Chapter 3

The Diagnosis, and How to Train Your Children

Jean comes from school of dysfunction where things don’t exist if they’re kept hidden and are not discussed. She had excellent instructors.

Jean learned the art of denial from her mother and aunt, both of whom at different times raised her and neither of whom did a very good job. For my grandmother, it was a matter of messiness: talking about difficult subjects just made things messy. People cried and carried on and it was all so uncomfortable-making. For her aunt, there was simply no need: God knew what was going on and if it was bad, it ought not be acknowledged.

Jean was playing outside with her 2 siblings on a Chicago sidewalk in 1942, when she was 10. Her younger sister Patsy slipped on a patch of ice, hit her head on a street light pole, and died. There was no discussion about it. Jean’s brother was terribly traumatized and never fully recovered. Even today, he cannot read or write.

Two years later, when Jean was 12, she was sent to live with her aunt Mary in Minneapolis, because her mother had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and was being sent to a sanitarium. Thought she was Jewish by birth, Aunt Mary had long ago converted to Christianity, and immediately put Jean in catholic school when she arrived. Each morning, she would say to Jean. “you’re pretty ugly and pretty apt to stay that way.” Kind of a Mommy Dearest vibe.

When Jean started growing breasts, Mary told her it was the devil trying to derail her from her studies. Mary bound her chest with ace bandages to hide them and started using a stopwatch to time her walk home from school. If Jean was late – which clearly meant she was talking to boys – she was punished.

There are some people who succumb to attempts to break their spirit, become compliant, obedient. When jean was 16, she bought a motorcycle with money she had saved doing odd jobs. Weighing only 90 lbs, she couldn’t drive it herself, so she told a friend from high school that if he would drive her to California on it, he could have it once they got there. He agreed.

The same combination of sheer determination, chutzpah, and denial of what people tell you is impossible that can create magic, can also wreak havoc and destruction. What got her to California without an education or a degree was her ability to block out and ignore those who tried to stop her. It would work against her now.

2007 does not end well for John or Jean. John takes a turn for the worse and is back in the hospital in December. He is there for about 10 days and at one point it doesn’t appear he will pull through. His oldest drives down from Oregon, just in case. And then drives home again.

When John is sent home, it’s clear we have to enter into a more formal agreement with the caregiver next door to make more regular visits. John’s needs are simply too great for one person, and the Fire Department has made it clear Jean’s caring for him alone could border on elder abuse – a crime that would remove him from her care altogether – if she doesn’t get help. Mom does not suffer this indignity well and digs in her heels. We try to be persuasive without pissing her off more.

“Screw them. I’d like to see them try to get John out of here.”

“Mom, seriously,” I say. “You do not want to fight this. Can we just get the lady next door to come on a more regular basis?”

Jean has a way of setting her jaw that signals she is about to lose it. She starts slow and builds up to a full rolling boil.

“I know how to take care of my husband.” She pauses between the word, her eyes narrowed at me. “Who the hell are you?”

(Two weeks earlier, when Jean and I got the news together that she had early stage Alzheimer’s, she simply said, “Oh, that’s a crock of shit.” Then she walked out of the office, leaving me to finish up with the doctor. For her part, Jean didn’t – wouldn’t -- accept it, refused the medications, and demanded to be taken home.)

Standing in the kitchen with her now would probably be a good time for me to make her feel good, say something nice. Maybe agree she is a great wife and caregiver, and that my suggestion of augmenting her efforts with a professional caregiver would give her careful plan some redundancy just in case something happened. But that thing where daughters look for tender moments to pay back their mothers for years of kindness only happens on Lifetime. Instead, I point out all the ways in which she has failed, hoping my logic and common sense will make her come around, because that’s a winning strategy.

“Mom, you’re forgetting to give him his medicine on schedule. You can barely get him out of the chair to go to the bathroom. You can’t bathe him any more, and the nurse at Alta Bates said you were giving him his Ensure on the wrong schedule. Besides, you’ve got to take care of yourself. You heard what Dr. Davis said. Stress is going to exacerbate your condition.” There. Now all I have to do is stand back and wait for her to see things my way.

Not uncharacteristically, she loses it completely, and starts screaming, “I. DO NOT. HAVE ALZHEIMER’S!” Her voice has the bite of nails on a chalkboard. She pulls down the cookbooks from the shelf in the kitchen and slams them on the floor. That would end the discussion for the rest of 2007. My mother can still scare the shit out of me. Once I leave, Jean does pull herself together enough to hire the caregiver who works next door to come and bathe him, put him to bed, give him his medication. She makes an agreement to phone next door if he falls out of bed, and she has a guard installed on one side to try to avoid the issue altogether. I still come by once or twice a week to do recon., take notes. I watch her prattle about the kitchen while I take mental notes about what she was doing and saying, just as I did when I was little. I listen to what she tells me, only this time, I am watching for the caramel to turn amber.

