Bagels, Cookies, Ice Cream, Potato Chips

In 3^rd grade, I once ate a dozen bagels in one sitting. They were cinnamon raisin, my favorite. I was full after eating just one, but I found comfort in the repetitive chewing, the wholesome texture in my mouth. From the ages of six to eight, I was sexually abused. I got even with my abuser by stealing coins and dollar bills from the pockets of his jackets and trousers. I would take the purloined money to the local Publix and buy something to coat the shame I was feeling, usually ice cream drumsticks and Klondike Bars. Bagels, cookies, ice cream and potato chips. Childhood abuse was my introduction to kummerspeck, that jaunty, German-coined term describing weight gained from emotional overeating.

My mother’s people came from Naples, Italy and Italian food was the only food my mother cooked well. My father didn’t like his wife making a big mess in the kitchen—for some reason, her marinara sauce always decorated the walls, floors, and cupboards before it was all over, so the two made a compromise: We had one big Italian meal on Sundays and the rest of the week would be Crock Pot fare. These Sunday dinners weren’t just meals to be consumed and forgotten about. They were daylong fêtes and an excuse to eschew responsibilities while imbibing wine like Roman emperors. My Aunt Margaret and my cousins Marianne and Diane would always come, never bringing anything with them. My cousins stole money from my dad and their mother stole from my mom. Once, Aunt Margie took a stack of S&H Green Stamps I had saved over a period of six months. When I begged my mom to get my stamps back, she said, “Honey, your aunt needs crap from the S&H Redemption Center more than you do.”

Aunt Margie was a professional gambler devoid of any maternal instinct whatsoever. She often forgot to buy food for her kids, and when she did sashay into a grocery store, her mind was on money, not food. She was the type of person who’d intentionally drop a jar of pickles, pretend to slip, and fall, then threaten the store manager with a lawsuit. She made thousands of dollars that way. Aunt M lived on pastries, black coffee and the cocktail nuts that landed at the bottom of her purse when popping into bars just to use their restrooms. Her daughters Marianne and Diane grew up scrounging through garbage cans for something to eat.

Eventually, they found men to take care of them. My aunt’s violent husband Joe left when the girls were toddlers. Joe was wanted by the law for impregnating an adolescent daughter from a previous marriage. According to family lore, Joe got my aunt to marry him by pulling a gun on her and asserting that if she didn’t marry him, he’d kill her.

When a man did something like that, he surely loved you. This was family. We laughed together, went to Jai Alai and casinos en famille, ate second and third helpings of rigatoni and spaghetti with meatballs, and eventually learned how to avoid each other as much as possible. Not an easy thing for Italians to do in Tampa, Florida back in the 70s.

I did not inherit my mother’s love for cooking, but I’m too frugal to dine out. Whenever I have cooked a meal for someone, that person has always complained. I have an 83-year-old neighbor who has no family and few friends. He likes to sit in the lobby of our apartment building reading the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. He mentioned once that he had spent some years being raised in an Italian family and would give anything for a plate of homemade spaghetti with meat sauce. So, I surprised him one day with a mound of pasta topped with meat sauce I had made from scratch. When I asked him how he liked the meal I prepared, the first thing he said was, “Let me tell you what you did wrong. For one thing, you used ground sirloin instead of spare ribs. This doesn’t taste anything like the sauce my grandmother used to make.”

A few times a year, the property manager treats residents to a catered buffet which everyone lines up for hours before the meal is scheduled to be served. Last summer the fare was fried chicken, collard greens, mashed potatoes, and corn bread. The woman in line behind me shouted, “What kind of food is this?” I turned around and said, “It’s free food, that’s what kind of food it is. Just grab a plate and be grateful.” The grouser then bellowed to the caterers, “This here is Black people’s food. Next time, bring us white people food.”

Growing up poor but well-fed, I gravitated toward a career in food service. First, I would move to San Francisco in my 20s where I spent five years dating rich men for a living. I would find a man to pay my rent and bills (in Pacific Heights, no less) and when that situation became tiresome, I moved on to another rich guy. I saw nothing wrong with this adventure. In a way, I was groomed for such a lifestyle. My mother bought me too-pretty dresses inappropriate for a little girl. Whenever company came to visit, she would push me into the center of the living room and make me twirl around for the adults to ooh and ahh over my Jon Bonet Ramsey potential. My father was an abusive alcoholic and a total drag to be around, so as a child, I made a vow to never marry or have children. All I wanted was to grow up and get even with my dad.

A scene from my childhood: I was standing in the breezeway near the check-in office of our motel, buying a Coke with my weekly allowance, when a man appeared before me, looking me up and down, asking my mom if I came with the room. She laughed. I was only 11, yet she laughed at the thought of a grown man asking if he could rent her daughter. That memory will stick to my ribs until the day I die. My dad’s brother, my Uncle Bob, had always tried to get his hands on me, but I assiduously managed to evade him. When I started wearing bras at 13 though, he would sneak up behind me and pull the horizontal band to make it snap hard against my back. When I got angry with him for doing this to me, the criminally negligent adults in my purview told me to stop being so sensitive and learn how to take a joke. Both my father and his brother would eventually commit suicide.

When I was first told about my father’s death, I was living in Seattle’s University District where I rented a room in a boarding house for $350 a month. A woman on my floor kept after me to attend her church which was an amalgam of Christianity and benign religious conspiracies. I finally accompanied her one Sunday and was instantly mesmerized by a buffet of fried rice, egg noodles, honey prawns, pot stickers, garlic broccoli, and so much more. The sermon was so boring and the food smelled so good, I kept gravitating to the buffet table where I’d nosh until my housemate shooed me back to my folding lawn chair. I kept splaying my greasy fingers as a way of explaining the untouched Bible reserved just for guests.

My father did not kill himself because he was filled with remorse for the way he treated his wife and daughter. He was simply too ashamed to register as a sex offender. I flew back to Florida to pack up my mother’s belongings so she could move to Washington State where her grown children would take care of her. When I returned to Seattle, I immediately went grocery shopping, bringing back to my room two towering bags of comfort. I put the potato chips and cookies in the cupboard then let a pint of Vanilla Häagen-Dazs soften on the counter. There’s something beautiful and uncomplicated about vanilla ice cream. Life can be so ugly and unfathomable. The ice cream had melted to perfection looking just like a snow-capped mountain surrounded by a moat of white cream. The first spoonful of vanilla reached all the way down to the hurt space created by childhood sexual abuse and neglect. When I finished the pint, I went back to the store and bought another one. ▩