by Julie Powell
“My Dearest Paul, your poems always move me in this way, and yet it always surprises me . . .”
She’d been gone for just a little over a year, but still the very glimpse of her handwriting brought back with awful clarity those last months, the long desolate afternoons watching his lover gasp for air that would not come to her. Reading the poem, he realized that somewhere deep he felt that in leaving the country, he was leaving her.
Last spring, Bartleman had predicted there would be another woman for him, one to break apart this icy loneliness. It did not seem possible, much as he craved the comfort of a woman of intelligence, of humor and balance and perception. He’d already been given his one chance at that.
Outside, a car horn. Just concentrate on your work, Paul said to himself. He zipped up his bag and heaved it onto his shoulder. The hell with women, and marriage. A man can’t have everything.
DAY 23, RECIPE 34
You Have to Break a Few Eggs . . .
Most of the stupidest things I have ever done I’ve done in the fall. I call it my First-Day-of-School syndrome, a bone-deep hangover from a time when autumn meant something. When I was eleven, the syndrome revealed itself in the tragically self-defining sartorial decision to match a pair of purple zip-up go-go boots with a Miss Piggy sweater. In the fall of my thirtieth year, it showed itself in the concoction of a nonsensical yearlong cooking project, to commence in tandem with the biblical ordeal of a New York move.
I did mention the moving, right?
The first clue that I was descending into one of my occasional bouts of seasonal madness should have been my mom’s reaction when I told her about the Project.
“Huh.”
“Do you like ‘The Julie/Julia Project’ for a name? I think it gives it a sort of Frankenstein mad-scientist feel, what do you think? Did you get the link I sent you?”
“Yes . . . ? I did . . . ?” All her short sentences were wavering up into hesitant, high-pitched questions.
“Don’t worry. It’s just for a year. I’ll be cooking every night and writing every morning. It’ll be like a regimen.”
“Mm-hm? And why are you doing this again?”
“What do you mean?” What an obtuse question—though, I did dimly realize, one I’d not actually asked myself. I noticed my voice had gotten a little squeaky.
“Well—I mean, maybe this isn’t the best time to start a new project like this? While you’re trying to move?”
“Oh—no. No, no, no, no, it’ll be fine. I have to eat, don’t I? Besides, it’s already out there. Online, where anybody can see it. I have to go through with it now. It’ll be fine. It’ll be great!”
At my age, I guess I should know that when the timbre of my voice reaches such unendurably cheery heights, trouble is on the way. I should know it, but somehow I never remember until it’s too late.
It had started so well. The night after I wrote my first-ever blog entry, I made Bifteck Sauté au Beurre and Artichauts au Naturel—the first recipes in the meat and vegetable chapters of MtAoFC, respectively. The steak I merely fried in a skillet with butter and oil—butter and oil because not only did I not have the beef suet that was the other option, I didn’t even know what beef suet was. Then I just made a quick sauce out of the juices from the pan, some vermouth we’d had sitting around the house forever because Eric had discovered that drinking vermouth, even in martinis, made him sick, and a bit more butter. The artichokes I simply trimmed—chopping off the stalks and cutting the sharp pointy tops off all the leaves with a pair of scissors—before boiling them in salted water until tender. I served the artichokes with some Beurre au Citron, which I made by boiling down lemon juice with salt and pepper, then beating in a stick of butter. Three recipes altogether, in just over an hour.
“I could do this with one hand tied behind my back!” I crowed to Eric as we sat at our dining table, hemmed in by the ever burgeoning towers of packing boxes, scraping artichoke leaves dipped in lemon butter clean with our front teeth. “It’s a good thing we’re moving, or it would be just too easy. Like taking candy from a baby!”
After we’d finished our very good and buttery steaks and cleared away the large pile of scraped artichoke leaves, I sat down to write. I made a witticism or two about artichokes—“this was my first time with artichokes, and more than liking or disliking them, I am mostly just impressed with the poor starving prehistoric bastard who first thought to eat one”—then posted my few short paragraphs onto my blog.
