The first serialized installment from Boardinghouse Reach: A Novel with Recipes

Exclusively for my Substack readers

Chapter One

The house where my husband, our little son and I had been living for the past two years had the stake of a big “For Sale” sign plunged straight through the heart of the herb garden I’d planted in the front yard between two of my favorite roses, “Double Delight” and “Perdita.”  That about sums it up, too. I was dating two men; and, financially, at least, I felt as doomed as someone who’s been pushed from a swift-moving vessel into the middle of the ocean.

There I was, suddenly a single mother and sixteen thousand dollars in debt. A free-lance writer and poet, God help me, in one of the most expensive places to live in the entire country.

Even before Stewart had decamped from the house onto the sailboat he’d surreptitiously shopped for and bought, I’d taken in a boarder to help subsidize the rent. It seemed a more sensible solution than putting our son in daycare and getting a full-time job that would pay for the daycare and not much more.

The East Bay has a local language academy that caters to wealthy foreigners who want to learn English. The school’s immersion program places these students in middleclass households with a resident mom (such as myself) willing to welcome an extra body at her table for self-serve breakfasts and a sit-down dinner every night.

One such student would pay half our rent.

I moved the contents of my basement study into the perpetually messy, wildly disorganized room that had served as the physical manifestation of Stewart’s unrealized creative potential. With Stewart’s help, I moved the futon and one of the oak dressers (his) into my cleared-out study, and bought and assembled (really, Stewart did it) a huge but cheap pressed-wood wardrobe from one of the local discount stores; kept my own beloved Arts-and-Crafts desk there, bought some extra hangers, installed blinds, and told the home-stay program I was ready to roll. Stewart slept on the living-room couch until he’d made his sailboat—a $7,000 fixer-upper—habitable.

Thus began my career as a boardinghouse lady.

***

For centuries, gentlewomen—most often widows—have taken in boarders. There’s a distinguished tradition of ladies of good breeding but straitened circumstances letting a room or two to people of quality who nonetheless found themselves without friends or family in a given town; or who, for a variety of reasons (most often, but not always, financial) chose not to have a household of their own. The lady of the house would keep her silk and velvet gowns in good repair even if she couldn’t afford to have too many new ones made. She would oversee the servants’ work, ever watchful of the economies that could be made without compromising her general quality of life. She prided herself on the food she served at her table and would cultivate friendships with her boarders, doing her best to create the illusion that the entire arrangement was a matter of hospitality rather than necessity.

Things are not all that different now, except that divorce rather than death is usually the motivating circumstance. And the cast of characters in these poignant domestic dramas has been significantly pared down. The gentlewoman must play her own role as well as those of the servants of yesteryear. In all probability, she also has an outside job requiring at least part of her energy and time. If she’s lucky, she can afford to hire a cleaning person to come in once a month—but most likely it is she herself who gets down on her knees to wipe the hair off the bathroom floor and scrub the mildew off the grout. She plans the meals and shops for them, does the cooking, is charming during dinner, and then washes the dishes and puts away the leftover food in heat-proof glass containers. She does the laundry and tries to make sure that her child doesn’t get to bed too late every night. When she finally falls into her own bed, she’s too tired to even dream about something or someone coming along to change her life—all she longs for is the comfort of sleep.

***

Our debut boarder was an eighteen-year-old boy from Thailand whose first name was listed on the home-stay form as “Kitti.” Whether it was from knowledge that the name wouldn’t fly here, or some sort of cross-cultural prescience, he chose to bill himself on the American scene as “Jax.”

Jax spoke absolutely no English at all, apart from the words “Okay” and “Thank you,” which he used with a neutral, nervous smile as his universal response to everything. I’m usually adept at communicating on at least some level with almost anybody. But having Jax in the house was like playing host to E.T. Evidently from a wealthy family with lots of servants, he was indolent even for a teenager, and he hadn’t the foggiest notion how to do even the simplest domestic chores. When I asked him after a week to strip his bed so that I could wash his sheets—my request supported by pantomime and written instructions he could decipher with the help of his dictionary—he brought me his duvet, then his pillows, then his mattress pad. I finally gave up and took the sheets off the bed myself. When, after a couple of weeks of breaking bread together, I asked him what he normally did at home during the summer, he said “Video games.”

Dinner conversation was sparse. He never offered to help with the washing up, although he would sometimes play soccer with my son using an inflatable globe on which Little Kyle had learned to locate Thailand, San Francisco, and England (where Stewart was born in the lean years following World War II). I told myself that our son’s cultural horizons were being expanded.

Stewart, still in residence although exiled from our bedroom, rose early every morning from his nest on the couch—often sleeping fully clothed—out of concern that Jax would notice the unhappiness of our domestic arrangements.  Or perhaps it was out of pride. For all Jax knew, though, this was how all American families lived. He probably thought that Stewart, who is the soberest of men, drank and then passed out on the couch every night.

