Talking with My Mouth Full (4 page)

He put my parents through a lot of stress when we were young. My mother now tells me she has guilt about that time, that she worries she neglected my other brother and me. Alan sucked up so much of their energy, and in many ways still does, because he continues to battle his inner demons. Suffice it to say, he was the more difficult child in the family. He was always breaking curfew, getting arrested for shooting BB guns with his friends, stealing from my parents’ liquor cabinet.

In contrast, my brother Eric was a straight-A student and the quintessential jock: classically handsome, on the hockey team, and a star tennis player. Both my brothers were rowers in high school, but Eric was the true athlete and always the popular one. Like a scene from an eighties teen movie, my girlfriends used to come over in the summer just to watch him mow the lawn with his shirt off. Eric has always been a hard worker. He has created for himself a wonderful life and family. He married at the age of twenty-six; he and his wife, Kim, had three kids by the time he was thirty-three: Tyler, Elle, and Brooke, my beloved and awe-inspiring nephew and nieces!

Although Alan and Eric remained close, they went separate ways after high school. Their personalities and preferences were black-and-white—the introvert and the extrovert. I always felt that I landed somewhere in between, but I am probably more extroverted than either of them. They both liked to shape me, and since they were significantly older, we never had much to fight about. They teased and bugged me, to be sure, but they were also my greatest confidants and consummate protectors, without ever being overly protective. In many ways they still are.

In an effort to broaden our minds, my parents led us on adventures to faraway lands, especially my father’s native South Africa, a complicated and beautiful country with a history as diverse as any on the map. Cape Town is my father’s favorite city in the world. He has blinders on when it comes to the crime, poverty, and socioeconomic tensions there. Physically, the city is extraordinary. It feels like it’s tumbling down a table-shaped mountain range, crashing into the South Atlantic Ocean. I think he would move back there if my mother would let him.

When I was six, my parents took us there over Christmas holidays for two weeks. It was my first time in the country.

Like the people themselves, the food of South Africa derives from many sources, including India, Malaysia, Britain, Holland, and several native African tribes. There are a few key dishes that are very particular to South Africa, like
bobotie
, a baked egg-and-milk sauce over minced meat, flavored with herbs, raisins, and nuts; pickled herring;
boerewors
, which are mixed meat sausages best cooked on a
braai
, or barbecue; bunny chow, a hollowed-out loaf of bread filled with curry and popular on the coast near Durban; and my favorite,
melktert
, a milk custard tart flavored with orange zest and baked in a delicate flaky dough.

What I remember most from our trips there are the raw ingredients, the country’s outrageously delicious and unique fruits and vegetables that you just cannot find (or aren’t as good) anywhere else: guava,
naartjies
(native oranges), mangos and apricots, pawpaw (papaya), and
mielie
(corn).

My absolute favorite South African food is biltong: air-dried, salted meat, cut or shaved into bite-sized pieces or sold in large strips that can be sliced up as you desire. It has a very specific savoriness and is not sweet the way American beef jerky is. Sometimes it has a spice rub.

Originally, biltong was made from beef, but now you can get all kinds, including ostrich, kudu (antelope), or buffalo biltong. My favorite is actually chicken biltong. You don’t usually want to think about eating raw chicken, but it is dried and salted sufficiently. Ostrich is also outstanding. The flavor is halfway between steak and chicken: the best of both worlds.

Chewiness is the most underrated texture. Biltong is salty and savory, but also chewy. I like gnawing on a larger strip. In Sea Point, where my cousins used to live, there is a shop called Joubert and Monty’s that is famous for its biltong. Some people order it sliced or moist, but I like to slice it myself and let it dry out a bit first.

Whenever we go back to South Africa, we buy pounds of the stuff and keep it in the glove compartment to eat as we drive around. Any meat that you can keep for hours on end in the blistering African sun is the perfect road-trip snack, as far as I’m concerned. For ages it was impossible to find in North America. Luckily, a company in North Carolina, called Biltong USA, makes really good biltong and sells it online.

That trip when I was six was the first time I met my extended South African family. We knew my grandparents already, because they had come to visit us in Canada, but we were introduced to a whole new contingent of aunts, uncles, and cousins.

I have a lot of vibrant memories from that trip. We went to Johannesburg for a few days. Then to Kruger National Park, where I went on my first of many safaris. Kruger is the largest safari park in the world. It was an amazing experience as a child to see those wild animals up close: wildebeest, kudu and their young, wild dogs chasing our car, impala, and giraffes, all gathering around a watering hole. Lions!

We also went to Cape Town, and from there we drove through the wine region, to Stellenbosch, about an hour away, where my parents took us wine tasting. Now the area has a booming wine industry, but at the time, it was just budding.

We arrived at our first winery and my parents brought us into the tasting room. They explained that we should taste the wine by dipping our tongues into the glass, just to get the flavor. Well, I followed whatever my brothers did, because they were my idols. They were knocking back whole glasses of wine, so I started drinking from a few too. My parents may have noticed us taking a sip, but no one seemed aware of quite how much we were drinking.

Having lunch at a winery in South Africa in 1982

We went to a few wineries that day and I kept on slurping glass after glass of wine. Before long, I was having the time of my life. The story goes that I started copying everything everyone said and making my parents crazy. I was running in circles, giggling and jumping up and down. When we returned to our car I promptly passed out cold for eight hours. I woke up with my very first hangover.

I only remember that it tasted bitter and dried out my mouth. I don’t remember much else about the experience, but then again, I was six and I was drunk.

