Creative Non-Fiction: You Sure You Want To Order That? By Karen Resta

By Karen Resta

The man across from me was vaguely familiar, but I really didn’t know him at all. The woman next to me I did know, but at the moment she was acting distant. We sat in a large booth near the front of this famous old Brooklyn restaurant, a gilded place with broken-springed red velvet banquettes, uneven wooden floors, and elderly waiters wearing long aprons that fell well below their knees. The gaslights fizzed grimy yellow, highlighting the dark sticky contours of the heavily varnished booths. 

At the time, I was a few months past 14 years old and was living with my boyfriend Michael, who was 26. I was a runaway/throwaway, Michael was a jazz musician.

I use the term “runaway/throwaway” because it’s the closest thing I can find to describe what I was, who I was. 

“You sure you want to order that?” the man asked. His stocky arms moved forward on the table toward me, elbows out, sleeves rolled up.

“Yes,” I said, looking up and into his unreadable eyes. The woman at my side stared at the large menu in front of her without comment. Leaning forward, I spoke to the waiter across the woman’s bent head, pointing at the words on the menu. I didn’t look at the man across from me, my father, though he seemed to be staring at me.  “Lobster Thermidor,” I said again, louder this time so I’d be sure to be heard clearly over the murmur of conversation and the clatter of dishes. 

I loved that name—Lobster Thermidor. I knew I just had to have it. 

What I Knew At the Time: I liked the way it sounded, plus it had lobster in it.

What I Now Know: Lobster Thermidor is a dish within the classic cuisine canon of France—or more specifically, within the French haute cuisine tradition. It’s not often found on restaurant menus anywhere in the world.                     
                
I’d met my father only once before that day. Like Lobster Thermidor, he had an uncommon surname. I’d semi-disliked it even before I knew my mother put on my birth certificate without his consent. Nobody ever said it or spelled it right, and he hadn’t been around to help with that my entire lifetime—or with anything else, for that matter. I’d never spoken to him, never had a letter or card from him, he basically wasn’t a real person to me. But I’d found his name in the Brooklyn phone book a few weeks before this gathering at the restaurant. Seeing his name was a shock. I’d looked for it in all the other phone books in all the different places my mom and I had lived while I was growing up. It had never been there. But here it was, and his address was only a short walk from where I lived with Michael. 

On one of those sunny days in Brooklyn where the light tells you the city is an island surrounded by water, I decided to see what my father was like. Not thinking about it too much, I walked along Montague Street almost up to where it ends in a standoff with the East River. His building had one of those bow-shaped fronts that hints at waterfront property, but take the bow-front away and what you’d have is a hard-working New York City apartment building that was, as the old saying goes, no better than it should be. 

I pushed the grimy buzzer that had his name next to it—which was also my name—took the slightly depressed elevator up a few floors, and walked along a dimly lit hall where each door looked the same as the next. Which was the right door? It was my own private game show—which door had the best prize? Anything at all could be behind these doors. But I didn’t think about winning or losing, I actually didn’t think about anything at all. All I did was repeat my lines in my head over and over. I had to say them right. First: Who was he? Next: Who was I? Then: What we were. If we were. Were we?  

There was his door, the exact same as the others. I knocked. The very instant I saw him in the open doorway I understood why I didn’t look like my mother. Graying thick hair, roundish face, wearing jeans of all things (I totally didn’t expect that) and a checked flannel shirt. 

He didn’t really look like me but there was a kind of mirroring thing going on. My mother’s height had always been a source of pride for her, even a self-definition, and my own short height always seemed to hint I might be less than she expected, not “like her at all” in some important way. But this man was definitely not tall. It seemed to me as I looked at him that his feet were rooted to the earth. 

He stood there saying nothing, so I asked him if he was who he was, pronouncing his name carefully. He said yes, and I told him who I was and said “You’re my father,” and the first thing he said back to me was  “Who’s your mother?” then “You’d better come in,” then “Is it Ellen?” 

