What's Cooking, Mom? by Florence Pasche Guignard

Author:Florence Pasche Guignard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Demeter Press
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

9.

My Mother Did Not Cook

DOMINIQUE O’NEILL

MY MOTHER DID NOT KNOW HOW TO COOK and she refused to learn. We lived in France, and when she was a girl, before the Second World War, her family had had servants. The war took them away, along with her family’s wealth, and my mother never forgave the world for having robbed her of their services. They were her due.

She didn’t burn water—she just forgot it until it evaporated while she stood by the stove lost in a book, then burned her hand removing the pan from the flame and cried. Milk boiled over and canned food stuck to the bottom of the pan and turned black.

Children know from a very young age what mothers are supposed to be and do, and if theirs meets expectations. Mine did not meet any: she worked and was shamefully divorced at a time when respectable women, even battered ones like her, stayed married and at home. Strange men came and waited by our door to see if she would receive them. That she never did could not redeem her reputation. She was excommunicated, said the priests, and neither she nor her children would gain entry into Heaven, no matter how virtuously they lived. We had to lie and say that our father was dead to even be allowed to go to Catholic school.

Walking home alone from my convent school, I used to try to catch glimpses of women at traditional tasks: sweeping their stoop while awaiting their own children, dusting their front room, or weeding their flowerbeds. A latchkey kid, I envied children whose mothers stayed at home, often invisibly—their presence and activity only betrayed by the smell of cooking wafting from their kitchens. I used to dream of a mother who had no face but wore an apron. The father figure carried a briefcase, but he was just an absence anyway.

My mother was an artist, with a Beaux-Arts diploma from a large city, which made her even more suspect to the small burg in which we lived, and its even smaller-minded burghers. She painted landscapes in oils on Sunday, always in order to sell them for extra cash or to barter with the butcher. Since oils are slow to dry, and her easel was set up in the middle of our small kitchen while she painted, and stashed in the bathroom between the shower and sink afterward, if I walked too close, I would collect slashes of brown, green, or blue, on the skirt and sleeves of my white and navy schoolgirl uniform. They were symbolic of my mother’s “misfitedness”—they branded and shamed me—but I wore them with a silent stoicism worthy of a Saint Sebastian painting. I would not explain, even when other girls made remarks about them.

After we ran away from my father’s house, she worked at whatever jobs she could find: delivering flyers on her bicycle and selling cheese at the market, teaching art and English in exchange for our keep as semi-boarders at the Catholic school.

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