I Feel Bad About My Neck (2 page)

What’s the solution? I’m no longer a freelance writer who sits home all day; I need stuff. I need stuff for work. I need cosmetics to tide me over. I need a book to keep me company. I need, sad to say, a purse. For a while, I searched for an answer. Like those Hollywood women who are willing to fling themselves into the Kabbalah, or Scientology, or yoga, I read just about any article about purses that promised me some sort of salvation from this misery. At one point I thought, Perhaps the solution is not one purse but two. So I tried having two purses, one for personal things and one for work things. (Yes, I know: The second purse is usually called a briefcase.) This system works for most people but not for me, and for a fairly obvious reason, which I’ve already disclosed: I’m not an organized human being. Another solution I tried involved spending quite a lot of money on a purse, on the theory that having an expensive purse would inspire me to change my personality, but that didn’t work either. I also tried one of those Prada-style semi-backpack purses, but I bought it just when it was going out of fashion, and in any case I put so much into it that I looked like a sherpa.

And then, one day, I found myself in Paris with a friend who announced that her goal for the week was to buy a Kelly bag. Perhaps you know what a Kelly bag is. I didn’t. I had never heard of one. What is a Kelly bag? I asked. My friend looked at me as if I had spent the century asleep in a cave. And she explained: A Kelly bag is an Hermès bag first made in the 1950s that Grace Kelly had made famous; hence the name. It is a classic. It is the purse equivalent of the world’s most perfect string of pearls. It’s still being manufactured, but my friend didn’t want a new one, she wanted a vintage Kelly bag. She’d heard that there was a dealer in the flea market who had several for sale. The flea market is open on weekends only, so we spent several days eating, drinking, sightseeing, all of it (as far as my friend was concerned) mere prelude to the main event. How much is this purse going to cost? I asked. I practically expired when she told me: about three thousand dollars. Three thousand dollars for an old purse, plus (if you’re counting, which I was) plane fare?

Well, finally we went to the flea market and there was the Kelly bag. I didn’t know what to say. It looked like the sort of bag my mother used to carry. It barely held anything, and it hung stiffly on my friend’s arm. I may not be good at purses, but I know that any purse that hangs stiffly on your arm (instead of on your shoulder) adds ten years to your age, and furthermore immobilizes half your body. In a modern world, your arms have to be free. I don’t want to get too serious here, but a purse (like a pair of high heels) actually impinges on your mobility. That’s one of many reasons why you don’t see the guys-with-purses trend catching on. If one of your hands is stuck carrying your purse, it means it’s not free for all sorts of exciting things you could be using it for, like shoving your way through crowds, throwing your arms around loved ones, climbing the greasy pole to success, and waving madly for taxis.

Anyway, my friend bought her Kelly bag. She paid twenty-six hundred dollars for it. The color wasn’t exactly what she wanted, but it was in wonderful shape. Of course it would have to be waterproofed immediately because it would lose half its value if it got caught in the rain. Waterproofed? Caught in the rain? It had never crossed my mind to worry about a purse being caught in the rain, much less being waterproofed. For a moment I thought once again about how my mother had failed to teach me anything about purses, and I almost felt sorry for myself. But it was time for lunch.

The two of us went to a bistro, and the Kelly bag was placed in the center of the table, where it sat like a small shrine to a shopping victory. And then, outside, it began to rain. My friend’s eyes began to well with tears. Her lips closed tightly. In fact, to be completely truthful, her lips actually
pursed.
It was pouring rain and she hadn’t had the Kelly bag waterproofed. She would have to sit there all afternoon and wait for the rain to end rather than expose the bag to a droplet of moisture. It crossed my mind that she and her Kelly bag might have to sit there forever. Years would pass and the rain would continue to fall. She would get old (although her Kelly bag would not) and eventually she and the bag would, like some modern version of Lot’s wife, metamorphose into a monument to what happens to people who care too much about purses. Country songs would be written about her, and parables. At that point I stopped worrying about purses and gave up.

