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Food Memories: Of Pleasure and Perversion
by Holly Whiteside

Food drove the household. It was a moving force: indulgence and escape, intrigue and enticement, and a vehicle for acting out unspoken twists of impotence.
           

During the fifties, in our three-story Tudor home in the Philadelphia suburb of Bryn Mawr, we were blessed each week with the Bond Man. Bearing his tiers of trays of identical loaves, the Bond Man was four-wheeled mobilized nourishment that came to our yard. At Easter time, boxes of hot crossed buns passed through our squeaky back screen door. Through cellophane, my two elder sisters and I saw white icing dripping down, and raisins peeking their noses from the eggy goodness.
           

The Milk Man’s visits had more fanfare. If I was up early enough, I’d watch his white truck (I was sure it had been painted in milk) come up the long cinder drive that curved around to the back of our house. He’d pull up at the back steps, leave the motor running, and trudge around to the back of his truck. The fat chrome handle was gripped and pulled, and the thick door swung wide. Inside were floor-to-ceiling racks of chilled milk bottles, still sloshing slightly from the ride. Our rack was chosen and pulled by a gloved hand. Then up the wooden steps, clinking, to the little back porch, and down they would plunk, to await retrieval. Bringing in the milk gave me a little thrill of pleasure. The bottles were heavy and cold. I would put them on the yellow Formica kitchen table and immediately, before anyone could stop me, I’d grip the little cardboard tab on the lid of one and pull till it popped off. I wanted to check to see if there was a layer of cream, proving it was real milk, like Heidi drank. I’d take a little bit of cream on my fingertip, put it on my tongue, and imagine it squirting out warm and fresh from a cow just that morning. I was a farm girl at heart, misplaced in suburbia.
           

Milk was a savior when it came to handling the most disgusting of edibles, lima beans and peas. These green nodules, appearing as icy blocks from the freezer, were unceremoniously dumped into pots of furiously boiling water, and were boiled until mushy. Then, just before dinner was called, they were drained and anointed with gobs of margarine, then swished until thoroughly coated. God didn’t make margarine, and I was pretty sure lima beans were a mistake. A big silver kitchen spoon would scoop up a dose of limas, and as they met my dinner plate, they’d slither every which way, as though they didn’t want to be there either. After all the good stuff had been eaten on the plate, and the limas had nowhere to hide, I’d face the fact that I’d have to take into my body at least a token amount. This was the technique for downing lima beans: I’d slide my fork like a derrick under the lima pile, and carefully insert the captive beans into the hold of my mouth. The trick then was to keep my mouth motionless. The fat starchy limas would sit on my tongue, and if I was careful and didn’t move my tongue, the coating of margarine shielded my taste buds from the beans. Then quickly, with no time to waste, I grabbed heavenly milk and washed a wave of it into my mouth, flushing the horrid greenies whole down my throat. Two or three rounds of this were enough to satisfy my mother. My elder sister had an easier time of it and a cleaner getaway. As the eldest, she was privileged to sit at a second little table over against the wall, all by herself—an interesting honor, to be separated from family. That table had a little drawer, and years later, when cleaning that drawer, we found many servings of shriveled pale hard peas and limas.
           

My mother had a complex relationship with food. Her cooking acumen consisted of boiling and pan-frying. But then there were the requisite cocktail parties for which Show Food must be prepared. All day was an anguish, as Mom took on the kitchen and the pale, defenseless ingredients. We kids stayed on the perimeter. We’d sneak down the back stairs into the pantry, and peek around the corner to watch the action. There’d be Mom, hunched over the yellow Formica table in the center of the wide kitchen, feverishly poking filling into things. She gave little snorts, bursts of air escaping from between her teeth when some poor filling would escape and plop onto the table top. Party food ingredients were like children—they just wouldn’t cooperate. Mom relied on white foods to bail her out as party chef: white Bond bread, Philadelphia cream cheese, Hellman’s mayonnaise, and pre-packaged puff pastry.
           

But there was a more private side to Mom’s relationship to food. When she’d had it with everyone, she would go into the freezer and pull out a gallon of Breyer’s chocolate mint chip ice cream. She’d place the box firmly on the yellow Formica and open the lid, slowly peeling back the paper from the pristine creamy surface. At the deep utensil drawer, she would select her favorite spoon, the same huge silver shovel that had done damage with limas. Her chair screaked on the linoleum as she hastily plunked herself down and pulled it in tight. Then she would grip that spoon and dig down deep into the cool green heaven. My mother had strong hands with knuckles like large ball bearings—she could scoop. Then out would come the paperback mystery, and my mother was gone. I think she felt invisible, sitting there at that table, as though the ice cream cast a spell over her that protected her from her life, from us, for just a little while. But ice cream disappears, especially when dug by a shovel, as did her moments of reprieve.
           

It was Grandma who introduced us to a certain formality, the more gracious rituals of food preparation and consumption. Grandma lived with us from the beginning of time, in her own apartment on the second floor of our old house. I don’t remember her coming out of there much. Those two dark doors between my parents’ bedroom and bathroom stayed closed. Now and then, one of us would be told that we had been invited to Grandma’s for dinner. This was a thing of awe. We would leave the usual hubbub to climb the dark stairs, slowly tiptoeing past the massive dark lemon-oiled woodwork of the newel posts, the phalanx of staircase spindles. We’d step gingerly along the long hallway, carefully avoiding the squeaky boards, until we arrived at the rightmost door of my grandmother’s apartment. We would pause, then knock.
           

