Tender at the Bone

by Ruth Reichl

  “Why not?” I asked. “Other guys in your fraternity have gotten pinned, haven’t they?”

  He nodded. “But they’re not like her.”

  I still didn’t get it.

  He looked across the room, considering. He looked back at me. He looked annoyed. “They’re not Negro,” he said, his Georgia accent very pronounced so the word came out “nigrah.”

  “I see,” I said brightly, “that’s no problem. Serafina’s not either.”

  Much later it made me angry, but at the time I didn’t think too much about it. I was too busy thinking about Serafina’s sex problem. Now that they were pinned, Rob considered that he had certain rights. “Everybody does it when they’re pinned,” he reportedly moaned, night after night.

  “Not me,” said Serafina, eyes flashing. I didn’t say anything. I had sort of thought the pin/sex connection was obvious, but Serafina was the kind of Catholic who ate fish on Friday. She had her soul to consider.

  In any case, Rob didn’t last long. A year later Serafina was saying contemptuously, “Can you believe I once went out with a fraternity guy?”

  Frankly, I couldn’t. That year we moved into a dormitory suite. We did our own cooking, sharing a kitchen with two other girls. Our roommates were prim midwesterners who wore plaid skirts with matching sweater sets and considered meat loaf exotic. The most experimental thing Marina made all year was fried chicken, and Susan stuck to steak and Rice-A-Roni.

  But Serafina was a great cook. She stayed up nights marinating chickens in curry, onions, and Kitchen Bouquet. She made little fried breads called “bakes” and asked her mother for the coconut bread recipe. Soon she was making roti and souse, filling the kitchen with smells I’d never even imagined.

  Personally I was devoted to How To Eat Better for Less Money, a thirty-five-cent paperback that somehow included recipes for goose and suckling pig in its budget menus. Some of the recipes were strange; I made osso buco once, but the risotto part was puzzling. James Beard and Sam Aaron, the authors, called it “a favorite Italian way of preparing rice, and simpler than most methods,” instructing me to cover the rice with boiling broth and bake it in the oven until the liquid disappeared. It tasted exactly like the rice my mother habitually cooked with her chicken, only less greasy. This was Italian cooking?

  When Serafina and I discovered the farmer’s market on the far side of town, we started going every Saturday morning to buy fresh fruit and vegetables and the sweet-potato pies sold by an ancient, deeply black man with sad eyes. Later Serafina took me to the Eastern Market in Detroit, and we began cooking Greek food with the olive oil, lamb, and grape leaves we brought home from our expeditions. The night we made moussaka Marina and Susan both looked ill. “Ground lamb?” said Marina, picking up the phone. “How disgusting!” She was calling Domino’s.

  Still, they liked that better than the times Mohammed, a Moroccan who had befriended me so he could speak French, came over to cook couscous, fluffing the grains with his hands. They thought the idea of the roast goat Mohammad sometimes cooked was really repulsive, and they would flee at the very mention of his name.

  The next year, when we moved out of the dorm and into our own apartment, Serafina and I expected to do a lot of cooking. But the place we found was only half a block from campus, above a coffee house, and too convenient for our friends. If one of us walked into the kitchen and started chopping onions, there would be fifteen people waiting expectantly by the time dinner was ready. We couldn’t afford to cook for the crowd that was always hanging around, and regular meals disappeared from our lives.

  Our door was never locked. Most mornings when I walked through the living room I’d find a couple of guys asleep on the floor, arms curled around the pillows they had pulled off the broken-down sofa. Sometimes I knew them, sometimes I didn’t. Pungent ashtrays spilled onto the brightly printed Indian blankets we had thrown across the floor. Often there was still a candle sputtering in the wrought-iron birdcage that hung from the ceiling; we liked to sit in the dark and spin the cage, watching the patterns it splashed across the walls. Usually there was still a record rotating on the turntable, playing softly as people slept.

  If I didn’t like the music I’d go over and change it, substituting Bob Dylan or Bessie Smith for whatever was playing. Serafina favored jazz; there was one three-month period when she played a single Lalo Schifrin record, endlessly.

