Born Round Read online

  A holiday feast required days and days of planning and preparation. Mom’s Thanksgivings in Avon, for example, tended to go like this:

  T MINUS SIX DAYS—Sit down at the kitchen table with a ruled steno notebook and, over the course of three to four hours, make, revise, refine and double-check a series of lists. On the first two pages list every dish you plan to make. Use a third page if necessary. On yet another page list every dish that, in contradiction to your controlling nature, and in a moment of rare and laudable flexibility, you have permitted Vicki or Carolyn to bring. On yet another page list every item of ready-made food you plan to put on a platter, and on several pages after that translate the list of dishes you’re making and the list of ready-made food you’re assembling into a list of every ingredient, and how much of it, you need to buy. Pause to scream at Mark, who is listening to a Deep Purple album in his bedroom upstairs, that the electric guitars are too loud. Pause to scream at Frank, who is watching TV in the next room, that The Love Boat is too loud. Wonder where Harry is, and when Dad will get home from the office, and circle certain items on the shopping inventory—the special-trip, specialty-store stuff like cannoli and bocconcini—to be assigned to Dad. Make a mental note to tell him that he should wait until Wednesday to pick them up, so that they’re as fresh as possible on Thursday. Make an additional mental note to remind him on Monday and again on Tuesday that Wednesday is right around the corner.

  T MINUS FOUR DAYS—Shop. Take the station wagon. Make sure nothing is in the far back, or in the backseat, or in the passenger seat, because it’s possible you’ll need all of this space. Make sure a stretch of about five hours is free and clear, because you’ll need this much time for driving to and among all the right stores and shopping and circling home to unload the perishable items; nonperishables can be left in the car until the kids come home, at which point, with enough prompting, they might help. When the kids do come home, tell them there’s some stuff in the rear of the car you’d like them to carry into the kitchen. When they haven’t budged a half hour later, tell them again. When they promise to get on it “during the next commercial,” commence strategic weeping. Thanksgiving requires you to use all the weapons at your disposal; besides, the stress is getting to you.

  T MINUS TWO DAYS—Back to the stores. There were things you didn’t get on the last trip, because you were worried about how well they’d keep. There were things you forgot. There were mistakes you caught when, on day T minus three, you spent two hours at the kitchen table reviewing your lists. Say to Dad, “You’re all set for tomorrow?” Hear him answer, “What?” Say, “The cannoli! The mozzarella!” Hear him answer, “Sheesh, I almost forgot.” Cry. He’s kidding, and you half-know that, but you need everybody to be operating with a peak sense of urgency.

  T MINUS ONE DAY—A new set of lists. A map, really. Plot a painstakingly detailed time line of what can be assembled in the hours before the guests arrive and what must be prepared after they arrive. So that you don’t get thrown off track or confused on the big day, prepare Post-it notes to be put on different bowls and pans and packages. Each Post-it note is an appointment, a set of instructions signaling destination (top oven, bottom oven, burner) and time (10 a.m., 11:15 a.m., 11:55 a.m.) and temperature (350 degrees, 425 degrees, medium heat). Turn the refrigerator and the counters into a yellow thicket of Post-it notes, then worry that you won’t be able to see and heed the individual trees for the forest. Look out the window, notice that Harry’s skateboard is still in the middle of the driveway, though he’s been told four times already to put it away, and scream at him that Grandma is going to step on it, break her hip and be rushed to the hospital, and if she dies it’s all his fault. Think about a glass of Chablis. It really might be time for a glass of Chablis.

  THANKSGIVING DAY, 11:30 TO 11:45 A.M.—The guests begin arriving, and you instantly begin feeding them. Pull two freshly made quiches out of the oven. Cut them into square-shaped pieces and put the pieces on platters and have Mark or Frank make himself atypically useful by passing them around. Have one of the children pass around a platter of chicken livers wrapped in bacon, too, and a separate platter of stuffed mushrooms as well. These supplement a tray of deviled eggs, another light beginning to a long day. Somewhere there’s a plate of little balls of mozzarella known as bocconcini; somewhere else, some prosciutto and maybe some olives. Don’t forget the chilled shrimp! You cleaned and cooked four pounds of them on day T minus one, and you’re serving them with cocktail sauce you made at seven a.m., another lifesaver that could be prepared ahead of time.

