Alice, Let's Eat: Further Adventures of a Happy Eater

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Alice

Now that it’s fashionable to reveal intimate details of married life, I can state publicly that my wife, Alice, has a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day. I also might as well admit that the most serious threat to our marriage came in 1975, when Alice mentioned my weight just as I was about to sit down to dinner at a New Orleans restaurant named Chez Helène. I hardly need add that Chez Helène is one of my favorite restaurants in New Orleans; we do not have the sort of marriage that could come to grief over ordinary food.

Without wanting to be legalistic, I should mention that Alice brought up the weight issue during a long-distance telephone call—breaking whatever federal regulations there are against Interstate Appetite Impairment. Like many people who travel a lot on business, I’m in the habit of calling home every evening to share the little victories and defeats of the day—the triumph, for instance, of happening upon a superior tamale stand in a town I thought had long before been completely carved into spheres of influence by McDonald’s and Burger King, or the misery of being escorted by some local booster past the unmistakable aroma of genuine hickory-wood barbecuing into La Maison de la Casa House, whose notion of Continental cuisine seems to have been derived in some arcane way from the Continental-Trailways bus company. Having found myself on business in New Orleans—or, as it is sometimes expressed around my office, having found it my business to find business in New Orleans—I was about to settle into Chez Helène for a long evening. First, of course, I telephoned Alice in New York. I assumed it would give her great pleasure to hear that her husband was about to have enough sweet potatoes and fried oysters to make him as happy as he could manage to be outside her presence. Scholars of the art have often mentioned Chez Helène as an example of what happens when Creole blends with Soul—so that a bowl of greens comes out tasting of spices that the average greens-maker in Georgia or Alabama probably associates with papists or the Devil himself.

I’m about to have dinner at Chez Helène, I said.

Dr. Seligmann just told me today that you weighed a hundred and eighty pounds when you were in his office last week, Alice said. That’s terrible!

There must be something wrong with this connection, I said. I could swear I just told you that I was about to have dinner at Chez Helène.

You’re going to have to go on a diet. This is serious.

It occurred to me that a man telephoning his wife from a soul-food restaurant could, on the excuse of trying to provide some authentic atmosphere, say something like Watch yo’ mouth, woman! Instead, I said, I think there might be a better time to talk about this, Alice. Toward the end of the second or third term of the Caroline Kennedy Administration was the sort of time I had in mind.

Well, we can talk about it when you get home, Alice said. Have a nice dinner.

I did. It is a measure of my devotion to Alice that I forgave her, even though my second order of fried chicken was ruined by the realization that I had forgotten to tell her I had actually weighed only a hundred and sixty-six pounds. I always allow fourteen pounds for clothes.

I must say that Alice tempers her rigidity on the meals-per-day issue by having a broad view of what constitutes an hors d’oeuvre. That is not, of course, her only strong point. She is tenacious, for instance—having persisted for five or six summers in attempting to wheedle the recipe for the seafood chowder served at Gladee’s Canteen, in Hirtle’s Beach, Nova Scotia, out of the management. She is imaginative—a person who can turn a bucketful of clams into, on successive evenings, steamed clams, clam fritters, clams in white wine sauce, and a sort of clam billi-bi. I can testify to her restraint: on the Christmas I presented her with a Cuisinart food processor, not having realized that what she really wanted was a briefcase, she thanked me politely, the way an exceedingly courteous person might thank a process server for a subpoena. (Well, I finally said. I thought it might be good for mulching the Christmas tree.) She is generous—the sort of wife who would share even the tiniest order of, say, crawfish bisque with her husband, particularly if he had tears in his eyes when he asked. Alice has a lot of nice qualities, but when someone tells me, as someone often does, how fortunate I am to have her as my wife, I generally say, Yes, she does have a broad view of what constitutes an hors d’oeuvre.

