Food
was the reason my father left early in the morning, before I was awake,
and came home at night after I was asleep. In between he carried other
people's clothes over his shoulder, like a hunchback, my strong,
powerful young Daddy, the hooks of the metal hangers cutting into his
fingers. He'd been a prizefighter before he married my mother, and had
taken good care of his hands, wrapping them just so before a fight,
before he put on the bulbous big gloves and became a different person.
I remember him always with clean hands and fingernails, even when he'd
been under the car all afternoon, fixing it and breaking it and fixing
it again. In those days it was a "real man's" sport to spend a Sunday
afternoon playing with some greasy piece of car, lying flat on his back
under it, maybe with a buddy who liked cars, too.
But
that was his pleasure. The gruelling days, and nights, of carrying
loads of hangared clothes to and from dry cleaning stores in the
farthest reaches of Brooklyn, that he did for us, for food.
That's all he earned, all most men we knew earned: enough or barely
enough to pay the rent on our apartment, and give my mother the
wherewithal to buy the best, the most food.
Everything
at our house happened at the table, the site of all our family drama.
We could know each other from the way we ate, what we ate. My father,
of course, got the first dibs, the chocolatey nuts from the Whitney
samplers Uncle Fred brought, the meaty, gristly bones from my mother's
life-sustaining soup, the buttery crumbs on top of coffee cake from the
bakery on the corner, or the chocolate ribbon he loved to excavate from
their marble cake.
My grandfather
needed to be catered to: no salad ("rabbit food!"), no lamb, anything
fried; fish, croquets, chicken, lightly done. The rest of the family
demanded "crisp!", "brown"!. My father liked sour cream on everything,
especially jello, which my mother made from scratch, pouring boiling
water into different colors of fruity steam, into which she lovingly
centered sugary pieces of Del Monte canned fruit. (Was it pineapple or
banana that did something embarrassing to the jello; it wouldn't jell.)
Then
there was me, who got second helpings of everything, got to drink the
cream from the milk, came a close second to my father for the bones,
built butter-layered towers of Ritz crackers, loved ice cream from the
ice cream truck, all kinds of penny candy, charlotte russe.....! Yes, I
was fat, and proud of it. In those days it was a mark of good fortune;
my father was working. And then there was my skinny Aunt Rosetta and
my skinny little sister, who hardly ate anything at all.
So
we lived, and my father worked, and my mother cooked. It seemed a kind
of heaven to me then, and if I close my eyes and forget everything I've
learned since then about feminism and entitlement and equality and
fighting and earning and losing and winning, it does still.
Some
of those days were war days. I remember lyng on my mother's chenille
bedspread and hearing the President's minty voice telling us that the
"Japs" had bombed Pearl Harbor on a day of "infamy."What did that mean?
My father knewp he went to war. He was only thirty-two years old --
nineteen when he married my mother -- and, I think, full of patriotism
and ripe for adventure. He didn't have to go; his number had been
called in the draft, that seemed to materialize instantly, along with
rationing, green stamps, black window shades to hide us from the ships
at sea, white stuff that you mixed with yellow stuff to make fake
butter, and scary movie newscasts of the War that ended always with a
reassurance that God was on our side and we were going to win.
We did win, and my mother went to work, and my father came home, and life had changed forever.
That
piece of time that centered us at our table was over. Now school was
my center, my mother's job was her center; for Grandpa it was the
Dodgers, for Aunt Rosetta, her new husband, Uncle Fred.
That
time when we were together, around that table, is like a painting to me
now; I can summon it almost at will if I smell the smells of childhood,
fresh bread. soup, crisp food frying in an iron pan....
Yes. I still love to eat.
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