Blood, Bones & Butter

by Gabrielle Hamilton

  Michele—and I live for this kind of old-world genius—took a stack of large clean dish towels out of the drawer and opened each one, set a finished platter on it, and then by drawing the four corners of the towel in and knotting them he created a built-in carrying handle and a way of keeping the food wrapped to carry it to the car. No Saran, no foil, no Tupperware. Beautiful Salentino pottery wrapped in heavy, clean dish towels. This is one of those old-world anachronisms, like when your mother would hard-boil eggs in the morning and pop them in your coat pockets, piping hot, to keep your hands warm on winter mornings as you walked to school, and then you had part of your lunch ready in your pocket when they cooled by midday—that retains such beauty and efficiency and clever simple invention that you never let it go, even with the advent of plastic cling wrap and the microwave oven.

  While Michele—with cute “help” from two-year-old Marco—carried the many platters to the car and packed them neatly and snug in the trunk, I rinsed off, combed my hair, and put on my dress. As I was hastily heading through the house to get to where everyone was waiting in the driveway, turning off the lights in some of the rooms on my way, looking up at the purplish- and pink-streaked evening sky as I crossed through the impluvium, I saw the light on in the clean empty kitchen. I breezed to the doorway and reached in to turn off the light and there sat Alda, in her nightgown, at the kitchen table under the harsh light, eating a bowl of cold cereal with milk for dinner.

  An unspeakable sadness overwhelmed me. I felt inexplicably abandoned. I ran to get Michele. Alda’s in the kitchen, in her nightgown, pouring a bowl of cold cereal.

  “Your mom’s not coming?” I asked Michele, my eyes stinging. “What the fuck?”

  I couldn’t help welling up and needing to look away. Michele came inside with me and we went to see his mother, sitting happily and peacefully in the kitchen with her cereal.

  “Che c’è?” Michele asked, and his mom rattled on in cheerful, but exhausted, tones.

  Michele turned to me. “It’s too much for her. She doesn’t want to go—all those people.” At this I laughed out loud, as if “all those people” were some large group of tedious work colleagues from some other floor or department in your company, and not her own sons and daughters and grandchildren.

  And Alda reiterated, confirmed, from her chair, “E troppo per me. Troppo, Gabrielle. Vai. Vai—amore mio, divertiti.” Go. Go. Have fun. It’s too much for me.

  Suddenly I saw that she had aged. Alda was getting to be old, old like a grandmother, exhausted at the end of a day, ready to sleep alone, in the lumpy comfort of her horsehair bed, surrounded by her heavy old furniture. It’s got to be something, that kind of tired, where you are not simply tired from that day, but an accumulated fatigue from the past 29,000 days. Where even the dinner meal with a crowd seems like too much, and just a cold bowl of cereal at the kitchen table alone is what you can or are willing to muster. In the time it takes to switch off a kitchen light and notice a figure at the table, I saw that I was going to lose her, sooner than later.

  During the hottest hour of that day, while Leone slept and Marco went to the pool with Michele, I had sat with Alda, wordlessly shelling the black-eyed peas that I’d bought from the hundred-year-old farmer. They were so tender and young that their “black eyes” were actually pinkish purple and their bodies were still the palest green, not yet dried into a chalky, withered, tea-stained white. Some were as small as grains of Arborio rice. They reminded me of that amusement park memento where they paint your full name in black ink on a grain of rice and then put it in a tiny glass bottle of mineral oil and string it onto a necklace. We split the pods open with our thumbnails and slid each pea out into a colander set in between us. What I have loved about cooking my entire life, especially prep cooking, is the way that it keeps your hands occupied but your mind free to sort everything out. I have never once finished an eight-hour prep shift without something from my life—mundane or profound—sorted out. A new way to organize the walk-in. An opening and closing line for an essay. A way to prepare the zucchini. A likely reason I came to long for my green card marriage to an Italian man eleven years my senior to become something other, deeper than a piece of performance art, and why it never quite became that thing.

  Not two handfuls into the black-eyed peas, it started. What am I still doing here this many years later? What am I still doing in this marriage with someone I don’t know and who doesn’t know me? This was all so intoxicating my first year. The simply boiled vegetables, the meatlike eggplant parmigiana so charming that I wrote an essay about it for the New York Times my third year. And now this, my fifth year? My sixth?