Inside was a quiet two-room world of lace table runners on gleaming mahogany, decorated with crystal, bone china, and silver memories. Grandma’s cooking was simple but good. She could make some wonderful things, like applesauce in a massive silvery pot that never sat quite flat on the stove burners. She had a spoon even bigger than Mom’s to stir the slowly dissolving apples, as the fruit-sweet air permeated her world. Pyrex measuring cups of sugar crystals would shoosh into the pot, and she would taste it, testing for just the right degree of tartness. Her bread was honest, and spread with real butter. Grandma didn’t say much, but she was real. The only time we ever really touched was when I would ask her if I could smell her hands. She’d hold them out and I’d bury my face in those clean, soft pillows of palm, breathing in the sweetness of onion, the earth of yeast, the goodness of food.
           

Grandma was big in her absence, which is to say she was very present behind those two dark doors. She appeared now and then to go grocery shopping in her old gray Plymouth that smelled like a musty attic. Now and then, we children would be invited to go with her to lunch on burgers at The Beau and Belle. The room was light and vast, the walls spinning with bright pastel murals of dancing men in white gloves and tails, and open-mouthed women with full skirts swirling. We eased ourselves into circular booths, young thighs sticking to squishy blue plastic upholstery. Those char-broiled burgers were a best thing in life. I would sit very still, anxious not to embarrass, determined to do the proper thing, yet aiming all my attention at the moment when my burger would arrive, and be placed before me. If I had been a hunting dog, I would have pointed. I was by nature a private eater, so this public, brightly-lit stage of propriety was something I bore for the sake of a consistently fine burger. And it was an honor to be invited out by a grand lady, my grandmother.
           

As a private eater, my favorite place to eat was bed. On certain evenings when I felt hungry yet invincible, I would risk a foray down the musty back stairs (where I knew time stopped), through the pantry of white floor-to-ceiling, tongue-in-groove cupboards to the cavernous kitchen of dim, familiar shapes. Once at the fridge, my hand moved knowingly in the glaring light of the bulb, finding a hunk of roast beef, a slice of Swiss cheese, which I wrapped together in a napkin. A pile of crackers from the top of the fridge was easy prey in passing, and I slipped away upstairs, landing safely in my very own room. In summer I would open the window wide over my bed to let in the sweet breeze and the nighttime chorus. I’d kneel in my yellow nightie, laying my victory feast on the sill. There I’d listen with all of me to the pointed call of crickets in the ivy beds below and watch the wavering fireflies on the lawn’s edges set off against the dark masses of trees. I’d slowly savor the meat, crumby butter of cracker, soft resistance of milky cheese. I was queen, and this whole show was just for me.
           

I had an incident that I will never understand completely on those mysterious back stairs. I was fairly young, but don’t remember the time of day or the surrounding circumstances. I now know I was angry, an emotion I couldn’t then recognize, let alone name. Uncontrolled emotion of any kind was forbidden in that house. Dad couldn’t handle it. I learned early to contain my feelings. On the day in question, I walked my contained anger to the fridge, opened the door, reached in, and took the pound of raw bacon, sliding its cold plastic under my shirt next to my skin. Then, going straight to the backstairs door, I went quickly through, climbed two stairs, and sat in the cobwebs and dark. No one knew. I pulled out that chilled package. I wondered what I was doing. I thought I would surely be caught, but I didn’t care; I almost welcomed the thought of being questioned. I ripped the plastic open with my teeth and pulled the slices of smoked fat with eager fingers until I held a greasy wad in my palm which I packed completely in my mouth. I chewed and chewed and chewed. I didn’t want to die; I wanted to do damage. I wanted to feel the force of my teeth working hard to tame something. When I was finally done, I spit the remaining evidence into a napkin and hid it in the trash, putting the rest of the bacon back on the cold, steel shelf. No one ever mentioned it. No one ever asked, “Who ate the bacon?” As much as I wanted them to know, no one ever asked.
           

A food incident in my father’s life sheds some light on the climate of our family. I had never met any of my grandparents other than my mother’s mother. My father’s father (known by all, even his wife, as Father), was an exacting man. He would tolerate no upsets. His wife was a small, fierce spirit with a forced pleasantness whose personal mission was to keep the atmosphere in their house clear and calm as a cloudless summer’s day. She would smooth and cajole her brood, herding their moods with little nudges, taking small cooing end runs around potential upsets, keeping all enclosed in a placid corral of sweetness and light. One morning when Dad was small, he came downstairs for breakfast and walked into the kitchen to find his mother firing toast against the wall. On the counter and floor were scattered more casualties. Clearly, this melee had been going on for some time; Father liked his toast a certain shade of brown.
           

It was this small woman who taught my father the phrases “Here we are, one happy family!” and “Don’t we all have fun!” The latter was not a question. These two phrases were my Dad’s opening lines for every family meal around our kitchen table. We’d sit with our plates before us, saying nothing. I had the sense he didn’t believe it, that he said it to nail the would-be family in place, to pin down that light thought so it couldn’t escape. So between my mother and my father, I moved carefully and quietly, learning marvelous powers of observation. I loved best feeling invisible, hiding behind furniture (under the piano), watching family members moving through their world with me apart in mine.
           

I am now middle-aged. Thirty-seven years ago I married a man who could cook, a gentle man who is at home with his emotions. He has taught me to be self-expressed and to mix a great curry powder. I have taught him the art of observation.