Sometimes my appetite scrolls back to the days where I never worried about greasy pleasures dripping in sugared condiments, and I want to be back at the Paris Diner with you at 2:00 a.m., high from every urge.
The Paris Diner was not in Paris. Paris was not in our vocabulary, it was only a dive in Flatbush that we stumbled into on nights when everything was satiated by a yearning for fries and ketchup and whipped cream that dripped over those curved fountain glasses.
Between our heated flesh and furtive kisses, we sipped something thick and creamy, and our simple lives flowed through a paper straw.
Laurie Kuntz has published two poetry collections (The Moon Over My Mother’s House, Finishing Line Press and Somewhere in the Telling, Mellen Press), and three chapbooks (Talking Me Off The Roof, Kelsay Books; SimpleGestures, Texas Review Press; and Women at the Onsen, Blue Light Press). Simple Gestures won the Texas Review Poetry Chapbook Contest, and Women at the Onsen won the Blue Light Press Chapbook Contest. Her sixth poetry book, That Infinite Roar, will be published by Gyroscope Press at the end of 2023. She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net Prize. Her work has been published in Gyroscope Review, Roanoke Review, Third Wednesday, One Art, Sheila-Na-Gig, and many other literary journals. She currently resides in Florida, where everyday is a political poem waiting to be written. Visit her at: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1.
On the couch with his friends, Jimmy watches a commercial. Two brothers bicker over the last Pillsbury croissant at a family gathering. Oh, did you want that?
Yeah!
Okay, we’ll split it. This is half.
Oh, that is not half!
It is so half!
Just when peace seems impossible, Mom emerges from the kitchen like an angel from some forgotten heaven and gifts the table with a fresh basket of warm, buttery Pillsbury croissants. Guys! More Pillsbury croissants!
“Whoa,” Jimmy says.
“For real,” says his friend, Bev, from the other end of the couch. “We should make some one night.” She tilts her entire body in his direction, but Jimmy doesn’t pay attention. They’ve been friends for years, on either side of puberty, and she can tell his mind is different lately. “I have to go,” he says, rising from the couch. Dan, sitting between them, finds the abruptness funny. He imagines Jimmy rushing off into the night in search of croissants.
Straight from Dan’s house, Jimmy drives to the supermarket. It’s already closed. He drives to the cheaper supermarket two towns over, but they won’t let him in. As the glass doors lock for the night, he stares at the jammed gumball machine that once stole his quarter.
Everything is closed. Still, he’d rather not go home. Better to lean back in his old Civic. Listen to the commercials on the radio.
Shortly before dawn, a few cars pull up around his. Green-vested people emerge to open the store. Jimmy follows them in. Dazed, he wanders through the dairy aisle until he’s found them: those colorful cardboard tubes. The ghostly doughboy stares up at him, arms outstretched, ready to be vored.
As she passes the kitchen, Mom spots Jimmy bent over a pan. “Making croissants?” she asks.
“Yep,” Jimmy says, still in the clothes he went out in last night. “I saw the commercial.”
Yawning, she reaches for the coffee maker. “Save me one, will you?” She’s on her way out the door as he slides them in the oven.
Twelve minutes at 300 degrees and Jimmy’s croissants are golden brown. He pulls them out of the oven, weighs one with his hand. He likes how the bread burns his palm. In his memory of the commercial, ribbons of steam twist off the croissants as Mom sets them down on the table. This is what he pictures as he closes his eyes. Then, feeling savage, he bites off more than half. He expects his mouth to smolder, but the croissant goes down without a fight. It becomes a part of him too easily.
He stops chewing. Feeling robbed, though unsure of what, he panics. Something is missing. He spits what’s left of the glob of bread in the trash, looks around the kitchen. In the pan, 11 fresh croissants wait to be eaten. But he doesn’t want them anymore.
Jimmy dumps himself onto the couch, wakes up the television. He waits for the commercial, certain it will come. It will re-enchant him, he thinks, and all his hard work will pay off.
