mushrooms—and the gritty edges of it, the slickness against my tongue, made me so sick I had to run to the bathroom to spit it out into a trash can.
When I decided to become a vegetarian, I abandoned my family’s communal learning space. Stepping outside of my family kitchen meant I’d left behind any chance to learn what to do when faced with a diet dictated by unknown ingredients. Like most twentysomethings left to fend for themselves, I learned to cook cheap and easy. I just did it without meat. I ate basically the same diet as I had as a non-vegetarian, subtracting the meat and filling in the white space left on my plate with more of the something else. Think frozen pizzas. Think Tater Tots and cheese sandwiches. Think instant ramen. Lots and lots of instant ramen (only the mysteriously named “Oriental” flavor, without beef or chicken fat). Kraft’s blue boxes of dried macaroni and powdered cheese are vegetarian friendly and only about sixty cents apiece. After a few years, I became adventurous enough to branch into the “ethnic” food aisles at the grocery store, tossing cans of refried beans, flour tortillas, salsa, and pre-shredded cheese into the cart for quesadillas. Boxed rice, boxed couscous, boxes risotto mixes.
I never really added produce.
When I discovered meat substitute products, they were a godsend. No longer did I have to pretend a meal without meat was filling. Now I had fake steak strips for fajitas, fake chicken patties to eat between hamburger buns with ranch dressing, fake chicken breasts to toss into a stir-fry, Tofurky and soy and mycoprotein molded into new shapes.
A few years later, I saw an episode of The Biggest Loser, NBC’s weight loss show, during which their personal trainer took the contestants grocery shopping with a nutritionist. The muscular trainer stood, midriff bared, alongside the trim blonde nutritionist in her blue polo as she told the group they should do most of their grocery shopping around the perimeter of the store, because that’s where the “real” food is located: the deli and butcher for meat and cheese, the bakery for fresh breads, the produce section. Avoid the middle, she told them. This is where the processed food—highest in calories, lowest in nutritional value—lives.
I did my grocery shopping at eight o’clock on Sunday nights in the neighborhood Safeway, beneath a sign alerting me to constant surveillance of this street corner as a known drug exchange. And I did all of my shopping at the center of the store, weaving a sparse cart up and down aisles of boxed food, canned food, frozen food. But at least I wasn’t eating meat.
D.C. HAD NEVER been my plan. When I finished college with a writing degree, I hoped to find freelance work in Montana. Kevin and I had stayed together when he moved west, but after a year and a half, the distance was putting a strain on our relationship. Openings for writers were slim anywhere, let alone in a small Western town, and when I found the internship at the Wilderness Society, I was just smart enough to realize I couldn’t afford to turn it down for a guy. Despite all this, I fell in instant love with the city, where culture seemed to light a match beneath radical politics, igniting it with color and dancing flames. Impromptu drum circles flared up in the middle of Meridian Hill every early Sunday evening, my neighbors dancing in brightly colored clothes as the last slants of sunlight faded behind dense trees. When Kevin came for occasional weekend visits, we strolled through the Smithsonian’s museums, drank white wine with brunch, sat at the edge of the Lincoln Memorial, and watched the sun set into the reflecting pool. I took yoga classes in a basement-level studio painted purple and run by two women whose black labs meditated with us. I stayed out late on the weekends, ears ringing from shrill guitars amplified through massive speakers as independent rock bands played cheap shows at the 9:30 Club or the Black Cat.
My roommates and I were all young idealists, four girls in a two-bedroom apartment with a view of the Washington Monument, swapping stories from our various nonprofit day jobs: providing microloans to farmers in Southeast Asia and escorting pregnant women past the picket lines at Planned Parenthood. One of my responsibilities as a communications intern was the “hill-drop,” where I literally walked the halls of Congress, knocking on the doors of senators and representatives to ask if I could drop off a memo about preserving wilderness for future generations. I felt at home and purposeful. In a letter to a friend, I described my job as “the real deal,” a marriage of writing and activist passions.
The city was like a bolt of lightning: brief and luminous, electric. One Friday afternoon I had off from work, the skies burst open with a sudden hot rainstorm. Thunder shook the building and wind whipped bare tree branches down the empty gray streets. I opened up our fourth-story living room window and sat on the ledge, closing the window over my face to protect the room from the water and myself from my fear of heights, and let my bare legs dangle out into the summer rain.
A GRAFFITI CAMPAIGN sprung up around the city that summer, a single four-letter word spray-painted all over our Northwest neighborhood, on metro station walls and cement park trash cans and stone pillars around Dupont Circle: BORF. For most of the summer, I didn’t know what it meant, just saw the word as it grew, lacing itself around the city. In mid-July, a young student at a city art school was arrested on a tip and made to explain himself. “Borf,” he said, was the nickname of his friend Bobby Fisher, whose image he had also used in stencil, a friend who had committed suicide by hanging when he was sixteen. The campaign was an homage, a mourning but, most of all, an act of outrage, the frenzied, messy, artistic expression of a group of students who had nowhere to put all their hurt.
In a video piece released the next year, the Borf Brigade, as they had by then become known, spoke over images of secret stenciling: “This epidemic cannot be medicated into remission. It is not a problem confined to our family bloodline. ‘Trouble at home’ is not the only trigger for depression.”1 Although seeing the mysterious letters on traffic lights and skate park slopes was always a little thrill, a discovery, once the story came out, the whole campaign seemed haunted, a reminder that there were forces at work in this city that I could only guess at, could barely see.
One night, some friends gathered at the apartment of my roommate’s boyfriend and his brother, the two of them sharing a studio in a secure building in Columbia Heights. We played Scrabble, ate cheese with wine, played at being thinking, cultured adults. I wandered around the small, single room they shared, admiring the construction-paper artwork on their walls. Red smears on a yellow sheet of paper. Thick black lines on green. One of the residents of the apartment was an art teacher at an elementary school in Southeast D.C. He explained that these were portraits he’d asked his second-grade students to draw: the red smears were how they painted the view outside their apartment windows; the thick black lines were drawn by one boy when he was asked for a portrait of his father, in prison.
In the summer of 2005, we were two years into a war I had protested on these streets, on the same streets where some of these children lived, on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, where rock attacks on buses were so common drivers were advised to wear safety goggles. The Southeast quadrant of D.C., where my friend worked, had a population that was more than 90 percent African American, only two grocery stores per ward, and diabetes rates higher and household incomes lower than anywhere else in the district.2 Just blocks from the White House, where I had once marched.
The heat of a mid-Atlantic summer oppresses slowly and softly, a heavy wet blanket of lethargy that spreads gradually, first up over your legs and then onto your shoulders. Finally, your chest heaving in sleep, you’re unable to breathe through the weight. We didn’t have air conditioning, so we slept with the windows flung wide open, the sirens and shouts of 18th Street echoing into our dreams.
In mid-July, the nonprofit I worked for threw a company picnic. We drove a fleet of rented vans to Maryland’s Rock Creek Park, about an hour away, and spent the day grilling hot dogs and veggie burgers, playing volleyball, wandering by bike or on foot the loops of wooded trails. Almost as soon as we arrived, a few other employees and I walked down to the edge of a small river running through the park, to a patch of warm sand where we could take off our shoes and wade in. I stood ankle-deep in the cool water, my toes curled and digging into
