This is going to be kind of rough, but the disgusting parts are icky enough to make for entertaining reading.
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My mother could have provided an entire career's worth of valuable data for someone specializing in the effects of poverty, abuse, malnutrition and rage over the long term. To describe the woman as having been 'warped' is simply to describe her in part. Her every waking moment was spent in a state of seething hatred and resentment. The entire world was her enemy and her coping strategies were that of a prisoner of war who had given up all thought of escape:
1. Life was shit, was never going to be anything other than shit and was in fact SUPPOSED TO BE shit because you were bad and were being punished.
2. Suck up to the strong
3. Trample the weak.
Yes, it was a barrel of laughs.
Now, despite having been employed in her fathers Greek restaurant for a number of years, and despite having been known as an excellent cook by all their navy friends, the woman I ended up with by the 1960's didn't cook so much as she simply opened cans and boiled the contents to death. Period. It took me years to associate the stories I heard about the dinner parties she used to throw and the food she used to cook with HER personally...it just never computed.
Not one meal-not ONE-ever landed on our table without having been complained about bitterly. 'Slaving over a hot stove' was a phrase she used frequently. So...three meals a day over 18 years is...a fuck of a lot of bitching about how she was nothing but a maid around this place and nobody ever lifted a finger to help because I was nuttin but lazy and boy, I'd sure have another thing coming once I grew up because POW comes the revolution etc etc etc WHATEVER, MOM, OK.
This is not to say that I was welcome in the kitchen (or that my help was even needed; after all, we had an electric can opener.) Neither would it be accurate to say that she ever taught me how to do anything in the kitchen except stay out of the way (I had to learn how to cook off the television from Graham Kerr) but the insinuation was, that were it not for me and my laziness, we would be eating fine cuisine off linen and silver.
...Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
The story I heard most often was how she and her brother never had nuttin to eat but oatmeal. How all she can remember was standing on a chair next to the stove stirring the oatmeal. That much is probably 100% true....right up until the point where she went to work in her fathers restaurant, of course. So deprivation doesn't cover it, and lack of skill wasn't the issue.
It was power.
For example, she liked to brag about how, back when they were first married, every time my dad pissed her off, she took a dish
that he liked off the menu.
He pissed her off a lot.
Their early marriage, from what I've been given to understand, was pretty much one long drunken slugfest. All that became a way of life. A perpetual grudge match. Nobody quite remembered why it was that way, only that it had to be that way.
I think that, in her mind, food
meant love.
You pissed her off, you lost something you liked. Forever. The end. That'll fix ya.
Then I came along, and the grand tradition continued. On top of losing a favorite item off the menu for good, though,
you got in trouble for 'wasting food'. Not that it makes any rational sense; when
you were just sitting there as this shrieking harpy suddenly jumped up and went screaming around the room brandishing hot bowls and plates and emptying the contents into the trash;
you MADE her do that so it was
your fault. (And remember,we were Catholic! Wasting food was also a sin, which meant THAT was one more reason you were going to hell! Two for the price of one! What a deal!)
Now, not one-NOT ONE- single specific incident or misdeed or transgression comes to mind. Not one triggering incident or episode. She'd just jump up and start in, apropos of God only knew what, and that was that. Goodbye anything you liked. Spaghetti. Goodbye hamburgers. Goodbye forever. Goodbye Franz bread. Goodbye blueberry jelly. Goodbye cereal. Goodbye.
What happened to the stuff that still remained? I have no earthly idea whatsoever. I've wondered about that for years. Did she sit and gorge on it like an ogre gloating over its hoard while no one was around? I kind of suspect that's exactly what happened. It makes a kind of weird, mythic sense. Heaven knows, everything else that ever came into that house REMAINED unto all eternity, particularly if it was food.
I've written about the hoarding. Huge 10 lb tins of flour absolutely alive with weevils and castings. Sugar turned into solid bricks in the bag, stuck to the shelves. Cans and mixes from 1963 that nobody was allowed to touch. Cases of capers in the basement.
