Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (14 page)

I guess it had never gone away. That easy charm he has always had. The fact that we speak the same language; he always understood me.

We pulled away and didn’t have a conversation about it. It was our little secret. We had kept our previous dalliance quiet for such a long time anyway and I’ll admit: It was thrilling to have the flame relit. Albeit briefly.

It was a moment, a kiss. Something to remind us both that while we were married we were still capable of passion. We were still alive. No big deal. Like a line of coke at a cousin’s wedding. Nobody knows; nobody gets hurt.

But the minute we got back to the house and I saw Dan’s face, I felt sick. He had come inside to find me and this look flashed between us. He was querying and I was defensive. It was less than a second. I was a bit drunk and I can’t even be sure I didn’t imagine it.

Dan didn’t drink for the rest of the day, which was his way of letting me know he intended to drive home that night. We stayed for dinner, and just before dessert Angelo followed me into the bathroom. He was drunk, but I suspect he was acting more drunk than he was.

“Come on, Tressa, you know you want to. Let’s live a little.”

“Are you crazy, Angelo? In the bathroom? With Dan and Jan downstairs?”

And the kids in the room next door, you disgusting dirt bag?
But I kept that one to myself.

He looked at me hard and when he saw there was no persuading me he went instantly cold, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Your loss.” Then he turned and left me standing there.

I was shaking and took a few seconds to calm myself down. In that moment I knew it was gone. Twenty years of friendship over. I didn’t want to be part of it anymore. This glamorous, empty life where your seemingly doting husband tries to fuck your friend in a bathroom because he’s rich and he thinks he can. Where you can’t make it to your friend’s wedding because you are too busy being fabulous. I had been part of this, too. I had enjoyed the kiss, wanted it, and now I felt corrupted. Now I had Dan.

I breathed in deeply, and in breathing out, I craved the simplicity of being sure again. Like I had been about my kitchen. Like I wanted to feel about Dan.

Jan was disappointed we had to leave, but Angelo brushed my cheek with his then gave me a nonchalant look as if he knew he’d never see me again and didn’t care.

The drive home was quiet.

Gerry had left an empty pizza box with a note scribbled on the top saying, “Gone drinkin.” He had left a small bag behind as evidence of his intended return but we both knew he might not be back for weeks, if ever.

Dan went straight upstairs for a shower, and I flicked the light on in the kitchen. I had been hoping the mood would lift when I got back to my project. But it didn’t. I hadn’t got the answers I wanted; in fact the weekend had just sent me away with more questions. Wretched questions that had been haranguing me for almost four months.

How could a few days have changed things so much? Those past few weeks had seemed as if they had been the halcyon days of a marriage that now felt all but over. I cursed myself for having broken the spell.

I realized that the joy was not in my grandparents’ dresser or the kooky antique kettle or the restored larder, it was in the people who built them.

Without the love and the spirit, they were just cupboards.

When it feels difficult to give, give more.

Everyday Bread

It seems foolish to be writing a recipe for bread because it was just something that had to be done every day, like peeling spuds or cleaning the range. Every woman found her own way of doing it, and the ingredients were certainly never measured except in the cook’s eye for what looked right. You might be feeling generous the odd morning, and add a handful of fruit or a spoonful of cooking fat if you had it on hand. After a while, you learned how much flour would suit you and how much buttermilk would wet it.

As for method, it is so ingrained in my fingers, I would not know how to describe it. All I know is that as I got older, my bread improved in texture and became more consistent. I nearly poisoned your poor grandfather, your mother only barely survived, and you—my wee Tressa—got the best of it! If you really want to master an Irish soda bread, make it every day until it becomes as automatic as walking. There is no escaping its boring drudgery and only you can decide if it’s worth it.

If you want to try, the basic ingredients are around llb flour, brown or white; a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda; and as much buttermilk as to make a wet dough, but not so wet as you can’t handle it. To this you can optionally add 1 tablespoon butter or any cooking fat, dried fruit, up to a dessert spoon honey or sugar, a pinch salt, wheat meal, porridge oats—use your imagination. Cook in a hot oven for up to 1 hour, and tap the bottom, listening for a hollow sound, to see if it’s cooked. Wrap immediately in a clean tea towel to stop it going hard on you and let sit for a good half hour before cutting.

Life can be hard, but then we make it even harder by the way we look at it.

My mother walked across two fields to a well twice daily for water. She cooked on an open stove, the hem of her long skirts blackened with soot, her arms muscled with the strain of lifting pots. As she grew old, the palms of her hands were slashed with burn marks where she had grabbed hot handles without thinking.

I didn’t notice my mother’s hardship because I was never called upon to do so. Suffering was ingrained in her. Servile, solemn suffering—I never knew her any other way. Life was a slow penance, buying her time in the hereafter; it was not meant for enjoying, but rather meant for serving. Life was a sentence. The harder it was and the more quiet your forbearance, the more assured you were of eternal life.

