Read an Excerpt
Bread
A Memoir of Hunger
By Lisa Knopp University of Missouri Press
Copyright © 2016 The Curators of the University of Missouri
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8262-7367-3
CHAPTER 1
THE PUNISHING SUMMER
The only bread that I knew as a child was store bought, machine made, sliced, plastic wrapped, and white. My mother insisted that my two brothers and I eat a slice of the airy bread smeared with Blue Bonnet margarine as part of our supper. "Eat your bread and butter and then you can go play," she'd say, as if it were a green vegetable. "Crust, too. It's good for your teeth." The bread we usually ate came from the Sweetheart Bakery, our hometown bread factory. But sometimes, Dad, who did most of the grocery shopping, bought Wonder Bread, which I liked better because the TV commercial said that it was made from whipped batter, reminding me of cake, and that it "helped build strong bodies twelve ways." My favorite bread, however, was Sunbeam because the mascot, Little Miss Sunbeam, with her pink apple cheeks and her bouquet of golden ringlets bound with a blue bow on top of her head, looked so cherubic and happy as she ate her slice of buttered bread.
The first time I ate homemade bread may have been at my friend Ellen Lloyd's house, next door to mine. Unlike my mother and the women on her side of our family, Mrs. Lloyd didn't have a job outside the home. She filled her time by going to Catholic mass every day but Sunday, drinking lots of wine, and whipping up dishes I'd never heard of, like leek soup, and she made bread from scratch. She and her life seemed exotic to me — especially when she reminded us that she was from "the East." I knew that by that she didn't mean across the Mississippi River in Illinois, but somewhere much farther away and beyond my imagining. One time when I was hanging out at the Lloyd home with Ellen, probably fixing each other's hair as we listened to Carole King's "Tapestry" or James Taylor's "Sweet Baby James," Ellen gave me a slice of her mother's homemade bread. It had a mild, nutty flavor and a far more substantial texture than that of any bread I'd ever eaten. It was heavenly.
I clearly remember the first two times I made bread. Because of a scheduling glitch, the only elective that fit in my schedule in the after-lunch slot in ninth grade was Foods I, not something that I, an artsy kid, would have chosen. Mrs. Nye taught us to cook meat (she made us fry liver) and work with yeast (we made white bread and doughnuts). The three other girls in my kitchenette and I mixed the bread dough and then took turns pummeling it. So that we could wait until the next day to bake, we refrigerated the dough. Mrs. Nye came in that evening and punched it down. After my co-bakers and I pulled our loaves from the oven, Mrs. Nye nibbled a thin slice as she filled out an evaluation form about the crumb, crust, and flavor of our finished product. We received an A-. Then, in what little time remained in the class period, my co-bakers and I devoured generous slabs of the warm, buttered bread. The bread wasn't as white as Sweetheart bread, it had air holes of different sizes and a firmer, darker, chewier crust, and the slices were thick and uneven. It was divine. Both loaves were gone before the bell rang. Surely bread that had received a full A would have given me more pleasure than I could bear.
I loved homemade bread so much that I asked my father to pick up some yeast at the grocery store and I followed the recipe for "Enriched White Bread" in my mother's red-and-white plaid Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book. The two loaves that I lifted from the oven were golden brown, fragrant, and disappointingly flat. When I looked at the recipe again, I realized why: instead of adding two teaspoons of salt, I'd added two tablespoons. I knew from Foods I that salt retards the reproductive activities of yeast by drawing moisture away from it, which is why my loaves were bricklike. Even so, I loved the heavier, grainier texture. I took part of a loaf to Mrs. Lloyd next door. She approved, but advised me to use less salt the next time.
