How to Cook a Moose (3 page)

Part of the problem was that I never felt like a Westerner. As a bookish, non-religious, violin-playing would-be writer, I felt out of place in the Arizona desert, the suburban, staid, Christian Southwest of the 1970s. I had no sense of belonging to a community or even an extended family; my mother and two little sisters and I were estranged from most of our relatives on both sides, for various reasons. We didn't go to church or belong to any social groups or clubs. We moved every year or two, so once again I'd have to make new friends, be the new girl.

What appealed to me in the novels I read was that often they were about place as much as character. I learned from books about tightly knit villages, the gossipy goings-on of the upper and lower classes, the severe repercussions of going against your place in tradition and society. In the 1970s, these things were being systematically dismantled without a solid replacement for them; I was fascinated by the literary evidence that they existed, as my own life went on being fractured and uprooted. To soothe myself, throughout my childhood, I planned my future as a novelist, vowed to find my own place somewhere in the wide world.

Even as a ten-year-old, when I wasn't wishing I lived in Victorian or Edwardian England, I dreamed of living in New York someday, that glittering metropolis of movies and novels. But when I finally arrived there in 1989, twenty-seven years old and fresh out of graduate school, some of my father's extreme Marxist values must have asserted themselves
in me, to complement my mother's cheerful romanticism of scrappy survival. In other words, I discovered that I deeply disapproved of rich people. I was flat-out horrified by the conspicuous spending, material accumulation, and financial striving I saw in the city; I looked askance at the countess I worked for as a personal secretary, the Wall Street traders I overheard in bars talking about swaps and derivatives, anyone who seemed to have more than his or her fair share, whatever that was. I even not-so-secretly disapproved of my Choate- and Georgetown-educated WASP boyfriend from Connecticut, James, and also, wholly unfairly, of his easygoing, generous, fun-loving millionaire uncle, who struck me as a shallow, nouveau-riche layabout whose Rhode Island McMansion was badly built and falling apart.

I remember, one cold fall afternoon when I was twenty-eight, taking the subway from the sketchy, skeevy neighborhood deep in Brooklyn where I lived to the Upper East Side of Manhattan to meet James, his uncle's wife, and some of her friends in the Carlyle Hotel bar. I walked into the Carlyle in my ripped thrift-store coat, wearing a black miniskirt, a moth-eaten sweater, cheap tights, and Frye motorcycle boots, an outfit that worked perfectly well in the East Village. But here, in the hushed, ornate Carlyle bar, I realized that I looked like a pauper, an upstart, an urchin. I felt so out of place, I might as well have been in a country where I didn't speak the language, where I had no passport or money and knew no one.

James's aunt, who lived in Madison, Connecticut, and played tennis and had a shining blonde pageboy hairdo and a permanent sharp, intelligent, amused expression, saw me first. “Kate!” she called, waving. I approached their table, suddenly intimidated, feeling monstrously out of place. I looked around at her and her friends, their tasteful makeup, effortlessly correct clothes, glowing burnished skin, impeccable hair, and then I saw James, who looked perfectly at home among them in his navy blazer, Brooks Brothers shirt, and khakis.

He gestured to the empty chair next to him. I wanted to get the hell out of there, run and never look back. Instead, I hung my unspeakably terrible coat on the chair's back, exposing the rip in its lining, and sat down.

“Did you really mean for me to come here?” I blurted, loudly enough so that everyone heard.

“Of course,” said James, his eyes flickering over my face in the general laughter at my gaucheness.

But I didn't believe him. I ordered a vodka on the rocks and sipped it, seething, uncomfortable, furious at him for making me come here where I didn't belong. It was as if he had forgotten who I was, momentarily mistaken me for someone who would fit in in a place like this. Then, as the vodka loosened my brain and diminished my anxiety, I watched them all talk, as curious as an anthropologist among a foreign tribe whose lifestyle she finds arcane and louche and exotic. They seemed so thoughtlessly self-satisfied, these wealthy Easterners, so polished and reserved.

