CHAPTER TWO
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE
(IN OUR HOUSE WE TALK ABOUT FOOD)
Ok, I "borrowed" the first part of the title. But in fairness I did go to Syracuse University the year Ray Carver was there and because of a scheduling screw-up found myself in one of his graduate writing classes. Since I, however, was only a lowly undergraduate and he realized the mistake, he made an enormous pronouncement at the beginning of class one morning that anyone who wasn't a grad student had to leave immediately. Why do I only remember myself walking out of the classroom feeling humiliated?
Imagine finding him in the house I shared with some graduate students a few weeks later, nursing a bottle of booze (even though he said he was off the juice) talking to one of my roommates? He was already famous then. I was 19. The intimidation factor was tremendous. I said hello to him and went up to my room.
Did I mention I was really hungry that night and just wanted to make dinner for the boyfriend but that I couldn't quite bring myself to go into the kitchen with Ray, the famous one, being in the house? Back then, it just wasn't cool to cook or even to acknowledge that you knew how to cook especially if you were a woman pursuing a degree in English Literature. Today cooking is sexy. I imagine that if Ray were still alive we might have become friends had he watched me cook.
So that night the boyfriend didn't have a meal. I'm sure we ended up going out for a pizza and a pitcher of beer but the fact is the boyfriend was spoiled. I had cooked for him nearly every night while we were in college with an occasional meal out when one of us got a paycheck. (Back then we both worked part-time and went to school.) After all, I had been cooking since I was 10. Not necessarily by choice but because there was nothing else to do growing up as I did in Munich, Germany.
It was the late 1960's when my father got a job working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. I wasn't an army brat but went to an army base school in a Munich suburb. Since we didn't live on base, I rarely associated with any of the army kids after school because if I wasn't hanging out at a museum or a café or a restaurant or a bar... I was reading or cooking.
Crêpes were the first thing I learned how to cook. How hard could making a pancake be? They always say it's in the wrist. I found the most complicated recipe of all, a layered spinach/mushroom/cheese/crêpe tower thing that needed four pans (one for the spinach mixture, one for the mushrooms, one for the cheese sauce and another for making the crêpes), at least a pound of butter and cheese and probably a quart of cream. When all was said and done, it took me nearly six hours to make it. I think I still have a picture or two of the crêpe tower on a plate.
I guess that's what Love is, making food for people who really enjoy eating. Had I had my wits about me back then, I would have dropped English Lit and gone to cooking school. Years later, I recreated the crêpe thing and got it down in under an hour to feed the boyfriend. The boyfriend, Lynn, became the husband. He's still spoiled.
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