A Place at the Table: A Novel

by Susan Rebecca White

  And here is where life gets really interesting, Meemaw. There’s one woman I kept noticing at the green market. I didn’t notice her only because she’s black, though that certainly had something to do with it. It’s funny, every time I see a black person up here I tend to smile too much, act too familiar, because I assume the person is also from the South and is also a fellow expat, as Gus calls us. But it wasn’t solely this woman’s blackness that drew me to her. It was her dignity. I swear, she carried herself like a queen, and she was always wrapped in the most beautiful scarves, her white hair pulled back into an elegant bun. And the concentration she applied in choosing her vegetables! It was as if she could understand the whole world in one little stalk of cauliflower, the way she would hold it up and then turn it slowly in her hand, studying its curds, its few yellowed spots, the tight leaves around its base.

  The vendors all recognized her, and it seemed they all had stashed away something special, just for her.

  “Gotcha some fresh eggs today, Alice, with nice orange yolks like those country eggs you grew up with.”

  “Here are some persimmons, good and ripe, like you was looking for last week.”

  “These are the best of the fingerlings I grow. I know you like a good potato.”

  She would reward each vendor with a brief but radiant smile, her teeth as white as her skin was dark. And then the smile was gone, replaced by a somber look, as if her smiles had to be carefully rationed.

  I began thinking of her as the African Queen of the Green, and I made it a point to look for her every Saturday during my early-morning comb of the place. One morning I spotted her there with a tall white woman, who was neatly dressed in khaki slacks and a button-down navy shirt printed with little white anchors, tucked in at the waist. Around her neck was a bright red scarf, tied rather jauntily. To be honest, she reminded me of Mama, only less done up, less “painted.” She wore her straight hair parted down the middle, the tips brushing her shoulders—a girl’s haircut, except for the streaks of gray. She had freckles across her cheeks, and if she wore any makeup at all it was just a touch of pink lipstick and perhaps a little mascara.

  I liked her right away. She looked sensible and no-nonsense—but kind. I know it sounds pitiful, but I followed those two around like a puppy as they went stall to stall collecting various fruits, vegetables, and herbs. I noticed that neither of them spoke much outside of commenting on produce and they kept a measured distance. And yet there was a real affection between them. Like how they hovered together excitedly over what looked to me like pieces of gingerroot, only yellower and more knobby.

  “Mother used to shave these raw into chicken salad,” said the black woman. “Tasted almost as if there was a truffle in there.”

  “How delightful! I believe Jack once made a creamed soup of these, though he nearly sliced off a finger trying to peel them all.”

  “Mother would just soak them in bowls of hot water to remove the clay and the silt. She’d get them so clean we could eat them with the skins on.”

  Though I had overlooked the strange roots earlier, suddenly I wanted nothing more than a bag of them, to shave into chicken salad and puree into soup.

  The black woman carefully selected a few choice ones, placing them into a brown paper bag she had retrieved from her purse. “I’ll make chicken salad and put these in it, just for nostalgia,” she said. “We can eat it on our picnic tomorrow.”

  Oh, Meemaw, I felt like a little boy with his nose pressed against the candy store window. I wanted to go on a picnic with those two! I wanted to have chicken salad enhanced with shaved roots that taste like truffles! Instead, I waited until they moved onto the next vendor before selecting my own little bag of knobby fingers. “Sunchokes,” said the farmer when I asked what they were.

  At home in my apartment, I tried soaking the sunchokes in hot water but found that after each bath they still had orange streaks on their flesh, as if they had grown in red clay. I wondered why we had never eaten a sunchoke grown in Georgia, since the red clay looked like it could have come straight from your backyard. (I admit, Meemaw, I had an urge to suck on the root and see if I could taste the land in which it grew. I remember how you used to suck on little bits of clay sometimes, brought to you by an old friend from Alabama. You said you grew up doing that and were teased something awful for being a “dirt eater,” but you couldn’t help it, sometimes you needed to taste your roots. I remember I tried a little of your Alabama clay, sucking on it like it was a Popsicle. At first it was sort of awful, and then, strangely, not so bad. Comforting almost.)

  Finally, I realized I was going to need to peel them, but I had nothing but a paring knife to do it with, which meant I ended up cutting off more than I kept. Still I managed to salvage a little pile of peeled sunchokes, which I roasted in butter at 425 until I could stick the point of a knife through one without any resistance. The peeled exteriors puffed and browned and their insides were creamy and a little sweet, balanced with a few sprinkles of salt and pepper. Which is to say, they were delicious and left me craving more, wondering what other fabulous things were out there that I had not yet tasted.

  The next day when I went to work I told Gus about seeing the black woman at the market with her white friend and how they bought sunchokes and so I bought sunchokes and I had cooked them and they were wonderful. “Dear boy, did you happen to catch the black woman’s name?” Gus asked me, and I said yes, that the vendors called her Alice.

