CHAPTER 17

Don’t Tell Our Parents

MooMal and Saydie, 1977

In 1974, my straight-A “top picker” oldest brother, Milton, plotted out what seemed like the perfect crime.

He pulled up outside the theater at Davison High School and placed a pair of jeans, underwear, and a sweater on the front seat of his red Mustang and left it running. He casually walked through the stage door as the first act of Arsenic and Old Lace got under way. After circling the darkened back area until he reached the other side of the stage, he dipped into the folds of the open curtains, stripped off his clothes, threw on a ski mask, and then streaked naked to the other side. He kept running, straight out the door, hopped in his car, and drove off.

Streaking was so popular that decade that the song “The Streak” hit number one on the Billboard charts in May 1974. The song was either apparent inspiration or simple acknowledgment; the Associated Press reported that more than a thousand episodes of streaking took place that year.

As Milton drove off, he sensed someone recognized him. Would the police come after him? He thought about where to go and headed to the one safe haven he knew: the Davison Hotline offices.

The hotline was started by Milton’s high school classmate and friend Michael Moore. (Yes, that Michael Moore. His father worked with my dad at AC Spark Plug and they lived on East Hill Street, just a block away.) The hotline was a place that teens could call if they were depressed, thinking about suicide, or just wanted to talk. Sandy worked there part time after school, training to answer calls. Most were from teens sharing arguments they had with their parents or frustrations about school. Home pregnancy testing kits weren’t available then, so the center also did pregnancy testing, which made the hotline controversial. Moore himself was already controversial. At eighteen, while still in high school, he had run for and was elected to the Davison school board.

Milton burst into the rental house that served as the hotline’s office. “You have to hide me, I just streaked the high school play!” he frantically explained to Moore. “I can’t go home. I think someone saw me.” The strategy they settled on was to sit and eat chips and drink pop for two hours. When the cops didn’t show, Milton went home.

Almost immediately, a stagehand identified my brother as the culprit. The next day, Mom got a call from the principal. Mortified, she sat with my brother in a small office furnished in atomic era institutional decor. After a stern talking to, the principal sent my brother to wait in the hallway. Mom pleaded his case.

“He’s got less than a month to graduation,” she started. “He’s had straight As all through high school. Can’t you cut him a break?”

The principal shook his head. “If we don’t punish your son, we’ll have kids running naked all over.” He felt for his pocket protector, an absentminded habit. “No, I’m afraid the best I can do is a one-week suspension. But I’ve checked with his teachers. He has no major tests coming up, so it shouldn’t affect his grades.”

Mom stood up, smoothed her rayon floral-print skirt, and shook his hand. After all, it could have been worse. He could have been arrested or even expelled. Things like streaking didn’t happen in Davison.

She found Milton slumped in a chair. “You’re driving,” she said brusquely and tossed him the keys. He followed her silently as she walked, her seventies-style sling-back heels clacking against the industrial marble floor and then across a black asphalt parking lot to her Buick Regal. She waited silently while Milton got in the car, unlocked the passenger door, then slipped into the camel-colored velour seat without saying a word.

Milt sat motionless behind the steering wheel. They sat silent for many moments. Then Milt said, “Promise me you won’t tell Dad.”

Mom kept staring out her window. “What’s it worth to you?” she replied coolly, not looking at him.

“Anything,” he said quickly. “I’ll do anything.”

She turned to him and gave him a bright smile. “Great, I’ve got just the idea.”

Along the northern edge of the house on Hill Street stood the base of what must have been an extraordinary oak. The ground rose up like a swell around the sad, blunt stump. Mom and Dad talked endlessly about what to do with the spot. Mom had long fancied building a big rock garden there. She’d seen one in Better Homes and Gardens and snipped out the page with a pair of scissors. The mound had flowers and rocks around a cascading waterfall that gently tumbled from one small pool down to another and finally into a pond filled with koi fish.

By odd luck (or not) Mom had this clipping in her purse. She made Milton a bargain. Build her this rock garden in a week or she’d tell Dad.

The next morning, she woke him at seven A.M. He got out of bed and headed over to the farm on Coldwater Road, now rented out to a couple with two young children. Far back on the property was a generous cache of granite rocks and small boulders. Using Dad’s baby blue Chevy truck, Milt piled multiple loads of rocks into the truck, some two tons in all.

