In the winter of 1990 I was twenty-six years old, broke, and living alone in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Winter at the end of Cape Cod was a lonely proposition but since I have always been fond of being alone it was not at all a bad one. I had come to the Fine Arts Work Center as part of a fellowship program that gives ten artists and ten writers seven off-season months in which to work. We had a place to live and a stipend of $350 a month, which covered food, the phone bill, and anything else one can think of to buy when there’s very little money and no place to spend it.
I got along fine. Being broke and isolated is usually associated with hardship but it’s actually quite conducive to writing a novel. Like the scrubby little trees that grew in the sand near the ocean, I found I could thrive on neglect. Everything in the town that bustled and glimmered in the summer months had folded up its tent and left by the time I arrived in October. The fruit stands boarded over, the restaurants closed down. Only a stalwart bar or two hung on to keep the locals from going completely mad. The A&P on Shank Painter Road sold fewer goods during reduced hours for what seemed to me to be exorbitantly high prices. In short, The Season was over.
I had a very small apartment on the second floor of a house. One room was a kitchen and the other was a bedroom that was not much bigger than a twin mattress. I wrestled the bed into the kitchen so that I could call the bedroom a study, a study being the room I needed the most. As for sleeping in the kitchen, it made perfect sense to me. It was warmer in there, and in the morning I could get up and make my oatmeal and tea and take it straight back to bed.
Those seven months, long and cold and quiet, were really the first I’d ever spent completely by myself. At this tender age I had a great deal of experience being taken care of by other people, and a reasonable amount of experience taking care of someone else, but I’d never had the opportunity to see how I would fare when left completely to my own devices. When would I go to bed? Would I still be so neat? Would I drink too much or never drink at all? What would I make myself for supper?
The answer to this last one wasn’t so impressive.
It turns out that where food was concerned, I had a seemingly endless capacity for repetition. Breakfast was a fixed tableau and boredom never even entered into it. As long as I was eating alone I ate oatmeal, as Patchetts have done for generations before me. Oatmeal was actually one of the more complicated things I made for myself because it required a heating element, though in truth I have eaten bowls of uncooked oats as well, pinching them up between my fingers and thumb and nibbling while I worked. They were as pleasing to me as they would have been to any plow horse. Lunch every day consisted of a tomato sandwich with mustard. I could get two lunches out of a single tomato, three if it was a whopper. Even in February, when tomatoes were orange and vaguely translucent with the texture of a softball, I was never deterred. If I was feeling very fancy for dinner I would scramble some eggs or pour jarred red sauce over pasta, but most nights did not feel fancy at all. I ate slices of white cheese on Saltines with a dollop of salsa, then smoothly transitioned to Saltines spread with butter and jam for dessert. I would eat as many as were required to no longer be hungry and then I would stop. All food that wasn’t eaten sitting up in bed was eaten standing over the sink or sometimes in front of the refrigerator, where I looked around for things that weren’t there. Day after day, week after month, I stuck to my routines like a chorus girl in the back row. I never minded. Even all these years later, in a life that is loaded with fancy supermarkets and disposable income, a Saltine is still delicious.
Perhaps this shameful dearth of culinary sophistication could all be explained away by my lack of options at the time: funds were low, the grocery store was barren, restaurants, if I could have afforded them, were closed. If this were only a matter of what I ate when times were tight, then it would be reduced to no more than a sad chapter in an otherwise bright gastronomic history. Except I wasn’t sad, I was alone, and when I’m alone it’s impossible for me to have any standards about eating.
This isn’t because I don’t know better. Even as I was putting the salsa on the cracker I knew about food. My mother, who could live entirely off of Kraft processed cheese singles and Shredded Wheat, can also make a perfect béchamel sauce. She taught my sister and me how to loosen the skin from a chicken and slip in fresh herbs, to fill the cavity with garlic and lemons. Time after countless time, I saw her poring over Julia Child in order to reinvent Thanksgiving or have a sit-down dinner for twelve or a cocktail party for a hundred. My sister and I were taught how to follow a recipe (it’s only a matter of paying attention, like those eighth-grade reading comprehension tests) and when to leave the recipe behind and strike out on our own. In high school I excelled at home economics. I made crêpes and madeleines for French club. My first job in college was running the student bakery, getting up at five to bake a hundred cookies and several cakes before classes started. In the evenings I helped cook for dinner parties at the president’s house. I made butter knots and osso buco. I whisked up salad dressing, simmered the flan. Being plain in my twenties, I seduced the boys I liked with shrimp creole and chocolate cake. I found my share of love. In graduate school I made special soft meals for my best friend, Lucy, who had lost half her jaw to cancer as a child and was limited by what she could chew. I worked as a line cook in a fancy vegetarian restaurant and burned my wrists and thumbs on the grill. I have a piecrust recipe that takes two days to make, and all of my pies, even the blueberry, serve up flawlessly from the first slice. I have been a waitress, a hostess, and briefly, at the age of twenty-four, a well-meaning wife who followed the classic food pyramid while putting dinner on the table every night.
