Remembering What You Can't Remember

When I started to write a memoir I couldn’t remember anything because I’d blocked out my childhood so completely.

I decided to start by listing the contents of a cabinet in our 1970s-era kitchen. Soon my pencil was racing ahead, trying to keep up with the memories that were suddenly freed after decades of being squished down.

Of course most of it won’t end up in the final memoir, but it’s a good exercise and I’ve continued to use this technique whenever I’m blocked.

It’s pretty long so I’m splitting it into two parts, the second will post next week.

Here goes:

Describing my childhood kitchen provides a handy roadmap to our family’s dysfunction and eventual demise.

The knotty pine cabinets had brass handles where small patches were rubbed away from years of hands grasping at items that were always poor substitutes for the real thing.

Like the box of Carnation Instant Breakfast drink packets in the cabinet next to the wall oven which primarily heated up TV dinners in the pre-microwave era.

The ads said “each glass delivers as much protein as two eggs, as much mineral nourishment as two strips of crisp bacon.” Translated, that meant it would taste good, but I thought something was wrong with me because the people in the ads for the powdered flavoring were always smiling as they sipped at their glasses. Maybe the heat from the oven messed with the powder, because no matter the flavor, from chocolate to vanilla malt, it always had a faint chalky aftertaste like when I clapped the blackboard erasers at school and the dust got up my nose.

Perched next to the Instant Breakfast was a glass bottle of Sucaryl — the precursor to saccharine and Stevia, and the successor to cyclamates, which were banned in 1970 — which promised weight-conscious women calorie-free sweetness. My mother choked down a grapefruit each morning after furiously shaking out drops of clear liquid from the tear-shaped bottle onto the fruit, as if she could purge the bitterness from her life.

Sometime in 1972, when I was 9, changes started to appear.

One day she brought home a new kitchen table, pale yellow, lighter than the colorless lump of butter in the scratched blue Pyrex refrigerator dish, with three chairs.

For a family of four.

The black handle of the Farberware twisted when it swung around to perch over an adjacent burner, left unattended until it was too late.

The boxes of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti dinners, Hamburger Helper, and Kraft Mac & Cheese filled two full shelves, crammed in cheek by jowl like soldiers ready to do battle. The flour and chocolate chips – and anything else that involved actual cooking or baking – were demoted to a higher, unreachable shelf.

Processed was safe, so was fake. It was always the real things that would cut, piercing the thick veil of self-preservation she’d surrounded herself with since childhood. The boxed dinners rich with an alphabet soup of preservatives and stabilizers helped her to swerve out of the path of emotion.

After all, by the age of 40 she had already reached her lifetime quota of heartbreak. She wasn’t going to let another speck in.

There was no more room.

If my mother could get away with boiling water when it came to cooking, she was all for it. She never hesitated to hide the fact that she hated to cook, or that she never wanted kids in the first place. She considered my father, who planned to become a doctor, as her ticket out of the dirt-floor shacks of her Depression-era childhood where between an occasionally-absent father and three siblings, there was never enough of anything, from heat to food to love.

In contrast, my father had long viewed fatherhood as his salvation, a way to have something to focus outward on instead of dwelling on his lingering trauma after spending two years as a medic during World War Two.

My father wanted a family. My mother wanted a life.

In the end, neither one got what they wanted, and after drawing battle lines in the bedroom — in part to prevent another unexpected pregnancy — my mother moved onto the kitchen.

The kitchen became a scene of détente between my parents. Somewhere in the years after she withdrew from their marriage, their unspoken agreement was she would cook dinner as long as she didn’t have to eat with her husband sitting at the same table.

She performed a nightly hit-and-run in the kitchen: Throw something together into a soup pot or the Sunbeam electric skillet with daisies on the lid, timing it so it would be done minutes before our own stomachs started rumbling. She’d then fix herself a plate and rush off to the refuge of her den, which she had essentially turned into her own studio apartment. There, she could eat and watch TV in solitude.

My mother got no pleasure from food unless it was beige. It was boring and neutral, but she’d had enough unwanted color and upheaval in her life. Sliced turkey, potato salad, especially hard rolls with butter, her childhood comfort food. That was her dinner many nights during the Depression if she was lucky.

The only time my mother liked to be in the kitchen was when she was washing dishes. The sink looked out into the backyard with a row of trees separating the expansive lawn from the neighbors.

She plunged her arms into the warm soapy water, yellow rubber gloves up to her elbows, and daydreamed while attacking a scrap of dried food on a plate with Palmolive – You’re soaking in it! – and a scrubbie sponge.

Was she thinking about what might have been if she didn’t have kids? Or what she would have done differently? Or maybe what was out there? At the very least, she could look away from her life.

She cleaned the stove even if it didn’t need it and mopped the floor every day so she could have a sterile, scrubbed kitchen devoid of emotion. Maybe she was trying to scrub the despair from her life. If only she scrubbed hard enough.

When she finally gave up cooking, I think we were all secretly relieved.

This Week’s Takeaway: Go easy with yourself if you can’t — or don’t want to — remember something. Start with what you can recall, from inanimate objects to the songs on the radio that served as a welcome escape, however brief. Keep the pencil moving, and see where it takes you.