Letters to My Agent

Coco and I spent the past three days trying not to argue. I’ve been on a lot of bike rides like this, slogging up hills and rolling down, but never all the way. Up and up and up, if you get my drift. I can’t find the rhythm. My legs burn. I should be getting stronger, but I’m not. Coco isn’t fond of me. She stays out of my way. All is quiet, for what it’s worth.

Bitchiness breaks out the minute we start talking about cooking. We wanted to re-create the salad wraps we used to get at the Baby Greens drive-up before it closed. Oh boy, I think, I can use actual green vegetables. The shopping list in my head includes raw spinach, three kinds of lettuce, perhaps some mint. . .and then Coco informs me that the only thing she ate at Baby Greens was the Chicken Caesar wrap, which contains chicken, croutons, tangy lime dressing and Romaine lettuce.

I get it, I think snarkily: you like Baby Greens as long as it contains no baby greens. I hear myself put that thought into words, and now the gloves are off.  Romaine lettuce is nothing but nutrient-free cardboard, the chain-restaurant of the lettuce family. I’m a big, big food snob. Someone alert the media.

Here’s what Coco yells about: my insincere attachment to quote-unquote healthy food. Apparently I forgot that talk of “good” and “bad” foods can be triggering to a person with an eating disorder. Indeed I’ve had my finger on that trigger for two months. I laughed when Jerry Seinfeld’s wife wrote a  book about sneaking vegetables into her kids’ dinners, but I’m not laughing now. I really, really don’t want to spend an afternoon with a bunch of Romaine lettuce. And Coco really, really doesn’t want to eat a bunch of nutrient-rich grass.

My-lettuce-beats-your-lettuce is a pretty lame argument when you come right down to it. It lasts fifteen minutes. Now it’s time to cook.

Last week we crockpotted almost a gallon of black beans. Today, we’re re-frying them, stuffing them into burritos and bean burgers. Halfway in, I understand that making your own frijoles is one of those inane things I do, like shaking mulberries out of the tree onto a tarp and painstakingly separating the berries from the schmutz in order to make completely tasteless jam. It’s actually okay to use canned black beans, I think. But do I tell Coco? Not yet. I have my pride to consider. A pile of freezer-wrapped burritos rises on the counter.

Tonight after dinner we’ll work on the recipe notebook she’s planning to take back to Dallas.

“Put in that margarita recipe,” she reminds me. Ah yes, the Margarita of the Ex-Wife of the Ex-Husband. A classic booze concoction, full of romance and longing. (And frozen limeade and Old Milwaukee beer.) I’m proud to have it included. Also my Dad’s Chinese pork buns and sesame noodles, my husband’s salmon burgers and all my permutations of roasted vegetables.

“Matt will think I’ve turned into a completely different person,” she says, with a spatula in each hand and two frying pans going at once. “After chopping so many onions this week, I have moved goggles to the top of my long kitchen wish list.”

Ooooh, a kitchen wish list! My father checked so many things off mine—the KitchenAid mixer, the chef’s choice knife sharpener, the syrupy balsamic vinegar, the Chinese cleaver, the coolers of steak he sent my husband on major holidays.

I ask what else is on the list.

“A melon baller! A food processor. A knife roll, with all my knives in it, all chef-worthy!”

“Do you have any knives?”

“Crappy Big Lots ones. . .”

Coco took me to Big Lots last year–right as her BED was getting bad, although I didn’t know it at the time. It was a big store, filled with big lots of crap. I walked around hoping I wanted something there because it was so cheap, and, as my Dad used to say, more is better. But more crap?

“Do you go to Big Lots anymore?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “I just don’t.”

Here’s a picture of Coco’s hands covered in re-fried black beans. If I don’t include it, she says, no one will believe she did it.

I’m teaching my daughter to mix raw meat with her bare hands.

“I guess we’re doing the challenging part first,” Coco says. “When it squishes out between your fingers and comes pus-ing out. Yech.” We’re cooking, side by side. She wears disposable gloves; I don’t. She’s 21 and doesn’t quite know how to cook, at least not anymore than most people her age, but her situation is more complicated. She’s five months into eating disorder treatment—two-and-a-half months at the Renfrew Center in Dallas, two-and-a-half months back home.

I was looking forward to having her back home, safe and sound, and she said she came home for support and “to build a relationship with y’all.” Well, here’s what we did instead: yell, snipe and snit at each other. Our disagreements were minor, but also major. I don’t even want to go into it because she’s sitting right here and we both fear another argument. Yesterday she finally decided she’d had enough and began packing to go back to Dallas, where people know the meaning of the word “support.” We were all very adult about it and said our goodbyes.

