How to Cook Your Daughter Page 2

  It’s not the most ideal of childhood memories. But you have to consider the time (1969) the place (California) and of course, the parents. Mine had come thousands of miles from England to experiment with the Southern California scene of the late 1960s. They were born during the Second World War, part of the generation that would be responsible for the Swinging Sixties. My mother grew up in Wimbledon, a suburb of London. Her father, Alfred Christmas, owned a chemist’s shop. She, her sister, and her brother lived with my grandmother and grandfather in a mock Tudor house built on a lot leveled by a V-bomb in the waning years of the war. My grandfather spent his time growing roses and humming. Kind but emotionally reserved, he had a habit of walking with his arms behind his back, his right arm bent with the hand clutching his left arm, as if holding himself back. My grandmother proved warmer than her husband. On our visits, she played with us and baked jam tarts and Victoria sponge cakes for afternoon tea.

  One of her great sorrows was her name: Doris. My grandmother said my great-grandparents had planned to name her Kathleen. But at her christening, when the godfather was asked to name the child, he announced—much to the horror of the assembled relations—“I name the child Doris.” And Doris she would stay. When I heard the story some years ago from my mother, I asked, with a degree of skepticism, what any American of my generation would: “Why didn’t her parents say anything?” At the same time, I was saying to myself: because they were English. As I can attest, the value of keeping silent for the sake of maintaining family peace seems to run in our veins.

  Doris and Alfred named their second child—my mother—Judith. But for much of her life, Judith was Judy. I imagine it must have been hard being called “Judy Christmas.” As I told my mother during one of my more obnoxious moments as a teenager, it seemed a name more suitable for a stripper than for an intellectually gifted and talented girl like my mom, who became the bright light of her family by earning a place at Girton College, University of Cambridge.

  Anthony Hendra, my dad, was born the son of a stained-glass maker and raised in rural Hertfordshire, the region in which Jane Austen set Pride and Prejudice. Even as a child, he seems to have been eccentric. My grandma Georgina told me how little Anthony used to ram his tri-cycle at top toddler speed into a brick wall over and over and over again. “All day long, just riding right into the wall,” Grandma Georgina said with a smoker’s laugh. My uncle recounted how my father, then a teenager and obsessed with becoming a monk, instructed his brother and sisters to send letters to the Pope recommending one Anthony Christopher Hendra for sainthood. The Pope failed to respond.

  My father, like my mother, was tremendously gifted intellectually. To his family’s surprise (but no one else’s), he easily won a scholarship to Cambridge. Initially, he resisted accepting the place, having already decided on his vocation as a novice in a Benedictine monastery. But at the insistence of the more senior monks, he went off to the university.

  It was at Cambridge in about 1962 that my parents met. By this time, my father had put his monastic aspirations in the deep freeze and instead embraced the world of earthly delights. By the end of her senior year, my mother was very pregnant. At twenty-two and dreaming of success as a comedian, my father was understandably reluctant to marry. My mother, more in love with my dad than he was with her, could neither face an abortion nor give the baby up for adoption. So, unsure of what was going to happen, she continued on with her pregnancy. In her Cambridge graduation pictures, though unmarried and visibly with child, my mother wears her gown and rounded stomach with pride. She smiles into the camera defiantly, holding her diploma over the spot where her illegitimate baby—my sister, Katherine—grows. She is beautiful, her long hair untidily looped in a Bronte-like bun, a concession to the formality of the occasion. My grandparents stand awkwardly on either side of her: my grandfather in his gray Sunday best, my grandmother in a Queen Mother hat. To me they look confused, caught between the pride they feel in their daughter having graduated from the best university in England and their mortification over her obvious “condition.”

  In the end, sometime after my sister’s birth, my parents did marry, and they spent their honeymoon night in Paris. My mother said it was wonderful. My father said it rained and called it the worst night of his life. And so their marriage began.