When I was in sixth grade, I went through confirmation classes at our Methodist church. For my Palm Sunday confirmation, I wore panty hose for the first time and stood in front of the congregation with the rest of my class. Later that week, on Maundy Thursday, I took Communion for the first time. It was special going to church in the evening and seeing our beautiful, old sanctuary dimly lit. I was almost moved to tears by the solemnity and symbolism of the movements of our tall, black-robed pastor, the guy who wore pullover sweaters and joked with us at Saturday morning confirmation class, as he reenacted the Last Supper. He held up a loaf of bread and broke it, repeating Jesus's words: "This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me." At that moment, I was in the Upper Room with the disciples, watching a ritual that, like them, I didn't fully understand. The pastor invited the congregation to the Communion rail in groups. As we knelt, he served each of us a sip of grape juice in a tiny glass cup and a morsel of white bread.
I've always loved this rite of symbolic, communal eating and the idea that any given thing can stand for more than itself. In fact, that first Communion may have been when I fell in love with metaphor. The bread and juice were Jesus's flesh and blood. By eating and drinking this meal, I was taking Jesus into my body and soul. Communion offered a robust theological metaphor whose significance for me has grown with time. Now, when I place the Communion bread on my tongue, I am struck by the genius and the appropriateness of Jesus's presenting himself as something so common, so consumable, so essential, so nourishing as bread.
I'm not sure when I started binging on bread, but I associate it with babysitting. I had several regular, good-paying babysitting customers, and so from eighth grade until I left for college, I spent part of almost every weekend working. I wasn't particularly crazy about taking care of kids, though I did enjoy some of them, especially the younger ones. Rather, I needed money, and weekends were when I had time to work. Since several of my customers were educated professionals and seemed so affluent and sophisticated compared to so many of the people I knew in blue-collar Burlington, Iowa, I looked forward to going into their homes and seeing how they lived — the fashion boots in the closet, the pretty things in the bathroom, the albums they listened to (Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Water or the soundtrack of Oh! Calcutta!), and the books they read (Portnoy's Complaint, by Philip Roth, or the biography of Zelda Fitzgerald by Nancy Mitford).
After I put my charges to bed, I'd go in the kitchen and find the softest, moistest loaf of white bread. I'd take a couple of plain slices at a time — not from the ends, but from the softer middle of the loaf — fold them over, and scrunch them a bit so that they were condensed. When my mom made bread-and-butter sandwiches, she cut them into neat triangles, but my dad just buttered a slice and folded it in half — almost like what I did during my binges. It looked hurried and didn't taste as good as my mother's tidy triangles. My folding and scrunching of the bread was also hurried — urgent, even. I could have rolled the cushiony bread into a ball, but that was more firmness than I needed. During my binges, it wasn't the taste or density of the bread that I was after but the rhythm of stuffing the slices into my mouth, the chewing, the swallowing, and the stuffing, again and again. It was soothing, softening, blurring.
To sit at the table would have been to acknowledge what I was doing, and I didn't want my left hand to know what my right hand was doing. So I stood at the counter or knelt on the floor by the cupboard where I had found the bread and devoured a half loaf, one pair of slices after another. I may not have been hungry in my stomach, but somewhere, I was famished for something hard to name and impossible to find, and so I ate, secretively, ritualistically, alone. When I was at home, I could and did eat entire loaves of bread and then felt sick afterward from the bulk, the chemical additives, and my self-disgust. But not when I was babysitting. I figured that if I got caught, I'd rather get in trouble for eating a half rather than a whole loaf. Even then, though, I knew that binging on plain bread was not only bad but weird and that it would require more explaining than if I had wolfed down a package of Oreos or a box of Bugles.
For the duration of these binges, I was outside of myself, my mind no longer chewing on itself. Whatever I was hungry for could be satisfied, at least temporarily, by stuffing myself with bread.
By my sophomore year, my weight had ballooned to 135 pounds, far too much for my almost five-foot two-inch frame. Dark pink stretch marks scored the outer top part of my doughy thighs. In time, the marks turned a glossy, silvery white, reminding me of schools of slim, rippling fish. I usually wore bell-bottom blue jeans with a long pullover shirt or sweater to hide my hips and saddlebags, those fat bulges on the outside of my upper thighs. I wore the same regulation, snap-up-the-front blue gym suit that I'd gotten in seventh grade all through high school. But in tenth grade, it was uncomfortably, almost seam-splittingly tight in the thighs. On my way to and from the communal shower in physical education class, I was careful to hide my stretch marks with one of the tiny white towels that the teacher handed each of us.
