BRICK

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explained that she was influenced by Vincent van Gogh, by Paul Cézanne. Her brushstrokes—loose, heavy—recall the solidity of Cézanne’s artwork; her compositions of bunched objects draw from his scattered arrangements of apples and other fruits. But she was doing something different. Here is a meal that has just been prepared. Here is the site of its preparation. Modersohn-Becker didn’t like the kitchen. She wasn’t interested in making food, but still she knew the space intimately. After she became engaged to the artist Otto Modersohn, her family sent her to Berlin for cooking lessons. She learned to cook veal roast. She used her housekeeping book for diary entries. She painted milk soup on the breakfast table, a boiled egg, a white tablecloth with yellow flowers.

A few years ago, I asked my mother for my grandmother’s letters. They were given to me in a brown A4 envelope, carefully stacked photocopies of letters she wrote to her eighteen-year-old daughter— my aunt—when her daughter was working as an English-language teaching assistant in the town of Gmunden, in Upper Austria. The letters, which my aunt copied and passed to my mother and her other sister as a family keepsake, begin on Sunday, September 10, 1972, and end on Saturday, January 6, 1973. After a while of tugging the letters in and out, the brown envelope fell apart, and I placed the letters inside a yellow folder instead. I kept the folder on the wooden writing desk opposite the front window in the part of the house I try to use as a study, and morning after early morning, month after month, as the sky pooled black, then grey, maybe briefly blue, as winter morphed to spring, as summer arrived,

I leafed through the letters. The neat script, the numbered pages, the gossip, the asides. I read them over and again. The letters were a way for me to see inside the grandmother I had never known.

I asked my mother for the letters because my life had become unfamiliar to me.

I asked my mother for the letters because I had become a home worker. I was a writer (maybe, tentatively) in that space before dawn and the crowding of the day. I was a teacher, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. when I delivered my classes, and into the night when I prepared my notes and slides. Sometimes, when I did copy-editing work or wrote short articles and reviews for newspapers, I was still the journalist I had been since my mid-twenties. In the mornings, the afternoons, and before bed, inside the three-bedroom house with the noisy black cat and the front porch filled with children’s shoes, I worked to make the home work.

The home work that takes up the whole of the time.

The other work that happens in the between time.

My grandmother’s kitchen was very small. The sink was in front of the door, the cooker in a corner to the right, the table under the window. She organized her weekly dinner menu in advance: some form of meat (mutton, beef, pork), vegetables (boiled carrots, parsnips, turnip), and potatoes (plain, boiled). The meat was ordered every few days from Mr. Condon’s down in the village; the vegetables came regularly; milk was delivered daily by horse and cart. Tea, sugar, biscuits, flour were written on the list for Miss