Places des Vosges/Imlay City, Michigan

I remember looking at a studio apartment near Tompkins Square Park in my twenties; literally just one room with a tiny bathroom off to the side, it was all I could afford on my own. As I stood in the space trying to imagine how I might arrange my stuff there, I realized that with just the one room, I would never be able to escape myself in the apartment. A strange thought, I know, but one which I've returned to again and again over the years. Filling my car two days ago with a suitcase, an overnight bag, a bag of shoes, a box of books, a computer bag, another bag of books, two bags of Arlo paraphernalia, and a box of presents to be emptied over the course of the next 3700 miles with my friends and family whom I'd be visiting, I said I was escaping the horrors that my condo building has become (remember the monster in the basement you were afraid of as a little kid? She's now living in the "garden apartment" of my building). Yesterday, as I wept at the end of the audiobook of Joan Didion's The White Album and then again as I listened to Anna Ternheim's rendition of "China Girl," I realized I was also trying to escape myself, but there I was in the car right there with me, and for the next 3700 miles (MA to LA to OR) and back again.  

Less than two weeks ago I was sitting on a park bench with Alison, my former student and Research Assistant (and designer of this blog), in the Places des Vosges in Paris. I had led her on a hike down from our little place in Montmartre all the way to the Marais, stopping for various provisions along our walk -- soft breads baked with lardons (bacon) and olives and chevre with figs, canelles from the Stohrer Patisserie on rue Montorgueil, and a lunch at a little cafe/tabac on rue Rambuteau. There she had a croque monsieur (and why not!) and I had a salad drenched with bacon, chevre, green beans, and tomatoes and topped with a fried egg. The greens were a perfect delivery system for, let's call it, the protein portion of the bowl. She had a Coke, which would become her afternoon custom on our afternoon stops (over the course of only two days, but still customs set in), and I had a cafe creme, which I would switch over the next day or so to a customary espresso into which I would pour the entire package of supplied sugar. From our outside table, we crossed the street to one of our major destinations of the day, Pain de Sucre, the bakery/patisserie introduced to me by my friend Ruby four or five years ago as the place with the best macarons in town. I would like to say that I am on an expert on many sweet things, but I can't claim expertise on macarons. However, I have sampled them from those shops often considered the best for this fare: La Durée and Pierre Hermé. And with that limited range, I absolutely and utterly concur that no one makes a nicer macaron than Pain de Sucre. We chose just four: caramel with salted butter and pistachio for me, passion fruit with chocolate cream chocolate-chocolate (or chocolat noir) for Alison. My pistachio was perfectly good, chosen for the color and for my historical love of pistachio-chocolate things (like pistachio almond fudge ice cream from Baskin Robbins). But the caramel one sent me swooning in its creamy salty buttery yumminess. The ground almonds of the pastry were transformed by the caramel and the buttercream, and the buttercream was more cream than butter. It was, in a sense, heavy in flavor (caramel has a heftiness to it by nature, I think), but the sensation was pure light. "Silky" seems a predictable cliché here, but I'd like to say the macaron was the gastronomic equivalent of silk. It wasn't that it had a silky texture. It simply was silk. Alison had a similar experience with her passion fruit. "This is life-changing!" she literally gasped. Hers was, I think, an exceptional choice. A week after this day I would be sharing a plate of macarons I brought home from Pain de Sucre with my condo-mates in Massachusetts, both of whom are not only exquisite women, but also, I think, have exquisite taste (in dogs, for instance, and textiles). They deemed the passion fruit "strange" (and it is, frankly, with its amalgam of a tinge of sourness along the bittersweet chocolate, its texture somehow not as smooth as some of the others) and proclaimed the chocolate as the best. I don't mean to judge these respective choices -- at least not morally. The chocolat noir is perfect and therefore easy to love without condition. The passion fruit is perhaps a little demanding; it asks something more of the woman who consumes it.

Between bites of my macarons, which I didn't want to end, I filled Alison in on some of the details of the last year, details I had planned otherwise not to share and which, in fact, I hadn't over the course of often truncated or belated email. I hadn't seen her in nearly a year, this young woman who, to my surprise, had become so singularly important to me in my second year at Amherst. She had become one of three or four people Arlo greeted without barking. She became our kin. And I had missed her.

