Eleanor Vance

The kitchen in Flatbush was small enough that you could touch every wall without taking a step. My mother stood at the stove from five in the morning until nine at night, and somehow the sauce was always different on Sundays. She never wrote anything down. When I asked her, years later, for the recipe, she looked at me like I had asked her for the recipe for breathing. I learned, eventually, that her seasoning was grief. My uncle had died in the war, and she cooked as though she were still feeding him. Every pot was a letter she could not send. I did not understand this until I had children of my own, and found myself making her sauce for them on the anniversary of her death, weeping into the basil.

I cut my hair in the summer of 1956, against my mother's wishes, against the priest's wishes, against, it turned out, the wishes of the boy I would later marry. My friend Rosalind held the scissors. We were in her bathroom and the window was open and I could smell the linden tree on the corner of Sterling and Bedford. She cut, and I felt every inch of it leave me like an obligation lifted. My mother did not speak to me for three days. On the fourth day, she sat down at the kitchen table and asked me, very quietly, why I had done it. I told her I did not know. This was the truth. I think now that I cut my hair because I wanted to find out what was underneath. I had spent eighteen years being beautiful and well-behaved, and I wanted, for one summer, to be something else.

Frank proposed to me on a Tuesday, which I have always found suspicious. Tuesdays are not romantic. He had not planned it. We were standing in line at the bakery on Church Avenue, and he turned to me and said, completely without ceremony, "I think we should get married, don't you?" I said yes before I could think about it, which is, I have come to believe, the only honest way to answer such a question. The bakery woman gave us a rye loaf for free and called us idiots. She was correct on both counts. We were married six weeks later. The wedding was small. My mother cried. Frank's mother, who did not approve of me, did not cry, which I counted as a victory. We had thirty-eight Tuesdays together, and then a Wednesday in 2000 when he died in his sleep. I have never been able to stand in line at a bakery since without expecting him to turn to me.