by Julie Powell
Eric skated his last artichoke quarter heartily around on the plate he had balanced on my swelling foot—which in turn was resting on his lap—sopping up the last bits of melted butter. “It’s not like Sally’s some kind of saint.”
Just as he plopped the last khaki green, dripping triangle into his mouth I smacked him, hard, on the shoulder; quite a trick, since I had to reach across the entire length of my outstretched leg to do it. “Don’t be a jerk.”
“Come on. You know I love Sally. But she’s—prickly.”
It’s true that none of my girlfriends are much for compliance. Gwen once got into an actual fistfight on the subway after telling a bunch of squealing high school girls to shut the hell up. (One of the girls gave her a scratch across the cheek from her three-inch fake nails—it didn’t heal for weeks.) Isabel’s singularly raucous baby voice and willfully obscure sense of humor have been known to actually make men break out in hives. And Sally is the most challenging of all of them. If she were a movie star, she’d be Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday; if she were a vegetable, she’d be an artichoke. As it is, she’s Sally, tough cookie extraordinaire and a hell of a person to try to set up on a blind date.
“You know,” added Heathcliff, “maybe Sally just isn’t the marrying kind. Ow! What?”
Maybe if the men in my life weren’t always making smart-ass comments, they wouldn’t have to worry about bruises so much.
When we were kids, Heathcliff used to have a toy, a twisty piece of blown glass with two bulbs on either end, connected by a twining bit of pipe. It looked rather like some kitchen gadget Julia might have picked up on her travels abroad, except that it was filled with a mysterious red liquid. The idea was that you held the bulb with the liquid in it in your palm, and the heat from your body would be enough to make it boil up to the other bulb. Only it didn’t work for me. When I held the empty bulb, the red liquid in the other bulb seemed to be pulled back to my palm, as if whichever law of physics or chemistry made this toy work didn’t apply to me. This was just one of many ominous clues to the puzzle of What Kind of Freak Was I, Anyway? Another was the way I lost things—car keys, eyeglasses, retainers, twenty-dollar bills—at a rate that went way beyond plain flightiness, into the paranormal realm. Or how later, when I was a teenager, driving home alone after some late sexually fraught night out, I’d burn out the streetlights—they’d extinguish in front of me as I drove down the highway, one after another after another.
When I started cooking, in college, I quickly learned that I possess an eerie inability to make anything that requires setting, fermenting, jelling or rising. Bread, mayonnaise, vodka Jell-O shots, it doesn’t matter. If a liquid and a solid are meant to mix together and become something else, something airy or puffy or creamy, I’m hopeless.
Also, I kill every plant I touch.
I didn’t read comic books growing up, and so didn’t know about the X-Men until Eric explained them to me as an adult. If I had, I would have realized much sooner that I’m a mutant—I’m thinking something like Magneto crossed with Rogue, with a bit of Lucille Ball mixed in. Perhaps it’s all connected somehow to my hormonal trouble—the unwelcome genetic gift that is one more thing my perfect brother, being male, will never have to worry over. That gift worth a fortune to the electrolysis technician and someday, I assume, to the obstetrician who’ll be writing up the scrips for the drugs I’ll need to use to get pregnant, if indeed I’ll be able to get pregnant at all. The shock of panic that shoots through me when I think about this proves that (a) there is such a thing as a biological clock, (b) I have one, and (c) it’s ticking.
All my life, it has been as if tiny explosions were going off all around me, small revolutions, conspirators in my own body setting off booby traps. So when Heathcliff spoke the words “not the marrying kind,” I recognized the rumble of the bomb it set off deep in the underground garage of my gut.
“What does that even mean? ‘Not the marrying kind’?”
Heathcliff and Eric were now both rubbing their sore arms. “What’s so bad about that? Marriage isn’t for everybody!”
Of course not. Marriage is no more for everyone than heterosexuality or French cooking. But the queasy spasm that tore through me when he said it was real, and it didn’t go away.
“You’re not just born one way or the other.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you are.”
Heathcliff has never been short on women, much like Sally’s never been short on men, yet he has always remained essentially a bachelor. He lives lightly on the land, has few possessions, keeps a distance—a kind of redheaded Last of the Mohicans. Usually it doesn’t bother me.
