Blue Plate Special (37 page)

But I desperately missed the savory, eggy, bacony silkiness of spaghetti carbonara, the rich crustiness of hot fresh-baked bread slathered in butter, and chewy thin-crust pizza with tangy sauce, laden with artichoke hearts, sausage, and mushrooms, straight out of a brick oven. Knowing I couldn’t have any of it ever again was like losing the steadfast, stalwart, adoring man you didn’t realize you loved till he was gone forever. I missed waffles drenched in butter and syrup. And flour-tortilla burritos stuffed with black beans and spicy chicken, cheese and cilantro. And tart, springy lemon–poppy seed muffins
washed down with sweet, milky coffee; the luxurious crumble of hazelnut cookies; anything in flaky, buttery, light phyllo dough—spinach and ricotta or nuts and honey, it didn’t matter. I tried to nip my sadness in the bud whenever possible by forcibly redirecting my cravings to the things I could actually eat, polenta and potatoes and corn tortillas and risotto, but I could have wept over the permanent loss of pelmeni, those nuggety, hot, slippery little Russian meat dumplings served with sour cream, fried onions, and applesauce.

Over time, to my surprise and relief, the cravings faded as I replaced these things with other, gluten-free things. But it took years before the yearning ceased entirely.

I
n the late winter of 2003, Jon and I bought an old row house on Calyer Street, two blocks up from my former workroom in the Heartbreak Hotel. We spent the following nine months renovating it. We, meaning Jon, with me as his parttime, incompetent, subpar assistant, ripped out drop ceilings and bad partitions, crappy carpeting, linoleum, paneling, ugly fixtures, an upstairs kitchen, and several walls, filling an enormous rented Dumpster with trash. We hired a guy to refinish the original pine floors. We scraped and plaster-washed and repaired the plaster, upstairs and down, scraped and repainted the bedroom shutters, installed a kitchen and a half bath, refinished the upstairs bathroom, and renovated the basement to create a separate rental apartment, including laying an oak floor over the old dirt one down there. We created a grassy backyard bordered by flower beds, with a flourishing grapevine and cedar tree, from a pile of rocks, oyster shells, trash, and cinder blocks. Every day, we awoke in our old loft on Metropolitan Avenue, put on our dust-caked, sweaty work clothes from the day before, and drove together with cups of coffee to the job site, as we thought of our new house, saying little, both of
us exhausted and grim, to spend another day yoked together. None of our friends understood how miserable we were; in their minds we were impossibly lucky for owning a nineteenth-century Greenpoint house, which was true, but my guilty understanding of their inability to understand our misery just made me feel lonelier. We were sealed in a bubble by ourselves, a bubble in which I screwed up and Jon lost his temper, I collapsed with tiredness and he kept working, I knocked off early and he went on until almost midnight, doggedly. “I’m building you a house,” he would say to me, only half joking.

Little by little, over the months, we returned our little 1875 house to a semblance of its original beauty. As the renovation neared completion, we had the second big blowout fight of our marriage. It was over the living room walls. I scraped off all the old wallpaper, leaving streaks of old pink glue the color of Pepto-Bismol over the streaky green and brown plaster walls. It was a gorgeous long narrow room with an original plaster medallion in the high ceiling, a fireplace we’d had restored, French doors opening to the foyer, pocket doors opening to the dining room, plaster moldings, and big front windows. “What color should we paint the living room?” I wondered aloud to Jon, looking at the depressing, ugly, fucked-up old walls I’d revealed with my scraper and then screwed plaster washers into. In one spot, the plaster had fallen away to reveal the old lath.

“I don’t want to paint these walls,” said Jon. “They’re beautiful. I want to leave them exactly as they are.”

I had already agreed to paint the living room and dining room ceilings black; Jon had begged me just to try it, it was Victorian, it would look cool. They did look cool, because, I reasoned, they would be lightened up by crisp, beautiful, pale walls.

“No way,” I said, “these walls are hideous! I can’t live with them! No way!”

“I won’t paint them,” he said. “Once they’re covered over, they’re gone forever.”

And here it was again: our fundamental difference. I wanted an uncluttered, light-filled, traditional house; he seemed to want a dark, baroque, artsy Bywater shotgun shack. We started fighting about the walls loudly, sometimes at the tops of our lungs. Once, I stood at the top of the stairs, Jon stood at the bottom, shouting at each other, like a reverse Romeo and Juliet, locked in passionate discord, our faces contorted.

In the end, the walls stayed exactly as they were. Jon exacted a promise from me to give it one year, and then, if I still didn’t like them, we could paint them. I backed down; this was a battle I could not win now but might win eventually. But then, although I still hated them as much as ever when the year was up, Jon refused to paint them. Those walls clearly represented something very deep to him. I could have painted them myself, in defiance, of course. But I didn’t. I couldn’t go against something he so strongly felt, even though I felt just as strongly.

The kitchen, however, was beautiful. Jon built it in a former bedroom on the first floor, the long narrow room at the back of the house. He installed old wrought-iron casement windows that looked out on our tangled, green little yard. He built a deck off the back door, big enough for a small table and two chairs, with stairs leading down to a little bluestone patio where we kept our gas grill. He installed an old Chambers stove we’d found at a salvage place in Queens for a hundred dollars, in perfect condition. The walls were a cheery, perfectly ordinary butter yellow; the cabinets had opaque glass doors. It felt like a kitchen in a French country house—high-ceilinged, airy, hodgepodge, filled with beautiful things—a graceful wooden table that acted as a counter island and stood underneath the enormous multipaned window, a porcelain farmhouse sink, an old framed line drawing of a pig. It was a joy to cook in.