Filling her in on bits of the past months, my eyes welled with tears. And in taking my breath and then letting it out (so as not to cry), I wondered if I could leave those feelings there -- of loneliness and disappointment and frustration and something else I still can't describe -- in the Place des Vosges. I could imagine them disappearing, like my breath itself, into the middle of the grassy square. No-one would even notice, and I would go back to my macarons and my days in Paris with Alison, this lovely young woman who was my student and is now my friend.

What broke me at the end of The White Album is very much what made me suddenly burst into tears at the end of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Both of them end with Didion taking leave of a place: in the earlier book, it was to finally sell her home in New York and live fully in California, and in The White Album, she and her husband and their daughter visit their house in Malibu that they had left some months before and that, days before their visit, was miraculously kept safe from a devastating fire that had destroyed 197 other houses: "The fire had come to within 120 feet of the property, then stopped, or turned, or had been beaten back. It was hard to tell which. In any case, it was no longer our house." Over the next five weeks, I am driving around 7000 miles. I am not able to escape myself in that car nor even, ultimately, my house to which I must return. I will land in the places in which I used to live, temporarily or "permanently," and then I will turn around again. I am hoping to come back lighter.

Strawberry cheek

Thinking about my first return to Santa Cruz since I packed my house three years ago, I started planning what food I would eat when I was in town. Surely the Spartacus Salad at the Saturn Cafe: lettuce, tomatoes, onion, fake chicken cutlet cut into tiny bits, feta cheese, pieces of pita bread all awash in what I think is ranch dressing. I have never been able to properly reproduce this salad, so that most of the time I try not to think about the Saturn -- neither about the Spartacus nor their perfect soy burgers with sautéed mushrooms and skinny fries on the side. I forget about their vanilla shakes and even the glasses of beer which I could in fact reproduce if I wanted to. I wanted, too, to go to Tacos Morenos for carnitas tacos or even to Tacqueria Jallarta which I find to be very very bland, even while I love their tostadas piled high with cheese and sour cream. I wanted to go to Zachary's for breakfast for Mike's Mess (indescribably delicious mound of potatoes, fried eggs, bacon, scallions, more sour cream) or their French toast (round!) or their sourdough pancakes (as close to my grandma's as I've ever had) or their coffee cake of the day (please, let it be cinnamon or chocolate chip).

But somehow I hadn't thought about my friends' cooking, neglecting to imagine Nancy's Noodles or breakfast at Irene's. I hadn't thought of the possibility of oatmeal: the thickest, creamiest oats I'd ever had, the grains opened as wide as possible. Irene added a dab of yogurt and jam (strawberry-rhubard, handmade of course). Why hadn't I thought of adding yogurt to oatmeal myself, I wondered. Two hours earlier I had awakened to Chad mixing something that looked quite horrible in the blender: a smoothie which, as it turned out, was made of bananas, strawberries, apple juice, yogurt, and kale. "It looks disgusting," I told him, but I had a glass, and of course it was delicious, sweeter than I could have imagined given that it was bright green. What is gastronomically more virtuous than starting the day with kale? Sunday night, while I was snuggling with her six-year-old son Max, Irene finished a batch of apricot jam. Monday morning I awoke to the green smoothie again, this time followed by a fresh crepe with the fresh jam. Chad makes these crepes almost daily; Max's was filled not with jam but Nutella. I kept insisting he finish his breakfast before going to school, but I was told, "My parents are not the kind of parents who say that I have to eat all of my snacks." "I honestly do not think that's true," I responded (secretly hoping, in fact, that he would not finish his crepe so that I could steal it after he left; I would have to time it right so that Chad wouldn't toss it before I had the chance. This kind of worry is borne of the fact that, as I've been told, my sense of food is based on a model of scarcity; it's as if I'm an ex-con, guarding my plate "on the outside" with my arm crooked around it). Crepes, fresh jam, green smoothies, Nutella in the cupboards -- this house was awash with the possibility of happiness.

