Spontaneous metabolic change is rarely the culprit. More likely, in Ned’s case, his body changed shape because he was growing up—and eating too much. He loved his grandmothers’ foods, even Brussels sprouts and cooked cabbage. “Grandma Annie made this terrific chicken with onions and we loved to dip challah in the fat and juice. She also made terrific schmaltz (chicken fat). I loved making scrambled eggs in schmaltz and then mixing with Miracle Whip. Hmm, no wonder I have cholesterol problems.”
Ned played tennis in high school, which helped keep his weight in check. “I would practice for a couple of hours daily and just eat an apple for lunch and was able to not feel chunky. The word for me was husky.”
Girls, no wonder so many of us have food issues. Even the disparaging adjectives are harder on us. Who wouldn’t rather be husky than fat?
six
Middle School and the Great Job
Middle school is the worst of times for many kids. It certainly was for Lisa, at least until she developed full-on anorexia toward the end of high school. The ages of eleven through thirteen can make parents yearn for the diaper years. Your sweet child now often despises you, reminds you daily of your shortcomings, and forces you to relive your own painful adolescence. Which was why a big boost at work came at just the right time for me. At the start of Lisa’s middle school years, I got to be the restaurant critic for the Mercury News—“The Newspaper of Silicon Valley”—at the birth of the dot-com boom. Expense accounts rained cash, celebratory wines were uncorked, and every downtown in the area got rid of its hardware stores and put up wall-to-wall restaurants.
Suddenly I was very popular, holding the keys to many people’s dream job. Restaurant critics rarely lack friends. We have to be pretty grumpy or full of ourselves not to attract a flock of supplicants eager to drop everything and dine on the company credit card. Who doesn’t like to snoop, criticize, possibly be quoted as “my intelligent companion,” and let somebody else pick up the check? Which is great, except when they say something on the order of:“Eating in restaurants can’t really be a job; it’s so fun! I’d love to come with you but if work gets busy [at my significantly more strenuous job] I may have to cancel at the last minute.”
“I’ve never tried Burmese food, but I’m pretty sure I won’t like it.”
“Oh, a restaurant in Gilroy. That’s kind of far. Could it possibly be good? I don’t want to drive an hour in traffic to spend all evening in aluminum chairs, be ignored by preening servers, and served yesterday’s fried shrimp, like that other place you took me.”
The last bit they really wouldn’t say. More likely, “Oh, Gilroy! I’d love to, but it turns out I have a ton of work. Please, please ask me again!”
These people are off the island.
Before I became a critic, Ned and I felt we were the ideal “intelligent companions.” We stepped forward when the Mercury News’ former reviewer needed flexible, adventurous diners who would order whatever we were told, pass plates, and make apt, pithy comments. Only an emergency involving children would have caused us to cancel at the last minute, and it never happened, thank you very much. My predecessor, David L. Beck, returned the favor by thinking of us especially when reviewing a restaurant in our northerly corner of Silicon Valley. When David needed a family to investigate the enduring popularity of an old-line Mexican-American café (combo plates, chalupas, carved chairs), the Himmels gave him experience, enthusiasm, and two children with diverse eating habits. Jacob was polite and picky, while Lisa impressed David with her lusty embrace of enchiladas and the whole experience of eating out.
David, like Lisa, had a good appetite. But after five and a half years of eating his way around the San Francisco Bay Area restaurant boom of the early nineties, expenses paid by a newspaper that couldn’t stop making money, David’s waistband was tightening. He is a handsome man and a natty dresser. About to turn fifty, he realized that with his family history of heart disease, he might have had enough tiramisu. None too soon. The year David went back to working as an editor, he had to go in for angioplasty.