  NOON—Hustle Dad into the kitchen so he can begin the carving process. The carving process could take up to an hour, because you’ve made both a twenty-eight-pound turkey and a separate nine-pound turkey breast so that there will not only be enough turkey for the main meal but enough left over for sandwiches later in the day. You must serve sandwiches later in the day.

  12:30 P.M.—Lay food on the buffet table. Somehow find space for separate bowls of corn, green peas, creamed onions, canned cranberry jelly (because some people prefer it to homemade), homemade cranberry sauce (because some people prefer it to canned), stovetop stuffing (same reasoning), real stuffing (ditto), mashed potatoes and pureed sweet potatoes with little marsh-mallows on top. Find additional room for two casserole dishes of manicotti. Then find more room for a broad tray of individual foil-wrapped yams, which you had to have in addition to the sweet potatoes (and the mashed potatoes) because, again, diners have very particular preferences within a given genre, even if the genre is as tangential as tubers. You must find yet more room on the buffet, because you’re also setting down a basket of napkin-swaddled warm biscuits and of course the gargantuan platter of carved turkey, with the dark meat clustered in one section and the white in another. Put out the sliced baked ham as well. Though no one’s bound to eat the ham during the main meal, it’s going to be necessary for the sandwiches later on, so you might as well make it available now, too, just in case. Worry. Are there enough yams? Has Dad fallen behind on the carving? Amid all the worrying and arranging, use the turkey drippings to make gravy. Gravy is the final, last-minute flourish.

  12:50 P.M.—Ring a bell. It’s the only way to summon and speed sixteen to twenty vigorously chewing, loudly chatting Brunis to the buffet table and then into their assigned seats, and you need them to move and eat right away, lest the eating schedule be ruined. Collect and throw away loose Post-it notes that have fluttered into corners of the kitchen counter or onto the kitchen floor.

  1:20 P. M.—Begin badgering guests to head back to the buffet table and help themselves to seconds.

  1:45 P.M.—Begin clearing the buffet table. Clear guests’ plates. Tell Harry to tuck his shirt back in.

  2:00 P.M.—Begin making espresso. Put platters of melon slices and apple slices and grapes, along with bowls of almonds, in the center of the dining room table. This is the beginning of the official thirty-minute pause before dessert, but you still have to have some food around. You can’t not have food around.

  2:30 P.M.—Repopulate the buffet table with two pecan pies, two pumpkin pies, two apple pies and an assortment of ice creams. Vicki has made chocolate chip cookies: put those out. Carolyn has made some pizza dolce and some traditional Italian biscotti: put those out, too. Dad ultimately remembered to get the cannoli: put those out as well. Put out a chocolate cake with chocolate icing because that’s Frank Jr.’s favorite kind and his birthday was a few weeks earlier, on Halloween. Put out a separate lemon-flavored cake because not everybody likes all that chocolate and the guests shouldn’t have to suffer for Frank Jr.’s peculiarities. To Vicki’s or Carolyn’s compliments that “you’ve outdone yourself,” laugh in a carefree fashion and say, “Oh, please, it was nothing!”

  3:15 P.M.—Permit people to get up and leave the dining room.

  5:30 P.M.—Summon them back. The buffet table now holds bread slices and rolls and carved turkey and ham and mayonnaise and cranberry sauce and lettuce and tomato and
other fixings. It’s sandwich time. But guests needn’t feel confined to sandwiches. The quiche is back. The shrimp are back. Even the two kinds of stuffing and the manicotti are back. And, of course, the desserts.

  7:30 P.M.—Begin making doggie bags for all the guests. Include composed sandwiches in these bags: What if someone gets hungry on the drive back to New York? Include containers of manicotti, because there’s a lot of it left over. Do not include shrimp. They’ve been at room temperature too long and don’t travel so well.

