by Julie Powell
As I lay in bed early on the morning of September 12, dreading the approaching moment when I would have to throw off the covers and go to work, I thought about Julia’s job for her government agency. The OSS existed before the invention of cubicles and all that that implies, so Julia didn’t have to work in a cubicle. She didn’t have to answer the phone, and she didn’t have to comfort crying people, and she didn’t have to ride the subway to get home. She got to handle information substantially more top-secret than that bureaucrats are assholes, and that a not-insignificant minority of the American people are blindingly stupid, shithouse crazy, and/or really terrible memorial designers. In all these things she was better off, in her secretarial days, than me.
But she didn’t have her Paul yet, either, I thought as I curled up against Eric’s back for one last rest. And (as I tasted one last, gentle, beefy burp) she didn’t yet have beef marrow, either. So I guessed I had a few things up on her as well.
June 1944
Kandy, Ceylon
One bare, glaring twenty-five-watt bulb was not sufficient for this close work at noontime on a bright day; at dusk on a rainy one it was close to impossible. Paul pinched the bridge of his nose hard between his thumb and forefinger, then pushed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets. His bowels were in rebellion yet again, and he ought to be in bed, but these jobs weren’t going to get done by themselves—when you are the Presentation Division, you get no sick days.
He stared absently out his window. Through the curtains of warm rain he could watch the small elephants being herded out of the botanical gardens for their evening meal. The animals’ slow, gentle pace, their small swishing tails and comically long Theda Bara eyelashes always cheered him, and the gardens were beautiful in any weather. On the wall of the cadjan hut where he worked, an emerald-green lizard perched, making a sound like a spatula rasping across the bottom of a cast-iron pan. Paul dug his fingers down into his sock to scratch uselessly at his damned athlete’s foot, then returned to his drafting table, setting his mind to get one last board done, at least.
But then, just as he’d gotten himself settled and his head back into his work, the one light he had went out. Of course.
“Dammit.” He reached up and gingerly unscrewed the bare bulb, shook it for the light rattle of a sprung filament, but there was none. He replaced it, got up, and went to peek out his door. The lights were out everywhere. He’d suspected as much. This late in the day, they’d probably not come on again.
To think he’d once thought work with the OSS would be dashing and exciting. Well, perhaps he could at least organize some concepts for the boards he’d have to start first thing tomorrow. He began to shut his door again.
“Paul! Just what are you thinking of doing, alone in there in the dark?”
It was Julie, of course, no mistaking that voice, but at first he did not see from where she was speaking to him. He peered into the dishwater dimness of the hallway but saw no one. “Paul! Behind you!”
She and Jane had their faces pressed to the flimsy shutters of his one window and were grinning like a couple of twelve-year-old kids. Jane wiggled a summoning finger at him, and Julie cried, “Come with us to watch the elephants get washed. Don’t tell us you don’t want to!”
“Need to get this work done, I’m afraid. I’m already late with them, they need finished boards by tomorrow at the latest.”
“Balls to that! If they want to get work out of you they ought to get you some light, I say.”
Jane cocked her eyebrow at Paul in a way that would have been more seductive if it hadn’t been so obvious she meant it to be. “See what a bad influence you’ve been on our little Julia? She’s got the mouth of a sailor these days.”
Paul sighed. The girls had a point, didn’t they? Balls to that, indeed. He set his pen down. “I’ll be right out.”
DAY 40, RECIPE 49
. . . To Make an Omelette
Why don’t you just call someone to take the damned thing away?”
I was sitting in the living room with my right ankle—swollen to twice its usual circumference and turning an unsettling shade of yellowish-green—propped up on an ottoman. Eric was in the kitchen, getting me some ice; Heathcliff was standing over me with his arms crossed.
“I told Sally she could have it. She’s going through a rough patch.”
“Yeah, well, you can’t get into your apartment without major injury. I’d say that’s pretty rough.”
I shrugged.
“Now who was it she broke up with? A David?”
“Of course.”
In the ten years I have known her, Sally has dated at least a dozen Davids. It’s kind of creepy.