  Across the street was a bus stop and every time we looked out the window we could see a man, the same man, just sitting there. Serafina was convinced he was an FBI agent. At the time I thought that was ridiculous; now I’m not so certain. I don’t know what the FBI thought they might uncover, but it tickled us to think about the waste of the taxpayer’s money. We’d stand at the window and wave down at the guy on the bench, and when we went outside we’d cross the street and taunt “Less for the war” as we passed.

  The war was always with us. Most of the boys we knew stayed in school to avoid the draft, worrying about their classification numbers. Those who dropped out had to come up with other ways of avoiding Vietnam. Some did alternative service, writing us letters from the V.A. hospitals in the Ozarks where they were sent. Others pretended to be crazy; the effort unhinged a few and they would drift through the apartment, not quite of this world anymore. Canada was the last resort and we had a lot of crossing-the-border parties.

  Meanwhile my parents called every Sunday morning and my mother wrote me poignant letters about the respectable children of her friends. Occasionally I replied. “I know Loren Labe stayed with you,” I wrote, “and brought you a present and went out with a boy from Yale and came in at a decent hour every night and dressed neatly and wrote you a nice thank-you note after she had left. Very comme il faut.” And then I added, “I could never be like that.”

  I once spent an entire afternoon alone in the living room, with the record player. I kept dragging the needle back so I could copy out all the lyrics of “It’s All Right, Ma,” and send it to my parents in an attempt to explain myself to them. “When I look at society,” I told them, “all I see is a bunch of frustrated shadow people who have surrounded themselves with rules to insulate them from life. What passes for real is the most blatant kind of fabrication. I don’t want to live a complacent life.”

  Mostly, however, I tried not to think about my parents. I went dutifully home for major holidays—Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter—and I hated every trip. In the summer I found jobs that kept me away. One summer Serafina and I worked in New York. Another summer we stayed in Ann Arbor and then got a job driving a Volkswagen to San Francisco. We ended up in a crash pad on Haight Street with thirty people we didn’t know dropping acid all around us. We baked bread with the Diggers and hung out at the I and Thou coffee shop where Leonard Woolf was interviewing people for a book he was writing. He declined to interview us.

  “You’re not really hippies,” he said. Serafina and I were shocked and upset. How could he tell that we didn’t drop acid?

  “Oh,” he said, “you’re just too clean.”

  I don’t know when Serafina stopped going to church, but it seemed undramatic, just a falling away. Protesting had become our religion: we went to teach-ins and sit-ins and we dressed only in black. I fell endlessly in love with boys who were not interested in me, while Serafina stayed home at night, listening to Lalo Schifrin, writing in her journal. We’d order pizza and talk, endlessly, about life and the world and our place in it. We left little notes for each other. “We’re in a transient state—why hate our present selves?” Serafina wrote me once. “Let’s save the energy for when we are eighty, when we are perhaps beyond, or above changing. Then we can hate, if hate we must.”

  But in our last year of college everything changed. One of the SDS guys had fallen for Serafina. Bill was a rich political kid, embarrassed by his background. He was cute and sort of famous and I had a crush on him so I was jealous when he started hanging around. Serafina was more flattered than fascinated, but when Bill said he wan
ted to know what her parents were like, she took him home to Detroit.

  When they came back she was different. Overnight. She threw out her Lalo Schifrin records and replaced them with Aretha Franklin. She got all of the records, the new ones like Respect and the older ones, where Aretha’s voice was soft and gospel-like. Serafina would hum along with the music, dancing sometimes but not talking. Bill didn’t come around anymore and Serafina disappeared into herself. At night when I whispered across the room she’d turn over, with her back to me.

  At first I was hurt. Then I was lonely. Finally I was angry. “Why are you doing this to me?” I cried. She didn’t answer.

  I called her parents to ask if something had happened. “You’ll have to ask ’Fina,” her mother replied. It sounded as if she had been crying. She relented a little. “Ask her about the pelau,” she said.

