by Julie Powell
Meanwhile, the bone marrow remained a problem. It occurred to Eric that Sally was a natural to assist in this quest, but since we still didn’t know for sure whether her parents had been murdered by a lunatic with a high-powered rifle, there was the risk of disaster en route to enlisting her help.
“My parents what? What?! Oh God, did I not call you?” Sally’s tone was stricken.
Eric had never before inadvertently blundered into a conversation with anyone about their parents’ recent hideous murder, but somewhere deep inside he had always feared, and even assumed, that one day it would come to this.
“No, no, no, everything’s fine. The movers didn’t show up, that’s all. They were supposed to drive in from Rhode Island, but they never came. I’m so sorry, I thought I called! They’re Czech, and I think they’re on crank. The movers, I mean. If I get them to come again, can I still have the couch?”
It did not even occur to Eric to ask Sally why she had hired Czech moving guys who were both addicted to meth and from Rhode Island. Instead, still gasping from the unimaginable telephonic hell so narrowly averted, he told her that she could indeed still have the couch, which was still teetering on one end in the stairwell of our apartment, but only if she would help them find a marrowbone. “Sure, sounds like fun. What’s a marrowbone?”
Sally and I have managed to remain close friends ever since living together our freshman year in college even though I’m the kind of person, who, when bored or unhappy, either drinks myself into oblivion or cooks very unhealthy things; Sally is the kind of person who, when bored or unhappy, goes jogging or cleans the bathroom with a toothbrush or matriculates at rabbinical school. Sally didn’t yet want to talk much about the departure of her good-looking English boyfriend, but her tone, like an aural wrinkle of the nose, when she mentioned his dissertation on the prehistoric roots of feminism, and the gusto with which she agreed to join the marrow hunt, led Eric to suspect that the jig was definitely up with the Brit.
Eric took off work early, Heathcliff handed the cosmetics kiosk off to somebody or other, and Sally ventured down from the Upper West Side. They all met in front of Ottomanelli’s at five minutes to six. The shop was still open, barely, but was fresh out of marrowbones. They then proceeded on their grand tour of West Village groceries, flitting from Gourmet Garages to Garden of Edens. Only after five stops’ worth of flirtatious probing over meat counters (flirting by Sally, or possibly by Heathcliff, if they ran into any bubbly female butchers—but not by Eric, who was miserable at flirtation—I practically had to take him to a frat party and dose him with GHB-laced punch to seduce him) did they at last obtain their six inches of cow thighbone.
The three of them emerged from Jefferson Market with the marrowbone in its blue checkered bag held high—triumph at last! Eric felt the shudder of disaster averted. A month ago, he’d never have suspected how important a piece of cow might be to his marriage.
His giddiness was, however, somewhat squelched when Sally told him she would not be returning with him to Queens as planned, to eat the Bifteck Sauté Bercy I would be garnishing with the bone marrow of a cow. “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” she said.
“Ah, come on,” Heathcliff chimed in—not because he harbored a secret crush on her, much as I might want that to be so. I’ve long cherished a tiny hope that maybe the two of them would get together someday. Which, if you knew Heathcliff and Sally, you would immediately see was an epically bad idea. There must be something wrong with me.
“I just don’t think I can face the subway ride back. Tell Julie I’m sorry.”
She was far from the first dinner guest we had lost to the irresistible urge not to go to the outer boroughs to eat French food in a grotty “loft” apartment, but every time it happened it was both a disappointment and an obscure sort of humiliation. Socially speaking, we might as well have lived in Jersey.
Meanwhile, I had straightened up the Family Room after the last mourner left, and gone home. Even as my friends scoured the streets of the West Village for my bit of bone, I was separating the cloves of two heads of garlic for Purée de Pommes de Terre à l’Ail, or garlic mashed potatoes with a garlic sauce. Which is fantastic but sure does make for some dishes.