We talked for a bit, uncomfortably. He asked all the questions. It was a one-room apartment, so I sat on the edge of his bed while he paced around. 

I didn’t stay long but before I left he asked for my mom’s phone number. He wanted to call her to set up a reunion of sorts—him with her, her with me (I hadn’t seen her since I’d left home months earlier) and all of us together. One big happy family. I got to choose the restaurant.

What I Knew At the Time: Pretty much nothing.


What I Now Know: There are many editions of the classic French tome Larousse Gastronomique, but the 1961 edition—the first American edition—is considered to be the best, as it’s the most complete of the translations. In Larousse, the recipes are written in narrative form and often without exact measurements, as it’s assumed the reader has a good knowledge of cookery. The entry for Lobster Thermidor begins “Split a live lobster in two, lengthwise.” 

I learned that Morton, aka Morty, my father, came from a large extended non-secular Jewish family in Midwood that had emigrated from Amsterdam. Diamond cutters. He’d become a poet of the “New York School”, started a career, then faded away to obscurity. I have no idea why, why would I know? He had a brother, who had two children slightly older than me. I only know this because my mother told me so. I’d never seen him, spoken to him, or had any communication with him before I knocked on his door that day.

Ellen, my mom, grew up in Maine. I know more of what she didn’t like than what she did like, just because that’s how she was. She didn’t like churches or religion. She really didn’t like that life for women didn’t offer the same possibilities as life for men. She didn’t like people she called “poor slobs”, though I can’t exactly explain what a poor slob is and I doubt she could either.

When I was young I’d climb up onto her lap as she sat in her spot at the end of the couch, the royal blue couch, all the couches she ever bought were royal blue. I’d poke her and hug her and push her drab hair aside and kiss her all over her face. She’d let out a light little dessert-spoon of a laugh, turn her head aside, and take another puff of her cigarette. She smoked Virginia Slims. They had a ditty that played all the time on the radio: “You’ve come a long way, baby, to get where you’ve got to today! You’ve got your own cigarette now, baby, you’ve come a long long way!”

MIchael, my boyfriend, was a part of all this, too, but he hadn’t been invited to the restaurant. 

I’ve actually been asked how a 14 year old girl goes about getting a 26 year old boyfriend. The answer is that a 14 year old girl doesn’t have to do anything to get a 26 year old boyfriend, all she has to do is exist. Older boys and men just magically show up and they’re always ready to be some kind of boyfriend. Then all the 14 year old girl has to do is choose wisely. A boyfriend may be the best option for survival for runaway/throwaways, and if you happen to be a romantic you can believe all of this is wonderful, and who knows, it may be exactly that!

We can discuss this thing in terms of sociology, in terms of culture, in terms of history, in terms of human development, in terms of right and wrong, in terms of feminism, in terms of me too because it’s always me too and always was me too, we can discuss it in terms of anything you want. 

What I Knew At the Time: I knew that lobsters come from Maine and that to cook them, you boiled them alive and ate them with melted butter.


What I Now Know: The techniques used in the preparation of Lobster Thermidor are of a type generally performed only in professional kitchens by trained chefs. This endows the dish with a higher level of cultural capital. They are as follows (paraphrased): “After splitting a live lobster in two lengthwise, remove all the raw meat from every part of the lobster, season and oil both sides of the carcass then roast in oven for 20 minutes. Dice the meat coarsely, make a stock of wine, fish fumet, and meat gravy, reduce to a concentrated consistency, add Bechamel and mustard, whisk in butter, line the two sides of the carcasse with this mixture, fill with the lobster flesh, top with remaining mixture, sprinkle with grated Parmesan and butter, brown quickly in hot oven.”

Recipe for a 13 year old Runaway/Throwaway
Note: Please remember that runaways and throwaways, though appearing similar to the untrained eye, are different things. A runaway leaves home because they want to. A throwaway leaves home because they have in some way been asked to leave or told to get out. The runaway/throwaway takes both and combines them.

