Up For Renewal

by Cathy Alter

  I tried to channel my inner Dr. Oskar. “This dream is not about sex,” I heard him say. “This is about Karl’s intimacy with his sister.” Witnessing this closeness at dinner, quite literally catching them in the act, sparked some pretty painful memories in me. Ones of loss, of rejection, and of always sensing that I was different, an outsider, a sensitive mystery even to members of my own family.

  Macau was a true respite. We spent the day visiting temples, taking photos of each other in front of every stone dragon on the island, and wandering a maze of crooked streets bursting with pink and green buildings, reminders of the island’s Portuguese past. The day was a do-over of the previous evening. But even though Karl had forgiven me for my bout of insecurity (“My sister?!” he kept asking, baffled by the limitlessness of my imagination), his mother was still stewing about our decision to go to Macau instead of accompanying her to lunch with the eighty-nine-year-old aunt.

  Karl and I got the cold shoulder from Joy on the subway to the cemetery. After rooting around in her purse for some imagined necessity, she finally addressed Karl. “Gay wants to know how I could look at myself in the mirror and be okay with having such disrespectful children.”

  Karl chose to ignore this comment. We were in a no-win situation. I knew this Macau trip was our watershed moment and would soon be brought up again and again as evidence for Karl’s failure to be the devoted son. I wished I could slip her the essay from O magazine by Joyce Carol Oates. In “Love, Loss, and Transformation,” Oates wrote movingly about the vulnerable side of love. “The deepest wounds in my emotional life,” began Oates, “have come as a consequence of the loss of people I’ve loved.” But, she continued, it was what you did with that loss that mattered. “I have been deeply impressed by the reinventions of personality and destiny among individuals whom I’ve known for years as they entered middle age,” Oates confessed. “Most, but not all, are women whose children are grown and have moved away.” Their empty nests, however, gave way, wrote Oates, “to the abiding values of friendship: love for friends and relatives.”

  As we meandered through the cemetery, I wondered if Joy would ever rediscover those same values and see others as potential enhancements to her life, rather than as proven lessons in failure.

  “Do you know where your mother is?” asked Karl. The cemetery looked more like a concrete amphitheater whose seats were filled by gravestones most of which displayed laminated black-and-white photos of the deceased in younger days. The effect was a bit like standing in a giant high school gymnasium before the big game.

  “I think she’s over here,” said Joy, climbing up another level. “Yes, she’s right here.”

  I was startled to see that the photo on the tombstone looked so much like the woman standing next to me. The smile, the tilt of the head, the graceful neck. “She was so beautiful,” I told Joy.

  “Okay,” said Joy. “Let me do my thing.”

  Karl and I watched as Joy bowed deeply in front of her mother, again and again. Then she stood and looked at the photo of her mother. I had been aware of so many of Joy’s losses, but here I was actually seeing it. Karl saw it, too, and joined his mother, bowing in the same way, the same number of times. Then he put his hands on her shoulders, nodded, and drew her into a long embrace.

  I did not join them, not because I thought that I wasn’t wanted, but because I knew I didn’t belong. There was nothing wrong with finally knowing my place.

  As we left the grounds, Joy looked back over her shoulder. “Would you believe that I haven’t been able to cry for sixty years?” She dabbed her eyes for a moment and looked as if she might even blow her nose. “What do you think took me so long?”

  Karl sat next to his mother on the subway back to Hong Kong, occasionally sliding his arm around her and patting her on the shoulder. When we passed by the stop for Kowloon, Joy looked across the aisle at me and said, “This is the wedding dress district.”

  I had been toying with the idea of wearing a traditional cheongsam, thinking that would be a nice nod to Karl’s culture. But I still hadn’t ruled out the idea of Badgley Mischka couture either.

  “Do you plan on wearing white?” Joy asked.

  “What are you inferring?” I smiled, thinking she was taking a dig at my misspent virginity. But then I realized that to her, white was the color of death.

