Cook Book: Recipes for Raising a Reader

Guest post by Anne Schuchman 

​Were there any particular dishes your mother was known for?” the priest asks.

He must have a fill-in-the-blank eulogy where he’ll add personal anecdotes, something for the family.

There’s an awkward moment as my brother and sister and I look thoughtful. Then we exchange darting glances out of the corners of our eyes, silently pleading, Say something!

I finally say, “Our mom was a lousy cook.” And we snort with laughter.

The priest scribbles something in his notes.
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This isn’t quite fair, as my mother had a few dishes that were memorable, mostly from the years before she went back to work. She had time to let the dough rise, let us punch it down, then let it rise again before baking. I remember homemade pizza, American chop suey (whatever the hell that was), iceberg lettuce shining with bottled salad dressing, and Apple Delight, my favorite dessert.

But when I think of my mom cooking, I don’t think of what she made, but how she made it. Stirring a pot with one hand, a book in the other, reading. At the kitchen table, a book in hand, reading. Lying on the sofa as broccoli burned on the stove, a book in hand, reading. I rarely saw her without a book, her glasses perched on her head or carelessly looped through her fingers. She was extremely nearsighted but could read a book without glasses if she held it right up to her face. Then her eyes would become wide and she would hardly blink. When she was reading you knew the world had disappeared for her: she was gone. To interrupt seemed cruel, but we did it all the time. Maybe we were jealous of the attention—the devotion, even—that she gave those books. Maybe we just missed her.

“Just let me finish this chapter,” she’d say as she turned another page.

I was born with the reading gene, or perhaps I was just imitating my mother the way other little girls played house. She passed words to me like breastmilk. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t read. I may have lived in suburban Long Island, but I was equally at home on the Kansas prairie, in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, and on Prince Edward Island. My best friends were Dorothy, Laura, and the other Anne with-an-e. This fascination with books carried me from kindergarten through grad school. I got married, had one baby and then another, and my time became limited, fragmented, my days full of must-do’s. Reading required a purpose. There was a kind of pleasure in reading dusty manuscripts and secondary criticism, but it was in having read them, not in the reading itself. I had lost some of the joy I had first experienced in the small-town library that contained universes.

All this time, my mother and I regularly spoke on the phone and exchanged letters. She used to circulate a family letter that caught everyone up on everyone else’s goings-on, and later, a family email. She would tell me about the books she was reading, and I would tell her about my studies. And sometimes she would chuckle, “You think you’re so smart.” I sent her conference papers to proofread, and imagined her reading them, her glasses looped through her fingers, her eyes wide and unblinking. She always found something: a typo, a grammatical error, an editing mishap. She was my ideal reader.

But something happened so subtly that I hardly noticed. The daily emails became weekly, and then even less frequent. Sometimes my father would respond instead. An engineer in temperament as well as profession, he stuck to simple subject-verb-object sentences: what they did and where they went. Sometimes my mother’s emails didn’t address what I had written to her, and I had to go back to try and understand the miscommunication. She no longer told me about the latest book she’d read or magazine articles, because she’d nearly stopped reading altogether. Sometimes the words just didn’t make sense. Her decline into dementia seems obvious now when I look at our last emails: a back-and-forth about forgetting passwords and missing doctors’ appointments and repeated anecdotes.

Her very last email to me, written about four years before her death said:
 
I don’t know what I’m doing. —Mom
 
I missed her writing, of course. I was surprised, however, to find myself mourning her loss of reading. I had taken this joy of hers for granted. There wasn’t much we could do during those short, but too long years of decline: visit, chat, make her comfortable. How could I listen to someone whose voice seemed to grow fainter and fainter each time I spoke with her? I had already lost my mother.

I could read. I began by seeking out classics that had somehow escaped me back in high school and college: My Ántonia, Anna Karenina, To Kill a Mockingbird. I reread Catcher in the Rye, a book I despised in high school because my friends told me I reminded them of Holden Caulfield. Although I failed to recognize myself in Holden when I was a teen, this time I recognized my children in Holden—he felt like another insightful, wounded, and often infuriating son. Maybe it was because I was reading it as the parent of an adolescent rather than as an adolescent, but when I cried for Holden, maybe I was also crying for his mother, so cold and indifferent. Maybe I cried for the emotional distance that could never be bridged.

My mother was placed on hospice during the last six weeks of her life, ending the revolving-door of hospital visits. She barely spoke, barely registered recognition. Our visits seemed to exhaust her, and my children, newly uncomfortable around grandma, became antsy, so I kept our visits brief. Maybe it wasn’t our presence, but the presence of death that sucked the words out of the room. But on one of our last visits, I mentioned to her that I was reading Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain for the first time. She lit up in a way I hadn’t seen in months, looked up at me from her wheelchair, and said, “That’s one of my favorite books.”
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Going through my parents’ house years later, I came across her cookbooks: Fanny Farmer, The Joy of Cooking, The I Hate to Cook Book. Along with the creases and stains, I found notes and comments in her precise, bookish handwriting. Occasionally she wrote simple punctuation (! or ?) in the margins, and once a Bronx cheer—pbbb!—for what must have been a failure of a dish. She had really read these cookbooks, taken them in, and they became part of her. My mother was a great cook—on the page.

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Anne Schuchman is a writer and translator whose nonfiction has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Saranac Review, and Apricity Press. Her translations have been published in The Southern Review, The Los Angeles Review, and The Ilanot Review. Schuchman holds a Ph.D. in Italian from NYU and an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson.
anneschuchman.weebly.com
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