Authors: Molly Birnbaum
Every morning at 5:00
A.M.
, as the sun crept up in the incandescent desert sky, Mbula and I stood together in the kitchen and ate fried eggs for breakfast before going to school. Standing over the sizzling pans each day, I tried to control my anxiety.
A haze of disease hovered over the village. In Namibia at the time, 15 percent of the population was infected with HIV or AIDS. Wandering through the village on a Sunday morning, I watched men crawl out of the bars onto the sides of the streets before passing out, drunk by 10:00
A.M.
; I passed lithe young women carrying sacks of grains, wrinkled grandfathers butchering meat in the market, and groups of children shooting basketballs in the school yard. The town was filled with the scent of boozy breath, rotting meat, and sand baking in the heat. Everything held the faint cloy of disease.
Teaching was an exercise in control—of the forty-odd children who piled in each of my classes, and of the panic I felt knowing how little could be accomplished in three months with few resources available. Between the ages of seven and fifteen, my students were lovable and enthusiastic, scruffy and haphazardly dressed. They looked at me with wide, often confused eyes. My American accent made English, the country’s official language, sound as foreign as their local tribal dialects did to me.
I was often frustrated. Without training, I had no idea how to control a classroom. I had no idea how I should exact discipline, though I knew it wasn’t by the force I saw from most teachers, like the afternoon I walked in on one large-boned science teacher as she whacked each of my learners across the back of the skull with a wooden eraser. I often felt out of control.
But I taught as best I could, struggling through lesson plans and homework with the hopeful devotion of a twenty-year-old who had never failed. In the classroom we worked in ragged notebooks on letters and numbers. I had my students draw pictures of their future in crayon, which I taped around the room like wallpaper. Mpunga, who sat in the front row with a devilish little smile, wanted to be an astronaut. Sidney, often by his side, thought he might like to work for a newspaper. I read Dr. Seuss books out loud, slowly turning the pages, watching the children’s eyes widen with the songlike language, the colorful illustrations drawing them close. I taught young giggling girls to use condoms on bananas and organized stacks of books into a library the principal was hesitant to use. When I walked home at night, I watched the bonfires of the camps where my students lived burning like fireflies in the distance, pinpricks on the ink-black horizon.
I didn’t know that Mr. Liswaniso, the soft-spoken science teacher who sat next to me in school meetings with his hands quietly clasped, was sick with AIDS until after I returned to the United States. No one spoke of illness; the community did not yet want to publicly address its spread. He passed away six months later, but the image of his hands—like gloves, slack with time his face did not yet show—stuck with me. They were too wrinkled, too old, too worn for his body.
I took refuge in my friendship with Mbula. We sang songs by Celine Dion, Mbula’s favorite, loudly together while cleaning the house, little Mary watching warily from the corner of the kitchen. We took trips to Mbula’s mother’s home, an apartment in a tiny compound a mile of sand away. Once, I stirred and shaped the patties of
n’shima
all on my own, and they applauded me before we sat down for our meager supper.
But I cried at night, alone in my room, hungry and tired but unable to sleep. I could hear Mary wail, Mbula and Bonnie yell. There were no telephones capable of long distance in the house, and the only working computer with the Internet was more than an hour walk away. I missed Alex and my family. I pasted a smile on my face each morning, but I felt very alone. I couldn’t eat eggs for years afterward. The scent of oil and butter and splattering orange yolk would immediately conjure the intense anxiety that clouded my gaze each morning over breakfast in Africa.
On a cool Saturday afternoon toward the end of that summer, I found Mbula in the kitchen.
“I’m going to make an apple pie,” I said. I wanted to show her that I was not hopeless. I wanted to prove that I had a past and perhaps a future, too.
“Okay,” Mbula said. She smiled, humoring me.
I walked to the grocery store alone, a few miles each way. I could feel the sun on my shoulders as I trudged through the sand, past young kids playing soccer and teenagers hanging out on the steps of a house near town. They called to me as I passed. I smiled.
At the store I bought a sack of apples—soft and slightly mealy—and a package of butter. I walked home with the bag under my arm and then dumped the contents on the counter. Later, with Mbula’s help, I began to bake. It was my first apple pie. I hoped it would work.
