Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table by Ruth Reichl

Author:Ruth Reichl
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Tags: Cooks, Cooking, General, Personal Memoirs, Cooks - United States, Biography & Autobiography, Reichl, Essays, Ruth, Cookery, Women
ISBN: 9780812981117
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2010-05-25T07:31:01.555454+00:00

TUNIS

I spent my final year in college worrying about the future. I would have a BA, with honors in sociology, prepared for absolutely nothing. I wished school would never end.

Serafina was equally loath to move on. She was deeply involved in politics and completely unsure of what she wanted to do with her life.

We both spent the summer of ’68 in Ann Arbor, but not together. Serafina had made it clear that she had no interest in white friends. Understanding did not make me less lonely. She always spoke to me when I called, but she never called me back.

It was a pretty depressing time. L’Escargot had closed, Henry’s restaurant was not yet open, and my job as a cocktail waitress was every bit as bad as Henry had said it would be, down to the short skirt and the men’s hands.

I missed Serafina. I missed Mac too. He had delicately indicated that he would be happy to expand our relationship; my mother had been right after all. When I didn’t respond he went off and fell in love with someone else. I was miserable; it was clearly time to make new friends.

When a girl from my art history class asked if I wanted to move into her apartment I jumped at the chance. Pat was six feet tall, an artist, and the most flamboyant creature I had ever encountered. She attended classes barefoot, wrapped in bolts of cloth and clouds of patchouli. Bells and bracelets jangled each time she took a step. She was famous all over campus and I was flattered and terrified by the idea of becoming her roommate; she made me feel like such a bore.

Pat scoured her apartment from top to bottom before I moved in. She even emptied out a couple of closets. I was touched and surprised: I had expected her to be interesting but I hadn’t expected her to be nice. Aside from a reprehensible tendency to exercise—she went out at 6:00 A.M. every morning to run barefoot around a cinder track—Pat turned out to be remarkably unscary.

Much later Pat told me that I was the most depressing person she had ever met. I certainly felt that way. Out in the real world there were riots at the Chicago convention and a love-in at Woodstock, but I was locked into my own misery. I felt numb. When Serafina called to ask if I wanted to take a trip with her I felt as if she were throwing me a lifeline. “I’ll go anywhere,” I said, “as long as it’s cheap.”

“How about North Africa?” she said. “We can get a cheap flight to Rome and take the ferry from Naples to Tunis. From there we can go to Algiers and then Morocco. Mohammed said we could stay with his family in Meknes. He said his mother will teach us to make her famous bisteeya.”

“Fine,” I said.

“Why would you want to go there?” my mother asked when I told her of my plans.

“Because it’s exotic,” I said.

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