AUDASE

CHRISTINE WHO FED THE HUNGRY

By Emily Gould , The New Yorker

One morning in early 2011, I received an e-mail from a fancy kitchenware store where I’d once taken a knife-skills class, informing me that a soup kitchen, in a church situated a block from my old apartment in Green point, Brooklyn, needed volunteers on Wednesday afternoons. It was a Wednesday. That afternoon, I got on my bike and rode down to Flushing Avenue, then over onto the new bike lane on Kent.

The ride along that stretch of waterfront was beautiful then. To the left, the Steinway Studios lot sat low enough that most of your peripheral vision was taken up by sky; until you got past the Hasidic neighborhood and closer to the bridge, you often didn’t pass a single pedestrian or jogger. The Domino factory still emitted a smell of slightly rotten caramel.

When I got to the church, I followed signs to the kitchen, and peered through a cloud of steam to find two people washing a mountain of dishes at a big slop sink, while two others bustled before a restaurant-size stove. In an anteroom off the kitchen, several people stood at counters chopping and peeling vegetables. Every work surface was crowded with tools, bags of donated food, random leftovers, and foam cups of coffee. The air was leaden with food smells. A radio somewhere blared the oldies station. Nothing seemed to be organized in any perceptible way.

I said, “Hi,” and then, louder,“Hello?” Maybe half the people turned and nodded, then went back to whatever they were doing. I didn’t know what to do next, so I just stood there at the entrance until one of the women prepping vegetables finished what she was doing and looked up at me with an expression of complete neutrality, verging on uninterest.

“You’re here from the synagogue? They said they were sending over volunteers today.”

“No, I . . .”

“It doesn’t matter. Here, can you take over these onions?” Without saying anything else, she moved to the side of the cutting board where she’d been working, gesturing to the crate of onions she’d been peeling and slicing. “Most of them are half rotten. Just cut out the bad parts.”

For the rest of the afternoon, I did whatever people asked me to do and tried not to get in anyone’s way. At first I tried to insert myself into conversations that were going on around me, but it was as if I were a ghost. I gave up and just eavesdropped, trying to pick up clues to the pecking order.

What the kitchen did was inefficient and nonsensical and probably violated every known rule of food safety, though we cooked everything for so long and at such high temperatures that I’m sure it didn’t matter. But it was a system, and it resulted, each week, in a hot meal large enough to serve everyone who came to dine. Served promptly at 6 p.m., the meal included soup, a salad, an entree and a side dish, and a bunch of donated desserts.

The kitchen was run by a crew of regulars, who almost every week were joined by a new person, a dilettante: a high-school kid doing mandated community service, a visitor from some other branch of the church’s denomination who wanted to talk about Jesus, or, often, someone like me, who’d heard about the soup kitchen and was looking to fill some kind of a hole in her life. There were five or six volunteers who could be counted on to show up each week, but two women, Annie and Christine, were the backbone of the operation, meaning that they were there every week and they were in charge, though they both pretended not to be, saying, if you asked them a question about any aspect of the cooking process, “I don’t know, what do you think we should do?”

With no official hierarchy or assigned tasks, there was always a panicky moment around five-twenty, when it seemed impossible that any food would make it to the serving station on time. At first, I would come home and complain to my boyfriend about how badly the whole thing was run, and how, if I was allowed to be in charge, I could devise a much better, cleaner, more efficient system. I was unemployed at the time, and realizing that I missed having co-workers to complain about almost as much as I missed having paychecks, feedback, a boss.

Salad greens were the one thing we couldn’t count on from the C.S.A. or local shops that donated food to us, so Christine would scrounge in the cupboards until she found the petty-cash envelope and then send whoever was first to arrive out to the greengrocer on Manhattan Avenue, the one with a friendly, elderly cat and big bunches of decent lettuce for only a dollar-fifty a head. When you returned, you’d find that Christine had brewed a giant urn of coffee and was now sipping a foam cup of it, beige with cream, while pulling items out of the kitchen’s two overflowing fridges and arranging them haphazardly on all the counter tops as she devised the meal that would use them best. Annie, a pastry chef turned graduate student, was a great cook and a vegetarian, and she would balk when Christine sometimes padded out her beautifully balanced soups by shoving in chopped bits of kielbasa and ham from the Polish butcher shop up the block. But Christine knew that each meal might be the diners’ only hot one all week, and she wanted to make it as nourishing as she could.