“So, what, you think you’re beyond the whole marriage thing?”
“What?” He raised his eyebrows, sardonically baffled as only Heathcliff can manage.
“Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re better than me, that’s what like.” Suddenly, my blood was pounding in my ears, and I realized I was getting ready to say something I would regret. I was going to Tell.
When I was in fourth grade and Heathcliff was in first our parents separated. Our father went to live in some condo in far south Austin, and for most of a year we’d see him only twice a week—once when he came to take us out for burgers and video games, and once when he picked up our mother for their marriage counseling sessions. They worked it out, and Dad moved back in, and everyone lived happily, if occasionally grouchily and resentfully, ever after. All of this was old family history. But there was one thing I knew that Heathcliff didn’t.
It happened in Dad’s ZX. My father was driving, my mother was in the passenger seat, I was in the back, and my mother was crying.
“Are you okay, Mommy?” I asked.
“No, honey, I’m not okay.”
“Does your head hurt?” (Mom had sinus trouble—her head often hurt.)
“No. My heart hurts.”
This was new. “Why does your heart hurt?”
“Because your father is in love with another woman!”
My mom and I have always shared a gift for the cutting melodramatic statement; I was dimly aware even in the dreadful moment that I had just backed her up on a hell of an alley oop. Even as I began to sniffle in the backseat, somewhere deep I thought to memorize those lines—I knew the value of a good sob story.
The whole thing was so exciting and dramatic that it wasn’t until days later that the knowledge of this Other Woman began to weigh on me. But once it did, it only got heavier and heavier. I started staring at women at the mall or on the street, wondering if one was Her. I began to get tired easily. The circles under my eyes got so bad that teachers would send me home from school (although, to be honest, I might have been taking some advantage here of my inherited histrionic streak). When my mother asked me please, please, please not to tell what I knew to Heathcliff, I promised. Why spread this kind of misery around?
Well, apparently the promise stuck, because when I finally broke it that night over our artichokes and tomato omelettes—blurting out to Heathcliff, as if in revenge, that when he was in first grade his father had slept with another woman, and that his parents stayed together anyway, not because they were “the marrying kind,” but because they worked like hell and loved each other more than they’d hurt each other—I began to shake, and a lump of dread, small but heavier than iron, threatened to close up my throat entirely, as if my body judged choking to death a better fate than telling a secret.
What did I think? That upon the instant of breaking my silence, my brother would transform into the six-year-old I had to protect, crouched in his pajamas by my parents’ bottle-green glass coffee table, his bright hair still damp from his bath, his face crumpling into uncomprehending tears?
Well, he didn’t. Instead, he took another bite of omelette. “I didn’t know that,” he said. He stuck a fork into his final bit of egg, smearing it around the plate to get at the last of the sauce. “But it only makes sense, doesn’
t it? It all turned out okay, so I guess it doesn’t matter.”
He burped. “I thought omelettes for dinner was a weird idea, but that was pretty good.”
And that was that. I’d broken faith, failed to keep perhaps the only real secret I had ever been trusted with. And the ground did not swallow me up. It turned out, in fact, to be no big deal. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.
There is an entire chapter in MtAoFC devoted to the preparation of eggs. But in cooking my way through it, I found myself ravenously curious about something of which there was no mention: Julia’s first egg. I mean, surely she didn’t just start off blithely jerking off perfect omelettes at birth, right? Surely even the great JC required some practice. So what was Julia’s first egg like? Was it scrambled—a traditional choice? Was it an Easter egg she boiled herself, to tide her over until the big ham dinner? Or was she older when she cooked her first egg, a young woman, embarrassed to tell anyone she’d never acquired the skill, trying to make a dozen eggs Benedict in her first New York apartment and winding up throwing out half a dozen spoiled poached eggs while her roommates’ backs were turned?
Could she even have married before she mastered the egg? Julia married late, at thirty-five; perhaps she had wondered for a time if she was the marrying kind. That night, while Eric washed dishes and Heathcliff ate Ben & Jerry’s straight out of the carton and I recovered from the discovery that revealing a decades-old secret was no biggie, really, I wondered if that could be. For some reason it comforted me to think of Julia’s first egg as happening in her garret apartment in Paris, as she spun around in her cocoon, about to hatch as the new Julia, the Julia she was meant to become.
