Everything Is Under Control

by Phyllis Grant

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  For Matthew

  … the rhythm will keep me awake, changing.

  —ROBERT HASS

  Here, there is no intense heat.

  I whack the cold dough with my rolling pin.

  There is no Chef.

  I lean all my weight into the flattened disc.

  No dupes.

  Roll, spin, quick flip, flour, exhale.

  There is no judgment. No sweat. No VIPs.

  My heart starts to race.

  There are only my children, perched on stools, trying to control their eager hands, excited to fill their hungry bellies.

  When my great-grandfather, on my mother’s side, dies of myasthenia gravis, his business partner takes everything and my great-grandmother falls into a year of anxiety and deep depression. She goes away to a sanatorium while her daughter, my grandmother Phyllis, lives with relatives.

  My great-grandmother finally moves back home and takes two jobs in order to make ends meet. While she drives a school bus and works as an ophthalmologist’s assistant, my grandmother Phyllis is in charge of meals. There is no Hamburger Helper. No takeout. No frozen pizza. So she learns to cook. She is ten.

  Wait. Assembly line. Please cut all the apples in half before you start peeling them.

  But why, Mom? My son wants to do it his way.

  My daughter eye-rolls in his direction. She understands. She keeps her closet color-coordinated and her socks in a neat little row.

  She smiles. I smile back. And then I cut myself.

  As my daughter wraps my finger in a Band-Aid, I tell my kids about how I used to cut myself several times a week when I worked in restaurants. Sometimes a little nick, sometimes a gushing wound that three Band-Aids and a finger cot could not contain. How I would squat down behind the lockers, my hand wrapped in a bloody apron, begging my finger to stop bleeding so I could get back to my station before the Chef saw that I was gone.

  My son speed-climbs up onto my hip, charmingly invading my personal space in the way only a five-year-old can.

  But why were you embarrassed?

  I place him a safe distance away on the counter and nestle the sliced apples down into the hot sugar and butter.

  Because I knew nothing, my love.

  I wrap the dough up on the rolling pin and unroll it out over the apples, quickly tucking the edges down with a butter knife. My chest tightens and starts to ache.

  But now you know everything.

  I don’t correct him.

  My grandmother Phyllis marries a painter who likes his gin, his Mozart, his cigarettes. And so does she. They settle in Berkeley, California, with their two kids, where she continues cooking the inexpensive comfort foods of her youth. Tough cuts of lamb become stew. Stale bread is for cheese toasts or croutons. Ham hock flavors a pot of split pea soup that lasts for days. Eggs are baked in ramekins or scrambled or turned into soufflés. There is no waste.

  While there is a formality to things—napkin in your lap, no milk bottles on the table, don’t eat over the sink—the table is also the easiest place to be. No rushing. No shortcuts. Every meal counts.

  My daughter opens the oven door. I slide in the tarte tatin. She goes back to her homework world. My son and I sit on the dirty floor in front of the oven and wait.

  Mom, there’s a problem.

  What?

  Mom, I don’t think I can look at you and say what I’m thinking.

  I pull him into my lap and cradle his impossibly long body, carefully covering his eyes with my hands. I feel his heart racing in his eyelids.

  Mom, I don’t want to die.

  Did you know that we all die?

  No we don’t. Not the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus.

  But they’re all crazy full of magic.

  I just don’t know how it will feel to die.

  He nuzzles his face in the crook of my arm, smearing dirt, snot, tears on my sleeve. We hold hands and rock.

  My grandmother Elizabeth, on my father’s side, grows up in Minnesota with a mother who can create a meal out of a seemingly empty cupboard and a dairyman father who spends hours tending to his cheeses, coaxing and trimming with his special knife, storing them all in a dedicated refrigerator. Elizabeth’s brother is eighteen years older, so she lives the life of an only child. She teaches herself to paint.

  Mom, when is the tarte tatin done?

  When the puff pastry is light brown and firm and the caramel is bubbling like crazy.

  Mom, that sounds dangerous.

  My grandparents meet in a senator’s office in Washington, D.C. She is twenty-one. He is a thirty-year-old journalist from Dothan, Alabama, who chooses his words carefully, doesn’t suffer fools, and is incredibly proper. They raise my dad and his two siblings in Bethesda, Maryland, where my grandmother Elizabeth moves like a hummingbird, keeping their world house-tour beautiful. She is a reluctant cook who would much rather be painting or gardening or designing intricate tablescapes with white birds. The house is filled with politicians and neighbors and highballs and cheeseballs and shrimp hanging off crystal bowls. Dinner, which waits in the oven for the lengthy cocktail hour to wind down, is often a variation on a dish they call Super Supper Slush: canned beans, corn, and tomatoes casseroled and then baked until bubbling.

  Dude, do you want to watch me flip the tarte tatin?

  His face lights up.

  As I invert it onto a cake plate, I splash hot caramel all over my hands, the table, the floor, my son’s shoes.

  ShitcrapfuckIamsosorryareyouallrightIamsuchanidiotareyouallrightIcannotbelieveIdidthat.

