by Julie Powell
We ate our dinner amid the unpacking detritus, in silence. The egg tasted like the cheap wine we were drinking, only buttery.
It wasn’t half bad, actually.
“It’s good, honey,” tried Eric.
I said nothing.
“Just think, a week ago you’d never eaten an egg at all, and now you’re eating this. How many people, in their whole lives, ever eat eggs poached in red wine? We’re doing something hardly anybody ever does!”
I knew he was doing his best to comfort me, and so I gave him a watery smile. But he could not make the question go away, that unspoken one that hovered over our subdued table along with the gentle sounds of our mastication. “Why, Julie? Why Julia? Why now?”
When Julia and Paul moved to Paris in 1948, Julia was just along for the ride—and to eat, of course. She didn’t really know anything about food, not yet, but she was hungry—she could put more away than anyone (other than Paul) that Paul had ever met.
Paul was saddened by how his Paris, where he had lived for so long before the war, had been tarnished. The bombed-out buildings and the heavy military presence oppressed him. But Julia had never known the city any other way, so it wasn’t as bad for her. In fact, for her, life had never been better.
Their apartment on rue de l’Université was chilly, heated by a potbelly stove during a cold winter. The apartment had an odd L shape. Paul could lean out of the window in the living room and take a picture of Julia leaning out of the window in the bedroom, with the rooftops of Paris all around her. This eccentric, fusty apartment was where Julia learned to cook, and she loved it.
Still. Julia’s mother was long dead by the time she and Paul got the Paris flat, dead long before she had married or even met Paul. Which is sad, of course. But at least she didn’t have to worry about presenting her mother with a dark, smelly apartment, with a kitchen at the top of a creaky stairway, with an odd, somewhat sinister bathtub.
Actually I don’t know anything about their bathtub; it might have been quite nice. It was ours that was frightening.
Our new kitchen was quite large, by New York standards anyway. It was its own separate room, with a bit of counter by the sink and full-sized appliances, lit by an industrial fluorescent fixture. The first thing we’d done once we’d moved in was to tear out three layers, nearly a hundred years’ worth, of nasty tile down to the floorboards. These floorboards were dark and damp and rotting slightly—we weren’t quite sure what we were going to do about that yet. But I liked the kitchen—it was why I took the apartment, why I was blinded to the faulty jalousie windows and the strange black tub and everything else that was so terribly, terribly wrong.
The bathtub was black porcelain, set up on a raised platform so you had to climb two steps to get in. If this sounds kind of sexy, in a Las Vegas kind of way, it wasn’t. For one thing, the tub was rusted out and badly caulked, and the bathtub surround was of that molded plastic they used to use in less-expensive motels in the fifties, and it was cracked. The steps up to the tub were made of plywood covered in an adhesive no-slide rubber stuff painted battleship gray. Being two steps higher just brought you closer to the disintegrating drop ceiling and the hole cut into it for the dangling light fixture. The light didn’t work, was more or less just a gaping black hole out of which you could not help imagining horrid beasties falling down on you while you bathed.
The apartment was long and low, with linoleum floors all painted the same battleship gray as the steps to the tub, which gave it the feeling of a submarine’s interior. At the front was a large picture window framed on either side with sets of jalousies, which are the glass louvered windows you see in small towns all over the South. This also sounds nice, and it also wasn’t, because Long Island City is not a small southern town.
When my mom first saw the tub, she laughed, but it was not a nice sort of laugh. When she saw the jalousies, her eyes grew wide again. “Julie, they don’t even shut right. You’re going to freeze to death.” A freight truck slammed over a large pothole right in front of the building with a room-filling crash. “That is, if you don’t go deaf first.”
We had dinner reservations at an Italian place in midtown. I hustled everybody out as soon as I could manage, took us all to a bar beforehand, and tried to encourage the most orgiastic atmosphere of eating and drinking possible, succeeding so well that I had some trouble holding steady enough to pour us all into cabs at the end of the night. But it wasn’t enough.
