By the way, I have pictures, if anyone would like to see them after the reading, pictures from the years in between. Pictures of Mark and I playing shuffleboard in Deal, of him and his father and me going to New England, going to the Cape…That was the summer after I lost the baby and you could sort of tell looking at me, how skinny I was, you know, that I was still sad. Would you guys like to see the pictures?
PANDA EXPRESS WORKER
(Scrolling through his Instagram.)
Huh?
MARK’S MOTHER
Would you guys like to see the pictures of how skinny I was and still sad?
PANDA EXPRESS WORKER
No, that’s all right.
MARK’S MOTHER
Well, looking out at this food court tonight, I can’t help but think about how intermixed books and food have always been for Mark. Books were mixed with everything that we did and some of that was purposeful, because I went to stores with him and without him and bought him books, so that was, of course, uh, a thought-out thing. Books were very important in my life and in my house growing up, and it would never have occurred to me to raise him without a lot of books around, but it was clear very early on that books were very important to him. So we had mutual interests even when he was a year and a half or a year old. And he named some of his books. They were “eating books.” He was a slow eater, and, um, I don’t know whether he consciously was concerned about whether he had an appetite enough to really eat a good dinner or a good lunch or whether he just felt he would enjoy it more, which is more likely, if he had those particular books, The Tawny Scrawny Lion or The Musicians of Bremen, in front of him. And, uh, those were wonderful, funny days, and there were also other funny things about it that I’m sure he doesn’t know. We didn’t have any real money; his father was just about beginning his practice, and when Mark was born, Joel had been clerking for a judge, and you make virtually nothing. So when I would get lamb chops, from my mother’s kosher butcher, or wherever else I got them, I would cook them for Mark, I would get them and give them to him for lunch and for his dinner. It wasn’t what his father and I were having for dinner, and he would get the meat. I would cut…like if it was two or three little rib chops, I would cut up all the meat, and that was for him, and I would be salivating, and I would eat the bone when we were finished. And sometimes he would nibble on a bone, but he didn’t seem to care about that as much as I did. I should have known from those days that he was the person who was going to like rare meat. But I liked the crispy well-done part, and I couldn’t wait to get hold of those bones and eat them, but I was…When I was growing up, and I could see from the way that my mother behaved, that everything was for the children, I mean, that’s simply the way it was, and without consciously making a decision that the kinder or the children were the important thing, that was certainly the case. Everything was done to make him comfortable and clean and some of that was for my own ego I’m sure. I liked the way it looked, I liked the way he looked, I liked the way it appeared to me that I was capable, you know…as I said, his crib was beautiful and his room was lovely, and everything that he had was crisp and at the same time soft, and he never ever had dirty, torn play clothes, it just wasn’t like that. But it also turned out that he was a pretty clean kid and a pretty clean-lookin’ kid. And he was very easy to take places. He sat there quietly, I mean, he didn’t have temper tantrums and carry on like his sister, Chase. I used to have to carry Chase out of places under my arm. But Mark and I would go to the office in Journal Square, take the bus sometimes, and go up to the office and have lunch downstairs with his grandpa Ray or with his father and with his uncle Lewis. And we’d have lunch at the Bird Cage at Lord & Taylor’s — that’s when we moved to the suburbs and I had a car, so it was a little easier, and we would just go to the Bird Cage. And I know Mark loved it there. I was always very careful and very caring about the food he ate. When Mark was an infant, Harry Gerner wouldn’t let me feed him regular food the way, for example, Phyllis Leyner did. She stuffed huge globs full of food into those kids’ mouths, like they were grown-ups, and Rose couldn’t bear it. And Uncle Harry said, No, one food at a time, and when we know his reaction to that, ’cause his father is very allergic and you know we’ve got to watch out for those things, and that’s the way I do it. So the first thing he had was rice cereal, he liked it a lot, and then, like, two weeks or three weeks, whatever, he had applesauce, same thing, same thing, then after that I think it was some other fruit, I don’t remember exactly…pears was one of them. But I don’t remember the others. But then finally when we got to meat and vegetables and that stuff, I knew the drill, but he was eating the ground chicken and potatoes and sweet potatoes and carrots — carrots he loved and sweet potatoes he loved. I remember that the applesauce he loved, but by that time the rice cereal was okay, but it certainly wasn’t a big treat. That was the first regular food, so then it seemed like a big deal, but months later he knew the other things seemed more interesting. But then it was time to start some of the more esoteric vegetables, so I bought beets and green beans or whatever, and I had the little tiny baby spoon, which is really little! And I just dipped the end of it into the beets, so I had about that much on a spoon that was about that big, and just the little edge over there was beets, and I put it in his beautiful little pink mouth and he sort of — his eyes got very round and he sort of rolled it around for a couple of seconds and then he went spew!…I had beets in my eyelashes. I had beets up my nose. I had beets on my clothes. You would have thought that I had given him a quart of beets! And I thought, That does it, he’ll never get…I rolled it around, it was on him, it was on his clothing, it was on the table. And I don’t think I gave him beets again until he was pretty grown up. He likes beets now. Well, it just shows you.