Snapshots of Lunch: Fil Americain
My grandparents always start lunch with soup. Today we spoon up a thin potage aux poireaux, because Grand-mamy knows how much my mom loves leek. Always the same stainless-steel tureen, and for my dad and me, bread and butter on a battered wooden board. My grandparents spread Bridelight on their bread, but Grand-mamy knows I like real butter, so she winks at me and puts some on the table.
But the soup is only a preface to the fil américain.
Its
preparation is Grand-père’s domain. He mixes together mustard,
Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, pepper, capers, gherkins, olive oil, a
shallot, one egg yolk per person, no salt. Ground beef, with the fat
removed, looks like a brain. It bleeds all over the refrigerator and my
grandmother trails behind, mopping blood spots with a lavette. In the
old days it used to be horsemeat, he says, because that was safer. In
Italy I learned to like horsemeat, I tell him. We used to eat it during
the war, he nods. When I went to the States in 1951, people asked me
(and he says this in inflected English),
“Belgium—-isn’t that where
people eat raw meat and frog legs?”
Grand-mamy turns on the friolator for French fries, which are actually, we’ll have you know, Belgian. When I set the table Grand-mamy gives me three water glasses and two beer goblets. I don’t have to ask who’s drinking what—of course, the men drink beer and we women water. Even though I usually don’t drink beer I take a can out for myself, for spite.
I see my grandmother’s lilacs and the tall, reddening maples, the broad lawn scattered with crisped brown leaves. I sleep in what used to be my mother’s room and pore over old photo albums marked by year—1951, 1953, and then a gap until 1957, the absence of chronicled years conspicuously marking my grandmother’s polio. It’s comfortable here. My mom has brought me my winter clothes, and I wear jeans for the first time since Providence. They still fit. Sorrowfully I hand her my stack of halter tops, of spaghetti straps and cotton skirts, and squash the newly imported (smelling of Miami’s detergent, mmm) turtlenecks and sweaters into my suitcase.
After lunch my dad and grandfather stay seated to talk about Gmail while we women clear the table and wash the dishes, efficiency incarnate. No one appears to resent this arrangement--its replication at every meal, its inevitablity--but me. Grand-mamy brings her cake au noisettes to the table and cuts it with an electric knife, relic from the sixties, a saw for cakes. When I ask her about the recipe for the crème anglaise we’re gleefully spooning out of its porcelain saucer onto the cake she crushes my fantasy by chuckling and pointing at the crumpled carton in the trash. I'm always surprised when that happens, but am obliged to recognize myself wallowing in my own naive (dare I say nostalgic?) fallacies. She laughs at me for actually wanting to make crème anglaise in a bain-marie, the long way. Why, if Delhaize’s is just as good?
My grandfather and grandmother grew up one street away from each other, watching the other mature from afar, until they finally formally met when my grandmother was twenty. I used to see her in the tram, he recalls. I liked her braids... I didn’t pay any attention to him, she says. He wasn’t Catholic, so I wasn’t interested. After their first date they got engaged. She wasn’t on the market long! he says gleefully. You weren’t the only one after me, she says, winking. But that’s how things were then. She’s very curious about how “things” work these days. Do the men still start conversation by asking the women to dance? Amélie and I tell her that no one dances in couples any more, it’s more like one big writhing mass on the dance floor. Women can ask out men, we tell her, they even sometimes pay for dinner. C’est formidable! she says. I flash back on this summer when I asked my grandfather what twentieth-century invention he thinks most changed the world. The airplane, he mused. It was the pill, said my grandmother.
Things change, yes, but it’s still Belgium. The road between Brussels and Tournai remains sprinkled with chateaux and cows and coal and chicon fields (endive). When we get to Tournai Friday night Amélie and I go for a walk in the country behind her house. The corn is mown down and the fields sprinkled with cow shit, a smell I love. The highway’s on the horizon, in miniature, but the only motor I hear is a tractor’s, pacing the field like a swimmer doing laps across lane lines. We see two enormous hares gallop across the downy grass. There are foxes sometimes too. We sit down, specks of lint on this enormous green pillow, and Amé updates me on the wars between her family and the crotchety farmer neighbor. He once caught Amélie shooting marbles at his cows, so when he fumigates his field he sprays plant-killer on my aunt’s cabbages. Baptiste and Guillaume retaliate, fashioning a potato gun out of a PVC pipe and exploding potatoes at the cows. Hysterical, he calls the cops about the hoodlums and their bazookas. So when my aunt spies him cutting down the branches of her trees that dare extend leaves onto his property, she runs for her Canon and hides behind the living room curtain, snapping away. She’s keeping a dossier on the motherfucker. This is war.
We keep walking. The cows stare at us dumbly, as if they’ve never seen people before. Mountains of harvested beets waiting to be processed into sugar lie slumped in field corners. Check this brilliance: once the sugar’s extracted from the beets, the pulp that remains comes back to the country, where the cows feast on it all winter. And when they poop it out again, the farmers keep the manure to fertilize the fields with, so that more beets can grow. Perfect!
We pass Oscar’s chapel. Oscar is the previously alcoholic husband of my aunt’s former cleaning lady, Geraldine. He went to Lourdes and was healed. His appreciation was so great that he decided to devote the rest of his life to worshiping Our Lady, completely restoring a roadside chapel that had fallen into disarray.
Finally home. We watch the news, mostly Bush vs. Kerry-talk, munching on pistachios and drinking Tokay. Same world. Feels very far away.
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