When I moved to Montreal to do my PhD I brought only what could fit in my 1988 Volkswagon Fox. This included two enormous stereo speakers and an almost equally large desktop computer scored from a friend of my sister’s. I drove from Boston through to Purmort, New Hampshire, where I stopped at an A-frame diner and sat at the long Formica counter to eat a slice of coconut cream pie to give me courage. Then on to Quechee, Montpelier and Burlington, past the 49th parallel and over the border. By the time I found my way through the city it was late. It was a hot August night, so I ate my first meal under the blue and white striped awning at Terrasse Lafayette, two doors down from my stifling apartment. Later, my husband and I had our first real date there, at a table facing de l’Esplanade, a street of narrow three-story apartments, whose grey stone facades were decorated with images of saints and festooned with winding stairs that climbed up from tiny front gardens where families sat on battered chairs chatting, arguing, listening to the radio or playing cards. The kids dubbed the restaurant simply “Greek Place.” It was where we went for pizza, took our parents when they came to town, and treated our labs to platters of fried calamari and bring-your-own wine.
Paté was cheap
A couple months later, I moved to the fraying edge of a toney residential area across from a metro station. At the grocery store I scoured the hurt vegetable bin and the cart with cans and boxes past their best-by dates. I bought bags of no-name granola, toasting it in the oven after carefully picking out the few hard raisins so they wouldn’t burn and frugally replacing them when it was done. The patrician residents of this part of town did not go out at night. There were few restaurants and not much open past six o’clock except a narrow delicatessen. The hollow-eyed baker was an irritable man who cajoled or harangued the customers as they waited in line. In a glass case were tubs of cream cheese, egg salad and herring, a row of glistening salamis, sides of cold roast beef and slabs of paté. The paté, it turned out, was cheap. Cheaper than roast beef, cheaper than cream cheese and infinitely more delicious. I luxuriated in paté sandwiches on soft sweet braided challah rolls and wolfed down slices of paté with bagels and scrambled eggs for dinner. I would have eaten it for breakfast if it hadn’t been for the granola. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.
So much colder than I expected
Which was just as well because winter came and it was cold. So much colder than I expected, so cold that I couldn’t just ignore it and hope for spring as we did in Boston. Dressed like the doomed member of an arctic expedition who would never make it to the pole, I panted in the icy air as I walked up hill to the Psychology building, my breath coating my cheeks with frost and forming tiny pearls on the tips of my lashes. It was also the winter of the first Gulf War. I sat in my apartment watching the desert explode. My classmates asked me: Why was the US going to war? Why had the President pulled the trigger? Why did Americans support it? I couldn’t answer, not just because I didn’t know, but because it felt like trying to explaining your crazy uncle to someone outside the family. “Why would he do a thing like that?” “He gets into these moods sometimes.” “But why did you let him?” “He’s an adult, we can’t stop him.” “But shouldn’t you do something?” I sat on the stoop smoking a cigarette staring at the sky cut with stars made sharp and bright by the frigid air. It came to me that I had no map for this new universe. I couldn’t peer down from an imagined height and picture what was up the street, or between one metro stop and the next. I had no landmarks, no favorite haunts, no places I had been with friends or visited as a child. Of course that was what I had wanted when I left. But like my country and its war, I had only counted on the known unknown, and not the unknown unknown.
I don’t remember cooking anything that first year. My only memory of the kitchen is watching my roommate making spaghetti sauce by dumping raw meat, onions and canned tomatoes into a pot and boiling. I tried not to be home when she ate it. That spring I moved again to a place with a scruffy roof-top terrace. I made suppers there with friends, hauling chairs, cushions and whatever there was to eat up two flights of stairs, and sprawling out on the wooden deck. I found a small grocery whose prices fit my wallet. It was a makeshift venture, the rent probably borrowed from a cousin and merchandise cadged from someone who knew someone. Battered fruit and vegetables were piled on wooden pallets, dry beans and rice spilled out of their sacks, and open containers of pickled vegetables, yogurt and olives emitted a smell that was part rancid, part enticing. The owner’s son, a disconsolate engineering student, stood behind the cash. Because I was older, and female, and different from his family he told me about his life with naïve impunity. As I searched for unbruised tomatoes he talked without stopping about his classes, his grades and how he couldn’t wait to get away from the store. When I moved again, I stopped by to thank him and his father for keeping me fed. It was only a slight exaggeration when I told them that they had saved my life with their injured wares.
Landing in the Plateau
Finally I landed in the Plateau, a warm sea of fellow students. We floated with the tide along St. Laurent Boulevard, washing up in the cheap bars and restaurants that were tossed together with dusty stores – mono-thematic enterprises that sold nothing but buttons, or uniforms or plumbing supplies. On Saturday afternoons after shopping or errands I would take myself out for a treat. Strong dark coffee with tender pastéis de nata in the Portuguese bakery with its spotless counters where plates of warm cookies and donuts lay dozing on paper doilies. Napoleons are difficult to eat politely: I licked flakes of pastry, blobs of custard and chocolate glaze off sticky fingers. Poppy-seed hamantashen gave off a musky, fruity aroma as I savored them on the sidewalk outside a Jewish bakery on the lower Main. The interior was dim and mostly empty, with bare wooden floors, a counter at one end and racks of bread hanging on the wall behind it. The afternoon sun came through the high framed windows where the name was painted in fancy black lettering, lighting up a haze of flour that hung in the air. On Sundays while working in the lab I consumed giant coconut macaroons covered with waxy chocolate from the hospital cafeteria, a gluttonous ritual that consoled me during hours spent staring at brain scans on the computer.
Being alive and living
In tiny kitchen of my miniature apartment I finally began to feel at home. I began to cook with an eye to eating and to eat with an eye to feeding myself and others. I learned to roast a chicken, and to make the best of whatever vegetables were cheap and good. I found places for decent cheese and bread. But even better were the shops with narrow aisles whose overloaded shelves were packed with unfamiliar ingredients. I spent hours delighting in these colorful hordes and imagining the foods I might make.
Sometimes food can save your life. I do not know the gnaw of real hunger, but I do know that eating gives weight to the untethered soul, and that sensual pleasure can bring solace. A savory mouthful of pasta and sauce or the warmth of chocolate melting on the tongue can be the difference between being alive and living. Hunger is an ache that can only ever be temporarily satisfied and in this way stands in for all our hungers and all we need to soothe them.