Domestic Affairs (25 page)

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?”

The day had not begun well. Willy wanted me to bake him blueberry muffins. Audrey, whose friend Melissa had come for a sleepover the night before, woke to discover that Melissa had left in the middle of the night with a sudden attack of homesickness. Charlie couldn’t find his bear. Steve was dead to the world.

So I crawled out of bed, put on water for coffee, started clattering pans for muffins, and (this being Saturday) turned on the cartoons. I changed Willy’s diaper, found Bear Bear, promised Audrey we’d try another sleepover soon, and removed from the kitchen counter a piece of watermelon that had been left out the night before. With about a hundred ants on it.

The telephone rang while I was sifting the flour: a collection agency, wanting to know why I hadn’t been making payments on my Mastercard. (“I’ve been so busy fighting a nuclear dump in my town,” I told the woman. She didn’t seem too interested.) On top of everything else, my whole mouth was in pain from two teeth I’d had filed down for a temporary crown, my dentist was out of town, and I had poison ivy all over my left foot.

Steve came into the kitchen and gave me a kiss. I slid the muffin pan into the oven, threw my potholder to the floor, burst into tears, and told him (for probably the five hundredth time in our nine years of marriage) that I was about to have a nervous breakdown.

Steve poured himself a cup of coffee. “I thought I’d go for a jog,” he said. “Could you just hold off falling apart until I get back?”

I was still crying. Audrey and Charlie came rushing in to see what was the matter. “I’m sorry, Mom,” said Charlie, who no longer waits to see whose fault it was this time. He threw his arms around me. Audrey threw her arms around both of us. The weight of the two of them knocked me over—I fell backward and cracked my head against the floor.

Now, I am a little hazy about the order of things after that, but I can tell you some of the things I said (in no particular order), because they are the things I nearly always say to my family in times like these:

“I’m just a servant around here. Nobody appreciates me.”

“Of course I’m mean and no fun to be around. I could have a pleasant personality too, if I got to sleep late and hang around watching cartoons every morning, and if I could take off any time I felt like it to go jogging.”

“Just once, I’d like to see one of you put your bowl in the dishwasher without being asked.”

Of course there was more: about the nuclear dump, about my dentist, who had shot me full of Novocain and then stuffed my mouth with cotton, seconds before launching into his remarks on the nuclear issue. I complained about how I never get time to hang up all the clothes on my closet floor. I moaned about not having my tomatoes planted yet.

“Please don’t get tears all over my bear,” said Charlie.

“I have three hundred unanswered letters sitting on my desk,” I said. “Vicky leaves in three weeks and we still don’t have a new babysitter. Our medical insurance expires July first. How am I supposed to plant a garden when there’s twenty feet of brush piled up on it? What teacher will Audrey get for third grade? I don’t think calamine lotion does one bit of good for poison ivy.”

Of course I burned the muffins. Steve took his run. Audrey shooed her brothers out of the kitchen, and everyone stayed out of my way for about half an hour, until Steve came home. By then I was dressed, and glumly seated at the kitchen table, contemplating all the things about my life that seemed out of control. Steve took a shower, dried himself off, and sat down next to me with a ballpoint pen and a yellow legal pad.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s make a list. We’ll write down all your problems, so we’ll know what we’re up against.”

I told him to stop making fun of me. This was serious.

“Who’s making fun?” he said. He picked up the pen and wrote “MOM’S PROBLEMS” at the top of the sheet.

I told him I didn’t know where to begin, I had so many.

“Number one,” he wrote. “Having nervous breakdown. Number two. Have to put kids’ cereal bowls into the dishwasher all the time.”

“I’m always the one who has to get out of bed to change Willy’s diaper at six o’clock,” I said.

“What about yesterday?” Steve pointed out. Then he wrote: “Number three. Have to change Willy’s morning diaper—sometimes.”

“The three hundred unanswered letters sitting on my desk,” I said. “Cleaning the closet. Getting Audrey new sneakers.” Which was followed by “toothache” and “cat using fireplace for litter box.”

Number ten was poison ivy. Number fifteen was “Texas still being considered as a nuclear dump site.” Eighteen was our town fire marshal, who has been unwilling to give us a permit to burn our brush pile so we can rototill our garden. I was winding down—I could feel it. However, I had to admit, I was feeling better.

Number nineteen was the imminent departure of our babysitter, Vicky. Number twenty-one was nuclear war. Even that one seemed less than overwhelming, listed as it was just beneath “third grade.”

I had stopped crying by this time. I was even munching on toast, and fixing myself a third slice. The children had stopped tiptoeing around and were back to bouncing on the sofa. Steve put the list on our bulletin board with a push pin. Where it still hangs, right beside the grocery list, a pack of morning glory seeds, and a reminder about my next dental appointment.

This afternoon it rained, and we got a burning permit.

Tonight we burn the brush pile, and tomorrow we’ll rototill the garden. Check off item number eighteen. One down, twenty to go.

I often wonder about those housewives and mothers you hear about now and then, who simply, somewhere along the line, flip out. The ones who walk out the door and never come back or break every piece of their best china, some afternoon when their husband says he’s too tired to change the baby’s diaper. A woman who one day just lets the washer overflow and stops bothering to wash the dishes, a woman who simply wakes up one morning and decides to stay in bed.

And of course, at the back of it all is the image of some young, hardworking, responsible-seeming wife and mother (she cooks out of the
Silver Palate,
does Jane Fonda six days a week, gives perfect holiday parties) who one day sticks her head in the gas oven and signs off for good. I suspect many of us have wondered, at one moment or another, whether we could ever reach that point. And for most of us, the answer is no. Still, who doesn’t feel the urge, now and then, to just let loose?

So this is what happened last Tuesday. I had taken off work for the afternoon, deciding to spend it with my husband (also off from work) and our children. We packed a lunch and headed for the mountains. We had a wonderful afternoon. Then, on our way home (because I wanted to prolong this good time together, and everyone was in such a good mood), I suggested we stop in a nearby town for pizza.