Ingredients:
1 mother
1 daughter
1 summer rock festival that turns into a drug festival 
1 handful cool rock festival attendees
1 PhD dissertation due to be finished by mother
1 grizzled thesis advisor of unknown age
1 set of State Police

Directions:
1. Prepare mise-en-scène: Take 13 year old daughter and 48 year old single mother. Line up on countertop along with a grizzled thesis advisor of unknown age.
2. Place mother and daughter together in a bowl and stir well. If properly done, the daughter will ask if she can go to a weekend-long rock festival in a different part of the state, and the mother will say yes without asking for any details such as how the daughter is going to get there and back.
3. Meanwhile prepare the grizzled thesis advisor of unknown age for his affair with the mother. This will not be difficult as the mother already travels to spend weekends with him anyway, leaving the daughter home alone.
4. Mix the daughter together with the rock festival and the cool people and allow to rest until they all leave the festival together then hitchhike in the opposite direction of where the daughter lives.
5. Top generously with State Police who arrest them all for hitchhiking then put the 13 year old daughter in jail because she sure doesn’t look like the 26 year old on her fake ID. Bake until golden.


Everything, finally, comes down to certain moments in life, doesn’t it? I tumble right into one of those moments way too often, though for a long time I refused to think about it at all. We’re in family court together, me and my mom, after my arrest in Delaware for hitchhiking. I keep staring at her hands, because they’re so different from mine, hers elegant, mine plain. The woman with the tightly curled white hair sitting across from us at the scarred wood table says “Can you take her home and make sure she doesn’t do anything like this again?” My mom looks down at the table, then says “No” and my stomach goes up into the area of my neck, and a part of it’s been there ever since. 

This, I say to myself, over and over again. This, this. With each year that passes, this moment grows more insistent. What was this?

The ride home in the car was completely silent. When my mom went to work the next morning I packed my duffel bag (making sure to bring my favorite red, white and blue American flag bell bottom jeans, my Raggedy Ann doll, and a few books to read) emptied my ceramic pink pig piggy bank, and got on a Greyhound bus. 

I didn’t think about my mom for a while after that. I called her once from the pay phones in front of Borough Hall a few weeks after I left. It’s crowded there, between the subway and the courts and the Board of Education, noisy with the rattle of the trains below the sidewalk, the groans and sighs of the city busses constantly starting and stopping right at that spot and everyone bustling around trying to prove they belonged here in these big gray important buildings. I stood in the middle of it all, it was cold, I didn’t have a winter coat at the time. I held the dirty black hard plastic phone receiver against my face and when my mom answered she just screamed at me and that didn’t seem right, since she was the one who’d wanted to get rid of me in the first place, so I hung up on her. The next time I called she didn’t scream, so I told her where I was and what I was doing. She had no comment on any of it. 

What I Knew At the Time: Not a lot.

What I Now Know: All of the ingredients for Lobster Thermidor could easily be purchased in Paris (where the recipe originated) in 1891. The lobster likely was a Breton Bleu from Bretagne, the wine French, the sauces made from local ingredients, the butter from Bretagne or Normandie, the mustard French, perhaps from Dijon. The only ingredient that would remove this dish from being considered entirely “local” is the Parmesan cheese, but even that could be purchased in Paris at the time the recipe was first created.

Recipe for Finding a Place to Live in NYC When You’re 13 Years Old
Note: Please be aware that this recipe is fairly complicated, so be sure to allow adequate preparation time.

