Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (3 page)

Even decades later, with no real cause, that thinking lived in Dad. For him a house brimming with tubs of Breyers and boxes of his beloved Mallomars was as reassuring as his diploma from Dartmouth College, which he’d attended on a full scholarship, or his master’s degree from Tuck, the business school there, which he’d paid for with ROTC money and a brief service in the Navy. It meant as much as his rapid promotions within the large accounting firm for which he worked. It was the best and clearest sign that he’d made it.

Although Mom, like Dad, had grown up in White Plains, she’d belonged to the leafier, quieter, paler part of the city: Cheever territory. Her father, Harry Wendell Frier, worked as an advertising executive on Madison Avenue; her mother, Kathryn Chapman Owen Frier, dropped him off at the White Plains train station every morning and picked him up every night. The couple would shoo their two children, Leslie Jane and Bruce, upstairs during cocktail hour, so that they could have their martinis in peace. The dinners that followed were prim, contained affairs. Harry would get eight ounces of steak. Everyone else would get four to five ounces apiece. And everyone would chew it slowly, with firmly closed mouths.

There were no such limits and no such calm at Dad’s family dinners, which were more like gastronomic rugby matches, dishes colliding, tomato sauce splattering, cutlets flying. As soon as Mom made contact with this violent, thrilling sport, she took it up, her WASP reserve crumbling in the face of Grandma Bruni’s spicy, fatty Italian sausages—fried with slivers of green pepper that soon shimmered with sausage grease—and Grandma’s fervent belief that you had to make and serve enough of every dish to guarantee plenty of untouched, extra food on the table at the end of an endless dinner. If there wasn’t some of every kind of food you’d served left over, it meant that you had perhaps run out of something before someone had gotten his or her fill of it. There was no shame greater than that.

Mom was incessantly feeding people: friends who’d dropped by for a hello, not a ham and cheese omelet; whole second-grade classes, to which she’d deliver four or five batches of brownies she had made, on a whim, the midnight before; people she’d hired to do work around the house. She’d carry broad trays of tuna and egg salad sandwiches, along with deep pitchers of lemonade and iced tea, to men raking leaves in the Soundview yard. She’d insist that the cleaning woman who came once a week stop what she was doing around lunchtime and sit down to a bowl of homemade clam chowder, a plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies and, if the timing worked out just right, an episode of
All My Children
. Food was how she showed people the amount of time she was willing to spare for them, the sorts of sacrifices she was willing to make for them.

But while it was part courtesy, it was also part boast. She wanted to demonstrate what she could pull off. She’d chosen full-time motherhood over a formal profession, so she channeled all of the ambitions, vanities and competitive impulses that might have been satisfied by a career into the way she raised us and ran the house. Cooking was at the center of it all.

She cooked with a ferocity that belied her gentle appearance—lightly freckled skin, hair that was an age-darkened echo of her strawberry blond youth—and with an ethnic bent that also contradicted it. Apart from that once-monthly quiche Lorraine, the occasional
coquilles St. Jacques
and a twice-yearly beef Wellington, she focused on Italian food, and pumped it out in a volume that would have done any Mario Batali restaurant proud. She could make lasagna for eighty as easily as for eight—and, in fact, preferred the grander gesture. She put together mammoth pasta dishes for neighborhood Fourth of July parties, massive pasta dishes for PTA meetings, monumental pasta dishes for events at the YMCA. The planning and execution required many hours over many days, but they were redeemed, at the end, by the second helpings people took, the moaning they did about being too full, the sauce stains on their shirts: Mom’s version of applause.

 

 

 

 

All of us could eat, but Dad and I could eat the most. I took after him that way.

I’m told that in high school and college he was trim, and I can see that in pictures. But I remember him always carrying around extra weight. The amount varied—sometimes it was as little as ten pounds, sometimes as much as thirty, which wasn’t insignificant on a man just under five feet, nine inches tall. He’d grouse about it. From time to time he’d even diet. But he loved his lasagna and relished his Mallomars, especially after a twelve-hour day at the office. He worked many twelve-and fourteen- and even sixteen-hour days. And food was how he rewarded himself.

Before he left for work in the morning, he’d ask Mom what she planned to cook for dinner that night. He wanted to start thinking about it and to be sure that whatever he had for lunch wouldn’t make it redundant—wouldn’t spoil his appetite for it or dim his enjoyment of it. If Mom didn’t have the answer just then, he’d call her midday for an update. And if she promised meat loaf and he came home to beef Stroganoff, his whole face collapsed. Then he grumbled through the meal and maybe even skipped seconds. But that only meant he snacked more later.

At nine p.m. or so I’d often see him trudge into the kitchen or into the garage in his pajamas, on the hunt for ice cream bars or ice cream sandwiches. He’d reach into the freezer, grab two Eskimo Pies or two Flying Saucers and then, sometimes, after a moment’s hesitation, grab a third. I once went to talk to him in his and my mother’s bedroom, where he had an enormous leather recliner situated just opposite the television set, and spotted four Eskimo Pies stacked up on the table next to the chair. He had settled in for a long Yankees game, and didn’t want to take any chances that he’d need to rouse himself for another trip to the freezer.

During the Soundview years, he frequently took Mark, Harry and me into the city to watch the Yankees play baseball, the Knicks play basketball or the Rangers play hockey. Mark and Harry loved those games. I loved the peanuts, pretzels, hot dogs and ice cream bars with which vendors roamed the aisles, looking for takers.

“You’re getting another hot dog?” Dad would ask when he saw me waving down one of these vendors. He wouldn’t be opposed—just surprised. Mark and Harry would still be on their first hot dogs. Dad, too. The game seemed to distract them.

