My Kitchen Wars

by Betty Fussell

  Exactly why I kept a cleaver beneath my pillow may have been clear to the Shrinkess from the start, but it didn’t become clear to me until the end. It began with another routine affair, the Professor’s annual student beer bust at the end of spring term. Food was there largely to sop up the beer, boy food like cold meats and store-bought breads laid out on trays with mustard and mayonnaise and pickles, along with potato salad, cole slaw, popcorn, peanuts, pretzels, potato chips, corn chips, and the obligatory gesture toward health in raw carrots and celery. Prole food, the Professor liked to call it, and he loved every bite.

  I loved it less and, over the years, made an ever-shorter appearance among boys who were certainly not there to meet a prof’s wife, but who were happy to play Frisbee in the backyard and listen to jazz turned up high on the stereo and, as the evening progressed, to crash into furniture and occasionally throw up on the lawn. I was happy to do my obligatory once-around handshake, make a bologna sandwich, and retire to the bedroom with a glass of beer. The problem was noise. I could read until the cows came home but I couldn’t go to sleep until the boys went home.

  This party was a particularly raucous one. It had begun around four in the afternoon and by midnight riffs of life still wafted up from downstairs, but at least the sound was now concentrated in the library. Then there were noisy farewells and the zoom of motors along our lane. Finally we were down to soft music and hushed voices, but it was now around two in the morning and it was certainly time for all boys to be gone. I thought perhaps an appearance in my bathrobe would provide the necessary hint. But the door to the library was closed, and the voices were low. I got a glass of seltzer, went back upstairs, and tried to read. It was now after three and quiet below, but where was the Professor? Fears that clutch your stomach I was used to, but this was not fear of an unknown intruder creeping up the stairs. Instead, it was I creeping down the stairs, and my fear was of what I might find.

  The door was closed. The lights were out. It was quiet. I went into the kitchen and turned on the light, a signal that someone was up and about. I got another glass of seltzer and slammed the refrigerator door. Another signal, if anyone wanted to hear. I stood in the middle of the kitchen and considered my choices. I could turn out the light, go back upstairs, and pretend to go to sleep, as if nothing was amiss. Or I could turn on the light in the study and confront a truth long denied.

  I turned out the kitchen light. I paused outside the study door because I knew this was a Pandora’s box that once opened I could never shut. Then I opened the door and turned on the light. There were the Professor and the Student, buck naked, as startled as a pair of deer caught in headlights. The Professor tried drunkenly to explain that it had been too late for the Student to get a bus home, so he was going to spend the night on the living-room sofa. I told the boys to put on their clothes, told the Professor to go to bed, and told the Student I’d drive him home. I must have looked like an angry Housemother confronting bad behavior in the dorm, but to myself I was Madame Defarge before the guillotine.

  It took three-quarters of an hour, even with deserted roads, to get the Student back to his dorm in New Brunswick, so we had time for conversation. As in: “You know, Mrs. Fussell, you’d feel a lot better if you just told me how you feel.” As in: “I hope you realize, Mrs. Fussell, this has absolutely nothing to do with you.” I noted that he was not as drunk as the Professor, because he could get through a word like “absolutely” without slurring. I was a paradigm of cool, like the iceberg the Titanic hit. I found out where he’d come from, how he was studying to be an engineer but thought maybe he’d like to be a poet. I kept him talking and dropped him—“Yeah, if you’d just hang a right here”—in front of his dorm so he could say, “Take care, now.”

  And then I drove back the way I came, on Route 27, a road I’d driven for nearly thirty years, while acting, while teaching, while getting my Ph.D., while ferrying Sam to soccer practice and Tucky to piano lessons. I’d driven it to friends’ houses sober and driven it home drunk, driven it to meet my lover in a poison ivy patch. Twice I’d been driven down it, to the hospital to deliver babies. I could feel my heart pumping to the rhythm of the tires and my teeth slammed tight in my jaw.

