Starting with a poem this week...
(The third installment of Boardinghouse Reach, with a recipe, follows below)
Blow-Drying My Grown Son’s Long Hair
Everything about this brief visit
says goodbye: the hot home-cooked meal,
a last long shower before you hit the road.
My offer to blow-dry your long hair—
the bone-deep motherly urge
to keep you from darting out wet
into the night.
Pulling the warm air through the brown tangle
that reaches your shoulders,
I watched you close your eyes and enjoy
my solicitude and the sleepy feeling
induced by someone else combing one’s hair.
I didn’t mention the little flaxen sheaf
saved from your first haircut,
tied with a golden thread and tucked away
in a secret drawer.
Or remembering how it felt to feed you
when my body made your food, both before
and after you were born—how good it was to know
that I could provide everything you needed then.
Though you’re well launched now in your own life,
it feels like part of my body is about to be carried away
as, towering above me, you wrap me in your arms
and I smile, trying not to cry
as you say goodbye.
and now, back to Boardinghouse Reach…
Chapter 3
Learning To Do the Shimmy
Kyle was just finishing up his last year of private nursery school. In the interest of minimizing the hours I’d spend driving back and forth between school, home, and soccer practice, I knew I should base my move on whatever elementary school he’d be attending—but, at this point, I had no idea. Should I play Russian roulette with the Berkeley public school system, which makes assignments based on an arcane system of points and racial preferences? Should I move to neighboring Albany, where school assignment is at least predictable? Or should I go begging on bended knee for a scholarship from one of the excellent private schools in the area that costs as much as attendance at Harvard did ten years ago, and is fifty bucks a pop per application?
I toyed with the idea of moving to the Wine Country, where public schools are reputedly better, where I could get a fresh start and might even be able to manage, eventually, to buy a condominium. But Stewart let me know through a mutual friend that we’d better not move more than half an hour’s drive away from where his boat was docked at the Berkeley Marina if we wanted him to maintain an active role as Kyle’s father. This was less a reflection of his feelings about Kyle—which are as ardent as any father’s—as they were an expression of his anger towards me.
I knew that Kyle needed his dad. No matter how good a mother I managed to be, I could never teach our son about what it means to be a man. Nor could I redraw whatever behavioral roadmap Stewart drew for his son. All I could do was teach Kyle how to read maps and how to journey with open eyes.
Kyle was everything to me, despite my flirtations. No one’s kisses were as sweet to me as those of my little boy; no one’s absence weighed upon me so heavily after a day or two.
Stewart had tricked out a little berth for Kyle on the boat and bought him a pirate hat. Kyle slept there, rocking in the wind, two nights a week. I used these as my date nights. By five o’clock on Saturday, when Stewart was due to bring Kyle home to me, I felt an ache in my chest reminiscent of the ache I felt when my breasts were full of milk and I heard Kyle cry. I wondered if this physical need to have my son close by—to hold him in my arms, to snuffle up the scent of his skin and hair—would ever go away.
***
A Recipe for Feeling Full Even When There’s a Huge Hole in Your Heart
There are certain foods in this world that please everyone, young and old, from every culture. Honestly, I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like a good, steaming plateful of spaghetti and meatballs, especially when the weather is cold or life seems particularly unfair. Let’s refrain from talk of calories. This is a recipe for feeling nourished and comforted and ready to face a long, arduous journey, whether from childhood to adulthood or across one of life’s scrubbier, more difficult patches.
Dirty little secret: bottled spaghetti sauces are really all right if you don’t have time to make one from scratch. Try to find a product that doesn’t have sugar or any other sweetening added. Organically grown tomatoes are a plus. You can doctor up sauce in a jar with fresh herbs, sautéed mushrooms and garlic. But the thing that will really make the sauce into nothing more than pleasant background is the batch of homemade meatballs you’ll drop into the bubbling pot, one by one, after they’re nicely browned.
Take one pound of ground meat (the best quality you can afford, hormone-free if possible). Ground chuck is actually better for meatballs than a leaner cut, as the fat adds flavor.
Add about half a cup of homemade breadcrumbs (or packaged, if you must), one egg, about a quarter of a cup of minced onion, a handful of chopped fresh flat-leafed parsley, one or two cloves of crushed fresh garlic, and salt and pepper to taste. (I sometimes like to substitute a couple of teaspoons of basil pesto for the garlic.)
Heat a little bit of olive oil in a heavy gauge frying pan.
Squish all the ingredients together with your hands until they’re completely mixed up. Form smallish meatballs, a little smaller than a ping-pong ball. Sauté them in the oil, leaving enough room in the pan to shake it and cook the meatballs all over. As they brown, drop them into your simmering pot of sauce (doctored or undoctored).
You don’t have to cook this for a very long time for it to be quite delicious.
My late Italian mother in-law taught me to put some freshly grated Romano cheese on each plate, then top it with a spoonful of sauce before adding the pasta. (Cook the pasta according to package directions, and drain it well.) Ladle on the meatballs with sauce, then top with more freshly grated Grana Padana or Romano cheese. (None of the stuff you shake out of a cardboard container, please!)
