Blue Plate Special (25 page)

Lucy and I were frequently on breakfast duty together. She was my favorite person on the crew, little and fine boned but very strong, with wavy long blond hair and a wry, calm disposition. She wore white wifebeaters and baggy canvas shorts and Birkenstocks. We listened to Bob Marley nonstop.

Jo, our sterling, superresponsible, serious boss, armed us with ring binders she’d assembled, full of recipes proportioned for two hundred people. It was classic cafeteria food—red-bean chili, which we stirred with paddles in tall stainless-steel pots; spaghetti and meatballs; and various casseroles like baked ziti and mac and cheese, which we baked in industrial ovens in pans the size of small sleds.

Because the children all had varying degrees of “issues” and disorders (which these days would probably be medicated but
weren’t back then), their diets were severely restricted. The recipes were filling and healthy—heavy on vegetables and starches, light on meats and fats. The kids weren’t allowed to have any sugar at all. Desserts were sweetened with sugar-free applesauce, industrial-sized cans of it; we made vast sheet pans of gingerbread and brownies and cobblers, which always came out of the oven looking and smelling delicious but tasting disappointing, at least to me.

One day, I came into the kitchen for my shift and was confronted by a walk-in fridge filled with boxes I was evidently expected to haul forth and deal with: forty whole, plucked, very dead chickens, all of which needed to be hacked apart into the usual components: breast, thigh, drumstick, wing. I had never butchered a chicken before. I took the first one from its tightly packed box and laid it on a cutting board. The chicken looked small and vulnerable and goose pimpled, as if it were chilly and wanted a blanket. It was about the size of a very young human baby.

I looked at Ben, who was on duty with me that day. “Have you done this before? You’re the guy.”

“No,” he said. “And don’t be so sexist.”

Ben was sweet faced, intellectual, pale skinned, and mild mannered. All things considered, I was the more viable candidate.

“Here’s a chart, I think,” he said, handing me a piece of paper. Then he went off to make a vat of potato salad.

I looked askance at the chart, put it down, and hefted the cleaver Jo had handed me before she went back to the cabin for a nap.

The first attempt went badly; I’ve never been much good at following directions, even harmless and potentially helpful ones. I was glad the poor chicken was already dead. The second attempt was a little better. I now had a heap of hacked-up bird parts and was starting to feel a bit like a serial killer. I
arranged the third one for dismantling. It looked as daunting as the others.

With inward resignation, I consulted the chart finally. According to the instructions, birds came apart neatly. It was a matter of knowing where the joints were and severing them, not cutting into bones but liberating each piece from its neighbor with a sharp, well-placed chop. The carcass itself likewise came apart with little resistance if you sort of tugged it open like a book and cut through the hinges of cartilage.

About ten chickens in, I basically had the hang of it. By my thirtieth, Ben could have blindfolded me and I would have taken that thing apart no problem, chop-chop. I stopped seeing the chickens as once-living beings, stopped worrying about desecrating their little corpses. They were food, damn it. They were going to be coated in spiced bread crumbs and baked. They were going to feed a bunch of kids who were hyperactive, depressed, out of control, manic, hypersexual, maladjusted, violent, and/or learning disordered. And this was my job.

A
t the start of my sophomore year, after I’d had my heart well and truly broken by a stoner physics major named Kip with long blond hair and a dudely, passive-aggressive sweetness I could neither resist nor penetrate, I razored off my own long hair into a spiky boy’s cut full of cowlicks in an attempt to rid myself of my femininity entirely. I was skinny and muscular and angular, bristling with ambition, impatience. I had all but forgotten my past bouts of gluttony; I ate now so sparingly I sometimes got light-headed and had to remind myself to get some food. My brain felt electric and engaged, like an engine being tested and pushed and let out at full throttle. My obsession with food was sidelined, suppressed, displaced.

In the spring of that year, having finally recovered from Kip, I fell in love with a guy named Stephen, my skinny, angular,
spiky-haired, literary twin. We quickly became inseparable. We had several classes together and slept together every night in my narrow little bed; occasionally, we even had identical dreams. We loved Wordsworth; danced like pogo sticks to the Clash and the Specials; tried to puzzle out Ezra Pound; wrote villanelles and sonnets; ate cheap, easy suppers of Top Ramen (twenty-five cents a packet) with eggs and scallions and chicken thrown in; and laughed as hard together as I’d laughed with Susan as a kid.

That summer, and for many summers thereafter, I joined my family for three weeks on an island off Nantucket called Tuckernuck. Ben, my mother’s now-third husband, had a family house there, a shingled cottage with a breezeway; a library with window seats and shelves of old books; a gas-powered generator in a shed that pumped water up from the well; propane tanks to run the stove, fridge, water heater, and washing machine; and a boathouse down on the East Pond containing a barnacled dory, a small sailboat, and a couple of canoes. The island had no paved roads, electricity, or stores, nothing but twenty or so old shingled cottages scattered through grassy moors and scrubby woods. I slept in the small bedroom off the kitchen, a whitewashed chamber just big enough for a lumpy single bed and small wooden bureau. I read and wrote over coffee in the mornings, then walked after lunch with my sisters to the white beaches on the other side of the island for an afternoon of swimming and sunbathing.

In the evenings, we all played cutthroat, killer games of croquet, with our cocktails on the mown lawn that overlooked the water, like proper WASPs. When dinner was ready, someone rang the gong and everyone came to sit around the wooden table with its straw place mats and porcelain water pitchers. Above the fireplace was a wooden carving of an enormous fish. The dining room windows had ancient, wavy glass; through
their small, mullioned panes, the sky and water and moors looked watery and distorted in their greens and blues. As it got dark, we lit the kerosene lamps. After dinner, we went into the library and played charades or dictionary, or Ben read aloud to us. The nights were very dark and very quiet. I lay in bed watching the moon through the clouds and listening to the wind.