  In 1964, a year before I was born, my parents immigrated to America—first to the East Coast, a place where my father had visited to test the comedy waters. He and his stand-up comedy partner, Nick Ullett, had met with some success there, and the opportunities in the States seemed greater than in London. I was born in New York, where my parents had a fifth-floor walk-up apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

  Not ones for baby-naming books, my parents turned to the pages of the Collected Works of Shakespeare, just as they had when my sister was born. She was named Katherine after the long-suffering but tough-as-nails Katherine of Aragon in Henry VIII. I became Jessica from The Merchant of Venice.

  Our names foretold our futures. Kathy spent a childhood as “Thunder Thighs,” a name my father coined for her. She persevered by throwing herself into her studies. Today, she’s a doctor.

  My name seems even more prescient. At the end of The Merchant of Venice, Jessica faces a decision a daughter dreads: to follow her heart, thus betraying her father, or to stay true to him and betray herself. And so I was given not a name that I hated, like my grandmother’s, or a diminutive one as unfitting as my mom’s, but one that foreshadowed a future that no one in my family could have imagined.

  By the time I was born, my father had begun his career as a satirist and comedian. At Cambridge he performed with John Cleese and Graham Chapman. Soon after coming to America, the comedy team of Hendra and Ullett appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show (Dad and Nick believed Sullivan understood less than half of what they were saying but loved their accents). Dad was brilliant, charming, witty, and gregarious, especially to those who didn’t know him well. But he struggled. Despite his talent, he couldn’t crack the TV world. What he wrote was too racy, too clever, or just not right. And so, Hollywood wouldn’t be for us—or, more aptly, for him.

  I have only two other vivid memories of California—whirling around and around on the Mad Hatters Tea Party Ride until I threw up all the treats I had consumed for my sixth birthday and waking up in a shaking bed to the sound of breaking glass and the eerie rumble of an earthquake. For me, death by overdose, Disneyland, and earthquakes summed up L.A. in the late 1960s.

  I do, however, remember the day we left Los Angeles in the early summer of 1971.

  My mother prodded me gently. “Jessie, you need to wake up.” It was still dark in the room where Kathy and I slept, and I could hear only faint twittering from the birds in the fruit trees in the garden. For a second, I wondered if there was another aftershock from the earthquake—if my mom was waking me to stand under a doorway until the hanging light fixture in the living room finally stopped swaying. But the world appeared still, and Kathy was already sitting up in bed, her brown hair messy.

  “We have to leave today,” my mother reminded me.

  Yes. Leaving. Today we’d be starting a drive that would take us all the way across the country, back to the house in New Jersey where I had lived when I was two. I sat up. Despite the mixture of memories, I didn’t want to leave this place. There was my school on Wonderland Avenue, my friends, the playground down at the bottom of the canyon. But maybe the house where we were going wouldn’t shake like this one. Maybe Heroin wouldn’t be there. And they did have winter, with real snow and everything. What did it feel like? Did it smell? What was it like to be really cold? What was it like to be bundled up in a big coat, a scarf, and boots as I had seen in the stories at school?

  My mother told us we could keep our nighties on. There was no point getting dressed if we didn’t want to. Still groggy, Kathy and I walked through our bedroom doorway, along the hallway, and followed my mother’s slim, tall figure out the front door of a house that we would neve
r see again.

  My father was loading bags into the Volkswagen bus. He moved quickly and, despite being in one of his “heavy stages,” looked strong as he hefted the bags. The bus was white, with brown-and-red paisley curtains on the back. Its look was shabby but friendly, as though it were saying “It might be tough, man, but I’ll do my best to get you there.” In the back lay a mattress, the closest thing we had to car seats. There, we would sleep at night and perch during the long days of driving.

  “Why are we going now, Daddy?” I asked. “It’s still dark.”

  “We have to leave before the landlord wakes up,” he said matter-of-factly. “He’s a vampire and just went to bed.”

  I was still groggy but that woke me up. “Oh,” I said, not sure if my dad were joking. It was always hard to tell with him. Like the other night when the police had pulled us over for speeding. The cop shone a flashlight in the back seat of the car and told my father to take the “little girls home.” When the officer walked away, my father turned to us: “They always take the children to jail first, you know, girls.”