DAY 42, RECIPE 53|DAY 82, RECIPE 95
Disaster/Dinner Party, Dinner Party/Disaster:
A Study in Duality
On January 1, 1660, a young government worker in London started a diary. He wrote about going to church, where the preacher was saying something or other about circumcision, and about lunch afterward; he mentioned that his wife burned her hand while heating up turkey leftovers.
For the next nine years this guy wrote every single day. He witnessed the Great Fire of London and some disappointingly overdone roasts. He went to hundreds of plays, vowed to quit drinking then changed his mind. He ate a lot—no matter the precarious state of the union, a barrel of oysters was always appreciated—and worked a lot, and fondled whatever girls would deign to allow it. And he wrote about all of it—honestly, self-indulgently. He was often entertaining, often mind-bogglingly boring, every now and then ablaze with life—the Sid Vicious of seventeenth-century diarists. And then on May 31, 1669, he just stopped.
Some bloggers might say that Samuel Pepys was a sort of proto-blogger, but we’re not a terribly measured lot, so I don’t know that I’d listen to us if I were you. Sure, Pepys obsessively chronicled his interior-decorating ups and downs and the time he masturbated in the water taxi. Sure, he wrote in his pajamas. But although he carefully saved his diary, volumes and volumes of it, for the rest of his life, he never showed it to a single soul. Today, when we blog about our weight-loss problems and our knitting and our opinion of the president’s IQ level, we do it on the blithe assumption that someone gives a shit—even though there’s a guy stuck in Baghdad who blogs, and a Washington DC staff assistant who gets paid by Republican appointees for sex who blogs, and our own jottings must all be dreadfully dull by comparison. Nowadays anyone with a crap laptop and Internet access can sound their barbaric yawp, whatever it may be. But the surprise is that for every person who’s got something to say, it seems there are at least a few people who are interested. Some of them aren’t even related.
What I think is that Sam Pepys wrote down all the details of his life for nine years because the very act of writing them down made them important, or at least singular. Overseeing the painters doing his upstairs rooms was rather dull, but writing about it made overseeing the painters doing his upstairs rooms at least seem interesting. Threatening to kill his wife’s dog for pissing on the new rug might have made him feel a bit sheepish and mean, but write it down and you have a hilarious domestic anecdote for the centuries. Imagine if he’d had, say, a safely anonymous pamphlet cranked out on a press and passed around on the streets of London. Wouldn’t he have enjoyed occasionally overhearing some fellow in a tavern recounting to general hilarity Pepys’s own yarn about the king’s spaniel shitting on the royal barge?
There’s a dangerous, confessional thrill to opening up your eminently fascinating life and brain to the world at large, and the Internet makes it all so much faster and more breathless and exciting. But I wonder—would we still have Sam’s jack-off stories, the records of his marital spats, if he’d been a blogger rather than a diarist? It’s one thing to chronicle your sexual and social missteps to satisfy your private masochistic urges, but sharing them with the world at large? Surely there are some limits, aren’t there?
I wanted to make Heathcliff an orange Bavarian cream while he was in town. Orange was his favorite flavor. But my mutant jelling handicap made me hesitate. In my progress through the dessert chapter so far, my Crème Brûlée had wound up soup, and my Plombières had ranged from smooth but loose to solid but grainy. The Bavarian, unlike the Plombières, had gelatin in it. I didn’t know if this boded ill or well. The prospect of serving my brother, he who effortlessly improvises ice-cream makers out of tin cans, a failed dessert had me terrifically nervous.
On the morning of the last Saturday Heathcliff would be in town, I was awakened by Eric’s moans and instantly knew we were in for another of his Blanche days. Everyone has some genes to curse—Eric’s was the one that occasionally made him throw up all day, spending the between times lying in bed with his arm flung over his eyes, suffering through a splitting headache. It isn’t very nice to say, but I had no patience with the Blanche days, since he wouldn’t talk to a doctor about them, citing instead the “Powell stomach” or “drinking too many vodka gimlets.” During the Blanche days, besides moaning and retching violently, Eric also sweated and smelled bad—he was just no fun to be around. If ever I decide I’m not the marrying kind after all, I know it will be on one of Eric’s Blanche days.
