Tender at the Bone (33 page)

“But look,” he said proudly, “I’ve brought you something better.” And he held up three jars of honey. “This is clover, this is alfalfa and this is buckwheat,” he said happily.

“I HATE honey,” I shouted, grabbing one of the jars and throwing it on the floor. Nick beat a hasty retreat.

That afternoon he appeared with a peace offering. “You said you wanted a radio in the kitchen,” he said, plunking a Rube Goldberg contraption on the counter. “It works perfectly!” he boasted. It had no dial and springs were popping from the back. The antenna was a piece of hanger he had attached to an odd socket. He plugged the thing in and the familiar sound of KPFA, the local left-wing station, filled the kitchen. “Even better,” he said proudly, “it only gets one station!”

“What if I want to listen to music while I’m cooking?” I asked crossly.

“You can’t,” he replied. He seemed to consider this an advantage.

And then it was Thanksgiving, and the conscience of Channing Way made our national holiday his personal project. We weren’t planning on having turkey, were we? How could we even consider such a thing? Turkeys were not only high on the food chain but one of the more egregious examples of the vertical integration of agribusiness.

“But it’s Francesco and Elena’s first Thanksgiving,” I protested. “We have to give them turkey!”

“Why?” asked Nick innocently. “I’ve had a really great idea.”

“Your last great idea was the urine recycling project!”

“That
would
have worked if I hadn’t used metal barrels,” he said. “Anyway, this is a
really
good idea.” We all rolled our eyes, but he ignored us. “Do you know how much food supermarkets throw out every day? What if we make a vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner and cook the entire thing out of Dumpsters?”

“Garbage?” said Doug. “You expect us to eat garbage?”

“Count me out,” said Jules. Martha wasn’t enchanted either. But it was hard for any of us to defend our position; in the face of Nick’s moral rectitude we always seemed, well, bourgeois. How could we refuse when he urged us just to try once, to see what we could find in the garbage.

It was extraordinary what was being thrown out! Flats of perfectly good eggs had been discarded merely because a couple had cracked. We found ripped bags of flour and crumbled cartons of cookies. The bananas might be a little brown, but they made wonderful banana bread and the apples were just fine for applesauce.

We began making daily runs to the Dumpsters; I would never
have admitted it to Nick, but the garbage runs were fun. We came home with all sorts of items I would not normally have bought and I liked the challenge of figuring out ways to use them. Within weeks I had discovered dozens of uses for white bread.

And then one day I found a steak, neatly wrapped and perfectly usable. As I held up the package I thought of Rolf at La Seine. And then, of course, of Mom.

“Do you think it would be better to use this meat or let it go to waste?” I asked Doug.

“Waste can’t be good,” he said.

“Do
you
think we should eat it?” I asked Nick.

“Definitely,” he said.

Without any discussion the morality of garbage changed our diet. Soon we were dragging home torn bags of marshmallows, dented cans of soda, and similarly forbidden foods. Maybe Thanksgiving wasn’t going to be so bad.

The drought had devastated the eucalyptus population of Tilden Park and local residents were being encouraged to cut the dead trees for firewood. The day before Thanksgiving, Doug and Nick took the chain saw up to the mountain. When they came back we all went out to help stack the wood along the side of the house. The old lady next door watched silently from over the fence and without a word Nick went and stacked some of the wood against her house too. She nodded solemnly and went inside. Nick watched her go. Then, impulsively, he followed.

We watched him knock on her door and go inside. He was gone for a long time. “She’s pretty deaf,” he said when he finally returned. “It took me a while to make her understand that I was inviting her to join us for Thanksgiving dinner.”

“Is she coming?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said, “why wouldn’t she?”

“I bet you didn’t tell her we weren’t having turkey,” I replied as we piled into the van to make the final Dumpster run.

Inside the stores people were standing in line to pay for their turkeys and sweet potatoes; outside there was no waiting. Nick unearthed a ten-pound sack of potatoes and a pound of butter. I found celery and apples. Doug even discovered some dented cans of cranberry sauce.

