The substantial meat-based dishes that graced my grandmother’s table never found a place on ours. We never had a brisket, and only once did we have a steak. The steak came from the animal science department at the university. We had to fill out a questionnaire as we ate it. Was it tough? Was it dry? What color was it? I remember that it was tough and dry and gray, and why it was special was a mystery to me. I was ten years old, and what I really wanted was a horse, not a steak.
* * *
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Meat was costly, and my mother was loath to spend money on food in part because the food budget was what she dipped into to make sure we all had music, dance, and art lessons. At one point my mother and her three eldest children could have had a quartet if we were all in the same room at the same time. Even a quintet. My sister and mother played violin, I played violin as well but also viola, and Mike played cello. He also took up the tuba, which was, I see now, a slap in the face to my mother. Sadly, the result of her efforts to better her children culturally was that her three eldest became involved with food: Mike is a farmer, I have been a chef and food writer, and my sister, Jamie, is an excellent cook, although she is now an artist and not as interested in cooking as she once was. Or so she says. As for the last child in our family, my kid brother, Roger, my mother claimed that she was simply too worn out to insist on music lessons for him. He, of course, is the only one of us who plays an instrument. He’s played jazz guitar in various bands for years, and he’s a good baker, too. He mills his own flour and he owns a finca in Costa Rica.
* * *
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For the most part, my father was patient with the way my mother managed things, but sometimes a bitter word escaped, letting her know that he could tell the real from the ersatz and that he wasn’t always happy about substitutes. On one such occasion she had made a cheesecake using cottage cheese instead of cream cheese, a recipe I found copied twice in her files. My father said, “So, this is what the rich eat!” This was a comment I heard on more than one occasion, and I saw that it hurt my mother. I winced when he said those words, because I knew it took extra time and effort and money to make a dessert that wasn’t Jell-O. But I don’t think my mother could imagine the importance of making the voluptuous version my father knew, whatever it was.
I remember her cottage cheese cake as good, and I know that it can be quite a nice thing in its own right. I make a cottage cheese pie that is fragrant with nutmeg, and there’s nothing lacking about it. But I’ve learned that you can’t let anyone think you’ve made a cheesecake when you’ve used cottage cheese or they get all confused and upset. Cheesecake is just a different animal altogether. It’s seductive, creamy, and caloric, and you can’t stop eating it. One made with cottage cheese is not that. It’s too light and not as seductive. But it is very good.
* * *
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On an early spring day my mother and I took an aimless drive to look at the green foothills of California and the blossoming orchards. At ninety she no longer drove, so this was a special excursion for her. She was thin and fragile, but also alert, curious, and full of ideas. We talked about Judaism, about books and novels that we’d read or wanted to read or write. Suddenly out of nowhere—perhaps she stole a glance at my profile—she exclaimed, “My God, my children are so old!”
And we were. I was sixty-one, my brother was fifty-nine, my sister would turn fifty-four the following day, and our kid brother was hardly a kid at almost fifty. Still, it was a funny thing to say.
“You should talk!” I teased.
My mother knew she was old, but thinking of us, her children, as also old was another kind of mirror, a way of seeing herself and her age.
As we drove along I thought about how long we can keep our stories going—especially our anger at our parents. Even as an “old child” I could raise a righteous indignation about some thoughtless comments of hers, but when I heard my mother’s astonishment at where we’ve all landed in life, she at the doorstep of death, which could be true for the rest of us for that matter, we don’t know, suddenly my anger fell away. Whatever issues remained, they were now wholly mine to deal with, not hers. And I could even see them with humor. Spaciousness filled the confines of the car and our relationship, and we enjoyed the ride. Any edge that was in my voice seemed to have vanished. It was a miracle.
The practice of Buddhist meditation, zazen—watching thoughts and feelings come and go without judgment—was good for everything, including thoughts and emotions stimulated by powerful mother actions. But it was seeing my mother’s bony arms, watching her courage in the face of the daily dimming of her senses, seeing the perhaps foolish but nonetheless rising mind that made her invite a Mexican man who once rented a room from her to dinner—a meal that was a challenge for her to make at her age—was humbling. Of course she was forever stubborn and resisted doing the simple things that could make her life easier, but in the end, that’s just who she was.
* * *
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The trade-off of food for lessons meant that in place of real butter we ate Coldbrook margarine, which came in a yellow carton and cost ten cents a pound. Instead of a whole farm chicken roasting in the oven, we had the lesser parts of mass-produced poultry. Wishbone dressing was poured over iceberg lettuce—“the only kind of lettuce there was,” my mother rightly pointed out—and packaged puddings and Jell-O showed up repeatedly for dessert in place of the pies she and my father had made on their various farms back East. The hastily made Jell-O, never stirred long enough for the gelatin to dissolve, had a thick leathery skin on the bottom and was thin and wobbly on top. When it came to the lemon pudding, we ate our portions with trepidation until one family member’s face showed the rest of us a mighty grimace. Then we could relax. The pill, that sour lump of tart citric acid, was seldom thoroughly dissolved, and part of the thrill of that dessert was to see who got it. If you got “the pill,” you tried to hide it, but you couldn’t because it was so sour your face curled into a pucker. Clearly my mother was distracted in the kitchen. Carrots were burned. Fish sticks were as well, but still frozen in the middle. The Jell-O didn’t set, the “pill” wasn’t dissolved.