  That night I made a big dinner, cooking carefully, as if I were trying to seduce a lover. I made the things I knew Serafina liked: chicken fricassee with white wine, cream, and mushrooms; a large salad; chocolate cake. I urged all the hangers-on to go elsewhere. I even bought one guy a ticket to La Notte, my current favorite film, to get him out of the apartment. I put Carmina Burana, a record Serafina had once loved, on the player. And hoped she would show up for dinner.

  “What’s this?” she asked, walking suspiciously into the kitchen. I was nervous and slightly embarrassed.

  “I thought I’d make dinner,” I said as offhandedly as I could. “Are you hungry?”

  She looked as if she was going to back out the door and go right down the stairs. But she saw my face and relented. She sat down. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll eat.”

  I ladled some rice onto the plates. I squeezed a lemon into the chicken fricassee and poured the creamy sauce over the rice. I opened the bottle of wine, poured some into each of our glasses, and sat down.

  We clinked glasses, self-consciously. “Cheerio,” I said, before I could help myself. “Have a nice day,” she added and then we both laughed, the tension broken.

  “This is great,” she said, eating so ravenously that I wondered if she had been forgetting to feed herself.

  I took a deep breath. Now or never. “Your mom said I should ask you about pelau …” I began. Serafina sat up, her nose twitching like an animal scenting danger.

  “What happened when you went to Detroit?” I asked.

  She hesitated, as if weighing what she should tell me. “My mother made pelau for Bill,” she said finally.

  I waited. She paused before continuing. “I think he wanted to come home with me so he could be one with the people. He liked the idea that my father is a janitor. And he was not disappointed. I could feel him thinking that he had arrived, when we walked into that small hot apartment. I saw suddenly that I was everything he wanted in a woman, a passport out of the bourgeoisie.”

  She took a deep breath, took a sip of wine. “Mom made pelau. She was just starting to put it onto the big crockery platter when it cracked. It just cracked in two in her hands.” Serafina stopped, drank some more wine.

  “Pops said it was no big thing, that he and Bill would go down to the basement to glue it back together. They left, Bill looking all happy that he was going off to do useful work with his hands. While they were gone I asked Mom if pelau tasted different when we were in Guyana. I told her I couldn’t remember being in Guyana. And she told me that I was never there.”

  I looked blankly at her. Serafina looked directly at me and said, straight out, “She said that they didn’t adopt me until they got to Detroit.”

  I dropped my fork. She seemed to appreciate the response.

  “I couldn’t believe it. Adopted! She said it so casually: ‘We adopted you when you were a year and a half old.’ Then Bill and Pops came back and we sat down and ate dinner.”

  I got up and went to put my arms around Serafina but she shook me off. “Dinner was a blur. I don’t remember what they talked about. I looked at my father’s face, which is just like mine, and his hands and I knew I was his flesh and blood. I knew it. I decided that Mom was being noble, that I was really Dad’s child by some woman he had an affair with and she had agreed to raise me. I felt better.”

  I didn’t say anything. I’m not sure I breathed.

  “I couldn’t say any of this in front of Bill, so we finished dinner and drove home,” Serafina went on. “Bill droned on all the way back about what ‘real’ people my parents were. And all the while I could only think, ‘Why didn’t they ever tell me?’”

  “Did you ask your father?”

  She nodded, looking down into her glass. “He just looked at me and said, ‘’Fina, I wish you were my own but you’re not.’ And he told me where they had adopted me.”

  Her voice was getting rough, as if she were holding back tears, but her eyes were dry. “So the next day I borrowed a car and drove to the place where they had adopted me. But they refused to tell me anything. I went back, and back and back. And finally I found out the truth.”

  She looked straight at me and the tears began rolling down her cheeks. “I am not from Guyana. I am not Indian and French. I am Negro.” The word came croaking out, as if it were painful for her to say. “My mother was a Polish nurse. My father was a Negro garbageman.” And then she repeated it, less painfully. “I am Negro. Colored. Although my nose is more Anglo than yours. I wish I’d never asked about that damn pelau!”

  She pushed her plate away.

  “Do you want some salad?” I asked.