Later, when I worked as an office temp and then a corporate secretary for several years, I watched the people I worked among the same way; these lawyers, executives, all the corporate types, were completely foreign to me. I'd mostly only known outliers growing up—hippies, politicos, suburban and provincial Arizonans, artists, spiritual crackpots, then college professors and Oregon outdoorsy types and intellectuals, then fellow writers and friendly, unpretentious, middle-class Midwesterners. Rich people and corporate types were far more foreign to me in their way than the countless nationalities of people I rode the subway with, jostled against on the streets. I was one of the aspiring poor of the city, and the aspiring-artist class is generally allied with the immigrant strivers. People who had money, either inherited or earned, seemed to exist in a rarefied bubble all their own, a privileged inner sanctum sealed off by several airlocks from the hubbub
and chaos I lived in with my bodega beers, the well-used black pleather ankle boots I'd bought off a blanket on Avenue A for two bucks, the easy patois of half-heckling banter I was learning to speak with taxi drivers and deli cashiers and bartenders, the language of the aspirers.

The privileged, ruling-class people's language was radically different. At the table in the Carlyle, everyone spoke in low tones, understated, with calibrated pauses and significant eye contact, an elaborately developed shorthand. I didn't understand anything they said, caught none of their references, missed all the subtext and innuendo.

My half-alienated, half-fascinated disapproval of James and his family and their ilk did not, however, prevent me from buying a $70 round-trip Amtrak ticket, as often as I could, to go to Rhode Island to spend a three-day weekend with James in his uncle's empty house in Jamestown. For the year and a half before I became an office temp, I was the personal secretary to a countess on the Upper East Side, ghostwriting her spy novels and organizing her busy schedule of functions, fund-raisers, and galas, so “going to Rhode Island” meant escaping everything I dreaded and feared, and luxuriating in everything I loved. James and I lounged up on the house's widow's walk at sunset with glasses of wine, sat on the railed wraparound porch in the sun, rode our bikes to the old fort with a picnic for an afternoon, and hitchhiked into Newport to spend a day on the Cliff Walk and at First Beach or to go to music festivals or tennis matches.

I learned to love the food of New England—but not the famously bland WASP meals, imported straight from England, of turgidly gummy clam chowder and Saltines, or tuna salad with no mayo on a limp iceberg leaf with a pallid tomato slice, or overcooked chicken breasts drowned in thick sauce with a side of gray overboiled vegetables. In Rhode Island in the summertime, I discovered fresh, local food, and I never looked back. We bought smoked mackerel and fresh
striped bass at the little fish place across the bridge, squash and lettuce and corn from the local farm stand. We drank cold, fizzy, robust vinho verde from the Portuguese store in New Bedford.

And I also discovered excellent restaurant food. When James's uncle came up from Connecticut for a night or two, which he only occasionally did, he took us out for expensive sushi dinners in his Jaguar; we sat at a table in the window of the Japanese place in Newport. Uncle Jack always ordered an enormous tray of fish, “the sushi boat,” plus as much cold sake or Tsingtao as we could drink, and extras—unagi, or sea urchin with a raw quail egg, or a side of sashimi. He was rich; we were poor. He was generous; we were beholden. I couldn't ask for anything, and neither could James. We gobbled every piece of fish we could get our mitts on and tried to be charming and lively during dinner, and afterwards, we thanked him profusely. It made me uneasy. I wanted to be the one ordering and paying, the one who was generous. It seemed like an infinitely preferable position to be in.

Going back to the clanking, stifling, stinking, crowded city to my difficult job was excruciating after those heavenly weekends in Jamestown. All the following week, I craved the clean intense blue of Narragansett Bay, the washed-out greens of the sea grasses and beach plum bushes, the clapboard houses, and the briny, clean, sweet air. I had only been in New York for a year or two, but I was already dreaming of moving to New England. If I could have afforded it, I would have, but I was too poor. I had to make my way in the city, or not at all.

