“It’s not like you can request sick days at home,” Ms. Gibson says.
* * *
Unit 2 covers the Fundamentals of Food and Medicine. Cooking, the mothers learn, is one of the highest forms of love. The kitchen is the center, and the mother the heart, of the home. Like any other aspect of mothering, craft and attention to detail are paramount.
The dining hall chefs have the week off while the cohorts rotate through the kitchen, cooking children’s meals for the whole school. Some nights, the mothers are served purees. Other nights, jam sandwiches with the crust removed, oatmeal with raisins arranged in a rainbow. They eat overcooked omelets, meat cut into child-size bites, mushy sautés, an array of bland vegetables and casseroles. They’re only allowed to cook with a pinch of salt.
Several mothers sustain burns. One has a cast-iron pan dropped on her foot. One purposefully cuts her hand on a cheese grater. Allowing the mothers to handle sharp objects is risky, it’s been decided. Before leaving the kitchen, they have to turn out their pockets and unroll their sleeves and pant legs. The guards wave metal detectors over their uniforms. They pat the mothers’ hair and shine lights in their mouths. The known cutters in the community are taken to another room and subjected to cavity searches by the women in pink lab coats, a change in disciplinary procedure that dampens morale. Beth is searched twice a day.
The mothers go to bed hungry. They lose weight and become dizzy and irritable. When they’re not on a cooking rotation, they report to the auditorium for lectures on kitchen safety, nutrition, and mindful eating. In the kitchen, they compete to see who can prepare the fastest, healthiest omelet, who can crack an egg with one hand, whose cake is the most moist and flavorful, who can juice an orange and butter toast at the same time. Beth impresses the instructors with her chocolate-chip banana pancakes, which are decorated with smiley faces and hearts. Linda tries to one-up her by whistling as she prepares batter.
Frida’s father was the one who cooked. The family court judge should know this. Her father’s specialty is seafood. Steamed fish. Red snapper. Halibut. He’d carve tomatoes and carrots into garnishes, plated every dish. Her grandmother cooked too, but her mother didn’t have the time or inclination. Some women don’t. Some families don’t eat American food. Not once did her parents ever prepare pancakes.
She thinks herself forward and backward. To March, when she’ll speak to Harriet again. To last August, when Harriet was still chubby and hers. She is a bad mother because she hates cooking. She is a bad mother because her knife skills need work. Her grip is hostile.
“A hostile grip will lead to accidents,” Ms. Khoury says, noting the bandages on Frida’s left hand.
Observing Frida quartering grapes, Ms. Khoury shows her how to line up several grapes in a row and use a bigger knife to slice them at the same time, rather than cutting them individually. Frida lines up five grapes on the cutting board, and slices horizontally, then vertically. She collects the grapes into a bowl and hands the bowl to Ms. Khoury for inspection, wondering how much force is required to stab a person dead, what Ms. Khoury would look like with a knife in her neck or stomach, whether she would try, if all of them would try, if there were no cameras and no guards and no daughters.
* * *
Feeding Harriet had never been one of Frida’s primary sources of delight. Gust and Susanna began baby-led weaning at six months. Frida continued to spoon-feed Harriet until ten months, relying heavily on organic food pouches. After they insisted that she was hindering Harriet’s development, she began steaming vegetables, making pasta and eggs, serving solid fruit instead of purees. The laundry doubled. Feedings stretched to a full hour. After each meal, she had to clean up Harriet, then spend another twenty minutes cleaning the high chair and floor.
She tried serving food that was easy to grip, serving the same food she was eating, eating at the same time, scolding Harriet when she dropped food, praising her when she didn’t, not reacting. She bought bowls that adhered to the high-chair tray. She placed food on the tray directly. She took photos of the messy floor and texted them to Gust with a string of question marks. She occasionally resorted to spoon-feeding, darting in with a spoonful of yogurt when Harriet was distracted. But when meals were peaceful, when she stopped to pay attention, she loved watching Harriet eat. Harriet would stare at new food—a piece of cucumber, a raspberry, a bit of doughnut—as if it were a gold coin. Her cheeks jiggled as she chewed.
Back in the classroom, they’re feeding the dolls blue liquid molded into tiny pea-flavored balls. The food, the instructors explain, is made of a different substance than what’s inside the dolls’ cavities, but it’s blue for the sake of consistency.