I came back to New York and bought myself a purse. Well, it’s not a purse exactly; it’s a bag. It’s definitely the best bag I have ever owned. On it is the image of a New York City MetroCard—it’s yellow (taxicab yellow, to be exact) and blue (the most horrible blue of all, royal blue)—so it matches nothing at all and therefore, on a deep level, matches everything. It’s made of plastic and is therefore completely waterproof. It’s equally unattractive in all seasons of the year. It cost next to nothing (twenty-six dollars), and I will never have to replace it because it seems to be completely indestructible. What’s more, never having been in style, it can never go out of style.

It doesn’t work for everything, I admit; on rare occasions, I’m forced to use a purse, one that I hate. But mostly I go everywhere with my MetroCard bag. And wherever I go, people say to me, I love that bag. Where did you get that bag? And I tell them I bought it at the Transit Museum in Grand Central station, and that all proceeds from it go toward making the New York City subway system even better than it is already. For all I know, they’ve all gone off and bought one. Or else they haven’t. It doesn’t matter. I’m very happy.

Serial Monogamy: A Memoir

My mother gave me my first cookbook. It was 1962, and I began my New York life with her gift of
The Gourmet Cookbook
(volume 1) and several sets of sheets and pillowcases (white, with scallops).
The Gourmet Cookbook
was enormous, a tome, with a gloomy reddish brown binding. It was assembled by the editors of
Gourmet
magazine and punctuated by the splendid, reverent, slightly lugubrious pictures of food the magazine was famous for. Simply owning it had changed my mother’s life. Until the book appeared, in the fifties, she had been content to keep as far from the kitchen as possible. We had a wonderful Southern cook named Evelyn Hall, who cooked American classics like roast beef and fried chicken and a world-class apple pie. But thanks to
The Gourmet Cookbook,
Evelyn began to cook chicken Marengo and crème caramel; before long, my mother herself was in the kitchen, whipping up Chinese egg rolls from scratch. A recipe for them appears on page 36 of the book, but it doesn’t begin to convey how stressful and time-consuming an endeavor it is to make egg rolls, nor does it begin to suggest how much tension a person can create in a household by serving egg rolls that take hours to make and are not nearly as good as Chinese takeout.

Owning
The Gourmet Cookbook
made me feel tremendously sophisticated. For years I gave it to friends as a wedding present. It was an emblem of adulthood, a way of being smart and chic and college-educated where food was concerned, but I never really used it in the way you’re supposed to use a cookbook—by propping it open on the kitchen counter, cooking from it, staining its pages with spattered butter and chocolate splotches, conducting a unilateral dialogue with the book itself—in short, by having a relationship with it.

The cookbook I used most my first year in New York was a small volume called
The Flavour of France.
It was given to me by a powerful older woman I’ll call Jane, whom I met my first summer in the city. She was twenty-five, and she took me in hand and introduced me not just to the cookbook but also to Brie and
vitello tonnato
and the famous omelet place in the East Sixties. In fact, the first time I went to the omelet place, which was called Madame Romaine de Lyon, I was a mail girl at
Newsweek,
making fifty-five dollars a week, and I almost fainted when I saw that an omelet cost $3.45. Jane also introduced me to the concept of One Away. You were One Away from someone if you had both slept with the same man. Jane had slept with a number of up-and-coming journalists, editors, and novelists, the most famous of whom, at the end of their one night together, gave her a copy of one of his books, a box of which was conveniently located right next to his front door. According to Jane, his exact words, as she made her way to the exit, were “Take one on your way out.”

The night President Kennedy was shot, Jane was having a dinner party, which went forward in spite of the tragedy, as these things tend to do. Jane served as an appetizer
céleri rémoulade,
a dish that I had never before encountered and that remains a mystery to me. A few months later, I had a thing with someone Jane had had a thing with. Jane and I were now One Away from each other, and interestingly, that was the end of our friendship, though not the end of my connection to
The Flavour of France.

The Flavour of France
was the size of a date book, only six by eight inches. It contained small blocks of recipe text by Narcissa Chamberlain and her daughter Narcisse, and large black-and-white travel photographs of France taken by Narcissa’s husband (and Narcisse’s father), Samuel Chamberlain. I didn’t focus much on the mysterious Chamberlain family as I cooked my way through their cookbook, and when I did, I usually hit a wall. For openers, I couldn’t imagine why anyone named Narcissa would name her daughter Narcisse. Also, I couldn’t figure out how they collaborated. Did the three of them drive around France together, fighting over whose turn it was to sit in the backseat? Did Narcisse like working with her parents? And if so, was she crazy? But the Chamberlains’ recipes were simple and foolproof. I learned to make a perfect chocolate mousse that took about five minutes, and a wonderful dessert of caramelized baked pears with cream. I made those pears for years, although chocolate mousse eventually faded from my repertory when the crème brûlée years began.

