Long Time Leaving (18 page)

When they aren't at their beach house, they live above the wildly successful restaurant, in the ninety-four-year-old mansion they restored together after Elizabeth bought it in 1980 with a small-business loan. It's on Thirty-seventh Street, hence the name. A while back there was speculation that this street would be renamed Martin Luther King Boulevard. The Terrys could hardly be opposed to this, as they are keen liberals. Their sous-chef is African American, they determinedly keep their staff rainbowish in various respects, and Michael, who used to be a civil rights lawyer in Atlanta, is the unpaid president of a Savannah organization that helps poor parents and children. But “Elizabeth on Martin Luther King” was not going to sound right. As it turned out, another street was named for Dr. King—probably not, Michael stresses, because he talked the matter over with local officials. But he has a knack.

“I used to go to the produce market,” says Elizabeth, “and the guys there—”

“They just drove her crazy.”

“I'd say, ‘What the hell, boys. Buy it when it's fresh, sell it when it's fresh—just organize, guys!’”

Now Michael goes to the market, and chews the fat. “And if they act up I threaten to send in Elizabeth: ‘She's not going to like this, guys.’ ”

Savannah is an old coastal city, an early seaport. Through historical research and insistence on fresh ingredients Elizabeth has developed a cuisine that is indigenous but not parochial. Both Terrys grew up in the Midwest, but they had Southern grandmothers. Elizabeth makes fried grits—seasoned variously with shrimp, onions, spices, bits of country ham—that melt in your mouth too fast, because you want to delectate them longer. She makes a crème brûlée and a chocolate mousse that are as good (their textures right on the razor edge between delicate and substantial) as any I've had in Paris. Another dessert she makes is burnt-sugar ice cream with bourbon-butterscotch sauce. She serves up black beans, seafood, pork, greens, and chicken that are lighter and yet more savory than your mama's, bless her, the best day she ever had. When Elizabeth's food is set before you (in one of the dining rooms painted Acanthus Leaf Green and Tomochichi Red), you want to shout to everyone in earshot, “Oh, Lord, here, smell this!”

In Harvard Law School's alumni records, Michael is pleased to say, his occupation is listed as “wine steward.” He is also the greeter and seater, and he is the one who got Elizabeth started cooking. Early in their marriage,
when he was in law school and she was working in a Cambridge medical lab, he brought home two cookbooks and said, “You'd be good at this.”

She had grown up in a hardscrabble fatherless household with a working mother. Never had much interest in food. She did have, as she says, a “do-it-right complex” and, it turned out, a knack. “I'd put in a blueberry pie and go to bed,” she says, “and Michael would wake me up when it was done, and when it had cooled a little we'd sit on the bed and eat the whole thing.”

When they moved to Atlanta—after choosing it over Hawaii and Alaska because it seemed a good place to be involved in social change— they hosted notable dinner parties. But Elizabeth had no career.

Now. Listen to this, men. In Atlanta, in 1977, Michael made an inspired move. Their marriage was strained. He'd been obsessed with defending the indigent in court and she with being a full-bore housewife and mother giving herb lectures in her spare time. So here's what was said one night:

“You're getting a little boring.”

Here's the switch: It wasn't the mad housewife saying to the husband, “I'm bored and you're boring,” and him sulking and everything breaking down—it was Michael, jumping in first with a jujitsu move, putting Elizabeth on her mettle.

She rented some space in a mall. The two of them gutted it, replumbed it, fixed it up together, and Elizabeth opened a small deli, Thyme for You. Her soups and sandwiches went over big. In 1980, the Terrys sat down together and took stock. Why stay on in increasingly concrete-canyoned, big-bidness Atlanta when they could live more cheaply in a more colorful place?
^*
They moved to Savannah.

Since Elizabeth had made a speech for Michael “and drunk about forty-nine gallons of coffee” while he was running unsuccessfully for public office in Atlanta, he agreed to work with her for a year setting up a restaurant, and then he would start a law practice.

Instead, he found a new niche: restauranthusband.

“A lot of my lawyer friends said I'd be so unhappy because there'd be no intellectual stimulation. But I can find that on my own. You do miss the wonderful feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you go into court. I get a little bit of that fishing—taking the boat out into the sea. But
I had tried two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court before I was thirty-five. I feel about the law the way I feel about dieting—I'm not a very good dieter, but when I'm dieting I say, ‘If I live to be 104 and never have another piece of banana cream pie, I've had my share.’ ”

Michael grew up in a family that was “female-dominated. My grandmother, mother, and sister spent a lot of time with me. I remember vividly when I was nine years old, walking down the street with my mother, and she said, ‘Michael, I want you to go into this drugstore and buy me a box of Kotex. There's no reason why you can't.’ That was my liberation. Women think they have this secret mystery.”

He takes a good solid under-the-covers nap every afternoon. Then he stays up well past midnight, maybe playing poker with the staff, and he gets up every morning at 5:30 with Celeste because if she sleeps later she's too groggy to eat the decent breakfast he fixes for her.

Are any of us of the male persuasion beginning to resent Michael now? When he was practicing high-minded law while wearing clogs, other lawyer guys rolled their eyes. But as to yin and yang, Michael and Elizabeth are traditional. “I'm inordinately volatile,” she says. “He's totally calm.”

On the restaurant's opening night, she says, “we served a hundred and forty people. After the first hundred, Michael came back and said only forty more. I said, ‘I cannot lift another pan.’ It was a hundred and ten degrees in the kitchen. I burst into tears. Michael said, ‘This is what you wanted to do. You love to cook. You're having a good time.’ I had to go out back and run a hose over my head. My arms were shaking. But I did it.”

“We do whatever we want,” says Michael.

