The Bread and the Knife

by Dawn Drzal

  Unable to afford other accommodations and unwilling to turn around and drive home, I returned to my room. Changing into my bathing suit, I could feel the mildew seep into the pores of my exposed skin. I drove to Mother’s Beach, scoured myself in the ocean, and fell asleep in the sun despite the shrieks of happy children. I woke up slightly sunburned and extremely hungry. One of the few treats I had planned was dinner that evening at Mabel’s Lobster Claw, said to be the elder President Bush’s favorite restaurant, but it was only five p.m. and my reservation was not for hours. Spending time in my room was out of the question, so I drove across the river into Kennebunkport to get the lay of the land. Less than a mile along a coast road, I saw the sign for Mabel’s. I’d had no idea where it was, so it seemed like an omen. Why go back to that depressing room to shower and kill time when it was right in front of me? The place looked casual enough, with outdoor seating—now empty—under a bright blue awning. I parked the car along the edge of the dunes, tied my black beach sarong over my bathing suit, knotted my shirt, and tucked my damp hair under a rather elegant straw hat. Brushing the sand off my feet and donning a pair of simple black sandals, I thought I looked quite presentable.

  I knew the instant I walked through the door that I had made a mistake. Although the hostess treated me kindly, even charmingly, I felt like I had when I was six and came down to breakfast in a hotel in my pajamas. No one in Kennebunkport would spontaneously walk into a restaurant off the beach. The male customers were dressed in crisp, nautical whites and blues, the ladies in print dresses accessorized with oversized summer costume jewelry. They were too well-bred to whisper about me, but their looks of indulgence were almost worse. The waitresses were friendly, almost maternal, but my discomfort increased when I opened the menu. The prices were steep even by Manhattan standards. All of the “famous” lobster dishes cost more than fifty dollars, so I ordered what I could afford, a steamed chick, 1⅛ pounds, which came with a cup of clam chowder, a house salad, and a baked potato. To paraphrase Woody Allen, the food was terrible—and such small portions! Most depressing of all, the lobster was rubbery, its scrawny tail so chewy I couldn’t cut it with my butter knife. After finishing my roll and the skin of my baked potato, I was still hungry, but the waitresses were so nice that I lied when they asked if I had enjoyed my meal. I turned down the proffered blueberry pie and left. So this was the favorite restaurant of the former president of the United States? He could eat anywhere in the world, and he preferred Mabel’s? As I fell asleep in my moldy bedroom, the steaming streets of Manhattan didn’t look so bad after all.

  Despite glorious weather, the morning was no better. The promised homemade Lithuanian pastries and cheeses nowhere in evidence, the breakfast buffet was a pallid spread of weak coffee and quartered oranges, Cheerios, and toast. I had yet to adopt the cheerful make-do attitude of the professionally frugal guests who surrounded me. Once again, I got up from the table hungry. Although the guesthouse was on the wrong side of the tracks, it was within walking distance of town. As I crossed the bridge and saw the parade of blinding white shorts and white teeth, golden hair and tasteful gold jewelry, red pedicured toes and waxed, tanned limbs, I felt a poignant stab of nostalgia for Martha’s Vineyard. My husband and I had spent the last ten summers on the Vineyard, where the rich dressed like the islanders and there was no way to tell who owned a thirty-four-foot sloop and who scraped the hull, where everyone went barefoot and everyone’s car was covered with the same ubiquitous island dust. Like a punch in the midriff, it hit me that I had been doubly exiled from my former life, by poverty and by impending divorce. The Vineyard was my husband’s territory. I missed the affluence but even more, perhaps, the modest way it was carried. I missed being half of a prosperous couple, with a big house and a crowd to cook for. I missed the way money cushioned the harsher realities. So this was the price of freedom. I saw decades of want and loneliness stretching before me.

  But I also saw a long line stretching in front of a place called the Clam Shack.

