The intersection of food, love, and memory
If it wasn't frozen, processed, or
heavily laced with sugar, my grandmother didn't cook
it. I have her old recipe box, which includes many
selections from the "Kitchen of Duncan Hines," as
well as things like Pow-Wow Sandwiches, English Liver
Bake, and salad molds, recipes that are products of
the sixties and seventies. My grandfather made the
box, designed it to hang between the refrigerator and
the stove in the kitchen at Hollywood Beach. We use
it to hold keys now. One of the first things I do
when I move to a new place is to hang it by the front
door, a reminder of a past so long gone that it feels
like fiction. I may look through the recipes, but I
never feel an urge to actually make any of them.
When the corn and
tomatoes are at their peak, however, and I steam a
dozen ears to eat for dinner alongside a salad of
freshly-picked tomatoes, I feel a tug on the line
that connects me to those long-ago meals. Corn on the
cob with butter sits at the intersection of food,
love, and memory for me. It has the power to bring me
back to a time before I was born, to Hollywood Beach
in the late fifties and early sixties when my mother
and aunt were still children, before my grandfather
was injured in an
industrial fire. On late July and early August
evenings when my grandfather was working late at
the plant, Mom-mom could be persuaded to abandon
the freezer and let the canned food gather dust in
the cupboard. She would prepare farmstand corn and
sliced tomatoes for dinner, maybe add some sliced
bread on the side. Perhaps she was feeling as lazy
as Ludlam's
dog,
unwilling to turn on the oven or chop loads of
vegetables, happy with simplicity.
It's the only meal she made that my mother and I
still talk about. When I was a kid, my cousin and I
were given weekend corn shucking duty, sent outside
with paper bags to do the messy work of removing the
husks and cornsilk. We would sit on the white-washed
metal lawn chairs out front under a canopy of maple
leaves, kick our heels against the grass. After
passing the naked corn to my aunt through the side
door, we would wait for the moment at the table when
we could smear the cooked kernels with squeezable
Parkay. I was fascinated by the prongs, shaped like
tiny ears of corn, that Mom-mom stuck into either end
of the cob, and studied them between bites, felt the
neat rows of miniature kernels like braille against
my fingertips. We ate until we are too full for
anything else but a thin slice of tomato.
You probably have summer food memories of your own,
can bring back an evening lit by fireflies, your lips
stained purple by blueberry cake. Your parents didn't
care how late you stayed up and you got to light a
sparkler even though the fourth of July had been over
for days. Or maybe you remember your mother, already
unsteady on her feet, placing a platter of swaying
Jello on the picnic table. You swirled the first bite
against your gums, pushed it between your teeth
before swallowing and then refused to eat any more.
After dinner you and your brother played tag in the
dark while the grown-ups drank bourbon on ice and
talked in voices too low for you to understand. When
you slipped in a pile of dog shit, they laughed until
you started to cry.
Image: Recipe from my grandmother's
collection.
Marked by heavy hands

This is the sensory soup of
childhood. It is a mix of family and location, of bad
luck and lucky streaks. We continue the pattern with
our own children, begin the silent lessons, mark them
with heavy hands: this is who you are, who we are.
Whenever my son smells oatmeal pancakes or plucks a
plump blueberry from a glass bowl, the past will
live. "You Are My Sunshine" will conjure up a
darkened room, my soothing cuddle against impertinent
wakefulness. He may spend years in therapy trying to
get my voice out of his head, only to find that same
voice coming out of his mouth in middle adulthood.
I can only hope that his experience is as painless as
growing up can be. Sometimes my best won’t be good
enough.
I remember being seven, lying on that flowered couch
in my grandparents’ family room, my hand sunk into a
plastic bag full of cherries. Cold from the
manufactured air, goose-pimpled, I clutched a pillow
for warmth. The television, which was as much a piece
of furniture as an entertainment device, was showing
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat.
That night I would have another asthma attack,
whether it was because of mildew, cat hair, cigarette
smoke, or my own melodramatic emotions is up for
debate.
Image: Me and my grandmother, Hollywood
Beach, 1973.
Baby, stick around
Thanks to washwords, Koe Whitton-Williams, tricia, Dori, Karen, Bobby Revell, Jennifer D., Melinda, Lorenzo, Candy, Ashe.Selah, lydia, timethief, SmallWorldReads, John Folk-Williams, and Jim for your encouraging words and comments. Your support makes the difference.
Here's a bit of writing inspired by the prompt "Alright, fine. Let's hear your explanation." Well, inspired by that and by reading my grandmother's burn notebooks, written during my grandfather's long hospitalization, where her anger over his vices and infidelities comes through, clear and Mercurochrome-bitter. I couldn't bring myself to change the names; they are too good to be fictional.

