4 Lunch

In Panama, family dinners happen at lunchtime. At least, in my family they did. This was something I learned as a young girl when we took summer vacations to the country where my father had lived until, with two worn suitcases and a student visa in hand, he left to study chemical engineering at the University of Delaware. There was never any discussion of alternative destinations, and I looked forward to the trips because of how different everything seemed from the United States and how, year after year, so much in Panama remained the same.

We stayed at my grandparents’ house, a two-story building not far from Panama City’s financial district with twisted pink columns like candy and a wavy red clay roof like the ruffled edge of lasagna. In the morning, I would lie in the small bedroom I shared with my brother and sister—a circulating fan perched on a wooden chair, hens in the back yard cawing, sunlight pouring in through the gauzy curtains—and inhale the sharp smell of garlic as it wafted through the house, the signal that my grandmother had already begun her lunch preparations. I would wander out in my nightgown and flip-flops to find her in a thin housecoat and a baseball cap, hunched over the stove, stirring a gigantic pot of the meal she made every day: sancocho.

Sancocho is a traditional Latin American soup, and my grandmother crafted her version out of yucca, ñame, otoe, culantro, garlic, oregano, a stumpy cob of corn, chicken feet, a chicken neck, and chicken meat. Alongside it, she served plantains and rice that she cooked in a cast-aluminum paila, intentionally burning the grains at the bottom in hot oil.

Two aunts, two uncles, six cousins, and at least a dozen friends so intimate that we called them family also lived in Panama City, so every day my grandmother set two tables—one in the kitchen and one in the adjacent dining room—in case anyone should stop by. She dressed the tables with her best silverware, plastic placemats, plastic tablecloths, plastic napkin holders, plastic toothpick dispensers, drinking glasses emblazoned with worn World Cup decals, and salt shakers cut with dry rice to keep the salt from clumping in the humid air. She filled the glasses with water or Coca-Cola and covered them with coasters to keep the flies at bay. At every place setting, she turned melamine bowls, like miniature igloos, over packed mounds of rice on matching plates.

It was a boisterous time of day, with everyone talking across rooms, reaching for food, and laughing. It seemed all the more so because, until my Spanish improved, in high school, to me the noise was just that—noise—rising up around me like puffs of smoke. My grandfather removed his work shirt and cufflinks, and ate in a white ribbed tank, grinning underneath his silver mustache, regaling everyone with the news of the day and tales of politics, all of which I heard secondhand, translated by my mother. My grandmother went from one table to the other, making sure everyone was fed.

Much of this was the sort of thing we might have done at home in the United States, of course. My mother cooked dishes like pepper steak, Shake ’n Bake chicken, and spaghetti; we set the table, laid out silverware, ate rapaciously, and, with five people in the house, had our share of spirited conversation. But at home those activities were a cue to start winding down for the evening—to finish our homework, watch something on television, put on our pajamas. In Panama, it was still the middle of the day. By the time dinner rolled around, no one sat together at the table. We were expected to fend for ourselves.

My grandfather died five years ago, and since then our lunchtime ceremony has never quite been the same. My grandmother moved into my aunt’s house, on the opposite side of the city. She cooks in a different kitchen now, and no one comes home for lunch anymore, because it’s too far from people’s jobs.

The last time I visited was also the first time I had traveled to Panama by myself. My grandmother and I sat together in the midday heat and shared Chinese food, the leftovers from my dinner at a restaurant the night before. The dog, who was our only companion, stretched out under the table, cooling his belly against the floor. I warmed two plates of mixed vegetables and tofu in the microwave and slid one in front of my grandmother. She studied it for a long time. Finally, she speared the tofu with a fork and tentatively put it to her lips. When she tasted it, she grimaced.