Free Clammed Up by Barbara Ross

father and a distant cousin. My grandfather didn’t cook at all. When he had visited our house, he never crossed the kitchen threshold, expecting to be served his meals—even the bowl of cold cereal he always ate for breakfast—in the dining room. As far as I could tell, there’d been no beloved, long-term housekeeper/mother substitute in Mom’s life, just a string of Gerta-Colleen-Consuela-Brigittes who were rarely mentioned and who had left, at best, erratic marks on my mother’s culinary skills.
    Mom had tried to teach herself to cook. Alone in her kitchen, she attempted to reconstruct half-remembered meals prepared by the Gerta-Colleen-Consuela-Brigitte contingent. Her desire to be the supportive helpmate she imagined Dad expected matched his desire to provide the material comforts he thought she needed. But she never did get the hang of it. It didn’t help that our little grocery store in those days had such limited stock, especially in the winter. My mother had no compunctions about substituting tomato soup or catsup for salsa, or mayonnaise for hollandaise. The results were dreadful.
    It was one of the great ironies of our lives that in summer, fed by the clambake and by Gabrielle’s sumptuous cooking, we ate like kings. And then we suffered all winter long.
    For years, led by my father’s dutiful example, we ate, or at least pushed the food around on our plates, and didn’t complain too much—until Livvie rebelled, as she did in all things. But in this case, her rebellion was constructive. She spent time in our neighbors’ kitchens, learning their best dishes. She spent hours with Gabrielle. And we were saved from starvation.
    I finished up my work and went down to join my mother at the kitchen table.
    “The clambake’s running tomorrow,” I said brightly when she’d put the food in front of us. Too brightly? All spring, Sonny and I had been careful about what we said to Mom. Of course, she knew I was home to help with the clambake because it was in financial difficulty. But we’d never given her the details, never told her how close to the edge we were. And she never asked. We didn’t want her to worry and I thought she really preferred not to know.
    “First day of the season,” I continued. “Why don’t you come?” My mother, who’d spent the first fifty summers of her life on Morrow Island, had not set foot on it since the day my Dad’s cancer was diagnosed. I knew she loved the island, and I thought it would help her to go there and face whatever it was that kept her away. “C’mon,” I urged. “I’m sure Gabrielle would love to see you.”
    It was a mild play on my mother’s feelings of obligation, though I didn’t push it and say, “I’m sure Gabrielle would love to see you because she’s been traumatized by the murder on the island.” I had no wish to remind Mom about the murder, though I doubted it was far from her mind.
    She and Gabrielle were as close as my mother’s WASPy reserve and Gabrielle’s natural shyness allowed. Their husbands had been best friends and Jean-Jacques, Livvie, and I were all close in age. I know Mom cherished having another woman, another mother, living with us on the island when we were young.
    But then life got complicated. Jean-Jacques disappeared and less than a year later my father died. Gabrielle reacted to her tragedy by spending as much time on the island as possible. My mother reacted by never setting foot on Morrow Island again. Grief drove them to separate corners.
    I thought it would do my mother good to see her friend again. Especially now that her best friend, my father, was gone. I wanted Mom to be happy. To heal. To go to the island. But I knew she wouldn’t.
    “Maybe later in the summer,” she said. “Give Gabrielle my love.”
    We ate the rest of the meal in silence. Though my mother couldn’t cook, she’d nurtured Livvie and me in so many other ways. My parents’ marriage was a great love story, but it wasn’t the kind of