  “Congratulations! You’ve had an Alice Stone sighting! Don’t you know that’s whose book we’ve been cooking from?” He flipped Homegrown to the back page and there was Alice’s author photo. She was a good twenty years younger in it, but yes, that was the African Queen of the Green. “And I imagine the proper lady you saw her with was none other than the editor of this very book, Kate Wolanski, née Pennington.”

  Meemaw, I remember how you always put quotation marks around the word “coincidence” because you believed God’s hand was in everything. That what seemed like chance was really God sorting through his contacts and seeing who needed to be matched up. Well, the fact that the African Queen of the Green was none other than the woman Gus began the café with certainly points to that theory. After learning who she was, I immediately asked Gus if he might introduce me to her. Gus said that he would ring her up, see if she might come have lunch at the café, let me cook for her, and let her apply her famous palate to my cuisine, help me elevate my craft. Of course I’m all knotted up with anxiety even thinking about it, but I told Gus yes, of course, let’s do it.

  So that is what I’m doing today and tomorrow—Sunday and Monday—while the restaurant is closed: figuring out exactly what it is I’m going to prepare for Alice’s upcoming visit. It’s so cold here now that I think I will make some sort of a braise, although it can’t be one of her recipes, it can’t be duck with green olives or Boeuf Bourgignon. Maybe I’ll do short ribs with mashed potatoes, or something even simpler, maybe even your fried chicken. Alice likes things simple; this I know from reading her book. And it must be comforting, and provide her with a little taste of the South. I’m thinking of making banana pudding for dessert, but instead of using Nilla wafers, I’m going to use cut-up cubes of toasted pound cake made from your recipe, layering them with homemade vanilla pudding and ripe bananas, and topping the whole thing with meringue. Maybe I’ll make little individual puddings in ramekins, to honor the mousse Alice Stone made famous at the café. I’ll keep thinking on it. You send me some ideas if you can, okay? Just send them to me in a dream.

  I think of cooking for you all the time, Meemaw. I can’t tell you how much I’ve learned about cooking since I’ve been up here. Gus calls all of the little things he teaches me trucs, which means “tricks” in French. Like stick your onions in the freezer for twenty minutes before you chop them so your eyes don’t water, and wipe down the edges of your plate with a cloth before serving so everything looks perfect. (Mama used to do that, actually, when she would serve dips.
Wipe down the edges so it looked as if the dip just grew up from the bottom of the bowl naturally.) And when preparing meat, always let it come to room temperature before cooking. And salt, salt, salt. Before we roast chickens at the restaurant we soak them in a brine of sea salt and water for a day. Sometimes Gus just salts the outside of the bird and leaves it uncovered in the fridge, which dries out the skin and makes it extra crispy when roasted at a high heat. That’s another thing Gus has taught me—the beauty of heat. Chickens can be roasted at 500 degrees, if you can believe it, and cooking meat on a hot, hot grill really sears in the flavors. Gus says if you try to turn a piece of cooking meat and it feels stuck, to wait a minute or two longer, that as soon at the outside caramelizes it will release from the pan or the grill or whatever and you can flip it over, no problem.

  Gus hasn’t yet let me solo chef for customers. Instead I prep things: chop vegetables, salt chickens, make sauces. But it feels as if he’s grooming me to take over one day. And maybe he is. After all, he’s in his seventies. I’m not sure how long he is planning to keep running the place. Except we really need more customers if that is to happen. To be honest, I think Gus is a little stuck in the past. To anyone who will listen he will go on and on about the famous people who once ate at the café, but the problem is, he needs more people to eat there now.

  Still, Meemaw. Sometimes I look at where I was six months ago and I look at where I am now and I just feel really lucky. In this city it makes such a difference to have a place that is your own, to have people counting on you, to have a place you are supposed to be. Of course it hasn’t escaped my notice that once again I’m spending most of my time with someone much, much older than me. But maybe I’m an old soul, Meemaw. Do you think that might be it? I still go dance at the clubs; I still hang out with Mike, but that’s not where my heart is. My heart is in the kitchen, reading through Alice Stone’s book, trying out new recipes, tweaking my mistakes, and trying again.

  And I’ll end with this, Meemaw, because I know it will make you happy, but also, because it’s true. You know I’ve been mad at God for a long time now. Mad for reasons that surely you can understand. But with this job, and this recognition of my own talent, and this growing passion, it’s like a little light has forced its way in. It’s like God’s knocking at the door of my heart once again. And I can hear him knocking because—against all odds—I am starting to feel at home.

  9

  Like John the Baptist, Dripping with Honey

  (New York City, February 1982)

  Granted, I’m the one who suggested inviting Mr. Capote to the luncheon for Alice, but I was being facetious. It was after I found out that Kate’s husband, Jack Wolanski—a renowned writer himself—would be attending. “Gee, that’s a lot of pressure,” I said. “Making me cook for the Manhattan literati. Why don’t we just invite Truman Capote while we’re at it?” Gus’s response to my joke was to telephone the author right then and there at his apartment at the UN Plaza. Surprisingly, Mr. Capote answered and, after hearing the invitation, suggested he “might” stop by. Somehow Gus inferred a resounding yes from that tepid response, and he’s hyper with excitement at the possibility of the (now) infamous recluse deigning to grace us with his presence.

