother—words, actions, incidents—I have only invisible scars to show. Yet what is more abstract than the ties between parents and children?
The great tragedy of our relationship was that we were exact opposites. She was meticulous and outspoken, while I struggled to become indifferent and withdrawn. She pursued her problems like a predator, while I kept things close to my chest.
Parenthood for my mother was a lofty platform none of her children could ascend, from where she directed our lives. Formidable and unchallenged, she did not believe in affection, but instead reinforced our ties to her with guilt. All that I have done for you, she would say, and you don’t care. Frightened of her as a child, I carried that paralyzing fear into adulthood whenever I did something she would not approve of, as if I were still seven years old and had broken her favorite vase.
I felt this way when I married my first lover at 25, the soonest I could marry without parental consent. Her punishment was absolute; for two years she did not speak to me, and she bore her pain so intensely I was bound to appease her more than I had ever done as a child, when I hammered myself into the shape of the daughter she wanted: a proper sufferer, attentive to the needs of father and brothers, and most of all, to her own frustrations. Heartbreak, however, is more difficult to piece together than a shattered vase, or a broken promise, and I atoned for it the way I had always, only now I became the ideal wife, assuming what was both my mother’s lifelong burden.
For she had always accused me of a secret condescension towards her, proof of which was my distance, my reluctant acquiescence, my intelligence, every trait I owned that I had not inherited from her. I know you think I’m a bad mother, she would challenge me, and search my response carefully for some concealed edge upon which she could martyr herself. My solitude offended her, and made her suspicious. Why must you be so lonely, she asked. What sin have I committed that you want to grow away from me? This righteous self-flagellation was her most original quality—a bloodlust that hankered for more and more injury, until we were both drained and could bleed no more.
I wondered sometimes if she loved me. The thread of her patience, which loosened and lengthened itself for my brothers, was snipped short for me, and as a child I groped for its ends. Why doesn’t my mother look at me, I asked my dolls, crushing their heads in my palm.
She worried and fretted over the boys, over their appetites, their illnesses, even over their pleasures. Where is your brother, she often asked me, why hasn’t he come home yet?
Your brothers don’t want to spend their time with me anymore, she would say. I grimaced at the tears seeping from her eyes, and to quiet inside me, that heaving sea.
A few times my pain overwhelmed me. They don’t care about what you feel, I spat out. Why do you keep doting on them?
She looked away from me and out the window, scanning the night for any of my brothers. You don’t know what you’re talking about. When you have sons, you’ll understand.
