At 7 in the morning, dressed for work, I grab the chicken out of the refrigerator, where it’s been thawing overnight. I’ve stored it on a plate, because I’m at that eternal middle age of my mother in all my childhood memories. It’s that responsible age when experience has taught us the consequences of carelessness-a drying, sticky blood pool on the lower shelf, and drips across the linoleum. I shout through the dining room and up the stairs to my son: “Jake, get up! You’ve got 20 minutes before the bus comes!” At the sink, I cut the plastic wrapper away, rinse out the body cavity, toss the chicken into the Crock-Pot and sprinkle it with salt and pepper.
My mother raised her own chickens. Chopped off their heads with a hatchet she kept for the purpose, then let them dance among their peers, sisters mostly, blood spurting, until the wild energy left them and they just wound down and collapsed. Mom would pick them up before their legs stopped churning. Outside, on the porch stoop, we would grasp their scrawny legs as if they were the stems of squash, some vegetable we’d harvested, and dip the bodies into a kettle of water Mom had boiled over the gas range. We would pluck their feathers, a tedious, stinky job. Then my mother would take her position at the kitchen sink, where she would expertly wield her favorite paring knife, the one she’d sharpened so many times that the blade was no more than a quarter-inch wide from cutting edge to spine.
Sometimes my father would walk casually through the kitchen, in from washing off field dirt on the mud porch, his sun-blackened, hairy arms dripping water. Spotting her rear, which must have seemed an irresistible target beneath the gathers of her house dress, he would mischievously swat it.
“Ooh!” she’d yell as if angry. “Har-old!”
He would say things that I didn’t know I needed to forgive him for then, but which I do, without much effort, now. Such as, “What’s the matter? I’m just inspecting my property.”
Mom’s fried chicken was the best, crusty and amber, never doughy or greasy. As the youngest, I always got first choice, the wishbone, which Mom cut as a separate piece. I didn’t know then that her style of parceling chickens was distinctive. I just know now, when I stand at my sink in the big house I bought because it reminds me of the big house I grew up in, that my hands look like my mother’s against the painfully naked chicken. Our hands-hers then, mine now-are bony and veined, and beneath our long fingers, the chicken’s wet skin and flesh are the same color as our own. The knobby bone ends look like our knuckles would look, were our knives to slip. When I rub my hands, which are beginning to suffer from arthritis, they remind me of the slick, cool way my mother’s hands felt in all those thousands of purposeful and inadvertent touches between mother and child. The hands say “age” to me, age and love and soil and mortality. Soil, because we drew our lives from it, and Mom nurtured beauty by way of it in her immense flower garden. She would stand up while hoeing and splay her hands alternately, working the fingers back and forth. Dad used to make jokes about Mom sleeping with Arthur Itis.
My mother would have called herself a housewife, although there was never an occasion for anyone to ask. Everyone knew that she was just Jasmin, one of John and Lizzie Carlson’s daughters, who had married Harold, one of the Bairs. They now lived on the farm her parents had built through the typical 50 years of familial perseverance. Jasmin and Harold had three children, two boys and me.
She never taught me and I never learned how to cut up a chicken. On my visits home-I’ve never had the courage to admit this-the reluctance intensifies as the years advance. How could I be 45, my mother’s age when fried chicken dinners (at noon) were common fare at summer meals, and not be practiced in this essential art? I migrated spiritually, emotionally, geographically. Yet sometimes, after waking, just my son asleep in his bedroom, I murmur as I walk into my cold early-morning kitchen, “Mommy.” At night, I utter both their names. “Mommy.” “Daddy.” I plead with fate, because, at 76 and 81 respectively, my parents will die soon, and I long to travel now, this instant, the 300 miles to Kansas. Except after we hugged for a few seconds, after a few enthused words of greeting, their house, a modern one they built in town some 30 years ago, would return to silence. We would feel comforted only by the knowledge that we were together, and then I would go home, and find myself aching again with the same sense of imminent loss.
I’ve had this image in my mind ever so long now-her hands, mine, as naked as the chicken; my mother, me, at the kitchen sink, preparing a meal for our family. She still prepares a lot of chicken, although she doesn’t fry it. “It’s the cholesterol,” she says. “I have to be careful of Harold’s heart.” Often when I’ve visited in the last few years, I’ve heard her complain, while standing at her aqua sink, “These store-boughten chickens are just terrible anymore.”
“Terrible?” I once asked.
“Yes.”
“How? Terrible?”
“It’s all this godawful crap you have to scrape out of them, and the fat. Chickens never used to be like that.” She then told me a story my sister-in-law, Kris, had told her about a woman colleague. When Kris also had complained about cleaning chickens, the colleague had said, “Clean what? I just stick ’em in the oven.”
