Cleaving

by Julie Powell

  Eric walks into the bedroom, bundled up in his coat. “You sleeping? We didn’t know where you were.”

  “Sorry. I texted you.”

  “Ah. I let my phone run down. Crap service up here anyway.”

  “Yeah, I figured.” Rob and I both climb out of bed, both of us creakily. My wrist is still pinging away.

  “Well, we got the tree. And stuff for cooking. Talking about just going out tonight.”

  “Going out? Where?”

  “I thought you’d have some suggestions.”

  “There is fuck-all around here. You can barely get pizza delivered.”

  “We’ll figure something out. Anyway, we should go down to the cottage. Tree decorating and nog.”

  “Yup, yup, yup…” I’m still in my meat clothes, sticky, stinking T-shirt and jeans. “I don’t guess I have time to take a shower. What time is it?”

  “Go ahead and take one if you want. It’s five thirty. We’ll have to figure out a dinner plan, I guess.” Eric’s squatting to give Robert his belly rub. Utterly unfairly, I am sometimes annoyed by the attention Eric offers our dog. I try to transform it into affectionate exasperation. “You spoil that dog—”

  “Everybody needs a good belly rub. Don’t they need a belly rub? Don’t they need a belly rub?” His nose is up against Robert’s, play-growling as the dog snorts blissfully.

  “Should we feed him here or there?”

  “I’ll feed him. You getting into the shower?”

  “Nah. Oh, yeah. I guess. Blar.”

  Eric stands at last and brushes the dog hair off his jeans. “Where did that come from, ‘blar’? You say that all the time. It’s weird.”

  God, marriage is a strange thing. Everything clear, nothing said.

  “I don’t know. Just picked it up somewhere.”

  I know exactly why Eric is asking me this. He knows I know. My vaguely defiant tone is the closest we will get to a discussion of the fact that he thinks I picked it up from D. (Which I didn’t, as it happens, but all new vocabulary not part of the official marriage jargon is immediately suspect.)

  “Well, I’ll feed this one. Shower will make you feel better, maybe.”

  “Maybe.” I strip down, throw the dirty clothes in the general direction of the duffel bag I live out of when I’m up here. We have always been casually naked around each other, slept in the nude, wandered the house without a stitch on. Long ago, I used to think it was a mark of our sexy, adult coupledom. Now I fear we’re just completely immune to the sight of each other’s bare skin. I don’t even merit a second glance; Eric heads to the kitchen, Robert following with pricked-up ears, while I go into the bathroom.

  It takes the water forever to get warm.

  DINNER IS some pasta with store-bought sauce we dig up in the pantry. The tree is a funky-looking thing with bald spots and a crooked trunk, just the way we like it in our family. Mom has decided she doesn’t want to get pine needles all over the carpet—not sure why we didn’t think of this before—so we wind up putting the tree on the front porch, adorning it with the lights, tinsel, and the sparse decorations I’ve brought up from where they usually live in our storage unit in the city. We huddle around in our coats, squeezing between the branches and the side of the house to get the decorations hung. When it’s done it’s rather lovely, if odd. Ten minutes later as we’re sitting down to dinner it blows down in the wind, and Dad and my brother spend another twenty minutes securing it to the porch beams and handrail with twine.

  Christmas Eve Day is, as usual with my mom and me, spent in the kitchen. While the boys—Dad, my brother, Eric, and Robert—toss around a football in the front yard, I roast poblano peppers over the gas flame of the stove, brown lamb stew meat in bacon fat and olive oil. Mom toasts pecans in the oven, crumbles up the corn bread that needs to be thoroughly dry by tomorrow for the crown roast’s stuffing. I hold ice to my wrist, which again kept me awake through the night. I stared at the ceiling, listening to Eric’s and Rob’s contrapuntal snores, as tears leaked down into my ears for no particular, immediate reason.

  Jesse is the first guest to arrive, by quite a few hours.

  “Hey, I like your tree! I haven’t had a Christmas tree for years.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll just be lucky if it doesn’t blow down again. Where’s Juan?”

  “He wasn’t answering his phone.”