Eric came out of the kitchen with some ice in a Ziploc freezer bag. “What do you want me to do about dinner?”
“I’ll cook. I’ve got the artichokes to do. Anyway, I’m really behind.”
“You shouldn’t be putting weight on that foot. Hold the ice on.”
But I was already getting up and hopping back toward the kitchen. “I only did six recipes last week. And the week before that with the folks in town I didn’t do any at all. My readers need me!”
I had meant that last to be construed as a joke, even though it wasn’t, really. Eric was having none of it. “Your readers? Come on, Julie.”
“What?”
“I think the dozen people who click onto your Web site while they take their coffee breaks will manage to carry on if they don’t get to read about you sautéing thorny vegetables in butter for one more day.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
Eric and I glared at one another with a poisonous good humor meant to suggest this whole argument thing was just a big loving put-on. Heathcliff smirked, eyes sliding between us, taken in not at all.
My brother has house-sat for a mobster in Crete. He’s been mugged by policemen in Hungary. He’s chewed coca leaves offered to him by a waiter in Peru. He left an island off the coast of Sicily once because he was the only redhead the people there had ever seen, and the old ladies kept crossing themselves whenever they saw him. What’s more, the woman he lives with off and on, when he isn’t getting his wallet stolen in Budapest or herding goats in Italy or selling soap in New York, is the kind of person who can just decide of an evening to whip up an apple pie from scratch. Together they make ice cream for the pie by putting milk and cream and sugar and vanilla in a coffee can set inside an old potato chip tin filled with ice, then sitting catty-corner on their kitchen floor and rolling the tin back and forth between them. Clearly, he’s got laid-back domestic bliss down just as pat as brave adventuresomeness.
When I snap at Eric in front of Heathcliff, then, it’s a humiliating acknowledgment of my relative failure on both these fronts. But it’s not only that. It’s also a searing reminder that I will inevitably turn out just like my mother, either a martyr or a nag or irrational or just grumpy about my bad joints. Hopping around the kitchen on a swollen ankle while bitching meanly at a spouse, for example, is exactly something my mother would do. I would have soothed the irritation provoked by this realization with a healthy vodka tonic if only Eric hadn’t dropped the bottle of Stoli he’d bought on the way home on the subway platform, smashing it. Getting mad about that would be another very Mom-like thing to do, so I just gritted my teeth and set about preparing the very strange meal I’d planned for the night, Omelettes Gratinées à la Tomate and Quartiers de Fonds d’Artichauts au Beurre—tomato-filled omelettes gratinéed with cream and cheese, and artichoke hearts, quartered and buttered.
Chris—the one who wrote the halfway creepy thing about missing me so much when I didn’t post and thinking I was dead—found it mind-boggling that before the Julie/Julia Project began, I had never eaten an egg. She asked, “How can you have gotten through life without eating a single egg? How is that POSSIBLE???!!!!!”
Of course, it wasn’t exactly true that I hadn’t eaten an egg. I had eaten them in cakes. I had even eaten them scrambled once or twice, albeit in th
e Texas fashion, with jalapenos and a pound of cheese. But the goal of my egg-eating had always been to make sure the egg did not look, smell, or taste anything like one, and as a result my history in this department was, I suppose, unusual. Chris wasn’t the only person shocked. People I’d never heard of chimed in with their awe and dismay. I didn’t really get it. Surely this is not such a bizarre hang-up as hating, say, croutons, like certain spouses I could name.
Luckily, eggs made the Julia Child way often taste like cream sauce. Take Oeufs en Cocotte, for example.These are eggs baked with some butter and cream in ramekins set in a shallow pan of water. They are tremendous. In fact the only thing better than Oeufs en Cocotte is Oeufs en Cocotte with Sauce au Cari on top when you’ve woken up with a killer hangover, after one of those nights when somebody decided at midnight to buy a pack of cigarettes after all, and the girls wind up smoking and drinking and dancing around the living room to the music the boy is downloading from iTunes onto his new, ludicrously hip and stylish G3 PowerBook until three in the morning. On mornings like this, Oeufs en Cocotte with Sauce au Cari, a cup of coffee, and an enormous glass of water is like a meal fed to you by the veiled daughters of a wandering Bedouin tribe after one of their number comes upon you splayed out in the sands of the endless deserts of Araby, moments from death—it’s that good.
