Stir Read Online Free

thinking about food, an openness to it, a hunger for it in all its forms.
    We lived in a two-room apartment at Seventy-fifth and Third, my mother, my father, a cat named Spike, a shih tzu named Cheeseburger, and a baby me. It was a squeeze, so the functional took priority. The coffee table converted to dining height. The sofa pulled into a bed. That was where my parents slept, in the living-room-dining-room-turned-second-bedroom, when I was born and took over the only room with a door. “We were getting our money together,” my mother once told me. They were getting their lives together.
    My great-great-aunt Frances lived a few blocks away in an apartment three times the size. My memory of it begins in the living room, enormous and bright, with east-facing windows and bookcases that stretched floor to ceiling along the entire northern wall. In the dining room was a long table and, according to my mother, a buzzer on the floor that Aunt Fran would press with her foot to signal the housekeeper to bring the next course. If I’d eaten many meals in that room, I’d surely have remembered that, but I ate mostly in her kitchen, on a green vinyl stool with two steps up that folded out from beneath the seat cushion.
    Rosemary, the housekeeper, slept in the adjoining room, and the kitchen was her domain. It took me years to understand that the cooking and cleaning Rosemary did was her job. As far as I could tell, she and Aunt Fran were roommates, Rosemary living there and helping as she did because Aunt Fran was old, not because she was paid to. It seemed a lovely thing to do.
    Anyway, it was Rosemary who would seat me on that stool, tie a clean white dish towel around my neck, and hold out a bowl of bean-flecked vanilla ice cream with a grown-up-sized spoon. I can’t quite picture Rosemary’s face, but I remember a neat hairline and soft arms. I didn’t yet know about the herb called rosemary, so her name made me think of roses instead.
    Rosemary died when I was six, and when my parents told me, I cried. I wasn’t sure if I had a right to, but I think now of something the British chef Nigel Slater once wrote, that it is “impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you.” I think the same can be said of the person who scoops your ice cream into a dish and stands, smiling, as you eat.
    We saw Aunt Fran all the time, but each visit felt like an occasion. She was my first old person, a pale woman with dark hair that hung to just below her ears. I can picture her charging down the sidewalk toward me, her trench coat billowing behind her like a cape, my mother doing her full-arm wave, as though trying to get the attention of someone not staring right at us.
    Aunt Fran never had children, and by some standards you might say that she didn’t know how to be with them. I thought she was great. Instead of talking to me in the labored way people sometimes do to bridge the adult-child divide, she operated as though there weren’t one. Her voice was raspy and low, her eyes bright behind huge plastic frames. She would wait for me to speak, with a faint grin on her closed lips, then smile widely, with teeth, when I was through. She was observing me and, yes, judging, but only because she was listening for real.
    I have a memory of sitting with Aunt Fran and my parents at a low table in a candlelit, wood-paneled restaurant. The white linens are crisp, and a waiter sails by with a plate of something delicate and dark. Aunt Fran points and tells me they’re snails. She says it matter-of-factly; not how grown-ups sometimes say this kind of thing to children—
what do you make of that!
—but just to let me know. I am four years old and I do not flinch. She orders me escargots, and they arrive with a tiny fork, and no one makes a fuss, and I eat.
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    It’s funny how the foods that inhabit our childhoods turn around to house our childhoods when we’re