Julie and Julia

by Julie Powell

  “‘So,’ I say.” The registrar smacked her big mitts down on the tabletop, leaned in, cocked her eyes leftward, eyebrows flying. “‘So,’ says Alice.” Her eyes darted to the right, wide at first and then narrowing in comic suspicion. All around the table, anticipatory giggles as the registrar drew out the moment nearly unbearably, hunkering down and cutting her glance back and forth. “‘Who gets the first cocktail?’”

  The laughter echoed through the air like artillery fire, the registrar’s most piercing of all. Paul didn’t know whether to join in or duck.

  “Say! I’m so hungry I’m going cross-eyed!” she shouted. The mob heigh-hoed their agreement. Paul was surprised to feel a needy grumble of his own, the first he’d had after weeks of gnawing Delhi Belly. “I know what let’s do! Let’s go down the hill to town. I passed a restaurant the other day that smelled delicious!”

  Bateson raised a finger halfheartedly. “Now, Julie, your stomach isn’t up —”

  “Oh, can it, Gregory!” crowed the registrar merrily. “My stomach isn’t up for any more canned potatoes, that’s what it’s not up for! Come on—shall we eat as the Ceylonese do?”

  There was some toasting and a great scraping of chair legs as the party rose. They headed out into the darkness.

  Was he intrigued by this annoyingly ebullient, oddly compelling giant of a woman? Or was he just hungry? Paul didn’t know, and he didn’t ponder too much, either—he just went with them.

  DAY 36, RECIPE 48

  Hacking the Marrow Out of Life

  Here’s a nifty fact for you: during World War II, Julia Child worked for an undercover agency called the OSS—that stands for Office of Strategic Services, a nicely meaningless moniker, don’t you think, for a very cloak-and-dagger sort of outfit? This was back when she was still just Julie McWilliams, thirty-two and single and not sure what she wanted to do with her life. She thought maybe she’d be good at espionage, though it’s hard to imagine a six-foot-two-inch redheaded woman making herself inconspicuous in, say, Sri Lanka. Of course she didn’t do any spying—although I suppose if she had, she wouldn’t tell us, would she?

  In a way I was sort of in the same boat. I too was working for a government agency—though not a particularly cloak-and-dagger one—at a historic moment. My own agency had some busy weeks ahead of it, because it happened that a lot of what the government agency did had to do with filling up the hole left when the towers fell. This is an exciting thing for a government agency to be in charge of—beats the hell out of, say, processing building permit applications or something—which is probably one reason why I caved and went permanent in May of 2002. But here it was, nearly a year after the attacks, or tragic events, or whatever you want to call it—even at the government agency, people still had a hard time with that, mostly settling for “September 11,” which is at least neutral, better than “9/11,” which sounds like a deodorant or something—and there were memorial ceremonies to arrange, brave new initiatives to announce, publics to garner input from, and governors and mayors to get money from.

  An office competition had been held to come up with an inspirational motto for the agency. The winner got a free lunch (with the president of the agency—an odd choice, to say the least). The motto was on the stationery, the Web site, the glass front door of the office. It was a nice motto, very stirring. But I was a secretary. And when you’re a secretary at a government agency in charge of filling up the hole in the ground where the towers used to be, during the weeks leading up to the first anniversary of September 11, mottoes just don’t help at all.

  The trouble was not an inconvenient excess of emotion—the staff was much too busy to go around feeling sad. Besides, the place was lousy with Republicans, so genuine emotion wasn’t such a big commodity, anyway. Plus, the agency’s office was in a building right across the street from what the world called Ground Zero but we all just called “the site”; from the windows in the conference room you could look directly into the hole. After you look at that every day for a couple of months, you just get used to it. You can get used to anything, as long as you don’t mind collapsing a few mineshafts of your brain where the stuff you can’t think about is skulking around. It’s easy—not simple, maybe, but easy.