Ingredients:
1 college dropout (Jeannie)
1 heroin addict (Warren)
1 cat (Tabby Cat)
1 guy (Princeton Guy)
1 woman (Guardian Angel)
2 Michaels

Directions:

1. Tell Jeannie you’re going to have to go live in a foster home. If you have the right kind of Jeannie, she will say “You won’t survive that,” then she’ll say “My parents are still paying rent on the apartment in the city they got me for school, but I’m not going to school anymore,” then “I’ll give you the keys. My roommate is still there, but he won’t mind.”
2. Go to the apartment—which is a two-bedroom brownstone on the Upper West Side—meet Warren who is usually in the living room shooting up heroin with one of his boyfriends, take your huge duffel bag to your room, throw it in the corner and lay on the mattress on the floor for a bit.
3. Panhandle at Needle Park then go to Key Food to buy something to eat. Choose a hunk of Velveeta, if only because it’s so yellow, creamy, Mid-American and solid; and some crackers. Maybe Triscuits. Take the food back to your bedroom, avoiding Warren.
4. Tear open one end of the shiny silver paper that’s covering the slab of Velveeta, and Tabby Cat, who you didn’t even know existed, should jump out of the open closet filled with boxes and climb up your jeans, her sharp claws going right through them and into your legs, in an attempt to get the Velveeta. Drop the Velveeta, let her have it, back up a bit, then open the cracker box and crumble some crackers onto the floor for her, see that she’s pregnant, note the open window and get her some water from the kitchen, still avoiding Warren though he probably doesn’t even know you’re there. Call Jeannie, and if you have the right kind of Jeannie, she’ll say she’s sorry, she forgot to tell you about Tabby Cat and that Warren promised to feed Tabby Cat and that she’ll get her parents to take her into the city to bring Tabby Cat home.
5. Meanwhile, Princeton Guy should appear at the apartment door pretty soon one day when it’s too early for Warren to be out in the living room, the sun is pouring through the windows, it’s a beautiful day. You met Princeton Guy somewhere, he’s about 23, his father is a bigwig at Princeton University. Princeton Guy is very polite and has very good manners until he doesn’t. Tell him that you don’t want to do what he wants you to do, then he will pick you up and throw you against the marble mantlepiece, which is pretty scary, plus it hurts.  If you get the right Princeton Guy, he is about 6’2” to your 5’ even, so picking you up and throwing you around is a pretty easy thing for him to do. Plus that well-known male upper-body strength, you know? 
6. Now, run out the door of the apartment, down the stairs, and out to the green-leafed street. What a nice neighborhood! Trees everywhere, golden light filtering through, Central Park right up the street. The air smells fresh, clean. Princeton Guy runs after you, catches up to you, grabs you around the neck with his two hands, lifts you up by your neck, and starts carrying you toward the park like he’s some kind of Frankenstein. You will be blacking out when a lady (her name is Guardian Angel Lady) who happens to be walking up the street with her two kids who are around your age yells at him to stop or she’ll call the cops. He drops you and runs off. (Note: At this point you may wish to take a break from all this, but as I mentioned at the start there are a lot of steps to this recipe and you can’t just stop in the middle. Whether you’ve allowed enough preparation time or not you must keep going. Just keep going.
7. Guardian Angel Lady lives nearby and she says you must go there with her. She’ll say “Call your parents,” and if you don’t have any parents to call, you’ll have to fake that you’re calling them. Her two kids don’t play any part in this, aside from purposely not looking at you except for side eyes that distinctly say “What a freak.” Call a friend of Jeannie’s you’ve met before, Michael, ask if he’s “around” then say something happened and that you’re going to go to wherever it is he is. The lady won’t want to let you go. You must convince her you’ve called your dad, he was waiting for you, you’d be fine. 
8. Go to Michaels’ dark little apartment with brick walls and no windows in the East Village. This Michael is a friend of another Michael. Both are professional musicians, both play the trumpet, and both have been best friends since high school. This is how to meet your Michael, through the other Michael. It’s important to avoid Princeton Guy. Stay at the first Michael’s apartment for a few days, then move in with your Michael, and in about a month both of you should move together to Brooklyn, to a strange triangular building with narrow stairs, into a strange tiny apartment that’s barely large enough to turn around in, where Michael will practice his scales every day sitting on a folding chair facing into the one miniscule closet in the slip of a hallway between the triangular main room and the kitchenette. 
9. Wrap well and store carefully in an airtight container in a cool dark place with no direct sunlight.

