The Reader Travels

Speaking of cannibalism, some families tend to eat each other alive. Three books come to mind when I think about some of my extended family: Little Altars Everywhere and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells, and A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. Theirs are the types of secrets that make siblings scatter and look back at each other with anger and disgust.

But then it’s real food, not sibling-steak, that connects across physical and emotional miles. My grandmother’s funeral service was rushed, and the only personal words spoken were about her wonderful cooking. But then it was a topic that everyone could agree on, this love for good food and the sharing of kitchen knowledge.

After the funeral, one of my aunt’s friends asked about her favorite meals cooked by her mother — stewed chicken and crawfish etouffee were her answers. My aunt is more likely to buy me a good meal than to make it these days, but she knows good food and she knows how to cook it. One of the last meals she made for me was a delicious roast beef po-boy, its roots in her mother’s kitchen, its finesse learned from her daughter’s tour at culinary school. Nearing her husband’s retirement, she ponders moving to the condo in the city and selling the house in the suburbs, but she hasn’t figured out where she’ll put all her pots.

As brash as he is, my oldest uncle will light up when he talks about cooking. He visited a year ago, and stood in my mother’s kitchen describing the arduous, three-day process of making a good crawfish bisque. He’s a master of the crawfish boil and is not stingy with the knowledge. His son-in-law conducted his first crawfish boil last year, and it was a huge success.

My youngest uncle said to me last time I visited that he had cooked his father’s final meal, an omelette, something his mother had taught him to cook, just as she had taught my mother, who in turn taught me. I will make omelettes for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, doesn’t matter.

Although she did not teach me directly, I think of my grandmother every time I make spaghetti sauce. My mother used to cut her tomatoes in the can with a butter knife clicking against the tin. She told me her mother would always crush the tomatoes in her fingers to break them up, but she didn’t really like the squishy feeling, so she did it this way instead. I gently remove the bald tomatoes one-by-one from the can and stick my fingers into them. They shred with ease, leaving fleshy edges that feel good in the mouth. And as I feel the cool tomato juice in my fingers, I thank her for this gift of food.

Forget the rest.

I see her as the sailboat that was her namesake, her sails blown by the wind, toward the western horizon, toward the setting sun. For nearly twenty years, she’s been mostly silent, and I have missed her all this time.

For these long years, I have thought that God should have mercy and let her die, that perhaps this slow death was punishment for sins. But today, I believe that the stillness he granted her these last years was a mercy of its own, a mercy that stilled the pain of memory, that stilled the lashing tongue.

My grandmother inspired me to write. She said so many times, “You should write the family history, Ann Marie.” Her stories seemed more a soap opera than things that would happen in real life. But when I finally reached an age where I was ready to write the stories, she was no longer able to tell them. Her history became a fiction, but I’m alright with that. As objective as the historian tries to be, the truth is colored by his opinions and perceptions, and fiction taints fact the moment he takes pen to paper.

So my memory of her remains incomplete and bittersweet. I see her as that sailboat, and as the magnolia tree, chopped down, but living still, all these years. Goodbye, Grandma.