I made the crust with butter and flour, a few pinches of salt and water. Its texture was cold and smooth, reminiscent of my mother’s granite counter in Boston. I peeled and sliced the apples, which smelled sweet, like autumn. There was no cinnamon; only a strangely coarse cane sugar, but I didn’t care. Mbula and I draped the raw crust over the pile of fruit, pinched the top layer to the bottom with our fingers. I felt comfortable for the first time in months.
The pie came out of the small gas oven bubbling its aromatic apple juices. Rich, candylike wafts filled the house, and I smiled so wide it hurt. It smelled so familiar, so reminiscent of home and family. I was pleased when Mbula leaned in to inhale over its bulbous top.
We ate the pie together. Bonnie, Mary, and the two fellow volunteer teachers who lived nearby crowded around the kitchen table with Mbula and me. Though Mary quickly found more pleasure in tossing the soft apple filling on the ground, we were a festive group. The flake of crust, the silken sweet fruit, and the scent of my past took on greater significance with each bite. The act of cooking and eating together breached a wide chasm.
I should have saved some dough,
I thought.
Mary would have liked that.
I ARRIVED HOME
from Africa unable to shake the anxiety. The depression so pervasive in that small community stuck with me, lodging in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t shake the memory of often joyless meals with Mbula and her family. I couldn’t shake the sight of Mr. Liswaniso’s hands. I couldn’t shake the guilt I felt for having left. For months after, I had a hard time eating anything at all. Every bite felt like an accusation:
look what you have and they don’t
.
I lost weight rapidly and soon my clothes no longer fit. My mother began to look into nutritionists; my father asked me again and again what was wrong. I cooked constantly, feeding my family and my friends. I wanted to feed everyone around me. But I wouldn’t eat.
I began to see a therapist near my school in Providence. She had a bob of snow-white hair and a collection of funky shoes. We talked about Africa. We talked about eating. We talked about control. We talked through my final year of college, through my breakup with Alex and my growing obsession with the kitchen. I never left behind my guilt, but I learned to manage it. I learned about food, and what it meant. For me, it was family and warmth, nourishment and hope. It was my past and my future. For me, it meant everything.
I thought about the fried eggs I had shared with Mbula and how they remained painful, soaked in all the sadness I wouldn’t let myself feel. I could still smell the maize and booze of Katima, even as I inhaled the smoke of the grill on which my father cooked a steak upon my return and watched the ease with which it slid from spatula to plate.
I often thought about the afternoon of the apple pie in Africa. I thought about the emotion that had lurked behind each bite. The scent of the orchard, of baked sugar and sweet cream butter brought with it memories of home. It reminded me of love and then of guilt, of pride and longing and friendship. How can so much be contained in a simple bite of pie? I wanted to learn the art of the stove to get at so much more.
TWO YEARS LATER,
there I was at the Craigie Street Bistrot. I spent my nights chopping and cleaning, tasting and smelling. Even when I grew tired, when my back ached and I never wanted to look at, let alone eat, a clove of garlic or pat of butter again, I knew I was there for the right reasons. I knew I was on the periphery of that much more. Sometimes during dinner service I would steal away to the hallway dividing the kitchen and dining room and stand, for a few breathless seconds, at the pass. There, I could hear the clink of glass, the bursts of laughter, the soft chatter and background rifts of jazz music. On the edge of calm, on the edge of an air-conditioned cool, I could remain invisible in my stained apron and battered sneakers as I watched plates of bluefish and hanger steak arrive in front of dozens of well-dressed diners. I could witness couples holding hands and families giving toasts with glasses of white wine. I could watch a young woman gnaw meat off the rib bone with surprising grace and an older man wearing a bow tie take the first bite of pork belly and smile swiftly, contentedly into the air. Sometimes I needed proof that there were people out there. I loved my work, but after weeks of late nights soaked in grease, I could not completely suppress my frustration. It was difficult to clean mushrooms for three hours straight and imagine there was anything beyond wrinkled fingers and dirt-stained clothes.
One evening in July, I marched into Maws’s office and asked him when I would be able to do something besides pluck oregano or peel garlic. I wanted to know if this would be worth it. Why didn’t I just go to culinary school tomorrow?
