Blue Plate Special (14 page)

I remember the moment I learned that Susie was Jewish, very early in our friendship. I was ridiculously excited—I’d
never met any Jews before (although of course I must have). No one in any of my schools, to my knowledge, had ever been Jewish. Susie’s family invited me over for Shabbat dinners and Hanukkah, to her bat mitzvah, and to a seder. I went to Hebrew school with her a few times, and we jokingly told people that my name was Laurie Christenstein. Their house was fancier than ours; it had powder-blue shag carpets and a den with a big TV and nice, matching furniture and dishes and drapes. I had a mad crush on Susie’s older brother, Mike, so going to her house was a triple or even quadruple treat. I fell deeply in love with everything that had to do with Judaism, most of all the food—bagels with lox! matzo-horseradish-haroset Hillel sandwiches! brisket!

At Susie’s bat mitzvah, when she read and sang in Hebrew up on the bima, I got teary-eyed with pride for her. Then we all went back to her house for the party, and we kids hung out in the garage rec room and played pachinko, flirted, listened to music, ate big plates of buffet but did not drink Manischewitz, if only because the grown-ups made sure we had no access to booze.

On several occasions, Susie came camping with my family up on Mingus Mountain in northern Arizona. To get there, we had to drive two hours north, through the Verde Valley and up a winding road, through a ghost town called Jerome, a vertical town of rickety wooden Victorian houses perched on stilts on the steep slope of Cleopatra Hill. My parents had spent a summer there years ago, before I was born, with some of my mother’s Juilliard friends, making a spoof film called
Two Brides for Three Brothers
, and my mother had always had a romance with the place. As we drove through town, she pointed out the building where they’d shot a scene from the movie. Then we left Jerome behind and climbed even higher on the road toward Prescott until we reached Mingus Mountain’s campground.

Susie’s parents had heard from other friends that Jim had
drunk too much one night, as he generally did, and had fallen and hit his head. Now they were worried that he had a concussion, a drinking problem, or both, and they made it very clear that their daughter’s life could not be entrusted to his driving. It was deeply embarrassing to me, but nonetheless, whenever Susie came camping with us, we had to wait till my mother got out of work and drive up with her, arriving to find Jim and my sisters at the set-up campsite.

We loved it in northern Arizona, but we didn’t necessarily want to live there. However, in the late winter of that year, at a doughnut meeting, my mother and Jim announced that they were selling the San Miguel house and that we were leaving Phoenix and moving up to Jerome.

All my life until then, every time we moved, I had been happy about going somewhere new. But now I didn’t feel that way at all. I didn’t want to leave Susie. I didn’t want to leave my violin teacher, Symphonette, this nice, safe neighborhood where I knew everyone, the Chris-Town Mall, or our backyard, where Susan and I sometimes slept in a tent and woke up to the smell of the dew on the grass, a spookily beautiful, pink desert dawn. I didn’t want to leave Curtis, either. In Phoenix, I was a normal kid in a normal family in a normal neighborhood with normal friends; at thirteen, this was the most important thing in the world to me. Moving to a ghost town, even though a few hundred people did actually live there, was weird. We didn’t know anyone there. I’d have to start all over again from scratch, after I’d established myself here in Phoenix so well. I’d be the new girl again, an outsider.

But all my arguing did no good. My mother was determined to get out of that awful hot suburban hell and move somewhere more interesting and beautiful; she had just survived more than two grueling years. She had turned in her dissertation and passed her orals and gotten her Ph.D., and she was ready for a new adventure, ready to start a private practice and live in
a Victorian house and make a new life in a place she had such nostalgic associations with.

Our San Miguel house was put on the market and sold shortly thereafter. During my last months of eighth grade, we drove up to Jerome for several weekends and stayed in an old hotel above the Spirit Room bar on Main Street and looked at houses for sale. My parents quickly bought the Central Hotel, a big wooden apartment house right on 89A, the main highway that wound up through the town. It was in good shape and had wraparound porches with balustrades and a little store on the first floor.

At my graduation from junior high school, as one of three valedictorians, I was assigned a speech on “The Home,” which I made boldly feminist by announcing that “the home” was a place of equality now, where men changed diapers and baked bread, where women came home from work and opened a beer; this elicited shocked laughter from much of the audience, who clearly had no idea what I was talking about. Afterward, I said good-bye to Curtis. I told him I was sorry I wouldn’t get to go to Alhambra High with him.

“But we’ll see each other this summer, right?” he said. “This isn’t the last time I’ll see you.”

As it turned out, it was. I never saw him again, and during most of my hard, lonely freshman year of high school, I missed him so much that I began to suspect that I might have returned his feelings all along; I just hadn’t realized it at the time.