  When I was offered a permanent position back in the spring, those yellow trucks with the giant toothed scoops were still raking delicately through neat furrows of debris, searching for bits of people. Every once in a while, when you were downtown or even when you weren’t, you’d still find a torn bit of paper skittering along the gutter. Pages from legal memos, work orders, inventory sheets—all of them mashed in this odd way, like the icing on a cake that’s been wrapped in cellophane, and smudged with a strange pale powder, as if they’d been dusted for prints. You always knew just where they’d come from.

  The head of the agency called me into his office one day. He was a bluff sort of man, Mr. Kline, not particularly young but not old either, thick-necked, with features that were not exactly unattractive, but small and oddly close together. He probably looked a little piggy to me only because I knew he was a Republican. He was nice enough, though, and particularly so when he offered me a permanent position.

  Why did I take it, after years and years of saying no? I don’t know. Maybe it was because of Nate. Nate was Mr. Kline’s sort of unofficial second-in-command—baby-faced, cute enough if you like the evil genius look, and two years younger than me, if you’re to trust his word, which of course you can’t. His offhanded compliments, casual insults—just barbed enough to leave a pleasurable sting—snide asides, and comradely sexual innuendo had drawn me in, giving me the illusion that I was working in some alternate universe’s version of The West Wing, with President Bartlet on the other side of the political fence.

  Case in point:

  As I was coming out of Mr. Kline’s office, having received the job offer and told him I’d think about it, I nearly ran headlong into Sarah, Vice President of Government Relations, who was rushing in. (This particular government agency was absolutely crawling with vice presidents, with more popping up all the time.) Sarah was an implausibly pert woman with freckles and enormous eyes as thickly lashed as those of an animé character. (She was also, as I had learned when I spent a month and a half filling in for her secretary, a raving lunatic, in my admittedly unprofessional opinion.) She stopped and grabbed my shoulders, staring into my eyes like a hypnotist. “Julie,” she asked, “are you a Republican?”

  I was still picking up my eyeballs and sticking them back into my head when Nate, who’d been standing right there, for all the world like he had just been waiting for me to come out of Mr. Kline’s office with the job offer, gave me a little wink and smirked, “Are you kidding? Republicans don’t wear vintage.”

  Which, when I thought about it, seemed as good a litmus test as any.

  So maybe it was Nate. Or it could have been the temptation of history being made outside the window. Or maybe I was just almost thirty and afraid.

  Whatever the reason, this time I had said yes, and now it was four months later, early September, and I was in my cubicle—the fourth cubicle I’d inhabited since starting work at the government agency—spinning around in my rolling office chair, digging a trench in my forehead with my fingernails while muttering robotically into a phone headset, “Yes, sir, I understand your concern that our organization is shitting on the heads of New York’s Finest. Would you like to send us your comments in writing?”

  As the anniversary approached, dignitaries and mourning families and reporters began streaming in and out in ever-burgeoning floods. The large room where press conferences were held was directly in front of my desk; I knew I was meant to present a professional demeanor. But frankly, I just couldn’t be bothered. That was partly because I’m not very professional, but more immediately, it was because of the phone.

  When Julia Child worked in Ceylon, she probably didn’t even have a phone at her desk. Not a lot of international phone lines in Kandy in those days, I do
n’t imagine. But my phone is constantly in action. It has eight lines, endlessly blinking red lights. Sometimes I’ll have four or five people on hold at a time. I talk to screamers, and patient explainers, and the lonely old, who are the worst, because I can never think of a nice way to say to the housebound lady in Staten Island who is sure her idea for the memorial is being stolen by some big architect somewhere because the picture she saw in the paper looks just like the collection of crystal paperweights she keeps in her knickknack hutch, “Thank you for your input, you loon—bye now!” And then there’s the mail to go through—the drawings of enormous steeples shaped like praying hands, the models built from Popsicle sticks and Styrofoam cups and cotton balls dipped in tempera paint. Each of these, of course, is carefully archived and cataloged, presumably for some distant future exhibit of wackadoo outsider art.