Soon after moving to Brooklyn with Michael, I got a job as an office temp. I was a file clerk—a good one, too. New York City really needed good file clerks at the time, and lots of people just don’t have this talent of alphabetization. They didn’t know I was 14, I had a fake ID that said I was 16. I’d always loved my ABC’s. 
And soon after that, I met my father. I never saw Jeannie, Warren, Tabby Cat, Princeton Guy, or Guardian Angel Lady ever again. I was now well on my way to being a person who dined on Lobster Thermidor.

What I Knew At the Time: I couldn’t afford to buy lobster myself, that was for sure. If I’d had to cook anything designated as “seafood” it probably would have been frozen fish sticks, and I’d be okay with that. 

What I Now Know: The ingredients used in Lobster Thermidor are expensive—way beyond a usual home cook’s budget—and the use of fish fumet, meat gravy, and Bechamel denotes that the recipe will be prepared in a fine restaurant where the sauces have been made ahead of time by a saucier. The extra hours of labor created by making the mother sauces implies that money is not an object.

I knew the street outside Gage & Tollner better than I knew the restaurant. It seemed I knew it better than either of these people I was sitting with who happened to be my parents. At this end, the street was quiet and formal, filled with old people and lawyers, and as Fulton Street edged toward Brooklyn Heights, small banks and dying haberdashers. Cigar smell, damp wool, all the faces were shades of beige and white. The other end, as it reached out to central Brooklyn, was raucous with no-name department stores, street hustlers, cheap hot dog stands, men standing on overturned milk crates screaming that we were all doomed without Jesus. Fried onions on burnt steel griddle top, plumes of Kool cigarettes, all the faces were shades of brown and black. 

I walked the length of that street every Saturday. At the Brooklyn Heights end, they thought I was one of them. One of their daughters, their sisters, their nieces. I wasn’t. At the central Brooklyn end, first they wondered why I was there. Then looking more closely, they may have recognized my sense of dispossession. 

This is what it means to know the streets. You’ve been dispossessed and you’re going to survive here or not, there’s no liminal space to hide, no questions to be asked, none to be answered.


Daddy?

Lobsters were being murdered in the back of this restaurant for my dining pleasure, for me, the 14 year old skinny redheaded girl with glasses who’d ordered Lobster Thermidor. I had no idea what Lobster Thermidor was, but it sounded magnificent. After eating it I would surely become sophisticated, knowledgeable, and cosmopolitan. “Lobster Thermidor,” I’d said calmly to the waiter but now I had to figure out what to call this guy sitting across from me, the one who was my father. He certainly wasn’t “Dad”. That made no sense. “Daddy” was even more ridiculous, as was “Father”. He wasn’t any of those things. I couldn’t call him by his first name, because even that sounded bizarre to me. “Morton”. I’d never known a Morton, who knows a Morton? Nobody!

What I Knew At the Time: Not a lot about history, since I’d only finished the 8th grade in school the previous spring.

What I Now Know: The history of Lobster Thermidor is set in fine dining restaurants, though specific facts are disputed. It was named after a notorious 1891 play at the Comédie-Française. It may have been created by Leopold Mourier (an assistant to Escoffier) at the Café de Paris; or it may have been created at Maison Maire by an unknown and unheralded chef, then sold to Mourier by the owner of Maison Maire. The recipe for Lobster Thermidor at the Maison Maire included tomatoes, which are not included in any recipes I viewed during my research. The differing stories of the inception of the recipe suggest that more research is needed.

Here’s the thing: I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know this guy. I’d knocked on his door and told him I was his daughter, but it wasn’t from some deep-seated need. I’d never had a father, so how could I miss him?  My mother had told me a few things about him, but still, he was utterly alien. He was a myth, but not a big one. There wasn’t anything magical about the idea of him, and at this point in time the concept of mother or father didn’t mean too much to me.