  I, however, happened to disagree. To me, white, if I choose to wear it, was the color of just that—my choice. Ultimately, the course of my life wasn’t about taking cues from external sources like magazines or mothers. I had to learn how to listen to my own internal authority (a gut that had ironically been shaped by those very external sources). My mother had commandeered my first wedding. I wasn’t about to hand over my second. If my month began with a quest to define my boundaries, here was a good one to erect.

  “When I decide on my dress,” I said as we whizzed by the stop for Kowloon, “you’ll be the first to know.”

  MARCH

  Recipe for Success

  i walked into this month already knowing the challenge. Back in January, as penance for keeping a few choice secrets from Karl, I had promised him that March would be tagged for cooking. This was a good undertaking for many reasons, the least of which was to bone up on my woefully underdeveloped culinary skills. After one week in Hong Kong and another in Hanoi, Karl and I were scraping the bottom of the discretionary funds barrel. We simply couldn’t afford to piss our money away on imported beer and Dave’s Famous Chicken Sandwich, the meal of choice at the local restaurant that, at just a block away from our apartment, had un-fortunately (the true meaning of the word) become an extension of our own living room.

  Furthermore, we had a wedding to finance. Now that we were back from Hong Kong, the excitement of being engaged had transmuted into a rocket-fueled urge to pick a date (I was aiming for September) and secure a venue. And unless we wanted to host our family and friends at McDonald’s (our Happy Meals could contain personalized Beanie Babies as favors!), we needed to start stashing away some cash. My parents had already forked over a fat check, but since they had paid for my first wedding, I wasn’t expecting them to cover the full cost of my second. (“If you screw up again,” read the letter accompanying the check, “you’re on your own for number three.”)

  While combing the magazines for recipes (the more “Cooking for Dummies,” the better), I also was on the lookout for any budgeting and saving advice. Particularly, how to fund the J. Mendel dress I had seen on Natasha Richardson in InStyle. The color and nacre of a pearl, with the glamour and bias cut of a 1940s screen siren, it was perfect for a walk down the aisle—it was also easily ten thousand dollars. Maybe the pale gray Dior gown that Kate Beckinsale was wearing a few pages earlier was more affordable?

  With the dress as the just deserts for all this impending cooking, I found an article in Real Simple called “Fix Your Money Leaks,” which examined twenty-two minor expenditures that added up to big-dollar drains. For instance, in utilizing online bill payment, I could save over seventy dollars a year in postage alone.

  I showed the article to Karl, who had taken over paying our bills practically in tandem with his proposal.

  “I already do that,” he said, barely taking his eyes off the television to skim the page.

  “What about this one?” I asked, directing his attention to a leak authors Owen Thomas and Amy Kover called “Subscribing for cable TV, Internet access, and phone service from three different providers.”

  “We could save up to twenty dollars a month by switching to a package deal.”

  “Where have you been?” he said, blinking. “The first thing I did after moving in was to bundle our services.”

  He took the article out of my hands and worked his brow as he read. “This,” he said, pointing to a leak involving cell phone plans that charged for unused minutes. “And this,” he went on, tapping his finger next to one that warned about the hidden costs of paying only the minimum on credit cards, “I already know about all of t
his stuff.”

  And when I was first married, so did I. Back then, I was the one responsible for paying all our bills, which included handfuls of parking tickets (all my ex’s), a whopping student loan (ditto), and a matriculation fee that would continue to visit us every month until my ex got off his ass, broke through his wall of pain, and finally finished his thesis—which was at the time seven years in the making.

  So when Karl quietly and capably assumed the job of CFO in our two-person company, I was happy to hand over the reins and stick a pair of blinders over my eyes. After meeting one of my college boyfriends, my father had pulled me aside and said, “Cathy, I know, but I don’t want to know.” When it came to our fiscal affairs, that was my exact attitude.

  This lack of interest extended to my desire to learn how to cook. I really didn’t see the point of it—there had been vast improvements in the field of frozen food—and I wasn’t so sure this was an area that I wanted to improve upon in the first place, especially because Karl seemed fairly happy stir-frying for us four nights a week. I had never cooked for my first husband and had always fought against the antiquated idea of domesticity, which to me represented a life of egg timers and beige food.

