Next of Kin

Next of Kin

Fact-­Checker

She leaves me a message. My mother, eighty-­some years old. We haven’t spoken to each other in thirtyish years. Her voice is full-­throated, clarion, imperious—­she is ten feet tall, her footsteps set off car alarms, her teeth are as big as subway tiles, she scolds the trees, commands the rivers. But then it turns watery and apprehensive and trembly—­she becomes small, made of cotton, a tucked-­in child who pleads for one more story before lights-­out at bedtime.

“I’ve just received a call from a fact-­checker from The New York Times Magazine just to uh . . . whatever you’ve written in an article . . . she was checking to see if what you’ve written is all true . . .”

I scour the essay in my mind, wondering what I may have misstated.

“I’ve forgotten or I didn’t understand what it was that you had written . . . that she had questions, that she was asking about . . . so I’m just curious to know if it was kind or unkind or what it was . . . but I guess I just couldn’t wait to read and see it in the paper so maybe you’ll let me know what it was you said, okay?”

Her water-­hose voice peters out to an impotent trickle: Was it kind, or was it unkind, she worries.

Neither of us knows this yet, but we are about to trade places in the order of things. We are traveling toward each other from opposite ends of a long, long corridor and soon—­we will brush arms as we pass—­I will be the mother, she will be the child. I will find two of her teeth while sweeping the floor in her home and I will later slip one under her hospital bed pillow for tooth fairy money, I will change her smeared diaper, I will read to her, hold her face in my hands, tell her what a good girl she is being. But for now, here where this story begins, we are still the people we have always been to each other. She is still The Mother. I am still The Child. She still crisply reprimands, dismisses, criticizes; I still roil with self-­recrimination.

And she has left me a voice message.

For over a decade I’ve written occasional features and opinion pieces for The New York Times but what prompts her to call after all these years concerns my monthly column, which I’d just filed: a regular ditty about food that I’ve been writing for the magazine for a little more than five years. I decide what I want to write about: baklava, or butter, or beans, and every month I file an 850-­word essay with an accompanying well-­tested recipe. This one’s about a sandwich—­ripe beefsteak tomatoes, sliced red onions, mayonnaise, salt, and pepper on a split baguette—­that I’ve based on one I remember her making every day for us kids for lunch on a long-­ago summer vacation in Corsica.

This sandwich was her efficient and frugal way of feeding five kids on an otherwise extravagant vacation—­for which the budget had already been exhausted on airline tickets and a leased Citroën. Keeping the rest of it exceedingly, necessarily tight, she arranged rooms for us in a Catholic school dormitory vacant of students during the summer months, in exchange for a modest donation made to the convent. With only a kitchenette at the end of the hall to work with, she relied on these sandwiches as full meals, loading up the fresh, warm baguettes in the early morning and then, once tightly wrapped, stowing them in her cotton crochet sack until midday. The juicy tomatoes would soak into the bread as she marched all five of us down narrow goat paths to the black stone beaches of Ajaccio, or hiked us all up into the cool mountains above Calenzana, following a creek until she found flat, mossy rocks we could sit on for our lunch. There she would pull these hefty foot-­long torpedoes from her bag and hand them out.

Everything I know about eating and cooking starts with her. She is a woman who has spent her entire indoor life in the kitchen, and her entire outdoor life in the garden or the woods; she is a woman who wakes up every day and immediately puts on her kitchen apron and ties the strings—­even to read the newspaper—­and only trades it in again at the very end, for her nightgown. From her I got these sandwiches, and I’ve duly credited her in my latest column.

When I file, they put me through the editorial procedure that they do for actual journalists. It may be only an essay about honeycomb tripe or marron glacé or—­on this particular day—­tomato sandwiches, but it’s the paper of record, and my work gets put through four different editors, including the rigorous fact-­checker.

To be fact-­checked is an intimidating, thoroughgoing experience, one that I used to think was overkill for a food writer. And even though I’ve now been through it dozens of times—­concerning such topics as peanut butter custard cake, or caviar on toast—­I still feel like I am being interrogated about some wrongdoing when they request my “supporting documents” and the contact information of anyone I may have mentioned in the essay. It’s as if you are a person of interest, a suspect who cannot be released until they investigate the inconsistencies in your story regarding the price you mentioned of a tub of crab meat and the price they are finding. But I send a breezy email to the assigned fact-­checker with my mother’s phone number and a brief heads-­up before I am even asked for supporting materials—­as if to declare: I’m so faithful to the truth that I volunteer the information before you even have a chance to ask me for it. You don’t have to haul me downtown for questioning, no sir.

I email the fact-­checker, My mother is eighty-­eight or eighty-­nine years old—­somewhere in there, I think. A little hard of hearing. Often confused by the telephone. But feel free to see what you can get from her!

I worry that my mother, uninitiated, will be alarmed when the fact-­checker calls. She has never been interviewed nor rigorously fact-­checked. She lives by herself at the top of her own sylvan mountain, on her own hundred acres, with a driveway a steep and tricky quarter mile long, in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. For over forty years, she has lived far removed from anyone’s scrutiny.

Her phone rings infrequently and only at predictable hours as she has long ago arranged it: Friends, neighbors, family, and telemarketers alike—­all have received her stern instructions regarding acceptable times to disturb her with the nuisance of a phone call. The New York Times fact-­checker doesn’t know any of this and calls at their own convenience. I worry my mother will be set back on her heels—­“Fact-­checker? The New York Times?” You might as well say: Detective. Officer. From the FBI.

My assumption is that editors who are assigned to fact-­check serious pieces of journalism are probably thick-­skinned and accustomed to some level of hostility when they call their subjects, but I still feel mild concern on their behalf, should the fact-­checker catch the sharp tongue of my mother’s lifelong insistence on proper manners and strict telephone etiquette.

What if the fact-­checker behaves like one of our “weak-­chinned” or “mousy” friends back when we were children in elementary school, who would call the house and whisper-­squeak, “Is Gabs there?” Without the required well-­mannered, full-­throated preamble, “Good evening, Missus Hamilton, this is Lori calling, may I please speak with Gabrielle?”

What if the editor speaks too quickly, is on a tight deadline, is impatient to file copy, uses a cellphone and a headset for hands-­free typing, and what if the connection is poor?

What if the fact-­checker speaks with an accent or doesn’t enunciate properly? My mother has been described by many as “a real piece of work.”

Late into her eighties, she is still sharp, hale, and hardy. She drives her own car, does her own grocery shopping, cooks her own meals, weeds her garden, goes for long walks—­even during the mud and the deerfly seasons—­shovels snow, catches occasional mistakes on her utility bills or bank statements using a magnifying glass and calls the toll-­free customer complaint lines. But she is also showing her age, a slight frailty emerges in her voice now, she is going deaf in her right ear, her memory is a steel trap here and yet cheesecloth there, and by this day, the day of the fact-­checker phone call regarding a simple tomato-­and-­mayonnaise sandwich on a trip to Corsica one summer almost fifty years ago, she cannot always be absolutely certain what day of the month it is without first consulting her large-­print calendar that she keeps by the telephone.