The next day I got thirty-six hits. I know I got thirty-six hits because I went online to check twelve times that day at work. Each hit represented another person reading what I’d written. Just like that! At the bottom of the entry there was a spot where people could make comments, and someone I’d never even heard of said they liked how I wrote!
I was going to eat lots of French food, and write about it, and get compliments from total strangers about it. Eric was right. This was going to be brilliant!
Day 2 was Quiche Lorraine and Haricots Verts à la Anglaise.
Day 3 I had to go to New Jersey to pass out comment forms and set up folding chairs for a meeting of families of people who died in the World Trade Center attack. The meeting was organized by the governor of New Jersey, for the purpose of making sure everyone knew that if they were unhappy about anything, it was the fault of the downtown government agency I work for. The governor of New Jersey was a bit of a prick. So I didn’t cook. Instead I ate pizza and wrote this impromptu piece of sparkling prose:
Wealthy Victorians served Strawberries Romanoff in December; now we demonstrate our superiority by serving our dewy organic berries only during the two-week period when they can be picked ripe off the vine at the boutique farm down the road from our Hamptons bungalow. People speak of gleaning the green markets for the freshest this, the thinnest that, the greenest or firmest or softest whatever, as if what they’re doing is a selfless act of consummate care and good taste, rather than the privileged activity of someone who doesn’t have to work for a living.
But Julia Child isn’t about that. Julia Child wants you—that’s right, you, the one living in the tract house in sprawling suburbia with a dead-end middle-management job and nothing but a Stop and Shop for miles around—to know how to make good pastry, and also how to make those canned green beans taste all right. She wants you to remember that you are human, and as such are entitled to that most basic of human rights, the right to eat well and enjoy life.
And that blows heirloom tomatoes and first-press Umbrian olive oil out of the fucking water.
By the end of the first week, I’d gone on to make Filets de Poisson Bercy aux Champignons and Poulet Rôti, Champignons à la Grecque, and Carottes à la Concierge, even a Crème Brûlée—well, Crème Brûlée soup, more like. I’d written about all of it, my mistakes and my minor triumphs. People—a couple of friends, a couple of strangers, even my aunt Sukie from Waxahachie—had written in to the blog to root me on. And now I was leaving my downtown cubicle every evening with a jaunty new step, shopping list in hand, contemplating not how I wanted to rip that friggin’ office phone out of the wall (or maybe the windpipe out of some bureaucrat’s scrawny neck), but instead my next French meal, my next clever gibe.
Eric and I had begun the move in earnest now. On the weekend we loaded up the boxes in our living room and hauled them in our aging burgundy Bronco to our new apartment, a loft, so-called, in Long Island City, which is not on Long Island but in Queens. (Which is, yes, technically, on the water-surrounded landmass known as Long Island, but don’t ever tell someone from Queens or Brooklyn that they live on Long Island. Trust me on this; it’s a bad idea.) We were moving there because Eric’s office had moved there, and commutes from Bay Ridge to Long Island City uncomfortably reminded us of Latin American immigrants knifed to death by bigots in subway cars en route to one of their three jobs at two in the morning. So now we would be living in a “loft.” It was a step forward, a brave experiment, the urban dream. And still I was co
oking—joyfully, humorously, easily. This French food stuff was a snap! I wondered why everybody had been making such a big deal out of it all these years.
And then, in the third week, we got to the eggs.
“Julie, I want you to stop.”
“I can’t. I can’t.”
“Honey, this is just something you decided to do. You can decide not to if you want. You can just decide to stop.”
“No! Don’t you get it? This is all I’ve got. There are people out there, reading. I can’t just fucking STOP!”
I have been having this conversation with my mother my entire life. There was the time when I was six years old and had to wear my favorite sundress for the St. Valentine’s Day party at school—when my mother told me it was too cold, I stood goosepimply on the front porch in my Wonder Woman Underoos for two hours to prove her wrong. Or the time that I tried out for the drill team just because I knew I wouldn’t make it and then, when I did, refused to quit, and instead wound up spending eight months with a bunch of sorority girl larvae—turning bulimic and tying that stupid white cowboy hat onto my head so tightly that by the end of game nights I had to peel the leather strap out of the deep red welt it had burrowed into my throat. Or when two weeks before I got married I decided, in the midst of catering crises and maids-of-honor dress fiascos, that I had to make teeny-tiny sculptures of naked ladies out of Super Sculpey for two hundred guests. It’s the Talking Down from the Ledge conversation. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
My voice grew steely and cold. “I’ve got to go now, Mom. I love you.”