One day I was standing in line for lunch in the cafeteria when my mom, who taught biology at the high school, walked past carrying her tray to the teacher's lounge. That evening she said she wanted to talk to me. She said that when she saw me standing in the lunch line at school, she was reminded of a time when she was in eighth grade. She hadn't realized how much weight she'd gained until she saw her reflection as she walked past a store window and saw her "bottom" sticking out like a shelf. She suggested that I start wearing a girdle so that my bottom wouldn't look as jiggly. That I was fat was obvious, yet I was embarrassed and ashamed when she named and spoke the problem. I could suck in my belly until it was flat, but there was nothing I could do about my butt and saddlebags. I wanted to grab handfuls of the flesh on my buttocks and thighs and pull or cut them off me.
I don't remember how I got my girdles. Most likely, my mother gave me a couple of hers. Or perhaps I used my babysitting money to buy them, though I can't imagine myself walking into J. C. Penney's and inquiring about such an item. Once I started wearing a girdle to school, I wore one every day since I would have felt underdressed without it. I figured out that when I wore a long-legged girdle, my stomach, butt, and saddlebags looked firmer and flatter, but when I wore a girdle that looked like a pair of waist-high underpants, my saddlebags looked even bulgier and more prominent. While I looked better in the long-legged girdle, I wore the panty girdle on those days that I had physical education class since it wasn't as obvious to the other girls what I was wearing when we changed into our gym suits. The first thing I would do when I returned home from school was wriggle out of my polyurethane prison, so that I was free and unrestrained, and then I would get a snack.
My mom also wore a girdle to work every day to firm her bottom and stomach. She was a yo-yo dieter, up and down, up and down, twenty or thirty or more pounds. She'd eat cottage cheese and tomato slices; she'd take ephedrine- and caffeine-loaded diet pills to rev up her metabolism; she and I both took the fiber-filled diet pills that swelled in your stomach so you'd get full faster. She tried various diets but lost the most weight on the Stillman high-protein, low-carbohydrate plan ... and then gained it back. Every now and then, my mother would tell my father to pick up a vibrating-belt machine from the rental company. He'd set the machine in the basement near the washer and dryer. There, my mother would stand on the machine platform with the belt around her hips and jiggle away. The principle behind this machine was that it loosened or broke down the fat, which made it easier to flush it away. It heartened me to know that there was a way to get rid of fat without eating less and exercising more. I, too, tried to use the jiggle machine, but I found it unbearably boring since the motor was too loud for me to listen to the hit songs on Chicago's WLS and too jarring for me to hold a book in front of my face and focus on the words. I supposed that my mom and I never saw results, though, because we had to return the machine to the rental company before it had had enough time to blast the fat on our butts and thighs.
The girdles made me look firmer, but I was still too big. A fast and easy fix is what I wanted. I pored over magazine advertisements for Ayds, the "Reducing Plan Candy," which the ads promoted as a "safe and effective appetite suppressant" with amazing testimonials ("I barely fit in my bathtub, until I lost 74 pounds"). Far bigger people than me had dropped several dress sizes by eating Ayds, which came in chocolate, butterscotch, and caramel, with a hot drink an hour before each meal. "You eat less because you want less," the slim woman in the TV commercial assured me. If only I could get a box of Ayds, my weight would drop, my saddlebags would shrink, I'd be beautiful and popular, and my life at school and at home, less chaotic and frustrating. I never got to try the magical candies that would melt away my pounds and my worries. I figured that if I asked my parents to buy me a box of Ayds, they'd say no, and it never occurred to me that I could walk to the neighborhood drugstore and buy myself a box with my babysitting pay.
