give me a biscuit & skip the cream cheese
by celia miles

Biscuits . . . or bagels?

Today sitting in an upscale bagel shop I realized that I’ve never felt totally at home in a specifically bagel-oriented eatery—except in New York City, where surprisingly I feel pretty much at home on the street, in the theater, or at the corner bistro. The bagel scene leaves me not uncomfortable, just unattached; I’m apart from it. Looking around at the customers, my husband said, “We don’t recognize a soul in here. I guess we just don’t travel in our own orbit!”

Now, we’re dressed okay. We speak the language of the college educated, drive late model vehicles—neither Volvo nor sports utility van. We are never late with our bills. We’ve graduate degrees and had professional jobs in educational institutions where we could dress up or down. We read the local paper every day, the Sunday New York Times occasionally, the Charlotte and Atlanta papers, even subscribe to Gourmet. So why don’t we feel as at home here as we might munching biscuits at the Flamingo or Five Corners or the Silver Dollar? In a single word: Biscuits. We are—at heart—biscuit people rather than bagel people. Is there a biscuit personality, a toast temperament, a bagel bearer? If so, is it genetic?

Biscuits are clearly more down home...grits and gravy and mama in the kitchen. They’re associated with the rural and the poor. At least, the poor in Appalachia. As I grew up, biscuits were common fare, every morning fare, and few tables in Western North Carolina featured bagels. In college and then working in the sixties and seventies, I didn’t see bagels where I ate; those menus featured doughnuts, raisin toast, muffins, corn bread (of course), garlic bread, and pretty soon sourdough bread and even fried bread (England). When did bagels hit the back roads...i.e., anywhere but New York, Chicago, and New Jersey?

My first acquaintance with a bagel surely occurred late in life. And as with most skills and many encounters, anything not resolved in childhood brings some uncertainties: I mention swimming (something I came to late—post childhood), steak tartare (even more intimidating than swimming!), and skydiving (so late that I’ve postponed it indefinitely).

Eating a bagel doesn’t come as natural as eating a biscuit. I don’t have the physical aspects entirely mastered yet. Do I eat each half separately? Or try to get my mouth around that tough-as-hide circle without squishing cream cheese out in all directions? Use a fork or knife? Could one reason for my bagel unease be that I’m tackling this concoction because I think I’m supposed to like it? Certainly since bagels hit this “Paris of the South” city, my friends haven’t declared, “I don’t like bagels and I’m not going to eat one.” But then maybe my biscuit buddies don’t feel compelled to even think about them, much less decide on them. Do you have to be to the bagel born? and is that better, worse, or just different from being to the biscuit born? Now it is “in” to be comfortable with bagels, not biscuits. It’s a class thing? Maybe. It’s a geographical thing? Very likely. It’s a cultural thing? Surely. It’s an attitude thing? Definitely.

I look at the crowd enjoying their bagels on this Sunday morning: a man in a black suit; a man in a gray sports jacket, open shirt; two women with three children at a table, several loose-hanging college types; fairly subdued conversation, no crying babies. The women and children: women have no makeup and no coiffured hair style; no Sears salon cuts, but they may patronize the forty-dollars plus places for the perfect non-cut. They look clean scrubbed but essentially indifferent to the lures of mascara and Cover Girl. They carry on an earnest conversation while the children manage perfectly their bagels. The oldest girl, maybe ten, wears a long fur coat (fake, surely) over jeans; her doll (one of the women fusses with it) is not from K-mart or Toys R Us; it wears a fur hat (fake, surely!) and spectacles. It’s making some kind of statement. If it isn’t custom made, it’s clearly expensive. A biscuit kid could survive a winter in clothes that cost less than that doll. The boy wears jeans, boots, a fur (fake, surely) lined vest, and a necklace that came from the South Seas or the World Market Place. And the smaller girl runs about in an assortment of colors that look “thrown-together” exotic.

When they leave, they pile into a VW van, painted brown, trimmed in orange. These are not your conservative types; these are laid back, sauntering-through-life types; these are bagel types, not white-with-butter types. Of course, some of them may, on occasion, eat biscuits, but when they do, they’re slumming. They say things like “Let’s go down to the greasy spoon and load up on calories and cholesterol,” and once there they look at their fellow diners the same way I look at mine now...with an air of analysis and distancing. I don’t mean they’re all avant garde or arty types, but their charities are less likely to be the American Heart Association, the Cancer Society, or the local Fire Fighters or Policemen’s Fund and more likely to be Brazil’s Rainforests and Greenpeace. I’d guess that more bagel diners send their kids to schools with names like “Mountain Rainbow” or “Children’s Grammar School” than to Woodfin Elementary and Heritage High.

My immediate impression is that they have chosen a lifestyle that embraces the best of both worlds: they have the money to be able to say no to the Buick and Acura and yes to the old Volkswagen. Chances are those kids, though growing up in Western North Carolina, are never going to be biscuit boys and girls. Chances are the locals will never consider them the locals. What else can I assume about bagel people? They are, I’m as sure as if a pollster told me so, mostly college graduates or college dropouts by choice. They’ve been there, done that, liked it or didn’t, dared to drop out if they didn’t, risked family wrath or disdain by trying to live off the land, moving south, advocating vegetarianism and herbal cures, ignoring the rat race when possible, and voting Democratic and voicing liberal views at every chance. Again, inference, not fact.

Wait a minute…my husband and I advocate vegetarianism. We mostly vote Democratic although we tell ourselves we “vote for the man”, for the issues, for the right persons. We’ve lost absolute faith in the traditional cut-and-drug medical practices even as we face surgery or scans! We didn’t dare drop out of college, given the simple fact—then—that college was the way up and out of respectable, working-class poverty.

Discussing bagel and biscuit people becomes more complex, but I stand by my original semi-serious thesis: there is a difference. Few who are born to the biscuit will want a bagel and some born to the bagel may cross over to the biscuit—as a way of identifying with a certain level of society, often those whom they are trying to help, serve, advocate for, etc. in roles as social workers, crisis center workers, educators (occasionally), the “missionaries” of the local scene.

So now I’ve put us among those who cross the economic river from biscuit to bagel land. Starting social security, we’re still wet behind the ears in bagel land. We can walk the walk and talk the talk, but behind the walk and the talk is the fact: we weren’t born to cream cheese. Now it sits in our refrigerator—along side the butter and the jelly, the dill pickles, the black olives and the capers.

Actually I like bagels and I like cream cheese...but I love hot buttered biscuits (preferring the thin to the fluffy, two “lids” with no middle dough to the three-inch-high meltables at fast food places). Bagels may link me to another milieu; biscuits keep me rooted in my Appalachian place. For comfort, for back-to-my-childhood coziness, hand me a homemade biscuit. But when I’m in New York, tramping around thoroughly at home where we all seem immigrants, give me a bagel.

Celia Miles is a native of Western North Carolina, born in Jackson County. She is the authorof A Thyme for Love, Mattie’s Girl: An Appalachian Childhood, and On A Slant, A Collection of Stories reviewed on page 18.

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR:
In our very first issue, we had a bit of a goof. Okay, a colossal goof! The end of this story disappeared into the ethers. Of course we printed the end in the next issue, but the story has never appeared in one piece before, and it is one of our favorites, so we decided to reprint it in this issue. Enjoy!