I just went to the track to look at the horses, to watch them ripple around the oval, to see their hooves beat the dust into red clouds. But once I got there, the action sucked me in. Before I knew what my feet were doing, I was standing in front of Les’s booth to place my bets. The air was heavy with money and I was feeling lucky. I’d win enough to pay off the rest of Atlee’s mortgage or maybe just enough to buy a smooth fifth of whiskey. Or even score a downpayment on a new washing machine for you, Vi.
Then I ran into Williard, who had a full flask and offered me a swig or three. Maybe the alcohol clouded my judgment. Maybe I couldn't see what an amateur that jockey was, but I think the race was rigged, that somebody paid him out to fall off the horse. Or maybe they slipped the little guy a Mickey, I don’t know. The end result is that I lost. The flask made a few more visits to my lips and I didn’t feel like going home just yet anyways.
You and the girls were at the cottage and I was planning on sleeping at the empty Tuxedo Park house, but then I remembered Molly. Molly with the blonde hair and long legs, Molly from the Tip Top Club in Salem, a nice easy-going girl. The Mustang knew the way from the track to the bar. It’s no coincidence that they call that car a Mustang. It has all the bucking power and smarts of a horse. It knows where to find the watering holes, knows the trail back home, too.
After I left the Tip Top, I was exhausted, so I took a snooze in my ride. That’s where I was last night, sleeping in the Mustang.
You can ask Molly if you don't believe me.
The burn notebooks
Part of the front page of the notebooks my
grandmother kept after my grandfather was
burned.
After my grandfather was burned
over 80% of his body
in a flash fire at the Dupont Holly Run paint
plant, my grandmother started keeping a diary. I
have the copies, four small looseleaf notebooks
with her remarks on his hospitalization, dating
from the accident on 11 June 1966 until his
release from the hospital on 24 February 1967.
There are tallies of blood transfusions (38 pints
of blood between June and December), of skin
grafts (26; the last one is on 22 December, with
the note "last - if all take"). I'd missed the
fact that he actually had four operations on his
right foot before they finally amputated it (28
September: "Little toe came off in dressing.").
It's slow going. Mom-mom's handwriting is hard to
read and the first six months are a roller-coaster
ride of medical emergencies, infections, and mourning
for what was lost. Doctors gave him a 50-50 chance of
making it. No one knew that the fire wouldn't kill
him for another 24 years, when he finally succumbed
to skin cancer at the age of 78. The "girls" -- my
aunt, 20 at the time, and my mother, 16 -- don't get
much mention. What it was like for them? I may ask my
mother, but don't expect to get very much information
and it might not be necessary for my purposes.
I'd love to talk to my grandmother about that time
for her, too, though the notebooks conjure her up.
Ultimately, though, I'm looking at these books to get
a better understanding of my grandfather, who went
from being an active man in his fifties who loved
jazz and waterskiing and driving fast in his '65
Mustang to a dependent, almost-deaf burn victim. He
didn't get behind the wheel of a car again until
1981.
During his hospitalization, he suffered, really
suffered. Being burned is painful, but so is the
treatment, borrowing healthy skin to graft onto
exposed flesh, having your raw body immersed in a
whirlpool once or twice a day. Even the necessary
turning ("Dressings wet. Al begged not to be
turned."), which probably happened at least four
times a day, sounds like a horror. And then there is
the debridement, the sloughing off of dead skin and
muscle that had to be done on a regular basis. Things
surely have gotten better for burn victims since the
60s, but there is no getting around the pain. It's no
wonder that my grandfather was scared of his hospital
bed in those first six months. It must have seemed
like a torture chamber.
Pop-pop and Greta in 1978, 12 years after the
industrial accident.
Pop-pop suffered and hovered close to death, lost his
hearing and a foot. His once-smooth skin tightened
and scarred. Then he got out of the hospital, had a
home nurse for another nine months, and went back to
work (a desk job this time). He retired and taught
himself how to build furniture and make
Canada
goose and mallard whirligigs
to sell at
Nickerson's Fruit and Vegetable Stand. He built
the Little House and put a new wood shop on the
beach cottage, as well as a new family room. His
interest in model trains intensified and the old
wood shop became the setting for a huge train set
with two separate tracks, a couple of tunnels, and
a tree-covered mountain range. It was the kind of
thing that neighborhood kids and grown-ups would
come over to admire, though he would always remind
me that these small trains weren't toys.
I'm working on a piece that is about him, but not
quite about him, fiction informed by imagined
experience. I want to figure out what was forged by
flame.