I was only a year and a half in age behind Mark. Harry trailed me by just two and a half years. And as in so many families with children of the same sex clustered so closely together, the three of us defined ourselves—and were defined by Mom and Dad—in relation to one another. We competed fiercely against one another, each of us looking for distinction.

Mark was the charismatic and confident one, most at ease with his peers, able to waltz into a new classroom and instantly find himself at the epicenter of the in crowd. Had there been fraternities in elementary school, he would have pledged the most desirable one, and might well have ended up its president. There were many years—in elementary school, middle school and, to a lesser extent, high school—when my social life was an auxiliary of his, dependent on his and his friends’ good graces. More often than not he put up with that. I loved him for it, and sometimes hated him for it, too.

He was also the agile one, adept at just about any sport Dad foisted upon us. Little League baseball? Mark could play the infield positions that required swift movements and a slingshot arm: shortstop, second base. Beginners’ football? He could play not only running back but also linebacker, less hampered by his size—he lagged a good three to four inches in height behind most of his peers, and always would—than he should have been. He swung a tennis racket with authority, even grace. And he hit a golf ball on the first try, not whiffing repeatedly, the way a certain envious younger brother did.

As for food, he didn’t share my curiosity about it. He ate steadily but boringly: plain bagels with butter, cheeseburgers with ketchup but no other adornments, slices of cheese pizza instead of the pizza with sausage, peppers and onion that Mom and Dad preferred. I ate both kinds of pizza and I ate Big Macs and I ate pumpernickel bagels with cream cheese. And for every bagel Mark ate, I ate a bagel and a half.

Harry was the “space cadet,” a phrase I first heard in relation to him. I thought Dad and Mom had coined it just to describe him. It spoke, correctly, to the way he often zoned out from the interactions and physical circumstances immediately around him, deaf to Mom’s exhortations that he turn off the TV in the family room or to Dad’s bellowing that he come out of his bedroom and take a seat at the breakfast table.

But it also carried the erroneous suggestion that Harry was floating, adrift. Hardly. What he had was an extraordinary ability to focus on one task or thought to the exclusion of all others. He could spend whole days putting together the most intricate models, whole weekends building the most ambitious backyard forts.

That ability, coupled with an innate physical coordination that rivaled Mark’s, aided him in certain athletic pursuits. Not the team sports that Mark was good at—they didn’t hold the same appeal for him. But he was the smoothest and most acrobatic of any of us on a skateboard and, later on, the fastest and most agile on skis. Golf, too, came naturally to him. He seldom got mired for three or four strokes in a sand trap, the way a certain envious older brother did.

As an eater, too, he fixated on a single object of interest and lost sight of much else. For a while his fixation was French fries, and if Dad was working late and Mom took us to Howard Johnson’s or Friendly’s, he would get two orders of fries for dinner, then a third for dessert. He’d still be eating fries while I’d be eating the most rococo sundae or banana split on the menu. During another phase his fixation was bacon. In a restaurant at breakfast time he’d order an extra side of bacon to go with his bacon and eggs, and he’d leave the eggs untouched.

But if none of his special foods were around, he merely picked at what was in front of him, not so much disappointed as disinterested, never complaining of hunger or, as best as I could tell, experiencing it. If the meal Mom served wasn’t to his liking, he just left three-quarters of it on his plate, even as she idly threatened to put the peas he had passed over in a sandwich for lunch the next day. If the meal Mom served wasn’t to my liking—a rare event—I ate all of it anyway. Food that was only marginally appealing beat no food at all.

I was the most avid reader of the bunch, intent at one point on working my way through every children’s novel that had recently won the Newbery Medal:
Island of the Blue Dolphins
,
Sounder
,
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
. I had more vanity about schoolwork and grades, lording my report cards over Mark and Harry, even though theirs were nearly as good. I was also the skeptical one, first to question the tooth fairy, God and the rest of it, in a manner Mom and Dad always recalled as equal parts endearing and obnoxious.

“Is there really a Santa Claus?” I supposedly asked Mom at the dinner table one night when I was six.

“Frankie,” she responded, not wanting to lie but not wanting to upset Mark and Harry, who had definitely perked up, “I would like to believe there is.”

“I didn’t ask what you’d like to believe,” I corrected her. “I asked whether there is or isn’t.”

Above all I was the physically lazy one. Mom and Dad would later remind me of this, too, citing the first time Dad had recruited Mark, Harry and me to help him rake autumn leaves in the yard. This was on Manitou Trail, before we had gardeners, before Dad had climbed higher up the corporate ladder. He figured it was time that we boys started learning to pitch in a little, even though we were still too young to be much real help.

“Here’s our plan,” Dad said, outlining what lay ahead and trying to ease us into it. “Every hour we’ll rake for forty minutes, and we’ll rest for twenty minutes. OK?”

We nodded.

“So if someone needs to go to the bathroom or if someone needs a drink, there’s a twenty-minute break for that,” he said. “Twenty minutes out of every hour. Forty minutes on and twenty minutes off.”

We nodded again. It was all very clear.

“Any questions?” Dad asked.

I had one.

“What is it, Frankie?” he asked.

“Can I begin,” I asked, “with the twenty-minute break?”

On my Little League team, I was always given the positions that required the least running: third base, maybe, or right field. Tennis balls whizzed past me as I swung hard but spastically at the air. Golf—well, I’ve covered that. If forced onto the fairway, I begged to drive the electric cart and just watch Dad, Mark and Harry. Steering was easier than putting, and much less humiliating.