  Perched next to the bridge over the Kennebunk River that separates the haves from the have-nots, the jaunty little white and red building clearly had something besides looks to offer. Like any good New Yorker, when I saw a line, I joined it. By the time I arrived at the screened windows where orders were taken by preternaturally good-looking teenagers, I had observed that most people seemed to be carrying red gingham paper boats filled with picture-perfect lobster rolls. Despite the punishing price of seventeen dollars, I resolved to try one. The sign claimed that the roll contained a pound of lobster meat, and besides, I was starving. Rounding the corner, I sat down on a shady crate by the river where I could eat while watching the glittering crowd unobserved.

  My judgmental musings were cut short by the first bite. Was this the best thing I ever tasted? The sandwich was a delicately balanced creation. The warm, pillowy roll, like a round hotdog bun, had been grilled in butter to form a thin layer of crunch before being spread with mayonnaise. Heaped inside and smelling only of the sea was a pile of chilled lobster meat. Drizzled with more butter, the flesh—bright red outside, snowy within—was a perfect balance of firm and tender. Inspection revealed it to be an intelligent medley of tail, claw, and knuckle meat, each contributing a different texture. When only a lemon wedge remained in the paper boat, I was completely satisfied, envying no one.

  I ate every meal at the Clam Shack from then on, eventually branching out to try the other spécialité de la shanty: wholebelly clams. These, too, were shockingly good, a new sensation. Deep-fried and scalding, they exploded in the mouth like tender little bombs. I now understood the definition of a “poor man’s feast.” All right, maybe seventeen dollars for a sandwich didn’t exactly qualify, but the food at the Clam Shack was so extraordinary, so pure and humble, that it managed to create an oasis of democracy in the midst of the strictly stratified local society. Twice a day I was welcomed, nourished, made to feel part of the human race again.

  is for

  Melon

  Avalon in the 1960s was paradise for a child, wholesome in a way that seems more foreign to me now than Saigon—the Baby Parade, the Fireman’s Clambake, silver dollar pancakes after church. I spent every summer with my grandparents in that southern New Jersey seaside town until, one year, I was abruptly expelled by puberty. My grandmother was like God in the Book of Genesis. She loved children in their innocence, but once they discovered free will and couldn’t run around naked anymore, they got booted out of Eden in a hurry. Still, Eden it was. Even at four or five I had seen enough darkness to appreciate my grandparents’ unselfconscious goodness. Their curtains were always open. Unlike my parents, who were more likely to receive a visit from a bill collector or a bail bondsman than a friend, they had no secrets. The glorious relief of that was as tangible a pleasure to me as the summer sunshine.

  My grandmother’s happiness increased incrementally with the number of people in her kitchen, and nothing guaranteed the cheerfulness of her sometimes volatile nature like cooking for the neighbors and relatives who streamed through from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The daughter of Italian immigrants, she was obsessed with procuring the freshest ingredients decades before it became fashionable. Fruit and those vegetables that didn’t come from my grandfather’s garden came from the self-described huckster, whose dark green truck inched down our quiet street two afternoons a week. Long before we saw him, we could hear his voice calling, “Can-ta-loupe, sweet corn, can-ta-loupe.” The produce beneath the truck’s canvas flaps was usually fresh enough to please my grandmother, but like any Italian housewife worth her fiore di sale, she took pride in keeping him up to the mark. She and I would come back to the house bearing armloads of corn, paper bags full of string beans (which I detested endlessly snapping and stringing at the kitchen table) and several cantaloupes, at least one of which was left to ripen for my grandfather’s arrival on Friday evening. That melon would sit on the kitchen counter like an olfactory time bomb, its ever more insistent odor counting down
to readiness.

  Some things never changed in Avalon, and I knew that when I returned to visit with my boyfriend ten years later, there would be a melon sitting on the counter, waiting. Early Friday evening, my grandfather drove to meet my boyfriend and me at the Philadelphia train station after finishing work at his printing company. It had always been our ritual in late August to stop at my great–uncle Nick’s peach orchard in Hammonton to gather some of the late-ripening fruit the pickers had left on the trees. As the three of us walked between the rows in the early evening sun, my grandfather spotted a softball-sized peach so ripe it was nearly purple. Still agile at seventy, he climbed an aluminum ladder to pluck it from the branch. Cradling it in huge hands stained with printer’s ink, he deftly twisted it in two without bruising the delicate skin and offered us each a sunset-streaked half, webbed scarlet in the center where the pit had been. The taste of that peach, unctuous and perfumed, which we ate folded over at the waist so that the juice dripped onto the dirt instead of down our shirts…. We filled two cardboard cartons with equally ripe specimens for the cobbler my grandmother would slide into the oven to bake during dinner. Although we placed them on the backseat as gingerly as Fabergé eggs, they burst during the trip, as they always did.

