Blue Plate Special (24 page)

My grandmother visited us shortly after I got back. When she and I had a moment alone, she told me that it was good I was living at home this year so I could take care of my mother.

“She needs you to help her,” she told me.

Instantly, I felt an internal, immature, rebellious quailing. I was in no shape then to take care of anyone. In fact, I had been secretly hoping, irrationally and naively, that my mother would take care of me, now that I was finally home again.

I found a job right away at the Hawthorne Valley Waldorf School, where Emily was in the ninth grade. I worked for $4.25 an hour, helping Nick, the architect and contractor, build the new high school next to the lower school building. Over the
course of that year, I learned to sweat copper pipes together and install plumbing, install electrical wires and outlets, lay joists and flooring, frame out studs and hang and tape drywall, cut wood on a table saw, pour concrete, and install windows. It was hard work, which always felt good, but I had absolutely no aptitude for it. I made so many mistakes I started to feel deeply deficient. I also assisted in pottery classes, for which I had even less aptitude than construction. One day, I overlooked the melting of the little cone that signaled doneness and wrecked the entire ninth grade’s raku projects. I wanted to run into the woods and hide in shame. Instead, I faced them all at the start of the next class and told them what I’d done. They forgave me, amazingly, even Emily.

I found the Hudson River Valley to be a lonely, bleak place, closed in and dark, even on hot sunny days. I ate steadily throughout that year, as if I were homesick, even though I was home. On weekend mornings, Emily and I cooked French toast, big square stacks of egg-and-milk-soaked whole-wheat bread with cinnamon and vanilla, slow cooked in lots of butter until they were crisp on the sides and custardy in the middle, served up and drenched in Aunt Jemima. In the afternoons, when I got home from work, she from school, we loved to make a snack of bean burritos fried in plenty of vegetable oil, enormous flour tortillas wrapped around mounds of grated cheddar and dollops of canned refried beans—big, crisp, savory bundles of fat and carbohydrates.

I baked constantly—gingerbread, brownies, biscuits, carrot cake, and muffins—and I ate everything I baked as fast as it came out of the oven. At the school, when it was finally lunchtime, I went to the cafeteria, ravenous, and loaded my plate with bread and butter; macaroni and cheese; baked beans; chicken with dumplings; thick, rich beef stew—anything filling I could get my mitts on. I went back for seconds. The cooks remarked,
laughing, on my appetite, which had evidently become something of a joke among them; I didn’t care. I was hungry. And of course I was also “fat” again, as I called it to myself, although in photos from back then I see that a more accurate word would have been my mother’s term, “husky,” which I certainly was.

It was a long, raw, cold winter. We heated our house by going every hour or two down to the basement and shoving enormous logs into the wood-burning furnace. When the fire went out, which it did whenever we didn’t pay attention, the house almost instantly became freezing cold. We blasted through one cord of wood and stacked another one, me, my mother, and Emily, in a chain from the backyard through the basement door onto the woodpile by the furnace. It took most of a dark, windy afternoon.

One day, I walked home from work in a severe blizzard, five miles, because no cars could get up the hills. The whole way, I craved a grilled cheese sandwich on rye bread and a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup. As I tramped along in my work boots and down coat, I could barely see the road ahead or the dim headlights of any cars brave enough to try to drive in this maelstrom. When I finally got home, I burst into the house and found my mother and Emily, warm and safe, playing gin rummy over their supper. I didn’t say a word to them; I was so angry at my mother for not even trying to pick me up, even though her little white tin can of a VW Rabbit would have slipped and slid on the steep hills between home and Harlemville. To comfort myself, I made myself a hot, oozing cheese sandwich fried in butter. Then I heated up a can of Campbell’s tomato soup with a cup of whole milk, and ate it all defiantly, sitting at the table with my mother and sister. After that, I had a cup of hot cocoa and a brownie left over from the batch I’d made the day before, until I felt warmed and cared for enough to be friendly again.

By Christmas of that year, my mother was in a deep depression. She was unable to stop crying; she stayed in bed for three days straight. Susan came home, and on Christmas Eve, we three sisters went to the little cemetery in Spencertown and sang carols together. Christmas lights twinkled from the houses all around us. “ ‘In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,’ ” we sang dramatically, like heroines in an Alcott novel, and then we went home to put more wood in the furnace and try to cheer up our poor, ailing, wretchedly unhappy mother with Christmas cake and hot chocolate.

I’d been raised to be cheerful and make the best of things. I’d learned from my mother that the way to get through hardship was to pretend I had it all together, that nothing was wrong. This year, that all went out the window. My mother and I were in openly grim moods for almost the whole year. We were both depressed and lonely, and, for the first time in my life, we didn’t get along at all. She resented me for living there and not being more helpful to her, and I chafed at her resentment; if I couldn’t be in college, all I wanted when I came back from work was to be left alone to read E. M. Forster and Agatha Christie and write long letters in French to François. My red verb book was always with me, on my nightstand, at the breakfast table, in my backpack at work. My phrase book and dictionary were never far away, either. François and I sent each other almost daily letters on tissue-thin airmail paper. When I got home from work to find a letter from François on the table, I took it up to my room and opened it and savored it. His letters warmed me, gave me joy and hope.

I wrote pages and pages to him of thoughts and dreams and ideas and romantic assurances, and he wrote back in kind, sometimes laughing at my mistakes, encouraging me as I got better. Little by little, my written French caught up with my spoken French, until I could dash off a letter and say whatever I wanted without having to look anything up.

T
hen, in the late spring, François broke up with me, sadly, apologetically, with his usual delicate articulateness. He had fallen into the arms of his former girlfriend, he wrote to me. The possibility of our ever making a life together seemed remote. We hadn’t seen each other in nine months. I was starting college in the fall. Although he loved me, it had become clear to him that we should both move on.

