4
I hadn’t planned on a full dinner after the zoo trip, so the leftover lasagna that my mother had made Friday night sounded absolutely heavenly.
But I couldn’t very well serve Ruth leftovers when she was moving in because she didn’t think I could handle motherhood on my own. Instead I took stock of what we had that I could throw together quickly and decided on chicken breasts and canned vegetables.
While she unpacked, I dipped the chicken in breadcrumbs and got the whole mess into the oven, keeping an ear out for her footsteps.
My relationship with Ruth started as I imagine most mother/daughter-in-law relationships do.
By which I mean, I tiptoed as carefully as I could around her for the first couple of years, trying desperately to make sure she saw me as the perfect wife to her son and perfect mother to her future grandchildren, while she eyed me vigilantly for missteps.
At least that’s how it felt.
She was neither the demon that I saw some of my friends describe their husbands’ mothers as, nor the warm, second mother that I had imagined.
Warm wasn’t a word I would use to describe Ruth Feldman. Even Harry, when asked about her in the early days, stumbled over how to characterize her. Involved? Yes. Nurturing? No. Though she did have a flair for the dramatic.
“You have to understand,” he had said, beginning with a phrase that, had I not been a naive twenty-year-old in the midst of her first—and only—love affair, would have warned me of the power struggles that were coming.
“She didn’t grow up like we did. Coming here so young, losing everything, then losing my father .
..” He had paused there, remembering. “She did everything to make sure I had what I needed every single day.”
We had been in his car, the night before he first brought me to her house. A meeting that I understood the importance of. “She sounds incredible,” I said. And she did. The greatest hardship I ever saw my own mother witness was when her hairdresser retired to Miami. Oh, the indignity!
I hadn’t been expecting the slight woman who greeted me—Harry stood a proud six feet tall, towering over his mother by a foot—by looking me up and down, sighing exaggeratedly, then announcing that there was no meat on my bones, so she would clearly have to teach me how to cook properly or else her Harry would starve.
“Barbara is a great cook, Ma,” Harry had said, brushing it off playfully. “And she can eat as much as I do—she’s just got a great figure.”
I had never cooked for him, nor eaten anywhere near the quantity I had seen him put away, but I beamed up at him, grateful for the defense. Harry was her only child and the light of her life. No one could defuse her the way he could.
Of course, her stated intention to teach me to cook was laughable as her culinary skills were .
.. interesting, to put it kindly. I remembered looking over at Harry, wondering how he grew so tall on food like this, before gnawing on a half-frozen Passover cookie that Ruth proudly said I wouldn’t have known was for Passover if she hadn’t told me.
I definitely would not have guessed Passover, as I wasn’t sure it was food, but I smiled and politely agreed, which meant I received her seal of approval.
According to Harry. Because all I got to my face was criticisms. Ostensibly playful criticisms, but when it’s your future mother-in-law, you can’t exactly play back yet. And we never warmed to the point where I could.
And the censure only intensified after we got married.
I confessed, just two months after returning from our honeymoon, that I was worried our new home was haunted.
I would come home from an errand or lunch with a friend and find a plant had moved from one room to another.
Our bookshelf was rearranged. Even our bed, which I made each morning, was made differently from the way I had made it.
Harry listened, first concerned, then amused.
“I think I know who your ghost is,” he said, crossing to the kitchen phone. He dialed, waited, then said, “Hey, Ma. Have you been to our house recently?” He nodded, then chuckled. “Yeah, let Barbara know before you come over next time, please. She thought she was going crazy.”
I would have preferred a ghost, honestly. But it only took two more warnings from Harry about not meddling too much in our lives before she started calling before she came over—or at least knocking before she came in.
“Dinner will be ready in ten minutes,” I called upstairs. “Susie, come set the table, please.”
No one answered me.
“Susie!” I called again. I heard a muted laugh, and I sighed.
Then I checked the timer on the counter, peeked in the oven—serving burnt chicken wouldn’t help my case that Ruth’s presence was unnecessary—and then climbed the stairs to find my wayward daughter and remind her that no chores meant no allowance.
The doors to both children’s rooms were open, with no sound emanating.
Granted, it wouldn’t be the first time they’d hidden under a bed or in a closet, waiting to jump out and try to scare me.
I always played along, even though their giggles as I entered their rooms gave them away every time.
But the door to the spare room was closed, with muffled voices trickling out.
I hesitated, debating the etiquette of knocking in my own home when my children were inside, but ultimately opted for politeness over asserting dominance and rapped lightly.
No one answered, so I opened the door. Susie was wearing a matronly dress, complete with a wide-brimmed straw hat adorned with flowers that made her look like a miniature Minnie Pearl. Bobby was draped in a tweed suit older than I was, complete with a bow tie and a fedora.
Confused, I turned to Ruth. “You packed a men’s suit with you?”
“It was his grandfather’s,” Ruth said, waving a hand. “He can wear it for his bar mitzvah.”
In seven years, I thought. But it wasn’t worth arguing.
“Get changed,” I told them. “Dinner will be ready in ...” I glanced down at my watch. “Seven minutes. And the table isn’t set.”
“They’re having fun,” Ruth said, putting a hand on Susie’s arm as she started toward the door.
“One of Susie’s chores is setting the table.”
“And if she misses it one night, will it be the end of the world?”
I wanted to reply sharply that children needed structure.
That the entire purpose of chores was to teach responsibility.
Not to mention that I had just cooked a meal—albeit a simple one—that I didn’t want to entirely because she had shown up unannounced on my doorstep and that Susie not setting the table meant I had to do yet another task.
But Susie looked up at me with Harry’s big brown eyes, and I found myself acquiescing. Her straight nose, high cheekbones, and plump, rosy lips were mine, but her eyes were all his. “Just this once,” I said to her.