I had tacos and the Spartacus salad my first day in town. On my last I had polenta and eggs at Kelly's Bakery, where Nancy convinced me to take a box of food for both the plane and home (a chicken sandwich, two toralfa chocolate cookies, a chocolate crimpy, a tiny quiche) and then loaded me with a box to open when I got to the airport (full, I found then, of fresh macarons, which I doled out one day at a time in Northampton). As with the Saturn, I try not to think about Kelly's; I surprised myself to realize I'd forgotten about the crimpies (shaped like a brioche, but denser, as if made with milk, and filled with delectables like chocolate or almond or olallieberry jam) and the toralfas (a subtle chocolate cookie with slivered almonds on top; it occurred to me that recently I had been trying to reproduce these with a Swedish recipe, forgetting why I craved them in the first place). I try, too, not to think about Max too much, as I worry he will forget me someday soon. But when I saw him that Friday afternoon, he leapt into my arms, as he has every time we've greeted each other after a long absence (except the first time, after I'd left Santa Cruz and didn't see him again until three months later; he sat in a corner at his aunt's house in Queens, where he ignored me until he couldn't help it any longer). Saturday morning after his dad left and his mom was still in bed, I made him bread with strawberry jam and a side of goldfish crackers. Now when I think of this child I love, I see him with a strawberry thumbprint on his cheekbone. He was running on the streets when suddenly he stopped in his tracks and burst into tears for a reason I can't remember. I saw the strawberry stain then -- just beyond the tears streaking down. All I wanted in that moment was to kiss that little patch of pink on his cheek. Instead I stood at a distance while his mom tended to his tears, picking him up into her arms.

With Gusto

Why am I spearing these green leaves with my fork, stuffing them into my mouth? I'm eating with gusto. It's not the gusto of joy but of a kind of desperation. Desperation for my vegetables? To get this food finished? To have eaten rather than to eat?

A week ago I was dancing at my college reunion. I rushed to Providence, missed dinner but not the drinks and the stuffed mushroom caps in the freezing tent outside. After a beer and a mushroom I went into Sayles Hall, the place where I'd seen Jessie Jackson speak in the 1980s -- I remember internalizing the cadence of his voice as much as the content of his speech, so that by the end I was carried into such a frenzy that I almost didn't know what happened except in the realization that something had happened. Dancing more than two decades later in this same hall transmuted me, too. It wasn't so much the rhythm of the music, though it was that, too. It was partly the scotch that I drank with my friend Sue in honor of our dead mentor. It was at his memorial service -- held, I think, in this same hall -- that I decided, finally, to go to graduate school. I'd been toying with the idea, and then all of a sudden I knew. So it was an impulsive decision borne of years of indecision.

I mixed my drink with other kinds of sugar. The first tray a server brought round was lined with tiny chocolate mousse cakes. I took one that looked like it had a hint of orange (it reminded me of a delicacy called Amélie, sold at Pix, a Portland patisserie that used to be around the block from my brother's house). I didn't taste any orange -- it was just a dense pure moussey chocolate, the thickness of cream without any air to lighten it. I would have preferred to eat just half of it, but I didn't know what to do with the rest (it was so pretty and so delicious that it seemed like it would be rude to forsake it). So I ate it for the sake of eating, not unlike my frantic spearing of greens today. Next came by a tray of bon-bons: small chocolate balls filled -- I checked with the server first -- with ice cream. These were generously sized treats. In another circumstance I might have better appreciated the thickness of the shell, a solid wall of dark chocolate surrounding vanilla ice cream. But all I really wanted was to taste and feel the iciness of the cream in my mouth. As I finished mine, I wondered if there were more to come.

Instead of waiting for more, Sue and I headed to the dance floor for this Funk Night reunion. Dancing was so easy -- it was dark and I kept drinking and, for a while, I didn't care if I had a "partner." I wondered why I didn't go to Funk Night every weekend when I was in college and thought maybe my life would have turned out much better if I had. I could have been like the other college girls, meeting all the boys I would never have the chance to get to know now, setting up prospects for my future. I danced for nearly three hours. I didn't want to stop, except that I knew I had to be up early for the graduation at the college where I now teach. I had parked a block from where I used to live at Brook and John, so my walk to my car was the walk I'd taken night after night when I was in school -- through the Green, across the fraternity quad and past the Ratty, down Thayer, up to Brook and over to Williams -- but it didn't even occur to me to feel like myself of those days.

I'm not sure what I feel like these days either. Yesterday I ate a noodle salad so quickly that by the end I thought I might be sick. Where did that speed come from? What need is it chasing?