“Look!” said Jules, holding up a package of Monterey Jack cheese. “I bet if we came back at midnight we might even find a turkey.”

“Dream on,” I said.

Doug laid a fire when we got home and the fresh scent of eucalyptus filled the house. Martha went out to the garden to dig up beets and carrots and pick the last of the lettuce. While she roasted vegetables and made a salad I constructed the Con Queso rice.

“Thanksgiving’s going to be strange without turkey,” said Martha wistfully as we ate.

“We’ll have just about everything else,” I said. “Stuffing, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, pie. We’re even having creamed onions.”

“I know,” she said, “but it won’t be the same without turkey.”

“Do you really mind?” asked Nick.

“Not really,” she said. And then, in a lower voice, “Well, just a little.”

After dinner we mulled wine with cloves, cinnamon, and orange peels. Jules did the dishes while the rest of us began peeling apples for the pies. “Where’s Nick?” I said suddenly.

“Oh, he’s probably out in the shop inventing a more efficient fork,” said Martha, and we all laughed.

It was good in there; the kitchen was crowded with friends and more people kept arriving every minute. The air was heady with the spicy smell of hot wine and alive with Cajun music. Doug put his arms around me. “Aren’t you glad we came to California?” he whispered.

As he said it, I thought of my parents. My poor father, alone in the house with Mom. She was in a depression and the place would be eerily silent. Was she even cooking dinner? “I should have invited them to come out,” I sighed.

As I spoke a gust of cool air burst into the kitchen. Nick came in carrying a big box. He set it on the floor, leaned down, and pulled out a bulky bundle wrapped in torn plastic. Handing it to Martha he said triumphantly, “Turkey!”

We all stared at the bird. There were twelve people in the kitchen at that moment, and every one of us had the sense not to ask where it had come from.

THE SWALLOW

“If all you’re going to do is cook, you should get a job in a restaurant. At least you’d be making some money.”

Mom perched on the edge of the sloping bench Doug had hammered together out of old pieces of plywood, eating raspberries from the bushes that threatened to overrun our lawn. Laundry flapped on the line above her head. My father, stretched out in one of the precarious plastic lounge chairs Nick had rescued from the garbage, snored softly beneath the newspaper shielding his face from the California sun.

My mother was staring critically at the unkempt yard, her gaze sweeping across the driveway filled with vehicles in various states of repair. I had tried to think of a million reasons to postpone my parents’ visits, but when my mother was high they always showed up. I dreaded the visits.

“You have no privacy!” my mother moaned.

“Privacy,” I replied, “is overrated.”

“This is not a normal life,” she said. “You don’t work. You live in this menagerie and all you do is cook for people who don’t appreciate you. Don’t you have any ambition?”

“No,” I replied proudly, “I don’t.” I launched into the standard Berkeley lecture about ambition being the problem with America. I told them I was trying not to use more than my share of the world’s resources and talked about walking lightly on the earth. I had cut my hair, bought Birkenstocks, and wore nothing but overalls purchased at Value Village. I had traded in my contact lenses (too artificial) for wire-rimmed glasses. “You look,” my father said, “like a New-Age nun.”

“You never
do
anything,” said Mom accusingly. “All you ever do is cook. This is no way to live.”

“Yeah,” I said sarcastically, “not much to brag about to your New York friends.”

She ignored me. “I just hate to see you frittering away your potential. Wouldn’t you like to go to France and take cooking lessons? Dad and I will pay for it. You can brush up on your French.”

“It’s in the wrist,” I teased. I knew that she had just turned me into Audrey Hepburn. She imagined that I would come home with better clothes and a better attitude. Maybe even a poodle.

Encouraged, Mom made a leap. “Since you’re going to Paris,” she said, “there’s no point in wasting the time on cooking. Why not go to the Sorbonne?”

It was clearly time to change the subject. “Actually,” I said, “I
have
been thinking of getting a job. There’s a restaurant here in Berkeley I’d like to work in. It’s a really good restaurant, Mom. It’s called The Swallow.”

There was a long silence and then my mother said in a very small voice, “Well, at least it will get you out of this house.”