by Marcella O鈥機onnor
I have a bad habit of using the word 鈥渨e鈥� when I talk about my family. Like, 鈥淲e were deported from America back to Poland.鈥� Or, 鈥淎nd then we were sent to the camps during the war.鈥� I catch myself doing this even if the events I鈥檓 describing occurred many years before I was born. Mostly it happens when trying to explain something about why my family acts a certain way, but it is a bad habit because I was never in any camp so it鈥檚 ridiculous to imply otherwise. The past still affects us, though. Furthermore, there are times when it鈥檚 perfectly accurate to use 鈥渨e.鈥� For example, 鈥淲e can鈥檛 throw away food in my family.鈥�
My babcia has always been intractable on this front. Growing up, if I ever had Muslim friends over, I鈥檇 have to explain the situation beforehand: 鈥淭his woman might attempt to feed you pork, but don鈥檛 throw it away. Whatever you do, don鈥檛 throw away any food. Just pass it to me when she鈥檚 not looking and I鈥檒l sneak it out.鈥� And diets were unthinkable. A friend of mine once tried to explain why she chose to be vegan. Babcia looked at her across the table sadly, as if thinking of veganism as a kind of terminal illness, before resolving to cook some chicken soup to try and cure the girl. In Polish, telling someone to get well is the same as telling them to get fat; therefore dieting is a form of self-mutilation while anger is thought to stem primarily from hunger.
During my childhood, family meals devolved into battles. I picked at my dinner and never finished. I spent many nights sitting up at the table staring down the food I refused to eat while the rest of the household slept. My Babcia beseeched. She pleaded, 鈥湸潮鹋浤�. You are too skinny. 闯别艣膰.鈥� She commanded, 鈥淐hod藕 tu ty. Siedzie膰. Tak si臋 nie m贸wi. 闯别艣膰.鈥� She had nearly starved to death as a child, had watched her siblings die one by one, and could not understand this modern world where children would turn away perfectly good food. My brother and my cousins ate and dutifully grew taller than any ancestors in living memory, but I stubbornly remained a runt, pretending to be a vegetarian one moment and inventing a host of food allergies the next.
Among my generation, we considered riling up Babcia with bad language or mischief to be perfectly kosher, but my refusal to finish dinner crossed some kind of line. Babcia鈥檚 breakdowns over wasted food filled us with guilt and also scared us a little. I would have preferred having my mouth washed out with soap or a lash of the wooden spoon to the sight of Babcia having gulag flashbacks. As Babcia tallied her war dead and wept, my cousins and brother began to turn against me. When I was nine, my younger cousin snapped and said, 鈥淲hy can鈥檛 you just eat your fucking dinner, you selfish bitch? You鈥檙e making Babcia sad.鈥� He鈥檚 now over six feet tall while I barely clear five. My shortness is still seen by some relatives as my existential punishment for all of those uneaten dinners, the tallness of the rest of my cohort like a rebuke.
Sometimes the elders would blame the influence of my mother for my refusal to eat. My mother鈥檚 people are long-limbed and slight like greyhounds (and also, like greyhounds, prone to back problems). They鈥檙e finicky, wispy souls who prefer coffee and pastry to a hardy meal. You might expect them to have the same philosophy about wasting food as the Polish side since they鈥檙e part of the diaspora driven out of Ireland by famine, but they鈥檙e the kind of Irish-Americans who don鈥檛 acknowledge being Irish-American. They don鈥檛 deny their Irish heritage as such, but never speak of it or think of it, and perhaps at some point in the past abandoned it on purpose, opting for cultural amnesia in order to become American.
In high school biology, another possible explanation for my poor appetite and lack of stature emerged. According to my textbook, height is partially determined by genetic makeup. Mendel鈥檚 pea plants inherited their long or short stems. My dad鈥檚 side of the family had produced plenty of small people. Some of them, sure, must have had the tall gene but never got enough nutrition to make the most of it, but maybe some of them would have been short no matter what. How could you tell? Maybe, I told myself, I was genetically-destined to be short so I ate just enough to fill out my frame by instinct. Maybe I would have been short even if I had eaten all those dinners.
Eventually it dawned on me that our battle of wills over food had nothing to do with me, at least not directly. I brought my son back to Queens for a few weeks of the summer. He had tried a new kind of yogurt and ended up not liking it, so I re-covered it with the foil lid and put it in the fridge, hiding it in the back behind a bowl of kapusta. Babcia spotted it one morning and said, 鈥淗e didn鈥檛 finish?鈥�
鈥淗e didn鈥檛 like it.鈥�
鈥淵ou are going to eat it?鈥�
鈥淵eah. I鈥檓 going to have it for lunch.鈥�
I had absolutely no intention of eating it myself. Two weeks later, Babcia fished the container out of the fridge while I was making tea. 鈥淥h no,鈥� I said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 out-of-date. I forgot about it.鈥�
鈥淚t鈥檚 still good,鈥� she said.
鈥淣o, it鈥檚 mouldy.鈥�
A green film marked the border between yogurt and plastic. Babcia scraped the mould off with a spoon and plopped it into the garbage. Then, still standing in the light of the open fridge, she downed spoon after spoon of yogurt until the container was empty. The defiant look on her face told me that this was between herself and her god. Fate dared her to waste food, to become comfortable, to forget, but she never would.
Later that week, more relatives visited and I made tacos for everyone. There were a few taco shells left over, mostly broken. I shoved them back into the box, but forgot to get rid of the evidence in time. A few days later, the broken bits of taco shell reappeared in a bowl in the middle of the kitchen table. 鈥淎re you going to eat them?鈥� asked Babcia at breakfast.
鈥淚 will,鈥� I said. 鈥淚鈥檒l have them for a snack sometime.鈥�
They sat there for several days. On the third day, plastic wrap covered the bowl (though surely the taco shells were already stale): a message. After making sure Babcia was still watching TV in the living room and unlikely to walk in on me, I dumped the taco fragments into my pocket. I poured a dollop of salsa into the empty bowl and swished it around until it looked spontaneous, then left the bowl in the sink like an offering. A few hours later, while watching my kid run around Doughboy Park, I felt grit in my pocket and remembered the shells. I drew out fistfuls of crumbs, throwing them to the pigeons, scattering them to the wind.
Quarryman
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