An Unexpected Cure for Heartache
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Before my father left his second wife for his third, Julia made me congee.
I was twenty-six, living in New York, at the violent end of the relationship with the alcoholic I started dating in high school. It didn’t matter that I’d been the one to do the leaving—my sense of abandonment, loneliness, and heartache was nearly as profound as my mother’s had been when my father split. My mother, whom I’d mercilessly judged for being weak.
I couldn’t get it together after the breakup. I lost my appetite along with my sense of self and shrank to eighty-nine pounds. The skeletal young woman in the mirror repulsed me. I reminded myself of my mother, at her nadir. Gutted, I wanted only to sleep, or die. A therapist recommended antidepressants.
Julia’s saving cure was congee. She understood I couldn’t digest anything else. I needed the most basic, pre-masticated food, food for the toothless, food that would stick to my bones. She showed me how to fill the pot with the correct proportion of water and jasmine rice, and then stayed for hours until the fragrant smell filled my messy apartment. She added minced ginger and chopped scallions for taste. She sat with me and watched me eat it.
***
During the course of my parents’ very public divorce it bothered me that people openly assumed my black father had left my white mother for a black woman, as if race was the obvious problem in their marriage. Julia (also white) was tall, bony, and big-nosed, with an unruly cloud of white hair, odd clothes, and slight jowls. Bucking stereotype, she was older than my dad. Yet somehow she’d seduced him. She emanated a kind of shamanistic power with her dancer’s posture and homeopathy. My superficial first impression at sixteen was that she resembled a witch.
Is there anyone more maligned in children’s stories than the stepmother? But I didn’t actually see Julia as wicked. Nobody who’d seen her at work as an art therapist could accuse her of that. As a teenager, I saw her as something worse—buffoonish. She struck me in her hand-stitched hemp tunics and Birkenstocks as an aging hippie who worshipped Chinese medicine and spent too much money on deodorant made of rock salt; a failed conceptual artist whose aesthetic aped Basquiat’s New York Downtown 81 vibe; a do-gooder whose care for the black poor I suspected of cultural envy, paternalism, and white liberal guilt. It was impossible to love her in the beginning. I was loyal enough to my mother that the only aspect of Julia’s character to escape my early criticism was her cuisine.
Julia’s cooking tended to be vegan and macrobiotic; I still crave it like certain pregnant women crave dirt. Roasted root vegetables and squash, brown rice, wilted winter greens, toasted nuts, slow-cooked beans, seasonal vegetables, and healthier versions of Southern dishes she’d grown up on in North Carolina—corn bread, sweet potato pie, black-eyed peas. She cultivated most of the fresh ingredients in the garden. Anyone who ever enjoyed a meal at Angelica Kitchen (Julia’s favorite restaurant) on the Lower East Side before it closed in 2017 will understand the alchemy that made this food good. You could taste the earthy love that went into its preparation. As with the congee she would later introduce me to, it was simple, and took time. I couldn’t get enough of it, even as I begrudged the other guests at the dining table edging in on my broken family. These were Julia’s people.
***
When my father met her in the mid-nineties, Julia was running an art-clinic in East Harlem for the mentally ill, some of whom lived occasionally on the street. She didn’t call them mentally ill, or homeless, but “clients.” The clinic, Souls-in-Motion, was a vast basement space attached to a daytime psychiatric rehabilitation center. She’d transformed the underground realm with swaths of fabric, reclaimed furniture, rescued animals, found objects, potted plants, and art supplies into a fantabulous art studio and gallery. There were separate workstations for writing, sewing, basket-weaving, stretching, painting, making, and communing. The enterprise was so well-lit, dynamic, and artfully decorated that you forgot not only that it was a basement but that it was a room with walls. In the adjacent lot grew a community garden that Julia also maintained, equally abundant and wild.
The art on display was uninhibited and terrifically strange— the projections of blazing minds. There were intentionally ugly ragdolls, abstract quilts, life-size portraits done entirely with Crayola markers, zany totems of stained scrap wood: part dinosaur, part piano. Souls-in-Motion reminded me in spirit of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. I probably made that association because back when she was productive as an artist in her own right Julia had designed, of all things, the jeweled box containing the head of Jambi the Genie. Souls-in-Motion was as playful as that TV show. The community’s ragtag crew included a giant African leopard tortoise, a one-eyed stray cat, and a rabbit called Jack. There were hammocks for the artists to sleep off their meds when they weren’t actively making; desks and drafting tables made of discarded doors for them to work at, beneath which the animals freely wandered.
My father and Julia held their wedding reception at Souls-in-Motion. It was something like the Mad Hatter’s tea party. I remember getting knocked down by an elder wearing a ripped pink satin dress as she maniacally chased after the rabbit with a broom, her wig askew, her face smeared with frosting from the homemade wedding cake. That lady was Doris, one of the clients who became a regular guest at the house my father and Julia now shared.
Watching Julia’s gracious interactions with Doris and the other clients over time, I came to appreciate my stepmother’s gift for kindness. She didn’t distinguish between normal and abnormal behavior; high and low art; them and us. She was unafraid to sit next to trauma, even when it sometimes smelled. Also, there was a spiritual dimension to her socialism. Once, I heard an angry man with a single matted dreadlock that reached all the way down his back rant at her for what felt like hours. With great paranoia, hostility, and pain he decried the system that enabled her to enjoy shelter and money while keeping him endangered and oppressed. He made perfect sense while talking crazy. Julia listened receptively, calmly, to his looping monologue where most white people I know would have felt cornered, threatened, frustrated, or blamed; then she said that she was sorry, offered him a hug, fed him soup, and asked him what he wished to draw. The answer, of course, was monsters, and they were wonderful.
