Blue Plate Special (8 page)

I had a collection of names in a bowl, slips of paper folded up. Sometimes, when I was too lazy to draw or write, I would lie on the floor picking names out idly, letting them dictate people to me: “Victoria” was a beautiful, snobbish girl with a pouting expression who stamped her little foot; “Olaf” was an honest, industrious midwestern farm boy whose parents were old and poor; “Priscilla” was a cold, cruel, secretly sad rich girl whose mother was dead; “David” was a handsome, intelligent, studious boy with a full head of curly dark hair. I loved phrases like “a full head of curly dark hair.” I rolled it around in my mouth silently, then put the slip of paper aside and picked out another one.

I hated my own name. It was all wrong. I was going to be a novelist, I knew very early on, and novelists were named Jane, Charlotte, and Louisa. When I learned cursive, I practiced signing the autograph I might put in all my books when I grew up: Laurina Kate Johansen. Laurette Johansen. Those substitutes never looked anything but faux Victorian and trampy, and Laura and Laurel weren’t me at all, they were other girls I didn’t know.

Over the course of two or more years, I invented and created an imaginary country called Zenobia; my imaginary friend, Charlie, was the emissary from the queen of Zenobia, and it was from him that I learned about the country. I wrote down the customs, holidays, and religious practices; I drew maps of the towns, set out to write a Zenobian grammar book with conjugated verbs and vocabulary words. I developed an ongoing drama about the royal family’s internecine conflicts and rivalries.

I discovered a rhyming dictionary at the back of my mother’s
old
Webster’s
, and wrote poems with it, the longest and most ambitious of which began:

In bed at night, I sat propped against my pillows and leafed through the dictionary, opening pages at random and avidly reading various new words and their definitions until my mother finished telling my little sisters their bedtime story and came to read me mine. Then we picked up where we’d left off the night before in whatever book we were currently enthralled by. We cried together when Bambi’s mother was killed; we raced through
Swallows and Amazons
and all the rest of the books in the series by Arthur Ransome, cheering for Captain Nancy and her first mate, Susan.
The Princess and the Goblin
was our gateway drug to George MacDonald, then came
A Little Princess
and
The Secret Garden
. Sometimes, between books, my mother invented stories for me about a little goatherd named Roland who lived in a mountain hut with his father and had many adventures. She loved making up the Roland stories as much as I loved hearing them.

And I read books to myself, starting a new one as soon as I finished the one before it, checking out whole stacks once a week from the school library. I read as voraciously as I ate. The two activities went together perfectly. Like all kids, I read the back of the cereal box while I ate the cereal; everyone did, it was nonoptional. This compulsion, however, extended for me into other areas not everyone seemed to need to explore. The
absolute greatest pleasure I knew when I was little was to eat along with characters in books I was reading, or to write about characters who ate what I wished I could be eating.

A keenly piercing brain hunger gripped me whenever a character in a book ate anything—an urgent craving for the pemmican in
Swallows and Amazons
(which I imagined as a chewy kind of Spam); the Turkish Delight in
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
(I pictured pillowy glittering candy that tasted like perfumed nuts, and I wasn’t far off); the dripping sweet flesh of the enormous traveling fruit in
James and the Giant Peach
; or some miniature version of the gigantic, caloric, wonderful
Little House on the Prairie
breakfasts, which seemed to consist of equal parts carbohydrates, cured meat, pickles, and preserves. Part of the excitement of all this food was the stuff that preceded or accompanied it—pirate sailing games, a sleigh ride in snow with a glamorous, dangerous witch, a perilous journey in an oversized fruit, the hard work and terrible weather of nineteenth-century midwestern farm life. With travel, danger, and adventure, it seemed, came food.

Once during an overnight at a friend’s house, I snuck off and read
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
. As a budding hermit, I used these overnights as an excuse to read whatever books my friends had that I didn’t, sidling away from my hostess to read her books as fast as I could before she noticed I was missing.

I finished
Charlie
in my friend’s bedroom beanbag chair and ventured back into the light, blinking with the force of the imagined taste of chocolate. On my way to the glass sliding doors that led to their backyard, where my friend and her sisters were playing, I ran into their mother. “Hello!” she said cheerfully. “What’s up?”

“I just finished
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
,” I confided. “And I am craving chocolate now like crazy.” I wasn’t asking for chocolate; that would have been rude. I was simply answering her question, and I expected her to say longingly, “I know
exactly what you mean,” looking off into the middle distance as she viscerally remembered the book’s lascivious, melting descriptions.

“Well, sorry,” she said instead, her cheer undaunted, “I don’t have any!” And off she went, before I could explain. This might have been the first time I realized that not everyone’s brain was wired the same way mine was.

For our first Thanksgiving in Arizona, my mother heard about a group of people who were having a potluck celebration near the Superstition Mountains just outside Tempe. Ruth Ann and Frieda, our former Berkeley neighbors, were visiting, so we all drove there together.

There was a huge tepee set up in the desert, a real one; we all sat inside it in a big circle around the fire in the middle. People played wooden flutes and drums, and there was a long table full of the food everyone had brought. Suddenly, we were all pseudohippies again; it was a comforting thing for us Berkeley-bred, culture-shocked kids. I remember feeling right at home there with the crowd of long-haired grown-ups in tie-dyed skirts, beards, and granny glasses. The other kids seemed familiar, too, more like us, somehow, than the other kids we knew in Arizona.

The food was the usual hippie stuff—vegetarian, heavy on the legumes, grains, nuts, and root vegetables. But there was no turkey. My family had never celebrated Thanksgiving with traditional dinners. As my mother put it, “It was the sixties and we were rebelling against turkey. Sorry you missed out on all that tryptophan!”