She threw her arms around me in a tight hug, and I felt some of the tension leave my shoulders, relishing that I didn’t have to be the bad guy when pitted against Ruth and her bag of dress-up clothes.
Then I went down and set the table.
Bobby wrinkled his nose at my chicken. “Can’t I eat Grandma’s lasagna instead?”
“I didn’t make lasagna,” Ruth said. “You’ll eat what your mother made you.” She cut a piece of her own chicken, then held it up in front of her face to inspect it.
“Our other Grandma made lasagna,” Bobby explained, still making a sour face at the chicken. “Before she left.”
“I’m sure that will make a wonderful lunch for tomorrow,” Ruth said. “But tonight, we clean our plates.” She pointed with her fork.
My toes positively curled in my shoes. “Ruth,” I said quietly. “We don’t follow the clean plate rule.”
“What on earth do you mean?” She turned back to the children. “You’ll finish your food. There are starving children.”
Both little faces turned to look at me. Harry’s doctor had been crystal clear that his best chance of avoiding his father’s fate was being active and keeping his weight down.
From that day forward, we had to untrain ourselves from our Depression-era upbringings.
Not that it had made a difference for him in the end, but meals stopped being a struggle once we allowed the kids to stop eating when they felt full.
Now, however, I was torn between showing respect to my mother-in-law, who had suffered from actual hunger, and standing up for my kids.
Talk about a rock and a hard place.
Bobby pushed his plate toward the center of the table, then crossed his arms defiantly. “You can send it to the starving children,” he said. “I want lasagna.”
“Then you’ll go to bed hungry,” Ruth warned.
I made a T with my hands to signal a time-out.
“We don’t send children to bed hungry in this house either,” I said, more firmly this time.
“Bobby, you know the rule. If you don’t want to eat what I’ve made, you can make yourself a peanut butter sandwich.
” He glared at me for a moment, then pushed his chair back and went into the kitchen, where the telltale screech of a chair being dragged across the linoleum floor told me he was getting the bread and peanut butter.
“The chicken is rather dry,” Ruth said in a loud whisper. Susie looked from her to me with wide eyes, but I shook my head at her.
Then I took a deep breath, counted to five, and exhaled.
“The chicken isn’t the issue,” I said calmly.
“I am just raising them with values that don’t match the Depression upbringing that Harry and I had because they aren’t living in that world.
And assuming things don’t come to a head with the Soviets, they’re going to grow up in a world where they hopefully won’t ever have to worry about food. ”
Bobby returned to the table with the sloppiest sandwich I had ever seen, jelly dripping out of it at crazy angles, and a big, self-satisfied grin. “Better?” I asked him.
“Better,” he said through a mouthful of peanut butter, his blue eyes, the same shade as mine, crinkling at the corners.
Ruth started to say something, but I beat her to it. “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I said.
“Then don’t ask me questions while I’m eating,” he said, still chewing.
I couldn’t help but smile, though I tried to hide it from Ruth.
Ruth grumbled through much of the rest of the meal, then reached for Bobby’s plate when she was finished with her food and ate his chicken as well.
She had a hard childhood, I remembered Harry telling me. Her family had been wealthy in the old country, but that all changed when they came here. They escaped a pogrom with only what they could carry.
My shoulders sank, watching her finish Bobby’s unwanted chicken. The last thing I wanted was to be unkind to Harry’s mother—even if I didn’t invite her to be a guest in my house.
Ruth retired to her room to finish unpacking while I bathed the children—a bit of a misnomer as Susie had become self-conscious about bathing with her brother in the last year and now took a shower by herself in my bathroom while I sat on the closed toilet seat next to the tub as Bobby washed himself, having also rejected my help.
He didn’t actually need me in there at all, but he was a little skittish about being alone.
I brought both kids to Ruth’s room to say good night before reading them their bedtime story and tucking them in. Susie went down easily. Bobby still wanted me to sit in the rocking chair in his room until he fell asleep.
When his eyes finally fluttered closed and I heard his breathing settle into a slow, regular pattern, I tiptoed out of the room, shutting the door quietly behind me.
I wanted nothing more than to soak in a hot tub and just exhale, and I debated doing exactly that as I crept past Ruth’s room, where a light peeked out from under the door. I went as far as turning on the water in the bathtub before the guilt hit me.
No, I didn’t want her there. Especially not when my own mother had just left. But she lost her only son and was here to help. I turned off the water and pulled the stopper, letting it drain. The least I could do was be kind. I looked up at the ceiling. “You owe me for this one,” I said quietly.
So instead of relaxing, I went downstairs, made up a glass of Alka-Seltzer, and brought it to her room, knocking softly.
When she opened the door, I held out the glass. “I thought you might need this.”
“Thank you,” she said, taking the glass and bringing it to her mouth to sip. “I do have heartburn from whatever was on that chicken.”
I blinked at her. It was literally egg and breadcrumbs. But I could let that go. “Just so you know, there’s no need to finish the kids’ food. I won’t throw it away. I save what they don’t eat for leftovers.”
“You couldn’t have told me that before I ate two dinners?
” she asked, patting her practically nonexistent stomach.
But there was a mischievous twinkle in her eyes—Harry and Susie had inherited that same glint when they caused trouble too—which both made me feel better about giving up my bath and told me this wouldn’t be an enduring issue.
“Would you like to watch some television with me?”
“No,” she said. “Thank you. It’s been a long day. I’m just going to go to sleep.”
“Of course,” I said. “There are more towels under the sink in the bathroom and just let me know if there’s anything else you need.”
“I’ll be fine,” she told me. “Good night, Barbara.”
“Good night, Ruth.”