From that moment on I didn’t call him anything at all. I never said his name, it wouldn’t leave my mouth. I did try. I heard my mom call him “Morty” during the meal and almost died of embarrassment. “It’s very rich,” he said, about the Lobster Thermidor, after asking if I was sure I wanted to order it. Apparently he’d had it before. If he’d had it I definitely was going to have it too. “That’s okay,” I said. 

The Lobster Thermidor was . . . well, does it really matter how it was? Actually it tasted like shit. I hated it. But I wasn’t going to tell him that.

What I Knew At the Time: This dish with the marvelous name, which oozed a sense of perfection and ease, actually tasted really bad. It was almost inedible.

What I Now Know: It could have been that the lobster wasn’t as fresh as it should have been. It might have been that the wine used in the recipe hadn’t been allowed to burn off enough. Maybe the cook used an egg yolk to thicken the sauce and left it over heat for too long until the entire thing became grainy. It could have been so many things, but it all comes down to a lack of care.                

After the meal at the restaurant I didn’t see my father for a while. Then one day when I got home from work Michael was really upset. Earlier that afternoon my father had knocked on the door and introduced himself to Michael, who invited him into the apartment, offered him a seat in one of the two folding chairs, and got him a glass of water. 

As Michael sat down across from him in the tiny space my father suddenly told Michael he shouldn’t be living with me because of my age. When Michael responded that it was none of his business, after all, my father stood up, threw the glass of water at Michael’s face and left, threatening to call the police as he slammed the door behind him. 

Shortly after that my father called my mother to say he wanted to take me to Amsterdam with him when he started his teaching job at the American University. She called me to tell me. She said to call him.

He’d started the process of setting it all up when I got another phone call from my mom. She was upset, and she had a lot to say. 

“He’s put you on his passport. You have the same last name as him. You’re a minor. If you go there with him on his passport rather than on your own passport, you might not be able to get back. Also, he’s been dating a girl in her 20s. She’s a ballerina.

She’s pregnant,” my mom said. “And she might not be the only one he’s gotten pregnant over the past 15 years.” 

It was a Saturday. I knew he’d be home, so I walked to my father’s apartment. He let me in. He was acting unusually happy. I asked him about the passport thing.

“It doesn’t really matter,” he said. “Yes, you’re on my passport. That’s the easiest way to do it.”

“But what if I want to leave and go back to the States?”

“You won’t,” he said. “And if you do, we’ll figure something out.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. 

“Look,” I said. “We have to call my mom and sort this out.”

“Sure, go ahead, there’s the phone,” he said. He was almost laughing.

I called my mom and told her what he was saying. Her voice had a way of getting cold when she was angry. She spoke in snippy little syllables. My father, prowling back and forth in the room, got louder.

“You want to go to Amsterdam, this is the way it’s going to be. On my passport. You decide what you want to do, not your mother.”

I told my mom I’d call her later. His strange energy filled the small room. I was shaking slightly, he seemed insane. He looked like a manic overgrown four year old boy in his jeans and flannel shirt. The room we were in, his apartment, took on the look of a boy’s bedroom, part of a larger home where parents would obviously be sitting somewhere managing everything. The light through the one old-fashioned sash window was beautiful, a pale yellow carrying all the possibilities of the city right into this room. It didn’t fit, it was beatific, it demanded something more, something better. Chenille. The bedspread was chenille. 

“You . . . little Napoleon!” I threw the words at him. I was appalled by him, frightened by him. His laugh exploded into the room, a startling, gleeful mocking noise. I walked out of the room into the gray fluorescent hall, into the grumpy elevator, out to the street, which now felt unstable, tipsy. My feet felt odd, they didn’t exactly know what to do, but I knew my way up the street by the smells alone. The sea air of the East River, the bacon and burnt toast of the coffeeshop, the diesel of the delivery trucks outside Key Food, the pickles and roast beef of the deli, the paprika and sour cream of the Hungarian restaurant, the souvlaki of the Greek place.

