Baby Geisha (13 page)

WAR FOODS

“Let's go downtown and get some government cheese,” my father used to say to my brother and me. He thought that was entertainment enough for the weekends he had us in his custody. He was an ex-Marine who had served two tours in Vietnam. We didn't need the cheese, because we weren't that poor, so he must have thought we liked waiting in line to get five-pound cubes of Kraft Military Velveeta with the rations coupons he got from working at the Veteran's Administration. Carrying that 12x4x4-inch brown cardboard box marked with code numbers and the word CHEESE in capital letters was almost as humiliating as getting picked up from private school in his government-issued tan Ford Pinto that backfired. He used to say, “Don't worry about all those stuck-up kids. Be glad you're not like them.”

But eating that cheese just felt wrong.

Sometimes I ate the cheese if no one else was watching. It had a doll-head flavor. I'd cut rubbery slices off the end of the block with a cheese wire and throw them onto bread for a grilled cheese sandwich. “Don't you want some salt on that?” my dad would ask, tapping the salt shaker above the browning bread. Then, he'd open the door of his tiny hotel fridge and drink some pickle juice out of the jar. If the cheese ran over the sides of the bread while grilling, it would never burn or sizzle. It just liquefied and re-congealed like candle wax. You could melt it, pour it onto your hand, and watch it turn into a chunk again. Every time I ate the cheese I felt like a dog bent over a bowl of kibble.

Dear Annette
, this letter reads, emailed twenty years after my father's death.
If this is you, then hello, I am your cousin, daughter of your father's sister. We have not heard from you since your father's funeral
… I stare at the screen, read the letter eight times. I don't remember much about the funeral, especially the cousins, but I do remember burying my coveted black hi-top Converse All Stars in my dad's casket. The smelly sneakers are probably still in that grave. I still can't put faces on my cousins.

Death is an exercise in lucidity or lack thereof, a test of the memory's elasticity. What will I remember of this person, and what will I do with that information? Why did I forget everything else? I remember the gap between my dad's two front teeth, but not his eyes. No more am I surrounded by stuck-up kids, no more boring days trapped in my dad's cramped apartment flipping through his record collection. How does opening this letter still induce in me that feeling of being force fed the cheese? This relative of mine sincerely reaching out gives me one more thing to be embarrassed about: my lousy memory.

But I am more thrilled about the prospects of having family. I call my brother after a tenth read.

“Guess who emailed me?” Like he could. “Our cousin,” I say. “Remember all those cousins we have?”

We struggle to recall them. One caused a family feud at the funeral because he got my dad's pick-up truck, the only possession of monetary value. I got my dad's war medals, which I somehow managed to lose. My brother remembers one of our cousins smelling like salami.

“Should I try to see her?” I ask him, about the cousin who wrote.

“Sure, Annette,” he says.

The only date I recall with my aunt, this cousin's mom, was to the Rosicrucian church to see mummies. Over a hotdog lunch afterwards, we got a lesson in Egyptian afterlife. We don't care
how eccentric they are or were; it's lucky we have a family. At this point, I'd pay top dollar for any memories of my dad.

“I'll make a lunch date,” I say before we hang up.

 

Then, there was my embarrassment at dad's house. He didn't have duck or golf paintings, he had one watercolor of the World War I flying ace, Red Baron. Instead of a pool table room full of beer signs, lapis lazuli globes, shoehorns, and other Father's Day crap, he had a ramshackle room with one fraying orange armchair and a homemade plywood bookshelf. For washing hands, he used gritty Lava soap instead of musky man-scented mall soaps like Sandalwood or Spice. Rather than the preppy upper-class tortoiseshell and brass brushes my friends' dads used to comb their hair, he had the kind of plastic comb you buy at the gas station—the type called combbrush with a flat-toothed surface and a three-fingered slot on top for maximum control. I pleaded with him to get a real mirror in the bathroom. He said all we needed was a 3x4 emergency mirror, the tinny metal kind you take camping. I was a teenage girl. My girlfriends had track-lit three-angle mirrored vanities to primp in. I wasn't that picky, I just wanted a mirror.

One day, I learned why my dad hated mirrors. Dad was in the bathroom, finishing his shower, and I was in the living room when I heard his scream-grunt.

“Hunnnhh, hunnh!” Then the bathroom door slammed open. The apartment was dinky, and I was already at that bathroom's door. Little did my dad know that I was now prepared to drive him to the hospital if necessary. I'd practiced driving illegally and was well versed in stick shifting by age thirteen, from having given older friends sober rides home. I was ready to yank that skinny canvas cot I hated sleeping on right out of the bedroom, to drag Dad, unconscious, out to the car if need be. I would be his ambulance.

“Dad!” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. “What happened?”

He stood there, silent, pale, still groping the little mirror. His beard stubble made him look deranged.

“Bad daydream,” he said, inhaling deeply. He set the hand-held mirror down on the sink's edge, and walked out of the bathroom into the bedroom to lie down. I followed him into bed.

“What was it about?” I asked.

“The war,” he said.

I didn't press him, and instead went into the kitchen to bring him back some water. He had seen something terrible in that mirror. From then on, I didn't pester him to install one.

 

A few years ago I found a manila envelope of papers I kept, containing letters and notes he wrote, his handwriting samples. He had angular writing, like an architect's: neat, slanting forward to the right, penmanship marked with speed and purpose. I know that folder of his papers intimately, but I had never seen this poem of his in there. How and when had it been slipped in? I read it, again and again, trying to remember when he gave it to me, and if he really wrote it. Though his printing is proof of authorship, I have difficulty reconciling the poem's content with that person I loved.

No one escapes death

Hoped and believed in the world beyond death

Try to change the facts

Why fear death?

