Probably Needs Salt

It is 5:13 on a Sunday evening in April, and the line at the K&W Cafeteria in Rocky Mount, which snakes around like the line at an amusement park ride in order to accommodate as many people as possible, is backed up to the door. We'd set out from Nannie’s house in Tarboro at a quarter to five in an attempt to beat the crowd, but to no avail. Couples and families, some spanning several generations, line up to heap their trays with plates of food. I am astounded, having arrived the day before from New York, where the proper dinner hour is roughly 7 o’clock and a table at 9 p.m. is prime real estate, that this many people would so willingly dine out at 5 p.m. But I’m back in the South, where dinner is the after-church meal and supper is a smaller meal after dark. And judging by the number of patrons still dressed in their Sunday finest, church has just let out. So perhaps this counts as late lunch for more than myself.

The offerings of a K&W are both wonderful and terrible to behold. At the first station, they’re peddling cubes of cherry and lemon Jell-O, Waldorf salad, some sort of congealed marshmallow-cream concoction with coconut and maraschino cherries, a salad of shaved carrot with raisins. Nearly all of it is served topped with a dollop of whipped cream. This is nothing new to me, having been raised by grandmothers on both sides who loved cafeterias as much as they loved to cook. But still, there is something vaguely horrifying, something very Willy-Wonka about it: the commotion and bright lights, the ladies in their hairnets, friendly but stern, clouds of vapor rising from steam trays and hot hotel pans. I falter for a moment, feeling rude at the impulse to refuse the offer of the counter-woman, when she drawls, “What can I get y’all?”

I look from the rainbow of salads to her, and back to the food, and think, ‘I cannot eat ANY of that,’ and feel immediately ashamed. Because my grandmothers had instilled in me the belief that it was as impolite to refuse food, as it was to swallow without chewing, I panic. And then I remember, with some small consolation, that I am a grown woman and don’t have to eat anything if I don’t want to. I manage a smile, but before I can say “Nothing, thank you,” I see it, a huge glass bowl filled with fresh strawberries, and on the glass sneeze-guard, a small, hand-written placard where the standard plastic one should be, that reads: LOCAL NORTH CAROLINA STRAWBERRIES. FRESH!

Ye gods, as my Nannie would say, what a miracle.

Strawberries are just coming into season, and that the K&W bothered to buy them locally instead of out of California (and here, I picture a worn little old farmer pulling up to the loading dock, the bed of his truck filled with strawberries, unloading boxes of them and chatting with the receiver while the Sysco drivers look on with a bored kind of wonder) makes me happy. Truly happy. So I say, “Strawberries, please,” and feel not only relieved at having been able to accept something to eat but actually excited about what it is: Local North Carolina strawberries. Fresh! I place the small white bowl on my tray and slide down the line.

When I was a girl, strawberries in the fields were one of the first true signs of spring, and in mid-May, always, Mama would take us across the bridge to the Currituck mainland, to Maco’s Strawberry Fields. Lauren and I would fill buckets and buckets, as many as we could carry, getting sticky hands and sticky mouths as we moved down the rows, turning over the leaves, searching under, always searching for a bigger, the biggest, most perfect berry. Then we’d have them weighed at the small shed at the edge of the field and pay by the pound, dumping the strawberries out of buckets and into bags, racing home to wash and dry them, cool them for safekeeping. It was one of my favorite weeks of the year, as I could eat strawberries at every meal, with shortcake for dessert.

Inland two hours, in the fields around Tarboro, the season comes earlier by a few weeks. Unlike the Outer Banks, the ocean doesn’t moderate the temperature there, and it’s always warmer (or cooler in winter) by about ten to fifteen degrees. And so at Nannie’s you get early strawberries, like I did the year I visited from New York for Mother’s Day and carried a bucket of them back with me on the plane, all the way to my apartment in Manhattan.

The next station is protein. And again I have this pang of shame, because I have no intention of ordering chicken and dumplings, or fried chicken, or chicken-fried steak, or country ham. I’d forsaken my vegetarianism years before, when I really fell in love with the world of food, but I still had extraordinary standards when it came to meat consumption. The K&W, to put it plainly, doesn’t live up to them.

