Sometimes, learning to cook is the best thing a child can do
In our house, the first smell of Thanksgiving was not turkey roasting or pumpkin pie but the bleach-sweet steam of my mother ironing the good tablecloth. I remember it from a time when I was small enough to creep unnoticed beneath the ironing board while she painstakingly transformed an undistinguished hump of wrinkled linen into a curtain of shimmering white. With a curt flick of her wrist, my mother sprinkled each length with water from a yellow, plastic bottle designed for this purpose, and then the iron would sizzle a path just above my head. Soon I was surrounded by a linen tent. The smell sparkled like hot stars.
So my Thanksgiving apprenticeship began.
Discovered, I was set to work folding the napkins, the first task allotted to small children wanting to be holiday helpers. The next year, I was allowed to place them beside each plate. My eyes were not that much higher than the table's surface and it seemed the most glamorous thing I had ever seen, a snowy landscape forested by crystal trees, glittering with silver and dishes of every size.
It took me half my life to realize that when Guadalupe Contreras
says “Gadaymee”, she means to say, “Goddamn it”. I thought for years
that she had been referring to my sister, whose name is Amy, with a
level of stifled frustration that I found hard to account for. I told a
Spanish-speaking friend about this misunderstanding a while back, and
he in turn informed me that my Spanish pronunciation of “I’m scared”
(tengo miedo) sounds a lot like “I have shit” (tengo mierda). I relayed
this conversation to Lupe. She claimed to disagree.
Last fall, a neighbor of mine called to say he had a small Guernsey
cow, which wasn’t producing enough milk to keep her spot in his herd.
Since she was already bred, he hated to send her to slaughter, so he
said he’d give her to us.
The only time my dad came in the kitchen was to ask when dinner was
ready. True to his generation he literally couldn't boil water. My
mother and grandmother taught me to cook.
We had friends to dinner the other night, a nice little party with flowers and wine and Josie upstairs. These days I like making it nice but not stiff, special without fuss – but just a few years back it was all fuss all the time – to a newly minted chef girl, married girl, grown-up girl, hosting meant acrobatic recipes, exotic combinations, an absurdly high drive to please.