Dad came home the first night and saw the pile of rocks as he pulled into the driveway. Mom arrived immediately behind him. “What’s this?” he asked Mom.

“Oh, Milton has the week off from school,” she lied. “It’s a special thing they do for seniors who have straight As. He asked if he could do a project in the backyard.”

Dad looked at the pile of rocks. “Your rock garden?”

“Yeah, I told him about it,” she said, careful not to look Dad directly in the eye. “He insisted on doing it. You know how he loves to work in the dirt,” she added.

As they walked into the house, Milton was sprawled exhausted and filthy on the beige sofa. “Milton!” Dad said. “While I love that you want to do this for your mom, you should be out having a good time on your special week off!”

Milton looked up a bit dazed. He looked at Mom, then Dad. “Oh, right,” he said slowly. “My special week . . .”

“You know, for getting straight As,” Mom said, finishing his sentence.

“Right,” Milton said, picking up the plot. “No, I’m happy to do it.”

Dad seemed pleased. His son doing such a selfless thing on his special seniors’ week! He’d raised that kid right, he thought.

All week Milton worked tirelessly on the rock garden. He hauled in hundreds of pounds of top soil and dozens of plants from a nursery. He stacked and set the stones in place like a complex jigsaw. He dug a pond at its base, then two cascading pools, and poured each with cement and installed a circulating water pump for the pond. Mom woke him at seven A.M. each morning and he worked right until dark every day. On Wednesday, Dad gave him twenty dollars and told him to go out with his friends. Mom made him give her the money.

In the end, Milton was proud of the garden. When people visited, it was the first thing my parents showed them.

At the end of that summer, when the garden was at the height of its bloom, Milton packed up his Mustang and headed off to college. He was the first of my siblings to leave home. Within three years of moving to Hill Street, my three brothers and my sister all moved out.

To ease overcrowding, Davison High School offered students with the best grades a chance to graduate early. Sandy qualified in January 1977. She still had her dreams of studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, but at seventeen, she was too young to apply as an international student. Some of her friends were taking a year off between high school and college and had moved to Holly, a picturesque small town about fifteen miles south of Flint that had become something of a hippie enclave. My parents helped her move there and even lent her some money to get set up in an apartment.

After all, they were glad she was alive.

In autumn 1976, Sandy was in a one-car accident that should have killed her.

She was driving to a party for the Davison Hotline. She had a jug of lemonade for the affair on the passenger seat of the car. She borrowed Dad’s 1975 Nova, equipped with then-newfangled power steering. Driving out to the hotline’s office, a car coming toward her seemed a bit too close to the center line, so Sandy turned the wheel a bit to the right and the car veered sharply off the road, skidding into the gravel on the edge of the pavement. She turned back onto the road and the car whipped across the line. Panicked, Sandy turned right, but ended up wildly overcorrecting, slamming into an embankment. The car bounced against it and somersaulted at least once, landing on the roof. The jar of lemonade punched violently through the passenger side window, shattering the glass.

The car was totaled, but aside from bruises and cuts on her face and hands from the shattered windows, miraculously, Sandy emerged uninjured.

A police officer who arrived at the scene with the ambulance told her that if she hadn’t been using another newfangled device, a three-point seat belt, she wouldn’t have survived.

Sandy nodded, understanding. She couldn’t stop looking at the crumpled car. “Is there any way we can avoid telling my dad?” she asked. “This is his car. He’s going to kill me.”

The officer smirked and, without looking up from the clipboard where he was taking notes for his report, said, “Uh, I think he’s going to be happy that you’re okay.”

When Mom and Dad arrived at the hospital, Sandy started to apologize. Her head and face boasted a smattering of bandages. “Dad, I’m so sorry about your car . . .”

Dad grabbed her and hugged her mightily. When he pulled away, Sandy saw the tears. She had never seen him cry before. “It’s just a car, Sandy,” he said, wiping his eyes. “You’re the one I was worried about.” With that, he grabbed and hugged her again, this time until she could barely breathe.

When Sandy moved to Holly a few months later, she worked as a cook making soups for a local vegetarian eatery. At night, she waited tables at a 1920s-themed restaurant at the historic Holly Hotel. Other nights, she worked as a bartender at a joint down the street.

Then she met some clown named Buffo.

