Blood, Bones & Butter - By Gabrielle Hamilton Page 0,15
my pay.
But I got another job, this time as a dishwasher at the Picnic Basket, and listed the Canal House, on my application, as Previous Experience. When I saw two women making out in the kitchen—a chef and a line cook deeply tongue kissing up against the walk-in freezer door—my heart raced so fast and I felt such a prickling of adolescent embarrassment that in the middle of the shift I quickly changed out the garbage in my station, hauled the half-full bag out to the Dumpster behind the restaurant, and sprinted home along the train tracks. Afraid to be caught, I ditched my apron in the woods.
On so many occasions, vestiges of my real chronological age and all its attendant ignorance and confusion tapped a disruptive finger against the smoke rings I was convincingly blowing on the exhale of a Marlboro and must have startled so many people who took me at my word even though they surely perceived, on some level, the cleavage between the girl and her doctored-up story. Simon had found mealtime surrogate family life in the homes of some of his friends whose mothers were the more-the-merrier types who good-naturedly added another plate to the table and fed their broods Pop Tarts and frozen French bread pizzas. There must have been some adults who might have liked to have put a strong warm hand on the back of my neck, to walk me gently off the field for a quiet talk, and then to walk me back into the game, with better focused purpose and direction. But I was meeting only the kind who were enthralled and titillated by me in a red tube top, who were lavishly entertained by the way I said “cunt,” “fuck,” “dick,” “ass,” “bitch,” and “shit” in a single conversation, and who gave me just the enormity of attention I was so seeking. “She’s eleven going on twenty-two,” my dad used to say, proudly, to a stranger when introducing me.
During this summer I learned how to cook. I spent most of my time in our home in the kitchen, opening old jars of stuff my mother had left behind in the pantry. It was the only room in the large house that most resembled what it had looked like when my mother and family all lived in it together. How complicated it must be to separate out a vivid and fruitful marriage of twenty-five years. Half of the furniture, the photographs, the sheets, and the books had made their way to Vermont, and nothing had taken their places. When you split up, and you are struggling with the very meaning of everything said and promised in love itself, who is able to divvy up the contents of the pantry?
Our mother had her own double-tiered, potbellied couscoussier, and she made tagines with preserved lemons and cardamom pods, pigeon pies with sultanas and pine nuts, painstakingly brushing each fragile layer of phyllo dough with melted butter using a special brush made of white duck feathers, which would neither leave loose bristles in the dough nor perforate it. She knew to serve mint tea and sliced oranges with onions and olives, if she was making a bisteeya, and never put a meal together in a careless, eclectic, or incoherent way. The meal was always organized correctly, traditionally, which I now appreciate, but as a kid, pigeon was not a treat, even if it was served with the traditional condiments.
On certain nights, she gave us baths and then hair washes and then dessert, sort of. Side by side, however many could fit, we knelt at the edge of the tub after we had bathed, leaning over a drainful of suds, just as we had waited in that same huddle every Christmas morning at the top of the stairs before being allowed down to see the tree and attack the pile. Huddled there, we pressed washcloths to our clenched eyes until brown curlicues and stars formed from pressing too hard while she hosed water over our heads and shampooed us. When we were clean and dry, we stood in the kitchen while she stood before the pantry, its shelves laden with red boxes of raisins and cashews; crinkly yellow bags of sweet baker’s chocolate; metal tins of flour; sugar; green, yellow, and orange candied fruits; glass jars of oatmeal; dark bottles of olives, vinegars, and syrups; salt; strange cans of fish, beans, and crackers; tubs of peanut and almond butters. The boxes leaned against the