I felt dizzy. I felt like I’d won, and I was immensely proud of myself. “Little Napoleon.” How perfect! Yet there was something else, too. A sliver of dread.
                    
What I Knew At the Time: He was my father, I could see that just by looking at him. But was he, really, my father in any real way? Did he belong to me? Did I belong to him? Were we really father and daughter?

What I Now Know: Lobster Thermidor might be considered to belong to the French, to be authentically French. But it would depend on where it’s being made and with what ingredients—and within that paradigm questions could still remain. The final answer to this is, yes, the dish can be considered authentic to one or more concepts of what it should be. Is it the French version? The American version? Has the recipe been followed exactly? All of these questions help determine authenticity, but ultimately there are many ways to look at authenticity. Could a bastard be considered authentic? Or, is a bastard simply illegitimate?

My father went to Amsterdam. I did not go with him. Michael and I broke up later that year and moved on, remaining friends. I thought I saw my father once at a performance piece at a loft on Greene Street, but I wasn’t totally sure it was him. He was across the room, the space was huge, I didn’t wait to find out, I almost ran out of the place. I didn’t think about him much at all for some time. 

Yet here I am on Montague Street again, I’m now 16 years old, I’m walking to Michael’s place so he can show me how to file my taxes. Once again I see someone who might be my father from across the street, he looks at me and keeps walking.

Half an hour later I’m at the folding table in the tiny apartment with Michael. The table’s covered with tax forms. There’s a knock on the door followed by an insistent pounding. When Michael goes to the door and opens it, voices rise: one complaining, angry, the others in the background, deep and level.

It’s my father, and he’s with two New York City cops. Clunky guns in holsters around their hips, shiny badges on their shirts, hard wooden billy clubs, peaked hats, it all takes up so much space, this arcana of threat. My father—standing slightly behind and between the cops, shorter than them both, short like me—lifted his hand, stretched out his arm, and pointed his finger, the finger that had made me clearly know I was his daughter because it looked like mine, in a strict beeline toward me. I accuse. I accuse, the finger said.

“There she is! She’s underage! She’s living with him! You have to do something!” He sounded aggrieved. He sounded whiny. The air in the room smelled different now. Not sweat, exactly. Testosterone.

Something shifted in me. The place where my stomach had lodged in my throat a few years earlier when my mother decided she didn’t want me anymore disappeared for the moment. I didn’t decide to speak, it just happened. My voice resonated out all by itself, deeper than it normally was, there was no space for lightness within it. I became an actress in a 1940s film, one of those majorly bitchy women who settled the Wild West and took no shit from anybody and lived to tell the tale with their hair still perfectly coiffed and their waists still impeccably tiny between the lace blouses and long heavy skirts. The words were waves. Icy cold, impervious to anything apart from what they were, what they had to be. Truth. These words took their time, unhurried. There was no need to rush but rather the opposite, they were demanding of their place and their time. The voice was aimed directly at the two cops, and I could see they felt it. Their auras flinched, even as they carried the weight of all those tools of threat garnishing every part of their bodies. My father froze. Not like a statue, really. Not frozen, really. More like a plastic figurine.

“This man is not my father. He never married my mother. He was never around. I met him for the first time in my life when I saw he lived nearby and knocked on his door. My mother raised me. She knows where I am and what I’m doing. You can call her if you want. I’m 16 years old. I support myself. I have a job. I’m here because Michael’s showing me how to do my taxes. I’m in the middle of doing that, would you like to see?” 

I wasn’t really there anymore, or not as I’d known myself before this moment. I was simply an idea inside a voice that was determined to do its thing. Nobody said a word. Nobody moved an inch. Then one of the cops looked back at my father, then at me, and back at my father. 
“We can’t do anything here,” he said. “Let’s go.” He turned toward the door, lifting his hand to move my father in that direction. “Sorry,” he said to me and Michael, dropping the word behind him into the packed silence of the room. They shuffled down the narrow stairs to the street where the city drew them in, accepting them as it does everybody else. That was the last time I would see my father for years.