By midnight we were all bedded down together in the “loft” for what would prove the longest night I have ever had. Every passing car had lost its muffler, every 7 train hit the sharp curve behind our apartment at eighty miles per hour with an unearthly screech, and every sigh or irritated rustle from the air mattress set my teeth on edge and my heart racing. I know I did eventually drift off only because I jerked awake again at five a.m. to find my mother up, in her nightgown, with her forehead pressed up against the jalousies, muttering furiously and shaking her fist at what appeared to be a two-hundred-foot crane rolling slowly past the apartment, backward, beeping loudly, presumably so that none of the bustling pedestrians overflowing the sidewalks of Long Island City at five a.m. would dart out into the middle of the street and get hit by a slow-moving two-hundred-foot crane.
The first crisis of the morning came when U-Haul, to no one’s surprise, lost our truck reservation. “Exactly the kind of thing to expect in New York,” as Heathcliff pointed out. (My brother’s name is not, of course, really Heathcliff. Texans of Scotch-Irish descent do not name their red-headed children Heathcliff. I just think it’s funny to call him that—because it pisses him off, and because “Heathcliff” does rather speak to the whole sardonic, brooding aspect.)
Heathcliff is the guy you’d want to have as your second in a duel or watching your back in a firefight, as your vice presidential running mate or your partner in any reality-TV show that might involve speaking foreign languages, jumping off tall cliffs, or eating bugs. It is impossible to imagine him screaming at service personnel on the phone or having catastrophic hissy fits on subway platforms, two activities I indulge in frequently. Because of this, and also because Eric was nursing a hangover, which I felt responsible for, it was Heathcliff I took with me to deal with the U-Haul predicament, which was resolved with remarkable ease. (If it had been Eric with me, the day would have ended with us rebuilding a diesel engine with a giant timer ticking over our heads, in front of a live studio audience, while Hindu mechanics who disapproved of my mode of dress jeered at us and pelted us with stones. Or something.)
Everything was going just swimmingly, as far as I could see. The only outstanding question was Sally.
Over the summer my friend Sally had been living with her most recent boyfriend, a Brit working on his dissertation and trying for a job at the UN. But he had recently fled back “across the pond”—as he gratingly termed it—under suspicious circumstances, and Sally was moving back into her old place, an apartment she’d been living in off and on for the past few years. Sally used to be a rabbinical student, and it turns out that one of the great advantages of being a rabbinical student in New York is that even after you drop out you still have access to all of these wonderful old prewar apartments on the Upper West Side. People are always leaving to go on a kibbutz or pursue higher education or something, and so someone’s always looking for a roommate. Sally had been in and out of this particular apartment two or three times already. The only disadvantages to this arrangement were that she had to live on the Upper West Side, and that with all the comings and goings, the apartments didn’t tend overly toward hominess, or furnishings for that matter. So Sally was planning to bring some movers by the Bay Ridge place in the afternoon to take the big Jennifer sofa bed, our last major piece of furniture, off our hands. But I kept trying Sally’s cell, over and over, and she wasn’t picking up. And then, on the way out, we heard the radio reports of five random shootings in a Maryland suburb—as it happened, the Maryland suburb Sally’s parents lived
in. “Oh no,” I breathed.
“I’m sure they’re fine,” said Eric.
“I hope so. If her parents have gotten shot, I don’t know what we’re going to do with that fucking couch.”
“Why are you doing this again?” Mom sighed as we took the Sixty-ninth Street exit off the Belt Parkway and drove down quiet blocks of houses with lawns and then along the great green swath of park, a majestic view—of the Verrazano Bridge (where John Travolta’s friend killed himself in Saturday Night Fever), of New York Harbor, of Staten Island—rising up beyond.
It was the same question she had asked me about the cooking project, and the answer was the same, as well. The same, and equally inexpressible. I could not explain the soul-sick feeling I got underground late at night, when there hadn’t been an R train for forty minutes and the platform was as crowded as if it were rush hour. I couldn’t explain how cut off I felt, sealed in a pneumatic tube of a commute that spit me out each morning on a gray sidewalk teeming with business suits, and spit me out again at night in peaceful, isolated, hopelessly square far Brooklyn. I couldn’t explain why I thought another year like the last would ruin me, maybe even ruin my marriage. I couldn’t explain it because there was no explanation, I guess.
