What Family Taught Me
Kicking the family dog down the wooden cellar steps is okay and expected when the peach pie doesn’t come out right.
One of the most important things is to be dressed properly for church on Sunday morning. You must be clean, and your hair must be combed and clamped away from your face with a ribbon or barrette. Preferably, you should match your sisters, all wearing custom-designed, hand-tailored dresses and coats, courtesy of your mother or grandmother. The fabrics should be comparable, though different colors are allowed, except on Christmas when red velvet and white satin are called for.
Refuse, always refuse a gift at least three times before moving to a position of acceptance, and then only with profuse thanks. This principle holds true under all situations, even those threatened by an impatient giver who may only offer twice, and then walk away, gift in hand, which happens and must be accepted, although it is bitter, especially when the gift is a precious Minnie Mouse sweatshirt offered to you following a neighbor’s return from a three week stay in Disney World where the family had been delighting in whirly rides and roller coasters while you were home feeding their cat and raking the shit from its litter box.
Spiders and other crawlers are playful and fascinating; nothing to be squeamish about. Your mother plucks a Daddy Long Legs from its web and holds it firmly between forefinger and thumb: Look what happens when you yank out one of its legs…see?
There is a solution to every plumbing problem. Even if it demands inventing a system in which a bucket, strapped to an overhead leaking furnace pipe by a strand of clothesline, fills and dumps into another bucket and that in turn into another, then into a funnel connected to a pipe balanced on blocks of 2x3’s scaled down to ever decreasing heights so that the slope is just right (or close enough) to get the dripping liquid from up there to down below, into the floor drain.
Always use rosemary on a roasting chicken. Sage on braised rabbit. Nutmeg on pork loin.
When nails are sorted in clear glass jars, hammers hung on a pegboard, and saws organized by type and size, it makes building a doghouse a whole lot easier. No need to purchase plywood; the new house under construction next door offers an abundance. Sundays after dusk are best for the taking. The wooden sheets are stored behind the fagged Pinto in the garage and must be removed one at a time, and only as needed.
Sunday football games are enjoyed picture only, sound provided by Bing or Frank crooning from a square transistor radio in your grandparents’ living room. Although bodies are angled facing the TV console, the game is rarely considered, rather a discussion unfolds on the weekly neighborhood highlights, such as Tillie’s fickle gallstones and Mr. Glorioso’s mishaps with his self-propelling wheelchair.
When a nun lies, simply agree and smile graciously. Especially if she is Sister Helen Charles, your first grade teacher, who regularly insists What a happy student! you are, though everyone is clear this is not the case, and certainly not now as you cower before the black-robed woman, your mother at your side. Sister often effuses false warmth for you when speaking to your mother (who nods, affirming the untruth), all the while absently tickling the beetle-sized mole sprouting center chin, just below her lower lip, with her tongue.
The best stews and sauces require patience and love, take an entire day to prepare, and must be sampled by dipping in a piece of dry, crusty bread. Trippa is the most aromatic and saucy. A delicate meal of moist stomach lining, it is relished by women and denounced by men, who find its feisty consumption barbaric.
Beautiful skin comes from not wearing makeup. Natural is always best, with the noted exception of Max Factor’s fiery Crushed Rose lipstick. "You smooth it on and suddenly love is just a kiss away," the ad promises. Applying Crushed Rose begins with swiveling the gold tube one turn clockwise to push out the color. Gloss the upper lip by touching the lip’s center and smoothing left, touching center again and smoothing right. The bottom lip takes a single, broad left-right-left swipe. A press of Kleenex blots the shine. The lips close tight then open.
Spending money on nice cars, hotels with stars, or dinners in restaurants is a sinful waste. Get something with four wheels that runs. When traveling, EconoLodge will do. And always bring the portable propane stove into the motel to cook canned peas and ground beef for dinner.
Few things in a kitchen are more dangerous than a pressure cooker, especially when it is in the hands of a mother who is menopausal and disheartened, and after carrying the pot to the sink to run the cold tap over the lid, removes the little round pressure stop instead, blasting the pot apart and spewing chicken, boiled carrot, and scalding broth everywhere. She snatches the car keys, slams the garage door, and speeds off in her broth-soaked robe and slippers while your father cleans up the mess, sponging the cherry wood and Formica with a vinegar and water solution, his face sober, his body low along the sticky floor, his arms stretching under cabinets, his voice hushed but for the occasional “Nah!” when a hidden soup scrap shriveled brown and exploded months before, is exposed.
Always cover the sofa when children visit, even if they are three exceptionally well-behaved—angelic, even—granddaughters.
To finish a cabinet takes time. Watch the detail. It’s not complete until it’s been sanded and painted. Always apply three scant layerings of color, never one fat, squishy one. Being careless puts you on probation and demotes you from painter to cleaner, responsible for swishing coated brushes in empty Maxwell House cans filled with fuming turpentine.
It’s okay for parents to rifle through a daughter’s drawers and cabinets to uncover her intimate life, because they must know, and if she doesn’t confide in them, how else will they find out? And when her journal—a black hardbound with PRIVATE stenciled in red across the cover and wrapped twice around with thick rubber band—is, upon arrival at summer camp, unpacked from her duffel, her mother taps it and says, You don’t want this lying around where anyone can pick it up, do you? Let me take it back with me... I’ll put it in your room. The daughter hands it over, her faith as pure as the innocuous entries in the book; it’s not until her parents’ car disappears beyond the trees that there is a sinking Oh!
Pigeon (squab) are best when taken directly from the nest, while their meat is still tender. Hold the body with one hand, and with the other pinch the windpipe closed. After a few brief spasms, the bird will go limp. Dip it in boiling water to release the feathers. Slice into the gut, remove the tiny intestine and even tinier heart, sever the head, wash thoroughly, then sauté with garlic and herbs. Serve with fresh greens and a house pressed Merlot.
