By the time I pulled up beside Ned’s hotel, Audrey was asleep. “Be sure and say good-bye for me,” he said. I shook his hand and said, “If you’re ever in New Hampshire …” He picked up his briefcase and then closed the door very carefully, so as not as not to wake Aud.
The next morning I told Steve what had happened. Later that day (setting out for the grocery store with Charlie and Willy) I found, on the floor of the car, a package belonging to Ned, and called the hotel where he was staying. It turned out to be a crucial piece for the machine he was installing at MIT. I said I’d send it Express Mail that day. He wrote to me once, after that, saying it would be nice to get together in Boston, sometime when he came into town again. He had some records he’d like to tape for me.
I didn’t write back.
END OF ENDURANCE
Dressed for Snow
Tomato Sauce
Mom’s Problems
Flipping Out
Five-Mile Road Race
IT WAS THE MORNING after our first real snowfall of the year, and school had been called off. I didn’t go out to work, which meant I had an extra half hour to hang around in my nightgown, refilling cereal bowls. And then everyone wanted to go outside and investigate the snow.
Since this was the first storm of the season, we didn’t really have our winter routine down yet. I had to go up to the attic and dig out our collection of snowpants, to locate an old pair of Audrey’s for Charlie and an old pair of Charlie’s for Willy. I dumped a bag of mittens on the middle of the floor, in search of pairs, and found (what would the odds be for this to happen, I’d like to know?), among twenty-some mittens, not a single matched set. I untangled a clump of scarves and leg warmers, plus various sorts of novelty headgear: earmuffs in the shape of teddy bears, a hat with bumblebee stripes and antennae sticking up from either side, one of those total face masks, with holes cut out for the eyes, nostrils, and mouth. I found the remnants of a couple of mouse nests in there too, but I’m used to those.
Then it was time to get the children dressed. I weighed the situation for a moment and decided to start with Willy, because he’s young enough not to insist on helping me much, which can be a relief.
So I stripped him of his pajamas. I’m sure I cannot be the only parent in the world who’s observed the sudden and dramatic change in behavior a child undergoes the moment he’s liberated from clothing. Because they love being bare, the taking-off part tends to go smoothly. The only trouble is—once bare, the child disappears (with a whoop and, very possibly, his underpants on his head). Then you spend the next five minutes catching him.
But eventually I got Willy cornered and was able to proceed. I put on his turtleneck shirt (how many thousands of times have I said the words: “Where did your head go? There it is!”). I kissed his belly button, reached for his socks (not a matching pair, of course). But in the split second it took me to get his shoes, the socks were flung behind the refrigerator. And because Charlie was getting impatient to go outside by now, I reached for another pair of socks instead of fishing around for the lost ones.
Overalls. And then the ritual in which I give Willy a penny for his pocket. This morning, because I was harried and rushing, I didn’t (as I usually do) hunt for a shiny one, and I pushed his toes into his boots a little more roughly than I might. He looked faintly puzzled, but unshakably jovial still. I worked his thumbs into the thumb pockets of his mittens. He flung them off. I tied his hat under his chin. He shrieked, “No hat.” I gave up and sent him out the door.
Then it was Charlie’s turn, and we started the whole procedure again. I pulled his sock on (to hurry things up a bit) and he pulled it off and then spent five minutes lining the seams up along his toes. After hunting down a shoelace—he took one out yesterday to make a lasso for GI Joe—I laced up his boots. But he could still feel the seam of his socks against his toes. The boots had to come off. We tried again.
Meanwhile I heard Willy outside, crying. He’d fallen down in the snow, of course. His hands were frozen. As I raced outside (barefoot) to pick him up and blow on his fingers, inside I could hear Charlie wailing, “You forgot me!”
Not likely. I made sure he went to the bathroom before putting on his snow pants. Then I zipped up his jacket (only, he has to do it. I forgot). At last I pulled his hat over his ears and launched him out the door to join his brother.
