Friday the Thirteenth (1965) by Leonora Carrington
Today I’m making dinner for 17 family members, a traditional Carpatho-Rusyn meal called Valia that I make every year. The meal features homemade potato and cheese pierogi. They’re the absolute star of the show, surrounded by a far less talented and charming cast of prunes, sauerkraut and mushrooms, bobotky (bread soaked in honey and poppy seeds), lima beans, very plain rolls, and cloves of raw garlic.
One thing that’s pretty nice about starting off your meal by biting into a clove of raw garlic is that it’s all uphill from there. But honestly, raw garlic is like the sidekick that makes the star of the show seem that much more delightful.
And after a few years, the whole meal grows on you. You love the whole cast beyond reason. It doesn’t even make sense. This happened to my husband before my eyes. The first year I made Valia, he was like,
“Oh, now we get prunes.”
“Hmm, now sauerkraut. Right after the stewed prunes. In the same bowl. Interesting.”
But now on Christmas Eve he bubbles away about how much he likes to bite straight into a clove of raw garlic.
“The garlic is for warding off evil spirits,” my mother always says.
“What do the other courses stand for?” my sister’s in-laws always ask.
This is when the table falls silent in shame. Each course symbolizes something that no one really remembers and no one has the patience to research it. Even now that the information superhighway is finally complete enough that it’s starting to destroy itself — even now that we’re all complete enough to finally start destroying ourselves — we still haven’t looked it all up and written it down and memorized it all.
So we go to bed each Christmas Eve vowing to do better next year.
***
I can’t start feeling guilty about that now. Because it requires all of my patience and energy to make 120 pierogi by hand. This is not a minor task.
The first step is crack four eggs into a hill of flour. When you start the day with your fingers in a pool of eggs and flour, you’re committing yourself to many, many hours of menial labor. Twelve hours of menial labor requires total surrender, total patience. “I live to serve,” you whisper to yourself as you gently squeeze pockets of air out of each dumpling.
One Christmas my mother decided to travel with her friends to Egypt. I found this insulting and unbearable, so I flew home to stay at her house and make Christmas Eve dinner all by myself. My brother wasn’t coming home that year. My sister was living in my hometown, but she was a medical resident and she was on call until 10 pm. So I cooked all day, alone in my mother’s house, and my sister and her boyfriend showed up at 10 and ate.
I’ve made Valia every year ever since. That said, I honestly don’t know the person who flew across the country to cook and serve a holiday meal for two people at 10 at night. Even though it looks like the utmost in generous sacrifice, I suspect that there was more than a little compulsive need in the mix. I couldn’t handle being abandoned on Christmas. I was trying to fix the situation. I couldn’t reckon with change.
I guess my stubborn display of dedication to family tradition worked, because my mother never left town for Christmas again. I took over Valia from her maybe five years ago, but as recently as last year she marveled that I knew how to make the whole thing myself. She was standing in my kitchen, telling me how to do things as if I’d never done them before.
“I made this last year, you know. For all of us.”
“You did? I don’t remember that.”
“Yes. And I’ve made it for Bill and the kids every year we didn’t come here.”
“Really? I don’t think we had Valia in LA when I was there.”
At this, I stopped stirring the browned butter gravy, turned off the burner, and found my phone. Yep. There she was in LA, eating Valia.
“That’s funny, I don’t remember that,” she said, looking at the photos.
What’s truly funny is how, when my mother says “I don’t remember that,” it doesn’t sound like “Ooops, how did I forget that?” to me. No. It sounds more like “Look, I will admit now that this actually happened, since there is clear photographic evidence of it here, right in front of my eyes. However, it’s almost like it didn’t happen at all, isn’t it? Since I don’t remember it? And I really, truly don’t.”
This is probably why I sometimes say things like
“Well. It did happen.”
And she sometimes says
“Well, I don’t remember it.”
Photo in hand, she says this.
“Really, Heather. I don’t.”