My favorite thing to do as a kid was hang out in the kitchen with my mom. From 1966 to 1971 it was just the two of us. Because she worked full time, our weekends were generally filled with making the week’s meals, each of which she would mark with the date and title on a file label.

Mom would put a bowl of seasoned raw ground beef in front of me and let me make the meatballs for her Swedish Meatball recipe. (or her spaghetti and meatballs recipe). I would use an ice cream scoop as my measure and then shape them with my hands, lining them up in perfect rows for her to sauté in the giant cast iron skillet she bought at the goodwill, and we would talk.

“No self-respecting cook uses Teflon” my mom said. “A cast iron skillet will never stick if you treat it right.”

“Never buy a skillet new,” she told me, using chopsticks to gently turn the meatballs in the pan. “If you buy it new, you have to season it. Doesn’t matter what they say about how long it takes to season a pan, it really takes years. Let someone else do that work for you.”

All skillets were not created equal, however, she was quick to tell me. “You’ve got to get one that was loved.”

“Start by making sure there’s no rust on it. If there’s rust on it, it wasn’t cared for. Someone probably soaped it up too much, or put it away wet. If you can, get one that’s well-oiled, too, kinda shiny like this,” she pointed to the handle of her skillet, shiny and black from years of handling.

“Make sure it’s smooth all over. If it’s rough, that’s probably food that was never properly cleaned from it, and it will always stick there if you bake in it, or if you use it to make caramel. And one last thing: never use soap on your skillet.”

“Never?”

“Well, mostly never.”

All the while she was talking, she would be moving about the tiny galley kitchen, throwing things into pans and eyeballing liquids, never ceasing the conversation. She might have three or four things going at once. When she finished cooking the meatballs, she’d set them on a plate covered with a brown paper bag to soak up the grease. Paper towels were expensive and wasteful. Paper bags were free. We didn’t have paper towels.

Once the meatballs were removed she would drain the beef fat into the half-full Crisco can at the back of the stove, fill the skillet with a little water, and turn up the heat, using a pancake turner to loosen all the crispy beef or onion bits that fell off the meatballs, until nothing was stuck to the pan.

“This is good stuff,” she said, pointing to the brown water with the bits in it. “We’ll, boil this down a few minutes and this will be the base for our sauce.” She would add various white mixtures to her reduction, that I now know to be milk, cornstarch water, and sour cream, seasoned with shallots and onions and nutmeg. Then, it just looked like magic and tasted like heaven.

In those early days, after my mother left my father and it was just the two of us, we didn’t have a lot of money and we didn’t waste a thing. Leftover vegetables became a mirapoix for bean soup. Meatloaf got crumbled into spaghetti sauce. Rice was transformed into custard. Leftover tuna salad on a Friday, became curried tuna casserole Saturday night.

We had a tiny apartment on McKinley Avenue in Berkeley. I would make mud pies on the stoop on the weekends and we would have pretend tea parties together. At night, we would set up TV trays in front of the 13” black-and-white television set and watch Lawrence Welk.

On weekdays, before I was in school, my mom (or my dad, who lived close by) would walk me down three blocks to Mrs. Franklin’s house while she went to work. Her son, Rodney, would teach me how to play things on the piano.

Sometimes, when my mom came to get me on Friday, she would say, “we’ve got to high-tail it to the store, Sally Ann (that was my nickname), because we’re having a party tomorrow and we have to get ready!”

Parties were absolutely, positively the most fun in the whole world, not only because I got to help my mom make a grown-up party, but because there would be leftover food that was otherwise considered contraband in our home: potato chips, pretzels, Chex Mix (the kind you had to make yourself).

It was the sixties and dinner parties were in fashion. There would be lots of finger food, like rumaki, onion dip (for the chips and pretzels), miniature Swedish meatballs, cheese fondue, and best of all, mom’s deviled eggs. And the leftovers would be all mine on Sunday.

Friday night was set-up time. My job was to set out the nice hand towels in the bathroom, and make the cocktail station. I would stack the cups, the tiny napkins. and the colorful plastic stirrers on the end of the 5-foot long hi-fi, on the part you didn’t need to lift to play the record. The cocktail this week (and most weeks) was Lillet on the rocks with an orange twist. Mom taught me how to fan the cocktail napkins by pressing against the stack of napkins a glass on its side and turning it until they feathered out.

