Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (4 page)

My mother didn’t give me any explanation; she just said that there was no money and that therefore I could not marry Michael Tuffy.

I begged my mother to go back and ask again, but she refused. I threatened to run away with him. Michael and I were destined. Nothing could keep us apart. What did our families—what did money—matter?

When I turned around to plan our escape, he was gone. Back to America.

I knew I would never see him again.

I howled and tore at my hair until my father and brothers were afraid of me. For months, I locked myself into the house with my mother and shredded potatoes until my fingers bled, scrubbed flagstones until my knees bruised black.

I never spoke to my aunt again and spoke of her to others only rarely and with caution.

As the next five years passed, the pain softened. I came to understand that I had been privileged to experience such a rare love at all, yet cursed because it had ruined me for anything that would come after. As for marriage—the very idea of it became an insult. Although part of me knew it was inevitable, there was one thing I was certain of: No one or nothing would ever match my love for Michael Tuffy.

He was gone but the memory of him had marked me forever.

You can’t always have as much sugar as you’d like.

Rhubarb Tart

Head and tail the rhubarb and cut it into small pieces, about a quarter inch—your eye will tell you. When the rhubarb is young, you can put it raw into the tart. In late August when it is tougher, I fill a pan with water and leave it to warm over the fire with a little sugar while I am making the pastry. Sift 10oz flour with a half teaspoon salt, then mix in 2 dessert spoons sugar. Chop 4oz butter, then crumble into the flour with your fingers. Beat 1 egg into 2 tablespoons milk and work the mixture into a dough. Line a well-floured pan with a half inch of the pastry, then put in your rhubarb and as much sugar as suits. I like it sweet and could take up to 3 tablespoons. James prefers it sour, but I’d put in an extra spoon anyway so as not to poison him. Cover with a pastry lid then put in a medium oven and watch for up to 1 hour.

You can buy anything in New York, except rhubarb. Oh, you can buy the forced stuff all year round. Creamy-pink, firm, fat rods, but as far as this cook is concerned, they are a watery waste of time. What I wanted were the spindly sticks that used to grow wild in the field behind my grandparents’ house. Bitter green leaves and a sore scarlet stalk gradually giving way to a white tip. They were shockingly sour, but with the addition of sugar they took on a unique, exotic flavor.

I started reviving my grandmother’s recipes. It was painful, bringing all of her old dishes to life again. As I worked through my memories of her cooking, I could hear her talk me through the measurements and methods as if she were there. But she was only able to answer questions I already knew the answers to, like how many grams equal a cup of sugar. She was not there to give me the answer to the one question I really needed to ask her, which was what she thought of Dan. I wondered if Bernadine would have put Dan and I together, and when I was feeling unsure, I longed for her to be there. If she could only have given me her opinion, I think it might have helped. I guess I needed someone else to feel certain on my behalf. I knew that was not possible, and maybe that’s why I chose to value the opinion of the one person who would, let’s face it, never be able to give it to me.

*

Now that I had reorganized my apartment and sorted through the pile of storage junk I’d avoided for years, I needed to get lost in this cookery project so that I could ignore the fact that Dan wanted us to move to Yonkers.

The Hamptons? Of course. Brooklyn? Yes. The Bronx? Maybe. But Yonkers?

Dan owned a house there, which he had been renovating on and off for the past five years. I had never been to see it because as far as I was concerned, it was just an investment. It was nice to know that I was marrying a guy who was a property owner, but it had never occurred to me that he intended for us to live there. It was a weekend building project that he would scurry off to when I was away on press trips. Dan and I really did our own thing a lot. I didn’t bring him to work functions and I was good at avoiding socializing with his Irish American drinking buddies.

Out of the blue one day, when I was doing my day’s recipe prep and Dan was putting a plug on the stereo, he started this clumsy conversation about how the city was getting “real busy” and “real crowded” and “real dangerous.” It was an obvious attempt to ease me into his dumb idea of moving out of the city. I didn’t know which was worse. His wanting us to lose two prime apartments in Upper West Side Manhattan, or the fact that he thought I would consider moving to Yonkers.

But then, that was just number one on my “things I hate about Dan” list.

The list had been growing in my head so fast that I found writing it down helped to lessen its power over me.

*  He wants to move to Yonkers.

*  His toenails are too long, and they scratch me in bed.

*  He wears tartan shirts.

*  He keeps fishing catalogs in the bathroom.

*  He’s too big and noisy—he lumbers around the apartment so that you always know he is there.

*  He shuffles and uses hillbilly words like “real” when he gets nervous.

*  Instant coffee. He prefers instant coffee? Explain!

*  He gets up before me in the mornings, and wakes me with tea. It makes me feel guilty.

*  He forgets to put sugar in my tea.

*  He purses his lips just before he says something that he thinks is clever.

