Star Fanny

I never knew my mother when she was young. That is, I never had a sense of her as young and beautiful—if she ever was young and beautiful. I suppose that is true by definition: no child can remember her mother as young. But then, maybe that isn’t really true, either. What is true, though, is that I never thought of my mother as young.

From the earliest age I remember her as fat…really fat…enormously fat…embarrassingly fat. Maybe 300 pounds at her heaviest. No one knew for sure, because she never weighed herself. I thought she was afraid to—afraid to really see the damage she had done to her body. Then again, who knows, maybe it wasn’t easy to find a scale that could actually weigh someone that big.

It is difficult for me to admit that I was embarrassed by my mother’s fatness. A part of me is ashamed of that fact. I should have been a better person. Yet, if I’m honest, the way my mother looked was always a bit of an embarrassment for me. She was fat and wore glasses for distance, which she took off if she had to read anything.

That is one of the good things I inherited from her. My sister did, too. We do not need reading glasses. I feel smug about it, as I can read menus and price tags on clothing and instructions on prescription medications when everyone else around me is fumbling in their pockets for their glasses. I am comforted to have one less deterioration of the body to deal with—one less aging process to accept—one more small, daily victory over time. I always think of my mother then. I can still see her lying in bed, propped up on some pillows, reading the newspapers with her glasses on top of her head.

My mother’s name was Fanny, and she was a great cook. She was famous for her cooking, in fact, especially in Medicine Hat, before she came to live in Vancouver. She became famous in Vancouver too, but it all started in Medicine Hat—her cooking fame, I mean. It was just this little town on the Canadian prairies where she had wound up in life. The place got its name when a local medicine man slipped while he was crossing the river that runs through the town and lost his hat. Maybe that’s a true story, maybe not, but it is what everyone said, so it became a legend.

People always laugh when they hear me talk about that town. They think I am a really funny person and made the name up. But Medicine Hat is a real place, and I was born there—though when my father got to the hospital and the nurse told him he had another girl, instead of the boy he wanted, he said, “Drown her. ” The nurse thought he was kidding, because he was a farmer, and that’s what you did on the farm when you had a litter of kittens or puppies you didn’t want. But I was never sure.

As I said, my mother was a famous cook. She even published her own cookbook. Well, it was really a community project in Medicine Hat to raise money for the school. My mother was the editor, but when you look through the book, you see her name attached to most of the recipes. I still have that cookbook. I keep it in my kitchen cupboard with my other books of recipes. I had to put my mother’s cookbook in a red file folder before I could stack it upright alongside the other books, because it is mostly in tatters. There are rips in many of the pages, and raggedy, curled, orange edges on some of them, too, where I must have burned the page setting it too close to the gas burner on the stove. All the pages have yellowed and have brown stains on them by now, whether from me spilling something on them over the years or just from aging book-spots.

Even the old green cover with my mother’s name on it—“This Is the Property of Fanny Veiner” written in ink in her handwriting and underlined twice—is so wrinkled and torn that I have to keep a large elastic band around it to hold all the pages inside. My sister suggested it would be better if I Xeroxed all those pages, but somehow that didn’t work for me. I like seeing this falling-apart recipe book. It gives me some kind of continuity with an older cooking culture in which my mother was a real star. STAR FANNY, I should call her. There wasn’t much else she could really be a star at in those days. Maybe that’s why she was so fat.

When I was little, my mom used to have chickens killed by a kosher butcher in our backyard. The town had too small a Jewish population for people to be able to afford a kosher butcher of their own, so once a month a butcher would come from the bigger town of Calgary to kill chickens for everyone. The event was always at our house, since we had the biggest yard in the community, with enough room for all the chickens to run around. The butcher would sever their heads through the jugular vein right below the brain stem. The shock would send the nerves in their legs into involuntary jerking, and their little wings into hapless flapping, as the headless bodies ran frantically into each other in a frenzied last dance.

I started screaming the first time I saw the chickens running around in our yard. I screamed and screamed until my mother carried me upstairs and put me to bed. My bedroom was on the second floor and had a big picture window, which I used to leave open at night so I could smell the lilac bushes that rocked back and forth in the prairie wind. After that, she always made sure I was in my bedroom when the kosher butcher came. But as in a horror story, I would be pulled against my will toward that open window and the forbidden chicken dance.

When all the killing was over, my mother hung the chickens up on large hooks in our basement to drain out the blood, then plucked the feathers from them until they were fit for use. One or two at a time, she would bring the chickens into the kitchen, cook them into one of her special recipes, and then serve them at the table, all cut up in pieces and tasting so good that no one could ever imagine they had once been running around headless in our yard.