In order to live one must nearly die

Try to communicate with the dead

Life includes death

The Lord of Misfortune

Beyond the threshold of our ordinary experience

Cataclysmic journey from birth to death

Old terrors mingle with old truths

Death rides a Pale Horse

Ecstatic convulsions

Smell out the demon with snakes for feet

Sudden death from sheer terror is not unknown

He feigns to abstain from death

Exquisite torments

The taint of diabolical possession

 

Was it Death he saw in that tin mirror? My dad died two years later.

 

Beyond the cheese, the government-issued Salisbury steaks tasted a little bit sweeter than dog food, like Alpo mixed with sugar and slapped into patties. Smell some Alpo and you'll know how it tasted—like horse and cow scraped off the floor of a meat-packing plant after men have stomped in it. The steaks came in slender olive-green boxes that contained sealed baggies with meat encased in a jellied aspic sauce. The box had SALISBURY STEAK in the same lettering as the cheese. The sauce may have had tomatoes in it, but they were hard to detect due to its uniform russet color. You could eat the steak or poo it out, and it would look pretty much the same except for having been transformed into a log. Poo has that intestinal flavor as well—I've never tried it, but the smell tells you. It's the smell that goes,
I am not only unfit for human consumption, I am unfit for anything in the animal kingdom
. This is food that only microbes should be eating.

My dad reserved the “poo steaks” for fishing trips to Lake Isabella. This summer trip, the lakeshore was clouded with mosquitoes. We were in the bush—canvas army tent, rations boiling in the plastic baggies over the fire, lantern burning white gas, and our dad slathering us with insect repellent. My brother thought this way of living would aid him if he ever got stranded in the
jungle. He even got his pocket knife out and carved X's into his bug bites, then sucked out the blood, like our father had taught him. It was all very Vietnam—like a POW had taken his children into hiding and was briefing us on stratagems. I wondered if my dad had ever been tortured, had his wrists tied down and bamboo slivers pushed under his fingernails. Had he ever been forced to eat rats? No, but he'd told me once how he'd taken his camera on a photo shoot of severed Viet Cong heads, and he'd showed me a picture of an old lady who'd had her eyes poked out by soldiers. Not by anyone he knew, but he'd felt compelled to commemorate her.

On the first night of this camping trip, Dad woke us up in our tent, shouting, “I'll see you in hell!” The next morning, feeling guilty, he let my brother and I paddle all over the lake while he picked at his teeth with toothpicks on the lakeshore, fishing for catfish. In our canoe, I told my brother that our dad was a Pirate of War—a different kind of POW.

I ate the steak that night because I was starving. I'd been rowing all day. My dad pulled the sack of meat out of the fire with the point of his rosewood-handled hunting knife and slit open the plastic, plopping the slop into my mess kit pan. I unfolded my aluminum fork and bravely dove in. I couldn't bear to chew my bites; I just placed them as far back in my throat as possible and swallowed.

My girlfriends back home were probably at some fancy steak house, while their parents sipped martinis and flashed their jewelry. Whenever I ate with these families and saved my meat to take home in a doggy bag, glances shot back and forth between the parents.
Does she have enough to eat at home?
I can't wrap my mind around people who are embarrassed to take good food home. What a paltry thing to be embarrassed about. I had different food embarrassments. This camp steak, for example. It tasted grainy, like it had been stored in the attic with the wartime
memorabilia and the musty furniture. My dad must have been saving these rations since he was released from duty in 1974.

 

“So, did you meet the cousin?” my brother asked after I returned from the road trip I took to meet the cousin.

“No,” I said. “I just can't handle it. The whole food thing…”

“Food thing?” he asked.

“The lunch idea was too much,” I said.

“Why didn't you meet her for a walk in the park, then?” he asked.

“I don't know what to talk about,” I said.

“Kids, careers,” he said.

“You're welcome to,” I said. “I can't do it yet.”

My brother hung up, baffled. But as of today, he hasn't gone to meet our cousin either.

I went to fix myself a sandwich in the kitchen. Birds tweeted out the window, teetering on the branches of a guava tree. They chipped their beaks at the budding fruits to get at ripening tidbits. Birds don't need to wait for fruits' full sweetness; they savor every stage. My PB&J sandwich did the job. Will I ever take an interest in food preparation? I'm a terrible cook. I eat to survive, ever since my dad served me those gnarly Salisbury Steak rations. Choke it down and move on. I miss my dad, and this petty remembrance of him doesn't make me proud.

 

Don't eat government-issued foods unless you are a prisoner of war. Don't eat Velveeta; use it for fishbait. Don't eat boxed meat. These foods are last resorts if you're out of grocery money or trapped in earthquake rubble. Eating sick things when it's not necessary is like watching people agonize over gunshot wounds. I guess this diet was gratifying for a soldier who wanted to reminisce, but it was boring and confusing for his offspring. Re-hashing desperate times doesn't compute with children who haven't had desperate times.

War pirates like my father make sure their kids know they have it easy, but not in the conventional way. They shell-shock the young with the grotesque. I was taught to be grateful for the war foods because my dad lived on them for two years straight. I wouldn't insult his patriotism. I was glad I had a dad who weathered that war to feed me. But will I always be a dog eating kibble?

SHRUB OF EMOTION

I used to be a dolphin trainer, and drove to work in a black swimsuit and flip-flops. My office was a bench next to the pool. I sported a clipboard and waterproof work supplies. The dolphins could fetch, jump through hoops, score goals in water polo, and were advanced synchronized swimmers. With a whistle and some hand signals, I could tell them to circle the perimeter of their pool, pick up a disc and chuck it to me like a Frisbee, then come over for mackerel. Dolphins can handle a string of up to twenty commands.