Marion Cunningham, who redid the Fannie Farmer cookbooks and wrote some wonderful books of her own, when we talked about family meals, used to say, “Well, something always happens at the table. It might not be good, but it is something.” The pill was one of our somethings, and so was the leathery Jell-O, but so were the occasional chocolate pudding cake, custards, and the yeasted cinnamon rolls my mother made. The atmosphere at dinner wasn’t frightening, but it was sometimes perilous when the tension between my parents was high or the north wind had been beating against the house for three straight days. I recall a cast-iron skillet hurling through the air toward one parent or the other.
Our table, made by my father, was attached to the wall to maximize the space in our small kitchen, so instead of sitting around a table, we sat at the table, my parents anchoring the two ends, us kids on benches facing the wall. The wooden benches my mother made in a shop course she once took were such that if one sibling got up, the other suddenly sank down while the free end of the bench flew up in the air as if they were on a seesaw. Dinner was punctuated by unscheduled risings and fallings of the benches as one kid or another got up to retrieve milk or some other necessity. There was talk of school and this and that. Family chatter. We hid the bits of food we didn’t want under lettuce leaves that we claimed we were just too full to eat. We asked to be excused and Mike and I did the dishes. Evening meals were at 5:15, and we were called to the table by an old cowbell from one of the farms. Meals did not last long. They weren’t especially pleasant, but they weren’t horrible, either. They were ours, for better or worse.
6. My Central Valley—Flat and Fertile
If you grow up in California you are ruined. No other place is so fertile, so beautiful, so varied, so fragrant, and if you grew
up in the Central Valley, so flat. I once wanted to buy a walnut orchard near Davis, and when I took my husband, Patrick, to see it, he looked at it and simply asked, “Why?” Yes, it was flat, though I did point out the Coast Range and Sierra Nevada, both visible on that day, and the diagonal pattern of the trees, if you viewed them in a particular way, was handsome. It mattered not. “But why?” he asked again.
Today I live in a beautiful state in the West, but even after thirty years home is still, somehow, California. Yet when I return I don’t really like what I see—the prices, the traffic, a harsh and harried aspect I never noticed before, the terrible poverty in the smaller, more rural and affordable towns. The drought. The fires. The sheer numbers of people. My hometown, which was such a wonderful place to grow up, is both boring and booming. The crappy little houses we all grew up in are now selling for almost a million dollars. In fact, I don’t love California now nearly as much as I do my memory of it. Maybe we always feel that way about the places where we grew up because growing up is such an exciting thing to do. When we’ve had a good childhood, our home is the place that smells right, where the food tastes right, where the nuances of language and behavior are right. It is the right place. It is the place.
And if our experience growing up was not good, we maintain anger for that place. Distance.
A friend and I were talking about these qualities of place recently when she suddenly emoted, “Nebraska! I long to be there!”
“Really? Nebraska?” And then, like Patrick, I could only ask, “Why?”
She added that she was a fifth-generation Nebraskan. “But my husband reminds me that I don’t really want to live there.”
Still she longs for it. It’s the same story.
* * *
—
When I’m driving out to California I often have to stay in Barstow because I know I’m too tired to go onto CA 58 and make it to Mojave. Sometimes there is jet fuel in the water and you can’t drink it, so the motel gives you bottled water for your teeth. Barstow is ugly and limited, but I always give myself the exercise of looking out over the town and finding something I might fall in love with, a view I might look forward to seeing each day, a way to live there. But I can never find it. On the other hand, the stretch between Needles and Barstow, which was once hateful to me, has become a drive I look forward to because I once drove it in the moonlight and suddenly saw that its bare geological bones revealed a rugged beauty. Now I see that beauty in the daytime, too. Maybe Barstow can become a new heartthrob, but somehow I don’t think it will.
I do, however, thrill to names like Bakersfield, Delano, McFarland, Fresno, Ceres, Stockton, Modesto, Sacramento, and all the small agricultural towns in between. I suspect that not everyone feels this way. “Oh, Fresno” is what most people think. Not “Oh! Fresno!” Actually, I don’t like Fresno much either and I even tried to live there once with my first husband, Dan. The move lasted three days. I couldn’t go from Rome, Italy, to Fresno—it was impossible. Once we realized our error, we moved to Berkeley. That was better. We two, former valley kids, thought we could return, but we couldn’t. Still, I thrill to the names of the towns that fill the Central Valley.
7. Dashi Days
My siblings and I were expected to go to college, and we all did. But during high school I spent far too much time fooling around outside the classroom to get the grades I needed to go to an East Coast school, so I went to UC Davis. I had been to some teas where we young women were introduced to the Seven Sisters colleges, and I had decided that Smith was where I wanted to be. But I didn’t even apply. My mother had made the point of saying that Mike, who went to Harvard, would have to support a family one day, whereas I would be supported.