Give a modest-sized serving to each person—spaghetti with meatballs is very filling. Serve with red wine, some crusty bread, and a green salad. Eat slowly, and talk to each other if at all possible.
***
When Jax went back to Thailand, the home-stay program replaced him with a Swiss German named Peter, a twenty-one-year-old with the disposition and personality of a middle-aged man. Clean, orderly and parochial, Peter was utterly resistant to any of the Bay Area’s cultural richesse. He quietly pined for his beloved Zurich, where he’d already mapped out his future life, unto the very apartment where he hoped to live. He was immune to the charms of any of the other students in his program. The Asian girls, he said, were all ugly (which I found impossible to believe); the girls he saw around Berkeley, he said, were mostly fat. I thought what a shame it was, in a way, that Stewart was no longer in residence to provide companionship for Peter in his generally anorectic take on things.
To me and Kyle, though, Peter was unfailingly cordial. He and I shared a glass of wine every night at dinner. He was patient and supportive in the presence of my attempts to discipline Kyle for unacceptable mealtime behavior. We were an odd sort of family. I practiced my college German with Peter when I wanted to say something I didn’t want Kyle to understand; in his quiet, conservative sort of way, Peter was irresistible as a confidant. I talked to him about my private life, solid in the knowledge that he would keep my secrets to himself. Like Jax, he also kicked around the soccer globe with Kyle, making me realize that soccer is the Esperanto of the modern world.
***
The World According to Jasmine: Writer for Hire
My friend Dominique warned me that no woman should trust any of her romantic feelings in the first year following the end of her marriage.
Dominique is what one would call a philosopher-hair stylist. In the hour and a half it usually takes her to cut my hair to her satisfaction, she always leaves me with a nugget of hard-earned wisdom to ponder. There was a rocky period, to be sure, during Dominique’s divorce, when I had to be careful to steer her away from any discussion of her future ex. A passionate as well as an extraordinarily beautiful woman, she would snip in savage punctuation of her remarks about her husband, with sometimes disastrous results. But for the most part, watching Dominique cut my hair makes me feel like a work of art in progress. My biggest fear, in the personal grooming department, is that Dominique will finally realize how great her talent is, start painting (or sculpting) and abandon her hair-cutting clients entirely.
It’s probably been commented on before how similar the haircutter-client relationship is to that of the therapist and those who come to pay big money and pour out their hearts. For both professionals, the job provides a captive audience. Dominique says that she herself understands her deep-seated need to be heard. Standing with sharp and potentially deadly instruments above and behind someone else who is sitting in a chair is pretty much a guarantee of commanding that person’s attention. Therapists give weight to their words by making sure that you’re the one babbling. When they finally speak—always in measured tones, with eye contact indicative of empathy and compassion—you’re bound to listen. These are the pearls of wisdom you’re paying a hundred to a hundred and fifty bucks a truncated hour to hear.
In both these jobs, the practitioner enjoys an atmosphere of controlled intimacy. It is only a difference in monetary ambition, artistic skill or educational attainment that determines whether a person chooses one profession or the other. Both allow the person in question to avoid those painful life situations in which the degree of intimacy in a given encounter is dictated by somebody else. Both offer a service touching upon the most vulnerable part of the client’s self-esteem, which the professionals enjoy a frightening amount of power to either enhance or annihilate.
In both situations, for different but equally compelling reasons, the client feels an irresistible urge toward self-disclosure. In the one case, this is out of the desire to get one’s money’s worth out of the therapy hour. The tendency to divulge one’s juiciest secrets to one’s hairdresser is a slightly more mysterious matter. Perhaps it has something to do with the fug of chemicals that often permeate the atmosphere of the salon. Perhaps it’s the regression and instantaneous feeling of surrender induced by having someone else wash your hair, or the thrum of unfamiliar music or the indirect manner of looking at one another and everyone else in the salon through the infinite regression of mirrors. Both situations transport the client out of the normal adult realm into a more childlike world in which the client is, once again, smack at the center of the universe.
Personally, I think the hair-cutter offers the better deal, as the hourly rate is not only lower, but you also get a terribly useful service as a bonus: you walk out of the door looking ever so much more together and elegant than you did walking in. Whereas the opposite is often true of the therapeutic encounter, which sees you exiting through a secret door, your face blotchy from crying, your eyes red and swollen, your cheeks streaked with makeup and tears.
The mutuality of the haircutter brand of therapy is also delightful. Even though Dominique keeps a firm hand on just how much she does or doesn’t disclose to me about the current exigencies of her personal life, she nonetheless tells me a great deal. We also go out together once in a while to sip drinks at a chic café or see a chick flick together. I have yet to be offered such treats by any therapist who has been in my pay. (And, of course, I know that it would be strictly against their professional code of conduct.)
Far from disparaging the conventional therapy relationship, Dominique is a great subscriber to it—perhaps because, by virtue of her professional affiliation, she’s barred from the kind of relationship with her haircutter that I have with her. When I wished her courage recently with a thorny relationship issue she was trying to smooth out, she said, “Who needs courage? I have therapy.” The other profession, I think, could not possibly receive a higher tribute.