  Mom, I’m fine.

  I jumped the gun.

  You did what with a gun?

  My parents meet in college. They share a love of music. They fight every day about the Vietnam War; my mom is full-bore against it. My father slowly comes around to her ways. They get married and move to the North Beach area of San Francisco, where my dad rides a motorcycle and my mom learns from the downstairs neighbors how to make whole-grain bread. Six flights up, they push my younger brother and me on a swing—through the fog, over a roof garden filled with herbs and citrus trees—precariously close to the edge.

  My mom starts a catering company. My dad starts a management consulting company. Money is always tight. They buy a fixer-upper in Berkeley. On the weekend, my father is on his back fixing plumbing or hanging off the side of the house slowly shingling.

  My mom goes back to school to study acting, so she teaches my dad the two things she thinks he needs to know to take over cooking dinner: the proportions for vinaigrette and how to roast chicken. Every night, while watching Walter Cronkite, he teaches himself to cook. He is thirty-five.

  From then on, they cook together. Thanks to the Cuisinart, the bread maker, the pasta machine, Julia Child, and a garden of salad greens and parsley and lemons and avocados, there is a perpetual swirl of homemade fettuccini with butter and P
armesan, butter lettuce salads with shallot vinaigrette, glazed lemon cakes, and so much chicken.

  When I am eleven years old, I lose fifteen pounds. Everyone looks for a reason. Blood tests, weekly weigh-ins, X-rays, intense parental discussions behind closed doors. It is 1981 and people aren’t talking about appetite, hormones, and the teenage brain. They rule out the big stuff like anorexia and brain tumors. All I know is I keep looking and I just can’t find any hunger in my body.

  On weekend mornings, I bake. I bake to feed others. Danish ebelskiver, Belgian waffles, French toast, crêpes, chocolate chip cookies, bûches de Noël.

  When I cook, I am calm. And confident. Baking works. You just follow the rules. There is comfort in the logic.

  Often, in the middle of dinner, I slide down under the kitchen table and snuggle with the dog. As I listen to the muffled voices and clinking of glasses, my head gets all bubbly and blissful. I close my eyes and I am on a brightly lit stage pirouetting, suspending, leaping. I can’t stop choreographing dances in my head.

  After a year, I start eating again. I am twelve.

  My best friend and I sit on the kitchen counter, eating toasted presliced Colombo San Francisco sourdough, discussing our intersecting dreams of bigger sticker collections, kissing Han Solo, getting an apartment together in New York City, world peace. Each slice of toast drips with butter and my mom’s apricot jam. There is no such thing as being full.

  Left leg up up up. Toes to the sky. I am fourteen, in my attic bedroom in front of the full-length mirror, surrounded by magazine cutouts of Rob Lowe, the Soloflex man, and all the actors from Fame. I slam down into a standing split. Over and over again.

  I don’t see myself. I see only the dancer I want to become.

  My mom and I get out of the cab at Ninety-Third and Broadway, stand on the sidewalk, and look seven flights up to my new home: a residence hotel filled with Juilliard students.

  She walks into the apartment ahead of me and takes it all in. Stained rug. Bedroom windows facing an air shaft. No kitchen.

  We decide that the top of a left-behind yellow dresser will be my kitchen counter. My mom opens a drawer and finds used syringes. She throws them in the trash without comment and takes me shopping for my first winter in New York City.

  I sit down on the floor of Bloomingdale’s in an ocean of winter coats. They all look the same. It is 1988. There are lots of shoulder pads. I don’t know how to choose.

  My mom picks out a black wool coat, a floral scarf, a whisk, two wooden spoons, a plastic spatula, a cheese grater, a hot plate, and a microwave.

  We eat all over the city. Cheesecake and French fries and mesclun salads with goat cheese. Chocolate sundaes. Tiramisu. Sun-dried tomatoes are everywhere. Nothing is seasonal, everything is overpriced and oversize and overpackaged and over the top. We eat so we don’t have to acknowledge what’s coming next. But every time I look up, she confirms—with a gaze, a smile, an arm squeeze—that I am just where I need to be. And then I need to look away.

  She flies back to Berkeley, leaving me in my kitchenless one-bedroom apartment with a membership to the Museum of Modern Art and a book of her handwritten recipes.

  We are so hungry.

  We dance all day long. In the studios. In the stairwells. On the sofas in the lounge. Down Broadway. It is my childhood dream come to life. The New York City package: 1988 style. Dance school. Depressing apartment. Leg warmers. Straw basket bag like Coco on Fame.

  There are no dorms. We don’t know how to cook. New York City is our cafeteria.

  White onion, cheddar, and tomato omelets with French fries in fluorescent diners, all-you-can-eat barbecue ribs at Dallas BBQ, General Tso’s chicken with free white wine, Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk ice cream, banana muffins with inch-thick streusel, airy blueberry scones, Häagen-Dazs bars, Doritos, and Peanut M&M’s.

  We don’t care what we eat. We just want to be full so we can do it all again the next day.