Food was stashed all over the house. Behind books on the shelves. On the top shelf of the linen closet. In the buffet. Ancient candy stolen out of my Easter baskets and Halloween bags. Her purse, her coat pockets, all her sweater pockets were full of old hard rolls, bread sticks and crackers, packets full of every condiment known to civilization, creamers and old fortune cookies. We never left a restaurant without a doggie bag. Doggie never saw it. She even ganked food off other peoples plates once they'd left the table. If we went to a buffet, she brought an extra purse and a scarf. My father and I were press-ganged into going back for more, more, more. When we left the restaurant, that purse was full. There'd be a scarf lying on top of all the greasy napkins full of fried chicken and dinner rolls.
Now, I belong to two online groups dealing with hoarding and having grown up with a hoarder, and I'm still at a crossroads with the issue. They tend to see it as an obsessive-compulsive disorder, and for some people it definitely is. But that explanation doesn't cover it all. Not by a long shot. Compulsion does NOT describe what I grew up with. It's my contention that it wasn't OCD at all... it was warfare. SHE won. You LOST. SHE got the food. You didn't. SHE had it, not you. That was her attitude. Nothing was more blatantly obvious. She wasn't stressed or fearful about starving...that old 'child of the Great Depression living in fear of the next market crash' bullshit doesn't wash in her case. She was going to WIN and you were going to LOSE. The way you kept score was by the number of stale fortune cookies in your purse.
I have had nightmares about the sound of a pressure cooker. Remember them? They had a little round thing that went over the steam vent on the top of the pot, and when the steam would reach a certain pressure that metal thing would rattle and hiss and shake. I remember that noise going on for HOURS at a time. Literally.
Anything that came out of that pot was a crime against nature.
Particularly a dish she liked to call "stew".
It started out innocently enough. A cheap cut of beef, potatoes, yellow onions, maybe some cabbage, and carrots...other things that had started out green; and here I'm assuming beans or peas or something along those lines...some salt and pepper.
All of it hacked into fist sized chunks.
All of it sealed up in this iron lung of pressurized horror together where it screamed and cried and beat its little fists bloody against the hard, unyielding walls of its prison to no avail.
And then the heat was turned on, and it was left there.
For HOURS.
What came out of that pot was something that I had to wait years to see again, not that I was waiting with bated breath, mind you. The next time I saw it again was when I opened the door to a refrigerator in a house that the tenants had abandoned, where the electricity had been shut off for a month.
The contents were MELTED.
It was like opening a sealed coffin. It was SOUP. The only way it could be identified as food was that some of the wrappers were still recognizable. The food inside had not decomposed in any sense that you'd ordinarily recognize; it had simply turned into a chunky, indescribably foetid, LIQUID.
The same sight greeted you when the lid was finally taken off the pressure cooker, and God help me, something of the same warm, armpitty, bacterially active smell. Now heaven knows there was nothing left alive after that kind of treatment; you could have packed it into an open chest wound and not worried about infection because whatever else it might have been it sure'n the fuck was STERILE.
She would serve it up with a mean, mean grin as the loooooong strands of translucent onion slithered off the spoon like dead angleworms after a hard rain. In fact its that slithery texture, that texture of decomposition and slime that comes back clearly across the years. That, and the SMELL. Oh my God, that smell, like bad, bad breath, like boiled fat, like a sink full of dirty dishes on a hot day.
"Your favorite thing!" she'd chirp, and my father would laugh. Then the screaming would start, and the threats, no television, no going outside, no phone calls, no friends until I stayed there and ate everything on my plate and no getting up until someone gave me permission and I'd have the same thing for breakfast and on and on and on and on. I mean, as the night follows the day. That pot would come to the table along with the grin, and then the yelling and freaking. Meanwhile I'm just sitting there. Counting the days left until I'm 18.
Now there was a period of time when we saw that shit come to the table every single evening. Even my dads pickled taste buds woke up. He was lucky, of course; he had a car and money, so he just started eating dinner before he came home from work in the evening.
But yeah, this was something she started when I was about midway through 4Th grade, and she'd return to this tactic every time she was good and pissed off about something I'd done, which was more often than not. Deliberately destroy a meal and then scream at me to eat it. Over and over and over again. It took me years to figure out what was going on. Wanna know why? You want to know the punchline? The kicker? The really good part?
Started right after I hit puberty.
Happened about once a month.
So yes, there's a reason I've never been worried about where this womans' remains are buried. Just knowing that they ARE BURIED is more than enough.