(Have you ever seen pictures of Julia’s kitchen? It’s lined in pegboard, the whole thing, with rows on rows of pots, the outline of each one drawn on with marker so she always knew which pot went where. Her husband, Paul, did that for her, or maybe he did it for his own sanity. He was always very methodical. Such a setup might come in handy for me from time to time—say, for instance, when realizing at the very moment I’m meant to add boiling milk to the rapidly darkening roux that I have not in fact put the milk on to boil. At times like these it might be convenient to be able to have the smallest saucepan immediately to hand, rather than scrabbling around under the counter with one hand while frantically stirring the roux with the other. But I will never have such a setup, because the very last thing in this world I am is methodical.)
The making of Purée de Pommes de Terre à l’Ail is exacting and not quick, but even so, and even given my late start, I was still finished before the bone retrieval party, or what was left of it, returned. I was getting a little nervous. To pass the time, I went online to check e-mail.
My friend Isabel lives in the Texas hill country with her husband, Martin, and her mother, who’s a professional animal communicator. Isabel is, well—hell, I can’t explain Isabel. Just take a look for yourself:
Nancy has just shared with me a BRILLIANT, weirdly prescient and Truman-Capote-mixed-in-with-Burroughs-ian dream in which I was choreographing a TV Easter special with a cast of deranged chipmunks. And it reminded me of a dream I had last weekend, which I’m pretty sure is precognitive, I’ve been rereading my Dreaming into Truth, and this has all the signs.
Now, I have never met Nancy, do not understand (nor much want to) how a dream about chipmunks dancing could possibly be construed as pertaining to Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs, or precognition, and have never heard of a book called Dreaming into Truth. Also, you should realize that Isabel sent this to her entire mailing list, several dozen people at least. This is what she’s always like. In an age of brevity, Isabel is unembarrassedly prolix. This would read somewhat more amusingly if you knew her voice, for Isabel has a voice like a genius third grader who’s skipped her Ritalin—swooping from low guttural imitations of people you’ve never heard of into high-pitched trills and back again, unpredictably. Sometimes eardrum-splittingly. Her voice, I think for the first time right at this instant, is not unlike Julia’s:
I’m walking on cobblestones beside a river. I pass a sidewalk café, and sitting at one of the tables is Richard Hell.
(Oh, also? I have no idea who Richard Hell is. Not a clue.)
He’s drinking iced tea and wearing an old argyle sweater with leather pants and very thick purple eyeliner, which looks really sexy somehow. So I say, “Remember me? It’s Isabel. I just wanted to tell you that I finished Find It Now and it was wonderful.” His book is called Go Now, but in the dream I called it Find It Now, not because I had misremembered the name of the book but because in the dream that WAS the name of the book. And Richard says, “Have some real English tea.” But when I reach out to take a cup I realize I’m holding a bright pink dildo. It’s teeny-tiny, it fits in the palm of my hand. I know it will only get big in the bath, like a sponge but hard.
Next thing I know I’m knocking on an apartment door painted a sort of queer faded crimson, with the number 524 on it. My friend Julie—you know Julie, she’s the one who’s doing that cooking blog I sent you all a link to?—opens the door, and her hair is all wild, and her husband Eric is in the background throwing rounds of pizza dough in the air, singing beautifully. Julie asks me in to eat, but I hand her the dildo and say, “Thanks for the dildo you gave me, but I can’t use it.”
Julie asks why, looking very shocked, and I say, “I don’t take baths anymore, only showers.” To which Julie says, with
this totally un-Julie-like primness:
“Well, that’s your problem, isn’t it?”
Now, this is embarrassing, and my aunt Sukie is going to just die when she reads this, but Isabel didn’t make up the thing about me sending her the dildo. We’d been having an e-mail exchange—a private e-mail exchange, I might add—about Isabel’s sex life, which I guess was less than totally satisfying, which, well, whose isn’t? And it’s not like I’m some kind of dildo maven, but I did spend some time in San Francisco once. I guess I wanted to look hiply pro-sex or something, because sometimes when you’re friends with Isabel it’s nice to know more about something than she does. So I sort of talked up the joys of sex toys—gleaned from several years of Web surfing, rather than much in the way of actual experience. And I guess I talked a pretty good game, because Isabel wound up sort of enthralled with the concept. Then it was almost like I couldn’t not send her a dildo for her birthday. So I did.