Buffo wore a crazy mismatched thrift store getup with his shock wig and big shoes. His onstage gig consisted of sight gags and slapstick. In summers, he earned extra money working street fairs selling balloon animals. Sandy was intrigued. It seemed like an easier way to make money than waiting on tables or bartending.

She intimated her clown ambitions to Mike, who was all for trying it out, too. They found books on clowning at the Davison Library. Among their discoveries was the need not only to conjure up a clown name and costume but to develop a personality and general clowning aesthetic. They bought clown makeup at a magic shop in downtown Flint. They brought it back to Hill Street, where they practiced spreading the thick creamy “clown white” on each other and then trying out different looks with black, red, and blue greasepaint. Together they went to the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store and pulled together outfits.

Sandy chose the clown name “Saydie,” a love-starved, socially awkward kind of clown. Saydie’s costumes featured aggressively bad fashion choices that called to mind Diane Keaton’s look in Annie Hall gone horribly wrong, plaid skirts topped with nubby wool vests matched with polka dot shirts, that sort of thing.

Mike chose “MooMal.” We’d long had nicknames in our family. Mike’s had been “MooMoo” from infanthood for his ability to drink vast quantities of milk. After Sandy started taking French, she called him MooMal, which loosely translates to “bad milk.” MooMal was a once well-heeled, now down-on-his-luck yet fun-loving character with a quirky sense of humor.

Together they learned to juggle from a kit they bought at the magic shop. Via mail order, they purchased boxes of the long thin balloons needed to make animals plus a book detailing step by step how to make dogs, swans, monkeys, swords, and so on. Saydie and MooMal started working street fairs and discovered the money was pretty good. People would give them a buck or two to tie animals. Sometimes they earned as much as one hundred dollars in a day, a lot of money for a few hours’ work in the seventies. Sandy’s running joke when asked how many different balloon animals she could tie was, “I can do over two hundred, but they all look like dogs!”

Like Buffo, Sandy developed a one-woman clown show. My parents took me to see her opening night at the Holly Hotel. The first half of the show was a silent, mime-based Saydie extravaganza. Saydie had a “hopeless chest” instead of a hope chest. The show revolved around her readying for a date, but he never materialized. At the end of the act, to show she was down but not beaten, Saydie donned a tiara and presented a baton with a flurry of colorful ribbons on each end. She tried to twirl it, awkwardly at first, and then—thanks to Sandy’s years as a majorette—wowed the crowd with her expert twirling.

After a break, Sandy returned to the stage dressed in costume as a tribute to Charlie Chaplin. She had borrowed copies of Chaplin’s films from the University of Michigan, genuine films, in heavy round canisters. Fortunately, Dad had won a projector one night playing in a poker series at the VFW. She set it up at our house and she and I watched several of Chaplin’s “tramp” series, including City Lights, Modern Times, The Tramp, and A Dog’s Life. I had never seen a silent film before.

A few minutes into the first one, I asked, “Why don’t they talk?”

“Because they’re silent films,” she replied.

“So people didn’t talk back then?”

“Of course people talked,” she said. “The movies just couldn’t play sound.”

It was amazing to watch Sandy on the small stage. To replicate the frame-by-frame nature of the early films, she set up a light behind a moving box fan. As with Chaplin, in both her skits, she artfully showed well-meaning characters hungry for affection and doing their best to struggle against adversity. Mom and Dad were so proud. Dad even gave her roses after her performance.

She later enlisted me to come along on her gigs as a clown. At age nine, I became “Sissy the Clown.” My clown persona mirrored my real-life one: I was the bookish, socially awkward younger sister of Saydie. I learned walkabout gigs from her at corporate picnics. She’d take a hot dog and put it on a leash and tell people she was “walking her dog.” She taught me to make balloon animals, even teaching me to create a dog balloon in less than ten seconds.

Kids loved her. I loved her. All I wanted was to be like my big sister.

Dressed as a clown, I could see why she was drawn to it. There’s a certain freedom in covering your identity with face paint. You can act silly or sad or outrageous. No one can question it. You’re a clown. There’s also an understanding that some people are fundamentally afraid of clowns. As a child who had routinely been mocked by other children for being too precocious or too small for my age, I relished the power of knowing that as a tiny, strange creature with a grotesque smile and a shocking burnt orange wig, I probably made a few adults uncomfortable.

