by Julie Powell
“Sure sounds like a shitty weekend, all right.” I couldn’t help sounding the tiniest bit bitter. Gwen has a weekend of explosive sex, then comes over to my house depressed and complains about being served aspic. This is a situation that Julia would no doubt handle with aplomb. But Julia doesn’t hate aspic as I do. And she probably gets more sex.
“Wait, I’m getting to that part. So he asks me to leave when we’re done, he’s got to get some rest because he’s got a pitch meeting the next day—which is fine, whatever, it’s not like I need to be rocked to sleep in his warm embrace or anything. So Friday I go to work. He comes in and hardly even looks at me, which, you know, fine. This isn’t something he wants to make public. But all day I wait for him to IM me. I’m dying to IM him, of course, but I resist, which I’ve got to say was pretty impressive of me, don’t you think?”
“Very.”
“So he doesn’t. IM me, I mean. I hang around at the office until nine o’clock—not a peep.”
“Ah.”
“I stay at home all Saturday with my laptop on and my cell in my pocket. Finally—of course—I can’t take it anymore, and at 5:30 I go ahead and send him an instant message. I just say, Hey, you doing anything tonight? And not ten minutes later he IMs back: Come to the apartment.”
“Oh! Can I have another cigarette?”
“Take as many as you want. So, of course I’m there in like twenty minutes flat, and it’s the same thing all over again, just as good as the first time. Better.”
“Uh-huh. I’m waiting for the shitty part.”
Gwen made a sheepish face at me. “Well, now that I think about it, I guess there isn’t really a shitty part, per se.”
“I knew it. You just came here to criticize my aspic and mock me with your fabulous LA sex life.”
“No, no, no. I mean—I was with him all night, and then at the end I got dressed and went home, he got on a plane to go back to his wife this morning—which I’m totally fine with, I don’t want to marry the guy or anything. It’s all good, right? We understand each other.”
“And the source of your tragic ennui is?”
“Well, it all starts over now, doesn’t it? Best-case scenario, we IM and IM and IM, and I totally obsess for six months or however long it is until he comes back to New York again, and the cycle continues. Only now I know what the sex is like. And it’s not that great. I mean, it’s great, but how could it possibly compete with what we’d been writing to each other? With the imagining of it? It can’t. Nothing ever does, does it?”
“Jesus, Gwen. Jesus. That’s pretty fucking depressing.”
“Exactly. Can you get out the tonic and some ice? I feel the need for a refresher.” I passed her the ice tray, then went into the refrigerator for the tonic. There squatted the tarragon chicken in aspic, wanly gleaming. Gwen had gotten me down, I guess, because the sight of it just made me want to sit down on the floor and never get up. “But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that the only thing worse than the cycle continuing would be if it didn’t. If the IMs stopped, then I wouldn’t even have these diminishing returns on my investment. I’d have bupkes. So I have to keep on keeping on, you know?”
Christ.
There is a law out there, if not of thermodynamics then of something equally primary and inescapable, that explains why everything from instant messaging to fabulous sex to aspic can in the end be defined as an illustration of the futility of existence. And it really, really sucks.
By the time Eric came home at six, Gwen and I were both a little drunk and a little morose. Eric, who had not yet shed his Blanche-headache, wasn’t able to do much to lighten the mood. The Poulet en Gelée à l’Estragon was able to do even less.
We did try to eat it. It wasn’t that it was bad, though when Eric saw it, his face went a shade or two grayer. It just tasted like cold chicken with jelly on top of it. We all chewed glumly for a bit, but it was no use.
Eric was the first to declare defeat. “Domino’s?”
Gwen sighed in relief, pushed her plate away, and lit another cigarette. “Bacon and jalapenos?”
Chicken aspic and bacon-jalapeno pizza. Talk about diminishing returns.
The first one is tough, no fuckin’ foolin’. The second one, the second one ain’t no fucking Mardi Gras, either, but it’s better than the first one because—you still feel the same thing, you know, except it’s more diluted. It’s better. . . . Now I do it just to watch their fuckin’ expression change.