It comes, at last, between segments of Good Morning America. The family glows in their holiday wear. Brothers in red and silver. Mom in a green dress with white polka dots. As they pass around dishes, loading up their plates, the final croissant glistens in the basket. Over the din of bickering and clanking silverware, Jimmy’s stomach unclenches. It’s the bustle, he thinks. The bustle breathes splendor into lifeless bread.
Soon he’s seated in the dining room, debating the fairest way to split a croissant among himself. “Oh, that is not half,” Jimmy says.
“Are you kidding?” Jimmy counters. “That is clearly half!”
Here he is: getting up, making his way to the kitchen, and picking up the basket of Pillsbury croissants. He carries them into the dining room, announces to no one: “Guys! More Pillsbury croissants!”
It does nothing for him.
Jimmy spends the rest of his morning at The Salvation Army. He buys himself a musty red shirt like the one the younger-looking brother wears. He finds a sweater-vest, candlesticks, and a great deal on a green dress. It smells fresh. He fills a cart back at the supermarket, spends the last of his money.
What goes on a turkey? Dill weed, he thinks. Sure. Clove bud. Celery seed. He doesn’t nibble as he cooks.
It’s late when Mom comes home, but the table is set, the candles lit. “Well now,” she says. “Someone’s been busy. What did I do to deserve all this?”
It’s just Jimmy and Mom, of course. But they can make it work, he thinks. Mind revving in his skull, he tries not to get ahead of himself. “I got this for you,” he says, plucking the green dress off the banister. Mom’s face tightens with concern. “Maybe you could wear it now? And then you could bring me the basket in the kitchen?”
Mom stares at Jimmy. It’s not the worst dress, she thinks. She sees nothing obviously wrong with it, or with a hardworking mom getting treated to dinner. But as she fails to wheedle a good explanation out of her son, her doubts engulf her. “I feel like the victim of a prank here,” she says.
“No,” Jimmy says. “It’s just something I want to do.”
Something about it feels heinous, but she doesn’t have it in her to uncover what. “You know,” she says, “I already ate. And I couldn’t sleep last night. I really need a nap. Could we rain check this?”
Jimmy looks devastated. Somehow this makes her all the more certain of the bullet she’s dodged. Upstairs she takes a Percocet, climbs in bed, and stares at the ceiling.
Jimmy sits down at the dining room table. The sight of his feast exhausts him. The musk of his red, collared shirt starts getting to him. He doesn’t usually wear shirts with collars. It feels heavy around his neck.
He calls his friends. Dan says he’s game for free food, can gather the crew. Jimmy feels his pulse quicken under his wrists.
“So glad you could make it,” he greets Dan. He works out a seating plan that reflects the commercial’s—Pete, already balding, gets the father’s seat at the end of the table. The Rolfs, with their matching polos, can be the cousins who the camera never catches face-on. “Dan,” Jimmy says, handing his friend the sweater-vest he’d been wearing earlier. “You can be my brother.” Dan slips it over his T-shirt without question. “This is fucking awesome,” he says, eyes on the sweet potato pie. They’d all gotten high in anticipation.
“What about me?” asks Bev.
“Bev…” Jimmy begins. They’ve been friends for so long. He remembers peeing himself on the trampoline in her backyard, and how she never told anyone. Ever since, his instinct has been to keep her at arm’s length, along with his shame, and suddenly he feels so foolish for it. “I’m just so happy you’re here,” he says. His fingers brush her hip as he leads her to the kitchen, shows her the dress hung over a chair.
Bev isn’t hungry, didn’t smoke with the rest. Studying his red collar, that domestic flair, she can feel the appeal of Jimmy’s vision. She wants to bring it to life, to get her line right. She only has one, but she takes it seriously. As everyone else laughs, samples the room-temperature dishes, Bev stands alone in the kitchen, rehearsing in her head.
“Oh, that is not half,” Dan exclaims. Dan breaks character with his knowing smile, but Jimmy is satisfied with his performance.
“Are you kidding?” Jimmy replies. “That is clearly half!”
And then, right on cue, Bev emerges from the kitchen. Everyone turns to watch.