Still, I think it was the omelette section that really turned me around on eggs.
The diagrams in MtAoFC are always exciting. You can pretend you’re mastering something really daunting, like lithography or cold fusion or something. Or maybe there’s another analogy in here somewhere:
Grasp the handle of the pan with both hands, thumbs on top, and immediately begin jerking the pan vigorously and roughly toward you at an even, 20-degree angle over the heat, one jerk per second.
It is the sharp pull of the pan toward you which throws the eggs against the lip of the pan, then back over its bottom surface. You must have the courage to be rough or the eggs will not loosen themselves from the bottom of the pan. After several jerks, the eggs will begin to thicken.
It’s not just me, is it? Surely you too think immediately of some ancient and probably very painful Japanese sex practice you vaguely remember reading about when you were in college?
Okay, maybe it’s just me.
JC writes, “A simple-minded but perfect way to master the movement is to practice outdoors with half a cupful of dried beans.” I can just picture her chortling to herself as she wrote this, thinking of all those early-sixties American housewives in their sweater sets and Mary Tyler Moore flip hairdos scattering beans all over their manicured lawns. Because simple-minded is my middle name, I followed her advice, only instead of a lawn, my pinto beans got scattered all over the grimy sidewalks of Jackson Avenue. Drivers of semis honked at me; prostitutes stared. A minivan from Virginia pulled up in front of me. The driver, seeing that she had spotted someone of good sense and breeding in the person of Julie throwing beans out of a pan onto the sidewalk, asked me for directions to New Jersey.
“Lady, you are hell and gone from fucking New Jersey.”
My manners are not always the best, I’ll admit, and unsuccessfully flipping dried beans in a skillet in front of God and everybody does not do much to improve them.
(When I write about this incident, my high school boyfriend Henry, who I broke up with to go out with Eric, and who didn’t really forgive me for that for about ten years, writes, “Now your neighborhood has a crazy bean lady. That is so cool. . . .” Also, somebody I don’t know from Adam takes the trouble to lament the fact that I use the word f**king so much; people who object to my choice of language always use lots of asterisks.)
Accomplishing this technique with actual eggs can make you feel quite giddy—it’s like managing to tie a cherry stem into a knot with your tongue. The first time I managed it—sort of, anyway—was on a Sunday morning, for Eric and his friend from work, Tori. I didn’t know Tori all that well—she was an artist, she spent her days in an office with my husband, and she was pretty. For all I knew she could tie cherry stems into perfect bows with her tongue and flip omelettes like a whirling dervish to boot. So I was a little nervous.
When cooking omelettes the Julia way, everything goes so fast. It’s just silly to try to decipher the drawings and their captions—which besides being generally intimidating are also written for the right-handed among us, necessitating some synapse-switching on my part—while actually cooking. I couldn’t get the first one to flip at all; it just crumpled against the far lip of the pan, cracking up some at the stress points. But once I flipped it onto a plate it sort of covered up the filling—mushrooms cooked down with cream and Madeira, good, good stuff—and looked more or less like something one might call an omelette. So that one I decided to call a qualified success. The second, though, could not qualify as a success under any circumstances; first it stuck, and then when I flipped harder, the eggs sloshed all over the stovetop. Another flip sent a large portion of the semicongealed thing to the floor. I gave up, flipped its raggedy ass onto a plate, and called it mine. On the third, with increasingly terrified jerking motions, I managed to get a start on the rolling thing Julia describes, a bit. I managed not to spill anything more onto the stovetop, at least, and it stayed in one piece. I guess you can’t ask for any more than that. We ate our omelettes roulées with some prosecco Tori brought. I do love an excuse to drink before noon.