Writing prompt: Its dark and secret heart
Mom-mom,
1934.
My obsession with ghosts started in the sixth grade,
though it had its roots in my grandmother’s death two
years earlier. We were in the kitchen, putting
groceries away when she suddenly clutched at her
throat and started gasping for air, frantically
motioning to the kitchen chair. I stood there,
confused, scared. Finally, I moved the cat, and
Mom-mom collapsed into the empty space.
It was up to me to dial 911. We waited 40 minutes for
the ambulance to come all the way from Elkton. She
was dead or close to it by the time it arrived.
Congestive heart failure. In a couple of weeks, my
mother, her boyfriend, and I moved in with my
grandfather and tried to cope with her absence and
our new living situation.
I’m not sure where the Ouija board
came from. Maybe it was a Christmas present. I
started carrying it around with me, taking it to
school, begging my friends to help me contact my
grandmother. They went along with it and I believed
everything. Mom-mom had a friend named Sam up there
in heaven. Everything was all right, and she was
watching over me.

My mother took the death chair out of the kitchen,
eventually storing it in the attic space over the
garage. I was into sleeping in tight spaces, under
picnic tables, in tiny tents I set up in the
backyard. One night I convinced my best friend to
spend the night in the attic with the chair. The
space was hot and smelled of cut wood and roofing
tar. I kept staring at the empty chair, waiting for
my grandmother to appear.
Over the years, through neglect and hard times, I
kept on waiting. When, as a teenager, I moved to the
Little House adjacent to my grandfather’s place and
felt totally alone, I wished for a sign of her
presence, a sign that someone was watching over me.
Now I know that such hopes are false.
It's not easy being green
Elk River, Winter of 1977-78
The year before, my mother had decided to go back to college. In order to save money, she moved in with Jim, her future former husband, while I went to my grandparents’ house in Maryland. It was a year scented by cigarette smoke and coffee fumes. Mornings were my favorite time of day, sitting in the warm kitchen, a tray of food prepared for me by my grandmother, usually Eggo waffles dabbed with Parkay squeezable margarine and dripping with Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup, cartoon-character shot glass of orange juice on the side. That winter the snow kept coming. It piled up and formed five-foot drifts in the driveway, places to dig out forts and make snowmen. Snuggling in my grandmother’s bed as we listened to the radio school closing announcements became an almost-regular ritual.
Mom scored a one-bedroom apartment in student family housing in the summer of ’78 and I moved back in with her. She took the couch in the living room while I slept on a full-size mattress on the floor in the bedroom, a wooden orange crate for a bedside table topped with a flowery ceramic lamp, a clock radio, and an “I Love You This Much” figurine -- a robed, potbellied man, arms outstretched – that she had given to me in first grade.
1978-79 was the first year of
court-mandated school desegregation for the
Wilmington city schools. We were bused 34 miles
roundtrip from suburban Newark, a predominantly
white, middle class community at the time, to an
elementary school in the middle of the inner city. It
was the fourth school I had attended since
kindergarten.
The dark, institutional halls smelled of ancient
gymnasium mats and cafeteria pizza. Because I didn’t
like sandwiches, Mom would pack things like crackers
and cheese or the occasional hard-boiled egg, cooked
until it was sulfurous and the exterior of the yolk
was green. I’d display the egg to my friends and toss
in the trash can to a chorus of ewwwws.
After lunch, students were herded over crumbling
asphalt to play outside on ancient metal jungle gyms
and rusty swings. Murals with selected scenes of
black history covered the exterior walls. At night
the surrounding neighborhood leaked into the
schoolyard; people left behind their bottle caps and
broken glass, empty lighters and plastic bags. The
atmosphere became more unwelcoming when I acquired
the nickname “Kermit,” a name given after I came to
school in a kelly green, polyester, three-piece suit
(worn with white turtleneck!). Think Saturday Night
Fever meets Annie Hall meets the Muppets, a
well-meaning gift from my grandmother, who had become
accustomed to choosing my clothes.
The teachers weren’t happy either and went on strike
from mid-October through most of November. Much of
that time is lost to me. My third grade teacher
brought me back to Chesapeake City Elementary for a
day or two; I read a lot of books from the small
children’s section at the University of Delaware
library, spent many hours staring at the ceiling of
the Malt Shoppe. The ending of the strike coincides
in my mind with reports of the Jonestown massacre,
images of children lying on the ground beside their
parents, as still and peaceful as if they were
asleep.

April
1979
By early March, 1979, my grandmother was dead and
Mom, Jim, and I had moved back to Maryland to watch
over my grandfather.
Our grand experiment was over.