Children were not appropriate at dinner parties, and people who allowed their children to come, my mother said, had no home training.

“Goddamned Berkeley parents,” she’d say. “First of all, how is that fun for a kid, lugging him to a grown-up party? And who wants some little crumb-crusher darting in and out grabbing handfuls of food. Honestly.” Jean was highly opinionated when it came to children, and pretty much anything else, and she a stickler for etiquette. Etiquette dictated that children be left at home.

Etiquette also dictated that children of the host introduce themselves to guests, but otherwise stay out of the way. My job, therefore, was to answer the door. On the way to the Co-Op for groceries, we would rehearse what I would say.

“Hello, welcome. My name is Tsan. Won’t you come in?”

“Good,” my mom would say. “Now, what will you say if they already know you?”

“I will say, ‘It’s nice to see you again.”

“Then what?”

“I will say, ‘May I take your coat?’”

“Hmmmm, no, don’t say that, because the weather’s still nice and some people won’t be wearing coats.” She thought about it, then changed the script. “Say, ‘may I take your wrap.”

Once all the guests had arrived, my mom would raise one eyebrow in my direction, my cue to make my exit. “Goodnight, everyone. It was nice to meet you all,” I would say, and retreat to my bedroom. Then I would press my eat to the door for a few minutes so I could hear people tell my mother how lovely and well-behaved I was. Once I got bored of that, I’d usually, do something a little less dainty, like cut the shag carpet with a scissors or slather nail polish in the door jambs. Things she wouldn’t notice for a very long time.

The next morning, I would wake up early and creep out to the kitchen to raid the leftovers. Once, just once, I wanted there to be a deviled egg. It never happened.

Here is my mother’s deviled egg recipe. I resurrected it for an Austin Powers party I had in the 90’s, more as a joke than anything else. They were gone in the first hour.

When my mom made them, she used plain old Morton salt. I am a snob: I prefer fleur de sel. You will, too, or should.

Another twist – I drizzle my deviled eggs with chipotle oil just before serving. To make chipotle oil, puree 3 chipotle chiles and 1 cup of olive oil together, then strain out the chiles. Store in one of those squeezy catsup bottles you can buy at the grocery store during the summer months.

One more thing: paprika should never be used right from its jar; it should be first toasted in a small pan. To do this, dump the paprika in a small pan, place the pan over medium heat, and let the paprika get hot and toasty. You’ll smell when it’s time to take it off, but it doesn’t take long. You will not regret this step. No one else will care, by the way, and they will not notice the subtle difference toasting the paprika makes. They will, however, know that your deviled eggs are better than theirs and they will ask you for the recipe. When they see that the recipe requires them to toast the paprika and make chile oil, they will had it back to you and say, “no, that’s too much trouble.” People are assholes.

This is a recipe my mom said needed to be made “by vibration.” Thus, the measurements are bootstrapped. Use your vibration to add or subtract anything.

1 dozen eggs
2 tsp salt.
1 tsp pepper
2 Tbl Dijon mustard
2 Tbl. Mayonnaise
2 tsp dried tarragon leaves
½ cup heavy cream
2 Tbl paprika
chipotle chile oil (see recipe above)

Place the eggs in a large enough put that you have all 12 in a single layer. Cover with water, enough so that there is about 2 inches of water covering the eggs (use your middle finger and have it come up to the second crease).

Cover the pot and bring the water to a boil. When the water boils, immediately turn off the heat and let the eggs sit until the water has cooled completely. Using this method will keep you from getting that ugly grey hue around the yolk of your egg. No one likes a grey egg.

Peel the eggs and cut them lengthwise. If you do not have a deviled egg holder (and who does), you can keep the eggs from sliding all over the plate by covering the plate with cling film, or by spreading some large dried beans, like white kidney beans, on the plate (don’t get fancy and use black beans – they will stain the eggs).

Remove the yolks from each egg and place them in a bowl. Add the salt, the pepper, the mustard, the mayonnaise, and the tarragon leaves. With a fork mash everything together until it is very smooth. Set aside.

In another bowl, whip the cream until it holds soft peaks. Add the yolks and whip until the cream holds stiff peaks. Adjust the seasoning if you haven’t already.

Spoon, scoop or use a pastry bag fitted with the star tip to mound the mixture back into the egg white casings. Sprinkle with Paprika. Just before serving, drizzle with the chipotle oil, and reserve one for each child, who should be in bed (honestly, no one wants to see your kid after 8:00pm, no matter how cute you think s/he is).