She looks grown-up in her green dress, enters with a mother’s poise. She carries her croissants like a basket of light, buttery babies. They are her duodecaplets.
She doesn’t pause for dramatic effect. She says it just the way Jimmy coached her: proud, but not showy. Sweet, but sincere: “Guys! More Pillsbury croissants!”
She sets them on the table, right where Jimmy told her. He lifts the best croissant from the basket, holds it up for close inspection. It’s still warm from reheating. It’s as good as it’s going to get.
But his eyes well up.
His friends exchange nervous glances, all except for Bev. Bev stays in character, rests a hand on his shoulder. “What’s wrong, dear?”
He swats the duodecaplets off the table. They tumble and crumb all over the floor.
“Jimmy!” Bev says. “What’s gotten into you?”
They never eat them, he finally realizes. It all fades to black before anyone’s taken a bite.
Bev holds Jimmy against her waist and strokes his hair. She has never consoled a boy in this way, but in the dress, she is emboldened. Though everyone else looks eager to leave, none dare say it out loud. They just sit in silence as Jimmy weeps. “I’m so sorry,” Bev says. “I’m so, so sorry.”
He clenches the green fabric.
Dan, meanwhile, meditates on his hunger. He wants a slice of that pie before they go, but he wills his hands to stay in his lap. Dry mouthed, starving, he starts thinking of the commercial. He imagines scholars of the future studying it, this ancient TV stuff—millennia from now, when humanity will satiate itself with pills or something. Will they divorce our shows from all the sweaty close-ups of fats and carbohydrates that interrupt everything, punctuating every cliff-hanger? Or will they see what Dan suddenly suspects—that hunger is the only story, and all else adornment?
Mike Nees is a case manager for people living with HIV in Atlantic City. His stories are featured in The Baltimore Review, The Greensboro Review, The Forge Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the host and cofounder of the Atlantic City Story Slam series. (mikenees.com)
Life in the Nilgiri Mountains was arduous for much of grandma’s life. She was born in an indigenous community in a hilly district under colonial rule, where luxury was as alien as humid, sweltering summers. Unlike the precarious highland winds, the people in the mountains were affable, and as if to complement that calmness, their palates were gentle, delicate and knew no extravaganza.
My earliest memory of grandma is of her being cloistered in the kitchen by the mud oven with a long, heavy wooden spatula, battling a large mass of finger millet goo. With her elbows positioned as if she were bearing a flag to lead a group of marchers, she would mix the muddle in swift motions with her dainty hands. The cooked finger millet would then be scooped up in small batches, and grandma’s skilful hands moved gracefully as she patted them into neat, glossy balls. Ragi or finger millet muddle is called erugihittu in Baduga. It is often served with beans and potato curry flavoured with the unique local masala called maasuhudi. This is the staple food of the Baduga community, an indigenous community in the Nilgiri mountain district of South India, and was an everyday meal for a long time.
Grandma and grandpa were a pretty odd combo, much like ragi muddle—a native crop—and beans gravy—an English import—yet, to me, like the dishes, they were perfect together. Granddad was a literature-loving teacher, among those swept by the colonial winds. He dressed like an Englishman and spoke like one. A true Gandhian and a pious believer in our community deity, he respected enlightenment but also passionately read atheist existentialists. He followed his ancestors when it came to rituals and practices and till the end fulfilled his duty toward the community goddess that was conferred upon his family. He was the sophisticated pottihittu, the local version of a pancake, an interesting mix of ingredients like wheat, ghee and sugar, common in the mountains, but on assemblage becomes something that fascinates the taste buds with its prevalent modesty and imparts a subtle sweetness that always lingers on the tongue.
Grandma was like the humble finger millet that she carefully tended to on her farmland. An independent woman who could survive anything the mountain winds threw her way, she was amiable and the epitome of grace and calmness. A firm believer in community traditions, she was the only channel connecting me to the glory of my past and the mountains—through her stories.
I spent many summers and other short vacations with this fascinating couple, sometimes with other cousins, but most times, alone.
