Blue Plate Special (28 page)

At our end-of-semester conference, when we were invited one by one to his house to sit in front of his fireplace in armchairs and discuss our progress, or lack thereof, through the past semester, I sat in his living room by the fire and burst into tears and choked out that I couldn’t write. My boyfriend, Kip, whom I so madly and irrationally loved, had just broken up with me. He’d moved home to the Bay Area the year before, of course, but I had kept hoping I’d join him there after the workshop ended. I had hoped we’d get married and have babies. However, Kip had recently told me, during an excruciating late-night phone call that had lasted more than two hours because I was crying and refused to let him hang up until he changed his mind, which he couldn’t do, that he had fallen in love with his best friend’s girlfriend, a nineteen-year-old blond
California girl who was the same age as most of my Intro to Literature students. Apparently, Kip’s best friend was just as upset as I was by this, but Kip didn’t seem overly concerned about either of us. In fact, he had sounded unemotional at first, and finally impatient with my inability to comprehend this until he had repeated it many times: he did not intend to marry me, ever, and our relationship was really over.

A week later, I was still in a state of raw, disbelieving, heartsick, choking shock. I hadn’t seen it coming. I hadn’t let myself, hadn’t been able to face it, and so I’d been caught off guard. I had loved him since my freshman year of college, this lithe, funny, golden, nerdy, earnest, selfish, unattainable boy. Now that he was lost to me forever, I constantly felt like throwing up.

“Trust me,” Allan said. “Heartbreak doesn’t matter in the end. What matters is that you keep writing. You’ve got to get back to work.” He laughed. “Always remember: getting famous is the best revenge.”

Somehow, hearing this, I felt a very small but very deep jolt of hope. Not at the idea of being famous but at the fact that Allan seemed to understand heartbreak; it was obvious to me that he spoke from experience. He had survived it, and so I could, too. He made me feel as if we belonged to a small, hardy tribe of people who kept writing, no matter what, and thereby triumphed over adversity. I left feeling heartened and cheered.

That year, I lived in the legendary Black’s Gaslight Village on the edge of town, a romantic, picturesque cluster of haunted, tumbledown buildings set back from the hilly street in a copse of large old tattered trees. It was the former home of many literary luminaries and the site of former drug and alcohol abuse, scandalous affairs, and outrageous behavior. I tamely, quietly occupied a second-floor apartment in the back of the rambling old main house, a recently built addition without character, charm, or romantic history. My friend Sally
called it “the double-wide.” My friend Gretchen crinkled her nose at it.

I loved it: it was a big, rectangular box, one big room plus a galley kitchen and bathroom at one end, exactly the size, shape and general ambience of a trailer, with wood paneling, a thick rat-colored carpet, huge windows that overlooked the back parking lot, and a pink little bathtub I spent hours in, sipping Jim Beam and reading detective novels, when I wasn’t playing solitaire on my bed, screening my calls, or standing in the tiny kitchen making bean burritos with boiled frozen peas on the side, which seemed to be all I ate that year.

I had become addicted to detective novels. In many ways, they were the adult version of children’s adventure stories—instead of going off on adventures in giant peaches or in boats or inside the wardrobe, there was a crime to be solved. Like Huck Finn and Pippi Longstocking, a fictional detective was no decent, responsible citizen; he was a loner, sealed off with no-goodniks and perps in a shadowy underworld of lawless derring-do, tracking the murderer by trying to think like one. Often a former cop who’d been kicked off the force for breaking the rules and flaunting protocol one too many times, often picking up the pieces of a failed marriage, the detective was courageous and intrepid but flawed, self-destructive, prickly, hard drinking, at odds with everything.

And almost all fictional detectives knew how to eat. Marlowe armed himself for stakeouts with ham-and-cheese sandwiches and a bottle of whiskey; V. I. Warshawski escaped danger and made a beeline for a Hungarian goulash at the Golden Glow; Kinsey Millhone girded her loins for trouble by slapping together a peanut butter and pickle sandwich. Robert B. Parker’s Spencer ate as grandly as he spouted half-pretentious literary allusions, and I loved him for it; I hated his psychotherapist girlfriend, however, because she nibbled at a lettuce leaf and called it a meal. Smugly self-denying asceticism was a character
flaw that seemed to me akin to meanness or hypocrisy. If I had one criticism of Dick Francis, it was that his narrators, being jockeys who had to make weight, were therefore career anorectics; there was never enough food in his novels, although his heroes often craved it, which endeared them to me somewhat.