Mom was well aware of the situation that would meet her inside the apartment, mostly because of twenty-nine and a half years of history, but also because of an incident two weeks before. Basically, what happened was that our landlady in Bay Ridge, a sweet woman with a raging Brooklyn accent whose hobby was taking old photos and making them into greeting cards with off-color jokes about aging and the sex lives of married people inside, had seen the apartment. We, of course, had had no intention of that happening—at least not until I’d hired someone to clean the stove, and spackled over all the nail holes, and glued back the piece of the ceramic towel rack I’d broken off. But the landlady used her key and came into the apartment before all of that was done, and she left a message on our new answering machine. She was horrified. She was going to have to get the oven replaced. (The oven worked fine.) Please don’t bother with cleaning, just get your stuff and Get Out. Basically.
My mother was treated to the subsequent hiccupping hysterical crying-jag-type phone conversation, which lasted most of an hour. So she knew that she might be faced with a problem.
It wasn’t that bad. There wasn’t a smell, or rats, or maggots. (The maggots come much, much later.) Humiliated but proud, I had, despite my landlady’s edict, gone ahead and hired a woman to clean the stove. (What can I say? I was raised in proximity to a self-cleaning stove, and have never been able to square my belief in myself as a person possessed of free will with the act of getting down on my knees to stick my head in a box befogged with carcinogenic fumes and scoop out handfuls of black goo.) But if we were to conduct ourselves as responsible tenants and not trailer trash, there was a hell of a lot left to do. So for several hours we all scrubbed and painted and packed and swept. Mom even cleaned the drip pan under the fridge. I had never known there was a drip pan under the fridge. At last the apartment was empty but for the ugly fold-out sofa. It was 3:30 and—oh, I forgot to mention this part of the story—we had theater tickets that night. Edie Falco and Stanley Tucci in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. Eighty bucks a pop.
“So—what the hell do we do with this thing?”
“You haven’t heard from Sally yet?” asked Dad.
“Nope.” I was trying very hard not to be angry about that—if Sally’s mother had been shot through the head at a Texaco, I’d really feel like a heel being pissy about some couch.
“Well,” said Mom briskly. “I think she’s missed her opportunity. I say we take it to Goodwill and be done with it.”
By transferring a good deal more into our decrepit 1991 Bronco than was wise, my brother, father, and Eric managed to squeeze the sofa into the U-Haul. The boys then all piled into the front of the moving truck. The plan was for them to find a Goodwill and turn in the U-Haul while Mom and I headed straight back to Long Island City in the Bronco. After we unloaded it, we’d still have plenty of time to freshen up before the play that night. So Mom and I hoisted ourselves in, started up the Bronco, and headed off.
The view from the on-ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, just before the entrance to the Battery Tunnel, is lovely, with the sparkling harbor, the lower Manhattan skyline, picturesque Carroll Gardens unfolding below, but that is not what I will always remember about it. I’ll remember instead how even in the best of times the traffic here, where the Gowanus and Prospect expressways merge, is heavy, and that the ramp is quite high off the ground, and quite steep, and that it has only one lane, and no shoulder. I will remember it as exactly the sort of spot you don’t want to break down in.
Ah, well.
Long and tedious story short, Mom and I kissed our play tickets good-bye. Once we were towed off the beltway to an Atlantic Avenue gas station staffed by many very polite but none-too-helpful Sikh gentlemen, I stuffed my grease-stained mother into the back of a taxi and then waited for several hours for the tow that would get me and my incapacitated Bronco back to Queens. Mom got back to the apartment to find herself faced at the door with an upended sofa bed blocking the stairs. The search for Goodwill had been, apparently, in vain. This was the last straw for a woman without much in the way of native patience who had nevertheless gotten through this arduous day without complaint. She was exhausted, her hip hurt, she was dirty. She leaned up against the couch and wept.
