Food Memoirs, Two

My parents had a run of bad luck with babysitters. I didn’t know much about this; I slept through the good parts.

I looked forward, midway through my first decade, to babysitters with the same vigor with which I waited for a sister or a best friend: Maybe this will be the one who entertains me. I was desperately bored of entertaining myself, and the Brother, while enthusiastic, was too repetitive to crack my immense disdain.

But the babysitters, without fail, were disappointing. Drab girls with makeup bags and ennui, girls who caused me to write in my journal I will not be like that when I am a teenager. (I was.)

The babysitters didn’t want to play Sorry! by Milton Bradley again; they didn’t want to watch Darby O’Gill and the Little People on the Disney Channel, they hadn’t appeared (as babysitters ought) with trunks full of puppets and puppet clothes, or paper dolls and paper doll clothes, with which the babysitter would prod one into making up stories, since on one’s own one tended to be unable to sustain a narrative and instead to drift mindlessly into arranging hair and hats. The babysitters, in other words, were boring, and when they were there I always went to bed on time without protest.

Clever babysitters.

Their unravelling started because my mom noticed a cracked glass. Also, because my two-year-old brother had some sort of garbled report of walking in on someone lying in the bathroom.

It wasn’t that Leslie had CRACKED the glass, my mother explained over and over to her friends in my hearing, until I was dead to the drama and didn’t care. It was that she didn’t confess her error (which was after all, my mother hastened to add to clinch her own role in the story, no big deal!) to my mother, on her own initiative, in a confiding and submissive way.

That, and she’d thrown a huge party.

We lived, at this point, downtown, in a two-story shotgun style house with funky décor. The bedrooms were upstairs. Three big rooms downstairs all led into each other (the “shotgun” in the name of the style of the house signified, I was told, that you could stand in the front room and shoot a bullet all the way through to someone in the back room). The middle room, the “dining room,” was covered all around the top with panels of glass, and below by a tall sort of wainscoting made of old barn boards. Old and decrepit: not old and interestingly weathered. Around the ledge that rimmed the room, my parents had placed a what now strikes me as crazy assemblage of tchotchkes: among them, my father’s hooka pipe (!) and a samovar, which was some weird old tea pot that he’d paid some dude to bring him back from Russia (there was also a stringed instrument that looked like a funky guitar propped in the corner, between bookshelves totally crammed with books); also, an assortment of ceramic clowns, whose appearance at this location in my memory totally befuddles me. Also some authentic German beer steins and some ceramic Victorian figures in states of romantic pursuit.

In the kitchen was a huge island, with those stools that bolt into the ground and feature tops that spin around.

In retrospect, it was a great place for a party.

Once the drunken orgy was pieced together, from the girl’s own sketchy resentful confessions and my little brother’s memories, my parents were kind of turned off teenage girls.

This is all a long preamble to the story of my love affair with pork chops.

My parents – who were young, after all, maybe a year or two older than I am now, and who therefore still went to bars, occasionally – solved the babysitting problem by hiring Ione. This was pronounced in the basic, no-nonsense way: I Own. Ione was a tall, thick, vigorous woman with black eyebrows and cropped hair with mannish grey sideburns. She lived, conveniently, a couple of blocks down, and she was poor.

It is amazing to me in retrospect how conscious I was of money, and its emotional hierarchy, in these early encounters. I wonder in what ways this consciousness played into my dislike of Ione: because I disliked Ione.

She was stern and commanding, and I was a little bit afraid of her. There were no games or sense of fun, though the only particular grievance I can now reconstruct is that she made us walk downtown one afternoon in the cold – when I was playing by myself and particularly did not want to go for a walk – so that she could visit her daughter. WHO WAS ON WELFARE. In spite of this, she had a big TV, and my brother and I had to sit and watch this TV while Ione talked to her daughter, for what seemed like HOURS. I was ticked off: made to sit like a little church mouse, scared to move, unsure what to do while the grown-ups droned out their list of complaints and angers. I was ticked off because I was bored and I was cold, and I was ticked off because it was my understanding that my parents paid Ione NOT to make us do stuff we didn’t want to do, but to watch us in the comfort of our own house, where at least I had my books even if no one to play with. As a customer, or as the representative of the customers my parents, I was displeased.

I despised Ione and her family. Not so much for being on welfare – I ate reduced lunch at school, after all – but for being so BORING and MEAN. Persons who did this to life were not on my good list. Rather, I liked persons like my beautiful music teacher at school, who had pretty hair and wore long skirts and pointed boots and loved singing in her beautiful, mellow voice, like an organ! And taught us all to sing all the hymns for mass but it was fun to sit with a whole cafeteria of children, singing all together. If I were a butterfly, I’d thank you father for giving me wings. If I were, a buzzy bee, I’d thank you father for giving me stings. Also, something about inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow.

I liked songs and earth, and didn’t like forced visits to houses where I wasn’t allowed to do anything. I wished someone would teach me how to garden, because it seemed impossibly hard.

However, I also liked Ione’s pork chops.

She must have found a package in the refrigerator one time, and she fried them up for us for lunch. I have no idea how she did it, but I was convinced that she’d used milk to fry them in, and spices!

They were so good. Fat and sweet and wonderful.

After this, pork chops were my favorite food, for years. The way the fat outside could get crisp, then pop (like a blister!), letting lovely oil spread out over your tongue. The different ways the meat could taste -- tough, which enhanced its barny flavor and pointed out the durability of the material, or plush and soft, courting the sharpness of teeth, as satisfying to breach as wrapping paper slit by sharp scissors. And this pleasure in spite of the fact that we could never cook them as good as Ione could.

In our early household, we lived out the promise of convenience food: sterile! Hygienic! Nutritionally balanced! We didn’t eat TV dinners, but we had individual pot pies, La Choy brand Chinese dinners on egg noodles, macaroni and cheese and fishsticks.

We didn’t use spices, except for salt, pepper, and Molly McButter. Also, on garlic bread, we used garlic salt. We didn’t use real garlic, onions or peppers, because my mother couldn’t eat these foods in chunks. (She also couldn’t stand ice in her drinks, and for years I also ordered my drinks with NO ICE because of her lead.) We ate tuna fish mixed with mayonnaise and boiled eggs, smeared on English muffins and covered with a perfectly square envelope of Kraft cheese. I was also obsessed with cooking turkey-cheese hotdogs in the microwave, and even had a way of fashioning a sort of hive out of paper towels, in which three turkey cheese hotdogs warmed, each in its own paper cell.

In other words, we were well fed, but flavor was neither a lesson nor a goal. And when I saw fat Ione, competent and severe, DOING SOMETHING in the pan with the fork and a pork chop, paying attention to how it was cooking and manipulating the food as it went… and when the result was this pork chop, this full dollop of pleasure… it occurred to me that cooking could be different.

My ill wishes on Ione came to a confusing conclusion when one evening, just as my parents were about to go out, a knock came on the door. Standing on the doorstep was not Ione but a polite young man. He was very sorry. His mother, Ione, had been in a car accident. She would probably survive. He was here to let us know she would not be at work this evening.

Many that’s terribles! and of courses!, and the young man went away. My parents quite willingly stayed in, where they probably played many games with us and told us stories and altogether provided much more entertainment than one could expect from babysitters.