  I suppose if I thought Mr. Capote were really going to attend I might be more anxious about the possibility, but frankly, I think Gus is delusional, and anyway, my anxiety is reserved for Alice, whom I want to impress. She along with Kate and Jack Wolanski all arrive together, right on time. Gus prepared me for meeting Jack by giving me a stack of old New Yorkers that contained some of his articles. My favorites are his profiles of the city’s more eccentric residents, which read like short stories. Like the one about an Upper East Side dowager with connections to the Kennedys, known as “Mumsy” not only to her children, but also to the rest of her family and even her friends. Mumsy has tea three times a week at the Carlyle with her adult son, Nipps. Nipps will order a Shirley Temple with a straw, while Mumsy can put back three dry martinis and still appear perfectly sober. Mumsy’s typical outfit is a misshapen gray skirt, the waist held in place by a safety pin, topped with a Bryn Mawr sweatshirt. Somehow she gets away with this by always accessorizing the outfit with multiple strands of pearls worn around her neck. I guess I shouldn’t say “somehow” she gets away with it; she gets away with it because she’s loaded.

  Gus makes a big production of Alice, Kate, and Jack’s arrival, kissing cheeks and complimenting everyone’s outfit. He pops open a bottle of Champagne while I pass around a plate of hush puppies, which are, as Meemaw used to say, fresh off the grease. Still, it is obvious that Gus is distracted, that his focus is on the possibility of Truman Capote’s arrival.

  Jack Wolanski is remarkably skinny and significantly less refined than his wife. He looks as if, minutes before walking into the restaurant, he ran his fingers wildly through his hair, making it stick up every which way, whereas Kate is preppy and polished, her white silk blouse tucked into pleated navy trousers, a pair of sensible red loafers peeking out below the cuffed hems, giving her whole outfit a subtle aura of patriotism. Despite their difference in style, the two of them seem well matched. They have the easy banter of longtime lovers, and within the first ten minutes of their arrival Jack makes Kate laugh out loud, not once but twice.

  Alice does not laugh at all. It seems she does not want to be here. She makes little eye contact, training her eyes instead on her fingernails or on Kate, to whom she keeps giving pained expressions. She eats a single hush puppy but does not take seconds. She turns down Gus’s offering of a flute of Champagne, asking instead for a glass of water, no ice. Jack valiantly tries to make conversation, but mostly we stand around awkwardly.

  Things loosen up a bit when Randy—Gus’s “companion”—arrives, full of good cheer and bustling energy. He makes us cluster together so he can take several photos of “the gang,” as if we are old friends reunited. At seventy-something years old and blessed with a full head of thick hair, Randy still exudes boyish charm, right down to the way he absentmindedly brushes his bangs off his forehead, like a little boy bothered by something itchy.

  After twenty or so minutes standing around, futilely waiting for Mr. Capote to arrive, Gus finally agrees to let us sit down and eat. This provides a little relief, because at least now we can speak of the food before us. The lunch menu—a fish fry—is a risk, I know. But I had determined that it was foolish to serve Alice anything from her own cookbook and I thought a fish fry would be a fun way of honoring our shared southern roots. To the table Gus and I bring fried catfish with tartar sauce, red beans and rice loaded with andouille sausage (a nod to Meemaw’s husband, my Granddaddy Banks, who originally hailed from Louisiana), red cabbage coleslaw, collard greens, and a breadbasket filled with hot biscuits, corn muffins, and more hush puppies. I serve it all family-style, letting everyone help themselves.

  Ironically, it is Jack, a Jew born in Brooklyn and possibly the thinnest man I’ve ever seen, who is the most enthusiastic about this most southern of meals, helping himself to three servings of catfish and countless hush puppies. “My God, the batter on this fish is so light and crisp,” he says.

  But Alice, eating slowly and deliberately, remains quiet, not even finishing the single catfish filet she put on her plate, making me wonder if something is wrong with it, if her palate is so highly developed that she picked up on some off taste the rest of us aren’t sensitive enough to recognize. Or maybe her particular piece of fish was bad. But that can’t be. It just can’t. I bought the fish fresh this morning, sniffed each piece before dipping it first in flour, then egg, then seasoned cornmeal.

  Alice’s response, or lack thereof, is so frustrating, so anxiety producing, that my leg starts shaking under the table. It shakes so violently that I have to hold it down with my free hand in order for it to stop.

  I picture the dessert I’ve prepared, homemade vanilla pudding layered with ripe bananas and chunks of Meemaw’s pound cake, topped with meringue. I imagine
Alice rejecting it, and I feel like crying.

  And then the restaurant door flings open and a pretty woman, wet hair hanging in ringlets all around her face, bursts inside, looking around wildly at the nearly empty café. She is dripping wet. A bizarre thought—that she is covered in honey, like John the Baptist—crosses my mind, but then I realize that it is raining outside. I can hear the sound of it landing against the windows, a slushy downpour, somewhere between rain and snow.