poured the soup into a heavy pot and spooned the chutneys
into two tiny dishes—intended for butter, but they would do. She
unwrapped the cakes of cheese: Vermont feta and Humboldt Fog, a goat
cheese from California striped with ash. She laid paper oak leaves on a
china plate and put the cheeses there to soften. She filled a steel tray
with the pale, pulpy liquid she would stir into an ice to cleanse the
gubernatorial palate. She placed it in the freezer.
"Do fancy food," Mary Bliss had said when Greenie asked what sort
of a meal she should make. "Fancy but not pretentious, know what I
mean?" So Greenie fantasized that she was cooking for dignitaries from
abroad, showing off wholesome American plenty—and showing off to
Ray McCrae that she could hold her own with more indigenous chefs.
She felt pride along with a familiar unease. The opulence of the meal—
counting ingredients, she stopped at sixty-three—was shameful in a
way, but this was a fact of modern life at its most inequitable. When
you made only desserts—when what you squandered, if anything, was
chocolate, not corn (you wouldn't think about the flour)—you could
fool yourself into believing that your professional dealings were in fantasy
and art, removing you from the workaday morality of food, of
excess here and hunger there.
Whether because of her personality or the lessons learned by her generation,
Greenie's mother had been a thrifty woman. She had washed
out plastic Baggies and polished her windows with yesterday's news.
Beside her kitchen sink she'd kept a basin for all remotely edible waste,
from tea bags and onion skins to leftover rice on the verge of fermenting
and the fat trimmed from a roast. Every night before going to bed,
Greenie had carried the basin across their backyard and dumped it over
a stone wall into a plot of forest owned by the town. And every morning,
were you to have checked, you'd have found not a single trace of
what had been discarded (what, in most households back then, was pulverized
in a sink disposal and swept away, sight unseen, as sewage). "I
can't feed the orphans of Southeast Asia, but I can feed the wildlife,"
Greenie's mother had boasted.
Living in the city, Greenie often wished for that basin, for its prudent
circling of the food chain—but here, what would you feed if you tossed
your leftovers into the night? Rats and roaches? Though, really, could
you convince yourself they were much different from foxes, rabbits, and
owls? Were their souls any smaller? Earnest little George would have
argued their case.
Not long after George turned two, Greenie's parents took an anniversary
trip to England and Scotland. As her father drove them along a
coastal cliff in the Highlands, along a mere ribbon of road with a
famously grand view, he missed a curve, sending their rental car to the
rocks far below. This was what the chief inspector of the small Scottish
town told Greenie in an awkwardly tinny phone conversation (the day
after she had been notified, confusingly, by the chief of police in the
town where she had grown up). "We warn the tourists how treacherous
the roads are hereabouts," said the Scottish chief inspector mournfully,
"but there's no other way to see these views without taking a little risk.
I'm sorry as can be, miss, but I hope you don't find it disrespectful if I
say, 'twasn't a bad way to go."
She clung to the odd false comfort in the chief inspector's lyrical r 's,
in the quaint, pretty way he pronounced "tourist": teeyoorist. "Ther-abouts,"
perhaps the people were exceptionally courteous and charming,
by American standards at least, their cobbled hamlets genteel and
safe. But in America, the roads would have been safer, too. Along an
American road of the kind this man described, there would have been
heavy concrete barriers, like the ones placed around embassies to thwart
car bombs, because an accident of this type would have set off a chain of
lawsuits. The barriers would have marred the view, but
into two tiny dishes—intended for butter, but they would do. She
unwrapped the cakes of cheese: Vermont feta and Humboldt Fog, a goat
cheese from California striped with ash. She laid paper oak leaves on a
china plate and put the cheeses there to soften. She filled a steel tray
with the pale, pulpy liquid she would stir into an ice to cleanse the
gubernatorial palate. She placed it in the freezer.
"Do fancy food," Mary Bliss had said when Greenie asked what sort
of a meal she should make. "Fancy but not pretentious, know what I
mean?" So Greenie fantasized that she was cooking for dignitaries from
abroad, showing off wholesome American plenty—and showing off to
Ray McCrae that she could hold her own with more indigenous chefs.
She felt pride along with a familiar unease. The opulence of the meal—
counting ingredients, she stopped at sixty-three—was shameful in a
way, but this was a fact of modern life at its most inequitable. When
you made only desserts—when what you squandered, if anything, was
chocolate, not corn (you wouldn't think about the flour)—you could
fool yourself into believing that your professional dealings were in fantasy
and art, removing you from the workaday morality of food, of
excess here and hunger there.
Whether because of her personality or the lessons learned by her generation,
Greenie's mother had been a thrifty woman. She had washed
out plastic Baggies and polished her windows with yesterday's news.
Beside her kitchen sink she'd kept a basin for all remotely edible waste,
from tea bags and onion skins to leftover rice on the verge of fermenting
and the fat trimmed from a roast. Every night before going to bed,
Greenie had carried the basin across their backyard and dumped it over
a stone wall into a plot of forest owned by the town. And every morning,
were you to have checked, you'd have found not a single trace of
what had been discarded (what, in most households back then, was pulverized
in a sink disposal and swept away, sight unseen, as sewage). "I
can't feed the orphans of Southeast Asia, but I can feed the wildlife,"
Greenie's mother had boasted.
Living in the city, Greenie often wished for that basin, for its prudent
circling of the food chain—but here, what would you feed if you tossed
your leftovers into the night? Rats and roaches? Though, really, could
you convince yourself they were much different from foxes, rabbits, and
owls? Were their souls any smaller? Earnest little George would have
argued their case.
Not long after George turned two, Greenie's parents took an anniversary
trip to England and Scotland. As her father drove them along a
coastal cliff in the Highlands, along a mere ribbon of road with a
famously grand view, he missed a curve, sending their rental car to the
rocks far below. This was what the chief inspector of the small Scottish
town told Greenie in an awkwardly tinny phone conversation (the day
after she had been notified, confusingly, by the chief of police in the
town where she had grown up). "We warn the tourists how treacherous
the roads are hereabouts," said the Scottish chief inspector mournfully,
"but there's no other way to see these views without taking a little risk.
I'm sorry as can be, miss, but I hope you don't find it disrespectful if I
say, 'twasn't a bad way to go."
She clung to the odd false comfort in the chief inspector's lyrical r 's,
in the quaint, pretty way he pronounced "tourist": teeyoorist. "Ther-abouts,"
perhaps the people were exceptionally courteous and charming,
by American standards at least, their cobbled hamlets genteel and
safe. But in America, the roads would have been safer, too. Along an
American road of the kind this man described, there would have been
heavy concrete barriers, like the ones placed around embassies to thwart
car bombs, because an accident of this type would have set off a chain of
lawsuits. The barriers would have marred the view, but
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