“Let’s get out of here,” Bob said. He dropped me off at the corner of Emerson Street three blocks away, where the D.O. lived, and drove on to a parking lot by the drugstore, where he would wait for me.
“Well, blow me down, well, I never,” the D.O. said when she opened the door and saw me there. She was wearing her upper plate but missing her lower one. I hadn’t seen her for three or four years, and she was more stooped now, in her printed terry-cloth robe with a sleeveless sweater over it. Her eyes were sharp and her frown focused as she scuttled to a card table set up in the kitchen, covered with boxes, folders, and papers. “Here you are,” she said, “here’s Betty right here and here’s Bob.” Next to our folders was one labeled Funeral Expenses and another, the thickest one, To Do. She was still shuffling through the files, muttering about how much she had to do, how she was going to take me through everything, the birthday cards, the bills, her Bible, her devotions in Daily Bread, a copy of the letter she meant to send me weeks ago, the troubles with her abdomen, back, eyes, ears, how her niece never came to take care of her, when I left to find Bob.
“We need a drink,” we said in unison.
Dad died the next year, even though nobody in my family dies. He passed away from “heart stoppage” at ninety-one. Bob telephoned to tell me, and afterward I telephoned the D.O. “Hello, hello? I can’t hear too good,” she said. “I’ve lost my new hearing aid, not as young as I once was and I can’t get everything done the way I’d like to, but I’ve got you on my list and I intend to sit right down and write, I’ve got so much to say, I had my notes right here somewhere …” I put the telephone back in its cradle. She hadn’t once mentioned Dad.
Bob called again to tell me how the service went. Several members of the Cactus and Succulent Society had driven up from Joshua Tree National Monument, and the minister had made only a few mistakes. He called Dad a physicist and pronounced Meryl as two syllables instead of one. I was surprised that Dad had decided to be cremated rather than buried in the earth, as my mother had been, in Forest Lawn Cemetery outside Hollywood. When I was researching Mabel, I’d once located the small flat plaque that identified Hazel Kennedy Harper among the rolling green acres of plaques watched over by statues of Jesus. Several years after Dad’s death, I visited the mortuary drawer in Riverside’s Evergreen Cemetery that contained his ashes. It was the same cemetery where he’d buried his parents and taught me to drive. Later still, after the D.O.’s niece had moved her to a nursing home in Alhambra, she reported that Dad’s ashes were gone. “What happened to them?” I asked. “Nobody knows,” she said. “They’ve simply disappeared.”
I knew I wouldn’t have to journey back to Riverside ever again. Home is where the hearth is, and I had already lit new fires in my new stove. Things I’d lugged with me were a comfort, like Grandma H.’s wicker sewing basket with her thimble and a few odd teeth I’d saved. I put her egg slicer in a drawer and my dad’s squeezer in a cupboard and lined the walls with books and rebuilt my little universe, implement by implement, in the kitchen.
The kitchen is the one place in which we’re all required to begin again, each day, at ground zero—reborn after the death of sleep to feed the gut, brain, and soul by daily murder and redemption. Cooking and eating, as Lévi-Strauss has said, are a form of mediation between heaven and earth, life and death, in the workplace of the kitchen. The kitchen mediates between power and submission and love and hate and all the other dynamics of living and dying, day by day. It’s the place where, if we but have eyes to see, we can see the miraculous in the ordinary—can see each day water turn into wine, wine into vinegar, flour into bread, milk into butter, butter into cheese, loaves and fishes into food for multitudes. In the kitchen, the literal and symbolic, visible and intelligible, are as indistinguishable as the body and blood of Christ in bread and wine, as the feathers of Quetzalcoatl in a dish of ground corn, or the smile of Buddha in a bowl of burning yak butter.
In the beginning was the mouth, like Eve’s mouth, biting. “The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth,” and at the center, “there God is waiting to eat him,” Simone Weil once wrote of man the maze-walker. “Later he will go out again, but he will be changed, he will have become different, after being eaten or digested by God.” Sam at six had put it more simply: “We’re all inside God’s stomach.”