Often, as I sat in my bathtub in Black’s Gaslight Village, my fridge almost empty and my stomach rumbling, I daydreamed about my own detective alter ego’s stakeout provisions. She would take a loaf of rye bread, a package of pastrami, a package of sliced Swiss cheese, a jar of mayonnaise, and a jar of mustard, and slap together three thick, hearty sandwiches oozing with mayo and wrap them in wax paper, put them in a big paper sack with a large bag of potato chips, a small pack of chocolate doughnuts, an apple, and a bottle of rye whiskey; and then, on the way to the address in question, she’d stop for a large Styrofoam cup of strong, black coffee, add whiskey to it, and drink it and eat the doughnuts on the way to the perp’s address.

And by she, of course, I meant me. In the front seat of my 1974 Chevy Nova, at 11:00 p.m., without taking my eyes off the suspect’s darkened windows, I’d eat one of the sandwiches, alternating bites with handfuls of potato chips and sips of whiskey. I would repeat this at 4:00 a.m. At 7:45 a.m., I’d eat the third sandwich and the rest of the potato chips and finish whatever was left of the whiskey. When the suspect appeared in his doorway at 8:27 and headed for his 1972 Camaro, I’d throw the apple out the window, put my car in gear, and tail him.

W
hile my passion for food in literature ran wild, I believed back then that if I allowed myself to indulge it in real life at all, even a little, it would quickly balloon out of control. I had not forgotten being “husky,” which I associated with depression, homesickness, drudgery, loneliness, adolescence, and lack of control over my own life. If I couldn’t feel at ease in my surroundings,
if I couldn’t leapfrog myself into my compelling fantasy of my future life as a successful writer living in New York, at least I could eat stringently.

So I lived like a mouse hiding from a stalking cat. The longer I stayed at the workshop, the more morbidly terrified I felt there. Mary’s reaction to my story was all too typical; except for my group of friends, the workshop was not a friendly place. The director, Frank Conroy, did not acknowledge female writers at all except to dismiss our writing as “little coming-of-age novels” (which was true; that’s exactly what most of us were writing, but somehow it never occurred to me that of course his own first book,
Stop-Time
, had been a little coming-of-age novel). He palled around with the guys. They played pool together, they got drunk together, they lavishly praised one another’s writing; it was a man’s world, a boy’s network.

Meanwhile, Frank wouldn’t look women in the eye. It was as if we were invisible to him, except in workshop, where he tore us down. And the playing field wasn’t level: there were the big men and women on campus who had published and were from New York and had connections and agents, and then there were those of us who had come from nowhere and were just beginning to write and wondered if we’d ever catch up.

In the wake of Kip’s rejection of me, probably due to the combination of bleak, daunting midwestern weather and the bleak, daunting workshop weather inside EPB, by my fourth and last semester, I had fallen into a deep depression. I was hardly going to workshop or class at all, avoiding parties and the Fox Head, hardly leaving my apartment except to teach my English class or to see Gretchen or Sally or my new, terrible, sexy boyfriend, Adam.

After Kip had dumped me, I had instantly moved on to the next self-annihilating source of heartbreak and pain, like a homing pigeon seeking the familiar. Adam was a fellow writer in the workshop. He had already slept with Gretchen and Sally,
both of whom had his number and didn’t much care for it, but their eye-rolling disapprobation naturally didn’t deter me from him. He knew how to make sushi. He rode a motorcycle. He was sad-eyed and Irish-Jewish and handsome in a skinny, feline way, and he had been a biochemist before he became a writer. He had a tragic family history. Most important, he seemed to think very little of me and to enjoy putting me in my place. This last quality was catnip to me and a clarion call to arms: I was determined to win his respect, to prove to him how worthy I was, to break through his impenetrably dense self-involvement. Also, he confirmed my worst opinions of myself, which satisfied my deep self-loathing.

