Stealing Buddha's Dinner (18 page)

I liked to pile my books around me in bed, moatlike, and sleep among the narratives.
Ramona Quimby, Encyclopedia Brown, The Great Brain, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. Choose Your Own Adventure, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlotte's Web, The Cay, The Secret Garden, The Chronicles of Narnia.
Then writers like Cynthia Voigt, Richard Peck, Norma Fox Mazer. I lingered over my favorite food parts—descriptions of Turkish Delight, fried chicken, hamburgers with onions, thick hot chocolate, even the beef tongue the Quimby family once had for dinner. I liked stories of kids on the outside, on the margins, overlooked.
The Pinballs. The Home-coming. Jacob Have I Loved. A Girl Called Al.
And then on to the shelf called Literature.
Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Little Women, A Tale of Two Cities.
Old-fashioned language, and reading it felt like a wriggling down into some tunnel of words. I was determined to fit in, to learn how to see in that dark.

I read to be alone. I read so as not to be alone.

When I stepped into the brown-tiled entryway of the Kentwood Public Library, the sunlight flowing down on me from the high windows, I felt a sense of importance. It gratified me to be in a place devoted to books and quiet; I was filled with a sense of hope. Reading to me
was
fundamental, as fundamental as food. And nothing could be more satisfying than reading a good book while eating a good meal of
mi
soup, french fries, and a thin cut of steak. I plowed through books as fast as possible in order to read them again.

I loved the opening of Louisa May Alcott's
Little Women,
when the March girls give away their Christmas breakfast to a poor German family and Mr. Laurence sends over a surprise bounty of bon bons, ice cream, cake, and hothouse flowers. Then Jo makes friends with Laurie, bringing him a bowl of beautiful blancmange. A few chapters later, she struggles over wilted lobster salad and accidentally salts rather than sugars a dish of plump strawberries drowning in cream. The Marches were a romantic ideal with their white gloves and snug evenings, their plays and art and moral lessons from Marmee. I felt inspired to be like Jo, with her pluck and ingenuity; whether up in the garret or among the family circle, she was like a mythical heroine to me.

More down to earth was Beverly Cleary's heroine Ramona Quimby, one of my closest fictional friends. I understood her dread of having the same dull after-school snack of juice and rye crisp the same way I understood her resentment toward pretty, blond-curled Willa Jean next door. My favorite Quimby meal takes place at the Whopperburger, when a nice old gentleman secretly pays for their dinner. I appreciated the realism of how the Quimbys worried about money. Mr. Quimby loses his job, takes up smoking, goes back to school, then works as a grocery store cashier. When the cat eats half of their family jack-o'-lantern, Mrs. Quimby converts the leftover pumpkin into soups and breads. The family makes ends meet. In spite of such tensions I never doubted the Quimbys' love for one another. I would gladly have traded my life with Ramona's, to live on Klickitat Street in Oregon, with the hump of Mount Hood just visible in the distance on a clear day. I would have liked a mother like Mrs. Quimby, who could be stern but never mean, and who always seemed to understand the small and big anxieties that make up the life of a girl.

All of my fictional friends liked to eat, but perhaps no one did more than Laura Ingalls Wilder. For the Ingalls family out on the plains and prairies, every harvest means a year of leanness or a year of fullness. The long days of sowing and haying and threshing could be distilled into a single sourdough biscuit fresh from Ma's oven. The days provide slices of salt pork, purchased in town then parboiled, dipped in flour, and fried in their own fat. The days mean fighting against blackbirds that ravaged the corn and oats. Once, Ma gathers the blackbirds to make a pie. “The meat was so tender that it slipped from the bones,” writes Wilder. “There's no great loss without some small gain,” says Ma.

The first book in the series,
Little House in the Big Woods,
was given to me by Jennifer Vander Wal on my ninth birthday. My first reaction to it was disdain; I was beyond illustrations and stories that began with the words “Once upon a time.” I had, too, an automatic suspicion of any book endorsed by the Vander Wals. So I set it aside, unread, for months. But then the boredom of winter got to me, and one Saturday afternoon I read the book from beginning to end, caught up in the butter and bacon, and how every mealtime depended on the success of Pa's hunting or Ma's gardening. I felt a stab of regret at having gone so long without knowing about hog-butchering, maple-sugar-making, cheese-making, and sausage-making; I had lost years of pork cracklings, hulled corn, and hot johnnycakes. When Pa butchers his hog, he blows up its bladder into a ball so Mary and Laura can play with it. Then Ma lets them roast the pig's tail. They hold it before a blazing fire, watching the curlicue get crackly and greasy, then nibble at the bits of meat that Ma sprinkles with salt. In the winter Pa shoots a bear in the woods and keeps the meat frozen in the attic. Then there's the sugaring-off dance at Grandma and Grandpa's, to celebrate making the year's supply of maple sugar. Laura and Mary pour hot syrup onto plates of fresh snow, making squiggle shapes that “hardened at once and were candy. . . . They could eat all they wanted, for maple candy never hurt anybody.”

