Food as a way to fill emotional emptiness

Food as a way to fill emotional emptiness is a recurring pattern in the narrator’s childhood: sweets offer immediate pleasure, Bubby’s kitchen provides safety and belonging, and eating becomes a practical answer to needs that cannot otherwise be met. The pattern shifts from shared abundance to secret compulsion. Food comforts her, but it cannot close the deeper absence she feels; its temporary relief makes that absence visible.

Abundance as comfort

A visit to the bakery with the narrator’s father ends in a display of plenty. He selects baked goods to take to Bubby’s house, where the boxes are emptied onto the dining-room table: kosher cupcakes with rainbow sprinkles, cinnamon and chocolate babka, a margarine-rich seven-layer cake, and black-and-white cookies from which the narrator eats only the chocolate. Bubby loves egg kichel, and the family brings her some after these trips. The child experiences the assortment not as ordinary groceries but as wealth, a spread of sweets laid out like auction goods. Frosting and crumbs linger as she falls asleep, making pleasure a physical sensation that carries into the night.

The scene is also one of the few good moments the narrator shares with her father. He brings Klein’s chocolate-dipped ice-cream bars when he visits her at Bubby’s, watching expectantly for her appreciation. His gifts suggest a limited way of performing fatherhood: he supplies treats, then leaves on errands. Because he cannot reliably care for her, the food he brings becomes a tangible, if brief, sign of attention. Its comfort is real, but it is bound to the instability of his visits and cannot substitute for dependable care.

Bubby’s kitchen as refuge

The narrator eats and sleeps at Bubby’s much of the time because her mother is often absent and her father is unreliable. In this household, food is not merely a treat brought home from the bakery. Bubby cooks from scratch and is continually concerned that the child eat enough: rye bread thickly spread with butter, vegetable soup, and moist apple strudel. Her care takes the form of placing food before the narrator at almost any hour, whether roast turkey at breakfast or coleslaw at midnight. The pantry holds no bags of chips or boxes of cereal; what is available has been freshly made.

The kitchen gives this feeding a social and emotional setting. It is where relatives gather to talk while Bubby mixes ingredients or stirs pots, and where good news is shared. The narrator remembers crawling down one flight of stairs from the third-floor apartment to reach the kitchen on the second floor, hoping for cherry Jell-O. Its cooking vapors, familiar food, and steady activity mark a contrast with the strange, disorienting world in which she feels no one knows who she is or what language she speaks. The room feels like a place of origin and safety, even though she cannot fully explain what she needs protection from.

That refuge does not erase the lack of other kinds of nourishment. The narrator remembers her mother reading children’s books aloud, but at Bubby’s the only books around are prayer books. She wants to read again, yet her English is weak and she has no way to get books for herself. Cupcakes from Beigel’s and egg kichel become substitutes for a lost pleasure: food is accessible when books are not. Bubby’s evident enthusiasm for eating draws the child into that pleasure, while the larger deprivation remains unresolved.

From appetite to an emotional void

As the narrator grows, she describes an appetite that reaches beyond the ordinary discomfort of hunger. The space between meals feels like a yawning gap, and the hunger has both a physical and an emotional dimension. She builds elaborate stories about the dishes placed before her, giving food an imagined history as well as a taste. Eating is a convenient way to occupy an emptiness she cannot otherwise fill. It offers temporary relief, not an answer: the gap threatens to widen again unless she stuffs it with as much as she can manage.

The food practices in the house sharpen this tension. Bubby cuts mold from vegetables and returns the usable portions to the refrigerator. Cakes and pies are frozen for special occasions; once served, even the remaining crumbs are wrapped and stored. The household treats food as precious and nothing is casually discarded. The narrator, meanwhile, longs for novelty snacks such as chocolate bars and potato chips. Her desire is not simply for more food, since the house is full of it, but for a different kind of pleasure and for the freedom to reach for it without the rules and scarcity that shape her experience.

Secret eating and its aftermath

When Bubby and Zeidy are away and the narrator is alone, the cakes in the freezer become difficult to ignore. She opens the freezer and looks at foil-wrapped pans of apple pie, chocolate brownies, filbert fudge, and marble cake. She tells herself she will take only a sliver, but once a cake is uncovered on the kitchen table she cuts large pieces and eats rapidly with her fingers, driven partly by fear of being caught. Frosting-laced brownies and crumbs spread the scene beyond the food itself: appetite has become an urgent act conducted in secrecy.

Afterward, she scrubs the kitchen floor painstakingly to remove evidence. She feels guilty about eating as she does about reading, yet the guilt does not satisfy the hunger. The episode makes the contradiction plain: the food is plentiful in the house, but her relationship to it is shaped by concealment, anxiety, and a need that remains after she has eaten. The kitchen that once promised safety becomes, in her absence from the household’s ordinary rhythms, the setting for an act she must hide and clean away.

A promise of greater generosity

The narrator’s response is not to reject food. She resolves that, as an adult, she will never be stingy with it. At times what she craves is not a rich cake but the simple pleasure of a fresh tomato, with firm skin and tender flesh. She takes quarters from the charity box Bubby keeps, buys slices of watermelon, and eats them on the porch, letting juice and black seeds fall into the flowerpots. Weeks later, seedlings emerge among the petunias; Bubby examines them and decides they are weeds. The small chain of consequence gives the pleasure a life beyond the moment of eating: what is dropped becomes something that grows, even if it is not recognized as a gift.

Food also belongs to the surrounding seasonal landscape. Strawberry plants bud beside the limestone path, wild roses climb the barbed-wire fence, and a loganberry tree hangs over the porch. Bubby worries that the tree blocks sunlight from her tulips, but Zeidy refuses to cut it down because biblical law forbids destroying fruit trees, with even pruning treated as questionable. By Passover, berries fall onto the porch and stain the artificial grass, creating more work for Bubby. The fruit is abundance without control: it ripens, drops, and makes a mess. Across these scenes, food remains both comfort and complication—an available pleasure, a language of care, and a temporary filling for an emptiness that the narrator’s childhood circumstances leave open.