Agorafabulous! (11 page)

You could throw an entire banana in there (peeled, of course) along with “the milk of your choice” and some peanut butter and honey, and boom! It was almost as if you were eating Elvis’s favorite sandwich! If you wanted a Slurpee-like texture, you added ice first before putting in the solid ingredients and then the liquid ingredients. And there were plenty of other combinations. He had just about every kind of fruit imaginable out there on the butcher-block center island in his gleaming kitchen studio. And man, did the guy look excited about his invention.

There was something hypnotically soothing about the close-up shots of the strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, pineapple juice, and ice being smooshed and zapped into liquid. The mixture was red and then blue and then purple. The pitchman hoisted the machine’s removable pitcher above a lovely big tumbler and tipped it. The smoothie glooped and glopped out of the pitcher magnificently until it thickly settled to the bottom of the fancy glass. The mushy pile looked like baby food for grown-ups. I padded off to bed, cradled my stuffed giraffe in my arms, and slept the blissful sleep of a grown-up baby.

When I woke up, I got out of bed extra early and walked into the kitchen, where my parents were scrambling to get ready for work. They both broke into smiles. Dr. Morrison and I had recently devised a checklist of daily goals for me to attempt. At the top of the list was “Get out of bed before noon.” The other goals included “Take your medicine,” “Go for a walk,” “Call a friend,” “Take a car ride,” and “Write in your journal.” I always hit at least four of the six daily goals, but “Get out of bed before noon” had never been one of them, until today.

“Well, look who’s up with the rest of the world!” my dad said. “You want a bowl of dry Cheerios?” My mom was already pouring one for me.

“Thanks,” I said. “Do we have a blender?”

My parents looked temporarily confused. We possessed a great number of cooking implements. We just didn’t know what they were for, or how to use them, or why on earth our friends and family had thought to give them to us. These nice, useful stainless steel or ceramic or nonstick or copper instruments of culinary alchemy sat unused in our cabinets and drawers. On the rare occasion that someone made mashed potatoes or cookie dough, my mother’s twenty-five-year-old yellow KitchenAid standing mixer did the trick nicely. It had been a wedding gift from my father’s mother back in the seventies, and we all loved it. Even better, we all actually knew how to use it. Steve was the only one among us who displayed any hint of talent in the kitchen, and one Thanksgiving he had gone so far as to use the KitchenAid to make mashed
sweet
potatoes. He even added pecans. We still talked about that Thanksgiving in awed whispers.

But a blender? We’d never had cause to blend anything. A typical dinner consisted of Boston Market chicken with takeout cups of mashed potatoes. When we did cook, my father or mother put a bloody supermarket steak on a pan, sprinkled some salt over it, and put it in the oven. I emptied a can of asparagus into a dish and covered it with a sheet of waxed paper before heating it up in the microwave. Then I did the same thing with a can of creamed corn. Drinks were diet Coke for my dad and regular Coke for the rest of us. Occasionally, somebody mixed it up by drinking Newman’s Own Lemonade or Arizona Iced Tea.

None of that required a blender.

“Steven!” my mother called. “Do we have a blender?”

“How the hell would I know?” came a tortured response from the next room. His voice was muffled by approximately seven quilts.

“Watch your tone,” said my father.

My mother began rummaging through the lower cabinets.

“When was the last time we used a blender?” she wondered aloud, clanging pots and pans together.

“Never,” said my father. “The last time was never.”

“Aha!” she shouted in delight, pulling something out. “We have this!”

“That’s a food processor,” I said.

“Is that different from a blender?” she asked.

“It’s on a different infomercial,” I said. “We might just have to go buy one.”

“Good chance for you to get out of the house, Ra,” my dad said.

Early that evening, my mother and I drove over to our town’s pride and joy, its outdoor shopping center. When my mother was a child in Catholic elementary school, her class visited a living-history educational village in Flemington. By the time she moved to Flemington with her husband and children, Liberty Village had been converted to a collection of name-brand clothing outlets. Busloads of tourists from all over the tri-state area poured into our town every weekend to get deep-discount, slightly damaged Calvin Klein underwear and “irregular” Maidenform bras. The Donna Karan store had great bargains if you didn’t mind fucked-up hems. And most of the budget-conscious, unwashed masses tromping through the place didn’t mind fucked-up hems (or haircuts, apparently).

