Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

by Gabrielle Hamilton

  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.

  Michele doesn’t feel as I do, unfortunately. So there I am, stuck in the driver’s seat driving, cell-phoning, and having a blood sugar crisis while my eight-month-old expresses his perfectly good reasons for wanting comfort to his totally unpersuaded father, who is able, somehow, to sit through the tears completely nonplussed, while giving me friendly suggestions about some $8.99 brunch place he used to eat at with his old girlfriend twenty years ago. “And you get a frrrree mimosa,” he tells me from the backseat.

  Meanwhile, I don’t eat $8.99 brunch with a free mimosa. I have rules. Standards.

  I do not get vague or generic appetite, which will be satisfied, more or less, with just anything that is handy. I will skip a meal rather than eat the corner joint’s interpretation of eggs Benedict with spinach, button mushrooms, and “blood orange” hollandaise sauce. I don’t eat that kind of shit. Michele, from the backseat, kept saying, “I rrrreeeeemember a place, verrrrry good brrrrunch, up here on the left.” But when we approach and I see the chalkboard on the sidewalk advertising free mimosa, I speed up and drive on.

  Free mimosa is the kind of signal I rely on to stay away from a place. Why is the mimosa free? What is wrong with a place that it needs to provide the customer with an incentive to eat the food? On the other hand, things are now kind of urgent and a mimosa would really soothe and refresh. I’m saying things I don’t mean, that I will later regret, and that Marco is sure to repeat as soon as he can think up a way to work them into a sentence. I’m saying things like: Maybe if I just order poached eggs and toast it won’t be so bad up here at The Red Potato Bistro.

  Four o’clock or so is a diner’s wasteland. Nothing’s open, it’s between services, and those few places that do stay open continuously go through shift change so you spend countless minutes being ignored while the bartender restocks his wine for the evening service and a busboy resets tables and you can hear a dishwasher on the intercom in the kitchen yelling down to the cooks: Here is a ticket! Here is a ticket! But this is my favorite time of day to eat, to eat well, to eat long luxurious meals with high-end wines. I have eaten staff meal in restaurants at odd hours my whole life and now I am geared to have my main meal at four-thirty. It’s the new eight-thirty as far as I’m concerned. Every week or so an outraged woman or somebody’s grim personal assistant trying to get an eight-thirty reservation at Prune scoffs at our offer of six p.m., which we more generally have available, saying: Who eats at six o’clock? Amateurs! Amateurs eat at six!

  It may be amateur, but a restaurant at an early hour is my kind of joint. Maybe especially with Michele, as we were always just leaving the beach around then and we would ride the motorcycle to Astoria and have a late lunch of grilled fish, octopus, skordalia, and a bottle of retsina. Or at four o’clock, we were scratching at the door of Bar Veloce for two sweet salami tramezzini and two hot speck panini and a bottle of gruner veltliner. After, there was still time for an eight o’clock movie. This was all during courtship, though, and I think my attachment to a four o’clock lunch is about clinging to a past, a deep nostalgia for a time when we rode motorcycles, drank negronis, and smoked cigarettes.

  But here we are in a Volvo station wagon fitted with not one but two child seats, the motorcycles long ago sold or stolen, and our responsibilities commensurately graver than they’ve ever previously been. I have worked very late the previous night and didn’t get home until three in the morning. I was awoken by the littler one, Leone, at seven-thirty, a mere four hours after I had put my head down on the pillow. I’ve had coffee but no breakfast, and now we are in trouble. Code Red. Michele—who eats indiscriminately and in his good-natured Italian way thinks everything is “nice” and “good”—tries to get me to pull over and park and go to one of the pretentious restaurants on Smith Street, that minor-league stretch of Brooklyn that always disappoints—and I just can’t. I would rather starve and kill my children—Medea-like—than eat the truffle oil omelette with chorizo “foam” and piquillo peppers at Soleil or Blue Bird or whatever those restaurants are called on that stretch. And that’s where we find ourselves, at that particular impasse—Michele trying to get me fed and me putting my foot down, with two whining children in the backseat. I am shouting shit into the backseat of the wagon that I’m not proud of and that would make it hard for anyone, anyone, to be attracted to me if they heard me shouting at them, when suddenly Michele tells me to pull over at the bus stop and turn on the hazards.