  If I’m honest, I hadn’t really expected him to come, but it’s still a disappointment. I’ve not expressed this to anyone, but I’d gotten sort of set on having everyone from Fleisher’s there. “Ah well, come on in. Want something to drink? We got wine, eggnog, booze of all description… water?”

  “Eggnog sounds great. And some water too, actually.”

  “Come on in. We’re still cooking, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  Jesse is just exactly like he is at the shop—a little slow-moving, quiet, engaging. He offers to help, and within minutes my mother has him tearing up slices of bread and they are chatting about gerrymandering and the Democrats’ chances for the 2008 election.

  By nightfall the rest of the gang—Josh and Jessica with Stephanie and Matt, and another of their friends, Jordan—has found us, after a bit of searching and a nasty incident involving a U-turn gone wrong on a patch of ice and a resultant churned-up mess of mud on a stranger’s front lawn. The lamb chili stew and some mulled wine are both bubbling away on the stove, filling the cottage with their aromas. Robert is behind the bench out on the stairwell, and the small house is so full of people that there is always someone to give him pats, until eventually, after enough drinks and the persuasions of a bunch of people who are not so keenly aware as everyone in my family is of the landlady’s “no pets” rule, and of, in general, all the dangerous ways there are to step on other people’s toes and take up more than his fair share of space in the world, he’s released to roam the house.

  The stew is delicious and potently spicy. It is a dish that Mom and I make often, though generally only for family or Texas expats, as most of my New York friends are sensitive to heat—but I knew this crowd could take it, and they can.

  “This is fantastic, Kay,” Jessica tells my mom, and the sentiment is echoed by a chorus of agreement so effusive as to fall on my family’s ears, we who are so chary of compliments, as obscurely insincere. I know that insincere is the last thing these people are, and, as exquisitely sensitive as I am to the tiny vibrations of mood and secret thought of every member of my family, most especially my mother, I can’t relax for knowing that she doesn’t quite see this. My brother, never a spurting fountain of conversation, has gone almost perfectly silent and, while attentive to the flow of talk, has that tiny half smile and the slightly shaded eyes that tell me he’s got his bullshit meter out and is scanning the beach, listening for that telltale quickening tick. My mother has a version of the same shadow in her eyes—they are so alike, my mother and brother—though she never stops talking. My mother is a woman who could converse with a goat, who is found universally charming even when she’s thinking mean thoughts, which she does from time to time. Her failure to respond to Josh and Jessica, Stephanie and Matt and Jordan, as instantly and warmly as I have, irritates me.

  But after all, these five are old friends; they bring their entire history into the house with them, a history that makes them ebullient together, loud and bursting with inside jokes and stories that then have to be explained. It makes the cottage feel more crowded than it is. As much as I’ve been looking forward to this meal, to introducing my butchering family to my blood kin, I can understand why the fit is a little awkward, why my polite, sardonic, retiring relatives are a little bowled over by this walking circus of a group. And on Christmas Eve, designated “family time.” It is making my mom prickly, I can feel it, though of course she would never betray that to guests. Later, when I ask her opinion of them, it will turn out, as I suspected, that Jesse is the only one she’s entirely one hundred percent on. Of Josh and Jessica she will say, “They’
re very nice. And I like anybody who likes you as much as they obviously do. They are a little, well, New Yorky.” She doesn’t even realize what it is that “New Yorky” implies. I will be embarrassed, and angry, and will start to argue, then let it slide because what’s the point, really, except that having my mother not love what and who I love, just as much as I love them, disturbs me more than it should.

  Shortly after D moves back to New York, before he’s gotten me into bed but after I’ve begun to suspect that that’s where it’s heading, if I’m not careful, my parents come to town for a visit. As usual, theater, expensive meals, and lots of booze are the prime activities on the menu. I’ve bought us tickets to see Mary-Louise Parker in a revival of Reckless, and I made us reservations for after at L’Impero. We wind up with an extra ticket. And so I invite D. Natural enough, I tell myself. Officially speaking, he is now Eric’s and my friend.

  Of course what I’m doing is presenting him for approval. And the jury is definitely out on that. Hell, he even sets my bullshit meter ticking, like he’s walking around with a scoop of yellowcake in his coat.