  When everything was packed, we climbed into the VW, and Daddy started the cheery engine. Kathy and I lay down in the back. I clutched the tattered mass of wool that had morphed from a baby blanket into my most precious possession. I called it, simply, “Mine.” Then I watched out the back window as Laurel Canyon disappeared.

  “We’re off!” my father shouted into the early morning light. And so we were, a family making its way across the country in the true American pioneer tradition. Except we were going from west to east. And my father, the comedian and satirist, wasn’t looking to settle the country like the pioneers of the 1860s. He planned to unsettle it.

  We drove all day and ended up spending that night somewhere in the Utah desert. But the job of getting to New Jersey was proving hard for the valiant VW. The next morning, I woke up to the sound of a choked engine.

  “For fuck’s sake!”

  The bus wouldn’t start. My father smacked the steering wheel in frustration.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  He jumped from the van into the desert heat and began to have a near epileptic fit, his huge blue eyes growing larger and larger the more his anger mounted. Each word, perfectly enunciated in a fine English accent, exploded from his mouth.

  “God…damn…mother…fucking…piece…of…shit!”

  He hopped around the VW, kicking it and screaming, his longish blond hair bouncing up and down on his shoulders. His unbuttoned shirt flew out behind him. His white belly reflected the sun. Sweat popped from his face, and his usually flushed checks grew scarlet.

  “Fucking…heap…of…fucking…crap!”

  My mother sat in the front seat, completely silent, her face tense, her full lips set. We would come to know that posture well. Kathy and I kept quiet too, waiting for my father’s eruption to subside. There was nothing else to do. After a while, he gave up kicking the VW and squatted glumly in the sand.

  We waited in the desert for what seemed like an eternity. In the sweltering heat, the VW grew so hot, it sizzled to the touch. Then, suddenly, two shapes—bathed in intense sunlight—moved toward us from a car that just seemed to appear.

  “Need some help?” one asked.

  When we were chugging hopefully along again, Daddy told Kathy and me that the men who had gotten our car started were guardian angels of the desert, waiting under the scorching sun to help people like us. “The Mechanic Angels,” he called them.

  The VW averaged two breakdowns a state. On highways, on small country roads. Not that my sister and I minded. We were having a great time watching the country go by, eating diner pancakes in the early morning, listening to trucks hurl through the night when we pulled off the road to sleep.

  Finally, tenacious to the end, the VW willed itself across the New Jersey state line and into the tiny town of Glen Gardner. It sputtered past the gas station and local bar, past the general store, down a small winding road that led over an old bridge and into the gravel patch at one side of a shadowy barn. My dad cut the headlights. We were home.

  He carried my exhausted sister and me out of the van and into a darkness deeper than any I had experienced. The house was a huge black box in the night. I heard trees rustling, the call of an owl, and a low noise that sounded like running water. I held Mine close as my father carried me toward the house. In the morning, I woke up and fell in love with Fifty-five Red Mill Road.

  My mother and father had bought the house soon after they arrived in America. They became instantly enamored of the rural townships of Hunterton County, where they had rented a small summer place in 1966. Perhaps it reminded them of England: lush, green, and with a relatively long history. Or maybe it was just because it was cheap.

  My mother had been desperate to get Kathy and me out of New York for the summer. She looked in the New York Times for the least expensive summer rental available. That meant we wouldn’t be heading to the Hamptons or the Cape but rather to unfashionable New Jersey. While exploring one day, my parents came upon the house on Red Mill Road. They scrounged together just enough money and bought it, renting it out during our years in L.A. Now we had returned, mainly because we were broke. Los Angeles had proved to be a place with a lot of talk and very few paychecks. My dad had retreated to the East Coast to try his luck writing for anything but television. And there the house stood, as if knowing we’d be back.

  It had been there for more than two hundred years, surrounded by trees and fields, along a narrow country road that had once been even less—a cart path. By American standards, the house was ancient. And though it was neither large nor ornate, it was the sort of place that deserved respect. After all, it had been built by a blacksmith who dragged each of its hundreds of stones from the stream that ran a few yards from the front porch and from the fields that lay around it. The walls he constructed were so thick that from the outside, the house seemed much larger than it actually was. A covered porch ran along the front, and a small garden was nestled between it and a white picket fence.

