Blue Plate Special (19 page)

While most of my classmates were busily visiting various colleges with their parents, prepping for SATs at their parents’ prodding before taking them multiple times, and spending hours researching their higher education decisions, I approached the whole thing with a lackadaisical confidence that was entirely at odds with my longtime desire to get the best education I could. No one prodded me or asked me what my plans were. I took the SATs once, because I had to, and the achievements once, because Jason offered me a ride with him. My class adviser, realizing that I was completely directionless, took me aside one day and asked where I was applying. I said I had no idea, but I preferred a small school out west, so I could be closer to my family; I didn’t really know anything about colleges, but I thought that would be the best thing.

He told me he had a hunch I might like Reed, which was in Portland, Oregon, and handed me a catalog whose photos reminded me of those long-ago brochures from Putney and Interlochen—interesting-looking, unconventionally dressed kids in classrooms, hanging out in the grass, talking in groups, playing instruments, working in labs. “It’s a very good school,” he added. “Academically, one of the best.”

Reed was the only college I applied to. Luckily, they accepted me, and gave me an immense amount of financial aid.
But as it turned out, the aid I got was for the wrong year. Evidently, my high school chairman was too busy sleeping with and then running off with a girl in the class below mine, abandoning his pregnant wife and small sons, to realize that the financial aid form he had given me was a year out of date. The college admissions department was as frankly perplexed by this mix-up as I was. Why they hadn’t caught it right away, I have no idea, and now that the deadline was past, it didn’t matter. I had to defer my admission and reapply in a year for financial aid.

So I went home to Jerome for the summer to figure out what the hell I was going to do.

RUTH’S BREAKFAST

My grandmother ate breakfast in bed every single morning, as long as I knew her. The night before, she put oats to soak in milk in a small covered pot; laid out her wooden tray with teapot, bowl of turbinado sugar, eggcup, plate, knife, bowl, spoon, china cup, and cloth napkin.

When she awoke the next morning, sometimes before dawn, she went out to her kitchen in her nightgown and robe, put on the kettle, simmered her cereal until it was very creamy, soft-boiled one egg, toasted some whole-wheat bread, and added to her tray a creamer, a butter dish, a pot of crystallized honey.

She carried this laden tray into her bedroom and put it on her wide, flat, firm bed. She climbed aboard and leaned against her “husband,” the corduroy, triangular pillow with arms that was so popular in that era, turned on NPR, poured out her first cup of tea, and opened her latest library book.

Leisurely, over the next hour or so, she ate her oatmeal and toast and egg and drank her strong black tea with cream and
sugar, played a few hands of solitaire, read several chapters of whatever novel she was currently ensconced in, and eased into her day.

This always struck me as the most civilized, cozy breakfast on earth. I have tried to replicate it, but I have never approached the Zen perfection of hers.

When I got home after graduation, I learned that my mother had decided to leave Jerome at the end of the summer and move to upstate New York. She’d been offered a job at a mental health clinic in the town of Hudson. So, at the end of August, right after my eighteenth birthday, we loaded up a U-Haul and drove it east. My mother had rented an old brick farmhouse on the edge of a tiny town called Harlemville, which was, ironically, an anthroposophical community, with a Waldorf school and biodynamic farm. Emily enrolled in eighth grade at the Hawthorne Valley School. Susan had just turned down an internship at the Joffrey Ballet in New York, decided to quit ballet for good, and started her junior year at Green Meadow. She also got a scholarship and worked for a family for room and board, as I had done, and turned out to be as miserable there as I had been.

Meanwhile, my grandmother had managed to find me a job at yet another Waldorf school, this one in France. I was hired as the
fille au pair
for two immensely kind, impecunious, scattershot, warmhearted teachers named Vivian and Pierre della Negra, taking care of their four little boys before and after school, with weekends and school holidays off. The salary was room and board plus the equivalent of sixty dollars a month in francs, a tiny amount, but they couldn’t afford to pay more. The school, which doubled as an anthroposophical seminary
for young adults, was located in the dead geographical center of France, a muddy and otherwise nondescript farming region called the Allier. I would naturally much rather have been going somewhere exciting, like Paris or the South of France, but I accepted this job and felt lucky to get it. It seemed to be a good solution to my dilemma: I’d get out of the States for a year, learn French, and have some adventures, at least.

I bought a round-trip plane ticket with money I’d earned that summer, working as a dishwasher in a Sedona greasy spoon called Auntie Maud’s. The cook was a mean little hard-ass who listened to the same Blood, Sweat, and Tears album over and over during all our shifts, all day, every day. He seemed to take sadistic pleasure in burning things so I’d have to scrub extra hard. “Ride a painted pony let the spinnin’ wheel turn” happens to be the perfect rhythm for pot scrubbing, but that did not mitigate my hatred of the album. He was mad at me because his wife had wanted my job and they’d given it to me instead. He did everything he could to try to force me to quit, but I needed the money and jobs were hard to come by that summer, so I stuck it out.