I was thrilled when Laura slapped her sister Mary. She had a good reason. Mary was showing off her blond hair, letting Laura know that it was the prettiest of all and that no one cared for brown hair like Laura's. It was a dull, dirt brown, Laura admitted, and knowing it “swelled her throat tight.” So she slapped Mary, and that's when I thought, I could like this girl. The older Laura grew, the smarter, sassier, and more likable she became. She, too, has a blond-haired nemesis, Nellie Oleson, who sniffs at her and calls her “country folk.” And Laura never stints on food. The scraping of butter on a dry slice of toast merits her attention as much as a holiday feast of roasted jackrabbit, bread-and -onion stuffing, rich brown gravy, and dried-apple pie. She loves lettuce leaves sprinkled with sugar, cold cottage cheese balls, and the first spring chicken, fried and served with creamed potatoes and new peas. She glories in a birthday party where the hostess served oyster soup, fried mashed potato cakes, hot creamy codfish balls, and white cake with a whole orange for each guest. When she describes a barrel of lemonade, the “lemon slices floating thick” in cold, sweetened well water, I longed to try out the communal dipper, all the better to wash down Ma's bread-and-butter sandwiches and Pa's “boughten” treat of smoked herring.

Farmer Boy,
which follows Almanzo Wilder's boyhood in New York State, goes even crazier with food. Where the Ingallses count pennies and ration potatoes, the prosperous Wilders eat hearty piles of meat and beans every night. The breadth of their everyday breakfasts astound: thick oatmeal covered with cream, sausage cakes, pancakes and syrup, fried potatoes, jellies, preserves, and bread, and slices of apple pie with melted cheese. The lunch pail the Wilder children bring to school holds delectable bread and butter and sausages, fresh apples, doughnuts, and spiced apple turnovers. At dinner, Almanzo can count on ham or roast beef or chicken pie, mashed potatoes with gravy, baked beans with a bit of “quivering” salt pork, mashed turnips and stewed pumpkin, watermelon pickles and jelly and bread and butter, and bird's nest pudding with spiced cream poured right over it. Then, after evening chores are done, the family sits cozily together munching apples, cider, doughnuts, and freshly popped popcorn. The girls do embroidery work or read from the newspaper; the boys grease their shoes and whittle. Mother Wilder knits jackets and caps. Her hands—like all good mothers' hands—never cease moving. On Sundays everyone eats stacks of her pancakes, richly layered with butter and maple sugar, and looks forward to chicken pie after church. At Christmas, the family table includes roasted goose with “edges of dressing curling out,” a suckling pig with an apple stuck in its mouth, candied carrots, fried apples and onions, all manner of mashed parsnips, squash, and potatoes, and an assortment of fruit preserves and pickles and jelly to go with corn-bread and wheat bread and light white bread. Waiting for his serving, Almanzo laments: “Spoons ate up the clear cranberry jelly, and gouged deep into the mashed potatoes, and ladled away the brown gravies.” Then, of course, there are fruitcakes and pies—apple, mincemeat, custard, pumpkin, and vinegar. In my favorite Garth Williams illustration in
Farmer Boy,
Almanzo is cramming his mouth with a giant forkful of food while half a ham and a pie sit nearby, ready to be devoured. Almanzo is hungry on nearly every page of the book, and his hunger matches his ambition to be a better farmer, and thus breadwinner, than anyone else. And so he is depicted as the right companion for Laura. He knows how to raise the finest horses and grow the fattest pumpkins; he knows how to make buckwheat pancakes soaked in molasses and butter. He knows the value of food, and risks his life to go after a crop of wheat in the middle of the Hard Winter, to keep the town of De Smet from starving.

