(by Debbie Weiss)
My mother, Thalia, was tall and curvy with auburn hair, green eyes, and an innate sense of style. I can still remember the Boho lace top and maxi-skirt she wore to host dinner parties at our suburban ranch house outside of San Francisco, California, and the cocktail dress with the jeweled collar she wore to the opera. I can even remember the last outfit I saw her in, a pink and green quilted skirt and matching floral blouse from I. Magnin. She wore it to serve dinner the night my dad, Morton, took her to the hospital.
But I don’t really remember her face.
She’d been sick all summer, holed up in their bedroom, abandoning her regular home improvement projects and afternoon bridge games. But she usually emerged around 5 p.m. to feed me my usual dinner of green peas, tater tots, and a hamburger patty. I was a very fussy eater.
Around 7, she’d have dinner with my dad, a more adventurous eater, beginning with a gin and tonic and moving on to a recipe from Sunset, a lifestyle magazine that she promised “the best of the West.” Only now she had big dark circles under her eyes.
She died at age 42, four days before my tenth birthday.
I never really understood the cause of her death except that it was a brief illness, not hereditary, and very unusual. It was 1973, and back then people didn’t talk much about grief. There was no counseling or time off from school. If a kid appeared to be functioning well after a loss, the prevailing view was not to talk about it for fear of making them even more upset. As if you wouldn’t notice that the hospital had eaten your mother.
Life after my mom died was weird. And probably even weirder for Morton, a physicist who, like most men of the time, wasn’t involved in running a household. It must have been hard for him, going from taking me on Saturday afternoon planetarium visits to providing full time care and feeding. But he managed, starting out with dinners of meatloaf and broccoli, and in my case, a big helping of anxiety. I had just discovered that anyone could die at any time, even the person I loved most in the world.
Together, Morton and I got me to school and him to work and the cat to the vet. We didn’t really talk much about Thalia, we had so much to do and adjust to. I take after my paternal grandmother, so I don’t look like my mother. I wore a few of her things over the years, but they didn’t make me feel closer to her. By the time I was curious about her, she’d been gone for many years. I knew she was a very good mother and, at least rationally, that her death hadn’t been anything personal.
My father never once complained or acted like I was a burden to him. This being the 1970s, over time he grew a beard and got a tiger’s eye necklace and took meditation classes to deal with his new reality. He was actually cool.
In contrast, I was a geek who got bullied in junior high and learned about girl stuff from Judy Blume books. I wondered why I sucked at math, never realizing that my brain was clouded with unexpressed grief. I became an atheist because living with a random universe seemed better than believing in a god who’d deliberately stolen my mother. I kept a pretty close watch on my dad, worried that he too might suddenly vanish.
(With my father at my college graduation)
Perhaps Thalia’s death gave Morton a heightened sense of mortality as well because he became a health nut, replacing the meatloaf with grilled fish, steaming the broccoli, and eschewing the butter on top. There were no more sweets in the house, no candy bars or store-bought cookies. We could only have the ingredients for homemade treats—sugar, flour, unsweetened baking chocolate.
These days I’d argue that’s way too ascetic for an adolescent girl without a mother, but back then I wanted to get along, so I learned to bake from my mother’s old cookbooks.
One day when I was 13, my longing for my mother crystallized into a deep craving for her chocolate mousse—actually Julia Child’s chocolate mousse, my favorite thing she’d ever made. So I decided to make it myself. I loved the ritual of baking—carefully separating the eggs, watching the chocolate melting slowly in the double boiler, stirring with a wooden spoon and hearing it gently lap against the pot. It was so satisfying to create the very thing that I wanted.
When my dad came home from work, I surprised him with the mousse, and he loved it too. I don't think he’d previously thought of me as being creative or wanting to give him something good to eat. As we ate dessert that night, it felt like we were becoming friends who genuinely liked each other. We laughed over my one mistake, using ground up coffee beans instead of actual coffee, resulting in a slightly grainy texture and mildly diuretic properties. But it still tasted heavenly.
In my teenage years, my dad and I watched PBS cooking shows together and threw dinner parties for visiting physicists and people from his meditation classes. He did the main course while I made dessert. All in all, I had a pretty great childhood filled with interesting people and recipes, too much opera, and looking up words in the dictionary. But mainly it was because I had a truly remarkable father.
Yet I was awkward with kids my own age, and extremely cautious. I attended a small liberal arts college close to home and went straight on to law school, with a job waiting for me when I graduated. I married my high school sweetheart, the son of family friends I’d known since I was seven. I never thought to explore the world or experience other people before settling down. You never know what might happen when you take your eyes off the ones you love.
Thalia died before I could know her as a person beyond the mommy who took care of me. But she’d been a social worker with a master’s degree, and she was planning on going back to work soon before she died. Our bookshelves had copies of The Feminine Mystique and The Female Eunuch along with Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care.
She and my dad had spent a year in Europe for their honeymoon. After she had me, she took trips to Scotland by herself to see relatives. In college, she’d been the only woman on the Rutgers chess team, which was how she met my dad. Clearly, she was smart, adventurous, and a feminist.
I’ve never seen her ghost, but I’ve seen my own. She’s who I would have been had my mother lived and I hadn’t become so anxious. My ghost spent a year abroad in college and stayed on when it was over and loves to travel and is secure in her power. She takes trips without pre-planned itineraries and never worries about the lawn dying or the house burning down.
But mainly, she knows what she wants and goes after it without hesitation.
I’ve cooked some of Thalia’s recipes and tried on her clothes and read her books, but she remains a mystery to me. And the person who I might have been remains one too.
----
A former lawyer, Debbie Weiss is the author of the award-winning memoir Available As Is: A Midlife Widow's Search for Love. Her essays have been published in the "Modern Love" column of The New York Times and elsewhere. She can be found at debbieweissauthor.com.
Julia Child’s Chocolate Mousse
(Adapted from Mastering the Art of French Cooking)
6 oz. bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, chopped
6 oz. unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1/4 c. dark-brewed coffee
4 large eggs, separated
2/3 c. plus 1 T. sugar
2 T. dark rum
1 T. water
pinch of salt
1/2 t. vanilla extract
Fill a saucepan one-third full of water and heat to barely simmering.
In a bowl set on top, melt chocolate, butter, and coffee, stirring until smooth.
Remove from heat.
Fill a large bowl with ice water and set aside.
In a bowl large enough to nest securely on the saucepan of simmering water, whisk egg yolks with the 2/3 cup of sugar, rum, and water for about 3 minutes until the mixture is thick, like runny mayonnaise.
(If you feel like cheating, you can use a handheld electric mixer).
Remove from heat and place the bowl of whipped egg yolks within the bowl of ice water, beating until cool and thick.
(Pro Tip: Use more ice than water. I didn't and was afraid the water was going to splash into my situation the whole time).
Fold chocolate mixture into egg yolks.
In a separate bowl, beat egg whites with salt until frothy.
Continue to beat until they start to hold their shape.
Whip in 1 T. sugar and continue to beat until thick and shiny, but not completely stiff.
Beat in vanilla extract.
Fold one-third of the beaten egg whites into chocolate mixture.
Fold in remaining whites just until incorporated (don’t overdo it or the mousse will lose volume).
Transfer mixture to a serving bowl or individual serving dishes, and refrigerate for at least 4 hours, until firm.
Serves 6 - 8.