  When I got home, I made another bologna sandwich in the kitchen, filled up another glass of beer, went upstairs and sat in the blue leather chair in the Professor’s study, and read. I read a recent book of literary essays because I knew it would focus what was left of my mind. I could feel my heart behind my left breast, frozen and cracked. I didn’t know how it could keep on pumping. I read the book from first page to last, including acknowledgments and index, which took me until nine in the morning, when Paul had to get up, hungover or no, to receive the university’s Teacher of the Year Award at a luncheon for students and their parents.

  When I went to make the bed, after he’d dressed and shaved and gone, I took the cleaver and put it back in the knife block in the kitchen. The things that go bump in the night had been given a name and a shape at last, and maybe not the right name, but at least I knew that what scared me was not something I’d made up inside some dark psychotic recess of my own. It was out there, it was real, tangible, a happening that divided before and after in one clean stroke. There would be no more tears, no more fear of drowning, no more shouldering alone the backpack of guilt for everything that went wrong with our journey. From now on we would go separately. The truth had divided us, but the truth had made me free.

  The next time I took up the cleaver was almost a year later, long after Paul had gone to England and returned to live in an apartment in the middle of town. I was in the kitchen, cutting up live lobsters to test out a recipe for lobster bisque for my first cookbook. In it I wanted to explain how I’d learned to cook from books, from American books written by the masterful quartet of Claiborne, Child, Beard, and Fisher. I’d gotten a contract with one publisher the day after I learned that my Mabel manuscript had been accepted by another, about a week after my night of truth. On both days we were having lunch. Paul’s response to the Mabel contract was to break open a bottle of champagne and then suddenly stop. “My God, I’d better get upstairs and get cracking.” His response to the second book lacked champagne. “Anyone can write a cookbook. Why didn’t you do it sooner?”

  In the week that followed, Paul made many decisions, often within the same week, sometimes within the same day. We should stay married, and he’d give up alcohol. We should split and live however we wanted for a while, have a lot of sexual partners, see how it went. We should get a divorce; he’d talked to his lawyer. Sex had nothing to do with it.

  That summer was unreal, with Tucky taking courses at Pratt and Sam renting an apartment in New York, and Paul and me trying to make bisque out of the carcass of our marriage. For the first time, I left my marital bed to sleep in Tucky’s room, and Paul was hurt. We came together at mealtimes, in the kitchen. Cooking and eating were the last rituals left us, and neither of us wanted to dismantle them. We would drift down to the kitchen from our separate studies and our separate typewriters and open a bottle of house wine. Paul thought white wine less caloric than red, so we would fill our glasses with ice cubes and pour on the Frascati or the Bolla Soave and I would fix something simple like steak and salad and we would for the first and only time in our married life talk straight, because there was no other way to talk.

  We talked about our mutual sexual betrayals. When it came to naming names, I was no less surprised than he. “Not Chessie Franklin, she was so ugly,” I’d say. “She had a huge crush on me,” he’d say. “I knew she wanted me, so we went up to the bedroom and had half an hour between courses.” To my surprise, he hadn’t known about my affair with Dave. Of the crowning incident, he’d say, “This would never have happened if I hadn’t been so lonely.” “But you just admitted you’re incapable of loving anyone but yourself,” I’d say. “Well, you would have distracted me,” he’d say. “From what,” I’d say, “yourself?” “Precisely,” he’d say. “I do
n’t want to live with a man, I want to live with a woman. I like the opposition. I’m aggressive, you’re recessive.”

  The talk was not always this polite, particularly as the bottle neared its end. Paul just wanted to contemplate youth and beauty—to touch, to kiss, he said, but not to sodomize. That was repulsive, “putting your cock in shit.” When I suggested he might try a shrink, he objected mightily. “I don’t want to change,” he’d say. “I’ve built my whole life on a set of intellectual principles, how can I change that?” It was all my fault. “You never wanted sex,” he’d say. “I always had to ask.” “You used sex like a weapon to keep me in my place,” I’d say. “You were making war, not love.”