“Julie, wait.” Fear on the other end of the line. Mom knew she was losing me. “Please. Honey. Stop cooking.”
“Bye, Mom.”
I hung up the phone. My neck had a crick in it; I twisted my head around, and the tendons popped. The trek back across my living room, littered with Styrofoam peanuts, was like the Bataan Death March.
“We’ll just take it easy,” Eric had said. “Slow and steady wins the race,” Eric had said. As a result of which, Eric and I had been moving for two and a half weeks now.
It was agony. For a week and a half we just shuttled boxes. Then, on a Saturday, we managed to get our box spring and mattress moved. We left the cats in the old place that night while we slept in the new, making the disheartening discovery that at three o’clock in the morning, our loft apartment sounded as if it was perched in the center of a monster truck rally. On Sunday we brought the cats over. En route, one threw up all over her carrier, and a second beshat herself. The third simply fell into the psychic abyss inhabited by war orphans and the sole survivors of alien invasions, and immediately upon arriving in his new abode found his way up into the drop ceiling, from where he had not returned, though we could hear him prowling around up there, and occasionally yowling. Every once in a while we’d lift up a ceiling tile and slip him a bowl of Science Diet.
Eric and I had forged through several circles of hell in the last weeks—I named them the “Last-Minute Home Repair Hell,” the “Soul-Sucking Dead-End Job Hell,” the “My Spouse Just Turned Twenty-nine and I Didn’t Get Him Anything Hell,” and the “I Have Married a Raving Schizophrenic Hell.” We had bled, we had screamed, we had dropped peeled root vegetables onto the rotting floorboards of our new “fixer-upper” “loft” before picking them up and throwing them into the soup. So though we could now be said to be living in Long Island City, the word living seemed a rather cruelly euphemistic way of putting it. We were more like the walking dead.
The kitchen was a crime scene. Eggshells littered the floor, crackling underfoot. What looked like three days’ worth of unwashed dishes were piled up in the sink, and half-unpacked boxes had been shoved to the corners of the room. Unseen down the dark throat of the trashcan, yet as conspicuous as tarpaulin-covered murder victims, were the mutilated remains of eggs. If the purplish-stained shreds of yolk clinging stickily to the walls had been blood spatters, a forensics specialist would have had a field day. But Eric wasn’t standing at the stove to triangulate the shooter’s position—he was poaching an egg in red wine. Two other eggs sat on a plate by the stove. These I had poached myself just before Eric’s and my impromptu reenactment of that scene in Airplane! in which all the passengers line up and take turns slapping and shaking the hysterical woman, with Eric taking the roles of all the passengers and I the part of hysteric. These three eggs were the sole survivors of the even dozen I had begun with three hours before. One incoherent gurgle of despair escaped me, seeing those two pitiful things lying there, twisted and blue as the lips of corpses. “We’re going to starve, aren’t we?”
“How was your mom? Did she make you feel better?” Cool as a cucumber, Eric lifted the last egg out of the wine and laid it beside its sad blue sisters.
“I don’t know. I guess. You’re like Charles fucking Bronson, you know that?”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, you know, smacking your self-destructive wife back to her senses, dispensing violent justice to foodstuffs. Thanks for doing the last egg.”
“I didn’t do a very good job.”
“As long as it’s not me not doing a good job. For once.” I curled up in his arms, and soon was crying again, but gently this time, a mild aftershock.
“Babe,” Eric whispered, kissing my damp hair, “I would do anything shittily for you. You know that.”
“Yes. I do. And I thank you. I love you.”
“You love me? Who loves you?”