  “What?” I say.

  “Go,” he says, pointing. We are in front of a pork store on Fifth Avenue.

  As soon as I get in the door I can smell that it’s a good one. It’s a knockout. The smell of cured Italian meats and scamorza and dried oregano hits me as soon as I enter, and immediately I feel warm fluid resume its course through my spine and my veins and I realize I am in fact made of blood, warm blood, and I can’t believe how perfect Michele can be. He has a way, frequently, of letting a crisis build to its peak and then just casually dropping in front of you exactly what you want and need when you most want and need it. The meat cases are eight feet long and packed and there are three of them. I’ve thrown on the hazards, left the kids howling, and their dad coping in the backseat and run into this old-school place where big Italian-American guys in flannel shirts under their long white coats make huge sandwiches with mortadella, soppressatta, prosciutto, salami, capicola, and the works of marinated peppers, mozzarella, and pitted, chopped olives. They use good olive oil and good semolina rolls. I’m watching the guy slice the meat to order. I’ve got my eye peeled out of one corner for a traffic cop and out of the other for the meat slicer man to get on with it already with his artisanal, neighborly Italian manner. He’s taking the customers one at a time, making light neighborhood conversation. I smile, keeping quite still while in my mind an unkind monologue runs, until at last, at last, the guy hands over three meat-packed sandwiches that weigh so much my bood sugar creeps back to normal just from happily holding them. I’m back in the car in a heartbeat. Hazards flashing. And doling out sandwiches. I pass the mozzarella and prosciutto one into the backseat, while I start wolfing my mortadella. Michele asks if I got anything to drink and I’m chagrined; I feel like an ass. I didn’t even think about something to drink.

  “Should I go?” he asks.

  I say, “Whatever, a water or something,” as he hoists himself out of the backseat, climbs over the car seat with Leone sleeping in it—how did he manage that?—and stumbles out the car door. He spills out onto the sidewalk and disappears into a corner store for a few minutes. I don’t even pay attention. I am shoving meat sandwich into my face and giving scraps to Marco as fast as I can.

  Michele returns. He climbs, awkwardly, back into his spot in the backseat between the two car seats. The B63 bus pull
s up alongside us, forced away from the curb and the bus stop by my double-parking. The bus spits out its hydraulic steam, lowers, and the passengers walk around the back of the Volvo and make it onto the bus. Michele presses into my hand an ice-cold beer in a can. And we sit there for a full leisurely, inappropriate twenty-five minutes, hazards blinking, forcing the bus and its patrons to accommodate us, while we eat meat sandwiches and drink beers at four o’clock in the afternoon. While the elderly and infirm struggle to get on the bus, I’ve never been happier. Leone is asleep, his fatigue finally trumping his fear of death, Marco is buried quietly in his own bits of sandwich, and Michele and I, with no silverware and only our open paper wrappers on our laps, sit double-parked with the hazards blinking in a public bus stop, grinning while eating Italian sandwiches and drinking beer, and I would swear to all that I’ve never met a better guy than this one that I’ve been cursing and loathing for the past bloody hour, and the past five years.

  20

  WE WERE IN THE CAR SERVICE MINIVAN, MICHELE AND I AND our two kids, and I was sitting in the broken seat, trying to balance without tipping back as we headed to the airport. Somehow we had survived another winter and were headed out for our one shared pleasure, the annual vacation in Italy. The driver had the radio on blaring mariachi as well as his dispatch radio making loud, static, ocean storm noises. He hung a Honduran flag from his rearview mirror along with a “strawberry” pine tree air freshener that poisoned the fresh July afternoon air blowing in the open windows.

  In my handbag, I had our expensive tickets to Italy. Five thousand dollars’ worth of tickets now that each kid is too big to fly free and requires his own seat.