  My nightly soundtrack is made up of car alarms, a hissing radiator, and the frantic inhales and exhales of my assigned roommate trying to climb the walls. Several times a week, she puts in a James Taylor tape and run run run slams her naked body against the wall, her hands and feet clawing at the chipped paint, sobbing as her body slides to the ground.

  I meet her older brother. He has scars over a quarter of his body. Something about a backyard barbecue and an exploding can of lighter fluid and the death of an older sister. He asks me to watch out for his baby sister.

  She tiptoes down the street as if she is walking on air, smiling hard at everyone, engaging strangers in conversations about the beautiful day, her light blue eyes brimming with tears, her ecstatic bliss changing midsentence to deep gloom.

  She buys a folding shopping cart at Bed Bath & Beyond that she pushes up and down Broadway. She bursts through the door with a new collection of gathered items: a broken lamp, three packages of stale Mint Milanos for the price of one, a man she met at Tasti D-Lite frozen yogurt shop.

  I shake her awake every day. I feed her granola. I tuck the hair behind her ears.

  My ballet teacher squeezes my waist. He trained with Rudolf Nureyev and wears a cape that he flips back when he’s angry. He smacks my ass with a stick.

  Stop eating so many croissants, Phyllis.

  He says I have an attitude problem. He would like me to disappear.

  We share a bathroom with the School of American Ballet, I listen to the heaving in the stalls. I watch girls erase their femininity, their fertility.

  I learn the tricks.

  A stick of Juicy Fruit gum is ten calories and if you chew it for over an hour, you will burn eleven calories.

  Bulimia is much harder to cover up. It’s loud and messy. But you get to eat more. Anorexia is clean and requires control.

  I choose anorexia.

  Breakfast is coffee and a cigarette. Lunch is a cigarette. Dinner is broth.

  I think I’m in control. I hear the words I want to hear: You look great, Phyllis. Look at the line in your penché. You finally have a waist.

  I audition for the big performance at the Juilliard Theater. I don’t even get cast as an understudy. I almost get cut in my first evaluation. So I ask why.

  We saw a lot of potential in you but you haven’t lived up to it. Your technique is very weak and we’re not sure you’re going to make it here at Juilliard.

  I go to the Juilliard Halloween party. Alcohol hits my empty stomach. I don’t remember getting carried out of the school and ten blocks up Broadway to my apartment. I don’t remember how I get out of the tight green dress. I do remember waking up as my head slams the side of the bathtub, my body slumping to the tile floor.

  Head down, purse pulled into body, face emotionally sealed, I move with the anonymous throngs up and down Broadway. I find a speed I never knew I had. I walk for distraction. I walk to try to understand what to do. I walk to try to figure out who I am. I am eighteen.

  I visit every church, temple, mosque on the Upper West Side that will let me in. I breathe in the religious air. It feels thick, cool, supportive. It smells musty but sweet like my grandmother Elizabeth’s garage. I pretend to believe in God by listening to the music, planting my feet on the cement floor, holding a Bible to my chest.

  I peer into brownstones. I want to sit at those kitchen tables. I want to be fed. I buy a box of cake mix and make it in my microwave. To watch it rise. For the smell. To feel the warmth of just-baked anything in my hands.

  Why don’t you take your clothes off, Phyllis. Yes. Like that. Nice. And now do the splits. Beautiful. Let me photograph you from the other side. Hold on. Wow. I am so grateful to you. These photos will be so helpful. Now cup your breasts. Yes. That’s it. Yes.

  I am not the only Juilliard dancer who goes downtown to the Puck Building to have her picture taken in the anatomy teacher’s special studio for his extracurricular project. None of us tell. We don’t want to ruin his life.

  My mother sends me newspaper clippings.
Where to get the best tea. Lists of the best New York City restaurants. Farmers’ market locations. Thanksgiving hotline numbers. Turkey cooking tips are highlighted: You need half a cup of stuffing for each pound of bird. Safety tips are circled: Thyme has been shown to be active against salmonella. How I need to check my turkey after two and a quarter hours. How much she will miss me at Thanksgiving this year. How my brother is growing an inch a week. How much she loves me.

  But my first Thanksgiving away from home isn’t in a home kitchen. It is a prix fixe dinner at Windows on the World at the top of One World Trade Center. Three young women. Three bottles of wine. Three courses consisting of gelatinous corn chowder, dry turkey with mucousy gravy, leaden apple pie. Two out of the three of us throw it all up in the fancy bathroom. Before we leave, I stand at the floor-to-ceiling windows, tracing the avenue lights straight back uptown to my new home. Here, 100 blocks south and 107 floors up, I am relieved to be so far away from it all.

  I’m fine, Daddy. Everything is fine. I love you too.

  I hang up the pay phone outside my apartment building, step over a homeless man, walk past the bullet hole in the lobby door, and take the stairs. A few flights up, I sit down. The stairwell stinks of piss and misery. The building around me vibrates with Bach, Madonna, and laughter.

  I don’t want what I thought I wanted. I don’t want to decide what to eat. I don’t want to be set free.