Read Online Blue Plate Special by Kate Christensen - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Kate Christensen
Ads: Link
wasn’t self-pity or hunger that was causing it, it was my mortification at being looked at.
“I’ll be right back,” said the waitress. “Hon, I am so sorry!”
I got my food, and it tasted as good as it looked. Turkey was gamier and richer than chicken. Cranberry sauce looked sweet, like strawberry jam, but tasted tart and hearty, both at once. The two things together tasted so good, I couldn’t eat my dinner fast enough. And then that huge meal was followed by dessert: we all got pieces of both pumpkin and apple pie with whipped cream. I had never tasted pumpkin pie before. It was so creamy smooth, like pudding, but it tasted like cinnamon and wasn’t overly sweet, and it melted on my tongue with the toothsome, flaky crust. Full as I was, bursting with food, I felt I could never eat enough pumpkin pie as long as I lived.
M ortification was becoming an increasingly common experience for me, the sudden, self-conscious, horrified realization that I didn’t understand adults, no matter how hard I studied them, and that I had just done something totally oblivious and childish. I was a kid, and there was a barrier between me and the grown-ups, their world and mine. Often, it had to do with sex.
In the spring of 1972, we went camping with my mother’s grad school friends in Mexico. Our car joined the caravan from Tempe down south across the border to Puerto Peñasco, or Rocky Point, on the Sea of Cortez. Back in the early seventies, Rocky Point was a tiny town with a wide clean sandy beach. It was the third or fourth time we’d gone camping down there, and we always stopped for lunch about halfway, in a town called Ajo, Arizona, whose A&W, in my family’s collective opinion, had the best hot dogs in the world. They put grilled onions on them, along with relish and ketchup and mustard, which was how we ate them out west and how I always ate them until I moved to New York and caved to peer pressure and ate them with mustard and onions only, like the natives.
Camping trips meant special food, stuff we never got at any other time: orange and grape Tang, instant powdered lemonade, breakfast bars, and astronaut space-food sticks—the peanut butter ones were my favorite; they tasted like a combination of Elmer’s glue and those chewy peanut-butter candies called Mary Janes. My mother also packed baloney and Cracker Barrel cheese, hot dogs and buns, marshmallows, and—wonder of wonders—potato chips. Of course, there were also whole-wheat bread, granola, peanut butter, strawberry jam, apples, bananas, carrot and celery sticks, those old staples, but even they tasted better on the beach, in the shade of the tent, with a fine grit of sand between our teeth.
We ate breakfast on the beach in the hot sunlight by the sparkling ocean before a day of running down to the waves to plunge in and jump over each one as it rolled into shore. Sometimes we had late-afternoon lunches in the inner courtyard of an old colonial hotel in the town of Puerto Peñasco. We ate shrimp with garlic over yellow rice, grilled fish, chicken enchiladas in green sauce. The grown-ups drank bottles of beer with limes; we got Shirley Temples. There was Mexican music playing, and an ocean breeze blew in through the tall open windows.
At night, we sat around big driftwood bonfires, eating charred hot dogs and marshmallows on sticks, singing songs around the campfire and stargazing. My sisters and mother and I slept in our big green and orange canvas cabin tent with our sleeping bags all in a row with the window flaps rolled and tied up to let the ocean air in through the screen mesh windows.
The beach was quiet and dark except sounds of the waves and the intermittent headlights and putt-putt-putts of beach buggies going by. I was always anxious about being crushed under those big rubber wheels in my sleep, and I did my best to whip my little sisters into a frenzy of fear so that I wouldn’t be alone in it. In the mornings, miraculously still alive, we
“I’ll be right back,” said the waitress. “Hon, I am so sorry!”
I got my food, and it tasted as good as it looked. Turkey was gamier and richer than chicken. Cranberry sauce looked sweet, like strawberry jam, but tasted tart and hearty, both at once. The two things together tasted so good, I couldn’t eat my dinner fast enough. And then that huge meal was followed by dessert: we all got pieces of both pumpkin and apple pie with whipped cream. I had never tasted pumpkin pie before. It was so creamy smooth, like pudding, but it tasted like cinnamon and wasn’t overly sweet, and it melted on my tongue with the toothsome, flaky crust. Full as I was, bursting with food, I felt I could never eat enough pumpkin pie as long as I lived.
M ortification was becoming an increasingly common experience for me, the sudden, self-conscious, horrified realization that I didn’t understand adults, no matter how hard I studied them, and that I had just done something totally oblivious and childish. I was a kid, and there was a barrier between me and the grown-ups, their world and mine. Often, it had to do with sex.
In the spring of 1972, we went camping with my mother’s grad school friends in Mexico. Our car joined the caravan from Tempe down south across the border to Puerto Peñasco, or Rocky Point, on the Sea of Cortez. Back in the early seventies, Rocky Point was a tiny town with a wide clean sandy beach. It was the third or fourth time we’d gone camping down there, and we always stopped for lunch about halfway, in a town called Ajo, Arizona, whose A&W, in my family’s collective opinion, had the best hot dogs in the world. They put grilled onions on them, along with relish and ketchup and mustard, which was how we ate them out west and how I always ate them until I moved to New York and caved to peer pressure and ate them with mustard and onions only, like the natives.
Camping trips meant special food, stuff we never got at any other time: orange and grape Tang, instant powdered lemonade, breakfast bars, and astronaut space-food sticks—the peanut butter ones were my favorite; they tasted like a combination of Elmer’s glue and those chewy peanut-butter candies called Mary Janes. My mother also packed baloney and Cracker Barrel cheese, hot dogs and buns, marshmallows, and—wonder of wonders—potato chips. Of course, there were also whole-wheat bread, granola, peanut butter, strawberry jam, apples, bananas, carrot and celery sticks, those old staples, but even they tasted better on the beach, in the shade of the tent, with a fine grit of sand between our teeth.
We ate breakfast on the beach in the hot sunlight by the sparkling ocean before a day of running down to the waves to plunge in and jump over each one as it rolled into shore. Sometimes we had late-afternoon lunches in the inner courtyard of an old colonial hotel in the town of Puerto Peñasco. We ate shrimp with garlic over yellow rice, grilled fish, chicken enchiladas in green sauce. The grown-ups drank bottles of beer with limes; we got Shirley Temples. There was Mexican music playing, and an ocean breeze blew in through the tall open windows.
At night, we sat around big driftwood bonfires, eating charred hot dogs and marshmallows on sticks, singing songs around the campfire and stargazing. My sisters and mother and I slept in our big green and orange canvas cabin tent with our sleeping bags all in a row with the window flaps rolled and tied up to let the ocean air in through the screen mesh windows.
The beach was quiet and dark except sounds of the waves and the intermittent headlights and putt-putt-putts of beach buggies going by. I was always anxious about being crushed under those big rubber wheels in my sleep, and I did my best to whip my little sisters into a frenzy of fear so that I wouldn’t be alone in it. In the mornings, miraculously still alive, we
Similar Books
