Hungry (11 page)

After Lisa was born, though, having two children in daycare and no one to share job responsibilities got difficult. The newspaper’s Sunday magazine needed a six-month maternity leave replacement for a managing editor. I stayed for nine years. I got to work with smart people, including the paper’s knowledgeable and witty food editor, and I wrote some magazine stories. Most of them had to do with food and family.

A wounding experience at a well-known San Francisco restaurant resulted in “Ten Places to Avoid with Kids.” On a Saturday afternoon, usually the quietest meal in a restaurant’s week, we four Himmels had a reservation at Wolfgang Puck’s Postrio, as part of a family weekend in the city. Postrio had pizza and Pat Kuleto’s very cool interior design, with a sweeping staircase by which everyone descends into the dining room, like royalty. (Kuleto is still the überdesigner of Bay Area restaurants, now with projects in Chicago, Las Vegas, and Tokyo as well.) As the maître d’ took us through the bar on the way to the staircase, a well-dressed matron snipped, “What are
they
doing here?” I think she meant the kids, and wanted to say, “Ruining your meal, ma’am, and with pleasure!” but Lisa wanted to leave immediately.

Another magazine piece, for Mother’s Day, explored my disappointment that at the end of the twentieth century people were still surprised that Dad ran the kitchen in our house. By then, Silicon Valley warriors were buying Viking ranges and German knife sets, but apparently only the women or the nannies were using them. In our house, Ned did the food shopping and cooking. This struck people as odd. “Aren’t you lucky!” they said, all too often. Nobody was surprised that I was the scheduler, cleaner, launderer, and buyer of essential nonfood items like clothes.

We went out to restaurants for fun. Did I want to make it my work? David Beck appeared to be relaxed and normal when dining, jotting a nonchalant note every once in while. Two or three weeks later, an entertaining and informative review would appear in the paper, including detailed observations from what had been just an enjoyable evening out for us. Maybe in our enthusiasm for food and restaurants Ned and I were fantasy players like Walter Mitty and Homer Simpson, or like baseball fans who dream of glorious sports-writing careers, being paid to sit in the sun and write about what they loved instead of doing their own dumb jobs.

Not so fast, sports fans. I knew baseball writers. Their hours were brutal; they traveled constantly and churned narrative masterpieces out of grunts from monosyllabic athletes. There must be similar hazards in restaurant reviewing, I worried. But the family didn’t share my fears. Suddenly united in culinary self-interest, Ned, Jake, and Lisa chimed, “Are you crazy? At least try it!”

I couldn’t argue. Lisa and Jake were on the cusp of their own big changes. Lisa, eleven, was about to enter middle school, and Jake, fourteen, was starting high school. Jake was still picky, but no longer the refusenik, and he liked going out. They were willing food adventurers with highly developed tastes. Pad Thai, chicken teriyaki, dim sum, ho-hum. Those were
so
elementary school. What’s new?

Once the kids could be counted on to voice a reasonable choice, they had joined in the tradition Ned and I had adopted from our own parents: The birthday person picks the restaurant. We avoided upscale places with them, but could eat fabulously in Silicon Valley strip malls and the funkier downtown blocks with all the new Vietnamese, Indian, Pakistani, and Mexican regional restaurants. Chinese restaurants diversified even further, from mini-cafés serving only chicken dishes to bejeweled palaces serving fresher seafood than you could get in San Francisco. Jake and Lisa latched onto Vietnamese hot-rock cooking, with the excitement of having a 500-degree stone set upon your table, and barbecued Afghan kebabs, and soon they were eating the more sophisticated dishes of these cuisines, like
cha gia
, cold Vietnamese spring rolls, and
aushak
, Afghan ravioli spiced with coriander and leeks.