Sandy ended up teaching a clowning workshop at Mott Community College. She taught the basics of makeup, development of a clown persona, and how to juggle. She truly embraced clowning, even applying for a spot in the famed Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, then in Venice, Florida. So many people wanted to be clowns that it was considered more difficult to get into than Harvard or Yale. She wasn’t surprised when she got turned down, but that’s how dedicated she was to clowning.

Sandy became involved with a musician twelve years her senior and soon announced plans to marry—dressed as clowns. The Flint Journal even ran a story about her with the headline SHE’S NOT JESTING, CLOWN TO WED, with a photo of Saydie and MooMal.

At first, my parents went along with it. Dad even offered to dress up as a clown, too. But then he got to know Sandy’s fiancé. History repeating itself in a situation similar to that of his grandfather Milton Stark with his daughter Della, Dad told her that he didn’t approve. While the guy was a talented artist, there was something about him Dad didn’t like.

At first, he simply refused to pay for the wedding. Then he refused to take part.

For years, I assumed my nineteen-year-old sister eloped at a justice of the peace. But later I learned she did go through with her plans to marry as a clown in a ceremony held at a pinball arcade with walls painted like cotton candy. The minister and guests were all dressed in costume.

Later, Sandy realized Dad was right. The union lasted less than a year.

As eccentric as the other kids were turning out, my brother Doug was the epitome of a dutiful son.

One day after eating a pile of raw tomatoes from the garden, Doug lay down on the couch clutching his stomach. Mom asked him to pick up her dry cleaning from a shop around the corner. “I can’t, Mom, I don’t feel so good,” Doug said.

Mom told him he just had indigestion. “You shouldn’t have eaten so much,” she told him. “C’mon, go get my cleaning.”

Crumpled over and holding his side, he hobbled to the car. He returned white-faced. He handed over the plastic-covered dresses and then bolted to the bathroom, where he vomited everywhere. Within two hours, he was in surgery for an emergency appendectomy at St. Joseph Hospital in Flint.

“But what a good son,” Mom kept saying in the waiting room to the family, even strangers. “He was in all this pain and terribly sick and he still went and got my clothes from the dry cleaner.”

Once, when I was perhaps seven, Doug was pulling out of the driveway. I stomped my little foot and yelled for him to come back. He pulled back into the driveway. I went to the window and counted out my pennies with instructions on candy to buy at the store down the street. “Okay, three Tootsie Rolls, three banana-flavored BB Bats, and two butterscotch-flavored hard candy sticks.” Doug obediently pulled out of the driveway and returned with my candy.

While the other kids became too busy with their own social lives, Doug made a point to spend time with me. As long as it wasn’t a chick flick, he took me to any movie I wanted to see, from awful movies such as Herbie Rides Again to genuinely good films such as Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.

But Doug hit his strident point, too. After one year in college, he debated whether or not he needed to go back. He could always get a job in a GM shop, for instance, or he could start his own business. Doug also wanted to strike out on his own and move to Florida.

Dad listened to his reasoning and said he understood. “I’ve got an idea, Doug. Why don’t you go spend the summer at the house in Florida working?” Dad offered to pay for gas both ways in exchange for some work on the house that needed to be done. “You know, that way you could see what kind of work you could get there, just check it out.”

Doug thought this seemed like a great opportunity. He corralled our brother Mike into the scheme. They had it all worked out. They’d earn a bunch of money and spend their free time hanging out on the beach.

Just before they left, Dad explained that, of course, he’d be charging them rent and utilities for their stay. After all, this was their chance to see how they would make it in the “real world.” Doug and Mike agreed. How hard could it be to make the reasonable rent that Dad had set? They weren’t even quite sure what “utilities” meant, but they figured whatever they were couldn’t be that expensive.

Reality proved a bit different. Without anything more than a high school diploma, Doug found he was eligible only for blue collar or manual work. His first job was working as an orange picker for a contractor that supplied Tropicana with citrus for its juices. If he thought picking strawberries in the heat of a Michigan summer day was tough, it was nothing compared to late-harvest Valencia oranges in the searing Florida heat in June. The oranges were first reaped via a shake-and-catch system, in which a mechanical arm shook the branches of the tree to release some of the fruit, which were then caught in the bed of a truck. But the shake-and-catch system captured about 20 percent of the fruit. The rest was hand-picked.

