—Annaliese Jakimides
Although Henry and I have been eating together for years—Brazilian and French, Cuban, Filipino, Turkish, and the 24-hour mashed-potato diner near his place in Brooklyn that stays open every holiday—he’s never eaten in the place where I live, until now. He’s never even visited.
Henry is my love, my late-in-life love, the impossible love who crossed my path about twelve years ago after my twenty-seven-year marriage was over and the three children were grown and gone (one really gone like my love will be).
We met when he was performing in Orono—Charlie Musselwhite, Deborah Coleman, Corey Harris, and Henry Butler. No food involved.
When I pick him up at the airport, he’s surprised that almost everyone knows me. I remind him that this is a small place. I could walk to the airport or the bus station, which is how I usually travel when I go to visit him: take the Concord to the Greyhound, then to Port Authority, where I catch the Metro, three changes, many stops. A stroll down the street, past Collado’s, the family-owned Dominican fast-food place with community tables we love. The el rattles overhead, flecking daylight through the grime-crusted rails. Finally, key in the door. Of course, getting a key to Henry’s didn’t happen immediately. It might have. It could have. If I’d realized that all I had to do was give him the key to my world—no strings attached, meaning “You’re always welcome; you’ll never find me being anyone but me—the me that you know and trust.”
When we enter my building, he immediately perceives that I live in an old high school—the broad, high-ceilinged hallway and the faint must of old wood and plaster make it clear.
Sun glitters through my twenty-foot-tall living-room window, revealing the patina’d copper dome of the library next door. With the bowl of sky over the dome, it looks as if I could be living in a European city—maybe Portuguese or French—instead of Bangor. Although Henry’s performed in those countries, it’s not the look of my place that matters to him. He’s never “seen” any of it, although I often forget that he can’t see. (All right, let me get this out of the way. I know it will linger if I don’t. Infant glaucoma. Untreated. So shortly after birth, totally blind, no light. Eyeballs removed.)
He can identify everything by scent and taste, texture—and sound.
For days, I have been making lists:
- peppermint leaves
- long-grained organic brown rice
- unripe bananas
- granny smith apples
- bulbs and bulbs of garlic
- scallops from MacLaughlin’s Seafood down the road
and planning meals:
- cabbage salad: purple and green, with wine-soaked raisins, toasted sunflower seeds, diced apples, onions
- nut loaf: cooked rice, cottage cheese, walnuts and cashews ground in the old hand grinder
- tofu pie: chunked, with carrots and eggplant, nutritional yeast and tamari, ginger, mom’s pie crust, still unmastered but acceptable
- all with bread: not mine. I no longer bake.
I’ve stocked the refrigerator as much as I can. Usually the interior is cavernous with open spaces and an easy view to every corner; now it’s so full I hold a map in my head of where, and behind what.
I know that these are the only days I will have to feed him. I will chop and season and cook in the tiny galley kitchen. I haven’t fed anybody three meals a day for five days straight since I moved to this apartment, almost twenty years ago.
I’m not saying have to like it’s an obligation, a weight, as in “Oh, damn, I gotta feed this man, every day. Shit!” No, it’s literally all I’ll have, this one time in which to cook for and serve him. I can’t say how I’m so convinced, so sure that this will be it, that he’ll never be in my apartment again. Perhaps it’s because it’s taken him all these years to free enough days to come to a small town with no music, even if his love lives there. Perhaps it’s the rumble of rapidly expanding cancer cells I can hear, and he can’t.
A few years ago, we met three other couples at Chez Josephine on West 42nd for dinner. I was the only sighted person at the table and read the entire menu aloud, and loudly, in the crowded restaurant. I am convinced food has a language—is a language—beyond its spoken tongues of escargot à la bourguignonne and pissaladière. It comes out in your choices, your offerings and awarenesses, reactions. You don’t get to know someone because of what they tell you about themselves. That’s a façade or a shroud, a strange covering. The surface.
I am New England, not fancy. He is Southern, New Orleans.
Henry and I were born days apart. Worlds apart. Foods apart.
I went to public school. He went to boarding school for the blind. Neither of us cooked at home.
