Blue Plate Special (2 page)

It finally dawned on me, after a few months, that this of course was my next book. And so I set about writing down my own chronology, a sort of autobiography, through which run the currents that have preoccupied me all my life. I wanted to account for them, to trace them back all the way to the beginning, and watch them twist together through time all the way to the present. I wrote out of a feeling of “emotion recollected in tranquility,” as Wordsworth famously described his own writing.

Writing this book has felt in some way like an offering of thanks, the way I might cook a meal in gratitude for having been nourished. During dark, lonely periods in my life, of which there have been many, I have derived a great deal of
solace from books by the likes of M. F. K. Fisher, Julia Child, Nicolas Freeling, and Laurie Colwin. I’ve been as nourished by their warm generosity on the page, their revelations about food and their own lives, as I would have been if they’d cooked me feasts.

The impulse to write comes for me directly from reading good books, just as the urge to cook comes from eating good food. And the coincidence of food and language is as excellent and reassuring a combination as any other I’ve ever found. My favorite writing about food, like my favorite food, is plain and unfussy: clear, declarative sentences with a strong undercurrent of feeling, a soulful, hearty meal, nothing fancy, nothing pretentious, nothing but a blue plate special.

Peel, core, and chop a small butternut squash and 3 apples into bite-size pieces. Peel and cut up a red onion. Coarsely chop a knob of ginger and peel 8 cloves of garlic. Coat everything in peanut oil and roast on a cookie sheet for 40 minutes or so at 375 degrees, or until everything softens and caramelizes. Puree with enough chicken broth to make a thick soup, adding half-and-half as desired. Salt and pepper to taste. Heat in a saucepan. Serve in large shallow soup bowls with goat cheese and toasted pine nuts on top.

When I was a kid, on what passed for chilly mornings in Berkeley, my mother used to make my sisters and me soft-boiled eggs with pieces of buttered toast broken into them. We had eggcups, but we never used them. These soft-boiled eggs were so good, we’d lick the bowls clean.

One such morning, when I was about two years old, my parents sat at the breakfast table with my baby sister, Susan, and me. The table was littered with cups and plates and bowls, eggshells and toast crumbs. The sun shone in the windows of the kitchen in our small bungalow on McGee Avenue in Berkeley. My father was about to walk out the front door to go somewhere, work probably.

My mother said in a high, plaintive voice, “Please stay and help me, Ralph. I just need some help. Don’t leave yet.”

My father paused in the kitchen doorway, looking back at us all at the table. Something seemed to snap in his head. Instead of either walking out or staying to help my mother, he leaped at her and began punching her in a silent knot of rage. It went on for a while. He slammed his fist into her chest and stomach. He pulled her hair. He seemed to want to hurt her badly. She gasped with shock and tried to stop him, but he was much stronger than she was. Then he let her go abruptly and slammed out the door and left us there, the three of us. My baby sister was wailing. My mother picked her up out of
her high chair and held her, weeping slow, silent tears, rocking back and forth. I remember being paralyzed with an inward, panicky terror, but I didn’t cry, I’m sure of it. I just stared at the table, at the eggshells and toast crumbs, and then I looked at my mother.

There we sat, a young family around a breakfast table on a sunny morning, surrounded by the shells of soft-boiled eggs, such a cozy and nourishing breakfast. The air jangled with the wrongness of what had just happened, vibrated with the disjunction between this sweet scene, mother and children, and the terrible thing my father had just done.

There were many later violent incidents like this one, according to my mother, but that is the only one from those early years that has stayed near the surface of my memory. Maybe this was the first time it happened, the first time my father beat up my mother in front of me. Maybe I had learned by the next time to shield myself by blinding myself, by blocking my memory.

Whatever the case may be, this particular wrecked breakfast is imprinted on my soul like a big boot mark. It became a kind of primordial scene, the incident around which my lifelong fundamental identity and understanding of the dynamic between women and men was shaped, whether I liked it or not.

In that moment, as a helpless child, I had two choices of people to identify with. In that moment, I split in half. As part of me stared at the eggshells, the toast crumbs, the empty, yolk-streaked bowls, that other part allied itself with my father, the person with the strength and force and power.

And so, from then on, I denied that part of me that was female. I tried to be like some idealized version of a guy: tough, impermeable, ambitious, sexually aggressive, and intolerant of weakness and vulnerability, in myself and everyone else.

