Wheat with sugar and butter, Cream of Rice, cream cheese and olives on rye, tuna on toast, a BLT thick with mayonnaise, fresh orange juice, homemade applesauce, chocolate pudding. Sometimes the hand brought a toy. But the best thing the hand could slide was bacon. You could have bacon every day, and still it was a treat. Our bacon came from the store. It was thickly cut and had a sweet cure on the edges. Usually my mother would have Mattie make the bacon. But on Sunday nights after a long car trip my mother made it. I loved my mother’s bacon. She fried it so crispy, the fat waves turned brown.
Every medicine chest had a mysterious black ointment called Ichthyol that came in a sinister tube with a multiperforated nozzle. My sister and I took turns squeezing it out the window, watching the black strings pass out of sight on their way to the pavement. Like everybody, we had Unguentine for burns, Bayer aspirin, a can of Squibb powdered toothpaste, the very strange-smelling witch hazel, Vicks VapoRub for the vaporizer but also for growing pains, a blue-glass eye cup for when something got in your eye and the pharmacist at Whelan’s was too busy to take it out, Johnson & Johnson Band-Aids that caused more pain coming off than the injury, Breck shampoo, ipecac (a horrible medicine that made you throw up on the spot and feel better just as fast), and the wonder drug, Desitin. The family dermatological credo was, “If it’s wet, dry it. If it’s dry, wet it.” Desitin worked both ways. It could desiccate a pimple overnight. It could keep scabs moist enough not to fall off prematurely.
Beyond the medicine chest, there was my mother’s magic. When a colony of warts popped up on my knee, she rubbed Unguentine in and said, “You may not look at your knee for a week.” I didn’t. In a week the knee was smooth.
“Warts are psychological,” my mother says. “If you believe they’ll go away, they will. Before there was Unguentine, your grandmother used hamburger.”
“And your warts went away?”
“Of course.”
We called all my mother’s good friends Aunt. In addition to my real aunts, I had Aunt Hortie (Mom’s friend from N.Y.U. she spoke to every morning before getting out of bed), Aunt Dorothy (whose island on Schroon Lake was the high point of summer), Aunt Phyllis (who taught me how to whistle), Aunt Betty (who let me watch her stretch on a Playtex rubber girdle she rolled into a tube), Aunt Honey (who sang on Broadway), Aunt Gladys (Mom’s childhood friend from 845 West End Avenue), Aunt Renee (who designed dresses and was married to “Uncle” Harold, the New York City housing commissioner, whose signature was on a sign at Morgen’s that read OCCUPANCY BY MORE THAN 194 PEOPLE IS DANGEROUS AND UNLAWFUL), and Aunt Ruth (who owned racehorses and went to the bathroom with the door open so we could keep talking). Most of them aged well. My mother hasn’t aged at all. When I tell her this, she tries to prepare me. She waxes pragmatic. If there is any way my mother can bumper life’s blows for me, if she could raise her shirt and take each biting, bruising one, she would. So the woman who used to walk backward up Riverside Drive to shield me from the wind says, “I’m not afraid to die. I think of it as a velvet ledge. You’re on black velvet, moving along, and then there’s nothing there. You slide off the velvet ledge, darling. It’s quite comfortable.”
Recently she calls to tell me she doesn’t want the plots.
At first I think she’s saying
plotz.
“We live in Florida now,” she says. “It doesn’t make sense to be buried in Westchester. I’m signing them over to you.”
“I have to be buried by myself?”
“There are four plots,” she says firmly. “You have two. Your cousin Joan has two.”
“
Joanie?
I only see her Thanksgiving!”
We laugh. A week later the deed to plot 034, section 24, comes in the mail.
Down in Florida over Christmas, my mother takes me shopping. She’s
Every medicine chest had a mysterious black ointment called Ichthyol that came in a sinister tube with a multiperforated nozzle. My sister and I took turns squeezing it out the window, watching the black strings pass out of sight on their way to the pavement. Like everybody, we had Unguentine for burns, Bayer aspirin, a can of Squibb powdered toothpaste, the very strange-smelling witch hazel, Vicks VapoRub for the vaporizer but also for growing pains, a blue-glass eye cup for when something got in your eye and the pharmacist at Whelan’s was too busy to take it out, Johnson & Johnson Band-Aids that caused more pain coming off than the injury, Breck shampoo, ipecac (a horrible medicine that made you throw up on the spot and feel better just as fast), and the wonder drug, Desitin. The family dermatological credo was, “If it’s wet, dry it. If it’s dry, wet it.” Desitin worked both ways. It could desiccate a pimple overnight. It could keep scabs moist enough not to fall off prematurely.
Beyond the medicine chest, there was my mother’s magic. When a colony of warts popped up on my knee, she rubbed Unguentine in and said, “You may not look at your knee for a week.” I didn’t. In a week the knee was smooth.
“Warts are psychological,” my mother says. “If you believe they’ll go away, they will. Before there was Unguentine, your grandmother used hamburger.”
“And your warts went away?”
“Of course.”
We called all my mother’s good friends Aunt. In addition to my real aunts, I had Aunt Hortie (Mom’s friend from N.Y.U. she spoke to every morning before getting out of bed), Aunt Dorothy (whose island on Schroon Lake was the high point of summer), Aunt Phyllis (who taught me how to whistle), Aunt Betty (who let me watch her stretch on a Playtex rubber girdle she rolled into a tube), Aunt Honey (who sang on Broadway), Aunt Gladys (Mom’s childhood friend from 845 West End Avenue), Aunt Renee (who designed dresses and was married to “Uncle” Harold, the New York City housing commissioner, whose signature was on a sign at Morgen’s that read OCCUPANCY BY MORE THAN 194 PEOPLE IS DANGEROUS AND UNLAWFUL), and Aunt Ruth (who owned racehorses and went to the bathroom with the door open so we could keep talking). Most of them aged well. My mother hasn’t aged at all. When I tell her this, she tries to prepare me. She waxes pragmatic. If there is any way my mother can bumper life’s blows for me, if she could raise her shirt and take each biting, bruising one, she would. So the woman who used to walk backward up Riverside Drive to shield me from the wind says, “I’m not afraid to die. I think of it as a velvet ledge. You’re on black velvet, moving along, and then there’s nothing there. You slide off the velvet ledge, darling. It’s quite comfortable.”
Recently she calls to tell me she doesn’t want the plots.
At first I think she’s saying
plotz.
“We live in Florida now,” she says. “It doesn’t make sense to be buried in Westchester. I’m signing them over to you.”
“I have to be buried by myself?”
“There are four plots,” she says firmly. “You have two. Your cousin Joan has two.”
“
Joanie?
I only see her Thanksgiving!”
We laugh. A week later the deed to plot 034, section 24, comes in the mail.
Down in Florida over Christmas, my mother takes me shopping. She’s
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