When the Features editor asked if I wanted the restaurant gig, I said something like Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver: “You talking to me?” Except not hostile, just astonished. I loved the entertainment and social sides of restaurants as well as the food, and criticizing them among friends, much the way it’s done on Yelp and Chowhound. But to do it in front of 300,000 subscribers people and take the consequences? Bay Area residents are religious about food. Followers of one denomination or the other who disagreed with me surely would call and yell at me and trash me in print. Readers take joy in knowing more than the critic. I know this, I do it myself. (“Famous Critic says these are the best hamburgers west of the Mississippi! Can he be serious? What an idiot!”) More important, the responsibility of affecting livelihoods and business dreams weighed on me, especially having come from a small-business family. Restaurants are such a tough way to make a living. Even in a good economy, one in four restaurants closes or changes hands before the first year is up; three out of five fail within three years. People who study organizations often pick restaurants because, like fruit flies, they die so fast. How would I feel if my review put Mom and Pop out of business?
Reviewing restaurants wasn’t on many publications’ to-do list in the heady post-Watergate years, when I went looking for a job in journalism. Affirmative action had barely pried open hard-drinking, smoke-filled newsrooms to women and minorities. There were bottles in the drawers and ashtrays on the desks. At the Mercury News, female editors and reporters (then dubbed the “Vagino-Americans” by some of the men) lobbied management for parity in merit pay, and for hiring more women in editorial jobs outside of the Living department—home of Miss Manners, gardening, recipes, and heartwarming feature stories. Until recently, it had been called the Women’s Section. In 1979, when I came along, no woman had ever worked on the copy desk. A U-shaped bunker in the far corner of the newsroom, the copy desk was where grizzled reporters went when they got too old to chase fire engines and police cars. Two “slot men” sat in the middle and dealt stories to the guys on “the rim.” Theirs were the last eyes on every story, the bulwark against bad grammar, pretentious vocabulary and misspelled names. They were just about all smokers, grumpy about being pushed aside, about the newspaper business not being what it used to be, about having a woman in their midst, about the 49ers losing, whatever. When you walked into the newsroom, a dark cloud hung over one corner, not only because of the smoke. That was the copy desk.
I applied for a job, having corrected copy and written headlines at smaller papers, and having friends who could vouch for me at the Mercury News. In the interview, the classically crusty managing editor asked if I planned to have children. While I sat there dumbly, trying to remember if he could legally ask me that, he amended: “Oops, can’t ask that. Heh, heh.” I was twenty-nine and had been married three months. He could guess I would have children, but he needed to hire a woman and at that moment there weren’t a lot of seekers for the copy desk. The job was gruelingly sedentary and the hours were unattractive: 2:30 p.m. to 11:00 p.m., Friday through Tuesday. Walking into the building on Friday afternoon, the Monday morning of my week, I passed jolly coworkers heading in the other direction, wishing each other a nice weekend. At dinnertime, we rim guys ate and talked football in an empty cafeteria. The smoke gave me a headache. But my first day on the job, we worked stories ranging from county twelfth-graders’ worrisome test scores to Jones-town one year after the mass suicide to the Iran hostage crisis. Two weeks in, Ayatollah Khomeini ordered that the students occupying the U.S. Embassy in Tehran release the women and black hostages. What a rush! Within a year I was promoted to slot man, and two more women had been hired.
All this is sad and quaint now, with newspapers seemingly at death’s door. I was supremely fortunate to get in after Watergate and out before the crash, and I worry about sustaining a democracy without the newspapers’ vibrant reporting. But there were always people smarte
r than me in journalism, and there are today. They’ll figure it out.
After I’d served two and a half years on the copy desk, Jacob was born. The ideal would have been a part-time job with flexible hours, creativity, and responsibility. It didn’t exist in the newspaper industry, which was among the slowest to adopt family-friendly attitudes. I could work part-time as a copy editor, but the desk was a slave to weekends and nights. Also, the copy desk worked every holiday. The most senior people got first shot at the few holiday-off shifts. I could look forward to Thanksgiving at home in twenty years.
When the Sunday Opinion editor job came open, I jumped. It was a one-person, daytime show, with somewhat flexible hours, Tuesday through Saturday. It was a full-time job, though, and Jacob was only six months old. I asked if I could do it part-time and, thinking managers were doing me a favor by even considering my request, I didn’t ask about getting an assistant to work the remaining hours. The company was happy to oblige my generosity.