  Sometimes, when it gets really bad, I contemplate just going ahead and bursting into tears. I figure that’s just the kind of namby-pamby crap they expect from a Democrat, and maybe I’ll get lucky and they’ll shake their heads and let me go home with a cold compress. But I have a reputation to uphold. I am not a crier—well, not at work, anyway. I maintain more of a Weimar-era tough-cookie image, all paper cuts and ironic hysteria and dark circles under the eyes. So instead of crying, I sigh when asked to get a box of Kleenex for a grieving widow, or bang my head wearily on my desk in the middle of phone calls from some woman who can’t walk anymore and hasn’t been out of her apartment for a week and used to be a great hoofer and was in pictures but now can’t pay her medical bills and thinks the only appropriate thing to build at Ground Zero would be a reproduction of the ’39 World’s Fair. Instead of crying, I make withering comments about little old men who send in poems with titles like “The Angels of 911.” It passes the time. But hard-bitten cynicism leaves one feeling peevish, and too much of it can do lasting damage to your heart.

  Four days after they’d arrived, I loaded my parents onto a plane back to Austin, where the living is easy. All of us, by that time, were suffering the constant nagging headaches and viselike pains around our middles that are the inevitable results of parental visits to New York. You know there’s something wrong with your lifestyle when you look forward to getting back to your cleansing Julia Child regimen. The night after they left we ate Poulet Poêlé à l’Estragon, with mesclun salad out of a bag on the side, and found myself feeling very virtuous using less than a stick of butter for a dinner for three.

  Heathcliff was staying on in New York for a while because he’d gotten a job. It was not clear to me exactly how this had happened. Over the last few days, he’d constantly been getting calls on one or the other of his cell phones—he had two. He never told us about any of the conversations he had on them, but after one of them he pulled me aside and asked if he could keep sleeping on our couch for a little while longer. He was going to be running a kiosk at a cosmetics convention at the Javits Center, which didn’t sound at all like something Heathcliff would do, except that he was going to be selling soaps and lotions made from the milk of cashmere goats he had spent a year herding in Tuscany. That is Heathcliff all over.

  Anyway, it seemed I had been missed, out in the virtual world. Someone named Chris posted a comment on the Poulet Poêlé à l’Estragon post, my first in most of a week: “Oh thank GOD you’re back! I thought you were dead!!! I missed you SO much!” I spent fully half a day at work thrilled that I had a regular reader named Chris when I didn’t even know anyone named Chris, before realizing that Chris’s comment was, well, creepy. It was nice to feel appreciated, though, and after my parent- and hellish-move-induced hiatus, I came back to the Julie/Julia Project with all cylinders pumping. I started out slowly—some poached eggs, some soup. But soon I was ready for a bigger challenge. A challenge like, say, steak with beef marrow sauce.

  The first obstacle in a bout with a marrowbone is simply arranging the match. Perhaps in 1961, when JC published MtAoFC, marrowbones hung off trees like greasy Christmas ornaments. But I did not live in 1961, nor did I live in France, which would have made things simpler. Instead, I lived in Long Island City, and in Long Island City, marrowbones are simply not to be had.

  Lower Manhattan was not much better. There were wine stores and cheese counters and cute bistros, but since most of the fashionable people who live this far downtown prefer, like vampires, sustenance they can just grab and suck down on the run, a butcher was nowhere to be found.

  So I put Eric on the case. First he headed over to Astoria one evening after work. The thought was that in Astoria there would be stores patronized by good authentic immigrant people who still appreciate the value of a good hunk of bone. But the authentic immigrants seemed to have moved on; Eric had no luck. Heathcliff wasn’t finishing up at the convention center until after seven that night, and I didn’t get home until after nine. Dinner was roast chicken, Julia-style. I was supposed to mince up the gizzard for the accompanying sauce, but I found I didn’t know what a gizzard was. I knew it was one of the things in the paper bag up the bird’s bum. I knew it wasn’t the liver, but among the remaining bits of innards, which was the gizzard was a mystery.

