Our Hospital by Samuel Shem

Author:Samuel Shem [Shem, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

But dinners had become, over all these months, a trial. Each of the three had a particular food regimen. They were now six months trapped inside the house, with pandemic danger all around. Six whole months of repetitive life. Trying to feel alive, and even “new,” in the boredom. Each of the three prepared their (mostly) separate dinners. The kitchen had been remodeled years before. But to Ellie it seemed badly organized, especially in terms of utensils and labor-saving items. And so ever since she’d been home her mission had been to “bring it up to speed” by ordering the hell out of every new pot or pan or utensil or special easy-open glass (not plastic) tub for leftovers. This was a tough standard for older parents. Worse, with each new arrival, Orvy, Miranda, and even Amy had trouble finding things, because of Ellie’s reorganization of the cabinets. Not to mention composting—easy for food, but the two other bin categories, which were not easily decipherable, recyclables versus trash.

Eleanor was the Climate Police. The rest of the family’s goodwill was no match for Ellie’s saving the planet. And there was no arguing with her—who, aside from lunatics, could possibly want global warming?

Thus, dinner preparation was always tense, filled with land mines, and with shotgun crashes of pots and pans and drawer slams and, often, shouts. Each of the four of them—Ellie, Roy, Miranda, and Ben—had special food management. Amy, from all her travels throughout the world, and the fact that she rarely made dinner with them, was easy. Orville and Miranda, during the first few months of Ellie’s kitchen “upgrade,” had been hit hard.

All of them had been trained, and often traumatized, by their family-of-origin meals. Orville was especially vulnerable. His mother had been an expert at banging pots and pans, screaming, burning meat, and—having grown up in the Depression—keeping an Amana refrigerator so full of food that you could not shove a toothpick into it. Ellie also liked a stuffed fridge. And so now, again, Orvy was phobic to open the refrigerator door.

His solution? Grilling. He got a top-of-the-line Weber gas grill set out under the high Victorian roof and higher sky, for all-weather grilling. Now, at every dinnertime, he could hear from the kitchen, much muted, the bashing and clashing from Eleanor and Miranda.

Ellie followed a strict vegan menu—no meat or fish or other vaguely live creatures, no egg or dairy, but plenty of sugar, while Miranda full-throatedly embraced meat and fish and egg and dairy and all vegetables, avoiding only carbs. Orvy was on a no-red-meat and low-salt, low-carb diet, with a mordant fear of fresh vegetables. Ben was food cool.

The issue was not getting the food. Ellie had been a genius in organizing regular deliveries not just for each of their disparate food preferences, but—God bless her—for Peet’s coffee: French decaf for Orvy, and Italian for Miranda, in sufficient quantity to finish her tome on Columbia’s one local hero, General Worth. He was famous for breakages in his character that ended a dazzling career in the holocaust of the Indian Wars.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.