Just before I’d moved to New York, two historic events had occurred: The birth control pill had been invented, and the first Julia Child cookbook was published. As a result, everyone was having sex, and when the sex was over, you cooked something. One of my girlfriends moved in with a man she was in love with. Her mother was distraught and warned that he would never marry her because she had already slept with him. “Whatever you do,” my friend’s mother said, “don’t cook for him.” But it was too late. She cooked for him. He married her anyway. This was right around the time endive was discovered, which was followed by arugula, which was followed by radicchio, which was followed by frisée, which was followed by the three
M
’s—mesclun, mâche, and microgreens—and that, in a nutshell, is the history of the last forty years from the point of view of lettuce. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

By the mid-sixties, Julia Child’s
Mastering the Art of French Cooking,
Craig Claiborne’s
New York Times Cookbook,
and
Michael Field’s Cooking School
had become the holy trinity of cookbooks. At this point I was working as a newspaper reporter at the
New York Post
and living in the Village. If I was home alone at night, I cooked myself an entire meal from one of these cookbooks. Then I sat down in front of the television set and ate it. I felt very brave and plucky as I ate my perfect dinner. Okay, I didn’t have a date, but at least I wasn’t one of those lonely women who sat home with a pathetic container of yogurt. Eating an entire meal for four that I had cooked for myself was probably equally pathetic, but that never crossed my mind.

I cooked every single recipe in Michael Field’s book and at least half the recipes in the first Julia, and as I cooked, I had imaginary conversations with them both. Julia was nicer and more forgiving—she was by then on television and famous for dropping food, picking it up, and throwing it right back into the pan. Michael Field was sterner and more meticulous; in fact, he was almost fascistic. He was full of prejudice about things like the garlic press (he believed that using one made the garlic bitter), and I threw mine away for fear he would suddenly materialize in my kitchen and disapprove. His recipes were precise, and I followed them to the letter; I was young, and I believed that if you changed even a hair on a recipe’s head, it wouldn’t turn out right. When I had people to dinner, I loved to serve Michael’s complicated recipe for chicken curry, accompanied by condiments and pappadums—although I sometimes served instead a marginally simpler Craig Claiborne recipe for lamb curry that had appeared in Craig’s Sunday column in
The New York Times Magazine.
There were bananas in it, and heavy cream. I made it recently and it was horrible.

Craig Claiborne worked at
The New York Times
not just as the chief food writer but also as the restaurant critic; he was enormously powerful and influential, and I developed something of an obsession with him. Craig—everyone called him Craig even if they’d never met the man—was famous for championing ethnic cuisine, and as his devoted acolyte, I learned to cook things like moussaka and tabbouleh. Everyone lived for his Sunday recipes; it was the first page I turned to in the Sunday
Times.
Everyone knew he had a Techbuilt house on the bay in East Hampton, that he’d added a new kitchen to it, that he usually cooked with the French chef Pierre Franey, and that he despised iceberg lettuce. You can’t really discuss the history of lettuce in the last forty years without mentioning Craig; he played a seminal role. I have always had a weakness for iceberg lettuce with Roquefort dressing, and that’s one of the things I used to have imaginary arguments with Craig about.

For a long time, I hoped that Craig and I would meet and become friends. I gave a lot of thought to this eventuality, most of it concerning what I would cook if he came to my house for dinner. I was confused about whether to serve him something from one of his cookbooks or something from someone else’s cookbook. Perhaps there was a protocol for such things; if so, I didn’t know what it was. It occurred to me that I ought to serve him something that was “my” recipe, but I didn’t have any recipes that were truly mine—with the possible exception of my mother’s barbecue sauce, which mostly consisted of Heinz ketchup. But I desperately wanted him to come over. I’d read somewhere that people were afraid to invite him to dinner. I wasn’t; I just didn’t know the man. I must confess that my fantasy included the hope that after he came to dinner, he would write an article about me and of course include my recipes; but as I said, I didn’t have any.