Jo-Ann Mapson

Gramma's Rolling Pin

Forty was a friendly sounding age; thirty, seasoned. Twenty was whoo-hoo, mambo panties, and pour me another tequila, Sheila. Ten, I stayed up all night, certain that double digits would feel different. Fifty, however, is serious, high-pitched, and accusing:

Have you planned for retirement?
Do you really need to go shopping for new clothes?
About your diet.

I'm fifty, which means my mother's turning eighty.

Since I moved to "that place near Russia," my visits "home" are intense. I try to shove too much into each day, which makes me tired and cranky, and my mom and I "have words," and spend the last day apologizing to each other.

On one of my recent visits, we were making pie, using my grandmother's rolling pin. "She made the best pie crust," Mom said, as she proceeded to make one of her own legendary creations. I held up the rolling pin, solid maple with fixed handles, imagining its history. My grandmother emigrated from Italy. She named my mother Mary after a beloved sister who died in childhood. My grandmother was allowed to go to school through the elementary grades, and then she had to quit and work the family tobacco farm, until she was married off to a man in his thirties. She was seventeen at the time. She wasn't a huggy kind of gramma. She favored boys, yelled at her cat, and I was scared of her, but the women in my family can hardly be called shrinking violets.

My mom drives a BMW. Her doctor wrote her a prescription for golf after giving birth to five of us, and I don't think she's skipped a day since. She inadvertently taught me algebra with her favorite curse, "shit and two is eight!" Solve for shit and you're home free. She can work a VCR. When my father died, she cried for about one day, and then turned to raising my little brother and sister. They turned out a little funky, but neither is in jail. We've given her wrinkles, gray hair, a heart attack, and plenty of reasons to feel indignant, but she still loves us. She spoils her grandchildren, but she also tells them what to do.

Anyway, back to the rolling pin.

I wonder if it mutated from the mortar and pestle. In antique stores, there're fancy ones with ball bearings, hollow glass ones to fill with ice. They sit in an old crock hoping to be adopted. Inside the wood lurk the ghosts of countless hands and pie crusts and Christmas cookies, and probably a few cuss words, too. The instruments of a woman's world are so often turned into comedy, but how could that happen without a few men who deserved if not a whack with the pin, then at least the threat?

My mom doesn't like it when I ask probing questions. Such as why she met and married my dad in a weekend. "It was wartime," she says. I can get her talking about old time radio, and driving all night to see Cab Calloway, but women have secrets, many of them taken to the grave. My mom loves to antique shop, and makes great "dirty spaghetti." My grandmother made neutron lasagne, and raised high the rolling pin. I love to cook just about anything.

My last visit home, I asked my mother if when she died, could I please have Gramma's rolling pin. I have enough china; what I'm after is the stories. She gave it to me on the spot. Now, when I roll out dough in "that place near Russia," I'm in a kitchen full of ageless women, and every single one of them is telling me a secret.

Dirty spaghetti:
Lots of garlic chopped fine, sautéed in butter, thickened into a white sauce with heavy cream and maybe a little flour. Pour over angel hair pasta. Eat.

More later,
Jo-Ann

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