Then I had, I figured, about three minutes in which to get dressed before some disaster or other left one of the children crying in a heap of snow. I raced for my own winter socks and wool pants, sweaters, jacket, mittens, hat. I was lacing up my second boot (using garbage-bag twist ties, because it appeared that someone had absconded with my shoelace too) just as the first wail started up.
Outside, my two younger children stood stiffly (too tightly bundled for any sudden movements) while I dusted off the sled and sat Willy down. He demanded his bathrobe. Charlie munched on a piece of snow with a faint yellowish tinge to it. A few feet away, our dog, Ron, began to chew on Willy’s discarded mitten.
“Let’s make a fort,” I said cheerily.
“I think I’m ready for a little snack,” said Charlie, and Audrey agreed that hot chocolate might be nice, with an island of vanilla ice cream floating on top.
It was half past nine. It had taken us just under an hour to get dressed. We had been outdoors exactly eight minutes.
So we piled back into the kitchen and reversed the whole process, right down to the underwear, because everybody’s clothes had gotten wet in spite of the snow pants, and Willy needed a change.
I lifted him onto the changing table, sighing heavily, thinking what a long winter this would be. He pulled off the hat I’d forgotten to take off and did a little dance with it. He touched the top of his head to the pad on the changing table and looked through his legs at me, grinning. I unfastened the diaper tapes—still not amused.
You always open a diaper a little cautiously, until you know how major the clean-up operation is going to be. This time, I could tell, my son was merely wet.
But there was one other thing I could see, as I started to toss the wet diaper away: a copper penny. It landed neatly in my palm, like a tip. And I decided not to be mad after all.
It had been a lousy season for tomatoes. Too dry at first, and then, just at the point when they’re all that pale shade of orange, and in need of two or three hot days to ripen, what we got instead were cool, rainy days and downright chilly nights. The sort of weather that makes a person feel like canning tomatoes. Only there weren’t any around.
So I had been calling farm stands everywhere within a twenty-mile radius, in search of canning tomatoes. Just when I was about ready to give up, I got the word that a produce market a half-hour’s drive away had three bushels of tomatoes at a good price, if I could pick them up that night. Naturally I said yes.
In truth, it was the worst possible moment for three bushels of tomatoes to come my way. The next morning was Audrey’s first day in second grade, the day after that was Charlie’s registration at preschool. And I still had to hem up one size seven miniskirt and get Charlie’s health forms filled out, along with borrowing my friend Laurie’s pressure cooker and dropping off some overdue library books and getting Willy to the doctor and me to the chiropractor and somewhere in there attending to the stacks of work piled up on my desk after our week’s vacation at the beach. Steve had been working on a big job that got him home late and tired every night. And on top of everything else, I had to go into the city the next morning to work on an article.
A person might ask (as Steve did) why it was so important to me to can all those tomatoes, all that spaghetti sauce. True enough, the spaghetti sauce I make is great: all fresh vegetables, and no paste, simmered on the stove all of one night and the next day. But, Steve pointed out, stopping on his way to bed around twelve-thirty to watch me still standing at the kitchen counter chopping onions, with tears streaming down my face, something has to give. A woman with a full-time job and young children si
mply can’t do everything mothers used to do when they didn’t have full-time paid jobs. (Not that we don’t try.)
In fact, I think it’s because I’m not always home, not always free to read books to my children and give them kisses, that this sauce of mine seems so important. I love the way my house smells when my sauce is simmering. I love the look of all those jars lined up on the pantry shelves. And on cold afternoons in December, when it’s already nearly dark by the time I come in after my day’s work, I love being able to take down a jar of my spaghetti sauce and feed my family a dinner just as good as anything I could have come up with if I’d been in my kitchen all day. When I see the plate of steaming spaghetti on the table, I feel (there is no way to say this without sounding corny, I guess) that I’m offering up tangible proof of love. No one in her right mind would spend all these hours making sauce from scratch just to save money—that’s for sure.