— Virgil (James Gandolfini),
True Romance
If you object to steaming or splitting a live lobster, it may be killed almost instantly just before cooking if you plunge the point of a knife into the head between the eyes, or sever the spinal cord by making a small incision in the back of the shell at the juncture of the chest and tail.
— Mastering the Art of French Cooking,
Vol. 1
DAY 130, RECIPE 201
They Shoot Lobsters, Don’t They?
Aunt Sukie grabs me by my upper arms and shakes me gently. “Oh, Sarah, Sarah, Sarah! What are we going to do with you?”
(My aunt Sukie is not senile; she does remember my name. Sarah is a nickname. Short for Sarah Bernhardt. I couldn’t tell you how this came to be. I don’t even know why on earth anyone would know who Sarah Bernhardt is anymore. I only know who she is because I’ve been nicknamed after her my whole life.)
“What do you mean?” I wonder if she’s going to make a crack about my upper arms. I haven’t seen her since the last time I was back in Texas for Christmas, and they have gotten a little meaty since then.
“I went onto the computer and I read what you’re up to!”
I cringe a little at this. Aunt Sukie is a schoolteacher in Waxahachie, Texas, and one of those smart, kind people who nonetheless mystifies you by continuing to vote Republican. She also, unlike anyone in my nuclear unit, keeps a civil tongue in her head. Once Aunt Sukie handed out a high school paper I wrote on The Great Gatsby to her English class—God knows how she got her hands on the thing. But somehow I have the feeling that she would not be giving her students links to my blog.
But she isn’t thinking of my stevedore’s arms or my sailor’s mouth. She leans in close and whispers, “You’re worrying your mother. Don’t work so hard!”
Until the day she died, my granny said things just like this to my mother. “You do too much!” “You’ll make yourself sick!”
It used to drive my mother completely around the bend. “MOM! Don’t tell me what’s too much! I’ll tell you when I’m doing too much, goddammit!” (My mom and my granny fought about lots of things—laundry, ice cream, black people, television. But this one, the one about my mom doing too much, was a favorite, probably because it gave Granny the illusion she had a maternal bone in her body, and Mom the illusion she wasn’t working herself sick.) I figure that Mom, who is terrified above all things of turning into her mother, is reluctant to ride me too hard on this crazy cooking project deal. So she got her brother’s wife to do it. She must have really wanted to get through to me if she showed Aunt Sukie the blog. She had to know that my aunt would not be thrilled with comparisons of, say, trussed poultry to sexual fetishists.
But somehow I’m not irritated at all. Actually, it makes me feel looked after. And kind of like the circle stays unbroken, gene-wise. I give my aunt a hug. “I’m fine. Don’t worry about it.”
It’s always nice to go back to the folks’ house. There’s no mildew in the bathtub, and you can shower for as long as you want and the water will stay hot. There’s a queen-sized bed to sleep in, no roaring semitrucks passing in the night, a hundred channels on the television, and broadband on the computer. On Christmas Eve we jack up the air-conditioning so we can light a fire. There are trees—not just in little concrete boxes on the sidewalk, but everywhere. I love it here.
I think I may not go back.
Yes, New York is a stinking, chaotic, life-sucking cesspool and Austin, Texas, is a verdant, p
eaceful paradise, but that’s not really the problem—well, at least not the only one. No, the truth is, I’m on the lam.
Over a period of two weeks in late December of 2002, at the exhortation of Julia Child, I went on a murderous rampage. I committed gruesome, atrocious acts, and for my intended victims, no murky corner of Queens or Chinatown was safe from my diabolical reach. If news of the carnage was not widely remarked upon in the local press, it was only because my victims were not Catholic schoolgirls or Filipino nurses, but crustaceans. This distinction means that I am not a murderer in the legal sense. But I have blood on my hands, even if it is the clear blood of lobsters.
We had finally gone ahead and bought one of those sleep machines to drown out the roar of freight trucks that rumble past our apartment all night. It had a small speaker that fit under the pillow, and most nights it did the trick. But on the eve of my first crime, the lulling roar and crash of the “oceania” setting droned at me: “Lobster killer, lobster killer, lobster killer. . . .”