At the beginning of September, with a crammed-full backpack and a brand-new pair of cowboyish Frye boots that gave me blisters, I flew to Europe. It was my first time across the Atlantic, and I was going alone. I was excited and nervous.

I landed in Brussels, since that was the cheapest destination in Western Europe, in the late afternoon and figured out how to change money and how to take the tram to the train station. I was very proud of myself and felt that this augured well, but then I found out that it was too late; there were no more trains to France that day. I sat on the platform by the tracks anyway, and smoked a Gauloise, feeling very romantic, looking up at the spires and mansard roofs of Brussels. At a kiosk in the station, I had a coffee and a baguette with tomato and cheese, then
I wandered around the streets by the station, over a bridge, slumping under the weight of my pack.

I didn’t know yet about youth hostels and couldn’t afford a hotel room; I thought I had no choice but to sleep in the station waiting room. I put my pack on the floor by a wall and leaned against it and settled in for the night. Just past midnight, a young guy in a station uniform stopped and spoke French to me. I shook my head, hoping he wasn’t telling me I wasn’t allowed to sit there all night. Then, in broken English, he invited me upstairs to stay with him and his girlfriend. “I work here,” he said. “
J’ai une chambre, la haut
. I have a room.”

I followed him upstairs to a long institutional hallway of doors. There was, of course, no girlfriend. Omar and I sat on the floor of his tiny dorm room all night. He spoke French, I spoke English. We smoked hash, ate a melon, played cards, and listened to a radio station that broadcast from Tangiers, where he was from. He was gentle and sweet and not much older than I was. Finally he unrolled a sleeping bag for me on the floor, and then he got into his own bed. Exhausted and stoned, I closed my eyes and was almost asleep, five minutes after he’d turned out the light. But then he snaked his hand down to find mine, stroked it, and asked me to come into his bed with him. I felt I couldn’t refuse after his hospitality, so I woke myself up and slid in next to him. “Just don’t go inside me,” I said several times.
“Non, non,”
he assured me. I gave him a blow job, then slid back into my sleeping bag. As we fell asleep, he said with some anxiety, “We are still friend, yes, Katie?” I assured him that we were. Early the next morning, I woke up, wrote him a note to thank him, and crept out without waking him. On the train, I sat by the window, staring at the countryside going by, amazed. Here I was, in Europe.

I had some time to kill between trains in Paris, a few hours. I plunged into the city and walked and walked, agape. I wanted
to stay, I even considered blowing off the della Negras, but I had nowhere to go in that city, nothing to do there, and hardly any money. And I’d arranged for Vivian della Negra to pick me up that night at the station in Moulins. I had to go.

It was dark and raining when my train pulled in. Vivian had come to get me in the family’s rickety old Citroën. She was a tiny Englishwoman in her late thirties with a coppery, loose bun and dark red-brown eyes, dressed in baggy corduroy trousers, an oversized cardigan sweater, and knee-high rubber boots. She peered up at me from under a gigantic black umbrella.

“We’re all very glad to see you,” she told me in her dry, laconic accent. “The school year’s already started and it’s just been brutal. Well, you’ll see.”

We drove along tiny country lanes lined with trees, past wet, dark fields. We turned in at a huge wrought-iron gate and climbed a slight hill to the Château de La Mhotte; I caught a glimpse of it, a crumbling, grand old edifice with French doors and enormous, tall windows, mansard roofs, and a terrace. Vivian parked behind the château in a large bare inner courtyard. The Waldorf school itself, I would learn the next day, was up on a rise in Quonset huts, temporary and makeshift until more permanent structures could be built. The three huge, drafty, radiator-heated dormitory buildings around this courtyard housed the seminary students, a few teachers and their families, including the della Negras, and me.

I lugged my backpack into the della Negras’ cozy, warm apartment at the end of one dormitory block and hastily met Pierre, Vivian’s bearded, gaunt French husband, who was on his way to bed. He was much older than his wife, I guessed; his hair was shot with gray and his back was stooped. The four boys were asleep; I’d meet them tomorrow, early, when I showed up for my first day of work. I said good night to Pierre, then Vivian
led me out into the courtyard and through another door and up a wide, echoing staircase.

This part of the dormitory was entirely empty and dark and silent. All the other little rooms were unoccupied. She showed me mine: a small, bare room on the second floor with an iron bedstead, a sink in the corner, and a table and chair and dresser. An enormous casement window looked out over the courtyard. A big radiator ticked and steamed. The big bathroom was down the wide, dark hallway. There were three toilets in little closets lit by bare lightbulbs with string pulls; they were nothing but holes in the ground with places to put your feet and a pull chain overhead. I had never seen toilets like that. The showers had no curtains; they were just nozzles sticking out of the wall with a large common drain in the middle of the room. I felt as if I were in a Turkish prison.