The summer following my sophomore year, my mother took graduate classes at the University of Iowa, which was eighty miles away. She lived in a dormitory during the week and came home on weekends. In her absence and while my father was at work, I babysat my brothers; prepared easy things for their lunches, like SpaghettiOs, Jell-O, and tuna-salad sandwiches; and washed clothes, hung them on the line, brought them in, and ironed, folded, and put them away. My mom paid me five dollars a week for this. This wasn't the first or the last time in which these were the conditions of my summer vacation — my mother gone, me babysitting, my father always remote or irritated with me, it seemed. But for some reason during the summer following my sophomore year, I felt abandoned and that I was being punished for wanting my life to be more like those of my friends, who spent their summer days swimming and sunbathing at Lake Geode, thirteen miles west of Burlington, or hanging out with each other downtown or at Crapo Park, a beautiful old park created on a high bluff above the Mississippi, with a fountain, a swimming pool, and a wide view of the river, the bridges, the bluffs, and the floodplain.
That spring, I had received the news that I was accepted into the regional youth symphony orchestra for the summer. I'd dreamed of being part of the symphony ever since it had performed at my middle school, when I was astonished and smitten as the members, kids not much older than I was, played the fourth movement of Brahms's Symphony no. 1 in C Minor. Surely this movement had been greatly shortened and heavily arranged for high school students, but even so, when I heard Jane Madden play the piercing flute solo, I was enraptured. I yearned to hear that beautiful, plaintive melody again so that I could sing and play it myself. But all I knew were the opening notes, which I played over and over. I was thrilled that I, too, would be playing grown-up music at the rehearsals that summer, and I couldn't wait for the first one.
I was an inconsistent student, knocking myself out in history, English, sociology, and psychology, but showing far less motivation in math and science. I wasn't one of the fast-track kids who would win scholarships and awards, but I carried a B+ average and took a mix of regular and college-preparatory classes. My greatest triumphs at school were music-related. In seventh grade, I was last-chair flute in the concert band. Over the summer, I practiced like mad. At the auditions at the beginning of eighth grade, Mrs. Juhl, the new band director, herself a flutist, sat me in first chair. When another flutist saw the new lineup with me at the helm, she asked if there had been a mistake. Mrs. Juhl said that this was no mistake: I was the one she'd chosen to be section leader. The summer after eighth grade, I began flute lessons with Mrs. Juhl in her home. For years, I had also been playing, partly by ear, partly by reading music, an old, out-of-tune upright piano that my folks bought at an auction for ten dollars. That same summer, Great-Aunt Pertsie bought me a brand new spinet piano and I started lessons with Mrs. Bailey. I had great ambitions and advanced quickly. I wanted to be a concert pianist and marry Van Cliburn, and I wanted to go to Interlochen Summer Camp and even sent away for an application, though when I saw how much money it cost, I never filled it out.
Playing in the youth symphony seemed to be an important step toward achieving my musical goals. But with my father at work at the railroad and my mother far away during the summer of '72, I had no transportation to the rehearsals. It didn't occur to me or anyone else at my house that I might be able to take the bus or get a ride with someone else in the symphony. Nor could I imagine using my bicycle for anything other than leisurely rides to Crapo Park and back or to Mrs. Bailey's house, which was just a few miles away from my house. I was more angry than sad when I had to tell the director's assistant that I couldn't come to the rehearsals and I wouldn't be performing with the symphony at the middle schools or anywhere else.
To say that I began dieting in response to these circumstances is to attribute more intention and deliberation to that act than I remember being there. By some bizarre logic, I seem to have felt that because I was deprived of my mother and the chance to do what other kids my age were doing, I should also deprive myself of food. I cannot say if at that time I saw this as self-punishment or as a protest that I hoped would draw the attention of others to something that needed to be righted. What is true, though, is that I ate less and differently. In the beginning of that summer, for breakfast I ate two Pop-Tarts. The rest of the day, I ate fruits and vegetables. And for the first time in my life, I ate my meals alone.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bread by Lisa Knopp. Copyright © 2016 The Curators of the University of Missouri. Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press.
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