Dining Out I Collaborative Writing

In writing about the joys of dining out I risk seeming shallow, even to myself. Many years ago in the late 80s, I taught at Brandeis University, where the English department was fortunate enough to host the poet Carolyn Forché as a long-term visitor. One day, down in the departmental office, I noticed a stack of Forché’s returned student papers in the cubby next to mine. I am pretty sure we weren’t supposed to do this—and now, with student privacy laws and online submissions, my action would be unthinkable and even impossible—but I peeked at her pile to see what her students had been writing. As someone who taught literature rather than creative writing, I was, I suppose, curious about what the students were up to.

I don’t remember anything about the student poems at the top of the pile, but one of Forché’s comments burned onto my retina. It went something like this: “Why are you writing about all that food at yuppie restaurants? Write about something important!” Forché had recently published a collection of poems called The Country Between Us, about atrocities in el Salvador. She was a poet of witness,  and wrote about important—and horrifying— things. The mentions of food in The Colonel, perhaps her most famous poem from that volume, have nothing in common with the sun-dried tomatoes, the pink peppercorns, and the angel hair pasta that might have been the subject of student poems of the late eighties. After the speaker shares with the colonel and his wife a dinner of “lamb [and] good wine,” 

The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries

home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like

dried peach halves.

 In her comment, Forché may have said “bougie” instead of “yuppie.” She may have said “interesting” instead of “important.” She may have written those words in blue or black ink, although I remember them as red. I know the comment was big, bold, and legible; in those days, when I refused to wear glasses, I would not otherwise have been able to read surreptitiously. I remember the comment sprawled diagonally across the top of the student poem, its energy moving up and beyond the borders of the paper.

It was while eating at restaurants, —well, one particular restaurant, pre-yuppie and not bougie—that I learned to write. Every week, several times a week in the summer, between the time I was six and the time I left Italy at ten, my mother and I would go to a local trattoria in Piazza Ungheria. It had sidewalk tables and a multicolored curtain of plastic beads on its front door. While the first year or so was about learning how to read (looking for the elusive “H” in Ungheria, for example), after that it was all about writing. My mother and I would eavesdrop on people at the tables around us, and I would take down in my beloved colored markers the things that they said. Then I would make up background stories for the speakers, while my mother smoked and egged me on. In my stories, all adult speakers had children, nearly all had committed crimes. I don’t remember the genre of my stories (were they, for example, in the form of a letter to my mother, sitting across the table?) but I do remember the paper was always floral stationary we bought, along with the markers, at a store in the piazza.

Telling stories, of course, was not all we did at the restaurant. Before we gossiped, before I wrote, and before my mother chain-smoked her Kents, we ate what was on offer for a primo piatto on a particular day. Thursday was always gnocchi day, and on Mondays the special was always risotto. There may well have been fishy pasta or risotto on Fridays, but I don’t remember it. Maybe we did not go to the restaurant on Fridays, or maybe I had not yet developed a taste for seafood. I know that Sunday was lasagne day, but that we ate our lasagne at another restaurant, in Piazza Navona, with my father and my parents’ friends. I came to associate days of the week with particular foods—a synesthesia that persists to this day. I am a sucker for weekly specials and comforted by the rhythms of regularly appearing items. Looking back, I think that lasagne was served on Sunday in restaurants across the city, and would not be surprised to find, at least back then, that the pairing of gnocchi and Thursdays was also common.

While I pushed aside my plate of food to make room for my pens and paper, room for my writing, the food was always there. A bite of mushroom risotto with saffron, and then a sentence. A twirl of spaghetti alle vongole— I guess I did eat seafood—that would drip its savory oil onto the page. The feeling of finishing both at once—the gnocchi and the story of our neighbors who talked so loudly and intimately. The feeling of plenitude.

The story of early writing is not merely about the mouth, but about the ear. Overhearing was the necessary beginning to it all. I have lost that connection now, that connection in and through writing to other people’s voices. I have long thought of myself as someone who cannot write dialogue. I have lived for more than fifty years with and around these limits and submitted to the unpleasant psychological truths those limits might well reveal. She cannot write in any voice but her own. She doesn’t listen. She tries to fix things rather than letting me have my say. She talks too much.

Perhaps the part of my brain that registers other people’s voices needs food. Risotto, perhaps—or, if it is a Sunday, lasagne. Perhaps I need to be out of the house, outside, among strangers. It also strikes me that I may need my mother. 

I need my mother is a cry from a childhood table, through the years of dining out and the years of writing. So far in this post I have written from what the critic Susan Suleiman has called “the child position” in which the child is central and the parents, particularly the mother, unimaginable. It is hard enough to get there, to the child position, pushing aside intervening years like tables at a restaurant. This is the work of therapy. It is hard enough to to imagine oneself into being the child at a table, a child eating, a child with her mother. It is even harder, though, to write knowing there is something like a “mother position,” to treat the mother as a separate person at that table. 

Dragging myself into a mother position, I ask myself the question, what role did my mother really play in those encounters? Did she really only “egg me on” or “chain smoke Kents?” I am sure she did both things, but did she also write? What was she thinking as she flicked ashes into the ashtray, how did food taste to her?

I can see my mother’s handwriting on the page more clearly than I can see my own: blue ink, always from a fountain pen, with small squared-off letters—print, not cursive. Her sentences and phrases are connected with dashes, there are no commas or periods. Once when I was in high school, at my most oblivious or perhaps just my meanest, I told my mother that her writing style reminded me of the letters written by the Russian Empress, Alexandra. The Empress’s reliance on dashes and the breathlessness of her sentence structure, I informed my mother after I had read Robert Massie’s biography of the last Romanovs, had convinced historians that the Empress was mad. My mother claimed this “joke” as her own, referring to herself over the years as “Alexandra,” claiming for herself the name, the style, and the diagnosis. I doubt she thought of any of it as funny. Later on, when I was in college, older and somewhat kinder, I tried to change the terms of my original comparison by replacing Alexandra and her dashes with Emily Dickinson and hers—high praise I thought at the time. My mother never accepted this substitution; she was always “Alexandra” and never “Emily.” And she did once ask me in a different context if I thought Emily Dickinson was mad.  “No,” I said, “just housebound,” opening up another and longer family story.

It is entirely possible that my mother wrote alongside, or rather, across from me. That she, too, turned other people’s voices into her own prose. That she filled pages of stationary with her own sentences, her own dashes. I don’t have those stories, but then again I don’t have my own. It is possible that my mother, so attuned to conversation, and uninterested in punctuation, could write really good dialogue. 

As for Carolyn Forché, her collection of poems from el Salvador has recently been reissued. It is newly relevant in a world of atrocities in need of witnessing. I have started to go out to restaurants again, but only outside, on patios. Since reading Forché’s comment so long ago, I have slowly been learning to be more direct with my students, to demand that, even and especially if they are writing about nineteenth-century literature, that they make it clear what is important about that work. I am still eating food that Carolyn Forché might have called yuppie, but I never write about it.