Life From Scratch (47 page)

The month before the big feast, I cook the Vatican City, the celebrated walled enclave inside Rome, Italy. The Vatican City is 0.17 square mile of gilded glory—0.53 mile by 0.65 mile. To walk across the country is like taking
two laps around a standard jogging track
—that’s why there’s no country smaller.

I decide to make a gallon of Cousin Alfred’s Meat Sauce. There is plenty. I think of the Mongolians.

We pop over to the Beards.

“We were just planning a front lawn brunch!” van Gogh proclaims. “Why don’t you bring it over?”

A few minutes later, sun hot on our necks, we sit on the overgrown lawn around two plastic tables strung together and covered with mismatched tablecloths. In the center are two pounds of spaghetti, topped with twice as much sauce. There are no walls. No fences. Finally.

The Beards raise their forks, and we begin, twirling the pasta in our spoons. I glance over at Ava and see noodles hanging off her arm. “But the question is, how do you keep the pasta out of your beards?”

“Magic,” they laugh.

Mom arrives the week before the big event to help with Ava. On the radio, the weatherman predicts thunderstorms. The decision no one wants to make must be made: The food will have to be set up indoors.

As the weekend approaches, erratic weather patterns increase and interfere with flights. Tim gets in without incident, but my friend Katya’s flight is delayed. Grace’s flight, set to land the night before the event, is canceled. She won’t arrive in Tulsa until midday on Saturday, just before the buffet opens.

I try to keep track of all the missed connections, but there’s too much out of my control. I expand my anxiety to include the people who won’t be able to make it: my brother Connor, Toni—even Michael crosses my mind. On Friday night, Mom eyes me as I pour my second glass of port.

“You can’t fix it, Sash, any of it. You just have to let this thing happen however it’s going to happen.”

She pulls out two outfits, one from Pakistan and one from India, and asks me what she should wear.

But I can’t decide. I can’t even decide what Ava should wear. I fall asleep to the crack of thunder and the sound of rain pummeling the roof.

In the morning the clouds are gone. In their place: blue skies, 65 degrees in the shade. Still, the ground is wet and shows no signs of drying. When I get to Philbrook, the team of volunteers is already helping the 16 chefs and their assistants bring food into the museum. There’s a colossal amount of bowls, platters, and chafers, but no one falters. The line of chefs moves in and out smoothly, building a world of food.

The dozens of tables stretch on and on, like chatty postcards, flavor memories smiling back at me from the years of our cooking adventure. Even the tablecloths glow like jewels: ruby for South America, turquoise for Oceania, peridot for Europe, lapis for Africa, amethyst for Asia, fire opal for North America. The floral arrangements correspond with the continents, from the North American wildflower to the red puff of the African protea, Europe’s roses, South America’s large-stemmed anthurium, Asia’s lilies, and Oceania’s enormous sea sponges and birds of paradise.

And the food, so much of it: a chafer of kabeli palau, a platter of beef-filled empanadas, a bowl of chilled cherry soup, and then the German Tree Cake beyond a dispenser of rosewater lemonade. With 90 percent of the world on display, each platter with a recipe card that reads like an encyclopedia, there’s hardly room for all the globes. It’s hard to believe we’ve cooked and eaten all this food over the last four years—so much of it foreign to us, but so much dug up from my past as well.

Even with all this, I wonder if anyone will come. There are, after all, no tickets. I look at my watch: It’s already 10:30, but Grace’s flight has yet to land. Katya soothes, “She’s going to come—they’re all going to come.”

Until noon the hall is empty save a few curious onlookers. Then, beyond the stanchions, they start to arrive in flurries: a few, then a few more. Soon they pile up, hundreds at a time, filling every inch of the museum. And still more are arriving.

And there, finally, is Grace, suitcase in hand, her goldenrod hair shining. We hug and I realize, as I always do, how much I miss her. “I hope you’re hungry,” I smile. She hugs me tight and swoops Ava into her arms. Tim leads the girls back to where the rest of the family has gathered.

I step out into the rotunda and the waiting crowd. Beside me, a drummer dressed in traditional West African garb pounds out a heartbeat. Children dance around him. When I lock eyes with him, he smiles as he plays, his shoulders dipping up and down in waves.

“I can’t believe all these people,” I say.

He smiles bigger. “You’re the one who did this?” he asks. Even as he speaks, he fills the room with his music, never pausing, never stopping. The beat feels like a lifeline.

I look behind me at the teams of volunteers, the 16 chefs, and the food bank, now buried in canned food donations. In the mix I see the Beards, friends from my motorcycle days, old co-workers, and other mothers—all helping, helping. Behind them, silently waiting in the wings, I see my family and Keith’s, too. I can just catch the top of Mom’s hair in the farthest corner. I notice that she opted for the black-and-red dress from Pakistan. She has a list of foods to try—on a stack of oversized paper, and I can see her writing, circling, crossing out, erasing. Her brows are knit, every once in a while she exclaims, “Oh! That’s going to be
so
good.”

I look back at the drummer from Africa.