Doug, a seasoned picker thanks to his days in the strawberry field, showed up for work alongside a whole group of migrant workers, a motley mix of immigrants and general day laborers. They took a bumpy ride deep into the grove in the back of a filthy truck thickly plastered with bird droppings that reeked of fresh manure and the sour scent of spoiled fruit. A supervisor assigned each a few trees, a pole picker, and a bag.

The work was hot, exhausting, and every so often, Doug would find snakes woven around branches of trees or encounter a hornet’s nest. He collected his cash at the end of each day. Valencia season ended in late June, so he hunted up other work, eventually getting hired on a crew for Florida Power & Light digging ditches to bury power lines. If he thought picking oranges in a green grove was bad, standing on asphalt in the middle of a Florida summer wearing an orange vest breaking up concrete wasn’t exactly a dream job, either.

Meanwhile, Mike, then between his junior and senior years of high school, got hired on in the bakery department of a supermarket in town. Since they had only one car, Mike bought a cheap bike to pedal the nine miles into town along the causeway and back in the Florida heat for each shift. Since he was new and had the least seniority, sometimes he worked the late shift, until four A.M., baking cakes for the next day, and then had to get up to work a second shift starting at noon. He earned $2.10 an hour, the minimum wage.

Meanwhile, they learned that utilities included air conditioning, something they ran a lot when they weren’t working. Dad called to let them know that one of their electricity bills equaled a full week of their pay combined.

My brothers’ dreams of living a languid life at the beach quickly evaporated. Doug says that during that summer, he spent exactly three afternoons at the beach. The rest of the time, they both worked as many hours as they could just to make ends meet.

When September rolled around, Doug went to college. Mike went back to high school. When Doug had to take out student loans, he never complained.

“By the time you get this, I’ll be in boot camp,” the note from Mike started.

When we lived on the farm, my parents scraped together enough money to buy Mike a trumpet when he turned ten. One of the first songs he learned to play was the marines’ theme song. Dad would sit outside under a tree at the farm listening to Mike play, sometimes singing along.

From the Halls of Montezuma,

To the Shores of Tripoli;

We fight our country’s battles

In the air, on land, and sea;

First to fight for right and freedom

And to keep our honor clean;

We are proud to claim the title

OF UNITED STATES MARINE.

Mike had a natural gift for music as well as a talent for art. He could pick up virtually any instrument and learn to play it within a half an hour. By his teens, he could sketch anything. He began painting canvases as a freshman. Mike learned to play the piano by ear. When he first put on his marching band uniform, Dad hugged him so hard with pride that Mike couldn’t breathe. When he rose to the rank of drum major at Davison High School, Dad would dart alongside parades, taking his picture over and over. It embarrassed Mike to no end, but Dad couldn’t help it. He was so proud of him.

Like Sandy, Mike also graduated early, finishing his requirements in the fall of his senior year. He was torn between pursuing music, art, or his emerging interest in electronics and computing. One day, a recruiter from a local electronics program made a visit to the house. Dad threw the guy out. “My son is going to art school!”

So at seventeen, Mike packed his bags and left for Kendall College School of Design with a fifteen-hundred-dollar student loan and money he’d earned over the years mowing lawns. He shared a sixty-dollars-a-month apartment with a roommate and walked the two miles to school and back. He learned he was in the top 25 percent, but only the top 1 percent of graduates ever made a living in the art world. As he puts it, “Back then, the rest ended up pasting ads in newspapers.”

His friends in Grand Rapids were all older, among them a Vietnam vet, an adrenaline-addict sports freak, and a navy veteran, a dangerous combination for a disenchanted art student. After eating liverwurst for two weeks and hearing all the stories of his friends, he decided this was the one chance in his life to see the world by joining the military. But he knew if he mentioned this to our parents, Dad would talk him out of it.

At the end of the second semester, he packed up all of his belongings. He sent Sandy a box of his most valuable art tools along with a key to a friend’s long-term storage place with the address. Then he left for Naval Training Service Command in Great Lakes, Illinois, just outside Chicago.

Sandy was stunned. She immediately drove to Davison. When no one answered at the house on Hill Street, she called Aunt Mel. Mom and I were there. She came through the door crying. “Mike joined the navy!” she wailed. She and Mike were close. After all, they were clowns together. “He didn’t even tell me! I could see him not telling Dad, but not me?”