(Remember that scene in Superman where Margot Kidder is falling out of the helicopter and Christopher Reeve catches her, and he says, “Don’t worry, I’ve got you,” to which she responds: “You’ve got me? Who’s got you?” That’s where this familiar rejoinder of Eric’s comes from. He says it all the time. It’s impossible to express how precious and safe it makes me feel, how held up in a pair of improbably large and blue Lycra-clad biceps—but anyone who’s been with someone as long as I have been with Eric understands the power of nonsensical phraseology.)
If this had been a scene from a movie the music would have swelled, but there was no time for romance. Because making Oeufs à la Bourguignonne is about much more than just wasting a dozen eggs trying to poach them in the red wine that was the only booze we had in this hideous apartment we had been so foolish as to move into. I grabbed a bag of Wonder Bread down from on top of the fridge and took out three slices. I cut a neat white circle out of each of them with a cookie cutter, one of an enormous set that Eric’s mom had given me for Christmas one year, which I had very nearly thrown out during the move. I cleared off one of the three working burners on the stove (checking burners before signing the lease being one of those smart-New-York-renter things I could never remember to do), threw a skillet on it, and began to melt half a stick of butter.
“So really, what did your mom say?”
“Wanted to know if I’d gotten the reservation at Peter Luger.”
My family comes up to visit almost every fall for my father’s birthday, because my father likes to spend his birthday catching a Broadway show before going to the Peter Luger Steak House in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for a plate of creamed spinach, Steak for Six, and several dry martinis. That this year he would also get to spend his birthday helping his hysterical daughter finish moving out of her Bay Ridge apartment was just an unfortunate accident of timing.
“Are they really going to spend the night here?”
I shot my husband a look he knew well. “Yeah. Why?”
Eric shrugged, shook his head. “No reason.” But he wouldn’t look me in the eye.
My mother is a clean freak, my father a dirty bird, semireformed. Between them, they have managed to raise one child who by all accounts could not care less about basic cleanliness, but whose environs and person are always somehow above reproach, and another child who sees as irrecoverable humiliation any imputation of less than impeccable housekeeping or hygiene, and yet, regardless of near-constant near-hysteria on the subject, is almost always
an utter mess. One guess which I am.
I also have a long history of trying to kill my mother by moving into highly unfashionable, and often demonstrably unhealthy, locales. It’s been years, and yet she still talks about my first New York studio like it was the “hole” in a Khmer Rouge prison. And of course there is no forgetting the day she saw the one-hundred-year-old crumbling adobe building in Middle-of-Nowhere, New Mexico, that we rented the first summer we were married. She stood at the doorway, the beam of her flashlight piercing the gloom and skittering across the floor as she searched for mouse droppings or the dead bodies of larger creatures, maybe humans. Tears welled up in her wide eyes. As long as I live, I will never forget the sheer horror in my mother’s voice when she whispered, “Julie, seriously—you’re going to die here.”
I stood over the skillet, poking at the butter. “Melt, goddammit.” I was supposed to clarify the butter—which is done by skimming off the white scum that appears when butter melts—then get it very hot before browning the rounds of bread in it. There were a lot of things I was supposed to be doing these days that I wasn’t. Instead I threw the bread in as soon as the butter liquefied. Of course the canapés—which is what I was making out of the rounds of bread—didn’t brown, just grew soggy and yellow and buttery. “Fuck it. It’s eleven o’clock at night and I do not give one shit about the fucking bread,” I said as I took them back out again and dropped them onto two plates.
“Julie, seriously, do you have to talk like that?”
Now I was turning the heat up on the winey egg-poaching liquid to cook it down for sauce. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Eric laughed nervously. “Yup. Just a little joke. Pretty funny, huh?”
“Uh-huh.” I thickened the wine with cornstarch and butter. Then upon each sodden canapé I balanced an egg before spooning the sauce on top. “The eggs wore blue; the sauce wore gray,” I muttered in my best Bogart impersonation, which was not very good at all—I’ve never been much good at impressions. In any case, the sauce was really more of a mauve color. It wasn’t a good joke, and neither of us laughed.