Maws looked at me and said, slowly: “The only way to understand a head of garlic, Molly, is to work with it every day, taste it, feel it, smell it, grow with it through the changing seasons. Garlic in May is a different species from garlic in December. The only way to be a great chef is to understand your material, instinctively and experientially from the bottom, no matter how long it takes.”
I sighed and nodded. I was frustrated, but understood. When I returned to the kitchen, to my piles of dirty dishes and recently delivered microgreens waiting to be washed, I took a few deep breaths and tried to remember my purpose, one that was larger than the immediacy of the sink. I had to concentrate on the important moments—like the day that a sous-chef blindly placed an oblong leaf on my tongue and I immediately identified its delicate mintlike taste as hyssop.
I STEPPED OUT
onto the front porch of my mother’s home in Boston in running shoes and shorts on a drizzly morning at the end of that August and paused to look at the postdawn sky. It was dark and cloudy; I could feel the impending rain in the thick air.
I’ll make this quick,
I thought, sticking the headphones of my iPod into my ears. I wanted to spend the rest of the morning reading Harold McGee’s
On Food and Cooking;
my starting date at the Culinary Institute of America was approaching and I was already nervous.
The neighborhood was empty as I began to jog down the street. Even the local high school down the block, in its last week of summer vacation, was quiet. I ran on the sidewalk, bypassing the red pickup truck that was always parked in my way, and sidled up to the corner apartment complex, which bellowed the soapy-fresh aroma of laundry from its street-level vents. I loped up a small hill, around a wooded corner, and then paused at the intersection. Glancing up, I noted the warning of the blinking neon hand signal across the way. I only hesitated for a moment before crossing the four-lane highway.
I didn’t see the small Ford four-door as it sped through the light, which had just turned from red to green. I didn’t feel the crack of my body against the front bumper. I didn’t hear the sound of bone against glass when my skull shattered the windshield. I don’t remember flying through the air, as I ricocheted off the car and onto the hard sidewalk nearby. For me, the world shot straight to black.
According to the police officer who first arrived on the scene, I lay conscious but unmoving on the concrete sidewalk until the ambulance arrived. The Ford driver, a twenty-three-year-old recent college graduate on his way to work, hyperventilated into a brown paper bag nearby.
My parents sat next to my hospital bed for the next four days. My mother said that I was confused. I didn’t understand what had happened and I spoke like a child, calling out, “Mommy, I hurt,” when she walked into the Intensive Care Unit that first morning. I swore a lot and thought that the hospital, Beth Israel, was a synagogue. I recall hazy images of doctors’ white coats, the sound of cartoons on the television above my hospital cot, and the hard chill of bedpans. The ligaments in my left knee were torn, my pelvis broken in two places, and my skull fractured. Knee surgery came later. A bright strawberry bruise stained the side of my face and neck for weeks.
I lived in my mother’s living room for the next month. I lay on a bed that had been carefully hoisted downstairs by my brother and by Alex, who had driven down from his home in Vermont when he heard of my accident. I couldn’t move; everything hurt. I took pills—big ones, small ones, pink, blue, and purple ones—every few hours, which made me groggy and disoriented. It was impossible to fully focus my eyes.
And what my family found most disturbing: I wouldn’t eat. My mother constantly tried to feed me. She brought milk shakes and smoothies to me in bed—a desperate attempt, she said, to get some calories into my broken body. “No,” I would moan. “I can’t eat.”
THREE WEEKS AFTER
the accident I returned to the hospital for knee surgery. The morning was sunny and clear. As I hobbled from the car to one of the Deaconess Hospital’s hilltop buildings, I could feel the coming autumn in the cool breeze. I wasn’t yet used to my crutches and they dug into the soft flesh under my arms like wire.
I had just barely emerged from the fog of head injury. The weeks since the accident crowded into my memory, fuzzy and incomplete. I had lain on the bed in my mother’s living room day after day with limp legs and gyrating spirals of pain. Sometimes my mother and sometimes my father sat by my side, regularly in each other’s company for the first time since they had divorced seven years before. While they were at work, friends came. Alex, who extended his trip home to help me pass the days, spent a lot of time watching movies next to me as I slept. I was lucid when awake, but barely. I acted loopy like a drunk, stubborn like a preteen.