  But if Karl was going to handle our bread, I could at least learn how to bake it. I was about to enter a marriage, after all, and maybe I should aspire to do it better this time around, to sign on for the whole deal. This was what good wives were supposed to do, right?

  My horoscope confirmed my decision. “Your experiments in the kitchen will turn out delicious,” read Glamour’s prediction for Capricorn, “so share them with a worthy guy!”

  That I had no natural instincts toward baking was my mother’s fault. When asked to submit a recipe to the PTA cookbook, she sent me to first grade with instructions for making a Fluffernutter sandwich. “If God had wanted me to cook,” she once proclaimed, opening a twelve-piece meal from the Colonel, “I would have been born with Teflon hands.” I had my own koan, stemming from an early kitchen experience at a friend’s house. In fifth grade, my best friend Gail had suggested baking chocolate cookies and proceeded to gather the raw ingredients—the eggs, butter, and flour—on the counter. Baffled by what I was seeing, I famously remarked, “Where’s the mix?”

  For me joy of cooking remained an oxymoron. While legions of women touted a twenty-two-year-old recipe from Glamour dubbed Engagement Chicken for its amazing properties to inspire proposals from the boyfriends who ate it, I was fixing a dish I eventually called Break-Up Chicken. I had gotten the supposedly no-fail recipe—which involved dipping chicken breasts in Seven Seas Viva Italian Salad Dressing and then rolling them in cornflake crumbs—from my cookie-making friend Gail. Without fail, whenever I prepared this meal for a new beau, instead of proposing within the month (the magical time frame of Engagement Chicken), he usually dumped me within the week.

  Karl, naturally, wanted to break the curse. “We’re already engaged,” he reasoned. “What could happen?”

  “I don’t want to find out,” I told him.

  Back in December, I had practically severed my thumb while trying to slice a bagel. When I refused to get stitches, Karl bandaged me so zealously, I looked like I was wearing one of those giant cartoon hitchhiker thumbs.

  That said, my first order of business was to find recipes that didn’t require a lot of ingredients, dexterity, or prior experience. For this, I was counting on Real Simple to see me through, mostly because it was the only magazine to which I subscribed that offered any sort of meal preparation help. Well, I shouldn’t say only—Oprah also came up with her own concoctions, but this month her focus was on New Orleans, reflected in an instant-death menu of crab po’boys, seafood gumbo, and grilled redfish. Besides, Real Simple used words like easy and quick fix in reference to their menu options. Coming from a magazine with a name like Real Simple, this wasn’t an earth-shattering insight, but for someone who feared having more than one pot going at a time, the promise of these words held great comfort.

  I tore out recipes for, among others, Mexican Chicken Soup, Pesto Pasta with Green Beans and Potatoes, and Winter Lentil Soup. But while I was at it, why not look for other kinds of “recipes,” ones that held more interest for me? Real Simple also had all the right ingredients for “how to make the most of your time under the tap.” In addition to listing shampoos that addressed various hair maladies ( I made a note to run out and buy Dove Advanced Care Therapy Shampoo for my highlight-dry hair), the feature also provided a pictorial titled “Wash This Way,” with step-by-step directions for lathering up and rinsing out. Most important, the article espoused the benefits of shampooing every other day, “to allow natural scalp oils to coat the hair shafts and boost shine.” Maybe this would be the magic formula for transforming my hair from drab to fab (these magazine headlines were really getting to me). I decided to commit to this on-again, off-again schedule, hoping that scalp oil didn’t actually have a discernibly bad odor.