I don’t mean that her views on this matter are as broad as the views held by our friend Fats Goldberg, the New York pizza baron and reformed blimp, who, in reporting on the semiannual eating binges in Kansas City he still allows himself, often begins sentences with phrases like Then on the way to lunch I stopped at Kresge’s for a chili dog. A Kresge chili dog, it seems to me, reflects a view of hors d’oeuvres that has strayed from broad to excessive. (It also reflects the fact that Fats Goldberg in binge gear will eat almost anything but green vegetables.) What I mean is that if we happen to be driving through Maine on our way to Nova Scotia, where we live in the summer, Alice does not object when, ten miles from the lobster restaurant where we plan to stop for dinner, I screech to a halt in front of a place that has the look of a spectacular fried-clam stand. It’ll make a nice hors d’oeuvre, she says.

While I’m speaking in Alice’s defense, I should also say that I consider her failure with the children half my own: no one person could be responsible for engendering in two innocent little girls a preference for frozen fish sticks over fish. In fact, in Nova Scotia I have seen Alice take a halibut that was on a fishing boat an hour before, sprinkle it ever so slightly with some home-ground flour, fry it for a few seconds until it is covered with a batter whose lightness challenges the batter on a Gladee’s fishball, cut it into sticklike slices, and present it to her very own little girls—only to have them pick at it for a few minutes and gaze longingly toward the freezer.

Oddly enough, both of our girls have shown, in quick, maddening flashes, indications of having been born with their taste buds intact. Once, while we were visiting my mother in Kansas City, Abigail, our older daughter, looked up at me during breakfast and said, Daddy, how come in Kansas City the bagels just taste like round bread? Her father’s daughter, I allowed myself to hope—a connoisseur of bagels before she’s five. By age nine she’ll probably be able to identify any bialy she eats by borough of origin; she’ll pick up some change after school working at Russ & Daughters Appetizer Store as a whitefish taster. On trips to Kansas City, her proud father’s hometown, she’ll appear as a child prodigy on the stage of the concert hall, lecturing on the varieties of the local barbecue sauce. Not so. At nine, offered anything that does not have the familiarity of white chicken or hamburger or Cheerios, she declines with a No, thank you painful in its elaborate politeness. This is the daughter who, at the age of four, reacted to a particularly satisfying dish of chocolate ice cream by saying, My tongue is smiling. How quickly for parents do the disappointments come.

Abigail’s younger sister, Sarah, has a palate so unadventurous that she refuses to mix peanut butter with jelly. I have often told her that I hope she chooses a college rather close to home—New York University, perhaps, which is in Greenwich Village, just a few blocks from where we live—so that when I show up every morning to cut the crusts off her toast I won’t require a sleepover. For a couple of years, Sarah refused to enter a Chinese restaurant unless she was carrying a bagel in reserve. Just in case, she often explained. More than once, Alice and Abigail and I, all having forgotten Sarah’s special requirements, started to leave for a family dinner in Chinatown only to hear a small, insistent voice cry, My bagel! My bagel!

One night, in a Chinese restaurant, Sarah became a fancier of roast squab. We were at the Phoenix Gardens, a place in Chinatown that happens to have, in addition to excellent roast squab, a dish called Fried Fresh Milk with Crabmeat, which tastes considerably better than it sounds, and a shrimp dish that is one of the closest New York equivalents to the sort of shrimp served in some Italian restaurants in New Orleans. Just why Sarah would decide to taste roast squab still puzzles historians, since it is known that three months were required for Abigail, perhaps the only human being she completely trusts, to persuade her that chocolate ice cream was really something worth trying. Sarah herself has always treated her passion for a single exotic foodstuff as something that requires no explanation—like a mortgage officer who, being sober and cautious and responsible in every other way, sees nothing peculiar about practicing voodoo on alternate Thursdays. During lunch once in Nova Scotia, the subject of favorite foods was brought up by a friend of ours named Shelly Stevens, who is a year or two older than Abigail and is known among gourmets in Queens County mainly for being just about the only person anybody has ever heard of who eats banana peels as well as bananas. Sarah looked up from her peanut-butter sandwich—hold the jelly—and said, Squab. Yes. Definitely squab.

