The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [26]
She is carrying a bright blue plastic bag.
“What’s in the bag?” he asks.
She opens it; he looks inside. A jar of capers, the size of the ones they’d eaten at Valerie’s (so she’d been taken by them, too); two cellophane envelopes, one of beans of various colors, one he can’t identify. He asks her what the grain is called.
“Farro,” she says, “a kind of barley. It’s hard to find in America, but very common here.”
“What will you do with it?”
“Eventually, when I take it home, I’ll make a soup. With it and with these lovely beans. Look, Adam, the stripy red and white, the ruby colored, then the black and among them all the ordinary bright green peas. Aren’t they wonderful?”
“You’ll make a soup? You?”
“Yes. You might be surprised to know I cook and garden.”
“Well, I am surprised. You who were so hostile to domestic life. My mother understood that; she said you should never learn to cook, you didn’t enjoy it, it would become a tyranny. You would ask her to teach you and she would say, ‘No, just talk to me, tell me something interesting, something I need to know.’ She said she cooked because she loved it, so it would never be a tyranny for her, it was a friendship. But for you … she didn’t want you to be enslaved to it, like so many women were. But then, you know, after she went back to school, particularly when she started law school, she just sort of stopped. She’d cook for special occasions, but then she’d say, ‘There are just so many things I’m more interested in.’ The secret of my mother was that she really didn’t do things unless she wanted to do them. Of course there were a lot of things she really wanted to do, that she enjoyed doing. That was why she always made people around her feel so free.”
“Your mother went to law school?”
“Yes. My mother had a life as a lawyer for a happy twenty years. She took the bar when she was fifty. She worked with a group of lawyers who did domestic law. She was terrific with women who’d been abused, who were afraid of their husbands.”
“What did she know of that? If ever there was a woman who wasn’t afraid of her husband …”
“But somehow she understood being afraid … even though I think for my mother the world was essentially a kind of joke, sometimes a good joke, sometimes a bad one, sometimes a cruel one, sometimes an enjoyable one. But there seemed to be a very great deal she understood.”
“And when she stopped cooking, you weren’t angry?”
“I wasn’t living in the house. It was Jo and my father who paid the price. Only, they didn’t seem to be paying anything. Somehow they both learned to cook well enough, and they did it together, and they enjoyed that. It wasn’t fabulous, like when my mother did it, but it was, somehow, fine. And then on holidays my mother would produce, well, masterpieces.”
What he doesn’t say: that Beverly hated the holidays. She made fun of all the food, saying, “ ‘Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ is Rose in action.” She’d go home and vomit in the bathroom and then say she had to stay in bed for days: she’d been poisoned.
“But you, Miranda, how did you come to it? Cooking, I mean.”
“I somehow started reading cookbooks. It could only happen when I stopped being afraid of turning into my mother.”
“Your mother was very kind to me. Do you remember, when I got mono and my mother was back in school, your mother would come over during the day and bring me the kind of food my mother never would have made me: Jell-O with real cherries in it, custards, very light foods that were exactly what I needed. And she was good about us, Miranda. She might not have been. The time she caught us in your bed. She might have made us feel terrible about it. But she just closed the door and never said anything.”
“No, she never mentioned it. Not a word. Not even to me. Never. And you see, that was a kind of agony for me. Because I never knew what she was thinking, or when