  We were riding to the airport in happy isolation; a kid in each lap, the Honduran driver going too fast for me. I was feeling close to Michele. The bags all packed with fresh and clean clothes neatly folded. Full bottles of toiletries neatly arranged in Ziploc bags. Swimsuits bundled in with sweatshirts and cotton T-shirts. Three weeks of vacation now ours! Our driver blew through Bed-Stuy, Bushwick, Brownsville, then East New York. People sat on their stoops, hung heavily from windows of tenement buildings, cooked little makeshift barbeques on their fire escapes. I thought of how far from this we would soon be, stomping through the olive tree orchard with the naked kids in nothing but sandals, and eating Michele’s mother’s delicious boiled zucchini, her buttery olive oil, her harsh but addictive homemade vinegar.

  Michele and I can and do spend the entire year isolated from and unknown to each other, but as soon as we get in that car on the way to the airport, we smile at each other with a kind of bond, and we are unified—however briefly—by a nostalgia for the moment about to come. July in Italy.

  “Happy?” I ask. He smiles as if guilty of something but only says, “Heh,” a kind of grunt with raised eyebrows, which I now know means “abbastanza,” good enough, the highest degree of happiness he can allow himself to experience. Italians are suspicious of American exuberance.

  We ride a bit more in silence. The kids are babbling some crap between them, Leone particularly excited about all the trees as we pass the Jackie Robinson Parkway. “Tseees! Tsees! Tsees!” he points and yells. The sun is turning red and heavily slanted. Our evening flight to three full weeks of Italian vacation as near as night. Michele says, “I was theeenking …” and then pauses.

  I don’t look at him but I am fully attentive, expectant. It never ever ends how I wish it would, how I fantasize it will, but I nonetheless always imagine the rest of these started sentences. Ever since I understood that I was actually married, I have hoped for it to be everything I think a real marriage should be, an intimacy of the highest order. In the few moments between the beginning and end of the sentence, “I was theeenking …” I have readied myself, unnecessarily, for luminous pearls of his inner life, some word from his heart, some revelation of what he thinks about or fears or loves or agonizes over, which never arrives. Nonetheless, hope dies hard, and I still become alert in that brief pause in the Honduran minivan, and I imagine the sentence ending with him, finally saying “I was theeenking about hosting a dinner party this year in Leuca.” But as we hit the Belt Parkway, he finishes instead with this: “Theee newa iPhonea ees only two hundred ninety-nine dollarrrrz!”

  In all of the years we have spent together, all of the eight-hour car rides, the hours waiting together at airports, in transatlantic flight, in hospital rooms, the long silent hours at night when the kids are asleep and we are stuck in the same room together, all of the winter beaches we have sat on looking out at the oceans, he has never, incredibly, incomprehensibly, said anything important to me.

  When he said he was thinking about the new iPhone, in spite of having a rather new iPhone right now this very moment already in his pocket, I dissolved irrevocably. I lost the first fifteen days of my vacation with that iPhone comment. I lost my vacation to a seething, hot black rage that crawled up the back of my neck and covered my head and nose and mouth until I was suffocated by it and could barely breathe and certainly could not speak or make eye contact. It’s true; I tend to run a little hot.

  And that is how I lost fifteen of my sorely needed, hard-earned vacation days.

  And how I robbed him of his.

  I became speechless and impenetrable for fifteen days. He couldn’t reach me, and I couldn’t be reached, and that ended our vacation before it even got off the ground. You never know when this kind of internal defeat is going to overcome you.

  Once I saw an older woman fall down on the subway as the train lurched out of the station, and she landed on her ass. We all jumped to her aid, distressed to see this older, tired, heavy woman brought down by the careless, jerky transit driver. But she ignored us and our efforts to recover her as quickly as possible to an invulnerable, collected, and standing position. She waved away our eager grapplings to get her up out of this humiliating and embarrassing position. She remained flat on her ass on the dirty floor of the train, looking deeply exhausted, and she sat that way, fully present in her defeat, until we came to a halt at the next stop and she quietly and methodically lifted herself back up and took a seat on the bench.

