The Clean Plates Society
I am 8 years old and sitting alone at the green table in my grandma’s house. I jitter, feeling my eyes fill with tears, and I seek to escape by examining the wide variety of objects around me. The living room, bedroom, and kitchen (in that order) are all in one big space with an unbelievably high ceiling. But take this with a grain of salt, I am only 130 centimeters tall.
The space is almost filled with a cluster of bits and bobs, among which are numerous green kitchen appliances, some of them still in their boxes. The floor is green. The walls are, you guessed it, green. My grandma had even tried to buy a green fridge. But the employees in all Blagoevgrad shops had looked at her like she had told them she was a witch. Apparently, there were no green fridges in 2008 Blagoevgrad. Also, none in the vicinity, certainly not in Bobov dol, the small miners’ town where my grandma lived. She had to compromise with a regular, white fridge…
Everyone else has finished having lunch and has gone about their day. I am not allowed to leave the table until I have eaten all of my food. “Come on, you will not be part of the Clean Plates Society if you do not finish your meal,” my grandma is hanging over my head. Her voice is lively and perhaps she is half-joking but I am aware that she is also dead serious. My cousin is making fun of me in the background. As a member of the Clean Plates Society, she is already on the bed, watching Cartoon Network. I, on the other hand, know I am not leaving the table anytime soon.
I am stuck in an endless loop of being left behind to finish my meal, not wanting to eat the food, and eventually being told I could get up and do something else, but only when my grandma’s patience runs thin. “I will pour this food down your back,” she threatens me. I sigh in relief, knowing that this phrase signals one last attempt to make me eat until she gives up. For now.
The Clean Plates Society is a secret club that I could never join although my whole family was in it. Talk about nepotism. I never understood why, but food was a big deal for everyone around me. If we had guests coming over, we would cook huge batches of food. Every evening, we would all gather around the table to eat dinner and we would, without fail, discuss what would be cooked the next day. I have lost count of the times I have made family members cry because I said I was not hungry. At my grandpa’s funeral, we cooked so much food that we had to eat the same stuff for days after. Even though, for once, no one felt like eating at all. It was not just me.
I had once mentioned in passing that I liked my grandma’s banitsa with leeks. I never got the courage to tell her, but I was only trying to be polite. From that day on, every time we met, every single time, my grandma would prepare a banitsa with leeks for me. I did not have the heart to come clean.
In those first days of raw grief after my grandpa passed away, it was understandable that no one felt like thinking about food. But things never got back to normal. My grandma changed most of all. First, she stopped cooking because she did not feel like preparing a whole meal just for herself. Then she gradually reduced the amount of food she was eating. Before I knew it, she was sitting at the table with a plate in front of her, saying she was full after two bites. The person who had once insisted I finish my meals was suddenly not in the Clean Plates Society anymore — the club she had founded herself. I felt a mixture of relief and panic, in increasingly uneven proportions. She lost weight. Once big enough for the largest clothing size, she was now smaller than me, fragile, always cold. Cold! The woman who had walked around in tank tops during winter for all her life. She was sad.
The first crack in the family food order had come a few years before when my grandpa was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Due to the symptoms, he stopped being able to eat by himself. My grandma became more lenient about the clean plates rule. But she still held on to it right until he passed away. That was how she fought to keep the life inside of his body. He was deprived of all other forms of nourishment, unable to feel emotions and touch, recognize faces, or consume any type of soul food. The meals on the plate seemed like the only thing keeping him alive and soon he was gone.
As time passed, my grandma seemed to recover slowly but steadily. She stopped crying whenever my grandpa was mentioned, she stopped visiting his grave every week, and her memories of him were no longer the only topic of conversation. She seemed to be back. Except, she was not eating. It took me too long to realize what was going on: she would withhold food when she was sad. Fasting was her natural reaction to grief. Where food had been the substance of life and having a cooked meal on the table used to be a sign of joy and prosperity, there was now emptiness.
You know those trite quotes that say food is life? I think my grandma was struggling to hold on to life. In her house, the green room that used to look cramped seemed increasingly emptier. Refusing to eat meant letting go and surrendering to grief. Maybe she was trying to keep everyone securely attached to life by creating the Clean Plates Society in the first place. About a month before she passed, she sat me down and told me she knew I often did not feel like eating. “I do so, too,” she said. “And see where it has brought me. Once you stop, it gets harder and harder to get back to it. So just make sure to keep going.”
Nadezhda is a journalism student at the American University in Bulgaria. This story was born unexpectedly, yet Nadezhda feels like it has been growing inside of her for quite some time.