“There's a kind of giddy excitement in that,” says Elizabeth. “Michael allows me to be kind of hysterical and outrageous sometimes, which I think is good for—”

“You,” says Michael.

“For our marriage. In the kitchen, I feel so high—you have it set up right and it comes and comes and comes and you're ahead of it and it's so great and it goes on and on and on.”

She gets kind of flushed just thinking about it.

“I did have to educate Elizabeth on the art of argument one time. There was something she felt particularly heated about—”

“And he came up with blah blah blah.”

“And she says, ‘Fuck you.’ ”

“And he took me aside and said, ‘You cannot start an argument with
‘Fuck you.’ He is much more of a gentleman than I am. The reason he's never had a midlife crisis is I provide the tumult.”

“The best public fight we ever had was in Corsica. I was nursing Alexis and I wanted a big breakfast. Michael said, ‘It's not the French way. Let's eat croissants and coffee.’ I'm saying, Goddammit—”

“She was hungry and crabby and what she wanted was eggs and ham. I hadn't really focused on the fact that every nutrient was being drained from her body.”

“I handed Michael the baby and said, ‘You feed her.’ An elderly gentleman came over and said something to me.”

The elderly gentleman was offering, in a dignified way, to whip Michael's ass for her. Since Elizabeth had little French, Michael had to translate: “He says he wants to defend your honor. Sir, you can be of assistance here….”

The elderly gentleman directed them to a place where they could get an omelet.

Update, 2006, from Greg Jaynes, who introduced me to the Terrys:

T
he other day I offered my ball-of-fire granddaughter, Elsie, who is two, a bite of very crisp bacon crumbled up in some soft scrambled egg. Her response reminded me how dramatic things taste to a child. Elsie is not finicky, but, as an adult would say, she was not herself. The doctor had diagnosed “a viral syndrome, probably.” Something, at any rate, was causing her to reject foods she usually loves. She was hungry, and welcomed the bacon-and-egg at sight and smell, but when it hit her palate, she looked so pained. As far as
she
knew she was still herself, but bacon-and-egg, perhaps willfully, had lost its savor. Maybe it would never taste good again; maybe life would be yucky from now on.

I remembered, distantly, how much more than now I used to relish a bite of bacon, egg, toast, all together. Unless, of course, I had detected in the egg the least bit of underdone white. In that case, I would display such revulsion that my mother would sigh, with a pathos strong enough to counter nearly anything I could muster, “Don't pick at your eggs, son. They're
good
eggs.” And I would acknowledge, intellectually, and not without a backdraft of guilt, that they were good, to her. But nothing could make me sense that they were good to me, and therefore my position, though I wouldn't dare put it into words, was the hell with them. And as far as I knew, I was right. I knew it was crucial not to lose touch with gut reaction.

I had not yet developed a liberal cast of mind. In the South of the late forties, where injustice was hard—but certainly possible—to overlook, I had not begun to awaken politically. Eventually I did but not because any disadvantaged person touched my soul. I have thought about this a lot. I believe it was because of grapefruit at David's house.

There have been times in my adulthood when grapefruit was the only thing that tasted right. But not in my early childhood.

My parents loved grapefruit. My father put salt on it, which struck me as exactly the wrong way to go. He salted watermelon, too. Cantaloupe he salted and peppered. Today I can recommend those seasonings, without finding them at all necessary, but back then they heightened my suspicion that grown-ups were often pretending, or being perverse. My
mother would put sugar on my grapefruit, to get me to eat it, but nope. She gave up on me and grapefruit.

My mother and I had some history with regard to eating. To hear her tell it, I refused all nourishment for several years. In desperation, she would tell me that the spoonful of baby food was an airplane coming in to land. My lips were sealed. As I advanced beyond toddling stage, she would go so far as to cut a boxwood switch and lay it next to my plate. I would eat what was put before me, or else. The threat of corporal punishment didn't work. In some ways, I was a tough kid.

“I couldn't make you eat, to save my life,” she would tell me later. Invocation of, yes, “the starving Armenians” did not move me. What did they have to do with my prerogatives?

Finally, heeding our family doctor's advice, she made herself stop worrying about wasted food or the possibility that I was starving myself to spite her. She backed off, and in due time I became a trencherman. Today, with pretty much the sole exception of Japanese red-bean desserts, I say yes to the comestible universe.

I even like fruitcake. Is there anything intrinsically bad about fruitcake? I suspect that hatred of fruitcake is something that broad-minded people can feel all right about sharing. Everybody needs a guilt-free aversion. But, hey, a free society is one in which you can't make people do what makes sense, even if it's demonstrably good for them, until they are ready. Ideally, at least. And, as a boy, I had a good deal of idealism with regard to myself.

What I remember of that early mealtime duress is probably from being told about it. What I richly recall is free and ready enjoyment of my mother's good cooking. As a result, I lack colorful memories of horrid-food avoidance. My fiancée, Joan, so hated lima beans, which still make her shudder, that she would by sleight of hand convey them to the underside of the drop-leaf table and leave them on the little ledge there, where she would see their desiccated remains when she looked up during games of hide-and-seek and feel no remorse.

But I do remember going over to someone else's house when I was a kid. How different the smells were sometimes and how strange the food. I remember supper at my friend Jack's house. “Yum,” he said, “riced potatoes.” This was a concept new to me, but, hey, I liked potatoes, baked, boiled, fried, mashed, or au-gratin'd. (My childhood friend Sally once embarrassed her parents at a nice restaurant by robustly telling the waiter, “I'll have some kernup greems and some
bo
-taters.”)

But the riced potatoes of Jack's mother, with all due respect, were way
too salty. I toyed with them, couldn't dig in. And even though I could see the faces of Jack and Jack's mother fall, I knew I was right.