While Henry was playing the piano in St. Petersburg and Paris, developing his palate, I was a back-to-the-lander learning how to boil water on an old King Kineo wood cookstove in Mount Chase, Maine, population 146, in the shadow of Mt. Katahdin. Dirt road. No electricity. A red Demings hand pump.
Growing up in Boston, I had no interest in knowing where food came from or how to prepare it. When I married and moved north, I never envisioned that we would grow or gather almost everything we ate, including borage and pigweed, wild mint, dandelion root, and thistle.
Nikki Giovanni says that you take what you have and make what you can. It’s how I learned to cook. To write. To make art. No instructions—except to not waste what you know, what you feel, what you have. I learned I could always make something from nothing.
Henry is checking out the old crock on the kitchen counter, filled with my cooking utensils. He runs his palm along the hand-carved donut stick I no longer have a need for but still love—the shape, the smooth maple. He fingers the old wooden spoon with the singed bowl. I know he’s building a story of what they are, where they have been—before he asks, or not. Sometimes looking is enough. Like today.
For a moment, I wish he could have experienced me up north in the old kitchen big enough to hold both this living room and the galley space. The room with southern light and a table made from an old bowling lane, with plenty of room to measure, roll, chop, and mix. Food from the land. Immediacy. Freshness. And music flooding from speakers mounted in the high corners of the barn-beamed ceiling.
***
Luciano Pavarotti said, “One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.”
Still, I often skip eating, waiting for hunger itself to drive me to food, often just food at hand.
Today, I’m neither hungry nor casually at-handing. I’m purposeful, and happy to be feeding someone I love, this particular someone I love. Breakfast already in motion, I pre-chop extra onions and green peppers to go with my cheese soup later. I say “my” because nothing I make ever turns out the same. Another go at it, and I’ll have a new version.
Henry is waking hungry these days here with me—unusual for him. He sits at the early-morning table in a soft ocean of thin light leaking through the east window. I only have east windows, morning windows, windows that are today channeling a fierce winter wind. I watch his face—his whole face, glasses off—and his straight back. He was shocked one night at Dizzy’s when I told him how a certain pianist was almost lying on the keys when he performed; he always thought everyone played sitting straight up as he did.
I can see him easily through the rectangular opening over the sink between the kitchen and the living room. For the first time, I wonder why we don’t call them “cooking” rooms, like “living” and “dining” rooms. I realize my chairs are not quite enough for his large ass and deep chest capable of rolling out thunderous notes, a moving baritone.
I’ve cooked eggs, large and fat-yellow scrambled. I’ve never mastered over-easy or sunny-side-up, a perfect omelet. He uses Louisiana hot sauce. For me, it’s that wicked-hot Deer Camp 12 Gauge Ginger made in Waterville.
“You can cook,” he says. There’s almost an exclamation point at the end. He looks right at me. His smile opens the world.
We have eaten. I’ve made breakfast and lunch and dinner. Washed all the dishes.
He’s listening now to Tyshawn Sorey. It’s like dessert to me, the sound of Sorey swirling in the room, licking into his ears and mine. Sometimes he doesn’t like to listen to music, but I’m hell-bent on playing some while he’s here, on his knowing that I have a deep and diverse sound bank in my head, my heart. I don’t know how to talk music any more than I know how to talk food.
I can only show you, and that requires you to be in my world—even just this once—so I can show you, Henry My Love:
—how I set the table. Cloth napkins, some from my mother almost thirty years gone. The square plates with the tilted edges, food safe in the middle. I tell you they are red.
—how I scrub the carrots and the apples, vinegaring them just as you do.
—how my landscape is shaped. The long community tables at Bagel Central around the corner like at Collado’s and the tiny Halal place on your street. The people, the conversations, the love.
—how the earth shifts—tectonic plates adjusting to apples and sauce, coriander and cheese, tofu, peppermint, and potatoes from the fields up north, food made by my hand, placed on your plate, at the little square table, our faces inches apart, feeding each other in unimaginable ways, sustenance and salvation, over and over again—in this cluster of days in the February before you leave.
(Breaking Bread: Essays from New England on Food, Hunger, and Family, anthology)