Liberty Village had a Le Creuset outlet, and we made it our destination. It was the same place at which my mother had purchased the cereal bowls that met such an unfortunate end in my Boston apartment. I’d never actually entered the store before, but I’d had a job close by at Book Warehouse in high school. I remembered that it had looked nice enough, with pretty window displays full of objects I couldn’t identify. I’d spent all day preparing for the trip, repeating to myself, “This will be fine. This will be fun. This will be fine. This will be fun.” When the fear started to get too heavy, I reminded myself that Le Creuset was very close to the parking lot in case I needed a quick escape.

The drive to Liberty Village took us down Main Street, a place I loved. The trees, houses, and commercial buildings dated from the Victorian era. You couldn’t look anywhere without catching sight of an adorable gable, trellis, awning, or bay window. In the spring, the tidy front lawns bloomed with pastels and every shade of green. In the winter, Main Street looked like a sleepy gingerbread village covered in very cold icing.

After school back in junior high, my friends and I had often walked into town to get a slice of pizza at Jack’s and a box of candy at the newspaper shop. Sunday mornings after church, we picked up bagels at Bagelsmith. I liked mine with cream cheese and green Spanish olives. One old house was a requisite field-trip stop. It was canary-yellow and old and had Doric columns, so some imaginative local history buff had named it The Doric House.

Churches anchored the street on either end. One side had the big stone Presbyterian Church where I’d gone to nursery school (St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Roman Catholic Church hadn’t had a nursery school). The other had the American Baptist Church. In between, there was a Methodist church and a Jewish Community Center.

The courthouse on Main Street was the focal point of a lot of Main Street tourism, especially during the summer. In high school, I’d briefly dated a boy whose father played the role of the district attorney in each summer’s reenactment of the Lindbergh trial, where a jury sentenced German immigrant Bruno Hauptmann to death for the murder of Lindbergh’s toddler son. It was generally agreed that Hauptmann had been wrongly accused and convicted, and that he had become a scapegoat due in part to anti-German sentiment in the United States. We never talked about the fact that Lindbergh later became a big fan of eugenics and believed that the survival of the white race was tantamount to peace and prosperity. We didn’t learn that FDR had told J. Edgar Hoover that he was convinced Lindbergh was a Nazi. We just learned about Lindbergh the hero, and about the crush of reporters who stayed at the Union Hotel across the street from the big white courthouse. The trial had been the biggest thing to ever happen in Flemington.

Off Main Street was Flemington Furs, a yearly sponsor of the Miss USA Pageant. It was always exciting to watch the pageant and hear that the winner would receive, among other awards, a full-length mink coat from Flemington, New Jersey’s own premiere furrier. The highways into and out of Manhattan had big billboards boasting of Flemington’s fine furry establishment.

We rolled on down Main, took a right on Mine, and came to a stop in a giant parking lot designed to accommodate bargain hunters.

As we walked to Le Creuset, I prayed I wouldn’t see anyone I knew from high school. Some people stay close to their entire passel of high school friends. I wasn’t one of them. Not even three years out, I had abandoned contact with all but a few favorite friends—Gretchen and Rachel, and two others. To my mind, there was something pathetic about people who stayed all buddy-buddy with their high school pals. It was like they were afraid to grow up or something. I was glad I’d found Alexandra and Katherine, who kept in close touch with me even though I no longer lived in Boston. The rest of the crowd I’d run with in Boston didn’t really seem to care that I’d left, or to understand why. That was okay, too. I figured I’d done with Emerson College what I’d done with Hunterdon Central: socialized a lot, read a few books, then gotten the hell out and cut all but a few ties. On to the next adventure. Which had seemed rather a grand idea when “the next adventure” was college, but not so fabulous when the next adventure was a bargain kitchenware outlet with deep-discount nicked pans and warped spatulas.

My mother and I walked into Le Creuset without running into anyone we knew. I stared at the mysterious and beautiful objects gleaming on every rack and shelf. I felt like a baby bird that had just opened its eyes and lifted its head to weakly greet a bright new world. A giant sign hanging from the ceiling boasted
THE WORLD’S FINEST COOKWARE. MADE IN FRANCE SINCE 1925
. I would later learn that the factory had taken a brief break from fine enameled cast-iron cookware in the 1940s, when the Nazis took over and began manufacturing grenades. They didn’t put that on the sign in the Flemington store.

