The Books: Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink; edited by David Remnick; ‘Enough’, by Alice McDermott

Next up on the essays shelf:

Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, edited by David Remnick

Secret Ingredients is a collection of food writing from The New Yorker. I love these collections. So far, we have excerpted from the following collections: Life Stories, The Fun of It, and The New Gilded Age.

I’m not a foodie, but I love this collection because 1. it gives snapshots of different eras, 2. the writing is great.

My father turned me on to Alice McDermott. I still remember what he said: he had heard an interview with her on NPR after the publication of her novel Charming Billy, which won the National Book Award. Of course he was interested in her because she was an Irish-American writer, Catholic, of the pre-post-Vatican II divide – his generation in other words. My father’s grandparents had Irish brogues. This is the world McDermott describes: the Baby Boomer Vatican II Catholic generation in America, with the smell of the peat bog still lingering in the suburbs of America. So I knew why he was interested in her, but I still remember what he said about her:

“She sounds like a very nice person.”

I love my father. He always focused on the right things. I remember talking to him about Rosalind Russell one day. I had been reading her memoir, and watching all of her films in a row. He was interested, as he was interested in anything that interested his children. (Well, if I had been interested in hooking for heroin, he would not have shared that interest.) So he listened to me talk about her career, and how it went down, and who she was, and then he asked, “So … was she happy in love?”

I have tears in my eyes, and always do every time I remember Dad’s question.

Because that is what really matters. Of course it is important to have an interesting life and work you enjoy. Dad did not discount those things. I told him that Yes, she was very happy in love, and he was happy to hear it.

So. “She sounds like a very nice person.” And anything Dad recommended I would check out. I read Charming Billy, and THRILLED to her “voice”. It’s not a flashy voice, or an overly literary voice – but it is as familiar as the air I breathe. She writes about “my people”, my family. Not my generation, but the generation of my aunts and uncles. She GETS this world, from the inside. Her stuff is not quaint or kitschy or any of that “I’m of Irish descent” bullshit that you sometimes get from Americans who identify as Irish. Her stuff is real. Lived in. Homey. There are tragedies in her book, family ruptures, and crazy uncles who live off the grid … All of this I recognize. It’s my family. She has such a good eye for behavior, for nuance, for the rhythms of a big Catholic family who all live near to one another. Irish families are embroiled with each other (John McGahern’s Amongst Women is the real masterpiece in terms of how such families operate, especially daughters with fathers.)

I haven’t read all of McDermott’s books, although I own most of them. I love That Night. My friend Jon, who is a writer, told me that the two opening pages of that book were held up in one of his writing classes as a superb opener. He ain’t kidding. Check it out. Wow.

I know McDermott also writes short stories but I haven’t read any of the collections. This story, ‘Enough’ was published in The New Yorker in 2002. It’s included in the “Food” collection because of its opening, which describes a young girl clearing the plates from Sunday dinner, and standing in the kitchen, licking and slurping the leftover ice cream from everyone’s plates. There is no real plot to this story. It’s a character study. Of that young girl, and what happened to her over the course of her life. She grew up in the late 30s, came of age in the 40s, lived a long life. The story is a powerhouse. It really should be read in its entirety. Since it does not take an episodic form, and is more of an overview – like an elegy or an obituary (“This is the kind of person she was …”) – it works cumulatively.

It is a portrait of a woman who had a great hunger. For life, love, happiness, her husband, and ice cream.

What I love is that the character turns out not the way you would expect, and yet that is just an indictment of how female characters are often written and thought about. Especially mothers. Reading ‘Enough’ is a great and refreshing tonic. This story could be about my grandmothers, my grandmothers’ friends. Good conscientious Catholic ladies.

GORGEOUS. Seek it out to read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt.

Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, edited by David Remnick; ‘Enough’, by Alice McDermott

Extrapolate , then, from the girlhood ritual (not to say, of course, that it ended with her girlhood) to what came to be known as her trouble with the couch. Trouble on the couch would have been more accurate, she understood later, when she had a sense of humor about these things that at the time had no humor in them at all. But such precision was the last thing her family would have sought, not in these matters. Her trouble with the couch, it was called. Mother walking into what should have been the empty apartment except that the boiler at the school had broken and the pastor had sent them all home and here she was with the boy from upstairs, side by side on the couch, her two cheeks flushed fever pink and her mouth a bleary, full-blown rose, and her mother would have her know (once the boy had slipped out the door) that she wasn’t born yesterday and Glory Be to God fourteen years old was a fine age to be starting this nonsense and wasn’t it a good thing that tomorrow was Saturday and the confessionals at church would be fully manned. She’d had a good soaking in recrimination all that evening and well into Saturday afternoon, when she finished the rosary the priest himself had prescribed, the end coming only after she returned from the Communion rail on Sunday morning and her mother caught and held her eye. A stewed-fruit Sunday no doubt.

Her oldest sister found her next, on the couch with her high-school sweetheart, midafternoons once again – their mother, widowed now, off working in an office – and the first four buttons of her dress undone, the lace bodice of her pale-pink slip all exposed. And then not a month or two later that same sister found her there with another boy, his head in her lap and his hand brushing up and down from her ankle to her knees.

Then there was that Saturday night during the war when her oldest brother, too drunk to go home to his new wife on the next block, let himself in and found her stretched out on the couch in the embrace of some midshipman who, it was clear, despite their quick rearranging of clothes, had his fingers tangled up in her garter. There were buttons undone that time, too, and yet again when she was spied on by the second sister, who never did marry herself but who had an eyeful, let me tell you – a marine, this time, his mouth, to put it delicately, where her corsage should have been and her own hands twisted into his hair as if to hold him there – which led to such a harangue about her trouble with the couch that, finally, even her old mother was moved to say that there was a war on, after all.

Later, her best girlfriend joked that maybe she would want to bring that couch along with her on her wedding night. And joked again, nine months to the week later, when her first son was born, that she didn’t seem to need that old couch after all.

There were seven children altogether, the first followed and each of the others preceded by a miscarriage, so that there were thirteen pregnancies in all, every loss mourned so ferociously that both her husband and her mother advised, each time, not to try again, each birth celebrated with a christening party that packed the small house – made smaller by the oversize floral couch and high-backed chairs and elaborate lamps she had chosen – and spilled out into the narrow yard and breezeway, where there would be dancing, if the weather allowed. A phonograph placed behind the screen in the kitchen window and the records going all through the long afternoon, and on into the evening. You’d see her there after the last guest had gone, the baby on her shoulder and maybe another child on her hip, dancing to something slow and reluctant and melancholy (“One for my baby, and one more for the road”). Lipstick and face powder on the white christening gown that night, as well as the scent of the party itself, cigarette smoke and perfume and the cocktails on her breath.

She was a mother forever rubbing a licked finger to her children’s cheeks, scrubbing at the pink traces of her own kisses, forever swelling up again with the next birth. Kids in her lap and her arms wrapped around them even after their limbs had grown longer than her own. The boys, before she knew it, lifting her off her feet when she took them in her arms.