Luckily, Eric had opted to stay and wait for us back at the apartment while my father and Heathcliff went to go make use of at least two of the very expensive Broadway tickets. When he heard the sofa’s foot rock and bang against the wall of the entryway he came to investigate, and found my mother there, sobbing against the gray stain-resistant upholstery. He moved the couch to one side, and she was able to just squeeze past it and up the stairs, where she promptly collapsed onto the formerly white chair she had bought when she was pregnant with me, to use as a nursing chair, which she had given me when I came up to New York. “Oh my God,” she moaned. “I’m never getting up again.”
“Elaine,” asked Eric, “is this place really that bad?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I’m sorry I got your daughter into this.”
Elaine looked around through the splayed hands she had rested on her face—at the picture window with the broken jalousies, at the rotting floorboards in the kitchen, at the odd space at the other end of the long, open room, a sort of short tail of an L. She looked around thoughtfully, and then gave Eric a small but warm smile. “You didn’t get my daughter into anything she wouldn’t have gotten into herself. Besides, we’ll make it work. Now, the important question is—do you have orange juice?”
The Bronco and I did eventually get back to Long Island City at around 9 p.m., and after unloading the incapacitated truck and turning in the U-Haul, I came up into the apartment to find my mother bathed, with a large gin and juice in her hand, wandering around contemplating. “This back room is too cramped for a bedroom. Why don’t you put the bed over here and make this space into a sort of jewelbox of a dining room? It could make a great room. I’ll send you some sheers to hang, to soften it up. You’ll need mirrors. And maybe a flokati rug would be good.”
That night at eleven o’clock we all met at Peter Luger for Dad’s birthday dinner. Dad and Heathcliff had had a great time at Frankie and Johnny. (Dad’s a big Edie Falco fan.) They’d even managed to find a friend of Heathcliff’s—well, an ex-girlfriend, actually, Heathcliff’s the kind of guy who can always dig up some ex-girlfriend when he needs to—to take one of the play tickets, and she came to dinner too. We had Steak for Six and creamed spinach, and we managed to get in lots of martini toasts before my dad’s birthday had officially ended. Mom started drawing on a cocktail napkin to show me how she was going to rig some special curtains at the front window to block the street noise, and chattered on about some great cheap floor coveri
ng that we could use to hide the rotted floorboards in the kitchen.
“See, now this is great,” I sighed, holding up my martini to the light, good and tipsy and digesting well.
“Yeah,” agreed Eric, pushing back his chair. “Now if only we had some eggs poached in red wine.”
My mom glared up from her napkin, jabbing her pen at him. “Don’t. Even. Joke about it.”
So there it was—midnight. My father was sixty, and we lived in Long Island City, instead of just walking around it dead. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
April 1944
Kandy, Ceylon
“So after an hour or so we’ve got perhaps a vial full. Alice is up to her elbows in scales, I’ve got popped fish eyes all over me, in my hair, we’re both holding thoroughly squashed trout or whatever they were, one in each fist, and peering sideways into the beaker to see if we’ve got enough of the stuff. It’s a sort of cloudy pinkish color. The odor is, well, potent.”
The new registrar sat with her back against the wall, squeezing her cocktail glass in one giant hand, sloshing it either for illustrative purposes or because she was drunk. Her big wide face was bright, her hair a hysterical rust-colored halo. All around her sat men and women in various states of insobriety and hilarity, some squeezing the stems of their smuggled martini glasses along with her, others nearly off their chairs laughing. Paul knew it would be best for him to join in the fun. But the racket was all too much, so instead he nursed a gin and orange at a small oilcloth-draped table in the corner and eavesdropped. The estate where they had the OSS shacked up down here in Ceylon didn’t have an actual bar, but someone had obligingly, and hastily, re-outfitted the parlor with a smattering of tables and mismatched chairs for the thirsty Americans. The room was small and crowded, and in the tricky yellow light of the gas lanterns, Paul could easily make himself unnoticeable.