CAMPING PEAS

Camping meant, of course, hot dogs on sticks stuck into the flames of the campfire until they were spitting and charred; it meant marshmallows’ black outer husks melting in your mouth and the rest of the white part, now soft and raw looking and naked, thrust back over
the fire. In order to get some vegetables down our gullets, my mother opened a can of peas and we passed it around with a spoon, not even heating them, slurping the olive-green, mushy, sweet peas along with the syrupy water they were packed in
.

POT ROAST

The recipe, with my own preteen modifications to Irma Rombauer’s, goes like this:

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees, unless you’re using the stove-top method. Rub a 3–4 pound chuck (or other) roast with garlic. Dredge in flour. In a Dutch oven or cast-iron pot, heat 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil “over lively heat.” Brown the meat on all sides, but don’t let it scorch. When the meat is half browned, add 1 chopped carrot and 1 rib of diced celery and an onion stuck with cloves, says Irma, but I always skipped the celery and cloves, which I detested. Then add 3–4 carrots peeled and cut into chunks as well as a large quartered onion without cloves and 3–4 peeled quartered potatoes.

When the meat is browned, spoon off the excess fat, says Irma, but I always left it in. Boil a cup of dry red wine (in those days, Gallo), a cup of beef or chicken or vegetable stock, and a bay leaf, and add to the meat. Cover and bake 3 to 4 hours or simmer on top of the stove. Turn the meat several times and, if necessary, add additional hot stock and season to taste. When the meat is tender, spoon off excess fat (or not), remove bay leaf, and serve with the pot liquor as it is, or slightly thickened with sour cream.

In the summer of 1976, we moved into the Central Hotel in Jerome. The town had been reinvigorated in recent years by a scruffy bunch of baby boomers—artists, entrepreneurs, and hippies—who bought up the old Victorian houses and opened cafés and pottery shops and hung out drinking beer at the Spirit Room. It was just becoming a tourist destination: Winnebagos and campers jammed the narrow, steep streets in the summertime. But in the winters, it was snowy, eerie, deserted.

My family lived on the top two floors of the hotel, which had views out over the whole Verde Valley, and rented out the apartments on the two floors below us. My sisters and I got the penthouse, a self-contained apartment with its own bathroom, all to ourselves: Susan got the former kitchen, which still had a sink and linoleum floor, and which had no view because it was at the back, street end of the house. Emily got the middle room, a dark room with no privacy. And I claimed, by dirty pool, the private front-facing room with the enormous picture window and amazing view, meaning that I bribed my gullible, malleable little sisters with huge Hershey’s chocolate bars and five dollars apiece to let me have it.

T
he Verde Valley was in those days a flatland of dull-green cactus and cottonwood trees, bisected into a rough quadrant by the Verde River and highway 89A. There were a few dusty little towns down there—Clarkdale, Cottonwood, Camp Verde, Cornville—and the trailer-park cluster called Centerville. Cottonwood was the biggest; it boasted a strip of highway that had one alluring, well-attended fast-food place after another: Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Dairy Queen, Burger King, Taco Bell. These were the big attractions for teenagers and no doubt everyone in general; there was nothing else in the way of hangouts or cultural life for many miles in any direction.

That fall, I started as a freshman at Mingus Union High School, down in the valley, in Cottonwood. I finally dropped the name Laurie forever on my fourteenth birthday and adopted my middle name and forced my family to accept this. I registered for high school as Katie Christensen; the diminutive seemed less angular, more friendly and cute than Kate. This was all well and good, but unfortunately, I had a horrible new haircut—much too short. My mother had chopped it too enthusiastically, then tried to even it up and there I was, looking like Prince Valiant.

Mingus was a newly built one-story building, bright shiny classrooms around a central hub whose front half was an enormous, expensive open auditorium with a big, professional-quality stage and a state-of-the-art sound system; all visiting orchestras and musicians performed there. The front doors and lobby of the school opened right onto the auditorium, and kids hung out there between classes. Just behind the auditorium was the glassed-in school library. A wide hallway ran around it, sprouting classrooms and the cafeteria and the door to the huge gym, in back.

On my first day, I took the school bus and sat alone and walked into school and around the circular hallway during my free period alone, sat by myself at lunch in the cafeteria eating my sandwich, brought from home, made with my mother’s homemade bread. I watched everyone, stared at everyone, wondering who would be my friend, brightening at any spark of eccentricity or quirkiness (there were few) in someone, inviting anyone at all to make eye contact with me, say hello, anything. No one did: I was invisible.

For the first months at Mingus, I went from the school bus to class to my locker to class all day long, saying nothing unless I was called on by a teacher. I was stunned to find myself so completely alone at school. I’d never had any problem making friends before. All the kids at Mingus seemed different from any others I’d ever gone to school with. They were a foreign species with an unfamiliar language and culture and strange social habits. They talked among themselves about things I didn’t understand, places I’d never heard of, TV shows I didn’t watch, football, cheerleading, drinking, clothes, boys, gossip about people I didn’t know. No one even looked at me.