  8:00 P.M.—Shoo Vicki and Carolyn out of the kitchen, where they’re furiously working to help you clean up, and tell them that you’ve got it all under control, that it’s going to be a snap, that the whole thing was a breeze and you’ve still got energy to burn. Hand guests their doggie bags as you kiss and hug them good-bye. Notice that only three yams went uneaten, and feel a knot in your stomach. Did you make too few? Might someone have forgone a yam for fear there wouldn’t be enough for others? Make a mental note: next year, more yams. And maybe also some lump crabmeat to go with the chilled shrimp. The appetizer hour needed a little something extra.

  Four

  In the kitchen, Mom was a creature of habit, though the habits were sometimes short-lived. She would become fascinated for a span of months or maybe a whole year with a new dish, new sandwich or particular ingredient, celebrating it and toying with it until it finally I bored her and she moved on to the next thing.

  Picasso had his blue period; Mom had her shrimp period. There was shrimp scampi, of course, which she made with generous measures of butter, garlic and shallots and just a bit of lemon juice and cayenne pepper. There was shrimp Creole—a casserole of sorts involving shrimp, rice, onion and lots of tomato—and there was another shrimp and rice combination, which I liked better, called shrimp Harpin. Shrimp Harpin’s superiority was easily explained. The recipe called for a cup of heavy cream, two tablespoons of butter, a half cup of slivered almonds and a half cup of dry sherry.

  For a while Mom took to wrapping things in bacon. In fact she never completely stopped wrapping things in bacon, but there was definitely a phase of more aggressive, frequent, committed wrapping of things in bacon, and it was a happy phase indeed. If something could be wrapped in bacon, speared with a toothpick and broiled, she did precisely that, and usually served the results as canapés, disregarding the extent to which things wrapped in bacon might fill a person and diminish his or her readiness for the rest of the meal.

  She wrapped chicken livers in bacon. Scallops, too. She wrapped water chestnuts in bacon, though I never really saw the point. When you had bacon on the outside of something, why put a vegetable on the inside? It struck me as a crucial loss of nerve.

  She became obsessed for a while with club sandwiches, layered with bacon, and this was because of the pool that she and Dad decided to put in the forested yard behind our Avon house. It was a grand, ludicrous pool, out of sync with the family’s usually sensible spending habits, a splurge exponentially larger than anything before it. It was twenty yards long, so that Mark, Harry and I could do meaningful laps in it if we wanted. It resembled a lake, its outline curvy, its deck punctuated with enormous boulders that jutted toward, and hung slightly over, the water. Given all the money that had gone into it, Mom all but demanded, from mid-May to late September, that we get ourselves out there and enjoy it, and so she developed what she considered pool-friendly cuisine: guacamole with chips, crudité with dip. And club sandwiches.

  The fact that they had turkey in them allowed her to tell herself that she was making something healthier than hamburgers or hot dogs. She always bought freshly carved turkey or cooked turkey breasts herself and carved them. She carefully toasted the white or wheat bread (her choice depended on her mood and dieting cycle) so that it was firm and golden brown, discarding slices that emerged from the toaster too dark. Then she’d cut the sandwiches into triangular quarters, crucial to her insistence that this was just piddling poolside finger food. A person could have just a quarter sandwich—just a nibble. Who was she kidding? No one in our family stopped at a quarter or even two quarters, and I usually didn’t manage to put the brakes on before five or six.

  I had more discipline and did better with other things: chemistry, American history, Steinbeck, Wharton. At Loomis Chaffee, the private school outside of Hartford to which Mom and Dad sent us, I got As in almost all of my classes in the tenth and eleventh grades. I had editing positions on the school newspaper and the school literary magazine, and, due to those activities and my continued participation in swimming, more friends than I’d ever had before. I was, as Mom and Dad had always prodded me to be, well-rounded. Only the rounded part—well, I felt that it applied to me just a little too literally.