From our first encounter, we became embroiled in a psychodramatic welter of dissonance and incompatibility and thermonuclearly hot sex. Whenever we felt a schism between us, which was constantly, he informed me I had problems with men, and therefore it was all my fault; he compared me, constantly and unfavorably, to his past girlfriend, Sherri, who’d broken his heart and with whom he was still madly in love. He told me I was elitist. He disparaged my writing and was self-important about his own. My journal from that last semester at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which was the only thing I wrote the entire time, is filled with entries in which I tied myself into convoluted psychic knots, trying to understand why he hurt me so much, why I let him, why it mattered.

During a late spring thunderstorm with bolts of lightning so close, the air smelled of ozone and flashed all around us, we lay naked on my white couch and sucked each other’s toes slowly, one by one. On Valentine’s Day, not caring how clichéd it was, I bought strawberry-flavored edible massage oil and slutty lingerie and went to his apartment; we stayed up all night long doing everything we could think of to each other. He let himself into my apartment when he was drunk and got into bed with me and fucked me while I was sleeping; I awoke
to find him there, and instead of yelling “rape” and kicking him out, I responded with melting ardor. I ignored the fact that he had slept with half the women in Iowa City and could very well give me some kind of disease. This was intense, this was real. I couldn’t get enough of it; this kind of sex was addictive—it was half hateful, half desperate, and to me, it felt dangerous and thrilling, which I mistook for love.

O
ne warm night in May, Sally cooked a Thanksgiving dinner, a roasted turkey with all the trimmings, including pumpkin and apple pie, for about ten of us, our group of friends. I relaxed my guard that night and allowed myself to eat as much as I wanted. We all sat around her long table, glutted and happy and drunk on red wine. Our friend Jim Hynes read a Wallace Stevens poem aloud, “The Rabbit as King of the Ghosts.” There was a silence when he finished. It was a strangely perfect moment, spooky and calm. Outside, a full moon blazed. The workshop was almost over; we’d all survived it.

Despite my playing hooky at the end, I somehow, for reasons I’ve never understood, graduated from the workshop with a 4.0 grade point average. I didn’t officially get my M.F.A., though, having to do with some tuition payment I never got around to making until many years later.

T
hat August, Ben and Susan and I found ourselves alone at Tuckernuck, all of us heartbroken and obsessing and spinning in our separate hells: my mother had finally left Ben for good that year, and Susan and I were both pining for our ex-boyfriends; Adam and I had broken up when I left Iowa City. The weather was chilly and rainy and windy the whole time we were there. Susan and I sat at the little yellow kitchen table
and listened to Portuguese music and weather reports on the New Bedford radio station and played gin rummy. Ben read through his next semester’s syllabus in his wingback chair in the library, waggling his foot, letting out great, gusty sighs all day. We cooked lackluster little meals, mostly soups. Nobody had much appetite, and nobody felt like drinking much wine, either. We hadn’t shopped wisely at the beginning and kept running out of things: butter, rice, carrots, cornmeal. There were no fresh-caught fish, no quahog chowder, no long hot afternoons on the beach with picnic lunches and bracing swims in the cold surf, no sunset cocktail croquet games with gleeful shouts from my mother when she whacked an opponent’s ball into the tick-infested shrubbery. I kept up the four p.m. Hu-Kwa teatime, but only as a formality and source of warmth. We were like three damp, chilly dogs, skulking around, making high keening noises.

BEAN BURRITO

Open a can of refried beans. Spread ⅓ of the can in an oblong shape on a gigantic flour tortilla. Grate as much cheddar cheese as you want and pack it into the refried beans. Add a layer of pickled sliced jalapeños from a jar. Roll the burrito up by tucking in the outer edges and then rolling it like a joint so the flaps are underneath it. Fry it flap-side down in plenty of oil in a hot skillet on medium-low heat. When it’s brown and crisp on that side, flip it and do the same to the other. Smother it in hot sauce and salsa and, if you want a vegetable, serve it with a side of hot, buttered peas. Serves one.