 

lisa:
When Mom got the food critic job, I had a vast and adventurous appetite. I recall our first meals at a hidden treasure of a restaurant called Golden Chopsticks. The incredibly flavorful, authentic Vietnamese cuisine included my favorite hot rock, a sizzling square rock brought to your table with a platter of meats and vegetables to cook yourself. Another favorite that we came drooling back for was the whole crab with roasted garlic. I can still taste the tiny crispy chunks of garlic covering a fresh and succulent crab. We went there five or six times, but after a few years Golden Chopsticks closed. It may have been the bad location. Even the treasures sink in the complicated economy.

Another first-timer for us was the discovery of Afghan food at a restaurant in Sunnyvale. I quickly became a fan of the grilled chicken kabobs served aside a heaping bed of browned rice and a roasted tomato that simply melted in my mouth.

I loved the atmosphere surrounding our delicious meals, all around the Bay Area, in all kinds of restaurants. So many Saturday nights were spent with me, my brother, Mom, Dad, and whomever we invited to accompany us, gathered around a table, talking, laughing, reminiscing, and, above all, eating.

 

sheila:
Where previous birthday dinners had been spaghetti and pizza at Rudolfo’s, our neighborhood red-sauce Italian restaurant, now we drove through three cities to get to Afghani House and Golden Chopsticks. The kids’ friends often found these restaurants a little weird. And driving half an hour just to eat, what was
that
about? There are plenty of restaurants in Palo Alto. But even as teenagers, Jake and Lisa loved telling people their mom was the restaurant critic at the
Mercury News
, the area’s biggest newspaper. The only part Lisa didn’t love was the criticism. It didn’t matter that
Mercury News’
policy was to skip the review altogether if a Mom and Pop restaurant was bad and that only the big rip-offs earned scorn in print. “How can you say that?” Lisa would ask. “How are they going to feel?” “They” may have been a publicly traded corporation based in Houston, but Lisa hated being party to any deed that could make people unhappy.

Lisa was getting to know unhappiness. Middle school is, at best, a three-year reality spinoff of Judith Viorst’s classic
Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
. At worst, a prelude to
Carrie
. All that sweet talk from parents and teachers about cooperation, inclusiveness, and valuing each individual for her inner beauty goes on the back burner. It will become useful again, but surviving middle school requires other qualities.

A sense of humor, for starters. On the morning of her first day at Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School, Lisa still had that. As she headed nervously to the garage to get her bike, she smiled and said, with bravado, “I don’t feel old enough for middle school, but I guess I have to go!”

Also on Lisa’s side was a wonderful sixth-grade teacher, Shauna Rockson. The school made a big effort to ease the transition for eleven-year-olds fresh off the comfy elementary school boat, but there were more than a thousand students.

And there were grades. Jacob and Lisa’s elementary school had written evaluations, not grades. Now there were symbolic numbers and letters measuring your performance and worth. Lisa did fine in most academic areas, with mostly fours on a scale of one to five. In Study Skills, she didn’t fare so well. Lisa didn’t get any I’s (Improving) or N’s (Needs Improvement), but hardly anybody did. Neatness, attention, effort, and taking responsibility for learning were consistent problem areas.

Mrs. Rockson wrote, “Lisa is an unflaggingly cheerful, bright spot in our classroom! She needs to focus on turning assignments in on time.” If this was a signal of things to come, we didn’t get it.

Palo Alto’s public schools are populated by the children of Stanford professors, Silicon Valley magnates, and run-of-the-mill brainy people. It’s a hard place to be average. Lisa had struggled academically a bit in elementary school, but Ohlone was a warm, supportive community. If she had trouble, someone was there to help. Middle school was more like Middle-earth—dangerous and strange. As in the outer world, in middle school you aren’t known as a whole person, as you are in elementary school from kindergarten. Appearance becomes the important way to be known.

 

lisa:
In middle school, almost every morning I had a bagel at our 10:00 a.m. brunch, then lunch two and a half hours later. That was healthy enough, but when I got home there was a certain excitement about being out of the scrutiny of my parents and friends. I dove into the ice cream carton with a jar of peanut butter at the side.