It was the early 1990s, and money seemed to be everywhere except in my bank account. It made me feel prim and judgmental: The real romance, I remembered from my childhood, was in making a lot out of a little, or meeting adversity with a sense of adventure and derring-do. I thought defiantly of my mother's Friday-night suppers of homemade applesauce with Farmer's Fritters, thin, tangy cottage-cheese pancakes, doused in Aunt Jemima, eaten in candlelight in our
small Tempe cinder-block house while we told stories around the table. I thought of the platefuls of cut-up raw jicama, green peppers, and carrots that she gave us to snack on before dinner, her home-cooked plain nourishing meals, the way she managed to feed us festively and well on almost no money; I felt that we were akin to the March family in
Little Women
.

That was what being rich meant. Not the countess's gilt-and-marble foyer, not the tailored suits of Wall Street, not the stretch limousines that cruised along Park Avenue. Real wealth was found in literature and music, the joy of owning one's own soul and mind, a healthy body, the ability to laugh. Wealth was pleasure and adventure: fleeting, ephemeral, but all-important. Also, real wealth was access to good food.

I revised my childhood plan. Suddenly, I didn't want to be rich anymore; I just wanted to be able to afford to eat well. Actually, eating well struck me not as a luxury, but a basic human right. I'd never really thought about this before. Why couldn't I eat in good restaurants, too? For the first time in my life, as I ordered the greasy $6.99 Early Bird Special at BBQ or counted my change to leave a tip for my veggie burrito at Life Café, I began to aspire to all the amazing food I'd never had, “fancy” stuff made by “real” chefs. I wanted to eat in a place with an interesting, pricey menu and linen tablecloths and a sommelier and subtle lighting . . . I imagined ordering steak tartare, or venison, or exotic dishes whose names I couldn't pronounce. I walked by beautiful restaurants and gazed in their windows and daydreamed and schemed. Someday, somehow . . . But for years, I didn't dare go in. And I couldn't afford to.

And then, in 1992, I fell in love with a man who taught me how to cook and how to eat in restaurants, and offered to support me so I could work hard at my writing and not squander all my time in dead-end jobs. We got married in 1994, and for the next twelve years, we lived together in north Brooklyn, the epicenter of hipsterdom. I begin to publish novels and essays and reviews; I dove into the world of food. During those years, except for the occasional trip to Mexico or Europe or to visit family, we seldom left New York; it was hard to leave, even for brief spells. The city exerted a powerful centrifugal force. There was always a full calendar of social events that made getting away impossible. If I left, I might miss something! For most of those years, I loved the city with a deep, committed passion—first, the way one loves a golden, enchanting, glamorous but complex lover, and then, after September 11th, as one loves a fragile, damaged, suddenly elderly spouse. I understood then how deeply I belonged to, and in, the city.

Those were heady years. My former husband and I, from the start, observed a mutual pact to live as if we would always have money, even when things were tight. We were lavish, freewheeling, generous, and we loved to eat and drink. Neither of us cared about clothes or possessions or things. We loved to live well, loved adventure and pleasure. We ate everything, everywhere, all over town. We threw dinner parties and cookouts for our friends. Our shared passion for food and drink made our marriage fun and enabled me to ignore the fact that we weren't fundamentally connected.

Until it didn't; until it wasn't enough for me . . . although we were good friends and comrades, we were out of sync in many ways, and, at the very heart of things, I was wrenchingly lonely with him; no matter how hard I tried to bridge the emotional gulf between us, I was unable to connect deeply with my husband. And I craved this connection so desperately, I finally realized I couldn't live in a marriage
without it. Whether or not I'd ever find it with someone else, I remembered what my mother had told me throughout my life: “It's always better to be lonely alone than lonely with someone else.”