After we moved into our house, since Jon didn’t get home
most nights until very late, I took over most of the food buying and menu planning and cooking. Over the course of our marriage, guided by his feedback and encouragement, I had become a better cook; then a pretty good cook; and then a confident, adept, occasionally strike-of-lightning cook. Now I had an ongoing subscription to
Cook’s
magazine and read every issue cover to cover; I tried out many of their recipes and many others from our good, always growing cookbook collection.

I rarely relinquished the kitchen anymore, but there were still certain things that Jon always cooked as a matter of course. For Passover, he made matzo ball soup using his grandmother’s recipe, which involved throwing out the first round of vegetables with the bones and cartilage and starting over with fresh peeled carrots in the second phase. I made the haroset and chopped liver and was told every year by Jon’s family that I cooked like a Jewish grandmother. At Thanksgiving at Jon’s mother’s house in Pittsburgh, he made the mashed potatoes, and they were the best anyone had ever had.

Neither of us had ever fully understood that ancient rule that women cook and men grill, but we also never questioned it. Even in the bone-chilling dead of winter, with a drift of snow outside, Jon put on his hat and coat if the menu called for grilled meat, took his drink and cigarettes with him, and stayed out on the patio by the gas grill until the meat was done while I sat in the warm dining room, entertaining the guests.

I
n recent years, Jon had finally come around to wanting kids. But by this time, after everything we’d been through, I wasn’t sure I wanted them anymore. This, however, wasn’t a dramatic impasse: in general, we’d struck a genuinely loving détente in our marriage, having mutually and implicitly decided we’d rather stay married and accept our inherent, insurmountable schisms and differences than fight constantly
or, even more unthinkably, leave each other. And so we coexisted in a state of hard-won tranquillity, even though I no longer felt the passionate hope for true connection with Jon I’d had at the beginning of our marriage, despite all the fighting and strife. His adamant, yearlong refusal to have children with me had broken all of that in me, and irrational though it may have been for me to feel this way, it couldn’t be fixed.

But I gave in now, on the theory that I’d probably be happy once the baby arrived. We tried on and off for the next couple of years to get pregnant, but evidently my biological window had closed, or my body sensed my own ambivalence. In my early forties, we looked into adoption. This, too, came to nothing, also probably because my heart was never entirely in it.

Finally, in the summer of 2005, we adopted a trembling, formerly homeless, possibly abused young street dog. We named him Dingo, because that’s what he looked like—a skinny, wild, intelligent, aboriginal canine with enormous bat ears and almond-shaped brown eyes that bugged out slightly like a Chihuahua’s and an earnest furrow between his brows. In the South, he would have been called a yaller dog. When he came to live with us, he weighed a skeletal twenty-seven pounds and was not housebroken and spoke no English and appeared to be unfamiliar with stairs, puddles, furniture, and domestic life in general. After he graduated from obedience school, we kept training him on our own. He was so eager to learn and so easy to teach, we figured he was a doggy genius, until it dawned on us that he would do anything—anything we asked of him—for food.

He was passionately, single-mindedly food obsessed. He had no sense of humor about food. He was not one of those hilariously antic, clowning dogs who entertain for treats, nor did he beg with seductive whines and cute, obsequious expressions. He was quiveringly aware of everything that happened in the kitchen. He knew his rights and exercised them without
overstepping: he licked the beaten egg bowl, for example, and was always on hand to do so, but he wasn’t allowed to chew on chicken bones, so he never asked, even though they were the thing he loved most in the world. Maybe because he grew up on the street, he wouldn’t go near anything toxic: he had no interest in raisins, chocolate, onions, or avocado, even if they fell on the floor near him.

Dingo understood from the start that he was supposed to lie at our feet while we ate, but sometimes, when it was a meal he loved, especially chicken, he forgot himself. His nose nudged my thigh and I’d look down to see him sitting right next to me, looking up at my plate, his face alight with quasireligious exaltation. But he was not begging, exactly. His feelings about food were so similar to mine, I couldn’t help feeling that there was some sort of essential kinship at work there.

PERSIMMON PUDDING

A few years after we got married, when the Internet was just coming into full swing, Jon urged me to find my half sisters. We found Thea, living in St. Paul; she was married, but she’d kept her maiden name. I wrote to her, and she wrote back. That winter, I met her and her twin sister Caddie, and ever since, we have been family to each other
.

Thea, who is an amazing cook, sent me the following old-fashioned, excellent recipe, which she typed verbatim from an old index card in her recipe box. I made it one cold late fall day from very ripe persimmons. The insides of 3 of them whizzed in the blender yielded exactly 1 cup of golden pulp. I steamed the pudding for the full 2 hours, as instructed. It was so good, I wolfed down 2 slices of it before it had even cooled
.

Mix all ingredients except nuts. Pour batter into a greased mold or coffee can or metal mixing bowl (I used a Bundt pan). Sprinkle nuts on top (I used a combination of pine nuts and chopped walnuts because that’s what I had on hand). Set mold on a trivet in a large kettle, and pour water in the kettle to a depth of 2 inches. Cover the kettle and steam the pudding for 2 hours. Freezes well. Resteam for ½ hour to reheat before serving. Serve with hard sauce, as follows:

Cream butter with confectioners’ sugar until light and fluffy. Stir in vanilla extract or rum or brandy.