  After a week of hemming and hawing over menu selections, I was ready to get cooking. Not shopping, however. Whether a carryover from the days when I was married to a man who gained one hundred pounds or whether it had to do with watching my father weigh every single cantaloupe in the bin and then spend ten agonizing minutes deciding between coffee or pecan ice cream, the grocery store inspired major heart palpitations in me. I handed my list from Real Simple to Karl with items like “4 carrots,” “1 16-ounce package of brown lentils,” and “2 whole chickens” checked off. While I was drinking wine with my writers’ group and workshopping a short story about a man in love with his cat, he pushed a cart up and down the aisles of our local supermarket. I arrived home just after 10:00 PM to find Karl out cold on the couch with about thirty plastic shopping bags spread all over the floor in front of him.

  “Is any of this melting?” I asked.

  “You think this is a lot,” he said, motioning to the bags, “You should see what I put away.”

  Karl held high esteem for the circular coupon, especially the two-for-one variety. “Look at how much I saved,” he bragged and showed me a receipt for just over $250. “See right here,” he said, directing my attention to the receipt’s bottom line. “It says I saved sixty dollars.” Then he pumped his fist in the air a few times and congratulated himself with a drawn-out “Yessss!”

  I went to bed and dreamed about making a soup out of hair and sweet potatoes. The following morning was my first off-shampoo day, so I put my hair under an old hotel shower cap (after first gathering the front section into a spiral cobra shape and securing it just above my eyebrows). I had the door to the bathroom closed, but Karl barged in to grab some cologne and caught me just before I made a clean getaway behind the shower curtain.

  The look on his face said it all. “What in the world is that?” he gaped, cautiously poking at my see-through cap. I also was sporting a heavy green face mask. All I needed were cucumbers over my eyes and I’d look right out of an old I Love Lucy episode.

  “I’m trying not to wash my hair every day,” I explained, trying to get out of his sight as quickly as possible. It was bad enough I was naked—but in a shower cap with green gunk on my face? Was any woman really that secure?

  “Oh, dirty hair. Is that what Oprah is up to this month?” He pulled open the shower curtain and pretended to look inside. “Hello, Oprah? Is the water too hot for you?”

  Karl was in West Virginia. He had left the night before, riding his motorcycle just so he could get up at the crack of dawn and ride it around some more, at a speedway in the middle of nowhere with around thirty other testosterone-driven males. It was my first time sleeping alone in the bed since Karl had moved in. I was a big baby during the whole good-bye, crying and clutching at him like he was going off to war. I had read that Paul and Linda McCartney never spent one night apart during the course of their entire marriage. I loved that thought, that the former Beatle, the “cute one,” the one chased and clawed at by hordes of groupies, still slept next to his beloved wife every
night, presumably, until she died. Maybe that’s why Sir Paul remarried so quickly. He couldn’t stand the coldness of the other side of the bed.

  I decided that I would cook my first big challenge meal that evening, as a welcome-home present.

  The first thing I learned about making Mexican Chicken Soup was that you need a very big pot. After digging around under the sink, the best I could come up with was a five-quarts.

  I immediately phoned Jeanne in a panic. She and her husband Paul had lived in Rome for twelve years and had every kind of pasta pot known to man.

  “Do you happen to have a twelve-quart pot?” I asked, like I requested large cooking items like this all the time. “I’m making soup.”

  “Who is this and what have you done with my friend Cathy?” she teased.

  When I walked around the corner to her house, Jeanne greeted me at the door with a pot that was big enough to bathe a baby.

  “Whatever you do,” she cautioned, handing over the pot, “you need to boil the water and ingredients before adding the chicken.”

  “But the recipe says to put the chicken in the pot and then bring to a boil.”

  “Where did you get this recipe?” Her tone was one of personal insult.

  “Real Simple.”

  “Real Simple,” she huffed. “More like Real Crock.”

  “I’m going to follow their instructions,” I said, easing out of the door.

  “No, Cathy, believe me,” she pleaded. “I’ve been doing this for years. If you do that, the chicken will get all tough and dried out. I can’t believe this magazine is telling you to put the chicken in first.” Jeanne began to pace in her small entryway. “And after you make the stock,” she continued, “you should cool it with the chicken still in it overnight in the refrigerator.”