After Lisa was born, though, having two children in daycare and no one to share job responsibilities got difficult. The newspaper’s Sunday magazine needed a six-month maternity leave replacement for a managing editor. I stayed for nine years. I got to work with smart people, including the paper’s knowledgeable and witty food editor, and I wrote some magazine stories. Most of them had to do with food and family.
A wounding experience at a well-known San Francisco restaurant resulted in “Ten Places to Avoid with Kids.” On a Saturday afternoon, usually the quietest meal in a restaurant’s week, we four Himmels had a reservation at Wolfgang Puck’s Postrio, as part of a family weekend in the city. Postrio had pizza and Pat Kuleto’s very cool interior design, with a sweeping staircase by which everyone descends into the dining room, like royalty. (Kuleto is still the überdesigner of Bay Area restaurants, now with projects in Chicago, Las Vegas, and Tokyo as well.) As the maître d’ took us through the bar on the way to the staircase, a well-dressed matron snipped, “What are they doing here?” I think she meant the kids, and wanted to say, “Ruining your meal, ma’am, and with pleasure!” but Lisa wanted to leave immediately.
Another magazine piece, for Mother’s Day, explored my disappointment that at the end of the twentieth century people were still surprised that Dad ran the kitchen in our house. By then, Silicon Valley warriors were buying Viking ranges and German knife sets, but apparently only the women or the nannies were using them. In our house, Ned did the food shopping and cooking. This struck people as odd. “Aren’t you lucky!” they said, all too often. Nobody was surprised that I was the scheduler, cleaner, launderer, and buyer of essential nonfood items like clothes.
We went out to restaurants for fun. Did I want to make it my work? David Beck appeared to be relaxed and normal when dining, jotting a nonchalant note every once in while. Two or three weeks later, an entertaining and informative review would appear in the paper, including detailed observations from what had been just an enjoyable evening out for us. Maybe in our enthusiasm for food and restaurants Ned and I were fantasy players like Walter Mitty and Homer Simpson, or like baseball fans who dream of glorious sports-writing careers, being paid to sit in the sun and write about what they loved instead of doing their own dumb jobs.
Not so fast, sports fans. I knew baseball writers. Their hours were brutal; they traveled constantly and churned narrative masterpieces out of grunts from monosyllabic athletes. There must be similar hazards in restaurant reviewing, I worried. But the family didn’t share my fears. Suddenly united in culinary self-interest, Ned, Jake, and Lisa chimed, “Are you crazy? At least try it!”
I couldn’t argue. Lisa and Jake were on the cusp of their own big changes. Lisa, eleven, was about to enter middle school, and Jake, fourteen, was starting high school. Jake was still picky, but no longer the refusenik, and he liked going out. They were willing food adventurers with highly developed tastes. Pad Thai, chicken teriyaki, dim sum, ho-hum. Those were so elementary school. What’s new?
Once the kids could be counted on to voice a reasonable choice, they had joined in the tradition Ned and I had adopted from our own parents: The birthday person picks the restaurant. We avoided upscale places with them, but could eat fabulously in Silicon Valley strip malls and the funkier downtown blocks with all the new Vietnamese, Indian, Pakistani, and Mexican regional restaurants. Chinese restaurants diversified even further, from mini-cafés serving only chicken dishes to bejeweled palaces serving fresher seafood than you could get in San Francisco. Jake and Lisa latched onto Vietnamese hot-rock cooking, with the excitement of having a 500-degree stone set upon your table, and barbecued Afghan kebabs, and soon they were eating the more sophisticated dishes of these cuisines, like cha gia, cold Vietnamese spring rolls, and aushak, Afghan ravioli spiced with coriander and leeks.
lisa: When Mom got the food critic job, I had a vast and adventurous appetite. I recall our first meals at a hidden treasure of a restaurant called Golden Chopsticks. The incredibly flavorful, authentic Vietnamese cuisine included my favorite hot rock, a sizzling square rock brought to your table with a platter of meats and vegetables to cook yourself. Another favorite that we came drooling back for was the whole crab with roasted garlic. I can still taste the tiny crispy chunks of garlic covering a fresh and succulent crab. We went there five or six times, but after a few years Golden Chopsticks closed. It may have been the bad location. Even the treasures sink in the complicated economy.