When your father’s head is lowered with its chin nearly touching the upper chest and the grey-blue eyes stare their disapproving, how-could-you? stare: You are in trouble. It’s best to zip yourself up and disappear—an easy escape since your father will deny your existence anyway for a day or more, depending on the crime. There will be no discussion or defense of your innocence, just a grim spanking if God doesn’t spare you, then the wait until you are visible again.
In tackling a huge leaf-raking job, mentally mark off a square, about 8 by 8 feet, then rake in from the sides. Once the crunchy golden leaves are mounded in the middle, bag the goods. Be precise, but hurry. The wind can suddenly rage, and if it begins to rain, you will be at it all night.
When visiting the cemetery it is only the women who cry, and they do this profusely, so much in fact that the men feel compelled to support them—by squeezing their left elbow—as they convulse in grief. A trip to the cemetery means a woman has the right to insist on fresh flowers each time she goes, even if they cost almost ten dollars.
If you excel in math, then that’s what you will do, not music, not writing, but mathematics, because how many girls are actually good in math? You will have a stable job with good pay, you have a future ahead of you, because you are pretty, because you can work with numbers, because you can think like a man.
When strapping on a ball-bearing metal roller skate, place your shoed foot under the top strap first, tighten the leather and then belt the second strap around the ankle, leaving enough room (about a finger’s worth) for movement when making the forbidden 360 degree swings around the post in the garage. Continue to spin, hands on the post, arms taut, and tipsy with dare, release a shrieking “aaahhhhh!” Then skate away, quick.
Chicken necks are the best bait for Maryland blue crabs. Large minnows skewered just beyond the eyes will bring in the flounder. When out alone in a boat, keep one eye on the gas gauge, another on the trajectory of the sun, and always follow the shoreline. This way if the refurbished engine dies, you’ll have a chance of making it to land, assuming you first slip out of your sneakers and pants and remember your best crawl stroke and never once think about the eels snake-swimming along with you.
Being a Little Helper makes you special and offers privileges that your two sisters can’t take from you, like scraping lumps of steaming, pulped grass from the underside of the Toro lawnmower.
When a daughter screams of nighttime terrors huffing in the closet, a mother’s solution is to not discuss the fear, but rather blanket the bedroom’s walls in sunshine yellow and paint overtop a cheerful girl in a white-pearled blouse and hooped skirt surrounded by ducklings and daisies and a gentleman suitor lifting his hat. She kisses your forehead and gushes over the mural, knowing all the while that you find no comfort in fairy tales, no, that you would have preferred a scene of jungle greens with gangling monkeys swinging free.
The arrival of the Avon Lady delights everyone, especially German grandmothers, who although they wear no makeup, welcome the A-Lady into their living room for tea and biscuits, scour the pink catalogue, and pose questions with an unusually chipper interest. Grandmothers buy nearly one of every perfumed cream and then gift them to their granddaughters who detest the sickly floral scents but accept them anyway, collecting an obscene number of the little round glass pots with intricate, sculptured lids.
When shopping for produce in Pantry Pride, only fools pay the stated price. A woman must bargain, com’ è in Italia, with anyone wearing the store’s emblemed green apron, even a pimpled sixteen-year-old unpacking vegetables from crates. You want ten cents for this lettuce? Look at these wilted leaves! I give you five cents for it, no more.
At age ten, preparation for a heated game of gin rummy with your grandfather requires a chilled Michelob shared between the two of you, sipped from small, bulbous glasses once containing Smucker’s marmalade.
A father pulls into the driveway at 5:55 p.m. every workday, Monday through Friday, year-round, regardless of hailstorms, hurricanes, or a desperate lunchtime phone call from his housebound wife screaming that she is done. With it. Forever.
On a July day in Baltimore, Heaven is a crimson peach from Sewell’s Orchard, bit into unwashed and thickly fuzzed, with its floppy green leaf still on the stem.
The clear liquid drip-dripping into a glass jar from the copper coil contraption in the corner of the basement behind the grape crusher is not to be spoken of to anyone, not even best girlfriends, because The Men will come and take Poppi away.
In hemming a skirt, use a single strand of thread—poly-covered cotton is best—knotted at a length no longer than fourteen inches and matching the skirt’s hue. Pierce the fabric, delicately grabbing the finest weave possible to avoid puckering, and work toward you with small loopy stitches, as if suturing a wound.
Every American family must drive across country (ocean to ocean and back) at least once. The station wagon is set up with the suitcases fastened to the roof and the two rear seats folded down flat and covered in foam, giving you and your sisters room to sprawl and sleep away the deadly tedium of the journey…until your mother spies moose antlers roadside in Montana. Then the bed is discarded, the seats returned upright, and the luggage moved inside to accommodate, rooftop, the seven-foot souvenir.
When a woman trying to quit smoking is driving a dented Valiant without air conditioning in sweltering city heat and is cut off by a cabbie puffing a cigarette, any hollered profanity will do, although cocksucker is the preferred choice.
There is a magic that sometimes befalls mothers while in the kitchen. It happens only when fathers are not around to see and begins with a sudden stillness, followed by sighing and wiping at tears. A canzone hums heavily from her lips. She removes her apron, lifts her arms into the emptiness before her, an imaginary embrace, and begins a sashay across the room, 1-2-3 1-2-3, singing louder as she twirls faster, her head high and back, her lips smiling straight ahead. Sometimes she notices you crouched against the doorjamb and calls, Come. Dance with me. But you shake your head no, because she is too good, your body could never do that, and besides you just want to watch, because soon the enchantment will break, and you must hold this image, this seldom, astonishing image of your mother, beautiful, shining.