I slip into the night
My first memory of the house is from the summer of 1972. I am three, walking the 20 feet from the cottage to my grandparent’s place, planting my sturdy feet in thick grass and clover. I take off in a run when the ball of my right foot meets something small and sharp. It burns. I begin to cry. Someone – my aunt? my grandmother? – whisks me into the main house, probes tender flesh with pointed tweezers to remove the bee’s stinger. Afterwards, I lie on the family room sofa in cool air conditioning, injured foot propped on a pillow, a thick paste of soothing baking soda drawing out the pain. I watch cartoons, sucking on a straw to get at the last of Coca-Cola over ice.
That was over thirteen years ago. My grandmother has been dead since 1979 and the Little House is now my home. I spend my days waiting for darkness to fall. Bring on the night, I couldn’t stand another hour of daylight.
Inside the main house at 9:30 p.m. sharp, my grandfather takes out his hearing aids and removes his prosthetic foot, trapping himself in bed for another night of muffled sleep. Four houses down the street my mother, blinded by man and money troubles, sleeps in a cocoon of sadness. My father is sixty miles away, a prisoner of debilitating depression; his kindly wife is totally focused on his well-being. Unheard, unseen, and seemingly unimportant, I slip into the night or let the night slip into me.

This is where my power of
description seizes up.
Really, I’m on the road to forgiveness, and I don’t
want to rehash the past in angry diatribes here.
But – the inevitable but – I am in the midst of the
never-ending stillbirth story, attempting to write
about my time in the Little House, a companion piece
to my biological grandmother’s experiences and as I
try to get my mind around it I find myself asking:
WHAT IN THE HELL WERE MY PARENTS THINKING?
When reality broke through, when my pregnancy became
apparent and ended a month later in a stillbirth, in
dramatic labor occurring in the Little House, when it
became clear that I needed parenting, WHY DID NOTHING
CHANGE?
These are not new thoughts, but the underlying
feelings have changed. My anger before was mainly
self-directed, anger at my family turned inward: what
evil in me brought on their rejection? But now I am
reaching a different conclusion: my mother and father
had so little respect for themselves, for their power
as parents, that they gave up, figured I was fine on
my own, or maybe even assumed that they would only
make things worse. My mother stopped parenting; my
father never even started. They deserve my
compassion. It's no use getting angry at those who
don't see their own worth.
Now I have to work through the feelings, unpack the
meaning of the Little House, dense with suppressed
emotion, so much a part of who I am. I’ve left it
almost completely out of most other versions of the
stillbirth story because it feels like an emotional
bomb. As I try to get back into that time of
isolation, loneliness, self-hatred and anger, my
self-protection (or something) kicks in.
It is time to control the explosion through language,
to capture the shards of the experience on the page.
I'm scared. But if I don't go back, the experience
controls me.
The home of permanent in between
When my grandmother started to show, her parents sent her to the city. They dropped her off at the Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers. I imagine her emerging from the black car alone, tattered suitcase in hand, looking nervously up the set of granite steps. Inside, somnolent girls in the late, leaden months of pregnancy, inward, deliberate, walk slowly through the gray halls.
It is the home of permanent in between; the suppressed energy of smothered potential thickens the air. The girls, all going by pseudonyms, make very little small talk. In the nursery, rows of bundled babies silent as dolls wait, neatly packaged in individual bassinets. Once retrieved, the babies seek out their mothers’ faces, liquid newborn eyes encountering guarded glances. Both mother and child have learned not to waste energy on tears or outward displays of emotion. The bonding and the break are inevitable.
This is how I picture my mother’s birth: hazy trauma of labor, discovery delivered as flat fact – “it’s a girl.” They undo the straps, let the drugs wear off. Hours later, my biological grandmother holds her swaddled daughter, names her Lois. Lois is tiny – less than five pounds – too little to be released to her adoptive family. Over the next six weeks the pair are entangled in the monotony of new life, the seemingly endless cycle of feeding, diapering, and sleep. They calm to one another’s warm, familiar scent. Their gazes become intimate. Bone-deep.

When the six weeks are up, Aunt
Ruth, a go-between, my adoptive grandmother’s sister,
comes to take the baby. Waiting in the home's
entrance, the young mother frantically bounces her
silent infant, dreading the break. Finally, Aunt Ruth
appears, says her hello, and waits.
“It’s time.”
The mother hands over the baby. It is as clean as a
guillotine strike.