God, I hope her husband isn’t on her mailing list.
I was not at all sure how to respond to this missive, so I went offline again without answering and went back to the kitchen. Deciding to assume that Eric, Heathcliff, and Sally’s late arrival was a good sign, I opened the Book to the page on extracting marrow.
“Stand the bone on one end and split it with a cleaver,” wrote Julia, sounding ever so confident and blithe. I could think of one possible wrinkle right off the bat, which was that I had no cleaver. A few other vague misgivings were floating around in the old brainpan as well.
At that moment the door swung open. Eric and Heathcliff strode through like Arctic explorers in from the cold. Eric bore his plastic bag before him like a prized ice core sample. He was no doubt expecting a thankful kiss, at the very least—perhaps a good deal more. “Who’s the man?” he bellowed.
“You got it, did you?”
“I sure as hell did!” He cackled, even did a little dance. Heathcliff grinned a one-sided grin, and graciously did not roll his eyes.
“Did you have to trade Sally in for it?”
“What?”
Heathcliff explained, “She couldn’t make it. Didn’t want to deal with the subway.”
I sighed. I hadn’t kissed Eric hello, and he was beginning to fear his hopes for a show of gratitude would be dashed. “Well, maybe it’s for the best anyway.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s time to extract the beef marrow.” The look I gave the two of them was slightly stricken. “Not sure she’d want to be around for this.”
My largest knife was a carving one with a serrated edge, probably nine inches long with a blade about an inch and a half at its widest point. I’d always thought it a rather grand, daunting sort of a knife, but after one whack I could see it was not nearly tool enough for the job. “Julia must have the strength of ten secretaries,” I muttered. “She should have been a crusader—she’d have been hell at dispatching infidels. ‘Split it with a cleaver,’ my ass.”
For a moment Eric and Heathcliff stood over the bone in silence. Eric rested his chin in his hand thoughtfully; Heathcliff scratched the back of his head.
A few years ago, Heathcliff lived in New York for a while. The plan was that he would crash on our couch for a few weeks while looking for a place—he wound up staying there an entire year. This sounds like the worst kind of horror, a married couple with a brother-in-law lodged permanently in the living room, but it actually worked out pretty well. We cooked together a lot—Heathcliff makes a mean spinach, sausage, and cream pasta—and watched a ton of movies, and had a hell of a good time, actually. On the downside, Eric and I had sex like a dozen times that entire year. (But I don’t think we can really put all the blame for that at Heathcliff’s feet.) On the upside, I had lots of opportunities to sit back while my husband and my brother worked out various domestic puzzles, which was fun and saved me having to do it besides. Watching them sussing out the marrow situation got me feeling a little nostalgic, actually.
“Do you have a jigsaw?” Heathcliff asked.
For twenty minutes the two of them went back and forth with the saw Eric had dug out of the hall closet, until both of them were dripping with sweat. They managed to cut into the thing about an inch. The oozy pink stuff on the blade of the saw was, though exactly what we were looking for, truly horrifying. The boys were looking a little green.
“Hell, give it to me.”
I threw the bone into some simmering water on the stove. This felt wrong, like Julia would not approve, but I just didn’t know what else to do. I scooped the bone out of the pot after a few minutes and went after it again, this time with my very smallest knife, a paring one, about three inches long and narrow enough to fit into the round tunnel running down the middle of the bone. Slowly, painfully, I wormed my way into the interior.
I clawed the stuff out bit by painful pink bit, until my knife was sunk into the leg bone up past the hilt. It made dreadful scraping noises—I felt like I could feel it in the center of my bones. A passing metaphor to explorers of the deep wilds of Africa does not seem out of place here—there was a definite Heart of Darkness quality to this. How much more interior can you get, after all, than the interior of bones? It’s the center of the center of things. If marrow were a geological formation, it would be magma roiling under the earth’s mantle. If it were a plant, it would be a delicate moss that grows only in the highest crags of Mount Everest, blooming with tiny white flowers for three days in the Nepalese spring. If it were a memory, it would be your first one, your most painful and repressed one, the one that has made you who you are.
