A poem, a recipe--and the eighth installment of "Boardinghouse Reach"

This Dark Soil

I break the crust of last year’s earth
and work the loam to readiness
for this year’s seeds, remembering
the garden hoe my father gripped
in his two hands, as I looked on,
age twelve or so, my baby sister
holding tight to my two knees.

Our eyes grew wide as, captive to his rage,
we watched him break the hoe in two
and walk inside again.

I grabbed her, opened the garden gate
and ran away, unwilling to hear the sounds
of what I knew would follow, or see the aftermath
of my mother and brother’s injuries.

And today, a magician, I hold in my two hands
an unbroken hoe with which I cultivate this land,
captive once more—in lockdown now—
calling forth the sweet fruits
of this dark soil.

Copyright ©️ 2024 by Barbara Quick

Photo by Gabriel Jimenez on Unsplash

The Story Continues…

Moving is hell for everyone except those who have enough money to pay other people to do the whole thing for them. I gave my credit cards one final shake and came up with the first and last month’s rent on Tony and Pam’s house. It was a scary thing not knowing whether and how I’d be able to fill two more bedrooms (for which I didn’t even have furniture, to say nothing of tenants). Paco readily agreed to move with us, and on moving day he and his brother pitched in with a tremendous amount of help.

Despite the relief I felt in knowing we would have a place to live, my flu, or whatever it was, continued to worsen. I was packing boxes and hefting them up and down stairs, coughing and reeling with the enormous responsibility of making it all happen. Colby was heroically helpful; but he had his own work to do, and couldn’t just drop everything to devote himself to my move. Besides, deciding what to pack and what to throw out or give away is a job that no one else can do for you. I was dismantling the infrastructure underlying ten years of marriage. As anxious as I was to move forward, it was still painful on some level knowing that there would be no going back. I hired Kyle’s old babysitter to clean as I packed and sorted. It was pouring rain every day, and I truly thought I was going to die.

On the final two days, Colby and his assistant moved every box, every hulking piece of oak furniture, truckload by truckload between the two houses while I stood by supervising in between nervous fits of tears. The babysitter and her sister came back to clean the new house, which had been left full of dust-balls, stopped-up toilets and Vogue magazines by its former occupants, four co-eds from UC Berkeley. Almost every major appliance had been misused if not broken, and I understood why Pam and Tony would actually be rather blessed by my hyper-responsible presence in their rental home. I spread the word about the two additional rooms, hoping to get students by word of mouth without having the language school take its bite out of the monthly room and board. I also hoped to change the rules (for all except Paco) so that I would only be responsible for cooking four nights a week.

Shortly after I placed an ad with a rental agency, I got a call from a sweet-sounding, effusive girl named Allison.

***

The living room was still a welter of boxes when Allison came to audition for the role of star boarder. Any director would have cast her. A second-year pre-med student who simply exuded idealism, she was also, improbably, gorgeous. Allison’s big blue eyes, her softly curling yellow-blond hair, her luminous skin, her beautiful body would not be out of place on any magazine cover. The first thing she did when she walked through the door was to hug me. I was dazzled by her. Kyle took to her, Colby gave her the thumbs up, and Paco—poor, sweet Paco—fell head over heels in love with her. Allison was the ultimate gringa pin-up girl: and here she was, under the same roof with him.

Allison was evidently used to people finding her devastatingly attractive. She was gracious toward Paco—warm and friendly—but tread delicately on the borderline of encouraging any romantic aspirations. Brought up by a couple of flower children, she had a habit of interrupting herself mid-sentence to gaze at you with her blue eyes, which she’d close for a moment before saying, “I love you!” and giving you a tremendous hug. She did this rather indiscriminately. When something happened that pleased her—it could be the arrival of her new duvet from a mail-order catalogue—she would grab the hands of the person standing nearest to her and say, “Oh, let’s jump for joy!” It was always tricky extricating oneself from this situation.

Paco had gone through some amazing changes in California. When he arrived—or so I later learned from his brother—he had a history of refusing anything even resembling greenery in his diet. Now he ate with gusto virtually everything I served him, and always took second helpings on salad. He’d been addicted both to Coke and cigarettes, but had completely given up smoking—that is, until Allison came on the scene.

The new house was situated overlooking a creek that was a roaring torrent at this time of year. Paco and Allison would go down to our lowest deck and sit on the railing, smoking clove cigarettes after dinner. While Allison truly liked and appreciated Paco, he definitely played the role of scenery or, at best, supporting actor in the world at whose center she shone like a glorious star bestowing warmth and light on all around her. Paco grew more and more silent and soulful while they lived in the house together.

Because Allison was one of those very strict vegetarians—no fish, nothing even cooked in broth—we’d arranged that I would buy the ingredients for her to cook her own food. For a tiny little thing, she ate enormous, even shocking quantities. It became almost impossible to keep certain things on hand—they disappeared as soon as I’d put them in the fridge. Her school schedule kept her busy and hungry. She started out eating only the vegetarian parts of the meals I served, but was soon bending her own rules, extending her culinary range more and more. In the second month, she was eating fish, shellfish, and even risotto cooked in chicken broth.