Mike’s recruiter had signed him up for the naval engineering school. Mike’s idea of engineering was its most classic definition: “the application of scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge in order to design, build, and maintain structures, machines and devices.” Only later did he learn that engineering in the navy meant working in the boiler room.

He was eventually assigned to the USS Bigelow. His first day at sea, he ran to the top of the ship to see the waves breaking over the bow for hours. Then he was seasick for days. When he got his sea legs, though, it was great. They went to Spain, Egypt, Palma de Mallorca, and Yemen before being called to the Persian Gulf, where they went around in circles for months.

It took Sandy a long time to collect herself enough to retrieve Mike’s belongings. I sat in the backseat while she and a friend drove late into the night to Grand Rapids. Among his boxes were canvases of works that he’d painted. One of them was a landscape of the farm on Coldwater Road.

With my siblings gone and my mother working full time, at nine years old, I was the only latchkey kid in the neighborhood.

The week before Mike left home for winter classes at art school, Mom did something unusual: she took me to lunch. We lived near Four Corners, the intersection of Davison and State roads, the epicenter of what was euphemistically referred to as downtown Davison. On one corner sat Archie’s, an old-school diner, the kind featuring only booths and counter seating and waitresses in orange poly/cotton uniforms with small aprons and cheap name tags. The roof had a high arch, reminiscent of a faux Swiss chalet. We had never been inside, even though it was only a couple of blocks from our house.

I felt quite grown-up as I perused the oversized laminated menu. I had never heard of some of the items on offer. “What’s a Monte Cristo?” I asked my mother. Since we were Midwest WASPs, I followed up with “What’s rye bread?” In the end, I selected the soup and sandwich special with a glass of milk. I daintily nibbled at my grilled cheese sandwich and quietly slurped chicken noodle soup. Mom looked around the place and chatted with the wait staff. Then she casually dropped this idea.

“Hey, you know, your dad and I have been trying to figure out where you might go after school now,” she started. “What do you think of coming here?” For $1.99, she could be assured I’d get soup, half a sandwich, and adult supervision for the two and half hours between the time class ended at Hill Elementary School and they typically arrived home from work. This also solved a dilemma; we ate “lunch” at my school at eleven A.M., and invariably I was hungry again when school let out at three P.M.

I burst with pride at the suggestion. I must be nearly an adult now for her to think something like this, I thought!

At first, this arrangement worked fine. As the school bell rang, I put on my mittens and purple parka, collected my books and homework, and then walked the few minutes to the diner, snow crunching under my small boots. On my first day, I requested a table for one, and the amused waitress led me to a corner table. I tried to eat slowly, savoring the hot yet bland chicken noodle soup and my warm wedge of grilled cheese sandwich. Once she cleared my plate, I worked on my homework. Then I opened a book and read until it was time to go home. Time goes more slowly when you’re a child. To me, the afternoon felt pleasant, yet endless. At precisely 5:30 P.M., I bundled up and walked home, arriving just as my mom’s Buick Regal pulled into the driveway.

The next day, the waitress seemed surprised to see me. She led me to the same corner table. Within two hours, I finished my soup, sandwich, homework, and a short book. Bored, I took out paper. I started to write down notes about the people at the other booths in the diner. That night at dinner, I told my parents about the grizzled man with one eye at the counter, the giggling teen girls who split a stack of pancakes, and the couple at another table arguing about a lost library book. Dad congratulated me on my ability to notice details.

“Maybe you should start to just make up stories about the people you see and write them down,” Dad suggested. “That’s what a lot of writers do.”

So every day after that, I spent my posthomework time writing stories. The red-haired waitress who appeared to have been crying on her break? I wrote she was being tormented by a ghost whom only she could see. He would taunt her and call her names, but she couldn’t make him go away. A pair of pretty teenage girls came in late one afternoon dressed in long, formal gowns. They carefully folded their elbow-length gloves on the table. In my story, they were princesses who wanted, just for one day, to be treated like average people. Neither of them had ever eaten “normal” food, so all they wanted was to taste a waffle and a grilled tuna melt—just once—before being forced back to their elaborate fairy tale–style castle somewhere in Europe.