  Oh yes, I remember, it’s only our fifth visit, but it’s our sixth year fooling around. There was a year when we were fighting excessively. And Michele canceled the trip after I’d already bought the tickets because he didn’t want to “subject his family” to our domestic frost. I said, “Really? You think the family won’t be able to handle our garden-variety marital shit? Can’t we just do one of the very few things we do well together and take the lousy trip to Italy this summer?”

  “No.”

  And that’s how we’ve been here together only five, and not six, times.

  I am sure he was right. We would have fought and I am prone to fighting big and cathartic. The marriage counselors in their tidy offices tried to teach us the therapeutic tune of the moment, a horrible song of constant restraint in which you may speak only of your own feelings—which I experienced as having a constantly full bladder but never being allowed to let it out, but for a tablespoon at a time—with nil relief. We tried it, the concessions, the conscientiously held tongues, the supposedly edifying reiteration of those catch-phrases that all ill-suited couples resort to, mantralike: Marriage is hard work. Marriage is a compromise. But I like to break the furniture, throttle the bastard’s neck, hurl epithets across the room and narrate the exaggerated story with myself as the innocent. All of which I will cheerfully apologize for in the morning, but not until I have drained all the poisons, every last drop. In hindsight, I can see how it’s good that we skipped that year’s annual July visit. Michele, by contrast, was raised to see anger as vulgar and unintelligent, so his, unexpressed, steadily seeped into our life like lead leeching into the public drinking water, which, I’ve heard, is what brought down Rome.

  I have no way, it occurs to me looking over at Alda while we shell peas, to canvass her to know how she would have felt if we’d come anyway, in spite of our marital discord. Over the years, I’ve picked up some Italian, but with her it doesn’t work. To her I remain incomprehensible. Michele says that he thinks the reason I have become relatively able to communicate with almost everyone else over the years but not with her is that she has become more and more deaf. So just as I’ve become vaguely conversational, she’s tuned me out. But I sense from the way she is about everything—so extremely patient, so good-natured, the way she addresses all of her children as “amore mio” when they enter the room or call on the telephone—that she would be able to metabolize anything we would have brought with us, no matter how flulike.

  We shell the rest of the peas and start tipping the beans. Alda offers me something to eat from a platter of something unidentifiable she’s had stowed away for two full July days in the dish cabinet. I was seduced that first year by her boiled vegetables. And totally enamored with her dish cabinet with corks and espresso plates and leftover fried eggplant all jumbled in with the mosquito coils and the bottle caps and the fifteen-year-old dried dead herbs in jars.

  But as she’s proferring that plate of something I believe to be fried béchamel that has sat, uncovered, next to and on top of the mismatched espresso cups, the bags of dried pasta, among the moth-infested polenta meal, and the jars full of soda bottle screw caps. I start to unravel a bit, without letting on. A little spider of disappointment crawls down my back as she’s handing me the plate of undercooked béchamel still tasting of raw flour, rolled in bread crumbs and fried. It�
��s her great-grandmother’s recipe. But I need a meal, a full meal, a hot meal. I need fresh food that hasn’t sat in the propane oven and then in the dish cabinet all day. I need a steak. I need something I can’t name. I need to take all of the shit off this table—this beautiful old granite-topped table—and put it where it belongs. I need to be a wicked American, a total Italian failure and put the ironing in the laundry room and the cookies in the cookie tin and the scrap paper in the scrap paper drawer and the diaper cream in the diaper bag and the keys in her key pouch in her purse and the batteries for the camera into the camera so that here on the kitchen table we can just shell black-eyed peas.

  “No, grazie,” I say, and continue tipping the beans. She returns the béchamel balls to the cabinet for day three.

