Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [74]
Red beans and rice, chicken necks and dumplings, pot roast with vinegar and cloves stuck in the onions, salmon patties with white sauce, refried beans on warm tortillas, sweet duck with scallions and pancakes, lamb cooked with olive oil and lemon slices, pan-fried pork chops and red-eye gravy, potato pancakes with applesauce, polenta with spaghetti sauce floating on top—food is more than sustenance: it is history. I remember women by what we ate together, what they dug out of the freezer after we’d made love for hours. I’ve only had one lover who didn’t want to eat at all. We didn’t last long. The sex was good, but I couldn’t think what to do with her when the sex was finished. We drank spring water together and fought a lot.
I grew an ulcer in my belly once I was out in the world on my own. I think of it as an always-angry place inside me, a tyranny that takes good food and turns it like a blade scraping at the hard place where I try to hide my temper. Some days I think it is the rightful reward for my childhood. If I had eaten right, Lee used to tell me, there would never have been any trouble.
“Rickets, poor eyesight, appendicitis, warts, and bad skin,” she insisted, “they’re all caused by bad eating habits, poor diet.”
It’s true. The diet of poor southerners is among the worst in the world, though it’s tasty, very tasty. There’s pork fat or chicken grease in every dish; white sugar in the cobblers, pralines, and fudge; and flour, fat, and salt in the gravies—lots of salt in everything. The vegetables get cooked to limp strands with no fiber left at all. Mothers give sidemeat to their toddlers as pacifiers and slip them whiskey with honey at the first sign of teething, a cold, or a fever. Most of my cousins lost their teeth in their twenties and took up drinking as easily as they put sugar in their iced tea. I try not to eat so much sugar, try not to drink, try to limit pork and salt and white flour, but the truth is I am always hungry for it—the smell and taste of the food my mama fed me.
Poor white trash I am for sure. I eat shit food and am not worthy. My family starts with good teeth but loses them early. Five of my cousins bled to death before thirty-five, their stomachs finally surrendering to sugar and whiskey and fat and salt. I’ve given it up. If I cannot eat what I want, then I’ll eat what I must, but my dreams will always be flooded with salt and grease, crisp fried stuff that sweetens my mouth and feeds my soul. I would rather starve death than myself.
In college it was seven cups of coffee a day after a breakfast of dry-roasted nuts and Coca-Cola. Too much gray meat and reheated potatoes led me to develop a taste for peanut butter with honey, coleslaw with raisins, and pale, sad vegetables that never disturbed anything at all. When I started throwing up before classes, my roommate fed me fat pink pills her doctor had given her. My stomach shrank to a stone in my belly. I lived on pink pills, coffee, and Dexedrine until I could go home and use hot biscuits to scoop up cold tomato soup at my mama’s table. The biscuits dripped memories as well as butter: Uncle Lucius rolling in at dawn, eating a big breakfast with us all, and stealing mama’s tools when he left: or Aunt Panama at the door with her six daughters, screaming, That bastard’s made me pregnant again just to get a son, and wanting butter beans with sliced tomatoes before she would calm down. Cold chicken in a towel meant Aunt Alma was staying over, cooking her usual six birds at a time raising eleven kids I never learned