Allison woke up the young girl who had been sleeping inside me.

***

My family moved to Orange County from West Los Angeles in 1963, the year President Kennedy was shot. I was nine years old. I may have desired a change of family, but I had no wish to leave our old neighborhood.

Crestwood Hills, in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles, not far from where O.J. Simpson’s house stood, still looks pretty much as it did when I was growing up there: a collection of hilly streets and widely spaced, mostly wooden houses, each with its own distinctive character. There are no sidewalks; at the far end of Hanley Avenue, there’s a sprawling park with sycamore trees, grassy hills, a clubhouse, and a co-op nursery school nextdoor with an old beat-up car in the front yard that children can pretend to drive, and wooden play structures built by the parents. If you walk further on, beyond where the road stops, you find yourself in a back country of fire trails, live oak trees, manzanita the color of burnished redwood and yucca plants that send their cream-colored spires into the stratosphere.

Our new house in the City of Orange was part of a tract designed by Quincy Jones, who had also designed many of the houses in Crestwood Hills. Orange had a population of less than 27,000 in 1960. According to the census of that year, there were nine Black people who lived there. The second largest ethnic group counted was represented by twenty-nine people of Japanese ancestry. People of Hispanic or Latino origins were massed in that census under the general category “white.” Our tract, built by Palo Alto contractor Joseph Eichler, announced itself as mixed—a family of any color could buy a house there if they could afford the price. This was important to my parents who, despite their disastrously unhappy marriage, were in complete unanimity about their principles as liberal democrats.

Years later I found out that the Crestwood Hills Housing Association had a so-called restriction clause written into its charter in response to a bigoted but influential founding member. Some people dropped out at that point, in protest. Others, like my parents, stayed on, closing their eyes to that blot on an otherwise worthy and idealistic social experiment.

It’s true that there were virtually no people of color in my neighborhood or at my elementary school during the three years I was in attendance, but somehow I didn’t notice. The Civil Rights Movement was ostensibly an important part of my family’s—and even the neighborhood’s—political culture, and yet we had no Black friends. Most of the people we knew were, like my parents, assimilated, first-generation Americans with a strong cultural identification as Jews.

Why, as I write that word, does it sound derogatory to me? Perhaps it’s only Gentiles who refer to other people as Jews. The people I grew up with always spoke of someone being Jewish—they used the adjective rather than the noun. It was on my first day at my new school in Orange that I heard the noun for the first time, and people were using it to describe me. At recess my classmates assaulted me with questions about what it meant to be a Jew.

This was bad luck for me, as my upbringing had been completely secular. I had only been inside a synagogue two or three times, when Nana, my maternal grandmother, had taken me with her to services on the high holidays; but the experiences were too fleeting to have made much of an impression on me. We had never been to temple as a family. My parents were so anti-religion in general that they refused to have even an Old Testament in the house. I grew up thinking of the Bible as a Christian invention.

A tall, freckled girl with icy blue eyes and a turned-up nose spoke to me from the circle of children surrounding me. “Hey, do you have pews in your churches?” she wanted to know.

Although widely read for a fourth-grader (actually, I was a year younger than all the other fourth-graders), I hadn’t the slightest idea what a pew was—but it sounded rather awful. I knew that Jewish people who were religious went to synagogues, not churches, and I said so, hoping that this rough-boned girl would forget about the issue of pews. I hoped in my heart that Jews didn’t have them, because it was suddenly clear to me that I was going to be put in the position of defending Jewish religious practices. I also realized with some surprise how profoundly ignorant I was about Judaism, even though it was somehow the most important thing about me to all these new children I was meeting, as well as to the teachers at my school.

Orange was the heart of John Birch country, a land where the PTA was rejected as a Communist organization—our school made up another acronym for its parent-teacher organization. Any public works projects, including public roads, were considered tainted by Moscow’s influence. My teachers and the parents of my classmates were people who believed that America was a white, Christian country, and every other influence was to be distrusted and mocked. I remember a film in my fourth-grade class that showed, among other images, a person in Native American headdress riding a motorcycle. Our teacher, a kindly looking white-haired lady with the absurd name of Mrs. Pickle, led the class in malicious laughter.

I didn’t laugh. I refused to say “under God” when we said the pledge of allegiance. And I refused to leave the classroom when every other child filed out to go to the class period designated as “Release Time Christian Education,” during which they spent an hour in a trailer parked on the school grounds and received Bible instruction.

Looking back, I realize that part of Mrs. Pickle’s exasperation with me, her wheedling arguments that the instruction was “nondenominational,” probably had as much to do with her desire to go hang out at the teachers’ lounge as it did with any evangelical impulses on her part. She was probably just dying to go out and have a smoke. But as long as there was a child left in her classroom during that hour, she was obliged by law to stay and teach. What she usually did was give me extra arithmetic assignments that I worked in the echoing classroom while she sat at her desk and sulked.