  Of course it’s not her; she still holds my hand sometimes and cuts open sea urchins for lunch and fills my suitcase with linens and silver for the children as we pack to leave each year. Of course it’s Michele. He would never break a chair, but we will never throw a dinner party together in Leuca, I am sure of it. Over the years, he has never once raised his voice to me; rather, he has quietly and steadily, item by item, withheld the glitter, the motorcycle rides, the silk tie, the sandwiches, the spinning classes back-to-back, the sunset negronis, the cold apricot juice and hot coffee in the mornings, and now, like that long ago plate of courtship ravioli, I am left with the inedible contents of those gorgeous little packets. Undernourished.

  I should have known from those ravioli. Those many years ago when he was so heavily courting me, and he painstakingly made those ravioli, and presented them on a paper tray—so tender and translucent and beautiful. When we cooked them for family meal at the restaurant the next day, we took special care to use a slotted spoon to remove them from the water and we browned a little butter with a few leaves of rubbed sage and we all took our first bites and had to spit them out immediately they were so inedibly salty. Michele had failed to blanche the pancetta and additionally had overseasoned the ravioli filling and so those several dozen handmade gorgeous little beauties, which looked so enticing and appealing from the outside, went to waste as we opened them up and took out the filling and ate only the few bites we could salvage of the empty pasta alone with the butter and sage. I should have paid attention to that.

  19

  ON A SUNDAY AT THE BROOKLYN CHILDREN’S MUSEUM I STARTED to get hungry, just as Marco was beginning to fully appreciate the twelve types of drums that he was allowed and encouraged to bang on with different mallets and sticks. I said to Michele, who was holding Leone, now eight months old, “We’d better start to make our move. I’m going to need to eat soon.”

  People who know me well understand fully what I am saying when I suggest that I am working an appetite and that we’d best be making our move. This means it is time to hit the road before my blood sugar—what’s left of it—crashes to that point where I’m going to ruin your fucking day. My friends dive into their pockets, backpacks, and purses and proffer any peanut, energy bar, lint-covered M&M that they can lay their paws on, because friends are great like that. They can see what’s happening, from where they are standing, before you can. Even though I’d done a decent job of recognizing my hunger signs at their earliest appearance and duly notified the family that it would now be a good time to start “making our move,” making our move from the African Drum Room to the Volvo station wagon with the stroller, the umbrella, the boots, the coats retrieved from coat check, the bathroom pit stop, and two small children still in diapers buckled into their safety seats doesn’t happen as fast as my appetite comes on.

  But once they were all buckled in and I had the forest green wagon in reverse out of our parking spot, I had a burst of ambition. “Hey, Michele,” I asked, “wanna try for a real lunch? Like, with wine and silverware? Like, in a restaurant?” Like we used to do, which I didn’t say out loud.

  Michele looks at me for just the few seconds he needs to assess where I am in the hunger scheme of things—like a tree scientist who can tell exactly how old a redwood or an Adirondack spruce is by the rings in its flesh—and he takes a look at both kids, estimating them both close to falling into a nap, and says, “Sure.”

  We were still well out of the extreme danger zone. Chris Grill, the friendliest man on the planet who was Prune’s daytime sous chef for five solid years, knew the danger zone at every shade of yellow, orange, burnt umber, and into full Code Red, and he would gently suggest a peanut butter sandwich just from reading my tone at a kitchen meeting.

  But we’re still out of the danger zone, comfortably in a pale yellow mood and I’m driving, feeling a-okay. I catch Michele in the rearview mirror and say, “Hey, a real lunch. With wine and stuff. This sounds awesome!”

  You know, we don’t do this kind of thing anymore. We have become, to each other, all parents all the time. We eat plain buttered pasta at dinner every night, and even that we don’t eat together, because the way we have worked out our childcare and career schedule requires that one or the other of us is home alone with the kids while the other is enjoying his or her “late” night at work. We sleep in separate beds in separate rooms, each with a kid or more usually, me with two kids, him snoring alone for the few hours before his alarm goes off while its still dark, when he has to get up in order to get to and teach his eight a.m. lecture on the liver or the nervous system or the structure of the cell. We look at each other as units of labor to be bartered, traded, and assigned. If you take Wednesday night I can work that private dinner party, but then I’ll take Thursday night so you can go to that lab meeting, but Sunday I need to check on brunch for a few hours, okay?