A friend of mine traveling in the southern Oriente of Ecuador wanted to try the black root that the shamans of the Shuar eat for the trance state that transports them to the Other Side. Being an American, my friend insisted on going it alone. After a day of violent vomiting, the hallucinations began at night. He found himself in a black tunnel, drawn inexorably toward the end, and as he drew close he saw that the end was the fanged open mouth and throat of a giant serpent, black tongue flickering. His terror was so great that he fought with all his might against entering that mouth, fought so hard that he broke the trance and shook with chills and fever. When he told a shaman what had happened, the shaman said, “You should have let me go with you. Then you would have let the serpent swallow you. That’s what the journey is for.”
To eat and be eaten is a consummation devoutly to be wished in a universe that is all mouth, where black holes have a prodigious appetite for stars and neutrinos are always changing flavors. Small wonder then that humans have but the one orifice for food, speech, and love, or that the mouth, in eating, speaking, kissing, should be the portal to the serpentine tubing of the gut, the electrical wiring of the brain, the palpitations of the heart. The mouth is the shaman’s portal to the Other Side, whether the Other is a kosher-keeping Yahweh, a vegetarian Puritan, or a dieter’s Thin Man. All foods, all mouths, are sacred to the force that created them, whatever sumptuary laws man invents to triumph over his enemies in the vain attempt to deny that all alike are food for the mouths of worms.
I began as a mouth, sucking mother’s milk like gin, and will likely end as a mouth, as my father did, sucking Jell-O and Kool-Aid through a straw. On the back of my hands I see Grandma H.’s veins like blue earthworms tunneled just beneath the skin. On my face I see Grandma K.’s wrinkles. Without lines no life, without breakage no change, without being swallowed no swallowing. Once I stole from the seat of an airplane a sign that read: OCCUPIED BY A THROUGH PASSENGER. Not the end of the journey but the journey itself is the destination that keeps body and soul going. Shapes change, the form remains. The recipe is Ovid’s.
Memories fail, as recipes do, because what’s inside the head and what’s on the plate are never the same, no matter how hungry we are to bring them together. The recipe for my grandma’s instant applesauce would have to include her thumb on the knife and the pocket in the apron on her lap. And there is no recipe for my stockpot of memories which is always at the simmer and which I stir with that rescued wooden spoon, fishing out a chicken bone here, an onion skin there, sloughing off the gray scum that bubbles to the top, straining the liquid and hoping the broth is strong enough, clear enough, flavorful enough to make good soup. We’re all cooking, as Allen Ginsberg said, in “the alphabet soup of time.” And that soup, like the kitchen itself, cheats time, denying memory at the same time it evokes it in a hard-boiled egg, a scraped apple, the smell of an orange.
My round dining table is a kitchen midden of unpaid bills, half-spent candles, soiled napkins, mail-order catalogues I will never order from, tear sheets of recipes I will never make, last year’s letters I will never answer. To eat I must push all this aside to make a breathing space for my plate and glass. But that’s as it should be. I don’t require linen, napery, crystal glasses, polished silver, or an altar with a priest to raise the wafer and the wine. I’ll grant it’s better when you break bread and lift a glass and share words as well as tastes with other people in tidy and civilized surroundings, but eating alone has its virtues and rewards. I’m in a sure Place now. I can smack my lips and groan out loud with pleasure, put a slice of bread to my nose and inhale deeply, lick my plate clean with my tongue without embarrassment. I can
rejoice in the lamb, and the pork, and the beef without recrimination. I can eat my father slowly in a bowl of mashed potatoes, I can dilute the vinegar of my stepmother with the blessing of oil. I can give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a two-pound lobster drowning in a lake of butter as if each breath were a lover’s kiss. And if I want to, I can write about it, in the deep communion of words.
Acknowledgments
This work exceeded its estimated cooking time by so many hours of so many years that I am more than usually grateful to those who freed me from kitchen work so that I could write about it. For that freedom I thank the MacDowell Colony for appointing me a DeWitt Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fellow, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Villa Montalvo Artist Residency Program, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers. My editor, Becky Saletan, knows just how much I owe her, and I thank her for not telling.
About the Author
Betty Fussell (b. 1927) is an accomplished American writer whose essays on food, art, and travel have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Vogue, Food & Wine, Gastronomica, and more. She is the author of eleven books, including The Story of Corn and Raising Steaks. Her memoir My Kitchen Wars has been performed in New York and Hollywood as a one-woman show.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1999 by Betty Fussell
Cover design by Neil Alexander Heacox
ISBN: 978-1-4532-1843-3
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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