When I asked Julia how she was able to remain so unruffled by this man and other clients whose behavior could sometimes be rash and off-putting, she said she was attuned to what they were really saying: Love me, love me; I didn’t get the love that I deserved. We’re all expressing the same refrain at different frequencies, she explained. I believe she was right about that.
Within a year of my parents’ divorce, my mother began appearing at Julia’s table. I’m sure it was Julia who invited her to my father’s new house. I thought it was weird to celebrate holidays together as if our family were intact until enough holidays had passed that it wasn’t weird anymore. Against the odds, and to both of their credit, my mother and Julia became friends. They had a shared gift for caretaking that was expressed differently in each. I left home for college and returned at Thanksgiving and Christmas expecting, admiring, and enjoying my kooky stepmother’s all-embracing hospitality. By the time I graduated, five years into her partnership with my father, I could freely admit that I loved her.
***
When I needed nourishing in the wake of my breakup, Julia started with congee. Then she brought me to Chinatown and connected me to an acupuncturist she’d learned from, a woman who listened to me describe my symptoms, took my pulse, attempted to redirect my blocked energy, and prescribed herbs. What’s more, Julia encouraged me to get a dog, and to write. She knitted me a pair of fingerless gloves. She had me identify colors that made me happy in ordinary objects I treasured—the sea-foam patina of an old jewelry box, the peachy brown of a flower pot, the grassy green of the fern in the pot—and helped me repaint my walls in those tones.
While we painted, Julia spoke reverently of the cracking plaster canvas of my old apartment’s walls. She said its contours made it more interesting to work with than perfectly skim-coated drywall. Her technique was to use brushes instead of rollers, for the more tactile experience and textured effect. Applied this way, the walls attained a soft, pearly glow until they appeared to breathe. She pointed out how the colors changed with the angle of sunlight, and I saw what she meant. Pain had a purpose. Like a dark basement, or a fistful of rice, it could be converted with energy into something else.
Her therapeutic formulas took more time than Prozac, but worked. Five years after Julia helped me through that difficult period, I found myself in a better place—physically, financially, and emotionally—planning my wedding to a good man. That’s when Julia called with the news that my father was kicking her to the curb. Just as I was finding balance, my dear stepmother was losing hers.
During their separation, Julia fell down the basement stairs, martyr to the cause. Exhaustion must have played a part. Evidently, Julia had lain prostrate for hours alone on the basement floor after the fall. Who will take care of her? my stepsister implored.
Not me. I admired Julia’s generosity of spirit. I’d come to respect my mother’s grace under fire for having to revise her family. But I couldn’t sacrifice myself in their mutual way. I’m ashamed to say, I turned away. By the time Julia tumbled down the stairs she was no longer my stepmother, and I was a mother myself—preoccupied by my infant, short on sleep and compassion, I used the demands of my new family as an excuse. I’m ashamed to say I never made congee for Julia, who was my family, too.
Shame is a worthless emotion, a married lover told me once. He said it with such conviction that I believed him. Now that I’m a mother, I think differently about the value of shame, just as I think differently about the vocation of nurture. Shame is worth paying attention to. It teaches us when we’re lacking an ingredient required by those who depend upon us. That ingredient is nurture, in my case—one of the most overlooked and undervalued kinds of labor. Usually, it’s women’s work. Julia is brilliant at it. I am not.
In the end, it was my mother who cared for Julia when she fell. The sophistication of this gesture comes as no surprise, knowing her as I do. I don’t believe schadenfreude was a motivating factor. It was just my mother’s way of returning a kindness.
I wonder what they talked about, my two mothers. Probably us, the children they’d parented, and him, the husband they’d shared. His shortcomings and charms. I envision Julia changing her arnica poultice; my mother offering to make her bed. I imagine that they ate.
Whatever communion they shared that afternoon belongs to them alone. I consider it sanctified and beyond my reach. Afterward, my mother arrived at my place to help with the baby. I asked her sheepishly how Julia was faring in the aftermath of her fall. This is what my mother told me, and she may just as well have been speaking for herself:
The fall was hard. It laid her low. She was floored by pain. In her way, she prayed. She contemplated her injury and surroundings at the foot of the stairs. Time passed. She figured out that none of her bones were broken. And so, remembering the people who needed her, she got up and climbed the basement stairs.
***
Congee is easy enough to cook, only slightly more demanding than toast. It falls in the family of comfort-mush including oat- meal, polenta, farina, and grits. Sometimes referred to in the U.S. as the Chinese version of porridge, congee is eaten in many Asian countries for breakfast: six parts water or broth to one part rice: slow cook over low heat. I will always think of it as healing food, and it will always remind me of Julia. This is the recipe that she taught me.
Congee
6 cups water or vegetable stock
1 cup jasmine rice, rinsed
1⁄2 teaspoon salt (more to taste)
1 knob of ginger, peeled and thinly sliced
1⁄4 cup sliced scallions, for garnish
pepper (optional)
sesame seed oil (optional)
In large pot, add vegetable stock or water, jasmine rice, salt, and ginger. Bring it to a boil and stir.
Once boiling, reduce the heat to low and allow the congee to simmer with the lid on for about an hour until it thickens, stirring occasionally (it will thicken even more once it cools). Season with additional salt and pepper to taste.
Serve hot, topped with sliced scallions and sesame oil.
Emily Raboteau is the author of Searching for Zion and The Professor’s Daughter. “Julia’s Stepchild” by Emily Raboteau appears in Eat Joy: Stories and Comfort Food From 31 Celebrated Writers, edited by Natalie Eve Garrett, published by Black Balloon.
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