Free Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant by Jenni Ferrari-Adler Page A

Noon, and I knew I was pressing my luck. Oh, hell yeah. I knew, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t eating that shit.
    Finally, a few hours later—and granted, it might have been forty minutes, who knows?—but at some point, my mother asked one last time if I was going to eat my dinner. Never, I thought, throwing myself across the table and hiding my face in my forearms, nodding, but she wasn’t impressed with my performance. Keep in mind that I’d never been spanked before—my mother didn’t need to raise a hand, considering she had this terrifying register of voice that said Don’t…fuck with me! And that was the voice she used. This is your last warning. Are you going to eat your dinner? she said, firmly taking hold of my biceps. Double down, right? And I wasn’t scared—it was thrilling, actually. Last warning: I’d never made it that far! It was the moment of truth, and I said no. No, I said, and that was it: snap!
    I mean, she lost it. Oh, man, she pulled me from the table with such force that I knocked over the chair as she started wailing, paddling my ass. Honestly, if she’d had a wooden spoon, she would’ve broken it on the first swing. But what I remember most was her hand coming down, that there was just this haywire rhythm to her arm, like she couldn’t hit me fast or hard enough, and I remember thinking—no, I somehow remember knowing that she couldn’t stop hitting me even if she wanted to. When she finally did, I was sent to my room, and we never spoke of it again.
    In all fairness, maybe she only spanked me a few times, who knows, but that is definitely how I remember it. So it was a good twenty years before we ever talked about the incident. I’m not even sure how it came up in conversation, I was probably telling her what a terrible, abusive mother she had been all my life. Oh, that’s right—I cited the chili beating as but one example, and we started laughing, and then my mom finally told me the rest of the story.
    The simple fact was we had no money—I mean, no money— no food, nothing. We had absolutely nothing else to eat in the house—no juice, no milk, bread, cereal—and my mom didn’t know how she would feed me the next morning, or the next day, or the next. I don’t know how she got us through that weekend; I could never ask. So yeah, she lost it. And I’m sure I would have done the same in her position. Which might have something to do with never having wanted to be in her position, but anyhow.
    Now my mother is an amazing woman, truly, but she’s nothing if not proud. Seriously, it took years of pleading before she allowed me to trick or treat, because she always called it the Beggars’ Banquet, and we did not take handouts. Good Lord. Anyhow, a few years later, sometime during the late seventies, I can only imagine how difficult it was for her to apply for welfare. Then again, she had a kid, and you do what you have to do.
    So we did our shopping at stores that took food stamps, and I was enrolled in one of those programs you see advertised on the subway, usually in Spanish. You know those posters with a picture of a smiling young woman and her baby or maybe just some cute little kid— such bullshit, but anyhow. You know what I’m talking about, those posters advertising food programs in which the low income can enroll their kids, so you can be sure your kid gets fed one solid meal a day. Which is usually breakfast, every day before school. At least that was the program I was enrolled in, and it used to shame the hell out of me, slipping out of the cafeteria every morning.
    Of course it’s ridiculous now, but I used to live in mortal fear that one of my classmates would see me and then the whole school, K through nine, would know that Courtney Eldridge was a welfare case… oh, no ! Yes, I laugh. Then again, looking at it now, it’s hard to say who was more proud, my mom or me.
    I will say that my mother never encouraged or discouraged me from the kitchen. For better