Christine wore a strong perfume that mingled, sometimes unpleasantly, with the cooking smells. She was a unique physical presence: tall and made taller by chunky-heeled clogs, with a mane of thick blond hair that she often wore down, even in the kitchen’s heat and steam. Her waist was tiny and her butt and thighs were not. I didn’t think much back then about how old other people were, but Christine was definitely old enough to be classified as a real adult. She liked to chat and would confide in me and even in the one-off volunteers. There were well-worn anecdotes about her youth on Long Island and her first pre-sobriety years in New York, but beyond those stories there was always something new to learn about her. Every week, as I listened to her introduce herself to a new stranger, another puzzle piece fell into place. She worked as an art restorer in a studio in the Pencil Factory, a few blocks away. Her husband was in the band of a revered female rock star. If you mentioned artists or writers you admired, she often had a personal story about them. She wasn’t showing off; those were just the people she knew. She lived on the same block as the soup kitchen, so she would sometimes go home to fetch a missing ingredient.

Her faint Long Island accent was the same as my aunt’s and my father’s, so maybe that was part of what made me feel immediately comfortable with her. Or maybe she just made everyone feel comfortable. She wasn’t exactly warm or nice, and she could be loud and bossy when she needed to be—when people disobeyed the rules, or cut in line, or showed up so addled they couldn’t hold their plates properly. She also sometimes lost her temper with the church’s pastor, an enthusiastic woman with a penchant for describing the church’s good works in detail while you stood there captive, slicing peppers or peeling potatoes. Their arguments would occasionally lead Christine to storm out of the kitchen in tears, but she would always come back before mealtime, and stand behind the serving table as Pastor Ann made her customary announcement about the rules, ready to make sure that everyone got equal portions of casserole or chicken or sausage and peppers.

Except when we were really short-staffed, few regulars besides Christine ever served the meal. After I helped serve a few times, I understood why. Though some of the people we served were immensely courteous, most didn’t bother with social niceties. Some were rude, or very high or drunk, or just mentally ill. With the exception of kids and the people whose clean clothes and befuddled air marked them as recent Polish immigrants finding their footing in the neighborhood, most of the people who came to eat had lived primarily outdoors for a long time, and they smelled. Sometimes someone smelled so bad that it was hard to breathe, and the other diners would complain. I had begun working at the kitchen in the winter, and by the hot part of the middle of summer I had mostly stopped serving the meal.

Working at the soup kitchen was for me a purely selfish exercise. I got to lose myself in repetitive physical work. I got to feel a part of something larger than myself. And I got a weekly reminder that, no matter how badly my career was going, no matter how hopeless my work seemed and how low my bank-account balance fell, I was not actually poor, because I was not hungry. In New York, it can be so easy to walk around feeling that every single person you pass on the street has it better than you do. For years, I had walked around so dazzled by the city’s conspicuous wealth that I hadn’t noticed its opposite, even though it was just as conspicuous once you knew where to look, and often hiding in plain sight. There were several regular soup-kitchen diners who were well dressed; for months, I thought they were volunteers, or maybe community-activist types who felt it was important to sit and eat alongside the people they were working to help. Eventually, when I learned to look at diners’ hands as they held out their plates to be filled, I realized that even those people had black-edged nails and raw fingers—the inconcealable signs of life outdoors.