  (After reading my post about this, Eric’s father called me and cleared up the trouble: the gizzard is the thing like two hearts stuck together; the heart is the thing like half a gizzard.)

  The next night Eric and Heathcliff tried a two-pronged approach, with my husband catching a train from work to the Upper East Side, my brother catching another to the West Village. But both Lobel’s and Ottomanelli’s were shuttered by the time my faithful marrowbone-retrievers got there. Butchers must really need their beauty sleep. My brother did manage to get to the Petco before it closed to buy mice with which to feed my pet snake, Zuzu. (Whenever Heathcliff is in town I take advantage of the situation by letting him take over snake-feeding duties. I figure since he’s the one who gave me a five-foot-long ball python, back in college when he thought I needed a pet, he ought to be responsible for some of the karmic debt accrued over ten years of rodent sacrifice.) I got home just before ten and ordered pizza before I crashed on the couch. Eric had to make me wake up for long enough to take out my contacts. Waking me up when I’ve fallen asleep on the couch is no fun for anyone.

  And then it was Wednesday, September 11, 2002. I was up at five a.m. to get to my office by seven. I spent the morning standing about. First I stood around in the back of a crowded press conference room, listening to blandly stirring politicians talk and trying to decide if Nate was looking at me or just staring into space. Then I stood outside on the concrete plaza surrounding my building. Across the street, in the hole where the towers had been, a circle of family members stood silently in the blowing construction dust. They were reading the names of everyone who died there into a microphone. In the afternoon I manned the Family Room.

  The Family Room was actually a conference room that had been converted into a sort of funeral viewing area for those whose husbands and sisters and sons had never been recovered. The windows, twenty stories up, looked out into the hole; the walls were plastered baseboard to ceiling with photos and poems and flowers and remembrances. There was a sign-in book, and a couple of couches, and some toys and games for the children. The Family Room was the only place these people could go to be near those they’d lost without being assaulted by hawkers with NYFD gimme caps and Osama Bin Laden toilet paper, or tourists posing for cameras in front of the fence as if they were visiting the Hoover Dam. Until fairly recently bodies were still being found, so I suppose it made a certain kind of sense that they would want to come here, although I’ve never been much of a graveyard-visiting kind of person, and when I looked down there, I didn’t think of God and angels and the serene faces of the dead gone over to some Other Side; I just thought of body parts. I couldn’t see how anyone who’d actually lost someone to that sucking wound could stomach it.

  After the morning memorial, they all came up to the Family Room and stared into the hole some more. They brought yet more
pictures and poems to affix with pushpins to the walls. They were already so full that anyone who was coming for the first time and wanted to pin something up would need help finding a spot. I helped these people, carefully moving one memento half an inch to the left, another an inch to the right, to squeeze in a snapshot that was the only photo the small Ecuadoran woman had of the son who had washed dishes at Windows on the World. It was hard for first-time visitors, not just because the walls were so packed, and not just because they hadn’t started friendships with the other families that were more regular visitors, but also because if they were only coming for the first time a year after the tragic events had occurred, it was maybe because they came from another country and might not speak English, or because their relationship with the dead person they had known had been a difficult one. So I handed out Kleenex to gay German brothers and bottled water to dotty English aunts, and awkwardly patted the back of the estranged ex-husband from Belize who broke down in sobs. This was the job of the junior staff, during the anniversary of September 11—well, some of the junior staff, anyway. The secretaries but not the city planning interns, the girls from PR but not the guys from program development. Women, in point of fact, no men at all, spent the day supplying the thumbtacks and fresh pens and water and tissues and keys for the bathroom in the hall. Maybe, being Republicans, the senior staff had some family-values sort of notion that women possess inherent delicacy and sensitivity—despite the abundant evidence to the contrary within their own organization. Or maybe they just knew that twenty-something Ivy League boys don’t take kindly to being drafted for emotional shit work.