“It was just an idea, a little dream,” I tell him. “All these people, they did this.
They
made it happen.”

He nods, and I notice the rhythm of his drum change, the sound softening like the first drop of water melting from a frozen roof.

The farther into the crowd I go, the smaller I feel. I call Keith to my side. “I can’t do this alone,” I say. “I need you.”

We welcome families of all kinds. I hear accents: a woman from Australia, a man from Nigeria. We meet children from Ethiopia, China, France, and the United States. Old faces, new faces: I open my arms to all of them.

Finally the line stirs, and the people move inside the stanchions. Families pile food on their plates, moving slowly, reading the signs, learning about the dishes and their country of origin. Many sample something from every continent. Children show their parents what they’ve found.

Keith and I help Ava build her plate. After all these tastings, she chooses pasta salad and cookies. But even these aren’t ordinary: The buckwheat noodles from Montenegro are tossed with feta and cracked black pepper. The Maltese cookies are filled with marzipan.

Tim, a video camera strapped to his forehead, has piled mounds of food from as many countries as he can manage. “I’m going to catch every moment!” he calls, weaving around the professional film crew.

I look over at Mom, and see she’s made a plate, too, with
saag paneer
, the famous spinach and cheese dish from India. I realize that she’s changed out of the Pakistani dress into a beryl-and-gold silk skirt from India.

She tests a spoonful. “Oh WOW, this is so good.” The exclamation turns a few heads, but I laugh. This is my
mother
. Like her, I burst out enthusiastically when I bite into something delicious.

“I’m proud of you,” Keith says, squeezing my shoulder as he looks over the tables. “You must be so happy.”

Even as I nod, I know it’s not that simple. Happiness is not a destination: Being happy takes constant weeding, a tending of emotions and circumstances as they arise. There’s no happily ever after, or any one person or place that can bring happiness. It takes work to be calm in the midst of turmoil. But releasing the need to control it—well, that’s a start.

“Let’s just say I feel a … settling,” I say as I lean on Keith’s shoulder.

My thoughts drift to Michael. I wonder what he’d think about this feast. I picture him running through the crowd, grabbing his fill. So many years after his death, my mind plays tricks on me. He’s now my
little
brother—my lost, little 14-year-old brother, awkward with braces and bursting with too-big feelings. I cannot quite see his eyes or face anymore. The details have faded. And yet, like a shooting star, he seems brighter somehow, more memorable than the billion others that blink at me from the sky night after night.

This is his gift, this feast. Unexpected as it was, his bequest led me to question what I wanted from life. But this place, this moment, is unlike
Babette’s Feast
. There are no chairs, no formal plates, no quail or turtle. Instead—a thawing of a crowd, mountains of simple, easy food, from a world of people.

This feast is alive.

One woman has scavenged a lunch tray—from where, I don’t know. She’s balanced three heaped plates, two bowls, and a few cups onto it. Her small children surround her, also carrying plates. How hungry they seem. It’s against the rules, taking so much. I wonder what their story is.

I glance over at Mom, head bowed over her plate. I know what she’d say if she saw them: “Good for them!” And if I protested, she’d say, “There’ll be enough. One way or another, there’s always enough. They wouldn’t be taking it if they didn’t need it.”

And perhaps that’s been Mom’s secret all along: her brutal common sense that slices through any and all notions of what “should” be. From our living room kitchen back in Jamaica Plain to this global table, it’s been about getting our fill. Not just of food, but of the intangible things we all need: acceptance, love, and understanding.

This is not the time to turn people away, but to pile them in, in greater heaps than ever—the way we did in Mom’s living room kitchen. Perhaps this feast is my own living room kitchen, where everyone lives and breathes in one jumbled space. Where we bump elbows as we cook, laugh even as we chew, track the dirt in and clean it up later. Where there is enough room, enough space.

Even without enough chairs, we can stand, all of us—even those who might come later. We’ll make room. Take our fill. Though I’d always be wandering, I can always create a living room kitchen, wherever I am.

I smile, hoping they get their fill.

After the feast, the adventure staggers on for another month and then ends quietly with just Keith, Ava, and me around our small table with the oven door open, blowing warmth into the kitchen. On the wall, the stirring pot gleams with a dull luster.

My global table adventure ends with roasted squash three ways, and mini Zimbabwe candy cakes called
chikenduza
, found in big-city bakeries. The dense, yeast-risen balls of dough balloon in the oven to become equal parts cake, muffin, and bread. One fills my palm perfectly.

The texture is chewy and tight, but my Zimbabwean readers assure me that this is correct. Ava, now four, helps me drape the craggy domes with the traditional bubblegum-pink icing. Mouths watering, we relinquish the perky chikenduza to the spot by our plates where our water glasses might go.

I’d mistakenly thought we ought to have someone over when we cooked our last meal for Zimbabwe. From the beginning of the blog, I’d imagined a crowd for this meal, to celebrate with us. But we’d already had the big feast. As important as it is to free-fall into the jumble and chaos of community, there must be quiet moments, too, in the intimacy of family.