“Can you imagine that?” my mother asked, staring at me as I sat at the kitchen table. As baffled as Kris’ friend had been, I just shook my head in supposed equal disgust. Since then I’ve raked my fingernails over the interiors of chickens while running warm water inside, ripping loose the remnants of kidneys and other gutty things. I’ve trimmed the chunks of fat that hang loose near the tail. I’ve done this doubtfully, without much hope that I’ll ever understand what a truly cleaned chicken is supposed to look like. Yet I am becoming my mother in the way that we all do-foreseeing minor household catastrophes and taking precautions (the plate under the chicken and a dozen other preventive measures daily), feeling her body aches, her bafflement at the passage of years, the growth of children. I know this for the first full, real time, living in this house reminiscent of the farmhouse, at this age, her eternal age.
Today I’m trying to decide whether to allow a man who really loves me to come live with me. My mother could never have constructed such a sentence, although, as I contemplate this, it is not because of the “allow.” Traditionally, women have had the upper hand in courtship, their bodies and hearts constituting a fortress whose walls the men must scale. The “live with,” though, would have been morally perverse then, and I fear that it may be morally perverse now. Not in the sexual sense people had in mind back then, but because it betrays an unwillingness to give myself over completely. By avoiding vows, do I hope not only to hang onto authority over myself but over him also?
How strange that, at 45, I still crave my mother’s wisdom in romantic affairs. How did she feel, giving her husband control over her family farm? Did the thought ever cross her mind that she was giving it? It wasn’t an option in those days for a woman to run her own farm. But my mother’s deeper feelings are mostly inaccessible to me. That means I am also inaccessible to myself. If she could tell me what it’s meant to be my father’s wife, what she felt when she first met him, how those feelings changed as their marriage matured, what it’s like to sleep with him, then I wouldn’t feel like such an amputee, handicapped by the absence of intimate knowledge of the intimate lives of the people I am supposed to know most intimately.
While my mother enjoys discussing politics, she tends to skirt the personal topics-death, religion, love. In the manner of all the women of my childhood, she says, “Well . . .” if I say something provocative. I’ve learned not to wait for the insights I suspect would follow if only it were OK to express emotion. Was this absenting of herself the reason our farmhouse seemed so airy? How do marriages, how do families work? Do they function well only if one of the adults (most often the woman) submerges herself, pretending not to feel loss, to search spiritually, to crave appreciation and love?
I am a displaced Kansan, grown to adulthood, and then to impossible middle age, the smell of grain dust and summer rain still in my nostrils. No life feels right, no life feels complete unless it’s lived the way my parents lived theirs. At 18 I wanted nothing more than to get away from Kansas, but by the time I was 30, I began to wish I could have continued my parents’ lives, down the road in a big farmhouse of my own, cows and sheep in the lot by the barn, in view of my kitchen window. But I couldn’t, can’t, of course. Got educated, left, met two men, non-farmers, stayed married to one for eight years, the other for eight months.
If I had married locally, though, I don’t think I would be wandering my house murmuring “Mommy” at 45. Because in continuing a way of life, we incorporate our parents into ourselves. Wouldn’t my mother live on in me and in my children if I lived a mirror image of her life down the road? I could look out another window and see their place; my son or daughter would marry and move there. This is the way it is supposed to work out in families, in clans, in tribes. A few miles west, and there would be another relative living in Grandpa Bair’s old place. “Grandpa Bair’s,” we say, not “Grandma and Grandpa Bair’s.” This, of course, is only part of why it couldn’t work out. My mother submitted to my father’s rule of their household. He was a benevolent dictator whose dominion no one thought to question. The man who plans to move into my house is uprooting himself from California, where I once lived, to come live with me. He loves my son, who has been fatherless since birth. My son loves him. I could not have married a man from down the road because he would have wanted to rule, benevolently, as my father did. I could not have submitted my will to his, deferred to his decisions. I would have wanted to make decisions in the shop and field as well as in the house. That’s the kind of daughter my parents somehow raised. But I would have dressed chickens at the farmhouse sink, the air and light and quiet and expanse filtering in.
He would have walked up behind me like my father did behind my mother, assured in his role, in his dominion. The way my brother does behind my sister-in-law. The way men do where I come from. Now, with this man, even if I did learn to cut up chickens, it would be all wrong. He wouldn’t deem it his prerogative to swat my bottom as he passed behind me at the sink, and my hands wouldn’t extend down through the chicken’s guts into the earth of a flower garden.
Like almost everyone I’ve met since leaving Kansas, I am still trying, at 45, to invent a life out of the antiseptic remains of history, of displacement. Sometimes it feels as if too many miles, years and ideas separate me from the past and people who matter most because they mattered first.
But this man has worked his way into my life. A computer specialist who dresses in chinos and silk sweaters, who reads in bed at night wearing half-glasses, who fenced off part of my back yard last visit for a place to park his sailboat, he often stands with me at the sink.
This man respects my other attachments and doesn’t wish to rule anyone but himself. I feel an identity taking shape between us. Although uninformed by generations of life on the land, our family will have another kind of integrity.
Should I marry him? My mother’s voice comes to me, projecting itself into the void I’ve always wanted to bridge: “I don’t know how to answer your questions, because I never thought of any alternative; I never had an alternative.” I do.