Sometimes, when the tides were right, we carried rods and lures to the beach and went surf fishing for striped bass and bluefish, casting out into the waves, standing waist-deep in the water. When I reeled in a fish, I clonked it on the head to kill it, then slit its belly open with a sharp knife and reached in and pulled out its entrails and threw them to the seagulls. Later, on the breezeway of the house, I attached each fish I’d caught by the tail to a big, rough clipboard and scaled it with a knife, feeling as macho as Hemingway.

My mother used to stuff the oily, strong-tasting bluefish we caught with whole garlic cloves, lemon slices, and sprigs of fresh rosemary and thyme that she pulled from the kitchen garden. She doused it in olive oil and surrounded it with potatoes and baked it. She had found the recipe in a cookbook somewhere; it was the best bluefish I’ve ever eaten—rich and tender and so garlicky and herby, its gamey-fishy flavor was overwhelmed and conquered.

At low tide, we took quahog rakes and a bucket in the dory around the point to pull huge, knobby quahogs from just under the sand on the shallow sea floor. I soaked them in salt water all afternoon so they’d spit out the sand in their gullets, then steamed them in a big pot until they opened. Then I chopped the meat—which looked disgustingly, grotesquely genitalesque but smelled briny and sweet and clean—and added it to a soup of sautéed onions, chopped bacon, potatoes, and frozen corn simmered just barely covered with equal parts clam
liquor (I strained the sand out of the clam-steaming water) and whole milk, with two bay leaves, salt, and pepper. The broth was thin but very flavorful, and the soup was chunky and thick. The clams were chewy and tender. I floated a bit of butter on top of each bowl and sprinkled it with chopped parsley, and that, plus a salad, was dinner.

To get to Tuckernuck from the mainland at the beginning of our three-week stay, we took the Nantucket ferry from Hyannisport on Cape Cod with Ben’s car packed full of canvas bags of clothes and books, and my mother’s cello. Once on Nantucket, we drove to the Stop & Shop and filled three carts with food—canned goods and staples and as much produce as we thought we could eat before it went bad—and then we went to the liquor store next door for several cartons of magnums of Junot wine, red and white, a bottle of bourbon and another of Scotch. The trunk full of food, we met old Walter Barrett with his weather-beaten boat at the Madaket dock, loaded its belly full of bags, left the car parked by the dock, clambered aboard, and chugged over to Tuckernuck.

The first glimpse of the green, low island, rising from the blue waves on the horizon, always gave me a tingle of excitement; this was the high point of my year, the vacation I dreamed about, and now it was finally here. I was never disappointed. The three weeks on Tuckernuck were like a fairy tale for me, a children’s story come true in my twenties. I brought my boyfriends and best friend, Bronwen, there, and my sisters came every summer; it was the only time I got to see my family for such a long, unbroken period. It was heaven for me.

I naively thought my mother loved it there as much as I did. She seemed to, at least. She would sit on the shady breezeway in her straw hat all morning and read thick nineteenth-century novels—Tolstoy and Eliot. She practiced her cello for hours. (These, I now know, were tactics for keeping Ben at bay.) And
she was so much fun there—easily the most dynamic and competitive at games, and when she won, she gleamed with hilarity and triumph. At four every afternoon, I, the self-appointed ship’s mate, made a pot of Hu-Kwa tea, a smoky oolong, in the big blue-patterned china teapot with the straw handle, and served it on the breezeway with gingersnaps, which I doled out so our stores would last as long as possible. I loved teatime with my mother; she was chatty and effusive in the afternoons. We opened wine when dinner preparations got under way. I loved cooking with her in the small low-ceilinged farmhouse-style kitchen, bantering and laughing with Ben.

I also assumed naively that my mother loved Ben as much as I did. To me, he was a generous, genial, adoring stepfather, a mentor who read all my papers and stories, someone I could talk about books with for hours, a funny, charming man who felt like the father I’d never had. Not so with my mother. Her marriage to Ben was complicated and unhappy, and she was struggling to stay in it. One summer, she stayed in bed crying for several days. I couldn’t understand why—here she was on an island idyll with all three of her daughters. She told me in later years that the place was a prison for her. There was literally nowhere she could go to escape her husband. He had full control over her for those three weeks.

Meanwhile, Susan and Emily had both become raving beauties, known around Bard (where Susan was in college) and the nearby Simon’s Rock early college (where Emily was in school) as “the babes of the universe.” They were quite a duo, stared at and ogled and lusted after wherever they went together: two curvaceous, graceful, sultry, flowing-haired lasses with intelligence and charisma and warmth. Susan was now a modern dancer; Emily was a pianist, singer, and songwriter. They went to Dead shows and Rainbow Gatherings together. Emily was into world music and vegetarianism and smoking mullein, which she claimed was good for the lungs. She wore hippie dresses and went barefoot. Susan was alienated and solitary at Bard, which was a dark, lonely place in the early eighties. She threw herself into modern dance, went to parties, wore eyeliner and ripped sweatshirts and miniskirts with leggings and little black boots. She and Emily were both having spiritual awakenings and were questioning the way we were raised, without any religious practice or belief, by our adamantly nondogmatic, skeptical, empirically minded mother. They were both actively searching, each in her own way for her own answers, but their shared yearning allied them, made them close and bonded.