I was awake by dawn, worrying. It was Sunday in Long Island City—forget killing a lobster, how would I even get one, for God’s sake? How much would it cost? How would I get it home? I peppered Eric with these questions, hoping that he would reply, “Oooh, you’re right, that isn’t going to work. Oh well—guess we’ll have to save lobster for another day. Domino’s? Bacon and jalapeno?”
He didn’t say that. Instead he got out the yellow pages and made a phone call—the first fish market he called was open. The Bronco started, the traffic to Astoria was smooth. The fish store didn’t smell fishy, and they had lobsters in a nasty-looking cloudy tank. I bought two. The stars fell into alignment, for fate had decreed these two lobsters must die.
I had been imagining lugging the lobsters home in a bucket, but the guy just stuck them in a paper bag. He said to keep them in the refrigerator. He said they’d be good until Thursday. Ick. I brought them back to the car and set them in the backseat—what were we going to do, cradle the creatures in our laps? On the drive home the back of my neck tingled and my ears stayed pricked for the sneaking crinkle of a lobster claw venturing out of a paper bag—but the lobsters just sat there. I guess suffocating will do that to a body.
Julia gets very terse in her description of Homard Thermidor. She always seems to go all Delphic on me in my times of need. She doesn’t speak to the storage of lobsters, for one thing. Neither, to be fair, does the Joy of Cooking, but at least that tome gives me the hint that lobsters should be lively and thrashing when they come out of the tank. Hey. My lobsters didn’t thrash. Joy said if they were limp, they might die before you cooked them. It seemed to think that was a bad thing. I peeked into the paper bag in the refrigerator and was faced with black eyes on stalks, antennae boozily waving.
I had read up on all sorts of methods for humanely euthanizing lobsters—sticking them in the freezer, placing them in ice water then bringing it up to a boil (which is supposed to fool them into not realizing they’re boiling alive), slicing their spinal cord with a knife beforehand. But all these struck me as palliatives thought up more to save boilers from emotional anguish than boilees from physical. In the end I just dumped them out of the paper bag into a pot with some boiling water and vermouth and vegetables. And then freaked the fuck out.
The pot wasn’t big enough. Though the lobsters didn’t shriek in horror the second I dropped them in, their momentary stillness only drew out the excruciating moment. It was like that instant when your car begins to skid out of control and before your eyes you see the burning car wreck that is your destiny. Any second the pain would awaken the creatures from their asphyxia-induced comas, I knew it, and I couldn’t get the goddamned lid down! It was just too horrible. My heroic/homicidal husband had to take things in hand. I’d have expected him to collapse just like me, he’s not exactly the Field & Stream type, but some of those pitiless West Texas sheriff genes must have hit their stride, because he managed to get those bugs subdued with a minimum of fuss.
People say lobsters make a terrible racket in the pot, trying—reasonably enough—to claw their way out of the water. I wouldn’t know. I spent the next twenty minutes watching a golf game on the TV with the volume turned up to Metallica concert levels. (Those Titleist commercials nearly blew the windows out.) When I ventured back into the kitchen, the lobsters were very red, and not making any racket at all. Julia says they are done when “the long head-feelers can be pulled from the sockets fairly easily.” That they could. Poor little beasties. I took them out of the pot and cooked down their liquid with the juices from some mushrooms I’d stewed. I strained the reduced juices through a sieve, presumably to get rid of any errant bits of head-feeler or whatever, then beat it into a light roux I’d made of butter and flour.
When Eric and I start our crime conglomerate, he can be in charge of death; I’ll take care of dismemberment. The same no-nonsense guy who brusquely stripped two crustaceans of their mortal coils had to leave the room when I read aloud that next I was to “split the lobsters in half lengthwise, keeping the shell halves intact.”