  “I can’t stand Scorsese.” (My mother often makes pronouncements like this. She can work herself into a rage at any mention of, say, Nicole Kidman—“She looks like a lab rat!”—for years on end, and then all of a sudden the actress will be good in something or get dumped by her insane cyborg first husband, and all of a sudden Mom will not only do a complete one-eighty, but will also claim to never have felt any way but positively about the lovely girl. It’s rather charming, actually, and something of a family joke, these violently held opinions, hilarious except when one finds oneself in a screaming match about Bill Murray or getting a frying pan thrown at one’s head over a fine point of evolutionary theory.)

  “Sure you can.”

  “No, I really hate him. Taxi Driver? Fucking Goodfellas? Overrated, macho crap.”

  “Did you see Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore?”

  Bull’s-eye.

  “Oh, I love that one. Kris when he was young.… That’s Scorsese?”

  And he’s got her. Later he’ll tell me that with one glance at her, and at my grizzled, tall, deeply Texan father, he instantly knew she would be a Kristofferson fan.

  As it turns out, I will never mention D’s name to her again; once he and I start sleeping together I won’t be able to trust myself to. But at this moment I can see he plays her as effortlessly as he plays me. My mother and I recognize that he’s both dangerous and silly, self-congratulatory and slightly irritating, but somehow, mysteriously, irresistible. Furtively, I’m happy—as if my mother is giving me her approval for what I’ve halfway decided to do. A year later I’ll find myself thrilled all over again when, after briefly meeting D’s mother, he says to me, “My mother loves you. ‘I really like that girl,’ she said.” It irks me that I, a thirty-three-year-old woman, still need a parental permission slip to go on my emotional field trips.

  So Christmas Day is better, because we can get back to our usual routines of being family together—cooking, sitting in corners reading, doing jigsaw puzzles, and sipping celebratory daytime alcohol. We open our presents in the morning after re-erecting the tree that blew down again in the night. Mom and Dad have laid out the stockings for Eric, my brother, and me along with the presents “Santa brought”—i.e., the ones they didn’t want to wrap—just as they have every year since I was born. By noon we’re hitting the eggnog again, and the boys are bowed over the puzzle while Mom and I season the roast and start to put together the side dishes.

  “Isn’t it pretty? I made this!” I say of my beautiful crown roast, like a kindergartener presenting a prized tempera paint masterpiece. I make a joke of being childishly proud to cover up being childishly proud.

  “It’s gorgeous, Julie. I’m amazed you did that.”

  “Oh, it’s not that hard.” Of course I am immensely pleased.

  The roast involves nothing more than several hours of cooking, some prodding with the meat thermometer I remembered to borrow from the shop, and a bit of anxiety. I’m worried about overcooking my beautiful creation, and I’m worried about undercooking it. I try to resist getting snippy, but when I go to the bathroom I make the mistake, the terrible, masochistic, impulsive, habitual mistake, of texting D. I wish him a merry Christmas, cinch myself tight into the cozy fantasy of his answering, of his thanking me for the beautiful scarf he will wear though he knows he shouldn’t because it is beautiful and his mother loves it and it goes so well with his favorite crimson winter cap. And then, though the pork smells fantastic, I can’t decide when it’s done. The bones are darkening and unctuous fat is pooling below the rack and the temperature seems right, but aren’t those juices running awfully pink? and Eric is looking at me with suspicion, picking up my strange vibrations, and I’m feeling my lungs being crushed, I’m panicking because I have this responsibility to everyone, to be happy and good and make a great crown roast and I really don’t know what call I should make on the damned thing, I’m going to ruin it, and suddenly there are tears, and my wrist cramps in a wrenching spasm and the meat thermometer slips, clattering, from my fingers.

  “Julie, what is wrong with you?” My mother, like everyone else, recognizes these tantrums, though she is mystified as to their cause.

  “I… I don’t know what to do about… about the… about all of it. I’m ruining Christmas dinner. I am a thirty-three-year-old butcher who can’t read a fucking meat thermometer.”

  Everyone has his own technique for dealing with these fits of mine.