At UC Davis I knew all my professors, having babysat their kids while I was in high school. The first year I lived at home, but my sophomore year I moved into an apartment in downtown Davis above Whitey’s shoe repair store. The Spudnut shop was next door, and it became the source of warm, wonderful mouthfuls of soft, sweet maple bars, cake donuts with icing and sprinkles, and jam-filled Bismarcks. Fresh donuts, I discovered, were divine. While they weren’t exactly good for you, you didn’t come away from them with your mouth coated with strange grease and the feeling that you’d just taken five years off your life either. Compared to Krispy Kremes, these were real food. And doesn’t the “spud” in Spudnut refer to a potato?
I made a clearly more wholesome discovery when some fellow actors in a college play showed me a little carton of creamy white stuff and handed me a spoon. They said it was milk but somehow soured, and that it was really good for you and that I should try it. It took a long time for me to work up the courage to put that first spoonful of yogurt on my tongue. I expected it to be like spoiled milk but it was surprisingly pleasant. I don’t remember where this carton came from—I think that one of the men had brought it back from Europe. It was still awhile before yogurt would be easy to buy in the United States and people no longer needed to have their Salton yogurt makers going full-time to keep them in good supply. Yogurt was known then, but mostly it was the province of health food folks who made it at home.
It’s hard to imagine now that there was a time when yogurt was just breaking into our collective awareness, but as with arugula, fingerling potatoes, tofu, and goat cheese, there was a moment when yogurt went from being something only a few eccentrics ate to being something everyone eats. Today we’ve managed to fill our yogurt cups with ingredients of dubious merit—corn syrup, jam, sugar, sugar substitutes, and vegetable gums. But to balance out the horrors of overprocessed yogurts that are sucked out of tubes and spooned out of cartons are all those great organic yogurts, and especially good are those made from organic, non-GMO whole milk.
In addition to donuts and yogurt, I was ingesting other interesting things, like LSD. The drug craze was just starting and LSD wasn’t scary yet. No one had jumped out of a window believing they were flying. Rather, LSD was seen as something that had great possibilities for spiritual discovery, and it certainly gave me what I would call a spiritual experience with clear Buddhist overtones, or undertones, even though we later learned not to mistake drug-induced states with the real thing. This life-changing psychedelic journey was, for me, accompanied by the heavy perfume of sandalwood incense and the even more mysterious fragrance and taste of tamari, a condiment my boyfriend at the time served with the brown rice and vegetables that greeted me when my first trip finally ended.
Understandably my parents were dismayed when I—at last an A student—decided to take a break from school. My father, who was normally very supportive of me, was furious that I had taken acid—and here I’d thought he’d approve and even be interested in some for himself. Nonetheless, one January day he drove me downtown to the train station and I got on the Feather River Canyon train. It took me to Vancouver, where I switched to the Canadian National Railway and rolled across Canada to Montreal. It was a wondrous cold white journey over icy moonlit passes and thousands of miles of snow-covered plains dotted with solitary churches.
Dinners on the train—roast chicken, warm biscuits or rolls, fried trout, blueberry cobblers and pie, all served by handsome French Canadian waiters—were on the same level of goodness as my father’s summer pot roasts. But after dinner, at night in my cabin, I lit that sandalwood incense, unscrewed the lid on the tamari, and took a whiff. The sweet incense smoke entwined with the rich fermented notes of the tamari provided a thread back to my “spiritual” experience, and I wanted to keep that spell going as long as I could. The problem was, I didn’t really know what to do. I knew it might have to do with meditation, but what was that? Eventually, I would find out.
Once in Cambridge I got a job as a research assistant for the assistant to Dr. Jerome Bruner. Basically I showed out-of-focus slides to students and noted the point at which the images became clear to them, when what started out as a slab of meat became a bunch of red flowers. My br
other Mike was there, along with other friends from Davis who went to Harvard, so I got to know him better. And being in the midst of urban East Coast life was exhilarating. So much was going on for me there—playing in the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, rock climbing at Quincy Quarry, exploring my new landscape, and work, which I loved. The Sergeant Pepper album came out while I was in Cambridge. There was something dark about it, something that portended change, something exciting and mysterious.
I didn’t miss California at all.
* * *
—
One of the great joys of being in the Boston area was discovering Haymarket Square, the huge outdoor market in the North End. When I was last in Haymarket, the market was broken up by Boston’s seemingly endless road and tunnel construction—now finished—and it wasn’t nearly as vibrant as I remembered, but when I was there in the sixties it was an intense Italian market that was crowded and noisy with shoppers and vendors. I rode over on the MBTA with an empty Kelty pack and brought it back crammed with vegetables, bags of pine nut macaroons, bundles of pasta, and bottles of Italian syrup. These weekly visits made it necessary to cook nightly for my one roommate, myself, and whoever else might drop by our Somerville apartment for dinner if I were to actually use everything I’d bought. I know that I must have cooked a lot of vegetables simply because I had so many of them, but nothing stands out as remarkable or adventurous except for my roommate’s recipe for halibut baked with sour cream and onion dip. I did know that it was exciting to be cooking, but I don’t recall any particulars. I was just starting out, and probably making very basic things, but nothing that was very memorable.
An Onion in My Pocket Page 6