For two months, I went to the diner. The waitresses knew that I always had the same soup and sandwich, so they just brought me lunch without an order. One let me have milky hot tea, even though the other waitresses debated whether the caffeine could stunt my growth.

One day, a new woman named Edith began working there. She was a little unusual. She wore black tights with her orange outfit. You could not ignore the large silver cross she kept on a piece of white yarn around her neck. While the other waitresses thought little about my unusual postschool lunch visit, she found it unsettling.

Edith insisted on waiting on me. She asked me a lot of questions, some quite odd. How often did we go to church? Why didn’t my parents hire someone to watch me? How often was I left home alone? How did I feel about Jesus? Had I ever wanted anything from Santa that he didn’t bring? Raised to be polite to adults, I answered her questions, even as I wrote stories about her. In one, she had been rejected from a witch’s training program for being too odd.

Then one day, as I finished my lunch, she sat down across from me. She asked if I wanted to live with her. She had prayed to God about it, and he said that I should go home and live with her and her boyfriend. I could go with her after her shift the next day.

I told her that I would think about it. I paid my bill, left her a nice tip, and never went back there again.

I decided that it was time I learned to manage my own lunch. On my way home from school the next afternoon, I stopped at a small grocery. With my daily diner budget, I purchased a trio of forbidden gastronomic treasures: a can of premade vanilla cake frosting, a small bag of Fritos, and Hostess Ho Hos. I ate them straight from the package when I got home. I was so sick that my mother didn’t ask about the diner.

I shunned the Ho Hos and decided to make a real lunch the next day. My parents had recently bought a box of bulk steaks from the VFW. On one of his visits home from college, I watched Milt thaw one in cold water and cook it in a skillet. It seemed quite straightforward. I submerged the plastic-wrapped brick of a steak into a bowl of cool water in the sink.

Just to be sure I cooked it correctly, I pulled out a stool and selected my mom’s copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking from the kitchen shelf.

While the meat softened, I explored the fridge for something to go with it. I found a package of fresh green beans with a small label noting they had been “shipped from the Sunshine State.” I’d watched Julia make green beans on her PBS show several times in reruns. I flipped through her book and found the directions. I dropped the beans in a pan of boiling water for a few minutes and then shocked them in a bowl of ice water. I pulled out a skillet from the cupboard next to the stove and then . . . I realized something was missing.

Music. My mother listened to music while she cooked. She’d learned that from Grandpa Charles. We had a stereo in the other room, a fancy multicomponent affair with an eight-track player, the latest in home audio. I pushed in Johnny Cash’s live album At Folsom Prison and turned up the volume.

With Johnny’s twangy music in the background and the cookbook open on the counter, I went forward with my maiden voyage in the kitchen as I pan-seared the thawed steak. Using the step stool, I retrieved from the pantry the Montreal steak seasoning my dad always used on grilled meat. When it seemed cooked—or as it turned out, overcooked—I wiped the pan with a paper towel. Then I added butter, waited for it to sizzle, and cooked the green beans.

I moved the stool over to retrieve a paper plate from the cupboard. I sat in the baby blue kitchen at the gold-speckled Formica counter and ate my lunch, thinking. Recipes were like homework. If you read the directions and did what they said, your food turned out. Maybe not perfect, but that was also the point of homework. It took practice. I ate my tough steak and my slightly oversalted green beans with an overwhelming sense of pride as Johnny Cash went on to sing about the “Orange Blossom Special.”

I made my own afternoon lunches afterward, sometimes just a grilled cheese sandwich, sometimes a steak, and occasionally scrambled eggs. Eventually, when Mom asked about the diner, I truthfully informed her that now that it was warm and nearly summer, I preferred to make my own lunch and then go out to play with my friends until they came home.

“But don’t tell Dad, okay?” Mom agreed.

One sunny May afternoon, I had my first “dinner party.” I invited Katie and her sisters over for lunch. I set the table with my mother’s matching dishes. I served what Mom called Flinn burgers, hamburgers seasoned with Montreal steak seasoning served on bread with a thick slather of mayonnaise and slices of store-bought tomatoes and onions. Aided by Julia’s recipe, I made a side salad with vinaigrette. As I watched them happily gobble up their burgers and poke at their iceberg salad, I thought nothing was better than feeding people. It was like my old game of restaurant, but better. The food was real and so were my friends.