But while she was packing I had a little fantasy. She would stay ten more days, giving me time to prove that I actually could help her with something. Maybe not the unconditional acceptance she wanted, but something concrete. Never mind why I’m so conditional or growing someone a vegetable or s ewing them a quilt comes so much more naturally to me. I proposed ten days of teaching her to cook a few things. She wrote up a contract. We will clean as we go. We will argue according to some dusty old marriage counseling rules I found around the house. We will make food that she likes, but according to my high-fallutin’ rules of unprocessed food and maximum flavor. When she leaves, she’ll have lots of frozen food to take home with her. I hope. In another life, I would have been one of those moms who ran after trains yelling “wait, wait—you forgot the salt for the hard-boiled eggs!”

Day One: black beans simmer in the crockpot, on their way to becoming three different meals. Then we start the meatloaf. Coco remembers eating it a long time ago—back when I cooked meat more often and we lived in a cold climate in a little log house built by the Womens Army Corps. She had a Louise Brooks haircut and was just starting her collection of marbles. We had our food adventures. Once, my Dad brought over a Christmas pudding and instructed me to heat some brandy to pour over it, which I did, in a leaded crystal glass in the microwave. When I opened the door, huge blue fames shot out. Coco says I screamed “holy shit!” It’s a fond memory for her.

The original meatloaf recipe came from my Mom’s I Hate to Cook Book, a book even longer gone than my mother herself. I don’t remember any exact amounts, but with Coco’s help, I translate  “2 glugs of Worcestershire” into “2 tablespoons of Worcestershire” and finally into “2 glug-glugs of Worcestershire,” because that’s how Worcestershire sounds, she says.

ED doesn’t want her to cook. (ED, as in eating disorder. Read Jenni Schaeffer’s Life Without Ed if you’re ready to understand.) “If I’m restricting then I only eat my safe foods, things ED has determined will not let me gain weight,” Coco says. “That’s not experimental at all. When I’m bingeing, it doesn’t matter what the food tastes like because that’s not why I’m eating. If I cook something for myself, I’m very aware of the food and ED doesn’t like that. He says I might as well just have fast food.”

ED believes that mixing raw meat with your hands is messy and dirty and you’ll get sick. James Beard, however, thought it was the way to go.

So here we sit, waiting for the oven timer to ding.

We all know the dangers of gossip. It causes damage that can never be. . .disassembled, or whatever that verb is. The point is, gossip neither builds bridges for peace nor raises awareness of fibromyalgia. Gossip is an evil up with which I will not put, and neither should you.

The following info is not gossip, but that other thing.

I don’t know about you, but my head is full of yammering weasels who exist to offer 24/7 critiques. Dr. Albert Ellis — the famous nutbag who invented cognitive behavioral therapy — advises using piercing logic to debate the weasels, but Atticus Finch-of-brain-chemistry I will never be. The only thing that shuts up the weasels is gossip. Or that other thing.

So here’s what I do: pretend to be busy in the driveway and pay attention the stuff going on in the neighborhood. Sources within my own household are often able to corroborate and/or expand.

Item: Odysseus Kermsey, age 12, continues to spend his non-academic hours traveling to the convenience store. He never goes alone. You can hear the assorted wheels of his various posses (possi?) from several blocks away. Skateboard by bike by scooter they come — those two 13-year-old girls with the streaks in their hair, the first-grade boy who tried to build a fort out of an old Christmas tree over on Bluecrest Drive. It’s hard to gauge the relationship between Odysseus and these assorted people, and the day those cousins, or whoever they were, came running after him, each wearing one enormous black shoe, was particularly confusing. But not uninteresting. In the spring of 2010 Odysseus rolled by and said “what up.” His voice had become low and gravelly. Hormones were in the house.

A bandit broke into a woman’s car — well, it wasn’t locked — and hung a nice pair of women’s underwear over her rearview mirror. They were clean. A debate erupted on the neighborhood listserv. If you can imagine, some people thought this “assault” was funny! Well, it wasn’t. It was menacing, with definite sexist overtones. Someone may have asked whether the underpants were Hanky Pankies. That person may have been told it was none of her beeswax! Even if Hanky Pankies are the only underwear that fit every set of haunches, in perfect comfort, with no VPL!

The bag worms are back. They live in houses they built themselves — and you can do this too, according to the latest issue of Mother Earth News — and those houses look like bags. They must be destroyed by Francisco — who recently got a giant new pickup truck with duallies — or they will, in turn, destroy the pecan trees. Francisco takes time out from this job to survey my yard and cry too much! Too much plants! Too much weeds! Too much morning Gloria! This is how I found out the morning glories I planted three years ago have finally sprouted.

Today I expect breaking developments concerning the three guys who hurl medicine balls at each other on the tennis court. It’s worth noting that the tennis court, along with everyone and everything else of importance, is located in my zip code, not in my head.