Well, the night I got the tomatoes I set them on the back porch, with the plan that I’d get to them over the next few days. Nights, actually: after the children were in bed. The next morning, at seven-thirty, I drove Audrey to her first day of school. She kissed me a little distractedly and then ran off to compare jelly bracelets with other second-grade girls. Though few children wept, many mothers looked a little teary. I didn’t cry, but I found an excuse to walk past the window of her classroom to catch a fleeting glimpse.
Then I drove off to my day’s work. I put in long hours. Got a bad headache. And because I knew Steve would be tired from watching the boys all day (we were between babysitters), I picked up a pizza on my way home. I walked in the porch door, vaguely noticing that the floor had been mopped and thinking how thoughtful it was for Steve to do that.
Then Audrey ran out to meet me, breathless. “Tell me all about school,” I said, giving her a hug. “Oh, that,” she said. “Fine. But listen. That’s not what I wanted to tell you.”
It seems that her younger brothers had been getting a little wild, throwing cottage cheese. So Steve put them out on the porch with orders to play outside for a while. Audrey, meanwhile, was upstairs in her room, playing with her Glamour Gals ocean liner. Steve stretched out on the sofa with the current issue of Sports Illustrated and, evidently, fell asleep.
Suddenly, Audrey said, she heard Charlie yelling something about potatoes, which is what he calls tomatoes. “I thought I’d better investigate,” she said.
Just then Steve woke up, and the two of them opened the door to the porch. Where they found every single one of my three bushels of tomatoes spilled out on the floor, and, as Audrey tells it, “totally smushed.”
There were tomatoes on the porch screens. Several tomatoes thrown against the porch door. One tomato on top of Willy’s head, with the juice dripping down his face. Willy, of course, was happy as a clam.
So Steve gave Charlie a spanking and sent him to his room. He put the salvageable tomatoes back into the boxes and mopped the floor. He put Willy in the tub and gave him a shampoo. Audrey went back to playing Glamour Gals. Right about then I came home.
“Look on the bright side,” said Audrey, surveying the piles of oozing tomatoes. “You have to smush ’em up to make spaghetti sauce anyway.”
The only problem was, now I had the task of cooking up, at once, before rot set in, a quantity of sauce I had meant to work on gradually over the next week or so.
Still, I managed. I put the smashed tomatoes through an incredible new machine my friend Molly brought over, which sends skins and seeds out one spigot and juice out the other. I boiled down my tomato juice to the correct, meaty consistency. I chopped up about ten pounds of celery, onions, and carrots, and added them to the tomato juice.
After I cooked that, I put the whole thing—in batches—through my Cuisinart and back on the stove, where I poured in the olive oil, heated it a little more, and tasted it one more time, to confirm that this was, in fact, the most delicious tomato sauce I’d ever tasted. And then I sterilized my quart canning jars and lids, heated up a big potful of water, poured the sauce into the jars, cleaned the rims, screwed on the seals, and set them into their boiling water bath as tenderly as any mother would tuck her child into bed.
Somewhere around two A.M. a couple of days later, I put my twenty-fourth quart of spaghetti sauce on the pantry shelf—exhausted (and smelling strongly of tomato), but happy. Estimating conservative sauce consumption at the rate of a quart a week, I figured we had enough spaghetti sauce to get us through to March. A new bushel of tomatoes, awaiting the pot, sat on the porch (on a high shelf, this time, out of my sons’ reach).
That’s how things stood last Thursday when I got the call from Molly—a woman who, having lived without electricity or running water at a commune in Tennessee, used to put up about five hundred quarts of vegetables every year to feed her family At various times I have turned to Molly for sage advice on nearly every aspect of my life, canning being one.
“I have bad news about your tomato sauce,” Molly began. “Remember when I told you to can it, instead of using the pressure cooker? Remember when I explained to you that tomatoes are a high-acid fruit, so there’s no problem with botulism?” Yes, I said, my heart sinking.