What I Knew At the Time: I would never eat Lobster Thermidor again. It disgusted me. But that didn’t stop me from thinking of it as a beautiful thing in rare unguarded moments.

What I Now Know: In terms of cultural expression, the original Lobster Thermidor is a magnificent example of French haute cuisine made by restaurant chefs. It has it all—fresh local ingredients, no expense spared, inclusion of mother sauces, cream and cheese. 

Here I am on Montague Street again, I’m 19 now. I’m walking past the hardware store with its narrow door, big glass window, everything piled everywhere to the ceiling, the wonderful anythings anyone could ever want. I’m walking toward the subway and I clearly see him walking toward me on the same side of the street. We would be passing each other with a distance shorter than arm’s length between us. I looked at him. He was my father. He didn’t look like me, yet he did. I kept my eyes on him as he got closer. I wanted to say hi. That sounds funny, doesn’t it?

What I Knew At the Time: Once, I sat at a table with a man I’d never sat at a table with before that moment. He happened to be my father. I didn’t know him, but there was something about the word. Father. God knows I’d never said it before, and never would for as long as I knew him. I ordered Lobster Thermidor. I was sure I wanted to order it.

​What I Now Know: Lobster Thermidor, in a sense, is a living thing. It’s been looked at in  different ways within the culture(s) it exists in. It’s been a marker of various forms of cultural heritage and belonging in the lives of those who cook it and those who eat it. First as an example of French haute cuisine, then as a commodity that would endow high status, then as an item of cross-cultural curiosity, and finally as a form of democratic education in cookbooks with recipes written for outsiders.                     
                
As he got closer he saw me too. He caught my eye for the merest split second then quickly lowered his head. He stared fixedly at the sidewalk. The closer we got, the more  determinedly his gaze remained on the sidewalk. His eyes were glued to the ground. He moved past me, less than an arm’s length away, as I stared at him, frightened at what he might say to me, but at the same time waiting for some kind of acknowledgement.  I almost stopped, almost said “Hi,” but how ridiculous would that have been? We both kept walking.

I didn’t turn, I didn’t look back. I was past the hardware store, now I was staring at the sign of the Chinese restaurant we’d eaten in once. It was clear to me—I wasn’t going to exist to him. Not anymore. Not after what I’d said, a 16 year-old girl, in that voice that was far from being 16 years old. I’d done the unforgivable, I’d shamed him, a grown man seemingly impervious to shame. 

I reached the end of the street, where Brooklyn Heights ended and a different neighborhood began, one a little tougher, a little more street smart. If I kept walking I’d end up at Gage & Tollner where my memories of how I’d loved the idea of Lobster Thermidor remained as real as they had that day. 
​
If I kept walking, I’d reach the next neighborhood, the one inhabited by the dispossessed. I pulled my winter coat more tightly around me and went down the subway steps, searching for portents or signs, anything, really, that made sense.


What I Knew At the Time: Really, nothing.
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What I Now Know: The "Thermidorian Reaction'' is a term describing a month-long period of time in Paris named for the date Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794) in the French Republican Calendar. The Thermidorian Reaction began following a violent coup where Robespierre was deposed. It marked the end of the Reign of Terror but it was rather terrifying itself, with similar massacres and fighting in the streets of Paris. Everything was challenged: Power, policies, religion, ideologies. In this story there were tyrants, there were outlaws, there was the populace, there were judges, there were victims. Everybody wanted something. The Thermidorian Reaction was finally ended by Napoleon Bonaparte in a battle on the streets of Paris called 13 Vendémiaire  (5 October 1795). Thomas Carlysle described the method Napoleon used to attain his victory as “a Whiff of Grapeshot”.