stacked cans, and the stacked cans towered over the jars that sometimes lay on their sides.
One at a time, she blindfolded us with a dish towel, spun us around a few revolutions, and then set us in front of the shelves. With blind outstretched hands, each of us in turn surveyed the shelves and from behind came the shouts, “Cold! Cold! Lukewarm! Okay, Warmer! Warm! Hot! Hot! You’re burning!” of the siblings, trying to guide each other to something good.
Whatever we blindly landed on, that was our dessert. It was a game of roulette. You could have a can of cling peaches or escargots, equally. If you picked the wrong package—Trenton Oyster Crackers—tough shit. The older kids were better at this than me, obviously, rehearsing the layout of the pantry shelves ahead of time, peeking out from under the blindfold.
Our sweets were mostly of the “natural” kind: a piece of fruit, yogurt mixed with jam, sliced bread with butter and granulated sugar, the occasional little square of good chocolate. And our school lunches were just plain embarrassing: leftover ratatouille, a wedge of Morbier cheese, a bruised pear. We were given one piece of Saran Wrap for the week, to be reused and brought home each day, washed and left to dry in the dish rack over the back of an upturned ladle or wooden spoon, ready to wrap our lunch in the next day. My mother turned soured milk into buttermilk with the help of a tablespoon of cider vinegar, and then it went in the blender with strawberries for our breakfast. Stale heels of bread became bread crumbs, made by grating on the toothy holes of a box grater and then kept in the freezer. Mold was cut away until the creamy tender edible part of whatever thing was revealed.
Now without her, but left with the strange contents of her pantry, which my father had not cleaned out—the way a griever won’t empty the clothes closet of the deceased spouse? Or the way of a man who has not had to do any cleaning his whole married life?—I relied on what I had seen her do and improvised from there. I ate tinned white asparagus with capers and some of their juice and olive oil and parsley from the garden. I ate canned sardines and chewed through the spines and the silvery unpleasant skin until I finally realized how to skin and filet them gently with a paring knife, placing the meaty bodies on horribly stale Triscuit crackers with sliced shallots and mayonnaise. I washed lettuce from the garden in warm water so my hands wouldn’t get cold and watched it wilt but ate it anyway. I added Dijon mustard to milk and tried to make a pan sauce that curdled but I still ate it, poured over rubbery cold-and-raw-in-the-center chicken breasts which I had placed, still completely frozen, into the pan, reasoning that this would all just take a little longer to cook. When we ran out of Dijon mustard and olive oil, I used tomato paste in my salad dressing, and raspberry jam, and once even some chicken broth.
As my mother had shown me, I picked the Japanese beetles off the bean plants in the garden and dropped them into a mason jar of gasoline and harvested the lettuce from outside of the core so that it would regrow and continue to yield. I climbed into raspberry bushes and picked the fruit, getting stained, stung, and ripped apart in the doing. Our abandoned garden produced all summer, in spite of my inexperience, and I ate whatever it offered. I learned to cook a lot of different vegetables the way my schoolmates learned to put together a PB and J.
I finally got another job, where I managed to make my home for a few years working summers and after school and during holidays, at a restaurant on the main drag called, ironically, Mother’s. There I grew into a teenager and a beginning cook and even worked as a waitress and bartender for a stint when I dropped out of college. I started by helping in the retail bakery, cutting and rewrapping the two full cases of cakes for which the restaurant was rightfully well-known. They made everything from scratch in the bakery upstairs and produced gorgeous tall cakes that drew in thousands of customers who planned their meal around saving room for one of the twenty buttercream castles on display in the gleaming refrigerated case near where you