  “No I don’t want any damn salad!” she said. “Is that all you have to say?”

  I couldn’t say what I was really feeling; she wouldn’t understand. I was jealous again. I wished passionately that I could find out that I was adopted, find out that I was black. All this time we’d been marching and protesting, but Serafina finally had something of her own to be angry about.

  She embraced it with a passion, growing blacker by the day. Every time I looked she was farther away. She grew her hair in an attempt at an Afro, although her hair wouldn’t really do that, and she started wrapping herself in colorful African cloth. Eldridge Cleaver came to speak, and Serafina began talking about Black Power.

  On the surface nothing had changed. We still shared a room, but she spent her days in class and got a job at night, arranging her hours so we rarely saw each other. We communicated mostly by note.

  One day, just before school ended, I came home and found this sitting on the kitchen table:

  “You are the only white person to whom something has to be said. My people are me. I’m no longer lost.” And this is how she ended it: “I hope you find your Africa.”

  SUMMER OF LOVE

  “That man is in love with you,” my mother said the first time she met Mac. He had driven to the airport to pick my parents up when they visited in my junior year.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “You just can’t imagine that a Negro man would want to be my friend. He’s never even kissed me!”

  That was true. Nevertheless, we were inseparable. Serafina had introduced me to Mac, who was the gentlest man I’d ever met and the easiest to talk to. At first we hung out in groups, but as other people paired off we began to spend a lot of time together just as friends. Even in those days of civil rights marches and antiwar sit-ins we must have seemed a strange couple. I was pale and plump with masses of curly black hair. He was skinny and very black and, as my mother wasted no time in pointing out, seemed to be missing a great number of teeth.

  Mac had come to Michigan on a track scholarship, but as far as I could tell he had no interest in sports. By the time I met him he was a graduate student in psychology, working at the state hospital with disturbed children. It was whispered around that he had the ability to make autistic children talk. I don’t know if this was really true, but I never doubted it; he was a quiet person with a voice so gentle you instinctively answered every question he asked.

  “People are a gas,” Mac said, and meant it. He moonlighted as a g
arbageman while he was in graduate school, and he even managed to love that job. “It’s so interesting what you can find out from what people throw away,” he said. “Besides, the pay’s good and the hours are short.”

  Mac opened a whole new world to me. My parents had taken me traveling abroad, but now I discovered another country here at home. We’d drive around town in his comfortable black 1955 Cadillac listening to the Soul Preacher on the radio; the music sounded like everything that I’d been feeling but didn’t know how to say. Mac liked all kinds of music but it was the blues that really made me shiver with happiness. Later, after I knew him better, we’d drive to Detroit, stop at his friend’s house to get a joint, and then eat sweets and greens and fried chicken as if there weren’t enough food in the world to fill us up.

  It was Mac who first made me think about the way food brought people together—and kept them apart. When we went to a blues club in Chicago a policeman stopped us as we were walking back to the car and told us to get off the street before we started a race riot. In South Bend, Indiana, we discovered that the coffee shops wouldn’t serve a mixed-race couple. And Mac’s favorite tavern in Ann Arbor was a funky place called Clint’s with a sign over the scarred wooden bar that read THIS IS ONE OF TWO BARS IN TOWN WHICH BELONGS TO US. PLEASE GIVE IT YOUR RESPECT.

  To reach Clint’s much-mended door you had to pass a pool hall. Men spilled onto the sidewalk with their cue sticks, smoking cigarettes, punching at each other and whistling at the white girls on their way to the bar. Clint’s was notoriously careless about checking identification, which was one reason for its popularity with students. The other reason was Washboard Willie, who played four nights a week.

  When Washboard played, the black women would dance around him as if their bodies had no bones and the white girls, fueled on sweet things with silly names—Black Russians were particularly popular—would try to imitate them.

  I was so intrigued by Clint’s that I decided to write a paper about it for my sociology class. “Clint’s, Study of An Integrated Local Bar” gave me a fine excuse to spend all my nights sitting in a bar. And when my parents came to town, they came along.