***
Yep. We’re driving straight to the edge of the family-holiday-drama cliff this morning, to get all of you motherfuckers prepared for the next two days. Like I said, I live to serve.
My mother doesn’t have dementia. She’s not trying to one-up me, exactly. Somehow when I say “It happened, trust me,” she gets backed into a defensive position about her emotional experience of NOT REMEMBERING IT HAPPENING. I don’t mean she’s defensive about not remembering. She’s defensive about living in a different emotional reality than me in that moment. She’s defensive about being a person with her own thoughts and feelings that I don’t understand. In other words, when I say “You are wrong, and that is just a fact,” she’s sent back into some childhood state of not being seen, not being heard, not being respected.
I can relate!
But this is what happens when remnants of primordial shame get kicked up among family members. It happens to everyone in the room. It’s just very, very difficult to know the same people for years and years, people you grew up with, people who care about you. Just when you think it’ll be easy, watch out! It’s a fucking powder keg! Tread lightly!
Because most people, particularly when they’re around their families of origin, are broken and ineffectual and ambivalent enough that they erase each other and disrespect each other without even realizing it. When I say “I will correct the record for you,” in the most dispassionate tone possible, my mother and I are already on shaky ground. It doesn’t matter what we’re talking about. We could be debating whether that’s a downy woodpecker or a hairy woodpecker at the birdfeeder. We could be discussing whether or not it’s fair that she drew the most lucrative route through Scandinavian countries again in European Ticket to Ride. It doesn’t matter at all. The only real information being exchanged between us is this:
I feel invisible. I don’t think you’re seeing me clearly.
I feel silenced. You’re not hearing what I’m saying.
***
It takes forever for your closest family members to see past the cartoon character they have in their heads. I probably don’t need to elaborate here because everyone knows what I mean. To your family, you’re a caricature of your weirdest or most stubborn or most humiliating childhood traits. To my family, at least before I moved back to my hometown, I was a cross between a diva and a bratty baby who pooped her pants every few minutes. To them, I was perpetually threatening to either confront someone angrily, burst into tears, or belt out a showtune on top of the dining room table. It didn’t matter that I had two small kids and ran in circles to handle them for a solid decade. In their minds, I was still about to yank the tablecloth off the table in the middle of dinner and then run to my room, throw myself on my bed, and cry into my pillow.
They were afraid of me. And it’s true that I used to have a tendency to steer the conversation places no one really wanted it to go. If I sensed someone really didn’t want to talk about something, it was like I was a dog and they were hiding a squeaky toy behind their backs, squeezing it repeatedly. I needed to see what all the fuss was about!
In my defense, I had no idea people were so fucking reluctant to talk honestly about emotional things. I just didn’t get it at all. I thought I was helping all of us by turning our meals and trips into group therapy sessions. But these days, I try not to push anyone. I can see how much agony it incites, when you nudge someone into conversational territory they dislike. But it’s honestly taken me four decades to land here. When you absolutely treasure being asked pushy or uncomfortable questions, you just can’t fathom that other people find you rude basically every single time you open your mouth.
I was ignorant and insensitive, no doubt. What sucked was that I didn’t understand that the tiniest little weirdness or moment of assertiveness on my part would reinforce the preexisting cartoon version of me dramatically, because that’s how it is to see people two or three times a year. You just don’t have enough time to take in the fact that these are functioning adults with full lives who, quirky or not, don’t actually struggle to maintain relationships with other people in most cases. They are simply humans you knew when you were very young, so everything they say evokes this murky and mysterious universe of intense and wildly ambivalent emotions living inside your body, emotions that predictably leak out all over the place the two or three times a year these humans are around.
Once you see the bastards every week, though, those wild and vivid associations start to mellow and fade and you have more of a rapport based on mundane cooperative efforts. Instead of “YOU NEVER LISTEN TO ME!” your primary communications are “Who’s bringing the wine?” and “Where is [nephew’s] jazz band playing again?” and “Can you make the rolls? We definitely need a triple recipe at least.”