There was one thing that set my grandparents apart from other people their age. My otherwise gentle grandma’s inner Mr. Hyde surfaced at the sight of my granddad. In my memory, all their interactions are just arguments, not the fiery, relentless ones, but the mellowed-down and sometimes borderline genial ones. Grandma always had something to grumble about or criticize, and my hearing-impaired grandpa pretended to exist within soundproof walls. But grandma had a word even for this stoic state of his mind. And so grandma’s vehement chatter was a constant when her spouse was home. Like the dried beans and peas that crackled abruptly when she roasted them in clay pots for gravy or a snack, her blather came out when least expected.
Grandma—The Storyteller
Grandma belonged to a generation that consumed just two heavy meals a day. Dinner was the slightly more elaborate affair. The preparations began around 6:00 p.m., after an evening chat with her friends from the village. (Grandma’s peers assembled in her kitchen every day and chatted over coffee and a snack. Their favourites were roasted barley, called ganje locally, steamed corn or peanuts. At times, this barley was powdered and mixed with coffee. The nutty aroma filled the house along with their animated laughter. This was granddad’s reading time, and the door to his room was always shut, which was constantly met by a passing sarcastic comment from grandma.)
Once the women left, grandma prepped multiple items at once to get the dinner ready. She often started with spinach, several varieties of which grew in abundance in her backyard. Grandma cooked a different type each day depending on its flavours. Methi and nightshade were cooked with mashed potato to absorb the bitterness. The other varieties were garnished with shredded coconut or carrots. Amaranth was just sautéed with shallots and garlic and seasoned with red chillies with the elementary taste of green juices still intact. As she cleaned the leaves she would tell stories of bygone times, her childhood and the early years of her marriage, as I gorged on queen cake, a local variant of muffins and jam rolls. The stories were as interesting an amalgam as the dinner.
From personal to mystic to plain horror, her stories spoke of spirits that animated the hills and streams all around us, and the guardian gods of those ecosystems who killed the people they perceived as intruders. As she made balls out of soft-cooked rice or a sweet rice dish called Bella koo with jaggery, coconut and generous amounts of poppy seeds, Grandma told me stories about granddad’s professional years as the headmaster in a government school a good forty miles away from their village. With limited facial expressions, she would narrate how granddad returned home during his short breaks at the end of the week with more than a handful of students who had no place to go or had houses too far away for a visit. They stayed with my grandparents for the duration of their holiday. This was in the late sixties and early seventies, when grandma’s kitchen was not equipped with mixers and grinders.
Grandma sought help from one villager. Together they would soak close to two kilograms of pulses like rajma, black-eyed beans or cowpea in hot water one night, and they’d make a curry along with potatoes, shallots and maasuhuddi early the next morning. It was served with little millet balls. For the midafternoon snack, grandma cooked something simple for the boys. She either made ennaihittu, a deep-fried sweet made from wheat flour and sugar, or kalakihittu, wheat crepes paired with sweetened coconut milk, both of which were granddad’s favourites.
When the boys left home along with my grandfather on Monday mornings, grandma packed rice or millet balls and sandagai, a thick chutney made with spices and roasted tamarillo, when the fruit was available. For this, she would get working at 3:00 a.m. Grandma often recounted with fondness how the boys gifted her capped gooseberries or rose myrtle fruits from their strolls around the village. She was no stranger to these fruits, as she passed by them every day, but their tender act of love warmed her.
My Grandparents as Children
As a child herself, there was no dearth of food in grandma’s family home—in fact, quite often, there was an elaborate feast. Her father was employed as a writer by a British tea company, and he accompanied his employers at least once a week on their hunting expeditions. This paved the way for grandma and her four sisters to taste all kinds of meat.
Whenever grandma recounted her childhood, food was the protagonist of those tales. She narrated with vivid excitement how porcupine was cleaned on the days her father shot them at his hunt. To her, this meat, with the texture of scraped coconut, tasted best when stir-fried with basic spices, onion and garlic.
