On Betsy

I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy?

Yesterday, a woman died. Her name was Betsy, and she was the mother of my childhood best friend. She was an accomplished modern dancer and choreographer—I am only learning now, googling her, that she received an NEA fellowship for her choreography—but I mostly knew her as a funny, kind woman who opened her home to me at a time when I desperately needed it. It was so different from mine: gently chaotic, tolerant of moods and eccentricities, warm and cluttered and cozy and deeply interesting. An artistic home. Betsy loved to share her passion for movement; we all did improvised dances in the living room and she taught me about the rhythms of my muscles and how to let music flow through me and how to do a split. (I never did quite get down to the floor.) I wanted to spend all my time there. I felt loved, appreciated, and seen, at a moment in my life when I felt none of those things anywhere else.

I thought about writing something much longer, then realized I wanted to leave the tributes to the people who knew and loved her best. But I did want to share one memory of Betsy, which I hold very close.

I grew up in a house demented by diet culture, like so many 90s kids. Even before I was fat, I was hyper-aware of calories and carbohydrates, the wickedness of hunger and second helpings and snacks. Food was just landmine after landmine, and I was developing an endless list of food aversions and anxieties. I was—metaphorically—starving, and well on my way to an eating disorder.

One afternoon, while my friend and I sat at the counter of their small kitchen, Betsy asked me if I wanted a tomato. I told her I didn’t like tomatoes. She took that in for a beat, nodded, and then disappeared into the backyard. A few minutes later, she came in with a huge, luminous beefsteak tomato, straight from her garden. She washed it and cut it, put a slice on a plate, and sprinkled a little salt on the top. Then she pushed it across the counter, and handed me a fork.

Here is what I remember. It was red as a heart and dense with ventricles; nothing like the anemic, watery tomatoes I’d been encountering all my life. I knew that I didn’t like tomatoes, or I thought I did, but it looked so good and also I was an anxious, rule-following kid and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. So I ate it. It was still warm from the sun; rich and sweet and thrumming with umami, though of course I didn’t know that word. And the salt lifted it from delicious to sublime. It was my first encounter with a concept that every cook knows: that salt makes things taste more like themselves.

I devoured it all, and asked for another. She gave it to me, slice after slice, until the whole fruit was gone.

Whenever I eat a gorgeous tomato in late summer, I think—without fail—about that afternoon. It is my madeleine. And when I think about that afternoon, and Betsy, I think about how my body and my appetites were my enemies everywhere else except in her house. How grateful I am for that window into sanity and health and self-love, which would eventually liberate me from everything that threatened to destroy me.

I wish I could have had a chance to tell her that. But somehow, I think she knew. I think she knew when she pulled that tomato off the vine that I needed it more than I needed anything else.