When I was twelve I came across a picture my brother had taken of me about two years earlier. I’m lying on my parents’ bed, dressed in light-wash Gap overalls and a lime green baby tee. It was a mock photo shoot where I got to be the model and he was the photographer. He had me pose in different rooms of our house with a new outfit each time. I guess this one was my juvenile seduction pose. My mouth is slightly ajar, my eyes gazing into the lens, and I seem to be rather comfortable. I longed to look that way again.

I had discovered anorexia from one of my soccer coaches when I was ten. She had been friends with my best friend’s cousin. At our first practice, Feyi whispered in my ear, “That’s Melissa, she’s anorexic.”
Anor-what?
I had never heard the term before. Feyi explained, “Anorexia is when you don’t eat. So Melissa doesn’t eat.” Now with this photo in my hand, I figured that was the most logical solution: to just stop eating. My mistake was announcing to my parents that I had decided to become anorexic. I thought they would say, “Okay, Lisa, you can do that if you want to.” But of course my decision was met with much disapproval.

In middle school, food was my comfort and escape. I was never satisfied with myself, I felt ugly and fat, and the only way I knew how to comfort myself was with food. I couldn’t face who I was because in reality I had no idea. Food was like my own little support group and in it I could be popular, which was not the story at school. I felt like a complete outcast from all the skinny girls.

Every day I wanted so desperately to lose weight, but soon enough I turned back to food. Perhaps part of my chubby figure in middle school was due to lingering baby fat. I did eat quite a lot, but not enough to gain as much weight as I did. I think puberty caught up with me fast yet mingled with childhood chub that had a hard time saying good-bye.

My weight got noticed by people who knew me, and some who didn’t. On several occasions, as I was walking in our neighborhood, groups of juvenile boys would drive by, spot me, and shout out, “Fat!” At a birthday party in seventh grade, we were assigned to two cars and our driver asked who was the biggest girl, so she could sit in the front seat. One of the girls shouted out, mockingly, “Oh, it’s Lisa! Lisa is the biggest!” As if I wasn’t aware that my body was substantial by twelve-year-old standards. For the rest of the party, at a teddy bear factory, everyone but me was in a group, and when we got our pictures taken at the end, they posed together in happiness. I posed with my bear, my chubby cheeks smiling but inside I was breaking down.

I got my period when I was twelve. I was so ashamed, and prayed it would just go away. Mom reassured me that everything was okay and that this was a good thing, a sign of maturity. I didn’t want to be mature, certainly not this soon. My friends were still reacting to the idea of menstruation with a large
eeewww
, even though some of them had gotten their periods, too. Mom didn’t get hers until she was fifteen, so what did she know?

 

sheila:
Lisa was dealing with bras and tampons at an age when I still had the body of a little boy. I wanted desperately to “develop,” whatever that meant, but it seemed like everybody else had caught the express train and I was stuck at the station. Lisa just wanted the train to stop.

Psychologists point out that girls can’t win in their middle school years. Eighth-grade boys hit on sixth-grade girls, ridicule them for having breasts or not having breasts, for being fat or flat. While a girl’s body is spinning out of control, she looks at her mother for a hint of the future, and likely is appalled at her bad genes or convinced she will never look as good as Mom. She is dying to look and feel like a teenager, meanwhile holding on to childhood comforts and prerogatives, like having Mom drive her everywhere and Dad cook dinner. It’s a push-pull time that repeats in later teen years, when the freedom of adulthood is very appealing, but not the responsibility.

And for Mom, there’s a full plate of rejection. Those smiling brown eyes I used to lock with and know would often flash at me with anger and disgust. I couldn’t get past the surface. Yeah, yeah, at this age Lisa needed to separate from us and expand beyond the family, and by now she should be secure in our love and values. She was no longer my adorable worshipper, the one who asked, “When you die, can I have your red shoes?” Now she scorned my closet, and most of me. I would have dined out on rejection every day, though, if it would have lessened Lisa’s load. Instead, I relived my own mostly unpleasant early adolescence in spite of feeling a dash of jealousy. She was young and I wasn’t.