  And I swam in it, too, on this particular day unable to any longer pretend that our bags of neatly packed fresh clean clothes and swimsuits were a symbol of anything greater, of any kind of fresh start and clean slate. I relished my defeat. I said to myself: I am no match for you, anger and fatigue and loneliness. I am able to do only what I am able to do and I cannot nurse the infants, mother the toddlers, last two whole years without deep sleep, work one of the surgeon general’s most stressful jobs, live in an unhappy marriage, carry the bulk of the finances, and suffer the idea of a new technology toy for you, Husband, and so today, today, is the day I have run out of American cando spirit and today, I am not making or faking July in Italy with my Italian husband.

  Our ritual meal of Wok Express fast-food Chinese at the airport before we will not see anything approximating Asian food—even such as this bullshit chicken broccoli on a Styrofoam plate—for twenty-one days was shared perfunctorily and, worst of all, politely. We shared the beer on the rocks with icy routine, while harnessing the two squirming high-strung kids.

  Beer on ice, before nine p.m., is something for us. It’s almost a conversation for us. Beer on ice, for example, does not happen, like, at three o’clock on a Tuesday between lunch and dinner service at the restaurant with only an hour to get the kiddy dinner rolling and the tubby ready, before heading back to work. When Michele shows up with two beers and two glasses of ice it says, suggestively, that We Have Time. Time to sit for a minute. Time to sleep off the alcohol, should we feel it. Time to lie down with each other. And we drank the beer on ice, in Terminal C, as usual, as we had every year before our flight. But it was not with a grinning, quiet excitement shimmering with sexual promise, freedom, youth, all the things that a couple of beers makes us remember.

  “Beer?” he asks, proferring one as usual because he has not yet caught on that I have dropped o
ut.

  “Yes, please. Thank you.”

  When I am polite with Michele is when we are at our deadliest. When he is nothing more to me than a one-off customer at my restaurant where my professional courtesy is required. When I don’t even have the warmth and friendliness I can easily conjure for a beloved regular at the restaurant. When I am “Yes, please,” and “No, thank you” is when we are dead in the water.

  I’ve grown ambivalent about this annual trip to Italy as it is. Perhaps this is in direct proportion to questions I have about my continued stamina for the marriage itself. As early summer arrives and everyone’s casual conversation turns to vacation—the hairdresser, the meat man, the exterminator—all ask: “Are you going to get away this summer? Any plans?”

  And I answer matter-of-factly now, without animation, “Yup. I am going to Italy for the month of July. We go every year. My husband is Italian and we go every year to his home and his family in Italy.”

  And the meat man, the hairdresser, the exterminator light up as if plugged in. Eyes widen with delight and envy. Huge smiles. They burst as I did the very first time I went.

  Italy! Oh my God! That’s fantastic! Three weeks in Italy!

  While I still share much of this delight, after the first few years it’s no longer an unmitigated joy. I want to have seen much of the world before I bite the dust. I want to know more of Italy than the apartment in Rome and the crumbling old house in Puglia. I want to be with friends or people I can really talk to on my twenty-one days of vacation. To take the same one vacation every year, with someone I don’t get along that well with, while much of the rest of the world remains unexplored and unknown by us, makes me a little less joyful than the exterminator. That we also only go from the house to the same beach or to the same swimming pool every day while we’re in Puglia, makes me less electrified than the meat man. I like to be anchored by routine, not shackled by it. What I love about Italians is exactly what I also don’t love: the incredible fastening down of routine, tradition, the nearly pathological preservation of habit. I love that they haven’t torn down the ruins to make a highway, that the pasta is still made the same way, that certain foods are eaten only in certain places in certain preparations—Trippa Milanese is always Milanese and Trippa alla Romana is always alla Romana—this is so reliable and rich and fascinating. This is how countries older than ours become so rich in tradition. Repetition. Centuries of repetition. But it’s that very repetition that makes my heart sing a little wanly when I think of my one vacation a year. Shouldn’t we be on a houseboat on the Mekong River delta this year? Eating raw octopus head in Tokyo? Strolling the boulevards of Buenos Aires? Bicycling the coast of Portugal?