American Pastoral

HOT CHEESE SANDWICH

Having served food to the public in one capacity or another for more than a decade, I have encountered my fair share of truly terrible customers. Even years later I can conjure the very worst ones in my mind like it was yesterday, their sour faces and cruel words, their determination to be dissatisfied. There was the hotshot in his expensive suits who always called me “Big Guy” when he came to order his double Americanos. A joke, maybe, but precisely the kind of joke a nineteen-year-old girl who has just packed on the freshman fifteen is not entirely equipped to handle.

There was the woman who always paid for her bagel and coffee with hundreds of pennies, and the man whose vanilla latte was never hot enough, even when the milk was burned. The person I dreaded most, though, was a seven-year-old boy—a tiny ruddy-cheeked terror whose memory still makes me shudder. Every morning, without fail, an enormous production was made about what the little boy would eat for breakfast. Would it be a croissant? No! He hated croissants today. Maybe a bagel? Disgusting! Yogurt, no. Sandwich, no. Muffin, no. His parents cooed and soothed and petted, but the decision was never simple. He stomped and huffed and flailed, whining like a mosquito. In the end, he always got a chocolate chip cookie as big as his face, despite having refused it multiple times, and left looking smug, leaving a long line of frustrated customers in his wake. Even now, my palms sweat to think about him. I was amazed by the power this tiny child had over his parents, over all of us.

When I read Philip Roth’s American Pastoral a few years ago for my book club, I thought of this little boy the entire time, because his food rebellions reminded me so much of Merry Levov’s. For Merry, what she eats and how much she eats is the first thing she is able to control in her life, and she uses her eating habits as a weapon against her parents, whose idyllic, bourgeois American life she detests and seeks to destroy.

Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s favorite pseudo alter ego and the book’s narrator, learns of the “tragedies that have befallen” Merry’s father, Seymour “The Swede” Levov—the golden god of Newark, New Jersey—from Seymour’s brother, Jerry, while at his forty-fifth high school reunion. Jerry tells Nathan that his brother has just died of prostate cancer, after suffering for years in the wake of Merry’s terrorist act of bombing the local general store. Jerry launches into a venomous speech about Merry, whom he calls Seymour’s “darling fat girl,” saying, “It’s one thing to get fat… but it’s another to jump the line and throw a bomb.” It seems that these two sentences stick with Nathan, because in his reimagining of Merry’s story, her relationship to food is an integral part of her rebellion.

The rest of the novel is Zuckerman’s piecing together of the years leading up to Merry’s violent act of terror, his attempt to get to the root of how things had gone so terribly wrong for a man who had always done his best to do everything right. Zuckerman is determined to find the cause of Merry’s violence, to draw a complete line from her childhood to the day that she blew up the general store, to show us the signs that the Swede missed. To the Swede, who is blinded by his love for Merry, her violence springs from nowhere, completely unexpected. Zuckerman, however, paints her as a little girl who is rebellious from the very start and who wields her power early on by what and how much she eats.

Merry’s first act of rebellion is not eating the lunches her mother packs her for school. She hates bologna, detests liverwurst, abhors tuna—the only thing Merry likes is Virginia ham sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and hot soup, which she can’t have since she is constantly breaking even the most indestructible of thermoses. Merry throws her lunches away every day, subsisting only on the ice cream she buys with the dime Seymour leaves at the bottom of her lunch bag, and her favorite food—melted cheese sandwiches.

As a teenager, Merry continues to refuse any food served to her at home, but at school and elsewhere gorges on junk food “so that almost overnight she became large, a large, loping, slovenly sixteen-year-old.” By gaining weight, and refusing to brush her hair or teeth or wash her face, Merry defies everything that is most important to her beauty-queen mother, and also rejects the American ideal of beauty. Right before Merry plants the bomb she goes to a diner and orders a BLT and a vanilla milkshake—a meal she thinks of as “the ritual sacrament.” Merry hates, detests America, but she actively consumes it in the most literal way through the foods she chooses to eat—cheeseburgers, processed-cheese sandwiches on white bread, milkshakes, BLTs, pizza, onion rings, root beer floats, and French fries.

When Seymour finds Merry, five years after her terrorist act, she has converted to Jainism, an Indian religion whose followers pledge never to harm any living being. This belief leads Jainites to stringently abstain from eating all animal protein and by-products, and any plants whose cultivation harms any living creature. When Seymour sees her, he is shocked at how thin she is. Her extreme behavior still relies on food as a controlling device, a form of rebellion. Early on it was gluttony, later in her life it was abstinence—two sides of the same coin.

When my book club met to talk about the book I made BLTs and vanilla milkshakes—Merry’s “ritual sacrament”—but my heart wasn’t quite in it. I couldn’t get the melted cheese sandwiches out of my brain. When I was young, my dad used to take my sisters and me to a diner called the Nite Owl near where he grew up, in Fall River, Massachusetts. The diner was a tiny stainless-steel box striped with red enamel and dressed up with neon signs. It sat smack in the middle of a Shell gas station parking lot. Although they offered cheeseburgers and Coney Island–style hot dogs, we went there for one thing and one thing only—a sandwich called the “hot cheese.”

This was not a grilled cheese sandwich, it was a buttered, grilled hamburger bun stuffed with melted cheese that had the texture of curds and the tang of a super-sharp cheddar. It was slathered in yellow mustard and piled high with diced raw onions and sweet pickle relish. It was heartburn-inducing heaven, that hot cheese. We washed it down with Autocrat coffee milk and felt the burn of it in our chests all day long. Every time Merry’s melted cheese sandwiches were mentioned I thought of those hot cheese sandwiches, their grease-spattered paper collars, their potato bun like the smoothest surface of the moon, a tiny American flag toothpick buried in its craters—American diner food par excellence.

AMERICAN PASTORAL

Hot Cheese Sandwich

Serves 1

1 teaspoon unsalted butter

1 hamburger bun (the cheap kind)

4 ounces very sharp cheddar cheese, cut into thin slices

1 teaspoon French’s yellow mustard

1 tablespoon sweet pickle relish

1 tablespoon minced white onion

Preheat the grill or a stovetop grill pan, and the broiler. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil.

Butter each half of the hamburger bun and grill it, butter-side down, until it’s toasted and you can see char marks. Pile the cheddar onto the bottom half of the bun and place it on the lined baking sheet. Put it under the broiler until the cheese is completely melted and bubbly, about 5 minutes. Spread yellow mustard on the top half of the bun, pile the sweet relish and raw onions on top of the cheese, put the whole thing together, and eat your heart out.