To outsiders, every dinner looked like a holiday. The spinning wheel of my mother’s arsenal, which up to this point had always pulled in a fair number of ethnic outliers like stir-fry, spun tighter and tighter until it began to land each night on one of our richest Midwestern favorites: chicken marsala with mushrooms and spaetzle in brown butter; grilled pork chops served still a little pink in the middle and cloaked with horseradish sour cream; butterscotch bars caving beneath the weight of their thick chocolate tops. She began to make even larger batches in advance prep for the preteen raids on the fridge that so thrilled her. “Marc’s friends came over and ate that entire gallon of chili and all of those apple dumplings!” was a common boast in those days. I can’t remember her ever saying that she herself was hungry, but rather that it was “time to feed these kids.” The woman who made more food than a single family could eat had one wish for it: She wanted it gone.
Her cooking, and our belief in its eminence, was fast becoming the family glue. My abdomen-thorax regions grew permanently round and remained so, in a state of full-on satiation, for the next three or four years. To my mother’s credit, never once did she acknowledge my weight gain, even as my short frame skip-counted from size 4 to 10 and then 12, and not even when I begged her to admit the truth: “Agree with me, I’m getting fat.”
She dismissed this with a wave of her hand—“You’re absolutely not!”—and countered with the only words of eating wisdom I’ve ever needed: “If you feel that way, then cut out desserts, and don’t take seconds.”
She refused to ruin food for me, for which I’m forever grateful.
—
When it came time for me to apply to college, my main goal was to distance myself as much as possible from the fallout from my detonated family. I found a small liberal arts school in a village in Ohio—as insulated as Park Rapids but even smaller—called Kenyon, whose old stone buildings and ancient literary pedigree seemed like the perfect place to launch a small-town girl’s literary calling. Feeling hopelessly foreign, a Midwestern duck swimming in a pond of East Coast kids, I threw myself into my classes. To offset my social anxiety, I counterintuitively returned to my comfort zone: I got a perm. (I still believed the Midwestern adage that curls make round faces look thinner.) By the time summer break rolled around, I’d come to see my college foray as an indulgent, expensive escape from the family drama, a luxury that I probably didn’t deserve.
Moving back into the house in the cul-de-sac, I saw that they were doing about as well as I was—surviving but not exactly thriving. Marc wore his new angry-teenager costume 24/7; my mom began buying better wine but still in jumbo sizes—cheap magnums instead of boxes; and my brother Bob seemed to be taking the divorce the hardest. He’d been sending me long handwritten letters all year, some of them updates, some of them wildly inventive poems. One night we sat up and talked about them.
I thought his writing could have been really good if it weren’t for his syntax, a curious mixture of biblical and Middle English. While I had lost my Catholicism and my ability to pretend years ago (at around the same time), Bob remained in possession of both his Bible and the full scope of his imagination. In narrative terms, I was reasonable, boring nonfiction; he was fantasy fiction. The secular, liberal English major in me changed his every “morn” to “morning” and “ye” to gender-neutral “they,” and sent them back for revision. And now I was feeling guilty for having so mercilessly edited my brother’s work—little more than diary entries.
“I actually don’t think you need to change anything here,” I said.
“Whatever. The individual words aren’t as important as the meaning of the whole.” He sighed. I was the one in the family known for her achievements, her aptitude, and yet in his eyes I was often so dense. “Look at the last line.”
It said, “So be it.”
So be it? “Is that some kind of answer?” I asked.
“Yeah. When it comes to our family, none of them will ever change. Your problem is you expect too much.”
As a devout child of psychotherapy, I found that hard to accept, but the undeniable truth was that after that he dealt with our parents’ divorce, the move, and his own coming-of-age with the kind of finality and wisdom it would take me many more years to find. Unlike me and, to a certain degree, our brother Marc, Bob had no desire to return to our hometown to dig in our family’s wreckage for fossilized clues. He shut the door to the past and remained close to both of our parents, but never returned to Park Rapids for any length of time; I kept my door open, just a crack, and every time I went back I walked all over my past self, nose to the ground, sniffing for clues.
For my sophomore year, I transferred to Macalester in St. Paul, another liberal arts school—but this one was only twenty minutes away from my brothers, my mother, and her kitchen.
—
Macalester College pulled in lots of East Coasters from moneyed backgrounds, but I gravitated toward the more informal Midwesterners. I roomed with an enthusiastic social-activist lesbian-theologian from Milwaukee and a wisecracking poet from Minnesota who was deep into Sylvia Plath’s language of melancholy. The poet and I wrote endless pages of confessional poetry and smoked cigarettes until the silver ash mountain in the ashtray overflowed onto the floor. All three of us spent hours playing drinking games with the boys in the basement apartment, who then sculpted a living-room couch from our empty cases of cheap Wisconsin beer. (Huber Bock, to be specific, which in retrospect might have contributed to my thickening torso.)
Everyone in my family, save my mom, thought that my pursuit of an English degree in an expensive liberal arts college was pure extravagance, and told me so. “For that, why don’t you just go to a state school?” asked the ever-practical Grandma Dion. In a way, they weren’t wrong, for I basically spent my college years fine-tuning my god-given aptitude for procrastination.
I’d wait until the eleventh hour to start writing a twenty-five-page term paper, then drive down to my mom’s house and stay up all night long and write the thing in a single sitting, fueled by hefty servings of the food I revered. I came back toting bags of leftovers, which my hungry roommates leapt on.
Installed in my first apartment, I also started to cook on my own. Whenever the pressure of a writing deadline loomed uncomfortably in front of me, I’d dodge it by jumping into my car and driving to one of the nearby Asian markets. I’d happily plunk down forty of my precious work-study dollars at the Thai market to buy everything to make chicken coconut-milk curry and green beans with pork and fish sauce for eight of my closest friends—and another day’s reprieve from writing my paper on Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and the Southern literary consciousness.