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Sissy
My Mother’s Kisses
Today, my mother came to visit me, and we kissed hello and we kissed goodbye. I watched her get into the car with my friend, who had driven her to my new house. She looked older, more bent and frail than she had the week before.
My mother and I kiss rarely, perhaps twice a year, on a special holiday, or a birthday. We kissed on each of my three trips to the maternity floor of the hospital, and on my return home with a new baby.
But last month we moved. Our new house is much nicer than the one we left, and I hope its walls will shelter many joyous moments. Our new house is an hour’s ride from my old house. Our old house was around the corner from my parents.
There will be no more mother-daughter arguments which really are not arguments. “You and MomMom are always yelling at each other,” my daughter once said, and I laughed, “We weren’t arguing. We were talking!”
Once, we actually stopped talking – or she did. It was my first week home from the hospital with my infant son, my third child in five years. On a freezing-cold February morning, I opened my front door to retrieve the newspaper, looking forward to a quiet cup of coffee before the breakfast onslaught.
Florence, my mother, was sitting on the cold concrete step, reading my newspaper, waiting for me to open the door.
Uninvited, she had walked around the corner at dawn to help with the children, to sing to them and prepare their breakfast dishes and fill my tiny kitchen beyond its limit – and mine.
After a few mornings of daybreak bedlam in the kitchen, I got nerve enough to say, “Mom, please don’t come here at 8 o’clock in the morning. I am not a morning person. I need to start my day alone – to read my newspaper, enjoy my coffee – before the kids wake up.”
I knew by the look in her eyes how stricken she was. “I wanted to help you!” she responded. Then, she disappeared from my house, and our lives, for a week, a very long time when you live around the corner from your daughter and three small grandchildren you cherish.
I couldn’t stand her absence. I hadn’t meant to hurt her so terribly. Still, I needed my privacy. I needed to set rules.
At the end of that week I walked to her house and apologized for hurting her. We talked it out. She understood there had to be boundaries when a daughter is an adult. She stopped showing up at dawn, despite her need to help me.
She didn’t wait for an invitation all the time. And I didn’t expect her to.
I never understood the blessing of having an extended family within walking distance until I didn’t have that blessing anymore.
You don’t raise your voice to a mother you may not see again for three or four weeks. You treat her as a guest in your home, and you kiss her hello and you kiss her goodbye.
Life is a series of changing relationships. One part of your life ends. Another begins. Yet you take something from each part of your life and transmit it, intact, to what comes next. I expect my children to treasure, all their lives, the memories they will surely have of a grandmother who was always there.
To Florence, whose life was wrapped around kitchen and kinder, my little ones filled the void that opened when her children grew up. My sons drove over to her house on their bikes and went right to the cookie jar (she baked fresh cookies every week) and sat down with her for a snack and a talk. My daughter, when she was six, got angry with me one day and packed a suitcase, “I’m not going to live here anymore,” she told me. “I’m going to live at MomMom’s.” And off she went, full of sobs and bravado, to the grandmother around the corner. I had to do some fast and straight-from-the shoulder talking to make my mother understand that she was not to open her arms to the little princess. She was to send her home.
MomMom came to every school play. She couldn’t have gleaned more pleasure from a Broadway production than she did from her grandson woodenly reciting his two lines as he stood on the stage with the other eight-year-old pilgrims at Thanksgiving. She often saw the report cards before I did. The kids stopped at her house on their way home.
And there was never a fever she didn’t find out about, and dramatize out of proportion, so that all the aunts and uncles in the family called to find out how the patient was doing. I was annoyed. .But it didn’t annoy me to call on a morning I had an appointment, to say, “Mom, can you come over in about 20 minutes? I have to leave and Danny (or one of the other two) has a fever.” She never refused.
Once, when I had already returned to a career and was influenced by the women’s movement, I told my mother, “I am raising my children so that they won’t need me.” Her face paled.
“Your children will always need you,” she said.
“Yes, but in a different way.” I answered. I knew I had hurt her.
The Sunday before we moved to the house so far away from my parents,, my youngest, Stuart, disappeared before breakfast. It was a pleasant summer morning. We lived in a neighborhood of small row houses and people who knew each other and looked after each other’s children. He wasn’t gone long enough for me to worry. And I was busy packing the last few boxes.
He returned home when I was making beds, and I assumed he had helped himself to cereal and milk. That afternoon, my mother called, and said, “Did you know I had a guest for breakfast this morning?”
My son had gotten on his bike, taken the short drive to MomMom’s house, and waited till she asked the inevitable question. “Are you hungry?”
“I guess so,” was the answer. And the two of them solemnly sat down to a quiet, impromptu meal together, their own private farewell.
I know my mother is happy that my husband and I are taking this big step to a roomy house in the suburbs on a half acre of ground. I know that we will build new memories here, that my parents will be a part of them. I hope they will be here for the graduations and the weddings, and that the long automobile ride to MomMom’s house will become as routine to us as the bike ride around the corner.
Our bonds have been woven of strong material. All their lives, their grandmother will be a special person to my children, even when she is no longer with them. She knows this. I know this. Still, it hurts me to kiss her hello and to kiss her goodbye.
Sissy Carpey is the author of “A Piece of Her Heart” a memoir about growing up in her immigrant family, and the lifelong separation of a mother and daughter by the Russian Revolution.
She has been published in many newspapers and magazines and has won many writing awards, including a Clarion Award from Women in Communications for an article about her retarded brother.
