Blue Plate Special (6 page)

Then Carol lit the grill and we had a cookout: hamburgers with melted cheese on toasted sesame buns with pickles and ketchup, potato salad, potato chips, Coke, and ice cream for dessert. I stood dripping and shivering a little in the sudden desert chill at sunset, a wet towel around my shoulders, my hair streaming water between my shoulder blades, eating a cheeseburger as fast as I could shove it into my mouth and chew and swallow it, and wondering how food could taste even better through the chlorine clouds on my tongue.

Before we moved to Arizona, I was largely indifferent to
food, except those few favorite things I loved best and requested constantly. But at Wildermuth, something ignited a passion for eating in me. Maybe my palate had developed enough finally to enable me to taste fully what I was eating for the first time. Maybe Tempe itself, this wild, strange new place that was so profoundly different from Berkeley, opened my senses to taste and texture, flavor and smell.

I was in no way a born gourmet, and my palate was not instinctively refined. Far from it. I was an omnivore, a glutton. I loved putting things in my mouth and chewing them and swallowing. I loved eating, and thinking about food, as much as I loved reading and writing, and somehow all these passions were connected for me, on a deep level.

The rest of my family liked food, but no one else felt as vehemently about it as I did. At mealtimes, my sisters and mother ate happily enough, but I devoured, exclaimed, crowed, exulted. When something tasted particularly good, I would say in a didactic, insistent voice, “Yum!” My sisters would look at me, knowing I wanted them to concur but unable to share my visceral intensity. Susan later told me that she felt a certain strong pressure to agree with me and quailed under the fierce unblinking certitude of my stare around the table.

My mother was (and still is) possibly the slowest eater in the world. At the beginning of the meal, as the rest of us were all attacking our plates of food, she took a bite very deliberately, chewed and swallowed, then took a sip of whatever was in her glass, wine or water or beer. A long time elapsed before the next bite, during which she would talk, laugh, lean back in her chair. She appeared to have forgotten she was eating, as if the ongoing flow of bites that make up a meal, start to finish, were of no consequence to her, as if she were oblivious to any gustatory narrative flow. Instead, for my mother, each new, successive mouthful of food seemed to have its own logic, its
own internal poetry. Every morsel was a world in itself, separate from all the others. She sat over her plate until long after the rest of us were finished.

My mother could also do a neat trick: sometimes, when she was eating corn, she could blow a kernel out her nose, much to our astonishment. We had no idea how she did that. None of us ever could. She was very mysterious about it. “Oh, you know,” she told us. “It’s just one of those things.”

During most of our years as a family in Arizona, we were flat-out poor. My mother clipped coupons, saved books of Green Stamps, was very careful about her budget, and bought all our clothes in thrift shops. But we didn’t feel deprived. Every night before bed, our mother read us stories or made them up. In the mornings or afternoons, she sat with her cello in the living room and practiced the Bach suites, which she played with fluid, soulful beauty. For her graduate school friends and their spouses and kids, she threw barbecues, pumpkin-carving parties, and poker parties.

She also fed us very well with the little money she had—before dinner, to stave off our immediate hunger while she cooked, we got a plate of cut-up raw carrots and peppers and jicama, which, not knowing any better, we gobbled up as fast as she could dole them out—or a big bowl of frozen mixed vegetables, which we called frozies. She baked fresh whole-wheat bread and handed us a piece of fruit or a graham cracker for midafternoon snack. Sugary things were restricted; candy was limited, and the only cereals we got were Cheerios, corn flakes, and wholesome hot cereals. Pop (as we called it in Arizona) was out of the question; we drank nothing but milk, water, and juice in our house. Of course, out-and-out junk food like Cheetos and Pop-Tarts was never allowed.