  We are not really in these days seeing in each other much of a lunch partner. More like a relay race partner. This is kind of a tragedy, since there are only a few things we really have in common—food, an exorbitant love of and attachment to his mother, and the thing Italians I think are kind of known for—the luscious business—which we no longer very often have the energy or the inclination to seek out in each other. We still call Nonna on Saturdays. But aside from that, all the good stuff—the wine, the food, the deed—the stuff that cushions you against the central loneliness—has been triaged to the urgent and utterly consuming demands of parenting two children under the age of three while maintaining full-fledged careers.

  So, in some burst of energy, for me to suggest an actual lunch, braved with two children, gets us both … excited. But it’s about three in the afternoon on a Sunday in the dead of winter and we are deep in Brooklyn. Not the section of Brooklyn where white people push strollers around, but deep in the section of Brooklyn where we now live, Bed-Stuy, where there is no such casual Italian place where we could have a late three p.m. lunch with wine and cutlery and a tablecloth. Or if there is, we have not yet found it. Michele and I had just a few months earlier, upon our return from our Italian vacation, begun the experiment of living together, which we had, in spite of our seven years, two children, and a City Hall wedding, never done. But the kind of space we thought we would need, if we wanted the experiment to stand a chance, was only to be found—in a comfortably impermanent two-year sublet—far out in a section of Brooklyn that, while it had 3000-square-foot homes with generous backyards and many shuttable doors, did not have any restaurants. We could have gotten some excellent curried goat probably or some not excellent fried chicken for sure—there was a Bojangle’s or Popeye’s on every corner—but we didn’t really know our way around yet and besides, I wanted old times, nostalgia, our past. A tablecloth.

  I started to drive not knowing where I was heading, and at first the excitement and good cheer kept my hunger at bay; I knew something good, real, and adult was coming. I could wait.

  But there immediately appeared some signs of resistance to our brilliant European lunch idea. Every place I called on my cell phone in every neighborhood in Brooklyn where I could think of a place at which I wanted to eat all said the same thing: Not open until six p.m. for dinner service. I called a little-k
nown decent neighborhood place called Locanda Vini e Olio in Fort Greene and the excellent Al di La in Park Slope and was turned away, so I then even called Peter Luger, the famous steakhouse in Williamsburg, reasoning that I would happily sink into a burger and a gin martini, even if it was not exactly the broccoli rabe with pepperoncini and braised rabbit that I was craving. A burger would work. But the woman who answered just laughed me off the phone—No chance of a burger, honey! I start to get a little orange and less yellow; not yet red, no, but still, one ring closer to the danger zone. Michele’s got me in the rearview mirror, keeping an eye on me the way you might keep yourself aware of where the scorpion is in your room when you check into the hacienda you booked in Tijuana. You are game for an adventure, but best to know where the scorpion is at all times.

  Now we are heading toward the Slope and looking for Mary’s Fish Camp—I’ve decided I will, at this point, happily sink into an excellent lobster roll and a beer at a counter with plain paper table mats. I make the call and they also won’t reopen until six p.m. for dinner service. Brunch until three. Dinner at six, said the outgoing message. So now it’s done. I am tanked.

  And just at that moment, Leone started to cry his pitiful not-so-little falling asleep cry. I have never understood the heartless Ferber people who let their kids “cry it out.” If you are inclined to view your three-month-old infant’s cries as “manipulative,” as a means of discovering if she can get you to come into the room and pick her up “on command,” then you should rethink parenthood in the first place. I don’t think you are mature enough, frankly. An infant, to be sure, can’t haul herself downstairs and help herself to a glass of water, can’t call upon a good friend at two in the morning to discuss the finer points of her fears and anxieties. I feel compelled—involuntarily compelled—to pick up and try to comfort my child when I hear him wailing. My hormones shake like a passing tank when I hear children—children on an airplane not even my own—wailing in distress. I long to just pick them up and comfort the little guys. After all, they are crying. I’m going to assume they are crying for a good reason—even if it’s just an infant’s run-of-the-mill: Pick me up and hold me because I’m afraid of falling asleep because sleep is like death. For me, that is a good enough reason to pick up and hold my kid, so that he may feel—at a minimum—accompanied to his perceived death by someone who gives a shit.