Home Cooking

"Mama," Maria yelled over the phone with what sounded like a party in the background. "Can you make spaghetti carbonara with ham?"

This is the first generation of college students who often traded down when they went to school, traded queen beds and private bathrooms for the narrow twin and the communal showers. Yet they don't seem to mind much when they finally score a place of their own, perhaps because they are also the first generation to have homework-helping, soccer-coaching, essay-reading parents fluttering around them like moths with control issues.

Chris is living like a lonely guy, with a recliner chair and a standing lamp and a TV atop a chest of drawers and a fridge that freezes everything, even a jar of olives. The last time I went up to visit I obsessively rearranged some area rugs, although I've been made to understand that the words "window treatments" are verboten. Quin is luckier. He lives in Beijing. Foiled are my yearnings to provide a couch, some throw pillows, an occasional occasional table.

When we took our daughter to campus a dean passed out a palm card with these words: WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO ABOUT THIS? It was supposed to be placed by the phone and read aloud when she called to complain about the dorms, the food, the professors, the administration. That seems just right to me. Sara Delano Roosevelt is my anti-role model. The newly married Franklin and Eleanor moved into a town house in Manhattan that Sara had designed. She lived next door, and between the two houses there were doors on every floor so that she could pop in whenever she pleased.

First they are in your arms constantly, so that your joints go stiff and your back aches. Then they hold your hand, then tolerate an arm around the shoulder, then shrug and pull away. And finally there's that hug that always seems to vibrate with the adrenaline of near-escape. They recede into the distance, leaving vapor trails of memory and dinner for two, a culinary trick I cannot master. After my mother died we had a housekeeper who had been the house mother at a fraternity; she made smothered chicken and pork chops with onions and pepper steak in quantities so enormous that it looked as though Congress was expected to drop by. I merely make enough food for eight, which is what I always did when I was cooking for five. It is a good thing my husband likes leftovers.

Chris still comes for dinner sometimes, for the kinds of meals you can't make in a frying pan: beef stew, short ribs, spaghetti and meatballs. He eats the way you eat when you've been cooking for yourself, with a sigh and a smile. His room upstairs has not changed much, except that it echoes because some of the furniture is gone, and sometimes he goes up there to see if there's anything he's forgotten. But eventually he stands and says, "I think I'm going home now." How would he know how that feels to me? First the cradle, then the crib, the big-boy bed, the posters on the wall, the prom pictures on the desk. And then the U-Haul and the tiny kitchen with the lone pan. His home now is elsewhere.

© 2008