My mother was a cook of the plain, simple, homey variety, which was perfect for our undeveloped palates. She wasn’t
a puritan or a health nut, but she greatly cared what we ate and took pains to serve us good meals every night. Sometimes, when she dished up one of her typical home-cooked dinners, and we told her how good it was and asked for seconds, she would say half joking, “Aw, it’s nothing but a blue plate special!” She told us this meant the kind of dinner you got in an old 1950s diner: a piece of fatty, salty meat or chicken or fish, usually fried, with or without gravy, plus a side of vegetables cooked to a gray pallor, plus something starchy, like mashed potatoes or baked beans. It was old-fashioned and filling, and also cheap, which was a big consideration for her back when she was a student and had to live on fried farina for most of the week.

My mother’s own versions of those other, earlier blue plate specials from her past struck me as a lot more special than those meals she described to us. Her mashed potatoes were rich, lumpy, and buttery, and when she made fried chicken, she shook it in a paper bag of spiced flour before frying it in very hot oil, so it was always both juicy and crunchy. She thawed frozen cod or haddock fillets—firm, white, mild, kid-friendly fish—and baked them just till they were flaky and tender, then squeezed lemon juice on them. She made meat loaf with ketchup, eggs, chopped onions, and bread crumbs, then served us each a savory thick slice that melted on the tongue. Her vegetables were usually frozen French-cut string beans or peas brought to a boil, then drained when they were still bright green and tossed with salt and margarine. They were never gray or overcooked; we loved them.

Part of it might have been the romance of eating the food that had comforted and nourished my mother when she was very young and very poor, and part of it might have been how good these meals were, but the term “blue plate special” has always been one of the homiest, coziest, most sweetly nostalgic
phrases in the English language for me. It brings me right back to Wildermuth, back to that time in my childhood when I had my mother and my sisters all to myself; we were a complete family then, just us four girls, living in a wild, strange place, making a home for ourselves.

As if to counterbalance the charms of her blue plate specials, and perhaps to teach us a lesson about life, my mother had the occasional seemingly sadistic spell during which she dished up the most disgusting things on the planet: smooth but granular chunks of fried calves’ liver that tasted the way cat poop smelled and had, I imagined, a similar texture; frozen okra that she boiled into sluglike tubes with creepily crunchy guts held together by strings of snot; brussels sprouts both soft and coarse that tasted bitter and gaseous; and wretched heaps of foul, mealy, slimy lima beans. I could tolerate broccoli and spinach, barely, in a stalwart mood, but otherwise they made me gag. Meat was expensive in the 1970s, so my mother sometimes bought cheap cuts of beef that came with pieces of gristle in them; these likewise caused me to retch and want to spit them out.

These rare but intensely memorable awful meals were the occasion of much subversive drama among my sisters and me, silent antics, because we weren’t allowed to complain about our food. We were expected, like most kids, to eat it. So we mastered the near-universal childhood table arts of the wadded-up napkin containing half-chewed bites, the under-the-table palm off to the cat, the pushing-food-around-the-plate maneuver into patterns that minimized volume. We also all developed other means of avoiding hated food. Emily, who unlike Susan
and me was given to histrionics and wild displays of rebellion, could always plausibly throw a tantrum and be sent to sit on the hamper in the bathroom (her usual punishment), thus escaping the horrible item in question. Susan, the most sly and resourceful of the three of us, would excuse herself to go to the bathroom and sneak an entire napkinful of liver or okra with her then flush the whole thing away.

As the oldest—or, in other words, as the people-pleasing rule follower, the obedient one, the mama’s girl—I found ways to actually eat whatever food I couldn’t feed to the cat or hide in my napkin. I taught myself to simultaneously disarm my gag reflex and block my sense of smell by lifting my palate up into my adenoids, or something like that. Then I’d fork a gigantic piece of liver or okra or gristly steak into my mouth, barely chew it, keep it off my tongue as much as possible, and take three big swallows of milk.

And so, while one sister got herself banished to the bathroom and the other one snuck there to throw her dinner into the toilet, I stayed behind and powered through the vile stuff under my own steam until my plate was clean, and I could have dessert. Revulsion gave me a certain shivery almost-pleasure similar to that of the most terrifying ghost stories. I was proud of my ability to overcome and control it.