“Nothing, thank-you,” I say, and smile politely.

And the woman looks at me, astonished, and says, “No meat?,” to clarify that I do not, in fact, want meat, which in the South is a staple of every meal.

“No, thank-you,” I say, and feel a little less scrutinized when Nannie orders a plate of country ham and I take it from her and put it on my tray, and because of my triumph with the strawberries.

Then it’s on to vegetables, where I can breathe a sigh of relief, because there is no vegetable I won’t eat, even here. I ask for a vegetable plate and choose stewed cabbage, turnip greens, butter beans and corn. These, too, make me happy. Then it’s on to unsweetened iced tea, and I’m done, with Nannie and Mama trailing behind. I wait at the register as they catch up and the cashier scans our trays with a practiced eye, pushing buttons on the big keypad in front of her. She hands me the ticket.

We head for a booth that is being cleared, and settle in after the bus-boy wipes down the table, removing the various plates and bowls from our trays and divvying them up in front of each of us. The last time I was here was the spring before Grandaddy died, a year ago, when we sat for hours while Mama fed him and he struggled to swallow and chew and swallow without choking. I feel his absence deeply, but am cheered by the fact that Nannie seems to enjoy being out of the house, looking pretty in her lipstick and red sweater-set, excited about the ham, the cabbage, the baked apples and cornbread.

Southern food is salty, and I like salty food, but I also know that food that is salted correctly doesn’t taste salty, but seasoned. The right amount of salt makes the lemon taste brighter, the onion a little more sweet. Finding the right amount of salt is like finding the perfect adjective, an ultimately satisfying experience. I’m reminded of eating clam chowder at the bay in Wellfleet the summer Josh hurt his knee and needed surgery and we cancelled our honeymoon to Spain and went to Cape Cod instead; and him asking me, “How is it?” And me saying, “It needs salt.” And him saying, “I feel like it’s been a long time since you enjoyed something you ate,” and that stinging me. Because it was false; I enjoyed a lot of things, it’s just that I was of the opinion that most of them needed salt. And I said, “That’s not true. The clam chowder you made last night was perfect.” Because it was. Because we had learned to eat together and because he knew how I liked things and agreed with me basically about how food should taste in terms of a dish being seasoned properly.

It was a defense on his part, as a professional cook, to balk whenever anyone complained, or in the case of the chowder, made an honest remark, about a dish in a restaurant. You’d think it would be the other way around. You’d think because he worked in a kitchen and cooked at high volume, and prided himself on doing it right, that he’d have less patience for cooks who fell short of the standards he set for himself. But, no. We’d be out to dinner with friends and someone would make a comment about the temperature of their steak and he’d shoot me this look, like: If they think they can do it so much better why don’t they get in there and cook it themselves? Or better yet, stay home?

But the chowder needed more salt, and I wasn’t afraid to say so, as I was never afraid to tell him anything I thought. Which was probably part of what ruined us in the end: my infinite opinions.

Here is the point: the vegetables at the K&W that evening, to my pleasant surprise, needed nothing. Absolutely nothing. No salt, no pepper. I had no wistful wish that the greens had been seasoned with a little ham hock or a bone thrown in with the beans, because the K&W had gotten it right. Only a few weeks before, Josh had confessed that he had a crush on a girl at work; that he didn’t want to be married anymore; that he didn’t want to move home to the Outer Banks and open a restaurant together; that he desired a different life altogether, without me in it. I’d fled New York in a panic, first to my best friend Emily’s in Maine, and then home to North Carolina. My whole world had exploded. And yet the vegetables wanted for nothing.

And at 5:42 this evening, not much had changed. The place was packed. The fried okra was crisp, the creamed corn was the perfect combination of salty and sweet and creamy with butter, there was tarragon vinegar on the table for the turnip greens, about which Nannie was very excited. It was exactly the same, and everything else, completely different. Because today, Lauren and I have just come from the bank, where we took out a loan to open our own little beer and wine bar, which will have well-salted food and a view of the water. I am finally beginning once more to feel like myself. This time last year, I would not have believed it possible.