My self-protective urge to be masculine, remove myself from all things female—myself, my mother, my baby sister—
let me get through my childhood and early adulthood believing, because I told myself so, that I was unaffected and unscathed by any of it. My father didn’t hit me. He hit my mother. She was the one who was hurt. I was okay. And it had nothing to do with my own relationships with men. I wasn’t my mother. This last was key: I was not my mother, I wasn’t vulnerable, I wasn’t feminine, and I wasn’t ever going to be beaten up by anyone. I would do the beating up, if it came to that.

And so internally I absorbed my father, beating up his wife, a young, exhausted, vulnerable girl, punching her in the breasts, pulling her hair, seized by a rage that had nothing, really, to do with her at all, a rage that went all the way back to his childhood and was now caused by his own sense of failure, his disappointment in himself.

I absorbed my mother’s perspective, too, even as I refused to identify with it. She was attacked and punished for being needy, for daring to ask for something, for revealing her weakness. Her withstanding of this punishment without fighting back or leaving went back to her own childhood and was caused by a deep sense of unworthiness and a fundamental unlovableness.

When I understood this, I believed that by understanding, I was free of it. That was, of course, not true at all.

Despite her treatment at the hands of my father, my mother never seemed like a victim to me, no doubt because she refused to see herself as one.

She was born Marie Elisabeth Pusch in July 1936 in Dornach, Switzerland, to Hans and Ruth Pusch. Her parents were anthroposophists, devoted followers of Rudolf Steiner, the philosopher and clairvoyant who started the first Waldorf School in a Stuttgart cigarette factory for the children of its workers. Hans was an actor and theater director at the Goetheanum, where he worked with Marie Steiner, Rudolf’s widow. Ruth was a eurythmist, a kind of dancer, who performed all over Europe with a troupe of other young sylphs in purple gowns and veils, waving their arms while overenunciating vowels and diphthongs in wobbling, dramatic voices.

Hitler’s rise to power put my grandparents on edge; they weren’t sure what would happen to anthroposophists at the hands of the Third Reich, since they didn’t take kindly to weird spiritual/artistic types. So Hans and Ruth began to consider fleeing Germany for New York City; my grandmother was American, my grandfather German.

When Hans was drafted into the SS, they immediately booked passage on an ocean liner to New York City, set to sail the following month. But something intervened, so they had to postpone their trip another month. The ship they would have
taken sank, and everyone on board drowned. When they finally did set sail on another, later boat, three SS U-boats stopped the ship at midnight, as it was passing the Rock of Gibraltar. All the German passengers were called up on deck as a list of names was read, Hans Pusch’s among them.

My grandfather went down below to say good-bye to his wife and tiny daughters. My grandmother, crying, insisted that they sit and share an orange before he went. So they sat on the bunk, all four of them, and shared the orange that Ruth had peeled as slowly as she could. By the time Hans arrived back up on deck, the U-boats had pulled away and left him behind. And so they all came to America, saved by a piece of fruit.

Hans and Ruth immediately sent their daughters to Lossing, Ruth’s older sister Gladys’s boarding school for mentally handicapped children. My mother was three. She spoke only Swiss German and had to learn English as quickly as she could. At the farm school were a group of mentally handicapped children, including my aunt Aillinn, my mother’s older sister, who had been born deaf and mentally handicapped. With no one else to compare herself to, my mother didn’t realize she herself wasn’t “retarded,” as they called it back then, until she was five.

Gladys herself had gone deaf in her mid-twenties, while she was touring Europe as a concert pianist, and, suddenly bereft of her dreamed-of brilliant musical career—and with a gaping hole in her life to fill—she discovered the trendy, radical teachings of Steiner. She convinced her baby sister Ruth to join her in Europe, where she met Hans Pusch. Meanwhile, Gladys came back to America with a head full of pedagogical steam and single-handedly started the school, whose underlying philosophy was based on Steiner’s teachings.

Gladys was a mean little troll of a woman, and she beat my mother for her childish infractions and impish curiosity. My mother was expected to do chores even though she was only three. After Gladys took her by the hair one day and slammed
her head against the wall over her little bed, then left her crying, Lizzie, as my mother was called when a child, ran off into the fields alone. She stayed outside for hours. She ate ears of corn, raw and warm from the stalks, lay between the rows, looking at the sky, feeling untethered to anything on earth, as if she could float away and no one would miss her or notice. But she also taught herself something important—that she could distance herself from whatever was going on by narrating her life to herself as if she were a character in a book. And that was how she got through her time there.