But it was no problem, really. For once, a blithely terse turn of phrase by Julia was not an indication of imminent disaster. The knife crunched right through. It is true that all within was not as clear-cut as you might think. When Julia told me to “discard sand sacks in the heads, and the intestinal tubes,” I was able to make an educated guess. The sacks full of sand were sort of a dead giveaway. But when she said to “rub lobster coral and green matter through a fine sieve,” I got a little lost. There was all manner of green matter—what is “green matter,” though, and why won’t Julia tell me?—but the only orange stuff I found seemed to reside where a lobster’s shit would go, so I decided not to risk it. After that was done, I pulled the rest of the meat out chunk by chunk, cracking open the claws, using a tweezer—carefully cleaned of all eyebrow hairs, naturally—to pull the strips of meat out of the legs. The sieved “green matter” got beaten into some egg yolks, cream, mustard, and cayenne, poured into the lobster broth/roux sauce, and boiled. I sautéed the meat in some butter, then poured in some cognac and let it boil down. Then I stirred in the stewed mushrooms and two-thirds of the sauce. I heaped the mixture into the four lobster half-shells, poured the rest of the sauce over, sprinkled with Parmesan and dotted with butter, and ran them under the broiler.
They were, I must say, delicious.
I stalked my third victim in Chinatown on a rainy evening one week later, inconspicuous amid the bustling Christmas shoppers picking up knockoff bags and the more obviously murderous umbrella wielders. (Umbrella wielders in Chinatown have the key advantage of diminutive stature. On a rainy day—and it’s always a rainy day in Chinatown—one must step lively or risk losing an eye.) The creature stopped groping almost immediately after the guy in the shop tied it up in a plastic bag, dropped the plastic bag into a paper one, and handed it to me in exchange for six dollars. I was nervous about getting on the train with the thing, fearing it would thrash around and call attention to itself, but it just sat there like a bag of groceries.
When I got home I peered down at the lobster to see how he was doing. The inner plastic bag was sucked tight around him and clouded up. It looked like something out of an eighties made-for-TV movie, with some washed-up actress taking too many pills and trying to off herself with a Macy’s bag. I tore open the bag to let in some air—so this underwater creature would breathe better?—before putting him in the freezer. Suffocating is worse than freezing to death is better than being steamed alive? Perhaps anticipation of my evening of bloodletting had addled my brain, but the philosophical intricacies of lobster murder were proving too much for me to rationally negotiate.
The second murder went much as the first—steamed in water spiked with vermouth and some celery, carrot, and onion. The rosy-red dead lobster was bisected in just the same way, its flesh removed, and again its shell was stuffed with its sautéed meat, this time napped in a cream sauce made with the lobster’s cooking juices.
I think I overcooked it a little.
I confessed to Eric as we sat down to our Homard aux Aromates that cutting lobsters in half was beginning to prove eerily satisfying. “I just feel like I’ve got a knack for this shit.”
Eric looked at me, and I could see him wondering where was the finicky, soft-hearted young girl he had married. “By the end of this you’ll be comfortable filleting puppies.”
That chilled me. I lay low after that for a good long while, until after Christmas. I told myself it was because a transit strike was threatening, and I didn’t much relish the idea of buying a lobster in a bag and then unexpectedly having to hike across the Queensboro Bridge with it, in the company of a hundred thousand grousing outer-borough shoppers and menial workers. But that wasn’t really it. The reason was the next recipe, Homard à l’Américaine. For while I am sure that the argument can be made that any meat-eating person ought to take the responsibility once in her life for slaughtering an animal for food, that one ought to chop that animal up into small pieces while it’s still alive, I am less certain of. And even more frightening was the thought Eric had planted in my head—what if I liked it?
My mother did everything short of chaining the kitchen doors shut to keep me from cooking while we were home, and while you can see how her claim that she was doing it for the sake of my sanity did hold some water, I honestly think she was more concerned that I not make her eat aspic or kill anything. “Julie, just leave it alone for a week, goddammit,” she said, standing before the stove with her arms crossed.
“But I’ll never make it! I’m on a really tight schedule! Besides, my bleaders are waiting for me to post!”