Another first-timer for us was the discovery of Afghan food at a restaurant in Sunnyvale. I quickly became a fan of the grilled chicken kabobs served aside a heaping bed of browned rice and a roasted tomato that simply melted in my mouth.
I loved the atmosphere surrounding our delicious meals, all around the Bay Area, in all kinds of restaurants. So many Saturday nights were spent with me, my brother, Mom, Dad, and whomever we invited to accompany us, gathered around a table, talking, laughing, reminiscing, and, above all, eating.
sheila: Where previous birthday dinners had been spaghetti and pizza at Rudolfo’s, our neighborhood red-sauce Italian restaurant, now we drove through three cities to get to Afghani House and Golden Chopsticks. The kids’ friends often found these restaurants a little weird. And driving half an hour just to eat, what was that about? There are plenty of restaurants in Palo Alto. But even as teenagers, Jake and Lisa loved telling people their mom was the restaurant critic at the Mercury News, the area’s biggest newspaper. The only part Lisa didn’t love was the criticism. It didn’t matter that Mercury News’ policy was to skip the review altogether if a Mom and Pop restaurant was bad and that only the big rip-offs earned scorn in print. “How can you say that?” Lisa would ask. “How are they going to feel?” “They” may have been a publicly traded corporation based in Houston, but Lisa hated being party to any deed that could make people unhappy.
Lisa was getting to know unhappiness. Middle school is, at best, a three-year reality spinoff of Judith Viorst’s classic Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. At worst, a prelude to Carrie. All that sweet talk from parents and teachers about cooperation, inclusiveness, and valuing each individual for her inner beauty goes on the back burner. It will become useful again, but surviving middle school requires other qualities.
A sense of humor, for starters. On the morning of her first day at Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School, Lisa still had that. As she headed nervously to the garage to get her bike, she smiled and said, with bravado, “I don’t feel old enough for middle school, but I guess I have to go!”
Also on Lisa’s side was a wonderful sixth-grade teacher, Shauna Rockson. The school made a big effort to ease the transition for eleven-year-olds fresh off the comfy elementary school boat, but there were more than a thousand students.
And there were grades. Jacob and Lisa’s elementary school had written evaluations, not grades. Now there were symbolic numbers and letters measuring your performance and worth. Lisa did fine in most academic areas, with mostly fours on a scale of one to five. In
Study Skills, she didn’t fare so well. Lisa didn’t get any I’s (Improving) or N’s (Needs Improvement), but hardly anybody did. Neatness, attention, effort, and taking responsibility for learning were consistent problem areas.
Mrs. Rockson wrote, “Lisa is an unflaggingly cheerful, bright spot in our classroom! She needs to focus on turning assignments in on time.” If this was a signal of things to come, we didn’t get it.
Palo Alto’s public schools are populated by the children of Stanford professors, Silicon Valley magnates, and run-of-the-mill brainy people. It’s a hard place to be average. Lisa had struggled academically a bit in elementary school, but Ohlone was a warm, supportive community. If she had trouble, someone was there to help. Middle school was more like Middle-earth—dangerous and strange. As in the outer world, in middle school you aren’t known as a whole person, as you are in elementary school from kindergarten. Appearance becomes the important way to be known.
lisa: In middle school, almost every morning I had a bagel at our 10:00 a.m. brunch, then lunch two and a half hours later. That was healthy enough, but when I got home there was a certain excitement about being out of the scrutiny of my parents and friends. I dove into the ice cream carton with a jar of peanut butter at the side.
When I was twelve I came across a picture my brother had taken of me about two years earlier. I’m lying on my parents’ bed, dressed in light-wash Gap overalls and a lime green baby tee. It was a mock photo shoot where I got to be the model and he was the photographer. He had me pose in different rooms of our house with a new outfit each time. I guess this one was my juvenile seduction pose. My mouth is slightly ajar, my eyes gazing into the lens, and I seem to be rather comfortable. I longed to look that way again.
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