B
ut it wasn’t all healthy, home-cooked, square meals every night. It was the 1970s, after all, the decade in which American food reached a magical synergy of convenience, animal deliciousness, and creative packaging; and we reveled in as many of its glories as our mother would let us. Sometimes we got hot dogs or baloney or chicken pot pies, those magical things that came from the freezer section of the supermarket in cardboard boxes and were put into the oven in their individual little aluminum pie pans to turn golden brown on top and bubbling
and savory inside, with chunks of peas, carrots, and chicken suspended in hot, salty, ambrosial glue. We sometimes were allowed to have TV dinners. My favorite of these was Salisbury steak—a small rectangle of soft meat in gummy brown gravy, with suspiciously bright-colored vegetables—and what might originally have been fresh apple slices suspended in the same gummy cornstarchy stuff that was used to make the gravy (and no doubt the chicken pot pie filling), bound with sugar and topped with crunchy “oat” topping that might have been 2 percent oats and 98 percent sugar. It was stupefyingly delicious.

For a treat, my mother once bought Spam and fried slices of it for supper so we could see what it tasted like; we loved it, but she thought it was disgusting and nixed the stuff forevermore. Somehow fish sticks passed muster, however. God, how I loved fish sticks, those breaded, crunchy, tender oblongs, dredged in ketchup and tartar sauce. I don’t know what the manufacturers put in them, but they were mildly addictive.

On special occasions, like birthdays, we got to eat at McDonald’s, where I always ordered two McChicken sandwiches, medium fries, a hot apple pie, and a chocolate shake, and ate it all and wanted more every time. Or we went to the Chinese restaurant in a nearby strip mall; I had a hot romance back then with crunchy-slippery, luridly neon-red sweet-and-sour pork. Afterward, we generally had dessert at Baskin-Robbins, where I chose either mint chocolate chip or bubblegum ice cream in a sugar cone. Some nights we went to the thrillingly glamorous, or so it seemed at the time, local Mexican place, where I always ordered the deep-fried beef chimichanga with a deep-fried honey-soaked sopaipilla for dessert.

At school, I would pore over the weekly lunch calendar, looking for my favorites: fried chicken, chicken tostadas, sloppy joes, spaghetti with meatballs, and tamale pie, ladled out by smiling lunch ladies in hairnets. We also got little cartons of fresh-tasting, ice-cold whole milk. I always ate everything
on my tray, even the (God forbid) brussels sprouts, and I passionately loved the fresh-baked white rolls with cold little pats of margarine; the warm, fudgy brownies; and Mississippi mud cake, which was dense and nutty and gooey.

Every Saturday at noon, if we’d cleaned and vacuumed our rooms and done our weekly chores, we all got an allowance of 50 cents. This we pocketed and, making a collective beeline for the 7-Eleven on Apache Boulevard, promptly blew on Jolly Ranchers, bubble gum, SweeTarts, and Snickers bars. When Pop Rocks were invented, we were right there to try them out. Grape Bubble Yum was a whole new world.

On days when our mother got home after we did because of graduate school classes, my sisters and I used to sneak into her room, lie on her bed in a row on our stomachs, and watch her little black-and-white TV with the rabbit ears antenna. We watched
Gilligan’s Island
reruns and
Family Affair
and
Wallace and Ladmo
(a local comedy show) from the instant we came home from school until we heard our mother’s car in the carport, when we turned it off and scrambled to our rooms to give the appearance of afternoon-long engagement in wholesome, sanctioned reading and drawing and playing with our toys.

While we watched, we ate graham crackers, the closest thing to junk food our cupboards could provide. One after another, we slid them from their tightly folded wax-paper wrapping and crammed them mindlessly into our mouths, crunching them to wet pulp. The dusty, sweet, innocuous taste of graham crackers is forever associated for me with the sound of cartoon music and the
Gilligan
theme song. After about five of these corrugated, mealy-flour biscuits, I staggered to the kitchen and opened the fridge and poured cold milk from the carton into my mouth and gulped it, open throated like a python swallowing a rabbit. Then I went back to my mother’s bed, the TV, the graham crackers, to do it all again. This was my first experience of the catch-22 of mind-numbingly narcotic pleasures.