Before she has time to reconsider, she races inside
to the central staircase and runs up two flights of
stairs to her room. Her breathing is contained,
shallow, a precaution against tears. She’s been
trying to memorize every inch of her daughter, the
moon face framed by white-blonde hair, her blues
eyes, dainty toes and impossibly tiny hands, but
already the image is fading. She reaches her room and
slips inside, leans against the closed door taking
short, sharp breaths. A glass baby bottle sits on the
bedside table, a remnant from the final feeding. The
girl eyes it, finally reaching out. Then, the
satisfying sound of glass irrevocably broken, the
implied threat of jagged shards.
Taking several deep breaths, the young woman calms.
She begins to push the glass into a pile with her
shoe and decides to find a broom and dustpan.
There will be no tears.
The smog
Maybe it was the week of haze, the sun a bright disk behind clouds of diffuse smoke, the smell of fire hanging in the air. Or I could be homesick, tired of a landscape of bungalows, thirsty for brick and marble.
That's it. I want to go home. Not to DC (though I wouldn't mind just a taste of that city), but back to my grandparents' house in Hollywood Beach, before it was ruined by death, back to some sweet summer when my grandmother was alive.
We'd drink sugary Coca-Cola over ice, hang out in her freezing bedroom. She had a perpetual supply of Cheez-Its (it was a land of hyphenated foods, tasty concoctions of flavored chemicals with catchy, meaningless names), and I'd jam handfuls into my mouth while we watched The Price is RIght. Sometimes I would listen to the sound of her sewing machine humming along as she worked on another outfit or colorful muumuu.
After lunch, I would walk down to the river, step in the soft tar by the side of the road, sink into its soothing warmth. Somebody's grandparent was always sitting on one of the benches overlooking the beach, smoking a cigarette, keeping an eye on the young swimmers. With a running leap, I'd arc into the water, trying to avoid the muddy river bottom, several inches of sludge and leaves. I was heading for the raft or for water deep enough for an underwater handstand, ready to emerge with handfuls of muck and dirty fingernails. When a container ship came through the channel on its way to or from the C & D Canal, swimmers fought the pull of its engines and treaded water until the ship passed.
I'd swim until the skin on my fingers and toes wrinkled in protest, until I was covered in a thin film of mud, sometimes until I was shivering. Then it was time for the walk up the road, a towel wrapped around my waist, looking forward to farm-fresh corn on the cob and summer tomatoes.
Nostalgic memories are free of pain. They do come with an ache, however, a longing for simplicity. I'm sure it wasn't so simple, but my grandmother's house was a safe place, a place where I could be a kid. As I've been working on the stillbirth story again, I've been thinking of the dramatic event as the final nail in the coffin of childhood. That it happened in the one place where I had truly been able to be a child, where I was safe for a short time, seems especially sad to me. The happy memories will always be tinged with loss.
So maybe this funk has been a little burst of mourning, more grief experienced years after the fact. Let's hope that getting it out will allow me to let it go. I'm tired of the mental smog. I want to enjoy the sun, revel in the blue sky freed after a week behind smoke.
Missing person

The paneling tacked up against drywall, the damp concrete slab with its thin covering of plywood and carpet. The mildew, the cigarette smoke, the asthma attacks. Hollywood Beach, Christmas 1980.
In this photograph, from left to right: Jim, the unemployed soon-to-be stepfather, who spent his days lifting weights in the Upper Room; my grandfather, demanding, handicapped as the result of an industrial fire, who kept his candy in a cabinet by his porn; and me, a little freak 11-year-old who dragged a Ouija board everywhere and had séance parties, all in the hope of contacting my dead grandmother.
Mom was behind the camera. She commuted two hours round trip to work and came home every night to a hungry, demanding household. Once the plates were cleared, the complaints were served: the meal was too simple or too complicated. Had she gone too far this time, or held too much back? I listened and hated them, wanted to defend her honor. But I just sat there instead. This was not a happy time.
My grandmother collapsed suddenly one February afternoon in 1979. We were in the kitchen putting groceries away when she started breathing heavily. Unable to speak, she motioned in the direction of the sleeping cat on the kitchen chair. I was helpless. Finally she removed the cat herself, sat down, and closed her eyes. I called 9-1-1. The same volunteer fire department that whisked me off to Christiana Hospital six years later took her limp form away. They didn't tell me she was dead, but I knew.
The grief we were all smothering after her death came up in unpredictable ways. Just when we thought we had stamped it out, had ripped up the roots and crushed the last toxic leaf, we would discover another dank tendril wrapped around the front doorknob or emerging from the drain in the kitchen sink. It would not be denied. The only photographic evidence I have of her from my lifetime is a picture of the two of us. I'm playing on the floor, looking off at some distraction, away from the camera. She is a disembodied hand holding a cigarette.
It's been almost thirty years and I still miss her.