It is not really Alice’s fault that our girls are subject to bad influences. One morning, while I was preparing lunches for them to take to P. S. 3, I unwrapped some ham—some remarkably good Virginia ham that Alice had somehow managed to unearth in a store around the corner otherwise notable only for the number of hours each day the checkout counter clerk manages to spend doing her nails. Sarah said she didn’t want any ham. It turned out that she had trouble eating a ham sandwich for lunch because a little girl with a name like Moira would always sit next to her and tell her how yucky ham was—Moira being a strict vegetarian, mung-bean and bean-sprout division.

The people who warned us about sending our children to public school in New York were right, I said to Alice. Now our daughter is being harassed by a mad-dog vegetarian.

Alice was opposed to my suggestion that Sarah attempt to place Moira under citizen’s arrest. At the least, I thought Sarah should tell Moira that bean sprouts are the yuckiest food of all except for mung beans, and that carrot juice makes little girls pigeon-toed and bad at arithmetic. As it happens, health food does disagree with me. I tend to react to eating one of those salads with brown grass and chopped walnuts the way some people react to eating four or five fried Italian sausages. (I, on the other hand, react to eating four or five fried Italian sausages with a quiet smile.) Alice claims that what bothers me is not health food but the atmosphere of the health-food restaurants in our neighborhood—some of which seem modeled on the last days of a particularly unsuccessful commune. It’s a neat theory, but it does not account for the time in Brunswick, Maine, when—during a festival whose atmosphere was absolutely splendid—I was fed something advertised as whole foods for the multitudes and immediately felt as if I had taken a very long journey in a very small boat. Fortunately, someone at the festival had mentioned hearing that a diner just outside of Brunswick served chili spicy enough to charbroil the tongue, and just a small cup of it turned out to be an antidote that had me feeling chipper enough to order some more. I had realized I was at the right diner even before I sat down: a sign on the door said, When you’re hungry and out of work, eat an environmentalist.

Now and then—when Alice mentions, say, the nutritional value of brown rice—I have begun to worry that she might have fallen under the influence of the Natural Food Fanatics or the Balanced Diet Conspiracy. Once they learned of her fundamentalist views on Three Meals a Day, after all, they might have figured that they had a foot in the door. Could it be, I wonder in my most suspicious moments, that Moira’s mother has been sneaking in for missionary work—waiting until I’m out of town, then clunking over in her leather sandals from her food co-op meeting to talk up the health-giving properties of organically grown figs? In calmer moments I admit to myself that Alice’s awareness of, say, the unspeakable destruction wrought by refined sugar is probably just another example of knowledge she seems to have absorbed from no immediately ascertainable source. Occasionally, for instance, we have come home from a party and I have said, with my usual careful choice of words, What was that funny-looking thing whatsername was wearing? Then Alice—the serious academic who teaches college students to write and explains foreign movies to her husband, the mother of two who still refers to those rich ladies who swoop through midtown stores as grownups—tells me who designed the funny-looking thing and how much it probably cost and which tony boutique peddled it and why some people believe it to be chic. At such moments I am always stunned—as if I had idly wondered out loud about the meaning of some inscription on a ruin in Oaxaca and Alice had responded by translating fluently from the Toltec.

I admit that Moira’s mother has never been spotted coming out of our house by a reliable witness. I admit that the girls do not show the vulnerability to Natural Food propaganda they might show if their own mother were part of the conspiracy. Sarah, in fact, once left a summer nursery program in Kansas City because the snacktime included salad. They gave me salad! she says to this day, in the tone a countess roughly handled by the customs man might say, They searched my gown!

All in all, I admit that Alice is, in her own way, a pretty good eater herself. The last time she failed to order dessert, for instance, was in the spring of 1965, in a Chinese restaurant that offered only canned kumquats. I have been with her in restaurants when she exulted over the purity and simplicity of the perfectly broiled fresh sea bass she had ordered, and then finished off the meal with the house specialty