Her mother, Florence Litz, died three years after Sissy and her husband and children moved to the suburbs.
A Grandmother’s Strudel Recipe
A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That.
Nobody but my grandmother Malka could make my grandmother’s strudel. Not daughter nor granddaughter nor daughter in law.
Nobody would try. Nobody would dare to.
Until my friend, tasting the strudel at a party at my house, said to the old lady, “You made this?”
My grandmother nodded. “You like it?” It was a question posed for effect. Was there anyone who didn’t like my grandmother’s strudel?
“It is delicious,” said my friend. And then, “Will you show me how to make it?”
My grandmother lost the dignity of her almost 90 years for a moment. First she looked surprised … that a young woman would aspire. Then she nodded. The role of teacher appealed to her.
“Yes.” Her voice was strong. “I will come here for a few days soon, and I will make strudel. You will watch and you will learn.”
She came carrying her huge baking board and her rolling pin, and a small suitcase — because when you are almost 90, you don’t bake in the morning and go home in the afternoon. Besides, it’s fine to have a reason to spend a few days with your grandchildren and great grandchildren.
On the morning of the first day, we went to the supermarket to buy the necessary ingredients. Nuts. White raisins. Lemons. I reached a hand into the lemon pile and chose a lemon she rejected. I began to feel like the little girl who used to play with leftover dough on my grandmother’s baking table. I could not find the orange marmalade but she would not compromise with pineapple. I found the orange.
She strode down the supermarket aisle and stopped at the flour display.
“I like this flour best,” she said, pointing to a brand I never see advertised and never used. We bought the brand she wanted.
She came downstairs early the next morning in a neat skirt and blouse covered with an apron. She was ready for work. Gently, I restrained her. The women (the class had grown to two) were coming to learn, I told her. They must watch every step if they were to get a good recipe. Reluctantly, she agreed to wait.
The two students arrived, and one was my cousin, though not on this grandmother’s side of the family tree. Still, my cousin, Gloria, was not a stranger to her. Gloria came with her two pre-school boys in tow.
The old lady was polite, but firm. “You cannot come into the kitchen,” she told them. “This is not a job for boys!” They were properly awed by the authority of her tone and stayed out of the kitchen.
The lesson began.
Old hands, as white as the flour which soon covered them, measured, and mixed, and tested for consistency.
My grandmother belonged to the school of “a little of this and a little of that.” A measuring cup was not standard equipment for her. But a teacher must begin at the beginning. And so she measured, and the students watched and wrote everything down. Then, she added, and they erased. What emerged was a recipe fit for a cookbook.
The Dough
- 4 and one-half cups of all-purpose flour
- 1 heaping teaspoon salt
- 1 heaping teaspoon baking powder
- 2 eggs at room temperature
- 3/4 cup vegetable oil
- 3/4 cup sugar
- Enough warm water to make the dough stretchable
Mix dry ingredients first, then add eggs (beaten), oil, and water, and roll dough on a floured board and knead. Dough should be sticky, but light. Divide dough into four equal mounds. Knead each section in more flour. Then cover each section with a dry, clean kitchen towel, and let it rest for several minutes.
Cousin Gloria follows my grandmother’s recipe to this day. But there is an easier alternative. Buy phyllo dough at your supermarket and follow the instructions. You will find phyllo dough in the frozen food section.
The Filling
- 2 pounds white raisins, steamed, then drained
- 2 12-ounce jars cherry preserves
- 1 18-ounce jar orange marmalade
- 2 grated lemons
- 1 pound of fresh walnuts, shelled and chopped
- 1/2 cup sugar cinnamon
- 2 handfuls of cake and cookie crumbs
Combine all ingredients except crumbs, and set aside until dough is ready.
Now it was time to roll out the first mound of dough. Her students were silently respectful, but in awe of the old lady at the same time. Soon, she drizzled oil and then cinnamon on the thin dough. She followed that with a mixture of cookie crumbs, and then she spooned the fruit and nut filling generously on to the dough, making a two inch ribbon of filling. Now, she picked up another two inch edge of thin dough next to the filled dough, rolled up the dough, and stretched and filled and cut once more. Each layer of fruit and nut filling was thinner than the one before it.
She tucked here, rolled there, and the first strudel roll was ready for the oven.
Then she began again and filled another roll, her students watching with awe and respect.
When she was ready to begin the third mound, one of her students asked if she could try to make the roll of strudel.
Neither my friend nor my cousin were strangers to the art of baking. “Oh, no,” said my grandmother, in anger. “You will ruin it for me.”
The two students were reduced to the helplessness of beginners by my grandmother’s tone. They sat back in their chairs and returned to their note taking.
We brushed the tops of the strudel rolls with a beaten egg white and sprinkled with sugar. We made indentations where we would later make slices. This, my grandmother explained, would make the dough easier to cut when it was cool.
The rolls of strudel were baked at 350 degrees. I was too busy cleaning up to notice how long the strudel was in the oven, but the dough got nice and brown on the top.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon before the strudel went into the oven, a long time for a lady of Malka’s years to be standing on her feet. She looked very tired. I made her a cup of tea, and she went to a quiet room and took a doze.
I had just about dried the last pot and swept the last drops of flour from the floor when she walked into the kitchen.
There was a young sound to her voice.
“The little pieces of dough that were left,” she said. “It’s wasteful not to use them. Come! We will boil some potatoes and make potato knishes for supper tonight.”
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