Though my great-granddad often brought wild hens and rabbits from his hunt, a deer is what set the excitement in their household. Venison required elaborate cleaning, curing and marinating before being dried, roasted and stored. Grandma recounted how her mother added a few pieces of roasted venison into all curries, including dal and beans. It was her favourite memory of food, the one she recounted most often.
In stark contrast, grandpa grew up as a typical mountain community boy. In his family, food practices were traditional and minimal. They ate finger, little and foxtail millets and the wheat and barley their fields blessed them with; they snacked on fruits and berries that grew wildly in the vicinity.
Granddad’s father, like him, was a teacher. During the seasons of drought or failure in harvest, my great-grandpa’s earnings fed the entire village. When there was a shortage, grains and pulses were stored in abundance at granddad’s home and they were supplied on a need basis to others in the hamlet.
Because of how they were brought up, my grandparents found the utmost comfort in their daily grind. Even the slumping winter temperature did not alter their routine. After his retirement, grandpa took up responsibility as the president of the local pensioners association. This ensured he had a space to go at the stroke of nine each day after his morning breakfast of finger millet muddle or soft-cooked rice balls and curry. Grandma left the house shortly after on most days—either to the fields or the plantations for supervision, or to fulfil the numerous obligations that come with being an integral part of a close-knit community.
Granddad returned home in the evenings to his favourite snacks. On most occasions, he was served ennaihittu or kadiimitu, a version of ladoo made from wheat sooji, fried gram and jaggery. On a rare day, his favourite hachikai awaited him. Hachikai is coarse little millet processed differently, soaked in sweet milk and garnished with coconut shavings. Part porridge, part dessert, it was a delicacy in the mountains. On some days he relished tiny balls made of Amaranthus seeds and honey. Whatever the snack, it was generously sprinkled with grandma’s chiding.
Like an intermission to this routine came festivals and religious gatherings unique to the mountains. The biggest festival, Hethey Habba, for the community deity, was observed in the winter. My grandparents’ village was among the two villages in the mountain district that had a temple for this goddess, and the festivities were marked with much fervour for a week. On the concluding Monday, every person who visited their home was served a meal, including strangers. Each house in the village received many hundred visitors. But my maternal home received guests in thousands, thanks to my grandparents’ wide social circle.
Grandma and other family members stayed awake the entire night on Sunday to prep for Monday. The huge cauldrons were taken from their storage in the attic. The meal served all through the day on Monday was simple: rice, the staple beans curry and tomato rasam, accompanied by pappad. The first guests began streaming in as early as 9:00 a.m. and were served then. At around 11.00 a.m., the steady flow of people multiplied into a crowd. Furniture was cleared from all rooms of the house to spread mats on the floor, where guests sat and ate. The meals were sometimes served until 5:00 p.m. In the evening, a locally renowned baked snack called varukkey (introduced by the British) was offered with tea. The last of the guests left the house around 7:00 p.m.
The next day grandma cooked something simple like the local puttu, roasted rice grains and fried gram powdered and blended with sugar, a few spoons of milk and garnished with shredded coconut. She took stock of the previous day’s mayhem and almost always, she discovered that more than 2,000 banana leaves were used to serve meals along with many kilograms of tea powder and sugar. Many festivals fell at the advent of a new season, but none matched Hethey Habba in its grandiosity and the drudgery involved. Yet not once had I seen grandma cringe at the intensity of the labour.
When Flavours Went Bland
After having seen more than ninety odd festivals, granddad’s health gradually declined when an injury to his pelvic bone rendered him immobile. He spent close to three years bedridden, and every day turned out to be perhaps a festival in its own right, with numerous people coming to pay him a visit.
Grandma became granddad’s primary caretaker during his final years. His progressive Alzheimer’s only added to their woes. Granddad’s diet transformed in these years, resorting to semisolid foods. He still preferred native food, so finger millet porridge was his source of comfort. He took a liking to Amaranthus seed powder (keeraihittu in Baduga) and powdered ganje mixed with coffee. Grandpa could not remember the names of people, places or things. But there was one name he called out every passing minute—that of the woman who so lovingly added new flavours to his palate and his life since the day their lives together began. Though grandma’s chiding drastically reduced in those final years, she did continue to reprimand granddad until the end, even when we least expected it.