So we spent a perfectly nice day hanging out with some of the Arizona counterculture, and then later that night, we went home to Wildermuth, back to our Arizona desert life with the
black widow spiders in the carport, the broom handle in our sliding glass door groove to keep intruders out, our swamp cooler, our cornfield.

The following Thanksgiving, we drove all the way up to “the snow”—this was a rarity for us, a luxurious and strange new thing. My mother’s friends, two couples, Rich and Vangie and Steve and Debbie, organized a trip to Hannagan Meadow Lodge, nine thousand feet up in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in the far eastern part of Arizona.

We all stayed together in a cabin with a front porch stacked with firewood and a big living room with a stone fireplace. We kids didn’t have any coats warmer than light jackets, since we had never needed them before, but I remember my mother cobbling together some sweaters and knitted hats and mittens for us all. We spent all day outside, making snowballs and snow angels, running and shrieking around the vast forest meadows, and then we came back into the cabin and warmed up by the big fireplace, the tips of our ears and noses tingling, and our pants legs steaming as the snow evaporated.

On Thanksgiving Day, we all sat at a long table in the lodge dining room. “White meat or dark,” the smiling waitress asked, going all the way down the table and back up again and writing it on her pad. “Dark,” I said decisively when it was my turn, having no idea what it meant. The grown-ups drank wine, the fire blazed. I was sitting at the other end of the table from my mother and sisters, so I was quiet, listening to the grown-ups talking, eagerly awaiting my dinner. I was starving, as I always was, in those days, but the cold air had made my appetite even keener and more urgent. The plates started coming out, and they were loaded, laden, piled high with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and vegetables. I was mesmerized.

The people on either side of me got their food; the people across from me got theirs. Everyone started helping themselves to cranberry sauce and gravy. I figured they’d all asked for light
meat, and the dark meat probably took longer because it had to cook more, so I waited. And waited, and waited, until finally I realized that everyone else was eating, I’d been forgotten, and I had to speak up for myself because my mother was all the way at the other end of the table.

I raised my hand high and looked at the waitress, of course, since every schoolchild knew that was how you got a grown-up’s attention. She came over to me and leaned over. “Yes, hon?”

“I think … you forgot my food,” I said, mortified. I’d been hoping she’d just see my empty place mat and bring me my plate without making me explain myself. I hated calling attention to myself, hated being pitied or worried about.

But of course all the grown-ups around me immediately put their forks down and made noises of sympathy and concern.

“Laurie, let me give you some turkey!”

“Here, Laurie, I’ve got enough for both of us.”

“It’s okay,” I said through a knot of fierce pride that stuck in my throat. Absurdly, I was on the verge of tears, but it wasn’t self-pity or hunger that was causing it, it was my mortification at being looked at.

“I’ll be right back,” said the waitress. “Hon, I am so sorry!”

I got my food, and it tasted as good as it looked. Turkey was gamier and richer than chicken. Cranberry sauce looked sweet, like strawberry jam, but tasted tart and hearty, both at once. The two things together tasted so good, I couldn’t eat my dinner fast enough. And then that huge meal was followed by dessert: we all got pieces of both pumpkin and apple pie with whipped cream. I had never tasted pumpkin pie before. It was so creamy smooth, like pudding, but it tasted like cinnamon and wasn’t overly sweet, and it melted on my tongue with the toothsome, flaky crust. Full as I was, bursting with food, I felt I could never eat enough pumpkin pie as long as I lived.

M
ortification was becoming an increasingly common experience for me, the sudden, self-conscious, horrified realization that I didn’t understand adults, no matter how hard I studied them, and that I had just done something totally oblivious and childish. I was a kid, and there was a barrier between me and the grown-ups, their world and mine. Often, it had to do with sex.

In the spring of 1972, we went camping with my mother’s grad school friends in Mexico. Our car joined the caravan from Tempe down south across the border to Puerto Peñasco, or Rocky Point, on the Sea of Cortez. Back in the early seventies, Rocky Point was a tiny town with a wide clean sandy beach. It was the third or fourth time we’d gone camping down there, and we always stopped for lunch about halfway, in a town called Ajo, Arizona, whose A&W, in my family’s collective opinion, had the best hot dogs in the world. They put grilled onions on them, along with relish and ketchup and mustard, which was how we ate them out west and how I always ate them until I moved to New York and caved to peer pressure and ate them with mustard and onions only, like the natives.

Camping trips meant special food, stuff we never got at any other time: orange and grape Tang, instant powdered lemonade, breakfast bars, and astronaut space-food sticks—the peanut butter ones were my favorite; they tasted like a combination of Elmer’s glue and those chewy peanut-butter candies called Mary Janes. My mother also packed baloney and Cracker Barrel cheese, hot dogs and buns, marshmallows, and—wonder of wonders—potato chips. Of course, there were also whole-wheat bread, granola, peanut butter, strawberry jam, apples, bananas, carrot and celery sticks, those old staples, but even they tasted better on the beach, in the shade of the tent, with a fine grit of sand between our teeth.

We ate breakfast on the beach in the hot sunlight by the sparkling ocean before a day of running down to the waves to plunge in and jump over each one as it rolled into shore. Sometimes we had late-afternoon lunches in the inner courtyard of an old colonial hotel in the town of Puerto Peñasco. We ate shrimp with garlic over yellow rice, grilled fish, chicken enchiladas in green sauce. The grown-ups drank bottles of beer with limes; we got Shirley Temples. There was Mexican music playing, and an ocean breeze blew in through the tall open windows.