  Mom snaps at me until I go from angry to teary and contrite, then strokes my hands and peers into my eyes soulfully. “I don’t know why you do this to yourself, but you always have.”

  Eric takes me by the shoulders, gazes at me with something very close to terror, and speaks with quiet intensity. “Julie. Calm down. Please. Calm. Down.”

  My brother rolls his eyes and walks away.

  But I like my dad’s way best. He grabs me in a headlock and rubs my hair with his big knuckles, the male version of my own. “Oh, Jules,” he says, giggling, “you’re so crazy.”

  That cheers me, somehow loosens the binds, and for a while I can breathe again, not worry about having to take care of everything and everyone, every secret thought and perceived vibration.

  I overcooked the roast. But my family doesn’t seem to notice, or at least they are very kind in their praise; sensitive to my feelings, no doubt, after my recent breakdown. And it is still delicious, even if the texture is off; while Fleisher’s pork is good enough that you don’t need to cook it so much, it is also, with its loads of lovely fat, better able to cope with overcooking than your standard supermarket variety. We eat far more than we need to, and then Mom slices up the pie we decided to go ahead and make and doles it out. Dad leans back in his chair and puts his napkin on his head, which is just something he does after big dinners; we don’t even think about it anymore. “Well, dears, this was all wonderful. I’m going to have to go vomit now.”

  “Yeah, sweetie, it was really good,” says Eric, squeezing my hand and leaning over to kiss me. I smile, and feel a sort of pang, think for a moment about my BlackBerry that has not buzzed all night, will never buzz again, not for the reasons I want it to. Why is it that Eric’s compliments, his approval and love, constantly offered, don’t seem so real to me as a single word, any small acknowledgment of my existence, from D? It’s unfair and cruel, and I kiss Eric more tenderly than I have in months, in private apology.

  That night, as I lie in bed gripping my wrist, I remember something I haven’t thought of in years. When I was a girl, I went to the same camp every summer for seven years. In all that time, it was my mother who wrote me letters, two or more a week, faithfully, sending along little care packages, books and games and cassette tapes. With one exception. On August 8, 1988, my father wrote the only letter he would send me in seven years. In the body of the letter he said he just couldn’t help himself, because of the date, 8/8/88.
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br />   I treasure that, the random, occasional ways that my father has always shown his affection. He hardly ever tells me that he loves me; he doesn’t need to. I know it. He doesn’t have to tell me of his love for anything precious inside me. Instead he proves I’m precious by every now and then bequeathing to me something he delights in. An observation, a favorite book, a movie, a bird sighting at the feeder outside his window. It fills me with warmth. I don’t want any more. I wouldn’t know what to do with more. I like my expressions of love meted out. Earned.

  My eyes widen in the darkness, and my breath catches. I turn my head to look at my BlackBerry, sitting by the side of the bed like a stone. I stare at it, feeling the dull throb in my wrist and waiting, until somewhere in the early hours I at last am asleep.

  9

  Too Close for Comfort Food

  EVERY STEER THAT comes into the shop arrives broken into eight pieces, called “primals.” The best way to picture these primals is to use your own body as a sort of guide. First, hang yourself by a hook upside down, gut yourself, take off your head, and cut yourself in half vertically. The next cut you’ll make—just at the wide fan of the shoulder blade—will take off one of your chuck shoulder primals. An arm, a shoulder, and half of your neck and chest. Next to come off are your rib sections—all but the very top of your rib cage. Then cut off your loin sections, making the cut right at your tailbone. What you’ve got left hanging is your two legs and buttocks. These are what are called “rounds.” Butchery-wise, I’ve pretty much got breaking down rounds, well, down.

  Chuck shoulders, though, are a whole other problem. This is the biggest primal on the animal, and full of funkily shaped bones, knobby vertebrae, which, unlike the loin and rib sections, have to be removed to get to the meat. And then there’s the blade bone, an epic battle just in itself. Someday, maybe, I hope, I will be able to break down a shoulder in fifteen minutes, and that is when I’ll know I’m a real butcher. For now it takes me, I shit you not, close to an hour and a half.