*  He thinks he’s clever. He told me last night that he does not think that he missed out by not going to college.

Actually—that stuff about the list losing its power when it was written down? That’s bullshit. The only power I had was in the list itself, which was hidden under my side of the bed. When Dan moved toward me in the night or when he leaned in to me in the mornings, I knew it was there. The list said more about what a bitch I was than anything else, which didn’t help me either. I hated everything about Dan. The only time I looked at him and didn’t think, “I hate you,” was when I would look at him and think, “What have I done?” Poison or panic. Take your pick because that’s all that was on offer in my head right then.

Dan had been more or less resident in my apartment since we came together, but when we returned from our honeymoon we had a ceremonial him-moving-his-stuff-in evening. There was a mountain of stuff I hadn’t realized he owned: crates of old records, piles of cheap dishes, nasty acrylic linens, magazines dating back to the early eighties, to name but a few. As I watched it all piling up in the hall of my perfect minimalist palace, Dan happily hauling up another box of dusty videos, I honestly thought I was going to be sick. In the end, intuiting that I was unhappy with the mess, Dan moved most of it back down to the super’s apartment again. But it couldn’t stay there forever and we both knew it.

When we were dating, it was comforting to have him in my home. But now that Dan had the
right
to be there it felt wrong. I felt suddenly robbed of my privacy, and intimacy isn’t supposed to feel intrusive, surely?

I was possessed by this person I could only pretend not to recognize. May I introduce to you—my worst self: the discontented, bitchy, I-know-everything teenager. She was back, she was living in my brain, and no, she was not paying rent. What she was doing was complaining and criticizing and laughing sardonically at Dan and the sad, thirtysomething desperado who married him. She was vile and I hated her. But she was the only company I had. I couldn’t tell anyone else what was going on. My single friends would all say, “Gasp! You don’t love him! You must leave at once!” My married friends would say, “Love? Get real girl, this is
marriage.”

This was not what I wanted when I got married to Dan. This was not who I thought I would turn into.

Virtually everything I said out loud was a petty complaint disguised as a question. “Is the dishwasher still full?” “Did you forget to buy toothpaste?” “Are you wearing that?”

Sometimes all I could do was make a statement.

“These are the wrong washing tabs.” “I take one sugar in my tea.” “Close the bathroom door.” Then he would say he was sorry, and I would say, “It’s OK,” in this clipped voice that made it quite clear that it wasn’t OK at all. Without meaning to, I had joined the Passive Aggressive School of Noncommunication. All calm on the outside saying, “Everything is fine; everything is lovely,” when any fool could sense I was a simmering concoction of hatreds that, sooner or later, would come spewing out of me in a shower of lethal bile.

Nice.

I was scaring myself and I was scaring Dan. I could see him waiting for the argument he knew was impending, but couldn’t start himself because he hadn’t the first idea what was wrong. His truth was, we were newlyweds and in love. But my truth couldn’t have been more different.

*

I have never made rhubarb tart except with the vegetable grown from my grandmother’s garden, and it’s been ten years since I was last home in Kilkelly.

Granddad James had planted a single root bulb the year my mother was born. My grandmother hadn’t wanted the untidy, ferocious plant in her pretty back garden, so he planted it away from the house, but near enough that she could access it. By the time I was a young adult, the single root had reproduced so that it stretched out across a quarter of an acre, a mass of broad umbrella leaves hiding the scarlet underneath. It is an unremarkable and unruly looking vegetable—yet when prepared right, it is truly delicious.

During my summer vacations in Ireland as a child I ate rhubarb tart every day. I returned to live full-time in Ireland as an English literature student at Galway University when I was eighteen. The memories I treasure from those three years of living in Ireland are not the late-night, giggling, staggering walks up cobbled bar-lined lanes; losing my virginity to a beautiful, wild-haired philosophy student; or even the books I studied and the passionate professors who dissected them. It is the time that I spent with my grandparents that resonates with me now. I would carry one of my grandmother’s rhubarb tarts all the way to Galway on the bus from Kilkelly, carefully double wrapped in two tea towels so as not to be crushed. Once back in my digs, I would hide it in my room, safe from the afternoon munchie attacks of my dope-smoking housemates, and have a slice of it with a cup of sweet tea before going to sleep. That daily ritual and my weekends in Kilkelly gave some order to my crazy student years and got me a first in English Lit. Although I was born in America, rhubarb tart was the taste of Ireland, of home: not the New York loft that my mother and I lived in, then filled with Andy Warhol prints and work-shy boyfriends, but her parents’ home in Kilkelly, which smelled of smoldering turf, beeswax, and camphor. When I would visit each summer, I knew from their faces that they had been waiting ten months to see their only grandchild again. They adored me, and they adored each other. From July to September, I was the center of their world and rhubarb tart was always the first thing out of the oven. Tressa’s favorite.