I was out of bed early, hoping to drown out the first of the heaves with some NPR and the burble of the coffee maker. Sally called at eight on the dot.
“Oh my God. Did I wake you up?”
“No, I’m up.”
“Are you sure? God, I can’t believe I woke up so early! I can’t sleep these days.”
“It’s fine. I’m reading the paper. What’s up?”
“I talked to Boris.”
“Who’s Boris?”
“Boris! My Croatian moving guy.”
“I thought you said he was Czech.”
“Yeah, I was wrong, he’s Croatian. Anyway, he and his brother are going to drive up from Providence today. They’re leaving at nine, so I guess they’ll be in Queens by like twelve thirty or so? Can we come pick up the couch then?”
“Um, sure. I just have to go shopping, but I can be back by then.”
“You sure it’s not a pain in the ass?”
“Nope. I mean yep.”
“Okay—I’ll see you at twelve thirty, then.”
By the time I got off the phone the vomiting had begun, right on schedule. I peeked into the half bath, on the floor of which Eric was now slumped. “Sally’s coming over today to get the couch.”
“She is?”
“Yeah. Around twelve thirty.”
“Oh. Okay.” His voice was full of watery determination—by twelve thirty he would not be sitting on the floor of the half bath retching up violent green bile, as God was his witness, he would not. I’d seen this courageous defiance before—Eric hits all the Vivien Leigh highlights on his Blanche days. It wouldn’t make any difference.
“I’m going to Western Beef now, so I can be back in time.”
“Are you taking the Bronco?”
“I have to, I gues
s.”
“Be careful.”
(After our moving-day disaster we’d gotten the Bronco running again with a new alternator, but I caught the guy who did the replacing staring aghast after me in the one mirror the truck still possessed as I drove away, and it’s true the brakes were feeling awfully soft.)
The single best thing about Western Beef on Steinway Street is its name, but there are other things to recommend it as well. For instance, it has convenient recycling vending machines, which might come in handy if I lose my shit and go off on an evil Republican bureaucrat, get fired, and have to start collecting cans for a living. It has reasonably decent produce, a bizarre and fascinating section of West Indian herbs—including some fleshy pinkish seaweed-looking stuff in a cellophane bag labeled “Virility”— and a walk-in refrigerated section. There are no nifty insulated coats like I’ve heard they pass out at the big Fairway on the Upper West Side, but eighteen eggs are less than two dollars, cream is sold in gallon cartons, and they’ve got shelves and shelves of every cheap cut of meat you could want. (And I was making Pot-au-Feu for dinner, so I wanted plenty.) What Western Beef does not have is the sugar cubes I needed for the Bavarian.
(I’ll just bet sugar cubes were a lot easier to get in 1961. Now, of course, it’s all sugar packets, not to mention those godawful powders, which always remind me of that scene in 9 to 5 when Lily Tomlin thinks she’s accidentally poisoned Dabney Coleman. Talk about a movie that could give a secretary at a government agency some ideas. But that’s neither here nor there. It’s a shame about the sugar cubes, is all. Sugar cubes have such a neat white wholeness to them—when we were kids, Heathcliff and I used to leave sugar cubes out for the reindeer every Christmas Eve, on the coffee table beside Santa’s plate of cookies, stacked like a tiny crystalline igloo. What are you going to do now, leave the reindeer nine packets of Sweet’N Low?)
The Key Food on Thirty-sixth Street in Astoria didn’t have sugar cubes either, though I did pick up the beets and potatoes for the Salade à la d’Argenson that I had totally forgotten to get at Western Beef because I’d written them down at the last minute, on the other side of the shopping list. So I tried the Pathmark. I’d never been to the Pathmark, and let me tell you, I’m never going again. There’s nothing I need that much. The sliding doors at the Pathmark open into a wide, white, empty hallway, totally devoid of any sign of life or foodstuffs. At any moment I expected to see a chiseled Aryan commandant come around the corner to usher me along: “Ja, please, right this way, take a cart, the food is just through here.” But I was at last funneled into not a gas chamber, but a glaring white supermarket the size of a stadium, where for the price of the existential horror felt upon witnessing families buying two carts full of RC cola and generic cheese doodles, or a lonely older man purchasing three dozen packages of ramen noodles and four cartons of no-pulp orange juice, I could procure sugar cubes.