The outlet shop had everything one could possibly use in a kitchen: French ovens, braisers, skillets, grills, saucepans, roasters, woks, goose pots, crepe pans, pâté terrines, Moroccan tagines, fondue pots, grills, griddles, panini presses, trivets, canisters, butter dishes, spice jars, salt and pepper shakers, crocks, spoon rests (since when did spoons need to rest?), casserole dishes, tart dishes, au gratin dishes, pie dishes, cocottes, ramekins (what the fuck was a ramekin?), mortars with matching pestles, jugs, teapots, pitchers, serving bowls, salad bowls, French onion soup bowls, regular soup bowls, stockpots, frying pans, omelet pans (they made pans just for omelets?), pasta pots, pasta forks, pastry brushes, basting brushes, barbecue brushes, jar scrapers, spatulas, colanders, balloon whisks, handle mitts, potholders, chef’s aprons, and something terrifying called a screwpull.

They did not sell blenders.

We drove across town to Bed, Bath and Beyond, where a clearance table greeted us as soon as we entered the store. I immediately grabbed the blender of my dreams. The saleswoman tried to interest us in a variety of fancier, more expensive models, but she was too late. I had fallen in love with the ice-crush function and the $30 clearance sale price. Five minutes later, it was mine.

As we walked to the parking lots, my mother asked, “So what are you going to make first?”

I stopped and thought of the enthusiastic man on TV, blending all those fruits into a frothy little vat of liquid health.

“Smoothies,” I said. “So I guess I’d better go to the grocery store.”

“Make me a list and I’ll get it,” my mom said automatically. She was trained by now to not expect me to want to walk the aisles of commerce.

“No, it’s okay,” I said. “I’d like to go this time.” I hadn’t seen the inside of a grocery store in quite a while. We didn’t say anything about it as we drove over to Basil Bandwagon, but this was something of a milestone.

Basil Bandwagon was the locally owned organic and natural foods store. It had opened nearly a decade before, but in 2002 Flemington was just beginning to wake up to the organic food movement. We were proud that the state had preserved some of our local farmland from developers, though McMansions continued to mushroom up all over our county. Farm stands were a frequent sight along the country roads that wound through the valley and up into the low, ancient mountains. But we didn’t have what you might call a political food movement like the one you see today. If you wanted to see a big fancy organic foods store, you went to Wild Oats in Princeton or the brand-new Whole Foods shop in Manhattan. In Boston, we’d had Bread and Circus. But Flemington wasn’t cosmopolitan like those places. Basil Bandwagon was still an anomaly, and most folks got their groceries at ShopRite.

We walked in and immediately inhaled the unfamiliar aroma of fresh, healthy food. Basil Bandwagon was the only place in town whose “deli” counter hawked lentil loaf, tofu with brown rice, gluten-free macaroni and cheese, quinoa with cranberries, and organic kosher matzoh ball soup. There was an entire aisle devoted to bottles of magical supplements that went way beyond the alphabetical vitamins. They sold odorless garlic capsules, wheatgrass tablets, echinacea pills, and some refrigerated bottles labeled
FLAXSEED OIL
and
ACIDOPHILUS
. They stocked powders and extracts of astralagus, eyebright, horny goat weed (I giggled out loud), dong quai (I giggled out loud again), reishi mushroom, calendula, milk thistle, feverfew, açai berry, skullcap, marshmallow root (sounded awesome), motherwort (sounded gross), and about seventy other things that sounded as if they ought to go into a good witch’s brew.

I bought bananas and peanut butter. They were both organic, and I’m fairly certain the peanut butter was made by members of a back-to-earth Christian hippie cult. It was the type that separates naturally when it is in the jar, so it contains mostly a heap of peanut butter topped with half an inch of translucent oil. I’d never seen peanut butter like that before, but I’d read about it in Oprah’s magazine.

Once home, I set about creating the kind of alchemical culinary masterpiece I’d witnessed on that infomercial: ice, bananas, skim milk, peanut butter. My father walked in as I was adding the latter. He started to laugh.

“What in the hell is that, Ra?” he said, pointing to the peanut butter jar. I turned it toward him so he could read the label. His expression of amusement changed to one of utter horror.