Granddad passed away one summer during the early hours of the morning. His last meal was everything he asked for—finger millet muddle and beans curry with potatoes, along with grandma’s famed sautéed amaranth. In a strange coincidence, this was also the last meal grandma cooked. For the next eight years, until her last day, she assisted many a meal only by chopping. But the hands that could deftly cook for fifty people at once and feed thousands who walked through her door lost their impulse to cook one simple meal after her steadfast companion of six decades passed away.
Author’s Note
Some dishes mentioned here are a rarity now. Crop patterns have changed and have, in turn, altered the consumption practice of the locals. Grandma’s fields—which were once rife with ripe beans, millets and corn—are now barren. A few wild gaurs occasionally visit to feast on the grass there. Like those wild animals that stray into the fields and villages, the future of the mountains and its native people are directionless.
Global warming, along with policy mismanagement of the state, a populace which embraced the monoculture of tea plantations, and a fall in the global price of tea leaves—which has forced many farmers to sell their land to survive—has erased the cultural and gastronomic legacies of our past. But the stories—they are much like the food and flavours my grandmother curated; they are ours to preserve, savour and pass on.
Monisha Raman’s essays and short stories have been published by various magazines in Asia and internationally. She is an animist who believes in the spiritual powers of the natural world. Her essay “Surviving Abuse in a Conservative Society” was a part of the anthology Narratives on Women’s Issues Vol. 1: Domestic Violence, published by the International Human Rights Arts Festival. Her work can be found at https://linktr.ee/Monisharaman.
I would like to have six days back, one for each decade, as a minimum, for not having to think about holding myself inward, moving one leg sideways, obscuring the steatopygous view, a few days I could move without thinking,
like before I was six months old, when my pediatrician said I was too fat and told my mother to give me only skimmed milk. Mom could make a meal for four out of one can of Campbell’s soup with water; I taught myself to bake
cookies and cakes so that some days when there was no other consolation I could have something sweet. Now what would be sweeter is a day without clenching, without waiting for the blow to fall, like when my 90-pound
grandmother tried using a French word for it, as if someone who sat around and read so much wouldn’t know what the word avoirdupois means or how much scorn can be heaped on one person before each evening, adding up
to at least six days’ full, no matter how much yo-yo dieting, how much angling my shoulders and knees out of the picture, contracting my thighs and tilting my hips to squash between armrests, how much pulling myself together every day.
As a lifelong dieter and food lover, one of Jeanne Griggs’ favorite experiences on a trip to Norway was being asked if she would like caviar for lunch and replying that she’d already had some at breakfast. A traveler, reader, writer, ailurophile, and violinist, Jeanne plays with the Knox County Symphony and the Celtic Fiddlers. She directed the writing center at Kenyon College from 1991–2022. Jeanne earned her BA at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, and her doctorate at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her volume of poetry, published by Broadstone Books in 2021, is titled Postcard Poems.
The courtyard, cool, the menu en español we, a gringa and me, her sullen mate, both barely awake. The huevos, Oaxacan, a cold dish my wife begins to eat with all of her appetites intact until she sees the bits of chilies have legs, her plate seems to crawl with chilies that have legs.
We look to the kitchen, aghast, and then to the local folks at nearby tables who eat without reservation. I look back at the menu and read, chapulines check my pocket dictionary: grasshoppers! and I, who’d not eaten the flesh of an animal since 1972, take to the plate, and eat every one. The crunch satisfies a forty-year craving for the gnawing of bones, for the tasting of organ meat, for the rending of limbs.
Deb leaves hungry and my lust for flesh is not yet sated. We wander to the market and find plates of the critters in great heaps. I buy two scoops for a few pesos and find the hoary hunter in me is roused.
Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio. He is a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. His poems have recently appeared in Whale Road Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Gyroscope Review, The Banyan Review, Rattle, Ritualwell, One Art, and Cutthroat. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by Sheila-Na-Gig.