Even though my mother was such a good cook, I never really forgave her for being so fat. It left such a mark on me, and on everyone: my children, my sister, her children, our grandchildren, our aunts and uncles, their children, and maybe their children’s children. My mother was this terrible example everyone had to pay attention to, this fear of getting fat that haunted us all through our lives. It was something we were born into, something we had to work against rather than towards. She was an anti-role model, an anti-guru guru. It gave every one of us a peculiar relationship to our bodies and created a smorgasbord of body issues to feed on: fear, disgust, anorexia, bulimia, self-doubt, self-loathing, guilt. Take your pick.

There was one good thing about it: both my sister and I became very good cooks. I had to give it up around age thirty-five though. I had become so good at cooking that I could see it was becoming an art, and I couldn’t afford an art with everything else I needed then--like a job, so I could take care of my two children after divorcing my husband of six years who turned out to be, as the Freudian psychoanalyst his father sent him to concluded, “a charming psychopath. ”

So I gave up cooking around that age. But cooking is a wonderful thing, and if I ever have time in the future to take up an art again, I think that’s one of the things I would want to do.

Sometimes I wonder if I stopped cooking because it reminded me of my mother. Food seemed to define her in so many ways---her love of it and what that stood for. Sublimation of sexuality, her first psychiatrist said. He was another psychoanalyst with a severe Freudian bent. But who knows? Maybe he was right. Maybe it was yearnings that couldn’t be controlled. Maybe it was a repression so deep that only food could give her comfort. Conflict? Blockage? Gluttony? One thing for sure: she was always starving.

I guess I forgot to mention that my mother also suffered from manic depression. To use the sanitized phrase of today, bipolar syndrome. Or maybe it’s bipolar disorder? Hard to keep up. Anyway, you get the picture. Half the time she was flying high, and half the time she was sunk in some sort of deep depression. Once, she went to bed for about a year. I had to grow up very quickly.

One day when she was in one of her depressions, I had to get to school early, and I went into her bedroom to ask her if I could drive the car. She wasn’t in any condition to take me. I was only fourteen at the time and didn’t have a driver’s licence, but I had already learned how to drive a car and a tractor on the farm. She said no, I couldn’t, but I took the car anyway. That was the day our garage burned down, and she was glad in the end that I hadn’t listened to her. When she saw that the garage was burning, she apparently got so excited that she dialed the operator, meaning to call the fire department, and hollered into the receiver “Get me the FBI” instead.

My mother had a hard time looking after two little girls on her own when she left my father. That was a time when divorce made you pretty much a leper in the Jewish community, as well as in the community at large. She made her way as best she could, with very little money and no role models. Sometimes late at night she would tell me stories. She told me the first time she ever experienced a full-blown depression was after the birth of her first child, a son who died on the night of the delivery. The doctor had been drunk and caused a blockage in the umbilical cord. She told me this matter-of-factly, but it couldn’t have been matter of fact at the time, in that little town in Alberta, with a drunk doctor, and a handsome husband who blamed her instead of the doctor because she had gotten so fat, and a mother-in-law who lived with them and was jealous of my mother because she was “too smart for her own good. ”

Later, there were occasional long stretches of time when my mother was somewhere in between the highs and lows, like the time that she pulled up stakes and moved to southern California and went back to school to finish her university degree. She was close to sixty at the time, and that took a lot of courage. Her dream ended when they discovered and removed a tumor in her brain that was the size of a grapefruit—something that should have been diagnosed years earlier. She survived the operation but was left with a weakened left side, needing a wheelchair to get around.

Of course she hated the wheelchair because of the image it projected. My mother was very selective when it came to image management, and she wouldn’t use it. The only recourse was going back to bed again. She moved into an upscale senior citizens’ home where she would lie all day in her bedroom, waiting for her food to be delivered on a tray, or for the delivery boy to bring her the kosher hot dogs she’d ordered from the delicatessen on the corner, getting up only to go to the bathroom.

Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer. It was like watching a layer of mold growing over her life. So one day I went into her bedroom with two gigantic ambulance drivers and a stretcher. The drivers had brought a motorized hoist along, and they wrapped a sling around her body and lifted her, like a piece of granite stone, clear off the bed, onto the stretcher and into the ambulance. She cried when they lifted her in the air. She didn’t want to leave the snug, warm security of that bed. It was like we were ripping her away from a womb in which she had taken a final refuge.

We moved my mother into the psychiatric ward at the hospital, where she stayed for six months until she was able to function better. Fortunately, she had the time of her life there. The psychiatric ward turned out to be the catalyst for a kind of rebirth. She didn’t have to make any decisions herself; she was told what to do and how to do it. And she liked being taken care of, no matter how severe the restrictions on her freedom. Or maybe it was because of the restrictions on her freedom, since she was usually incapable of restricting herself.

I also forgot to tell you that my mother had a definite dramatic flair, and a charismatic personality. In the hospital she became a star again, the centre of attention in her therapy group. When I came to see her in the evenings, her cheeks were flushed. She would be all dolled up in her beautiful clothes, with fresh make-up on her face, and she was full of tales about what had happened that day. She told stories about the other people in the group and what she had said to help them.

