Still Life
During the war years, she had been an independent woman. When she wasn’t designing airplane parts, she was flirting with French soldiers at a hang-out on the lower west side of Manhattan called Pierre au Tunnel’s (the tunnel being the Holland). She spoke beautiful French. She learned to drink Pernod. She wore bright red lipstick and dabbed Crepe de Chine behind her ears. She had dreams starring herself and tall, dark, handsome men whose faces she couldn’t quite make out.
But by the early 1960s, her hang-out was the A&P on Wantagh Avenue, and her spirit was dampened by a decade of suburban isolation. She cooked, she sewed, she changed the bed linen every Monday, clipped coupons and went food shopping every Wednesday, ironed on Thursdays, waxed the kitchen floor on Friday and polished the wedding silver once a month.
For a while, a long while, she made efforts to hold on to who she was. Those were her most active days, my growing up years, when she taught herself to be a gourmet cook. She learned boeuf bourguignon and coq au vin from Julia Child. She perfected scampi, created a garlic-studded pork loin that I still dream about and occasionally spent all day pounding veal into paper thin scaloppini which she then wrapped around chopped proscuitto into individual rolls sewn closed with needle and thread before being braised in Marsala. She taught an adult education class in dressmaking. She finished the New York Times crossword puzzle every day.