Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [75]
“It’s good to watch you eat,” my mama smiled at me, around her loose teeth. “It’s just so good to watch you eat.” She packed up a batch of her biscuits when I got ready to leave, stuffed them with cheese and fatback. On the bus going back to school I’d hug them to my belly, using their bulk to remind me who I was.
When the government hired me to be a clerk for the Social Security Administration, I was sent to Miami Beach, where they put me up in a crumbling old hotel right on the water while teaching me all the regulations. The instructors took turns taking us out to dinner. Mr. McCollum took an interest in me, told me Miami Beach had the best food in the world, bought me an order of Oysters Rockefeller one night, and medallions of veal with wine sauce the next. If he was gonna pay for it, I would eat it, but it was all like food seen on a movie screen. It had the shape and shine of luxury but tasted like nothing at all. But I fell in love with Wolfe’s Cafeteria and got up early every morning to walk there and eat their Danish stuffed with cream cheese and raisins.
“The best sweet biscuit in Miami,” I told the counterman.
“Nu? Was zags die?” He grinned at the woman beside me, her face wrinkling up as she blushed and smiled at me.
“Mneh,” she laughed. I didn’t understand a word but I nodded anyway. They were probably talking about food.
When I couldn’t sleep I read Franz Kafka in my hotel room, thinking about him working for the social security administration in Prague. Kafka would work late and eat Polish sausage for dinner, sitting over a notebook in which he would write all night. I wrote letters like novels that I never mailed. When the chairman of the local office promised us all a real treat, I finally rebelled and refused to eat the raw clams Mr. McCollum said were “the best in the world.” While everyone around me sliced lemons and slurped up pink-and-gray morsels, I filled myself up with little white oyster crackers and tried not to look at the lobsters waiting to die, thrashing around in their plastic tanks.
“It’s good to watch you eat,” Mona told me, serving me dill bread, sour cream, and fresh tomatoes. “You do it with such obvious enjoyment.” She drove us up to visit her family in Georgia, talking about what a great cook her mama was. My mouth watered, and we stopped three times for boiled peanuts. I wanted to make love in the backseat of her old DeSoto but she was saving it up to do it in her own bed at home. When we arrived her mama came out to the car and said, “You girls must be hungry,” and took us in to the lunch table.
There was three-bean salad from cans packed with vinaigrette, pickle loaf on thin sliced white bread, American and Swiss cheese in slices, and antipasto from a jar sent directly from an uncle still living in New York City. “Deli food,” her mama kept saying, “is the best food in the world.” I nodded, chewing white bread and a slice of American cheese, the peanuts in my belly weighing me down like a mess of little stones. Mona picked at the pickle loaf and pushed her ankle up into my lap where her mother couldn’t see. I choked on the white bread and broke out in a sweat.
Lee wore her hair pushed up like the whorls on scallop shells. She toasted mushrooms instead of marshmallows, and tried to persuade me of the value of cabbage and eggplant, but she cooked with no fat; everything tasted of safflower oil. I loved Lee but hated the cabbage—it seemed an anemic cousin of real greens—and I only got into the eggplant after Lee brought home a basketful insisting I help her to cook it up for freezing.
“You got to get it to sweat out the poisons.” She sliced the big purple fruits as she talked. “Salt it up so the bitter stuff will come off.” She layered the salted slices between paper towels, changing the towels on the ones she’d cut up earlier. Some of her hair came loose and hung down past one ear. She looked