  Dinner, though as delicious as I remembered, was not a success. Despite my efforts to hide it, my grandparents knew my boyfriend and I were living together and disapproved, although they did their best to be welcoming. My boyfriend, while attempting to be polite, was visibly impatient with my grandmother’s stream of chatter. When I took him for a stroll through the sea mist that night down the half-mile boardwalk to the tiny skeeball arcade and shell shop, I could tell that Avalon’s quiet charms were lost on him. He vetoed chocolate-dipped soft serve at the Avalon Freeze, with its neon cone sign; he wanted homemade ice cream. The next morning, when I emerged from my (separate) bedroom, I found him sitting on the sofa next to my grandmother, a stack of photo albums on the coffee table in front of them, another spread on her knees as she identified member after member of the extended family. He looked as if he had been held hostage for a week. “Help me,” he mouthed, and I’m ashamed to say I rebuked her and removed the photo album from her hands as I took him off to find the New York Times, without which he could not function, no matter how remote his surroundings. The rest of the weekend was no better. Cinnamon buns and jelly doughnuts from the bakery were silently judged tacky, as were Philly cheesesteaks and Hoy’s 5 & 10 and my grandfather’s dozing and watching the Phillies on TV all day. Even the beach was a frustration to him since I knew the local breakers like the back of my hand and rode almost every wave until I scraped my chin on the sand. I am to blame, of course, for choosing someone incapable of appreciating who and what I loved. It was part of the price I agreed to pay for reinventing myself. When you cut off the past, you cut it off at the root.

  Perhaps he was relieved to depart before six o’clock Monday morning to beat the traffic—I know I was—but the pre-coffee malaise, grainy eyes, and vague nausea of getting up at five a.m. are never pleasant. No matter how early the hour, though, my grandmother believed in eating breakfast. All weekend, the cubed cantaloupe had sat in its airtight Tupperware container, brought out at breakfast and dessert on Saturday and Sunday, slowly digesting in its own enzymes, until the seal was broken Monday morning, releasing an overwhelming cloud of overripeness.

  My grandmother thrust the reeking container under my boyfriend’s nose.

  “Have some cantaloupe,” she said.

  He drew back and put up a protective hand. “No, thank you, Mrs. A.”

  “Come on now,” she said, her voice taking on an edge. “Eat it up.” How that expression made me cringe. I sneaked a look at his face for the grimace I knew I would find there. Part of the reason I loved him, although it made me feel horribly disloyal, was that he hated the same things about my family that I did.

  “No, really,” he said, raising a well-defined eyebrow at me to intercede.

  Here was the battle that had been brewing all weekend. I was being asked to choose sides, and I hadn’t even had coffee yet.

  I looked my grandmother in the eye and said in my most menacing voice, “He … doesn’t … want … any … cantaloupe.”

  There was an awful silence. Then she raised the container above her head and let it drop. Chunks of melon splatted and slid across the kitchen floor as she rushed past us and slammed her bedroom door.

  My grandfather had been shaving in the bathroom and did not witness this scene, but she did not come out to say goodbye, and the two-hour drive back was nearly silent.

  That night the telephone rang. My grandfather wanted to know what I had done to my grandmother, who had apparently been crying all day. I tried to explain that all I had done was say my boyfriend didn’t want any cantaloupe, which she had tried almost literally to force him to eat.

  “You apologize to her,” he said.

  “But he didn’t want it,” I argued, “and then she made a terrible scene. It was only cantaloupe, for God’s sake.”