I wrote back in tears, agreeing, saying good-bye. By that time, I had saved a lot of money. I could have flown to France to see him, but I thought I needed the money for college, and François had become an abstract idea to me by then; he existed for me only as beautifully written thoughts and feelings on onionskin paper, not as a real man with a real body and soul. And I had plans for the summer. Emily and I had been offered a job together at a Waldorf camp on a lake in Ontario as the counselors for the older girls’ cabin; we were heading there as soon as her school got out.

It was a good time for us both; after the hard year I’d just been through, it was a relief to be far away from it all with my little sister, floating around on a lake, singing songs and laughing so hard at our private homespun jokes, we almost fell into the leech-filled water. We took our six preteen girls on overnight canoe trips to a nearby island, where we all sat around the campfire eating corned beef hash from cans, toasting marshmallows, telling ghost stories.

That summer, I had sex for the first time. It was just before I turned twenty, in a hand-built sauna on the lake, with a Canadian guy who’d been a year ahead of me at Green Meadow. His mother was camp director. He relieved me of my virginity obligingly and expertly and without undue fanfare; Canada seemed as good a place as any for that particular rite of passage, and he was a fine man for the job.

When I got back to Spencertown, I found out that my mother had met and started seeing a very handsome professor named Ben La Farge who taught English at Bard College and wrote poetry and had a roguish way about him. He was smart, charming, and funny. They seemed genuinely in love, and I was happy for her. She had been alone, and lonely, for so long. Suddenly she was more cheerful, distracted from her worries.

Reed offered me a generous combo platter of financial aid; it turned out that I didn’t need any of the money I’d saved that year, because my mother offered to cover the rest of my tuition. My money was mine to spend as I liked. I bought a viola, a backpack, some new clothes, and a plane ticket to Oregon.

At the end of August, I said good-bye to my family and flew off to the other side of the country to begin, finally, at long last, my adult life.

As soon as I arrived in Portland, I moved into a tiny, shared dorm room, registered for classes, and started to study like I’d never studied before. I made a few friends right away. My professors were brilliant and intimidating, and I was too shy to open my mouth in class. The campus was green and misty with rain. I couldn’t believe my luck at finally being at Reed. I placed into third-year French classes and started writing papers, giving oral reports, and having class discussions in French. I got into the Collegium Musicum, a small medieval and Renaissance chorus, and joined the school chamber orchestra, playing the viola now, which I had switched to for its deeper, richer tone. I started sleeping with a guy named Bill who was nice enough, not too interesting or exciting, but generous and experienced and frankly adoring. Sex was fun, I was discovering. I was glad I’d waited, but now I felt like making up for lost time.

My first semester at Reed, I ate all my meals in Commons, the school cafeteria. I watched in fascination as my fellow freshmen, most of whom were two years younger than I was, piled their plates at breakfast with sausage, French toast, pancakes, and fried eggs. All around me, homesick kids were pigging out. I had done enough of that for one lifetime in the past year alone. But after my summer in Canada, I was thin again, and this time, I was determined to stay that way. I ate fruit and toast for
breakfast, soup and salad for lunch, and not much for dinner, always conscious of the strangely satisfying pleasures of asceticism, of self-control, of slenderness. But I thought about food, as always, lasciviously, lustfully. That year, my sense of food became bifurcated. I ate little, but I thought about it a lot. The idea of great food, my memories of the rabbit stews and chocolate mousses and Yorkshire puddings I’d made and eaten in France, sustained me as I ate the mediocre fare of Commons. My jeans fit loosely around my hips and stomach, and I moved easily around and felt light and clean, like an arrow. It seemed to me that I had found the best of both worlds.

There is a long and honorable tradition at Reed of scrounging: A motley group of students waited by the dish line at every meal and took uneaten food off other people’s trays and ate it. More than a few of them had dreadlocks and bare feet and ratty clothes. They were, Bill told me, trust fund kids with enough money to eat in the best restaurants in Portland every night if they wanted, or even to buy a restaurant of their own. In my dorm, kids binge drank, played records all night, and made a mess in the kitchen. It was a grimy, institutional place of shared fluorescent-lit bathrooms and cramped quarters, and my roommate and I couldn’t stand each other. I felt too old for this shit.

And so, after one semester, I moved off campus into a two-bedroom apartment with my friend Lisa, who was my age. We ate the same thing every day: breakfast was a cup of freshly brewed, strong French roast coffee with a well-toasted English muffin with butter and raspberry jam. I got a bowl of soup and half a sandwich for lunch in the Reed café; and then, back at home in the evenings after classes, we made stir-fries with garlic, ginger, scallions, broccoli, red pepper, and mushrooms, with chicken or ground beef, that we ate on top of baked potatoes. Every day, same food. The routine was soothing to my
newfound model of monastic eating, and it made grocery shopping a snap.

The summer after my freshman year, I was hired by Jo, a senior at Reed, along with five fellow Reedies, to cook at a camp for emotionally disturbed children near Shawnee, Pennsylvania, in the Delaware Water Gap. For the eight-week program, the kids lived in cabins with their counselors, and we cooks lived together in our own cabin—Jo, Jen, Lucy, Patty, and I, on five little cots in two straight lines. Ben, the only man on the kitchen staff, was in a cabin with the grounds crew and maintenance guys.

We had a rotating roster of duties. Breakfast duty, for example, meant showing up before six in the morning and breaking eggs into a mixer from pallets that held several dozen each (we all got very good at the double one-handed egg crack); beating them with the electric paddles; adding milk, cinnamon, and vanilla; and soaking loaf after loaf of generic wheat bread in batches in the egg mixture and frying them on the huge griddles.