  When I said that I knew he didn’t find a woman’s body beautiful, he’d say, “Someone would have to convince me that Bronzino’s Portrait of a Boy is not the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.” He’d kept a small bronze statue of Donatello’s David on his desk, but I’d never made the connection. He’d say I was out to punish him for a mere peccadillo out of professional jealousy. “You want to do the one thing you have no talent for, if I may speak bluntly,” he’d say. “Frankly, I wanted to save you from embarrassing yourself in public with your journalism. You have no talent for language, but you admire it because you’re around literary people.” “And what do I have talent for?” I’d ask, knowing his answer but wondering if he’d still have the nerve. He did. “Cooking, I suppose, and whatever it involves—presentation, patience, painstaking detail.”

  My husband too had his terrors in that house. I came home one night from New York to find him deeply upset. “One of my enemies has gotten in and shit in the sheets.” What? “I pulled back the sheet to get into bed and there were two horrible black blobs,” he said, “so I ripped the sheets off the bed and put a chair up against the bedroom doors.” Where was the cat? “She was in the study and bedroom with the doors shut because the air conditioning was on,” he said, “but this was no excreta from a cat.” I went down to look at the sheets in the washing machine, where he’d dumped them, and found without surprise that the blobs were cat shit.

  After we separated, he finally went to see a shrink for a few weeks, just long enough to discover, as he related with disbelief, that he’d always connected sex with shame, with dirtiness, which he’d gotten from his mother—of course. A mastoid operation as an adolescent had kept him home for six months and he’d become a mama’s boy, learning to knit and sew while his older brother went out for sports and girls. “The shrink says I’m a permanent adolescent,” he said. “I never grew up and that’s what makes getting old such a shock. Adolescents aren’t supposed to be old.” He was attracted to students who were straight, he said, because he got a charge from their youth. “I don’t want to be with old people like me.”

  Change was not in the cards for him, but it was my turn to deal, and I was changing fast. I wanted to be as old as my years and as old as the experience that filled them. I wanted to deny neither body nor mind. I knew I could put words together, if I worked at it, just as I could put ingredients together on a plate. Patience at the typewriter was surely as important as patience at the stove, and painstaking detail was what any art was about. Although I had seen many things in nature and in art as beautiful as Bronzino’s boy, I was not hooked on youth or boys. I was hooked on the wondrous changes that turn boys into men and girls into women and kittens into cats and the raw materials of nature into the creative ferment of art.

  No change without breakage, and the biggest change for the four of us was breaking up the house. Paul had sold it to friends while I was off in California, but I had a full year in which to adjust, to sell the books and furniture, to put things into storage that I couldn’t bear to part with, to shuttle back and forth between the study and the kitchen to test out recipes for the cookbook and write them up. I wrote and cooked and cooked and wrote in a frenzy, completing a massive book within the year because I knew I would never again have such a kitchen at my command and never again have such a fierce need to prove that I could write as well as cook.

  Meanwhile, negotiations on the house moved slowly after the initial contract. First there was termite inspection, and I had to bring in the exterminators. Then there was elm blight inspection, because we still had a few remaining elms in the yard thanks to assiduous spraying. Our real estate agent was a close friend, as were the buyers, but that only made each of their intrusions worse, made them personal.

  So there I was with cleaver in hand on an April afternoon, trying to deal with a pair of live lobsters on the chopping block, when the friend who had bought our house stopped by to ask if she could bring her gardener around to inspect the shrubbery and plantings. I didn’t know how much I minded losing the house until I heard myself yelling at her, “If you don’t want the house, say so. If you do, get out of my kitchen.” And with that, I held the body of the lobster firmly, and as it tried to curl its tail under and wave its rubber-banded claws in the air for help, I severed its thick carapace at the vital spot between head and tail, ending at once life, motion, and talk.

