In my mom’s programming of me to become the independent woman she herself wanted to be, her strategy was repetition. She told me the family stories, of strong women and stubborn men, over and over—with much variation in the details, revising them nightly as she saw fit. I was insatiable for the stories. And weirdly, I forgot all of them in between the tellings—like, total amnesia—which dovetailed nicely with her desire to repeat them. She sewed lead weights into the hem of every telling, giving each one the gravitas of new truth, and I believed the latest version as much as I believed in fiction—which is to say, completely.
She squirted herself a glass of wine from the box of Merlot sitting in the pantry and began talking. Her first story often recalled her dad, who had died of cancer when she was just three years old, and her most vivid memory of him, when he’d propped her up on the ledge of the kitchen sink and showed her the stars and told her he’d always love her. She told me about his mom, her beloved grandma Bertha Dion, a short, stout French-Canadian woman who could cook an enormous feast seemingly without effort. “She’d just be tinkering softly around the kitchen and then, suddenly Bam! Dinner for eight would be on the table.” All of Great-grandma’s gravies were elegant and thin, never thick and cloudy. She never turned the flame so high that fire shot up the sides of the pot, she never fried anything so hard that it spit grease (as her own mother did). “Everything was cooked on low heat.” When she made chicken fricassee, the whole mushrooms shrunk to tiny slick knobs and the slow heat nagged at the joints of her meat until it just “shrugged off the bone.” She was kind and soft and gracious, my great-grandmother, just like her food.
In contrast, my mom’s mother’s side—German-Bohemian farmers and dramatic, high-volume storytellers—seared their meat until it browned, and correspondingly, had tougher skins. “They’re funny—you know that,” my mom said, “but horsey.”
“Grandma told me the last time I was there,” I added. “?‘Be fun, be lively! The last thing you want to be is a dud. Those people are THE WORST.’?”
Addie Dion knew just when to throw a joke to take the edge off; her hard life had gifted her with perfect comic pitch. The eldest of seven girls, she quit high school to help her mom cook and raise her sisters, and was a widow with three young girls by the age of thirty. She was immensely capable and didn’t have time to waste on delicacy. While she could take notice of the sweetness in a shy person, over time she grew intolerant of introverts, of those who had to be drawn out slowly and coaxed to say what they wanted or needed. Unlike the Scandinavian reticence that made up the stereotypical Minnesota character, she was direct, often to fearless, comic effect. Like a good, fatty piece of bacon is said to have a streak of lean, my grandma had a bawdy streak of lewd, in that old-time way. Take, for instance, her greatest gag, the “Drinking Nuns.” A dozen found photographs reveal the premise: Mother Superior and her three daughters “Sister Joan, Sister Karen, and Sister Renee” in four perfectly rendered nun habits Addie had sewn, parked at a blackjack table in Vegas, heartily enjoying their first-ever brandy Manhattans. It was a serial bit, and they were loyal to their parts: just a few innocent nuns from Minnesota out on a ripper, “lifting a few.” Nothing was safe from her teasing, not even the almighty Catholic Church.
Sensitivity was not her strongest suit, however, and my mom, with her big expressive eyes, was easily the most sensitive of the bunch.
“What she means by that is ‘Have a good bar personality,’?” my mom said, rolling her eyes. “Like she does.”
“Sometimes, even her food was coarse,” my mom said, “like those hard knoedel she always made.” Just like her personality, Addie Hesch Dion’s cooking was generous and full-throated—and sometimes even catch-in-the-throat.
The moral here was that the Germans, you see, were hard and coarse, just like their dumplings. The French, my mom’s father’s people, with whom she had a special kinship, were soft and benign, just like their sauces. My mom’s cooking, although heavily influenced by her mother’s German roots, also bore some resemblance to the little French-Canadian lady’s: her gravies were strong but pourable and shimmered faintly with a surface glitter of fat; her potato soup was not like the local version—thick as sandcrete—but instead more bisquelike, each floating potato distinct. When my mom ordered a creamy soup at the local diner, she also ordered a glass of milk to stir into the soup by the spoonful until it was thinned to her liking. When she moved in the kitchen, she slid as smoothly as Grandma Bertha, like a slow pinball.
“I always wanted to be a chef, you know,” she said.
“You did?” I was surprised. “Why didn’t you?”
“My mom said it would be too hard, that I wouldn’t be able to handle it,” she said quietly, sipping her wine. “But there was this program that sent you all the way to France! I brought the pamphlet home and my mom said, ‘Oh! You’d be way too scared to go to Europe.’ And so I didn’t go.”
It didn’t sound right to me. Even though I was as loyal to my mom as a serf, it was hard to imagine my adult self so blindly heeding her advice.
“So I became a teacher,” she said with a sigh, heaving over the lump of practicality. “And then a few years later I had you!” she finished brightly. “I couldn’t wait to quit my job and stay home and cook a big dinner every night.” I knew she was speaking the truth.
As the level in her glass dipped, the dumplings became harder, the sauces thinner, the men increasingly egregious, and the women saintlier.
—
One night my mom poured two glasses of wine: one for her and one for me. I raised my eyebrows but said nothing. It was unspoken: Once my mother started talking, we were French, like her father, and the French drink wine, apparently even the fifteen-year-old daughters. As we sat there eating popcorn, my mom flicking through her bowl in search of slightly burned old maids only partly exploded, me looking for the big, yellow-sopped buttery ones, we paged through catalogs. Then she said, “We should go to the mall in Fargo soon and stock up on any clothes you think you might need because I don’t know how much money we’ll have after this.” She was so flippant about it, so self-assured, that it couldn’t possibly be real. My mom was leaving my dad. I gathered up the clues in her tales of women wronged, her growing inventory of my father’s failings, and stored the bud of their impending divorce in its green, tough, unflowered state, hedonistically allowing myself to ignore it in order to grab on to what seemed essential at the time, the words mall and money. I was a teenager, my desperation for new jeans that tragic.