Our housing tract was made up of perhaps eight square blocks of nearly identical houses designed, in the style of the time, without front porches or windows onto the street. Instead, each house was built around its own atrium, and had two sets of sliding glass doors that led out to a fenced backyard. This was the age of the nuclear family that did not have to answer to the community. These houses were designed for secrecy. The presumption behind it all was that there is no happier or safer place to be than in one’s own home.

There were two Black families in our tract—I’m not sure how many African Americans had dared to move into town in the three years since the census was taken, but I don’t imagine the number was very large. We were friendly with both families, although they never became close friends, and my parents seemed to treat them with a sort of exaggerated respect that mystified me, as if they were constantly afraid of somehow giving offense. They were the only adults in the neighborhood we were told to address as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” rather than calling them by their first name.

I started taking piano lessons from Mrs. Jamison, who lived with her husband and children two-and-a-half blocks away from us. One of the little tunes I was supposed to learn—“Londonderry Aire”—was also the tune for a tamely off-color ditty my parents knew. It started out, “Let’s go out and have a lark and goose the statues in the park.” My mother and father made me swear up and down that I’d never repeat those lyrics, which had absolutely no meaning to me, to Mrs. Jamison. I can’t remember much about the other Black family except that they had a pet rabbit that used to growl, much to the amusement of the neighborhood children.

Sometime shortly after we moved in, there was a cross-burning somewhere in our tract—I wasn’t given any details. As I look back now, I am much more horrified than I was then. I didn’t understand what a cross burning meant, or the extreme physical threat it implied—only that there were some local thugs who apparently hated the idea of people with dark-colored skin living among people whose skin was lighter. Much to the fury of the residents of our tract, the local press dismissed this clear evidence of a KKK presence in Orange as the prank of schoolchildren.

I didn’t think about how terrified the Black families must have been for their children’s safety. It didn’t occur to me that the incident might have implications for us, as Jews. There was a series of adults-only neighborhood meetings my parents attended, but I don’t know what they discussed or decided, apart from showing their sympathy and solidarity with Mr. and Mrs. Jamison and our neighbors who owned the rabbit.

When I asked my mother to help me reconstruct the events of that era, she admitted that she couldn’t remember much of it at all. She was so absorbed in somehow trying to survive the nightmare of her marriage to my father that she noticed very little of what happened outside the confines of our house and backyard.

***

Frittata Made From Leftover Risotto

This is, in a sense, a book of leftovers: sensations, details, insight and memories I’ve accumulated through the years, through what have sometimes seemed like several different lives. All of this comprises my cultural capital: this is my wealth and I am ready, I am willing, to spend it now.

A truly talented cook can take good leftovers and make something beautiful and new out of them, something that seems as much a gift to the diner’s appetite and senses as a meal conceived and concocted from scratch.

With this thought in mind, I’ll tell you my recipe for frittata, which can be made from scratch, but is at its richest and most rewarding when made from something cooked one or even a couple of nights before.

The first secret of inspired home cooking is to have an array of wonderful basic ingredients always on hand, in the same way in which your life will be most enjoyable if you live it in the company of delightful and endlessly fascinating friends. If your larder is stocked with extra-virgin olive oil, arborio rice, shallots and chicken broth, and you have an open bottle of white wine in the door of the fridge, you can always whip up a risotto. Leftover risotto of any kind makes for a rich and sophisticated frittata. Frittata and a green salad with a bit of good baguette make for a delightful evening meal.

You can use a nonstick frying pan for this; for a really large group, use a glass lasagna pan. I’ll give the frying pan instructions first.

Whisk two eggs per person with a little salt and some freshly ground pepper. Then put a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in your pan and swish it around over a medium flame. Add a one-inch thickness of risotto, spreading it out to the margins of the pan. Heat for a couple of minutes, then pour your eggs over the risotto, which will be coated but still visible in the way that rocks will show along a rugged seashore. Cook until the eggs have set but before any burning sets in on the bottom. Then place the whole pan under the broiler, but not too close: position the pan at least seven or eight inches under the flame. Try to keep the handle out of range if it’s made out of plastic (you can protect it by wrapping it in aluminum foil). Broil until the top is an even golden brown and the eggs are set but not dry. It may help to turn the pan. When done, slide or overturn the whole thing onto a large serving platter. Cut into wedges.

To make the same thing for a crowd, coat a lasagna pan with oil and spread a layer of risotto over the entire bottom of the pan (you can add other ingredients, such as artichoke hearts or slivered red bell pepper for added savor and decorative value). Pour your whisked eggs over, as above; place in a moderate oven, about 350 degrees. Bake until set but not dry. You can give the whole thing a quick pass under the broiler to get a golden color on top. Cut into squares.

I cherish the notion that everything I have lived—even the most painful parts—will eventually become tiles in my mosaic, and that the mosaic, when seen as a whole, will not only be beautiful but also—finally—make perfect sense.

Photo by Caitlin James on Unsplash