Anyway, by the time I limped into the kitchen to make a dinner of artichoke hearts and tomato omelettes for my husband, my brother, and me, I’d gotten pretty comfortable with the whole egg-flipping thing. The omelettes came out more or less omelette-looking, no harm done to the stovetop, and soon enough dinner was served. All should have been well, but somewhere along the way, with the lack of liquor and the embarrassing marital bickering, I’d gotten my hackles up, I guess.
Sally’s couch was what started it. Discussion of why it was still teetering in the foyer had led naturally enough to talk of her love life, always an interesting conversation.
“It’s not like the guy’s some great catch. He’s cute, I guess—if you like the type.” Sally’s type is muscular, loud, handsome, funny, and arrogant; mine is thin, quiet, dark, funny, and shy. In our years of friendship we have never once been attracted to the same man. “But he’s a total fraud. He basically told her that she had to apply and go with him to Oxford so he wouldn’t be ashamed of her. Him, ashamed of her. That ass isn’t worthy to lick her Manolos.” Sally was the only person I knew who actually owned Manolos—she’d bought them on eBay, and they made her feel deliciously sexy. And when Sally felt deliciously sexy, every man within a three-block radius thought her deliciously sexy as well—it was like a pheromone thing, she couldn’t help it.
Heathcliff poked at his artichokes somewhat warily, as if they might still have some fight in them. But while it’s true that when you attack artichokes, artichokes can fight back, the benefits of evolution had not saved these particular specimens—sprained ankle or no, I had been more than a match for them. I’d broken off their stems and snapped off their leaves, sliced and pared them down to tender yellow disks with spiky purple centers like tropical flowers, floating in a bowl of water doused with vinegar to keep their color up, simmered them, and mercilessly scooped out those tough, colorful petals, the artichokes’ last defense, until they were nothing more than accommodating delivery systems for butter. “So if he was such an asshole, what’s the problem?”
“The problem is, she wants somebody. Or thinks she does. If she doesn’t want to hear that she keeps picking assholes, what am I supposed to say?”
I’ve been with Eric the entire time I’ve known Sally, and in all this time Sally has never dated a boy for more than six months. This is a state of affairs that cuts both ways. Sometimes she’ll present us with a flurry of boys all at once: Cuban food with one on Wednesday, a Ben Stiller movie with another on Friday, brunch on Sunday with a third, the two of them freshly showered and flushed from one last
morning round. She’ll have a cheerful, leering glint in her eye, and when the boy gets up to use the restroom, she’ll lean across the table with a grin and whisper, “What do you think? He’s cute, isn’t he?” These periodic springtimes of Sally’s erotic life can sometimes knock me for a loop. One thing that must be said about marrying your high school sweetheart is, one does rather miss out on the polyamorous lifestyle. But it’s always a kick seeing Sally so confident, proud, with these guys’ dicks in one hand, the world on a string in the other.
But then some high school friend gets pregnant, or Sally’s mother gives her insufferably well-adjusted little sister who’s getting married a homemade family cookbook of well-loved recipes, then refuses to give one to Sally because “It’s only for the wives in the family.” Then Sally starts bringing only one boy around, one of the original three or another one altogether, and this time there’s a slightly desperate appeal in her eye, and when she asks, “He’s cute, isn’t he?” it’s more like a plea for reassurance than a prideful acknowledgment of her catch. She starts asking other leading questions: “You know,” she’ll say, her eyes wide with worry, “he only wants to have sex like three times a week. That’s a bad sign, right?” Or she might just say, “What do you think I should do?”
Sally’s looking for my usual “married friend” advice: “Relationships have ups and downs,” “stay the course,” etc. But I don’t want to give it. I usually don’t like the guy, anyway, and I don’t like who Sally is when she asks me. What I like, when it comes down to it, is the gleeful, sex-crazed, willfully neurotic Sally. The Sally who doesn’t care about being married like her dull sister, who knows that not one of the boys she brings over for us to meet is one whit good enough for her—not smart enough, not kind enough, with no gift to match her percolating laugh, her voice that can spread its champagne bubbles throughout a room of strangers.