Laura was born in the Big Woods of Wisconsin in 1867, a few years before the Ingalls family began their migration westward. They lived in parts of Missouri, Kansas (Indian Territory), Minnesota, and Iowa before settling in Dakota Territory (De Smet, South Dakota) in 1879. Like her father, Laura has an itchy wandering foot, a desire to keep pushing on to see what lands lie beyond the horizon. But sensible, strict Ma, a former school-teacher, had long ago made her husband promise to settle down so her girls could get an education and become teachers, too. Ma and Mary frequently got on my nerves. They were so ladylike all the time, so disciplined about chore time. My dislike for Ma was cemented in her dislike of Indians, whom she called “howling savages.” I knew that if I had lived in De Smet she would never have let Laura consort with me. Still, I tried to keep in mind Ma's good points. She was, for instance, a domestic goddess. She could stew rabbit and dumplings over an open fire in the middle of a prairie, braid straw hats, and sew complicated dresses and dolls with ease and expertise. During the Hard Winter of 1880 she contrives sustenance from their dwindling supply of flour, beans, and potatoes, saving a morsel of salted cod to break the monotony of plain brown bread. For dinner, which meant lunch, Ma might cook up a hot bean soup, flavored with a bit of salt pork. Then she'd drain the beans, lace them with molasses, and set them in the oven with the same salt pork to make baked beans for supper.

Ma had the cooking skills, but I preferred Pa Ingalls's company. He could hunt birds, rabbits, and deer; he could make fish traps; he knew just what it meant to see that muskrats had built themselves an extra-thick home for winter. Pa has an intuitive understanding of geography, climate, and behavior. He gets along with Indians, too, and
Little House on the Prairie
makes clear that his friendship with the Osage chief Soldat du Chene is the only thing that saves the family and the other settlers in the area from being killed. While Mary is Ma's daughter, Laura is Pa's. Together they find fright and fascination in wolves and wild animals. They ponder buffalo wallows, watch the laying of westward train rails, and make fast friends with the tobacco-spitting “Tennessee wildcat” Mr. Edwards.

Every time the Ingallses move they have to break new sod and start a new farm from scratch. So the family has to rely, increasingly, on salt pork bought from a store in town. Salt pork is always described as fatty and white, “held down in brine.” It represents both failure and prosperity: a failure to produce a hardy, self-sustaining farm that included fresh pork; a prosperity that allowed the purchase of meat from the store. Bacon was one of my favorite foods; I liked it super crisp, the grease perfuming my hands. After I read the
Little House
books I began to pretend that bacon was salt pork and that I was Laura herself. She was short and small like me, and she savored every last touch of the salt on her tongue. Such a moment might be her only pleasure of the day. I imagined she secretly longed for meals to last and for the salt pork slices never to end, that she fantasized about frying a few slices just for herself in the middle of the day, watching the white fat darken.

But gluttony was a sin, and nothing was worse than wasted food, which was wasted work. A pioneer in a covered wagon had to keep a careful eye on the provisions, gauge how much to eat and how much to save for the rutted path ahead. The goal of settling was farming, creating an independent cycle of crops, livestock, and vegetable gardens. The Ingallses struggle against storms, bad weather, stubborn soil, even plagues of grasshoppers, always trying to pull ahead and usually getting pushed back. Which is why a long day of plowing the fields could be brightened by a spoonful of ginger flavoring the water jug. The troubles garnered by a too-small crop could be forgotten for an evening with a surprise pie made from green pumpkin.

In many ways, their pioneer life reminded me of immigrant life. As they search for new homesteads, they, too, experience isolation and the scramble for shelter, food, work, and a place to call home. In the opening scene of
Little House on the Prairie
the Ingallses say good-bye to their family in Wisconsin, and the finality is chilling. They don't know if they will ever see each other again. Without mail or telephones, the rest of the family is left wondering for months what happened—if they survived, if they were okay, where they had ended up. The book's quiet description of good-byes belies the great anxiety of westward migration. As the Ingallses travel in their wagon, looking for their last stop, they meet settlers from Norway, Sweden, Germany. “They're good neighbours, ” Pa says. “But I guess our kind of folks is pretty scarce.” Yet these European immigrant families would one day cease to be foreign and become “our kind of folks.” Like the Ingallses, they would blend in, become American, eventually refer to their ancestry as something fond and distant. “Trust a Scotchwoman to manage,” Pa says admiringly of Ma. The children of European immigrants would be able to answer the question “Where are you from?” with “Out East,” or “Wisconsin,” or “Minnesota,” and no one would say, “No, I mean where are you
really
from?”