My father often said cruel things to her when he was drunk, but she only ever took one beating from him that I know of. It was while she was pregnant with me, and her four brothers visited my father in our back field the following day and thrashed him with sticks to within an inch of his life. She told me this herself one day after he had hit my brother Patrick; sent him crashing to the floor during supper for some supposed slight. Patrick was extremely clever and this annoyed my father. He had won a scholarship to the local boys’ school, but my father had refused to let him go on the grounds that we could not afford the uniform and books. The priest had been sent around to persuade him to change his mind and said that the church would provide any money needed to finish the boy’s education. Patrick was devout and sensitive. My mother believed he could have been a priest. My father had refused out of pure stubbornness, saying that fourteen was time enough to leave school for any man and that he was needed on the farm. My mother saw her chance to have a priest for a son fly out the window, and while she remained respectful of my father to his face, she took up the habit of raging against him to me. She told me shocking stories of his cruelty, embellishing them at times, lest I should have any doubt of the kind of Godless animal my father was.

It was a small community and with her only sister, Ann, in America she had nobody else to talk to but her young daughter. Even if Ann had been around when I was a child, I doubt my mother would have told her how unhappy she was. Certainly when Ann returned from America, my mother never let her know how truly miserable she was. She was a proud woman, and in talking to her child at least, her pride would not be dented. Through confiding in me she found some release, and she needed that to survive. There was nothing she could do about her circumstances. Walking away from a marriage, no matter how full of hatred you were, no matter what indignities you suffered, was not possible in those days. You had to endure whatever came your way. Complaining all around you was weak and sinful and my mother wanted to be seen as neither. I was exempt from these conventions, however. Our own children give amnesty to all sorts of sideways cruelty.

When my mother told me about her brothers beating my father, her eyes glittered with pride. She defended the beating by explaining that my father would have killed me in the womb if they hadn’t put the fear of God into him. It gave me a worse fear of my father than I had of him already, as well as a dread of any private contact with my mother. As the years went on, my mother’s confidences stripped me of any loyalty I had for either of them.

For all that she was a helpless victim of my father’s drunken abuse, she always held the Catholic Church above him. Above everything. Her devotion infuriated him but there was no arguing against it. Catholicism ruled her, but for all that she was a pious Mass goer and devoted priest worshipper, she seemed to get very little back from it. I have learned that a strong soul and a healthy dose of faith can carry a person through terrible hardships. My father’s drinking, poverty, the effort of keeping us all alive, had broken my mother’s spirit. She was religious, but she had very little faith. She clung to the candles and the ceremony like a drowning dog to a twig.

*

My brothers all left Achadh Mor. Declan and Brian to Birmingham, where they both found wives and started families, and Paddy to London. We never saw him again. In the nineteen eighties, I got a letter from the Metropolitan Police in London to inform me that Patrick had died in a hostel in Camden Town. They had found my name and address on a piece of paper he carried around in his pocket. Perhaps to remind him that he had a family, or perhaps in preparation for his death, who knows? His was a wasted life. He could have been a doctor or a teacher if my father had given him the chance of an education. In the end all he gave him was the bad genes and unhappiness that drove him to drink. Some people are just too delicate to survive.

My married brothers returned twice in twenty years. Their wives were strangers to us, and their children had English accents. We welcomed them, but it was an uncomfortable reunion. They had been away too long, and the gruff young men I had wrestled with as a girl had disappeared. They were overly polite, which is the worst insult a brother can pay you.

When my mother died, only Brian came home. He said he was representing the Birmingham contingent. They had tried, but could not find Patrick, which was the first sign that he was missing. It was an embarrassment to have such a small number of our immediate family present. My mother had suffered for us, but suffering does not buy you love. All it buys you is more suffering.

I had a dread of turning into my mother. It was why I had wanted to escape to America and why I had fallen so hard for the idea of falling in love. I never wanted to be trapped in the poverty of a loveless union. Even today, as I draw a picture of her in my mind to search for some common wisdom, all I can see is my mother’s long, sad face. Mouth turned down at the edges, deep lines etched along her cheeks—her face a map of everyday misery. “My poor mother,” I think, but I cannot conjure the same warmth as I felt for James’s mother whom I knew for less than a year, or even for Ann, the aunt who betrayed me.

Knowledge is not enough, however, to stop a woman from turning into her mother. Except that my complaining was not tempered with the martyr’s silent, pained forbearance. I could hear myself moaning over nothing at all: crumbs on the carpet, a broken cup. I was married to a hardworking man who loved me, who would never let any harm come to me, yet I did not seem able to silence the nag.