  “I don’t care if she was wrong. She’s your grandmother. You apologize.”

  I could count on one hand the number of times I ever heard my grandfather issue a direct order. He rarely had to. I called her and apologized.

  What I learned that day was nothing so simple as respect for my elders. I already knew that there were some elders you respected (him) and some you didn’t (her). What kindled in me instead was the first faint suspicion that there might be something more important than being right. And in that suspicion lay the spark of compassion. As the words of apology came out of my mouth, rote and reluctant at first, I saw developing before me, as in a Polaroid, a picture of the harsh self-centeredness of my behavior. I had not let her feed us. I had upset her. I had left her feeling useless and alone in an empty house with an empty week of shortening summer days to fill. The remorse I felt was painful but salubrious. It was right to feel bad about rejecting that melon, that last fruit of summer going ineluctably from ripeness to rot, like a girl growing up to betray her grandmother at the lift of a strange man’s eyebrow.

  is for

  Nova

  Moldering somewhere in a basement or attic, if it hasn’t been thrown away, is a square plywood board painted with eleven stick figures, ten of them wearing triangular hats. A wobbly banner reading CAMP ROCKHILL 1973—BUNK G-6 floats above their heads, and under their stick feet are the words 10 JAPS AND A CAP. To dispense with the political incorrectness, “JAP” stands, of course, for Jewish American Princess. I was the solitary CAP (Catholic American Princess), identifiable by the absence of a hat. The earliest of these Camp Rockhill “bunk plaques” were painted on pilfered toilet seat lids to mimic Grateful Dead album covers, which were still the desired template, but we lacked the requisite artistic talent. If the plaque has survived, odds are it is in the possession of a lifelong Rockhill camper named Carolyn, our self-appointed leader. In any other setting, Carolyn would have been a mean girl, but Rockhill was a utopia, which in this case denotes a place where mean girls were successfully encouraged to use their powers for good. Cruelty sputtered and died there like a flame deprived of oxygen.

  Camp Rockhill had been a traditional summer camp for decades before Irv and Tyler Stein bought it in 1971, whereupon it became for a few brief years the embodiment of all that was best about the sixties: a heady mixture of love, freedom, experimentation, nonconformity, and a certain innocence. There is disagreement about when the sixties ended, but the era indisputably lasted well beyond the numerical decade—at least until October 1973, when the draft was abolished. I attended Rockhill in the summers of 1973 and 1974, and between those two years, I registered a subtle but unmistakable hardening of the atmosphere. At first I thought it was I who had toughened between the tender age of twelve and the more knowing one of thirteen, and perhaps I had, but there was no mistaking that Rockhill felt less like a commune and more like a camp when I returned that second July. Although the camp m
anaged to hold on to some of its original spirit for several more years, it was eventually closed down in 1979. Rumor had it that the closing was precipitated by the counselors’ being caught smoking dope with the campers; public records indicate that the cause was simple bankruptcy. But anyone who spent a summer there knew that what truly killed Rockhill was the seventies.

  Rockhill’s brochure promised “Health and Happiness in the Highlands” at the oxymoronic elevation of 505 feet and made do with a pool instead of a lake, but my parents had no idea of the camp’s limited facilities, just as they had no idea that I would be the only non-Jewish camper. They heard the name Rockhill somewhere and they sent me there. That was their idea of research. Throwing a socially maladjusted Catholic girl into a situation where she was, by definition, the odd girl out should have been a guarantee of disaster, but for once I benefited from their impulsive style of decision-making. My bunkmates attributed the rough edges that had made me something of a pariah at school to exoticism rather than awkwardness. By the time they began to suspect the truth, Carolyn had already decided that I was her summer Pygmalion project. After making me pay with some very mild hazing that involved dipping my hand in lukewarm water while I slept the second night and smearing my face with toothpaste the following one (perfect environment or not, she was still a mean girl, the way a vampire is a vampire whether or not she drinks your blood), Carolyn began systematically reprogramming my faulty social circuits, using the same techniques she would have employed anywhere else to make my life a living hell. Where she went, the bunkmates followed, if they knew what was good for them.