  Originally there were four rooms, two downstairs and two upstairs. Later, a kitchen—built not of stone but of wood—had been tacked to the side. And a bathroom was added upstairs. The living room had a low-beamed ceiling; small, paned eighteenth-century windows; and a large fireplace. Next door was a parlor of sorts that we called “the study.” On either side of the old parts of the house were two sets of thin, winding staircases. Even then I knew they were incredibly dangerous. But that didn’t stop Kathy and me from racing up and down them almost immediately. We’d start at the top step, then thump, thump, thump—down step by step, on our bottoms and collapse in a giggling heap onto the hard wooden floor of the living room.

  Kathy and I were to have one of the upstairs rooms as our bedroom. It had two windows: one that overlooked the back lawn and another that gave us a view over the road and into the maple and oak trees that hid the stream. We could see the back of the small house—a blacksmith’s forge—that stood across from us. For the moment it was empty. Its owner, my father’s former partner Nick Ullett, was still in Los Angeles. Our room was decorated with pale blue wallpaper that had soft, red roses—the most beautiful pattern I had ever seen. A door separated my parents’ room from ours. The simple layout of the house hadn’t included hallways, but there was a small landing where one of the staircases ended. Then there was another door that, if opened, revealed the dark stairs that led to the mysteries of the attic, a place I feared to explore.

  At the side of the house stood the wooden barn, sagging and blackened by age. At sunset, the bats that slept in the rafters all day left to prowl for food. My father made his office there, in a spartan upstairs corner. Whenever he worked there, I would run down the stone path that led from the house to the barn, open the creaky wooden door to his office and tip-toe up the stairs. Then I’d just sit and stare as he wrote. I loved to watch his hands.

  He had bulky knuckles but long fingers that were far more nimble th
an they looked. I adored the way they flew over his typewriter, the keys tapping out a soundtrack to the words that appeared on the thin, yellowish paper. Then the music would stop, and there would be only the typewriter’s patient buzz as it waited for my father’s fingers to play again. In those moments, he would look out of the window above his desk, across the road, over the stream, and up into the field that lay on the other side of the river bank. He would puff long on the thin brown cigar that dangled from his mouth, dropping ash onto the floor. He seemed a world away, staring off into the field, deadly serious as he searched for a decent joke. His fingers would leave the typewriter and begin tapping on the wooden desk. First the thumb. Then the index finger. Then the pointer. Then the ring finger. And finally the pinky. Rat tat tat tat TAT. Rat tat tat tat TAT.

  I remained quiet on the floor nearby, trying to roll my fingers the same way. But my fingers were too small, too light, and my barely audible taps lacked authority, style.

  When he was finished writing for the day, Daddy turned off his typewriter, stood from his desk, and held out his hand. The veins shone greenish-blue against the pale whiteness of his skin. They seemed like huge, protruding pipes just under his flesh. When I looked closely, I thought I could see his blood pumping through them. I would take his hand and run my little fingers over the back of it, exploring the bumpy map. Then we would go down the office stairs together and out into the night.

  The two of us walked in the fields or the woods around the house, exploring fallen trees, stopping to spy quietly on deer or rabbits. He’d tell me stories about the spirits that lived in the woods. I’d hold his hand tightly, reassured by those bumps on the back. They proved he was alive. They proved he was my dad. And as long as he was with me, nothing horrible could happen—to me or to him.

  I loved our new house, but I still wonder what it thought of us. We weren’t of the same world, what with our beat up VW and California clothes. What did it think of my parents, of their 1970s intellectual attitudes? I wonder if it took one look at my family and wished for the old days of long dresses and dark suits, the formality, the clear line between child and adult. In my family, it was hard to tell who exactly were the grownups. But, of course, the house took us in, silent, solid, ancient—sheltering a young family that, unlike it, was anything but stable.