  The thing about lobsters is how slowly they grow. It may take a lobster seven years to weigh as much as a pound, and I usually prefer big boys who weigh two. Lobstermen trap them in a wood-slatted box that has two compartments, the “parlor” in front and the “kitchen” behind. That’s what they call them. The kitchen is where the action is, because there lies the bait, like a delicious little crab that the hungry lobster heads for when he enters the parlor. Once in, he can’t turn around or back out, but at least he has a Last Meal of crab.

  As a chef I know says, with a lobster you’ve got a primitive face-off, one on one, first with the fisherman, then with the cook, then with the eater. Maybe that’s why I go for lobsters. All I know is that when I taste one, I taste first my honeymoon on Cape Cod and then the lobster dinners at the Griswold Inn in New London, the flavor intensified by all those intervening years and sorrows and angers and fears, which great Neptune’s ocean cannot wash clean because the sea is as full of salt as of other things and when you ope your legs to the sea you embrace not just your dreams but all that is.

  Breaking and Entering with a Wooden Spoon

  One June evening of the following year, when the last rays of sun slanted across the tiles, my daughter and I stood in the middle of the kitchen and opened our second bottle of champagne. The bottle and two paper cups were all that remained. The accumulated nestings of four lives had been vomited up and wiped clean by auction, book sale, garage sale, Salvation Army, and Goodwill, until finally a hired truck hauled away to a dump the junk not even the cleaning lady or the junk man would take. The kitchen without chairs or tables or stools or hanging pots and pans was discomfiting, but not creepy like the rest of the house. The terracotta tiles kept their glow, the stainless steel its shine. One drawer even kept until this moment—“Hey, Mom, look what I found”—a simple wooden spoon, shaped from olive wood, bought in Arles and never used because I’d tucked it away to give as a present and it had remained hidden in the dark.

  The kitchen pulsed with life that made the rest of the rooms seem forlorn. We walked through them with our bottle and cups, toasting the wall above the living-room mantel streaked with smoke, the replastered spot where the ceiling had leaked, the black-painted hardwood floors that, stripped of rugs, had not looked so clean since they were sanded and painted and resanded and repainted, after the painters had got it wrong and put on a coat of glossy black instead of matte, and there was much complaint on all sides, but this was the house we were going to go out of feet first and we wanted it to be exactly as we wanted it before we went.

  Tucky was a much better tosser-out than I and a much better goer. “I hated this house,” she said. “We were never a family here.” For me each toss was like losing a finger or toe. I was woven into the fabric of the rugs, no matter how worn. I was glued into the rungs of the small Victorian settee I had mended and covered in bottle-green velvet when its horsehair seat tore.
I was stripped, stained, and urethaned into the round walnut dining table that was split through the middle so that you could lay in four warped leaves, transforming an intimate circle into an oval arena. I was buried in each of the dozen earthenware pots, along with the roots of the six-foot avocado trees I’d started from pits that had balanced on toothpicks in jars of water until the force of the green germ split them in two. Each object had sprouted its own history long before it had become part of mine—had been chosen because of its history of human hands shaping wool, wood, horsehair, or leather, as if sowing what later hands would tend and cherish.

  Cherished objects, like images, as the modern philosophe Gaston Bachelard tells us, have a life of their own, which we become part of when they become part of us. I could tour every room of the house and recall which piece of trash and which genuine antique, cherished alike, came from where, and when. I remembered the auction at which I had acquired the turquoise-and-beige Kazak rug, bigger than anyone else wanted, lucky for us. The extendable table came from a two-story warehouse of Victorian junk in New Brunswick when Victoriana could be had for a player-piano song. The settee we’d gotten at a New Jersey farm near Ringoes, where an old woman sat rocking on the porch that was auctioned out from under her as she watched the current of her life seep into the hands of strangers. I had seen another woman cry when her set of imitation Chippendale chairs—the pride of a dining-room suite lovingly dusted over the years, as children waxed and grown-ups waned, until even the kitchen was too big to eat in—was sold for twenty-five dollars for the lot. I knew that my pleasure in these bargains was purchased at the cost of someone else’s pain, and that part of the price was the responsibility for cherishing the object of someone else’s affections.