  I had either six or seven or twelve pounds that wouldn’t go away: I never knew exactly how many, because at a certain point I just stopped getting on scales. I didn’t like what they told me. I was about five feet ten, only three-quarters of an inch under what I’d grow to be, and according to those rigorous medical charts of ideal weights at certain heights, I should have been 170 pounds. But I often weighed above 180, and I could blame only some of those extra pounds on big bones and a genuinely broad frame.

  During physicals in doctors’ offices, I averted my eyes from the scale and instructed the doctor not to tell me the number. Usually the doctor just chuckled as he wrote it on his chart. Sometimes he said, “I’d like it if you lost five to ten pounds.” He never said, “You’re fine the way you are.” I know because I listened for that—listened for some indication that I was wrong about myself.

  Ten pounds: it wasn’t a disaster. I recognized that. But it was aggravating. Maddening. It was the distance between me and some confident, enviable, all-American ideal that might well be mine if I could just turn away from yet another quarter of club sandwich, from the third buttered yam at Thanksgiving, from the second bowl of ice cream I’d carry up to my bedroom—in Avon I had my own bedroom, connected to Mark’s by a shared bathroom—at eleven thirty on a weeknight when I was up late studying.

  The extra weight was the confirmation: once a fat kid, always a fat kid, never moving through the world in the carefree fashion of people unaccustomed to worrying about their weight, never as inconspicuous. It was the stubborn thing I seemed least able to control, and I often felt that all my shortcomings flowed from it—were somehow wrapped into and perpetuated by it. If only I could fit into pants with a waist size of 31 or 32 instead of my 33s and 34s, I could walk briskly and buoyantly into a crowded school party instead of hovering tentatively at the door, unable to decide whom to approach and questioning whether my approach would be welcome.

  With 31s and 32s, I could wear whatever color and cut of shirt I wanted instead of the vertical stripes and the dark blues, browns and blacks that Mom said flattered me most. I could wear the madras sport jacket I’d tried on in a Hartford department store, the one she had told me wasn’t “particularly slimming,” or the kind of red plaid flannel shirt that was also—according to Mom, and according to the mirror—a sartorial no-no.

  One of my best friends, Adrian, a fellow swimmer on the Loomis team whom I regularly harangued into going along with me to late movies on Friday or Saturday nights, had a shirt like that. But then he also had a thirty-one-inch waist, even though he stood three inches taller than I did, with broader shoulders.

  On some of those Friday and Saturday nights, I’d get home after midnight and, though I’d had dinner earlier, grab two or three hamburger patties from the freezer in the garage, put them on a broiler pan and shove them under the broiler, flipping them as soon as I thought I could get away with it and leaving them on that second side for maybe five minutes tops.

  My preference for rare burgers, by then established, started out as a matter not of taste but of haste. Rare burgers came soonest off the grill or out of the oven.

  Partly because I tried not to, I was always thinking about food. Mark was always thinking about Amy, his girlfriend during his
senior year at Loomis, which was my junior year. And since he and I shared the car for the half-hour drive between Avon and the Loomis campus, I spent almost as much time around her as he did.

  Actually, I spent most of that time with her best friend, Ann, who kept me company while Mark and Amy stole away somewhere. In Amy’s house, Ann’s house, or a house that Amy frequently watched for friends of her family’s, Ann and I would listen to Neil Young’s Harvest or After the Gold Rush, to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty, and eat toasted bagels with melted Havarti on them. Ann had introduced me to Havarti, flecked with dill. Like most such introductions, it went well.

  “Where’s your girlfriend?” she asked me once. I sensed she could be trusted with the truth, which I hadn’t told anyone yet. I didn’t want a girlfriend, I confessed. I wanted a boyfriend.

  “Mark doesn’t know?” she said. It was more statement than question. She could pretty much tell that was the case.

  “No,” I said.

  “Are you freaked out?” This one was a question, and she was asking about more than what Mark might learn and how he might react.

  I said I wasn’t. It was nearing the end of junior year. I planned to bide my time until going off to college in about sixteen months. And I was going to make sure to choose a college in a decent-size city or with a big student body: a place where I’d be guaranteed to find other gay guys and might even have a boyfriend, maybe someone tall and thin and able to wear a red plaid flannel shirt like Adrian’s.