Alex Witchel - All Gone: A Memoir of My Mothers Dementia. With Refreshments

Also by Alex Witchel

Girls Only

Me Times Three

The Spare Wife

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Copyright 2012 by Alex Witchel

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN 978-1-101-59699-9

The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the authors alone.

To Frank, Nat, and Simon,
with gratitude and love

Contents

One

T he meat loaf fooled me.

I should have known it would. Thats what a meat loaf is meant to do: make you believe the world is so forgiving a place that even an array of bits and pieces, all smashed up, can still find meaning as an eloquent whole. The duplicity is integral to the dish, if you make it well. And mine was perfect. Maybe not to you, or to someone else with opinions, someone named, say, Hungrydog4, who would tell you hes eaten plenty of meat loaf in his day and a meat loaf without ground pork is not a meat loaf at all. But when I made my mothers meat loaf for the first time, I could practically hear the garage door open, the car pull in. Mommy was home.

I used to watch her make the meat loaf. This was not a romantic endeavor. She never gloried in the squish of itthe part when you run your fingers through the cool ground meat just for fun. She is not a girl who has ever played with her food. Making dinner for her husband and four children was an obligation. It was also the center of the day, its organizing principle. We would leave the house each morning knowing what was for dinner because she would start it before she left to teach.

For meat loaf, shed defrost a block of chopped meat wrapped in brown paper inside a plastic bag. Not in the refrigerator, where we now know it is safer, but on the counter, where the job would get done. By the time she returned at the end of the day, blood pooled around the seams of the paper, and you could push the bag with your finger and leave a dent. When she unwrapped it, some of the meat was brown, not red. This did not concern her.

Also in the morning, before leaving the house, she would check that she had two eggs, glancing inside the refrigerator door at the scooped-out top shelf where the eggs sat, naked and available, without benefit of an expiration date stamped on the end of a carton. This did not concern her, either.

Back home, in the late afternoon, she would cook while I set the table. She grated the onions into a bowl, swiping at a tear with her forearm. She beat the eggs before mixing them into the meat along with tomato soup. The best part was the cornflakes. She would crush a few handfuls before adding them. They gave the meat loaf something of a golden aura, to my eye at least. She turned the contents of the bowl into a panthe black pan with white specklesand shaped it into an oval. There was no rack or tray on the bottom to drain the fat. Fat was what made it taste good.

Then she would empty a can of Le Sueur peas into a pot and set it on the stove. In another black speckled pan, she would toss some cubed potatoes in oil, sprinkle them with salt, pepper, and paprika, and set them above the meat loaf to bake. When I make them, I parboil them first, so they end up creamy on the inside and crispy on the outside. She would scoff at this innovationextra time, extra pot. But I know she would approve of my throwing the onions into the Cuisinart, zapping them into the watery mush great chefs tell us to avoid. Because neither one of us likes to cry.

After the first time I made the meat loaf, I felt pretty invincible. Yes, it is a simple recipe, but even simple recipes can suffer in the wrong hands. I had the touch. With three pounds of chopped meat, I could erase years, play with time. The meat loaf was a magic charm.

Until it wasnt.

I picture Mom in her kitchen. It is a cheerful room, wallpapered in white crisscrossed with arbors of red roses. It is sometime in the 1970s. She is just home from work, wearing a black-and-white tweed skirt and a white turtleneck. Her hair is blond and teased, like Farrah Fawcetts. Her broad cheekbones and wide-set brown eyes balance her strong jaw. Her face is perfectly symmetrical, hard and soft at once. She is beautiful in a way I will never be, and this has never bothered me. I love looking at her.

After a long day of teaching, she can be short on patience. This is one of those days. She does not make conversation. She gets on with it. That is her forte, getting on with it. She stands near the stove while I fold yellow paper napkins in half diagonally and turn the knife blades toward the plates because she actually checks things like that. Her back is to me. She is absorbed in her tasks.

Mom! I call. I need your help. I made the meat loaf and it was perfect. I made the potatoes and I added a steptheyre actually better. I made the same peas because some things dont change and dont need to. I did everything right. Every damn thing you ever told me to do. My knives faced in. I came home on time. I married a good man. I have a good job. I didnt have children, but no ones perfect.

So? I see her profile, slightly annoyed that Im distracting her in the middle of making dinner for six people. It really isnt the time to bother her with this. Maybe later, when shes scrubbing the pan and Im making the lunches for the next day, slicing the meat loaf and fitting each slab inside a kaiser roll, spreading ketchup along the tops. Maybe after that, when shes showered and put on a clean flannel nightgown, sitting down in the den in front of the TV, lighting a cigarette. Once shes out of the kitchen, shes happier, calmer.

But I need her to stay in the kitchen now, in command mode. I need her to tell me what to do. She walks past me. Dinner! she yells, in that strangely muted way she has, moving her voice to the back of her throat, apologizing for yelling even as she does it. With a spatula, she scrapes the potatoes out of the pan and into a bowl. She strains the water from the peas. She turns the meat loaf onto a plate in an instant. Im terrible at that. I worry it will break.