“Well,” she continued, “that’s true. But last night, just as I was falling asleep, I suddenly flashed on that bowl full of chopped carrots and celery and onions I saw sitting on your counter the other day when I came over with the food mill. And it came to me: Carrots are a low-acid food. Carrots should go in the pressure cooker.”
In other words, those twenty-four quarts of sauce, with their beautiful, hand-lettered labels, those two dozen jars that I stood admiring on my pantry shelves for about five minutes the night before (thinking that, come what may, my family would be well fed this winter), were not really safe after all. Not downright dangerous, just iffy. Which, in the world of canning, is maybe the worst way to be.
So I called the county extension service, and asked (like someone at the scene of an accident, calling out, “Is there a doctor in the house?”) whether the home economist was in. Which one? they asked. “Canning problems,” I said glumly.
She came on the line, sounding businesslike rather than motherly. “Your sauce might be all right,” she said. “But then again, it might not. The only way to be sure is to take off the lids, get all new lids, and put the whole batch through a pressure cooker. Fifteen minutes, at twenty-five pounds of pressure.” The only problem with that was that Laurie’s pressure cooker only went up to fifteen pounds.
Of course I called her right away.
Now, Laurie is another of those friends I turn to about every kind of problem from my marriage to split ends. She was there when I thought our entire family had head lice (but we didn’t). She was there when the brake pedal in our car broke off on an expressway in heavy traffic. (Laurie got down on the floor and worked the brakes manually.) She was there at the birth of our third child. As a matter of fact, talking me calmly through the pressure-cooking process while I carried out her instructions at the other end, she sounded, again, a little like an auxiliary birth coach.
She went over the part about cleaning the jar rims, measuring the water into the pot, putting on the little gadget called the petcock, with the correct pressure setting (fifteen minutes at ten pounds of pressure would be fine, she said). “Now just turn the water on to boil,” she said, “and in about fifteen minutes, when the petcock starts to click, turn it down until the intervals between clicks are around fifteen seconds apart.”
So I hung up and I waited. Gradually the pressure cooker began to shake. The petcock rattled. The whole thing looked like a bomb ready to go off. But there were no ticks.
Forty-five minutes later, with no sign of ticking yet, I panicked. I figured I must’ve missed something. I figured the water must have evaporated by now. I figured the pot must be ready to explode. So I turned it off.
I think that’s when things really started to go downhill. Now I really didn’t know where I stood: no ticks on my petcock, no twenty-
five-pound pressure gauge. Then I ran out of new canning lids, and had to drive into town. Then I got back, and could no longer tell which jars I’d canned and which I’d pressure cooked. I also knew there were some jars on the shelf (from my most recent batch of sauce) that had been neither cooked nor pressure cooked, but it was about ten o’clock at night, and I was exhausted and discouraged, and I figured I could deal better with the whole thing next morning.
But the next morning, when I reached for a jar to put into the pressure cooker, the lid suddenly popped off, shooting spaghetti sauce clear to the ceiling. Covering me, covering my just-washed hair and my just-washed floor, splattering drips of tomato into the children’s Kix and my coffee.
“Why don’t you just freeze what’s left?” suggested Laurie. “Then again, if it’s bad, freezing might not be enough.”
“Why don’t you just make sauce without carrots,” said Molly, telling me a comforting story about the time she made fifty quarts of pickles that all turned out mushy. Then there was the moldy apple butter. …
“I bet that stuff you just canned is really okay,” said Laurie. “Tomatoes are acid, after all.”
“True,” I responded, my hopes soaring.
“Then again,” she added, “there are those carrots. … Maybe you’d better just throw it all out.”
“Try more pressure cooking,” said Molly. “Maybe you just didn’t give the petcock enough time to start ticking.”
“Freeze it,” urged Laurie. “That’s probably good enough.”
“Are you prepared to live with the responsibility of my entire family’s death by botulism if it turns out you’re wrong?” I asked her.
She considered this for a moment. “Why don’t you just toss it all on the compost pile, then,” she suggested, “and chalk the whole thing up to a fantastic learning experience?”
Domestic Affairs Page 19