So there I was, scooping out the center of the center of things, thinking mostly that it was some nasty shit. Pink, as I think I’ve mentioned. Very wet. Not liquid, but not really solid, either—gluey clots of stuff that plopped down onto the cutting board with a sickening sound.
The boys looked on, mesmerized. “Someday,” Eric said, swallowing hard, “our ship is going to come in. We are going to move out of New York, and we are going to have our house in the country, like we’ve always wanted.”
I thought he was just trying to talk me into my happy place, but he had a point, and when he finished swallowing his bile, he made it.
“When this happens, we need to get ourselves a rescue cow. We will buy it from a slaughterhouse. And then we will treat it very well.”
“Yes,” agreed Heathcliff. “Damned straight.”
It’s true. I am a fanatical eater of flesh. But bone marrow, it struck me, was something I had no right to see, not like this, raw and quivering on my cutting board. Unbidden, the word violate popped into my head. “It’s like bone rape. Oh God, did I just say that out loud?”
We got maybe a tablespoon and a half out of the bone and decided it would have to be enough. Eric and Heathcliff had to go into the living room and find a football game to rid themselves of the horrid vision. Muttering “Shake it off, goddammit,” I went ahead and began sautéing the steaks.
But once you’ve got your head in a place like that, it can be hard to crawl out again. Reading about “the moment you observe a little pearling of red juice beginning to ooze at the surface of the steak” didn’t help at all in that department, though it did make for an excellently prepared steak. The sight of the pink stuff on my cutting board was still making me feel sick, but I thought I detected another, more buried sensation as well. A dark sort of thrill.
When the steaks were done, I put them on a plate and stirred the marrow and some parsley into the buttery pan juices. The vestigial heat from the juices is supposedly sufficient to lightly cook the marrow. Besides, Eric assured me, there was no way you could get mad cow from marrow, and even if you could, cooking it would make no difference—something to do with prions or something—but it sure looked scary, so I decided to leave it on the heat just a bit anyway. Then I dolloped a spoonful of the marrow sauce onto each steak, plopped down some garlic mashed potatoes and Tomates Grillées au Four—just whole tomatoes brushed with olive oil and roasted in
the oven for a few minutes—and dinner was served.
If I had thought the beef marrow might be a hell of a lot of work for not much difference, I needn’t have worried. The taste of marrow is rich, meaty, intense in a nearly too-much way. In my increasingly depraved state, I could think of nothing at first but that it tasted like really good sex. But there was something more than that, even. (Though who could ask for more than that? I could make my first million selling dirty-sex steak.) What it really tastes like is life, well lived. Of course the cow I got marrow from had a fairly crappy life—lots of crowds and overmedication and bland food that might or might not have been a relative. But deep in his or her bones, there was the capacity for feral joy. I could taste it.
One theory on cannibals, of course, is that they eat parts of their slain enemies to benefit from that person’s greatest assets—their strength, their courage. Then there’s that thing they do in Germany. You heard about that, didn’t you? Some man over there agreed to let another man cut off his penis, cook it, then feed it to him—now, what in hell was that all about? What did he think the taste of his stir-fried cock would tell him about himself? Was he seeking to wring one last drop of pleasure out of the thing? (Goodness, that’s an unnecessarily vivid metaphor.) But somehow—I said this over dinner—this steak with beef marrow sauce, it didn’t seem all that different. “It’s like eating life. It’s almost like eating my own life, you know?”
“No, not really. But it’s a hell of a good steak, sis.”
If I tried to say something like that to anybody at the downtown government agency I would get nothing but blank looks and a subsequent internal investigation. Especially on the first anniversary of the tragic events, some might think that a discussion of spiritual cannibalism might be seen as being in poor taste. Sally, the only sex maniac former rabbinical student we know, might understand, if only she could withstand the trauma of a subway ride to the outer boroughs. Julia might, too.