Mel insists he doesn't care that Francine doesn't cook. For more than 40 years he's been repeating this story; if he's not around, their daughters tell it: Mel's mother used to go to the Fourth Street Market in D.C. every Friday and buy a live chicken. She'd kill it and singe the feathers off and clean it, and make a big dinner of chicken soup and chopped liver and the chicken meat. Everyone would come and eat, while she was busy serving. Afterward, she would eat alone, then clean up.
Mel didn't see any reason for a wife of his to enslave herself like that.
Diet she's got in spades, but you won't find much else in Francine Levinson's refrigerator.
(Kyoko Hamada)
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Francine was working for the D.C. Welfare Department, and Mel, in addition to a government job, had a band called the Col-legians, with a busy schedule of weddings, bar mitzvahs and "sweet 16" parties. Cooking didn't fit into their schedule. Still, they missed home cooking. "We'd call his mother and ask what she was doing," says Francine. "We'd be hoping for an invitation." Or if Mel's sister invited them for dinner, "We ran."
They did keep food in the house in their child-rearing days: cereal, bagels, eggs. And they had live-in help much of the time, as Francine pursued "a new career every 10 years," she says. Mel sometimes cooked on the grill, and Francine learned to produce an occasional steak, chicken, baked potato or salad, as often as every couple of weeks when the children were small. Given that her recipe for chicken entailed just thrusting it into the microwave, still in its plastic wrapper, Francine says, "No one really wanted me to cook."
So their three daughters became restaurant regulars at an early age. They'd start with breakfast, first at Hot Shoppes and in later years at the bagel places that began to crop up around Potomac, where they lived. Francine would wake the girls up at 6:30, invite their friends along and dash out to Bagel City, which would feed the girls breakfast and pack their lunches before Francine dropped them off at school. For dinner the family would usually gather someplace near the lamp store Mel owned on Rockville Pike: delis, Chinese restaurants, Roy Rogers.
Francine might rarely have cooked when the girls were growing up, but "there were always tons of groceries," Stephanie says and says again, lest anyone think Francine deprived them. On the contrary, some mornings they skipped school so she could take them on an impromptu shopping trip to New York or for a day of skiing. The girls, who are now in their thirties, were proud of their permissive household, where, as Stephanie, the oldest, puts it, "people didn't eat together and didn't eat the same thing. You had what you wanted when you wanted it."
This wasn't an Easy-Bake Oven childhood. Instead, the Levinson girls used to play Restaurant. Stephanie ran the "kitchen." She took orders, cooked the food and served it. It seemed very natural at the time, Stephanie says. But she's begun to wonder, "Do most people play Restaurant as kids?"
Predictably perhaps, Stephanie grew up to be a rebel: She cooks. She enjoys cooking. She explains to her mother that it relaxes her. Stephanie even worked for a caterer for three years, and in this meat-eating family, she's been a vegetarian as long as anyone can remember.
Suzanne, the youngest, with a part-time job at her father's lamp store, a full plate of volunteer work, a toddler and a housekeeper, is following in her mother's footsteps. When Suzanne's daughter, Lily, was an infant, Suzanne just brought her along to work at the store every day. Now the toddler stays home with the housekeeper, who cooks. The nights the housekeeper is off, Suzanne brings home a rotisserie chicken.
If you ask Suzanne what she can cook, she'll say, "Nothing." She finds cooking hard. Still, she can make a kugel from her grandmother Lily's recipe, and pasta with bottled sauce. Stephanie reminds her she can also make "cheese in a cup." That's cheese melted in a microwave.
The middle sister, Monica, doesn't cook, either, but she entertains a lot and is known for her shopping talents. She buys the signature dishes from various restaurants and shops, then serves them with flair.
"Dad can cook," the daughters boast. He makes tuna fish salad -- "from scratch" (which means he opens the can and mixes in the mayonnaise). He also makes that oatmeal -- the real stuff, not instant -- for breakfast each day. Every couple of weeks, when Francine can't muster interest in going out ("Sometimes I'm really exhausted," she says), Mel brings dinner from the supermarket: grilled chicken salad, salmon cakes, string cheese. When a snowstorm threatened awhile back, he brought home a dozen eggs. And Francine boiled them. That was rare; usually Mel makes the hard-boiled eggs in their household. There's a family joke:
"How do you know when hard-boiled eggs are done?"
"When they hit the ceiling." That's what happens when Francine lets the water boil away, as she's prone to doing.