Actually, I had no idea what he thought. Jax was a cipher to me, and I was far too miserable at that time to do much more than merely tolerate him.

I imagined my future stretching out endlessly before me—the husband who, when queried, would say in a flat sort of voice that he’d never loved me, that he was sorry he married me; whose odd imbalance of chemicals caused him to view me as a ballet director looks at his dancers. No matter that I was by general standards a featherweight: all he could see was fat.

Stewart, when I first met him, was cheerful and bright, quiet but always up for a bit of clowning. He looked like the man in the Burberry raincoat ads—six feet tall, chiseled and lean, classically handsome. I remember the way young women used to follow him with their gaze, doe-eyed and full of longing, as we walked by on the street. One could never have divined from his mild-mannered exterior the welter of unresolved childhood issues, low self-esteem and pessimism that crippled Stewart in so many ways. It made it a lonely thing being married to him after the freeing influence of his initial infatuation with me had worn off.

Although possessed of a rich vocabulary, Stewart offered little more conversation than Jax. When in fond, foolish moments I went to Stewart with my troubles and fears, hoping for a crumb of encouragement, he would respond by agreeing how hopeless it all was. If I said I felt like a failure, he said he felt like one, too. His attitude in general was, “Isn’t it just awful? We might as well kill ourselves.” 

Lethargy had become a way of life for him. He would start telling a story to Kyle and fall asleep mid-sentence. The words we heard most frequently from Stewart were, “I’m just going to rest my eyes for a moment.” All of the energy required to get us to do something as a family had to come from me—nothing sounded fun to Stewart. He hated restaurants and cafes. It was too much trouble to go on hikes or picnics. If we tried to socialize with other people, he could easily go through an entire evening without murmuring more than a barely audible word or two.

I was exhausted by the responsibility of providing the emotional content for two lives, by being the sole provider of bread and hope; by carrying the overwhelming weight of my husband’s pessimism. I lay awake at night worrying about my mounting debt and the monumental task Stewart had set for himself in rebuilding the now gutted interior of his sailboat.

I cried sometimes while I stood washing the dishes at our kitchen sink, as worn out where the black iron showed through in ugly patches as I was feeling. No one was paying much attention. I was often tired during that year, bone-tired, more than ready to fall asleep at ten o’clock or so, but unable to because of all the work that still needed to be done. I got into the habit of weeping, as a child weeps, out of exhaustion, brushing away the tears, and going on with whatever I was doing.

This was a time when all of us needed comfort food—me, Stewart, Kyle, and probably Jax (although I couldn’t be certain). I’ll give you the recipe here for one of Stewart’s favorites, which he liked and appreciated even in our last months under the same roof together, when he would criticize me for making food “too beautiful,” or for spending too much time cooking.

A Recipe to Warm You in Your Darkest Hours: Vichyssoise

Slowly sauté one large yellow onion followed by the white and pale green parts of two to four leeks, depending on their size, in a quarter pound of butter melted over a low fire.  When the onions have the translucency of your fogged-up windshield on a rainy day, add five to seven sweet-fleshed potatoes (Yukon Gold or Yellow Finn, if you can find them), peeled and thinly sliced. Stir to coat with the butter, then add a quart or more of boiling chicken broth, either homemade or very good quality from the store, to cover the vegetables. Simmer until the potato slices fall apart when prodded with a spoon, about twenty minutes. Puree in the pot with a hand blender to minimize the washing up you’ll have to do. Ladle into bowls, garnish with chopped fresh chives. Eat with crusty bread and a glass of good red wine.

Copyright © 2023 by Barbara Quick

The next installment of Boardinghouse Reach: A Novel with Recipes will be published on Tuesday, December 5th, on Life-Boat Made of Words. Scroll down to read some scribbles from my journal. (There will be a new poem next week!)

Photo by Ashe Walker on Unsplash

A Daughter of Eve

some scribbles from my journal

How do I leach the bitterness out from the acorns under this tree? What ancient wisdom can I draw on to turn them into nourishing and palatable food that will sustain me over the wintertime of my life in this body?

What a waste of psychic energy, to upbraid the oak tree for the bitterness of its acorns!

Praise the knowledge instead, honed by our foremothers over thousands of years (for surely it was the women, determined to feed themselves and their children, who figured out the art of making acorn mush).

Never forget that it’s always been such, for as long as our kind has wandered upright on this planet. The men will claim all the credit and retain all the wealth, while the women work surreptitiously to keep the clan alive.

The Garden of Eden was not just a pretty place enjoyed by Eve but a life-sustaining paradise of good things to eat that she magicked out of dirt, coaxed and nurtured, harvested and cured with the salt of her own sweat and tears. God threw her out for being too clever, fearing she showed him in a bad light.

I need to be bold and clever, as brave as Eve. To gather whatever acorns and olives I can along the way—and figure out how to turn them into food. Into poems. Into books that will be read and loved. And, yes—eventually, somehow—into money.

Photo by Joвана Младеновић on Unsplash