***
Now my role is so much clearer. Because when there are 17 people eating dinner together and many of them are teenagers and some others are over the age of 75, it is your absolute duty, as a middle-aged human, to mostly shut the fuck up and ask good questions.
I think that’s one of the truest joys of being my age (among a sea of anxieties and terrors, of course): Understanding that my primary role is about curiosity, support, and service. Young people and old people need to feel that their absolute bat shit ideas are welcomed and embraced. And they are! My god, what’s better than spending your whole life dying to say something bat shit without ruining everyone’s fun, and then suddenly there are eight very young people and three very old people blurting out complete madness with gusto?
Now it’s not about trying to be understood. My role is to understand. I have to slow the fuck down and find out what a “rizzler” is (It’s kind of like a player, but not exactly because no Zoomer will admit to any new thing being exactly like something that came before it).
I also have to listen closely to the story about that one great cruise my in-laws took down the Danube, because even though I’m tempted to think you’d have to be a half-conscious zombie to willingly pack yourself onto a boat with a bunch of other old-ish rich-ish people, the real drama of this story – the nuanced drama, the subtle subtext! – is that they did feel like they were in hell a lot of the time, but in that hell they discovered one other couple that was pretty cool, actually, and Do you know, their daughter works at Allstate or something like that in Pennsylvania but their son lives in Durham so we see them every time we come here now! We saw them this morning for coffee at the Mad Hatter, in fact!
It's a relief to know your role. It’s a relief to play your role well, particularly when your role is to make some strong cocktails for the exuberant old weirdos in the house and then listen to what they have to say. It’s a relief to recognize that your role is to suggest that all the kids play Overcooked or Heave Ho or… okay, I’m not that into Mariocart. And then your role is to watch and listen to the ebullient freakishness that explodes everywhere, among these tiny babies with long legs and long hair who speak a strange language you can barely understand.
When I was younger, I thought I was supposed to lead and not follow. But family is like anything else. If you take the position that you’re going to lead and inform and educate and enlighten, you’re sure to fail. Besides, with family, you’re almost always doing something ego-related that you’re not acknowledging. You’re ultimately looking to be HEARD and SEEN and UNDERSTOOD as a non-cartoon, without having done the much slower, harder work of learning to see everyone around you as non-cartoons.
When you understand that your role is to serve, you can see people more clearly. Your ego takes a nap and your artist self wakes up. You get to observe the tragic and the delicious with equal zest now. You get to navigate the day with the quiet swagger of the valet, the gentleman’s gentleman. You are listening closely and you are also running a hot bath for the master of the house. You are shaking up a cocktail and you are also watching pierogi brown on the stove.
Trying to be seen and heard in a group is overrated, compared to running a hot bath for someone who pretty much never has a hot bath run for them. Giving someone else who isn’t usually heard the opportunity to be heard for a change is far more satisfying, as long as you spend enough of your own downtime hearing yourself. Once you listen to your real needs and respect them, you won’t feel ashamed of the cartoon version of you that your family sometimes sees in spite of your best efforts to set them straight.
You will stop trying to set people straight. You will serve them instead. You will play your role with gusto.
And slowly, without even noticing it, the whole weird meal will start to grow on you. You will love the whole ridiculous cast beyond reason. It won’t even make sense.
But does it even matter what it all means? You showed up. You committed. You were brave. You will remember this.
Cheater way to remember meanings of food in a ritual meal:
Bitter, dry, bland is always commemorating hardship.
Seeds & nuts are for future growth and abundance.
Honey and fruit bring sweetness into life.
Bread & fish/meat were traditionally communal efforts, so they are all about bringing people together and "The fruits of our labors".
These seem to be pretty consistent across time and space.
Absolutely beautiful and spot on. As the mother of eight adult children who rarely gather together, I am learning now, that everyone wants to be heard. They do t want to be pushed, prodded or provoked by me. I can’t teach them now. They are adults. I will draw a hot bath and serve. Love all. Serve all. Let them feel loved.