The fact is, I love to feed other people. I love their pleasure, their comfort, their delight in being cared for. Cooking gives me the means to make other people feel better, which in a very simple equation makes me feel better. I believe that food can be a profound means of communication, allowing me to express myself in a way that seems at times much deeper and more sincere than words. My Gruyère cheese puffs straight from the oven say I’m glad you’re here. Sit down, relax. I’ll look after everything.
So what does it say about my self-esteem that I know perfectly well how to make a velouté and yet would choose to crack open a can of SpaghettiOs when dining alone? (I am not using the word “SpaghettiOs” as a metaphor here.) Do I not believe that I am entitled to the same level of tenderness that I extend to others? Or is it, in fact, a greater level of self-love to not put myself through the hassle of making dinner?
I think it is quite possible to be a very good cook while caring next to nothing about food. Just because you can prepare a dish doesn’t mean you necessarily have any interest in eating it. I took far more pleasure in cooking for strangers in restaurants than I ever did having to sit down with my own guests. This is not a matter of having a preference for strangers, it’s just that strangers tend not to want to eat with the help. Cooking is exhausting, and nothing kills my appetite like spending a day trimming the fat off of chicken or shredding a couple pounds of Brussels sprouts into paper-thin confetti without slicing off my fingertips. Sure, I can make a sole meunière, but it must be done over a flame that is fit to brighten up the very gates of hell. There is a split second in which to get it right, to get your side dishes on the plate, and get the plate to the table the very instant the fish is done while everything is still searing hot. I can do it, barely, but then can I eat it? My hair is slicked back with sweat, my hands tremble when I hold the fork, the smell of browned butter coats the inside of my nose. That is the moment I long to be in the shower, not at the table, and besides, it’s impossible to both eat dinner and beat up a zabaglione.
So while it is a deep and genuine pleasure to nurture those I love, it is an equal pleasure to be off the hook for that responsibility as well, to pass over food that is delicate and beautiful and complex in flavor in favor of the item that is least likely to spoil. Eating as a simple means of ending hunger is one of the great liberties of being alone, like going to the movies by yourself in the afternoon or, back in those golden days of youth, having a cigarette in the bathtub. It is a pleasure to not have to take anyone else’s tastes into account or explain why I like to drink my grapefruit juice out of the carton. Eating, after all, is a matter of taste, and taste cannot always be good taste. The very thought of maintaining high standards meal after meal is exhausting. It discounts all the peanut butter that is available in the world.
When I picked up my oldest friend, Tavia, for dinner last week we met at her father’s apartment. Kent has lived alone for more than twenty years, since his girls grew up and moved out on their own. His home is small and overflowing with the artifacts of his life, the testaments of his pleasures and personal style. “Come to dinner with us,” I said to him. Though I certainly would have enjoyed his company, I also was showing a certain amount of noblesse oblige: here he was, after all, alone. Why not be nice and bring him along?
“Oh, I couldn’t,” he said happily. “I’ve made lobster Newburg for dinner.”
He had driven downtown to get the lobster tail at the fish stand in the farmers’ market. It is no small trek. Alone, Kent did not wait around for any crumbs of company or lobster his daughters or their friends might have thrown him. Alone, Kent had seized his Wednesday night and gone ahead with his Newburg. That was his pleasure, unimaginable to me but nevertheless deeply admired. I tried to picture myself turning down a similar invitation if I had a free evening. Could I stand my ground? Could I say no, in fact I’ve opened a fresh sleeve of Saltines tonight? Probably not. Probably I would lie. And then, after the visitors had left, I would stand over the sink and eat whatever was around, whatever I needed in order to go and do the work that I love. Even now it is a picture of heaven to me, an evening spent alone and well fed in the tradition of my own low standards, pure heaven.