The following October, Hurricane Sandy struck New York, leaving the Rockaways without heat and electricity for weeks. Annie and Christine would get to the kitchen early each morning to cook a meal that crews of volunteers would pack up and drive out to the places that needed it. The city’s response to the crisis seemed so haphazard. Why was a ragtag crew of volunteers from churches and temples across the city responsible for feeding so many people, and why was it taking so long for them to be able to return to their homes? A few days after the storm hit, when the entire Lower East Side was still lacking electricity, I travelled from Brooklyn to Union Square and walked up Broadway on my way to teach a yoga class to affluent teens, most of whom lived uptown. The streets were full of happy-looking people carrying shopping bags from expensive stores. They seemed to have no idea of how many people were cold, hungry, and suffering just a few blocks south.

During those weeks, the soup kitchen was a hub of frantic activity, producing big trays of food almost every day. I remember the squelch of tongs dragging through tray after tray of pasta with red sauce and cheese. When the kitchen overflowed with volunteers, we stood in the back yard of the church prepping giant quantities of donated vegetables. With numb hands, we peeled rock-hard winter squash and sliced turnips and potatoes into wedges. We spread peanut butter on sandwich after sandwich and packed donated toiletries into plastic bags. Christine brought in tons of tiny hotel soaps and shampoos; she seemed to have an endless supply. She also seemed to have endless energy. Bustling in and out of the kitchen, she was a little bit more assertive than usual when new volunteers asked her what they ought to be doing.

I went away for Christmas and then, right after New Year’s, started working in an office for the first time in years. I stayed on the soup-kitchen e-mail chain for much longer than I should have, thinking that maybe some Wednesday I’d get out of work early enough that I’d want to make the trek from midtown to Greenpoint in time to do dishes after the meal. I never did.

Months later, I was sitting at my desk at work when I got an e-mail from one of the soup kitchen’s regular volunteers telling me that Christine had died.

Pastor Ann sent a follow-up note to the volunteer list inviting us to come to the church that evening to talk about Christine informally, and I rushed there after work, hoping that someone would have answers. By then, we’d learned that she had committed suicide, but didn’t know how or when or why. It seemed completely impossible; Christine had sometimes been moody, but had never seemed remotely unstable. Even when, after her father died, she’d clearly been sad, she’d seemed able to convert the sadness immediately into unceasing activity on behalf of others.

That evening, in the pews of the church, we sat and told stories about Christine—her quirks, like the lipstick-stained foam cups of coffee and tea she left everywhere, and her adoration of her cats and all things cat-related, especially online videos. So many people had stories of how she had helped them. It was a strange, tense gathering. The feelings in the room were heavy and sad, but also angry. We couldn’t be angry at Christine, so we tried to figure out who or what was to blame for her death.

A few weeks later, the soup-kitchen crew, plus several hundred other people we’d never met before, packed into St. Mark’s Church in the East Village for Christine’s memorial service. Some of the people who spoke there were Christine’s compatriots in her decades-long sobriety; in A.A., we learned, she’d helped even more people than we knew. We also learned, finally, that Christine had been prescribed an antidepressant to help with the symptoms of menopause, and that she’d experienced a side effect that they warn about in the fast talk at the end of television ads: a sudden onset of suicidal thoughts.

Sometimes, when sadness is most socially sanctioned and appropriate, as at a funeral, it can be hard to feel it, and then it sneaks up on you at some unexpected moment, leaving you feeling devastated in the supermarket checkout line. This was not, I don’t think, anyone’s experience at Christine’s memorial, and it certainly was not mine. As the rock star whose band Christine’s husband played in closed the ceremony by singing “Amazing Grace,” the entire building seemed to shake with sobs.

The last time I had seen Christine was months before; I was on my way out of the new CVS on Manhattan Avenue, where I’d run in for some lip balm or paper towels after a date with my last remaining Greenpoint-based friend. We exchanged a few words about our respective cats, but all I really remember is how happy she was to see me, and how happy I was to see her, and how sure I was that I’d see her again. When her dad died, she’d brought little packets of birdseed for everyone at the soup kitchen, because her father had loved to feed the birds. She’d tied them with a ribbon and attached a little card for each of us. I didn’t have a feeder or a yard, so I just sprinkled the seeds on my windowsill. Juncos and mourning doves came and sat there every morning, and, when the seed ran out, I bought more.