Despite my early penchant for Pinotage, I was still a long way from being a sophisticated drinker. It was just seven years later when I had my second encounter with alcohol. I was thirteen, on Christmas vacation in Costa Rica. This was well over twenty years ago, when Costa Rica was not yet an eco-destination. It was still relatively undeveloped. My mother and father had close friends who were working in Peru for a short time, and they had a daughter my brothers’ age, so we met them halfway for the holidays.

At the time, I was annoyed by the entire situation. My teenage response to news of the trip was: “Where the hell is Costa Rica?” I was going to be alone with my family when I could have been in Florida, where the rest of Jewish Canada (and America for that matter) migrated for the season, with my friends and my middle school boyfriend. (Yes, I had a serious boyfriend in eighth grade. He was a musician, the first in a long line of musician boyfriends. In the end, I got the music fanatic with the business head, so it all worked out. But that came much later.)

We spent the first week in San José, taking trips to the rain forest and touring the surrounding area. Then, for our second week, we all moved to a small town called Quepos, on the Pacific coast. It is famous for its extensive national park, Playa Manuel Antonio, which was a draw for its quiet, pristine beaches and protected wilderness.

Now, apparently, it’s very built up. Ecotourism has thrived in that part of the country, but at the time, there was nothing—no hotels and no resorts. We rented condos for a week, a mile up from the beach, literally
in
the rain forest. We were the only gringos in the tiny town.

Every day we would buy plantains on the side of the road and carry them through the rain forest to the beach. We’d hold them up in the air and the capuchin monkeys would come down from the trees and take them from us for their lunch. We’d wake up in the morning and there would be a toucan in the tree outside of our bedroom window. Other days it might be a sloth or howler monkeys, with their deep, guttural growls at dawn.

On New Year’s Eve we all went to what was probably the only fully equipped restaurant in town. My brothers, who were almost twenty, and Lisa, the daughter of our friends, thought it would be fun to get me drunk again. They were doing shots of Jack Daniel’s and passing them to me under the table. After maybe two, I was feeling warm and fuzzy.

As with the first time around, I wouldn’t shut up. I was talking nonstop, and loudly. At one point, Marilyn, my mother’s friend, turned to me and said, “How much do you charge to haunt a house?”

I didn’t know what that meant, but I took it as an insult and burst into tears. Then I passed out. Thankfully, once I got out of middle school, I learned to handle my liquor a little better.

I tried to stay miserable in Costa Rica, but it was an amazing trip for a lot of reasons. It took us out of ourselves as children, exposed us to wildlife, to nature, and especially to a culture and way of life so totally different from our own. It was the ideal time in our lives for a trip like this. We were just old enough to appreciate how fortunate we were to have the experience, but still young enough for it to leave a substantial and lasting impression. I look back on it now as one of the most meaningful and idyllic times in my family’s history.

Soon afterward, life got more complicated for us. It became more apparent that Alan was struggling—with college, holding down a job, generally finding his way. Several years ago, Alan decided to seek out his biological parents. My parents were remarkably cool about it. My family had always talked openly and inclusively about my brothers’ adoption. I am sure they had prepared themselves for this possibility down the road. When he did find his birth mother, she embraced him. She has become a big part of his life and has a good relationship with my mother because of this.

One thing he discovered was that his mother was an artist and his father was a musician. The genes were strong enough that he found his way to music and art and excelled at it, with my parents’ support and encouragement.

I could talk about his personal struggles all day, but it’s impossible to summarize easily. It’s a story that would need a book of its own, and that’s his book to write, not mine. I don’t want to diminish or label him in any way that doesn’t fully explain what an exceptional person he is, and what hell he’s gone through.

Our childhood differences have manifested themselves in our feelings about food. Alan had food issues connected to his health. He’s been a vegan, a vegetarian, and he’s been on an all-chopstick diet. He doesn’t eat dessert. He has never had any interest in sweets.

And certainly compared to me, Eric could be considered a picky eater. He loves to eat well and is a solid cook, but he has a number of particular food aversions. He
hates
vinegar. He can’t stand it on anything, which basically wipes out eating salad or salad dressings of any kind.

I wasn’t fussy about food, but as a teenager, I did go through a semivegetarian phase. It’s hard to believe now, but for about eight years, I ate no red meat. Vegetarianism was not a moral issue for me. I had stomach issues in my teens, and I thought a vegetarian diet made me feel better. As with so many teenagers, my diet was tied more to what my friends were doing and what I felt would make me healthier based on the accepted knowledge of nutrition at the time (low fat, high carb, less red meat).

In my teens a lot of my girlfriends were vegetarians, too. There wasn’t any major activist purpose behind it—it was more about body image, I think. Unlike several girls I knew, I never suffered from an eating disorder, but I wasn’t immune to how such disorders were perpetuated at school and at home in so many obvious ways. I even remember some of my friends’ parents weighing them, telling them they looked fat, or that they would never get boyfriends, and so would never fit in.

The common message was: if you don’t have a boyfriend or aren’t skinny enough, you’re worthless. It was as though even in high school, people were concerned about girls finding husbands. It infuriates me to think that is actually how the world speaks to young women.

I remember clearly my conflicted feelings at that time in my life, the social pressure that drove me to be a vegetarian, because that’s what girls did to show they were feminine. They would “just have a salad.” I knew girls who would never eat in front of boys. That to me was so enormously sad and confusing—as if eating were a shameful act, as if you as a woman should be embarrassed for wanting to take pleasure in food. I wondered if I should feel shame that I didn’t mind eating in front of people. Many girls I knew counted every calorie they ate, eating only low-fat foods or not eating at all, needing to control that part of their lives in a desperate effort to make adolescence more bearable. At my house the issue was not up for discussion.