There is something else I haven’t told you: my mother was a brilliant woman. Why didn’t I say that at the beginning, instead of focusing on the fact that she was FAT? I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to putting image first. Did I learn that from her? Anyway, it’s the truth, and I’m telling you now: my mother was an unusually intelligent woman. She completed normal school (the name for teachers’ college in ancient times) when she was only fifteen and had to wait a year until she was old enough to teach school. She earned enough money teaching to go to university, and at the age of seventeen she traveled alone from Lethbridge, Alberta, the little town where she was born, all the way to San Francisco to attend the University of California at Berkeley. She had made up her mind to study economics and become a banker. It was 1927, and a journey like that for a teenage girl in those times was comparable to Columbus crossing the Atlantic Ocean or Magellan rounding the Cape. One year later the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that women were not “persons” and therefore could not be appointed to the Senate.

My mother was in her second year at Berkeley when my father looked her up. He was tall and handsome and drove a shiny Model T convertible. He was on the lam from Canada for a few months because he had hit a man who called him a “dirty Jew” so hard that the man had sailed clear over a car. The man’s four brothers started looking for my father, so he got out of town fast. His mother told him if he was going to California to look up this nice Jewish girl she had heard was at Berkeley and came from a neighboring town.

It turns out my mother was once thin and beautiful, as the picture of her wedding to my father in 1929 shows. My dad looked like John Wayne. From time to time I still wear her wedding dress to a formal dinner or a dance, although I had to put new mink cuffs on the sleeves because the old ones were going ratty. The pale beige lace is still beautiful, even if it has gone yellow around the edges over the years—just like the pages of her cookbook.

That wedding picture hangs on my wall with other family photos. Sometimes I search her face for a shadow of despair, like the negative lurking behind the picture. The truth of it is, the shape of her life had been determined years before she had gone to Berkeley, and years before my father had shown up there in his fancy car. It had been decided by the men in the community, and the women themselves. Choices had not been possible. Choices had already been set in stone. Despite her courage and intelligence, my mother could not escape the internalized siren song that said the pinnacle of life for a woman was to be chosen by a man. She had married the handsome stranger when he asked her, right there in California, and given up her dreams of a career.

And so my mother wound up back in Canada, in another tiny prairie town that was freezing cold in winter and burning hot in summer. That was where I was born, and where I watched her pluck and roast, knit and mend, pickle and can, as all good prairie women had to do. I always wondered if that was hard for her to do. How did she learn? How did she feel as she pulled the feathers from dead chickens, hanging on metal hooks in the basement in the big red brick house my father bought without even asking her? Her hands were all rough and red, this woman who had once done calculus and trigonometry at a great university. How long did she hold onto her dreams about another life in those early years when she was a thin and beautiful young bride and mother?

Those dreams haunt me still.

My Mother’s Chicken Soup

First you kill a chicken, but if that isn’t possible, see below:

Ingredients:
1 boiling fowl, 6 – 7 lbs.
2 medium onions, or 1 large
2 large carrots cut in thick slices
1 parsnip cut up
1 bunch of celery leaves, tied up
1 bunch of dill weed, tied up
Table salt

Order the fowl the day before cooking the soup. Have the butcher cut it into pieces. Wash the pieces thoroughly with cold water and rub with 2 tsp. table salt. Let it stand in the fridge overnight (or same day – 2 hours minimum).

Take chicken out of the fridge and rinse well in cold water. Put in a large pot and add cold water just to cover. Peel the onions and cut a cross into each of them, then add to the pot.

Bring to a boil over medium-high heat. While heating up, remove all scum that rises to the top. Reduce heat to a simmer and simmer for 25 minutes.

Remove pot from stove. Line large strainer with a double layer of cheesecloth and put over a large bowl. Remove chicken from pot with tongs and pour the liquid through the strainer. Squeeze juices out of the onions, and then discard.

Wash the pot thoroughly and rinse out. Rinse the chicken pieces with cold water and put them back into the pot. Return the broth to the pot as well. Add 2 carrots, cut into large slices, 1 parsnip in slices and the bundle of celery leaves. Add 1 tsp. of table salt.

Return to a boil and reduce to a simmer. Simmer partially covered for 30 minutes. Then add the bundle of fresh dill weed. Continue simmering for 10 more minutes.

Remove from heat. Take out chicken with tongs. Pour soup through a strainer into a large bowl. Remove vegetables from strainer. Discard celery and put carrots, parsnip and chicken in fridge.

Let the soup cool on the counter. Cover the bowl with saran wrap and transfer to the fridge. Let it sit overnight. Then skim off all the fat collected at the top with a slotted spoon so it is a golden colour.

To serve: Put in a pot, add back the carrots and parsnip and bring to boil. If you like, you can boil lokshen (fine, flat noodles) separately, drain, and put some in each soup bowl before adding the hot soup. Eat the cold, boiled chicken separately or discard.